English has a variety of options for when we want to express contrition or remorse. We can say we’re sorry, we apologise, we regret something. We can emphasise it by saying ‘I’m so/very/really/truly/awfully sorry’, and so on. Or we can just say ‘Apologies’.

Convention dictates in part how this and other ritualised speech acts take place. We generally say ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Congrats’, though ‘I congratulate you’ might begin a longer, formal utterance. With its jocular tone, ‘Greetings’ is fairly common in everyday encounters with friends or family, or in comic situations like ‘Greetings, Earthling’; it works less well when we meet someone for the first time. We say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I appreciate it’ rather than ‘Gratitude’ or ‘Appreciation’, as if these more personal expressions warrant mention of whoever is speaking or being addressed.

‘Apologies’ is an interesting case. It can be perfectly sincere, albeit often quite a formal way of acknowledging a mistake. At other times it strikes me as an offhand approach for speakers to appease injured parties without actually saying sorry. Something like: ‘Apologies are taking place. Look closely and you might spot them.’

Being sorry is about far more than just saying the words, of course. Authentic remorse tends to be effectively communicated so long as sincere effort is made through tone, gesture, penitent behaviour and so on. But the words, as an explicit admission of wrongdoing or shortcoming, can be an important part of reconciliation. Not counting instances of extreme sarcasm.

Because it omits the subject, ‘Apologies’ is somewhat disembodied and abstract, a bit like saying ‘Mistakes were made’ instead of ‘I/We made a mistake.’ It can be personalised, for example as ‘My (sincere) apologies’, but this feels formal – at least to me – whereas ‘I’m sorry’ does not. Omission of the subject is why the passive voice is not best suited to apologising: it is, as Lane Greene writes at Johnson,

the most straightforward way, syntactically speaking, for a coach, boss or bureaucrat to seem to be admitting something went wrong while not putting themselves, or any other human, on the line.

A Yahoo! Answers user named CeltAngel made an interesting distinction between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Apologies’:

Where I grew up you said “I’m sorry” when you were genuinely sorry for what you did – such as knocking into someone (or anything more severe). When you really weren’t sorry, or were sorry the other person reacted to your action in the way they did, you would tender “apologies”. It’s kind of a snarky distinction, but it was a very stuffy, polite society I grew up in. Semantically speaking, there is really no difference.

She’s right that there’s no semantic difference, or not much anyway, but there is a pragmatic one. Sometimes sorry really does seem to be the hardest word. (Sorry, Elton.)

What’s your take on these ways of apologising – is ‘Apologies’ more offhand or distant than ‘I’m sorry’, or does it depend mostly on how you say it? What makes them distinct?

The Eurozone crisis claimed another victim on 6 May when Nicolas Sarkozy became the eleventh European political leader to lose his job since 2008. His opponent, François Hollande, has become only the second socialist president of the French Fifth Republic. This change of presidency has been seen by some as a “lurch to the left”.

Meanwhile, in the UK, “David Cameron is facing pressure from Conservative MPs to “lurch to the right” following his party’s disastrous results in the local elections” according to heraldscotland.com.

But why left, why right?

In common with many frequent words, the words left and right have more than one meaning. As well as referring to the side that is east when you are facing north, right can also mean, among other things,  “correct”, “morally correct”, “immediately” or “completely”.

Left is not quite so rich – apart from its directional meaning, it is the past tense and past participle of the verb to leave. But both words are used to signify a particular political position.

If we want to know why François Hollande should represent the “left” and David Cameron the “right”, we have to go back over 200 years, to the Assemblée Nationale in France round about the time of the Revolution in 1789. The members sat then (as they still do today) in a semicircular chamber, facing the president of the Assembly. The position of honour was on the president’s right and was occupied by the nobles, while to his left were the commoners. Politically, the nobles were staunch supporters of the church, the king and the existing constitution, while the commoners were more likely to be anti-church, anti-royalist and in favour of overthrowing the constitution. In between them sat the moderates. So the right came to represent those political parties that favour continuity and stability (as they see it) while the left represents radical parties of change.

In the UK, such a distinction could not have been made, as the elected representatives sat facing each other in an adversarial configuration, and although the Speaker has the governing party on his or her right and the opposition on his or her left, the disposition of these parties will depend on who is in government at any one time. And in fact, it wasn’t until about 1906 that the terms left and right started being applied to British politics, when the Labour Party became a third force in national politics, joining the previously duopolistic Conservatives and Liberals to create more of a political spectrum.

This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Global English

What exactly is hand-shredded ass meat?
The Beijing Municipal government hopes to end unintended jokes with its new guidebook intended for the public and restaurants alike, “Enjoy Culinary Delights: The English Translation of Chinese Menus.”

Language change and slang

Rise of the twitchfork mob: how to civilise the web
Gawker founder Nick Denton declared at the South by Southwest festival in March that the dream of online comments – not just on social networking sites but also on news and blog sites – as a forum for intelligent debate was dead.

Improve your English

‘Scary quotes’
Scary quotes commonly appear in headlines and subheadings. Some indicate reported speech or text, a common function of quotation marks; others paraphrase.

The Verb “Do” Is Weirder Than You Think
You might not have given much thought to how many jobs “do” does, and how unusual it is, so today we’re going to give “do” its due.

Language teaching and resources

The Rotary Sushi Bar of English
Luke Thompson challenged himself to talk for 30 minutes. He ended up talking for 1 hour. Mostly about food.

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

Cajun Fench: Can dying language be saved?
Learning a second language can be a hobby or an attempt to reconnect with one’s roots. But for these students, there’s another goal: To save a dying local language.

DARE celebrates completion at ‘shindy’
At the party were [original editor] Cassidy’s children and grandchildren, as well as four of DARE’s original field workers, who were sent across the country to conduct interviews and gather the words that would eventually comprise the dictionary.

Omphalopsychites and umbilicani
I’ve heard the phrase navel gazing exactly a million and one times, without ever suspecting that it had once been more than a figure of speech. I thought that it merely involved contemplating yourself, and a particularly uninteresting part of yourself at that.

Video

History of the English language
This is a real period piece, a British Council film about the history of English. The film was made in 1943, in the middle of World War Two, which explains why the section about vocabulary of German origin is illustrated by a military arm bearing a swastika. Worth a look nonetheless.

We are constantly monitoring the language to ensure that we keep an up-to-date record.  You can be a part of this enterprise by suggesting a word for our Open Dictionary. Every Thursday Laine Redpath-Cole picks a new entry and goes on about it for a bit. This week’s word is:

gender reveal (noun)

the practice of revealing the sex of your unborn child to friends and family, often at a party with a cake that is coloured pink or blue inside

The first video of a gender-reveal party was posted on YouTube in 2008.| My favorite gender reveal idea is this.|The culmination of the party is the cutting of the Gender Reveal cake by the expectant couple.

(Submitted from the United Kingdom)

At first I thought this was something that came out of the Caster Semenye debacle, but that’s gender verification.

As far as gender reveal is concerned, it just goes to show that for those who believe it is possible to have your cake and eat it, you’re truly on the right planet at the right time. The main issue with finding out the gender of your child before it’s born seems to be that it ruins the ‘surprise element’. By ruining the surprise element for yourself and all your circle, you take away something from the content of the communication immediately following a birth: ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’; ‘OMG I can’t believe it, it’s a wee baby girl!’, ‘It’s a strapping young lad!’

We try to replace that element with a similar sort of excitement about ‘the name’. ‘We’re not going to tell you the name, it’s a surprise!’ Argh. Anyway, so there is a missing element of surprise and excitement and, therefore, attention for the new parents (babies don’t need to do anything for attention, you just can’t help it). In order to catch this missing element some fabulously go-getting Americans have come up with the idea of  ‘gender reveal’ parties. I’m finding it impossible to heave myself into describing all the sordid details of what a gender reveal party is here. This article covers it very well, I think. Basically: you can’t wait to find out – there’s a room to be decorated and paraphernalia to be bought – but you still want all the excitement of the reveal moment.

So, hey, the gender reveal party is a solution to a modern-day problem and who am I to pooh-pooh it? In fact, next time I’m pregnant I’m going to have many cakes and eat them all: I’ll have a fertility party (you know: we’re fertile, bring gifts!) then a fetus party (who can spot the human in this scan? Yay, bring gifts!), a gender reveal party (It’s a pink sort! Cry with joy and bring gifts!), a baby shower (bring gifts!) and a welcome party (meet us at the hospital, bring gifts… and champagne!). What do you think? Am I being too grumpy?

I guess what is more of interest to us on this blog is the choice of the name for the party, gender reveal. It’s horribly clinical. Imagine seeing it on an invite? Surely something cuter is available.

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the patterns that follow the noun possibility.

The noun possibility is never followed by an infinitive. Use the pattern the/a possibility of doing something:
✗ New technology offers the possibility to put very large dictionaries onto a single compact disc.
✓ New technology offers the possibility of putting very large dictionaries onto a single compact disc.
✗ With more flexible working hours, staff now have the possibility to build their own working conditions.
✓ With more flexible working hours, staff now have the possibility of building their own working conditions.

You can also use possibility in the following patterns:
▪  possibility of something
▪  possibility that
The possibility of a move to the coast was considered.
There is a real possibility that the government could be defeated.

Gill Francis is a freelance language consultant and writer of resources for teachers and learners of English.  Her latest project is Skylight, an easy-to-use online corpus access tool (for login details, email gillian.francis@blueyonder.co.uk).

_____________

When someone says ‘preposition’ and ‘language change’ in the same breath, you would be forgiven if your eyes glaze over. Prepositions are ‘grammar’ words, and grammar doesn’t change much, surely – or at least not in interesting ways.

If that was your first reaction, it may be because you were taught that prepositions, like pronouns, conjunctions, and determiners, are ‘closed classes’ whose members are definitively listed in grammar books (preferably unopened). Prepositions seem uninteresting because they mean very little out of context; they have uses rather than meanings, to put it simply. In context, their changing ways can be fascinating.

True, new grammar words don’t burst onto the stage with all guns blazing, like some ‘lexical’ words do. So-called ‘open-class’ words – particularly nouns and adjectives – are often coined or dug up by journalists when the situation demands it, like omnishambles in the aftermath of the last UK budget. Omnishambles may make its way into the dictionary, or more probably it will sink into oblivion once the narrative that spawned it is forgotten. In general, new ‘lexical’ words and compounds are coined as and when needed, to name new objects and concepts. For example, not long ago we might have been mystified by this supermarket product description: fairly traded party size instant barbecue (printed without any hyphens), which now causes only fleeting puzzlement.

New uses of ‘grammar’ words enter the language more gradually and without attracting much attention. This may be because the words themselves are not newly-minted or revived; instead, the same familiar little items are being drafted into new areas, annexing part of the territory of other members of their set.

Look at the preposition across in the next example, from The Archers, a UK radio soap. Two characters are discussing an upcoming event at a local venue (May 2011):

Elizabeth: The models arrive at about 4.30.
Roy: And … they’ll need refreshments?
Elizabeth: Yeah, but Hugh’s across all that.

Only a few days later, another Archers character, unable to access the website of a secondary school to which he considers entrusting the education of his offspring, grumbles:

“It doesn’t bode well if the school’s not even across basic technology.”

This sense of across is equivalent to the more formal conversant with, au fait with, aware of, familiar with, etc. More informally, we say things like I’ve got the hang of it or I’m clued up on this; we choose the level of formality according to the situation.

The ‘new’ use often occurs in the broadcast media and in conversation, but it does not (yet?) appear in any dictionary of Standard English (as far as I know). And I have found no evidence in large recently-compiled corpora, perhaps because there simply is no evidence, or because I haven’t spotted it amongst the hundreds of thousands of matches for this very common word.

Further support for this use of across is that has acquired its own unique collocations and phraseology. For example, it co-occurs with the modifiers very and absolutely, as in the next examples. (In the more usual senses of across, these modifiers are not used; we don’t say very across the road.)

He’s very across all the issues in international development… (Lenny Henry, BAFTA Awards ceremony, May 2011)
He would be absolutely across everything we have today. (Mark Gatiss on Sherlock Holmes, Radio 5, June 2011)

Finally Snowmail (an internet preview of Channel 4 News) informed its readers (April 2012) that Simon Israel is astride the latest on a particular controversy – a jokily inventive variant of across that sounds uneasily physical in the light of astride’s usual collocates in the domains of horse-riding, cycling and motorcycling.

Across is just one example of the ways in which prepositions are straying into new territory. Further investigation is needed into developing senses, the pragmatic information you need about them, and the detectable trends that link them together in their uncertain journey towards the dictionary.

English has a jumbled inheritance of words from many sources; the pie chart shows a statistical analysis based on dictionary etymologies. Even simple contrasting word pairs, such as in and out, may come from different sources: in is a Latinate word, and out is Germanic.

Despite their disparate origins, you can usually count on words that incorporate in and out to be opposites, and this pattern usually holds true as well for words that begin with in- (im- before certain consonants) and have a corresponding word beginning with ex-, a Latin preposition meaning “out.” The exceptions to the rule – where the “opposite” word is not really opposite in meaning – provide some interesting opportunities for English vocabulary exploration and expansion.

Let’s start with a simple, straightforward pair: inhale and exhale. You could hardly have one without the other, as every living creature knows, and we designate the products of these two verbs with another pair of equal opposites: in-breath and out-breath. You can take this pattern and run with it, finding along the way many word pairs in which what’s in forms a complement to what’s out: include/exclude, implicit/explicit, intern/extern, intrinsic/extrinsic, introvert/extrovert, import/export. The same dependable pattern of opposites holds for many English compounds that incorporate in and out: inboard/outboard, indoor/outdoor, inpatient/outpatient, infield/outfield. Compounds formed by fusing the parts of phrasal verbs also often represent opposite meanings: input/output, inflow/outflow, check-in/checkout, fade-in/fade-out, inbreeding/outbreeding.

So much for the easy stuff. What about the word pairs in which one member is far more common than the other, or has a meaning not at all expected from the meaning of its “opposite number”? These are the word pairs that provide an opportunity for a better understanding of the ways in which English words relate to each other.

You’re probably familiar with infect, and probably aware that English has no word exfect. There is, however, a word that is the etymological counterpart of infect, and that word is effect: before some consonants, the ex- prefix becomes ef-, or simply e-. The interesting thing here, however, is why infect seems to be more than poles apart in meaning from effect. What’s the explanation? The disparity in meaning is partly due to the fact that effect was used as a noun in English before it was used as a verb. If you look at the core meaning of effect as a noun, however – a change produced in something by another thing – you can see how an effect might be the result after infect has done its magic. A couple of other pairs in which ex- is disguised but in which you can probably find the connection with the corresponding in- word are inject/eject and infuse/effuse.

It’s likely that you have several other in- and ex- pairs stored in quite distant locations in your memory bank because their meanings don’t seem to marry up well with each other, but exploring the meanings of the words, while you have your thinking cap on, can reveal some interesting connections. Try this with insist/exist, inhibit/exhibit, inspect/expect, inspire/expire, impose/expose, and intend/extend. In some cases you’ll find that the words started off their careers in English with more or less opposite meanings, but then a later meaning eventually pushed aside the earlier meaning. This is the case with incite/excite, which today have meanings that overlap a great deal, but were originally more opposed to one another.

Some in- and out- pairs also provide interesting material for word exploration, but their contrast in meaning is more often due to the fact that they appeared in English centuries apart and for different reasons. Some pairs that fit this description are intake/out-take, income/outcome, and in-law/outlaw.

The Pennsylvania-based artist and illustrator, Victor Stabin has sent us a copy of his delightful book Daedal Doodle. It’s an ‘ABC’ for kids learning the alphabet – but with a difference. Books of this type usually employ familiar objects and animals (‘A is for Apple, B is for Bear’ and so on), but this one is based on rare words which Stabin discovered by scouring dictionaries to find unlikely pairs. These produce bizarre alliterations, accompanied by surreal illustrations. Each picture is helpfully provided with definitions – which is just as well because even lexicographers wouldn’t know most of the words being illustrated. Two of the less obscure examples are bifoliated bonito (a fish similar to a tuna, with two leaves – you can find it here), and microcephalic minotaur (the mythical creature with a bull’s head on a man’s body, but in this case with an abnormally small head). The whole approach is counterintuitive, but that’s what makes it interesting. Stabin has used this technique in schools, encouraging students to comb their dictionaries in order to find their own outlandish combinations and then draw pictures of them. By a strange coincidence, his first high-school assignment was in a class of 26 students, so they each worked on one letter of the alphabet.

Only a handful of the 50-odd words illustrated here appear in the Macmillan Dictionary – though we do have zygote, traditionally the last entry in most English dictionaries, which is paired with zooid in Daedal Doodle. This demonstrates both the vast range of English vocabulary (something we’ve discussed before), and the point that most of us, most of the time, get by pretty well with just a fraction of the available resources. It’s all about frequency: microcephalic, for example, occurs just 25  times in our 1.6-billion-word corpus, which makes it an exceptionally rare word. (Though, intriguingly, one of these 25 examples very nearly connects microcephalic with the minotaur: “Professor Henneberg has previously compared the remains against a microcephalic Minoan skull dating from 2000 BC.”)

It brings us back to the old question of how words get in the dictionary. The strict ‘entry criteria’ we traditionally applied made perfect sense in the days of paper dictionaries: if you added a new item, something else would usually have to go in order to make room for it, so words like microcephalic didn’t stand much chance of getting into a general-purpose dictionary. But with dictionaries now mainly in digital form, we find ourselves revisiting most of the conventional wisdom that guided us in the past. With unlimited lexical data at our disposal, and crowd-sourcing to complement our own lexicographic efforts, maybe one day children reading Daedal Doodle will be able to check the Macmillan Dictionary for its definitions of the picture illustrating the letter N: ‘nidus naga’s nucivorous nidicolous’.

This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Global English

Tidbits and titbits
Americans do not say tidbit because they would titter at BrE titbit. Americans say tidbit because that’s the original form of the word.

Have you ever been out swarping around?
I mentioned this expression to a middle-aged friend and he smiled and said he hadn’t heard it since his grandmother used it to scold him as a teenager.

Language change and slang

Swedish hens and singular ‘they’
A few parts of speech admit new members readily: verbs and nouns and adjectives are successfully coined all time. But the bits of grammatical plumbing like conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns don’t admit much innovation.

Old Spice Ad Campaign Tries to Make ‘Smellf’ Happen
Can Old Spice make “smellf” happen? We don’t expect to adopt this word into our vocabulary, but it might draw a slight chuckle each time we hear it.

Improve your English

The overuse of exclamation points!
For those who are missing the Waterstones apostrophe, here’s a little rant about exclamation marks.

Language teaching and resources

Quickworksheets: Create Vocabulary and grammar Worksheets Online
There are plenty of free online worksheet generators available, but most of them are cluttered with ads, and I couldn’t find any that are as well-designed and easy-to-use as Quickworksheets. The variety of worksheet types available is impressive.

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

How do you sign a local word like durian?
A video dictionary has been developed to show how the deaf can use sign language to describe local icons such as durian and Marina Bay Sands.

What is the worst of all words?
I remember as if it was yesterday the thrilling English lesson when my class teacher wrote the words nice, get, and got on pieces of paper and set fire to them, to impress upon our 10-year-old brains that we should choose more interesting words for our writing. This writer had a similar – if slightly less inflammatory – experience.

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about how to spell the inflections of develop.

Don’t write the -ed and -ing forms of develop with a double ‘p’. The correct spellings are developed and developing:
✗ We live in a world where everything is developping rapidly.
✓ We live in a world where everything is developing rapidly.

Don’t spell develop with a final ‘e’ (or development with an ‘e’ in the middle):
✗ As technology developes, we may find better solutions to diseases such as AIDS.
✓ As technology develops, we may find better solutions to diseases such as AIDS.