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

English atop the Eurovision pile, yet again
It is clear that pop is just another area in which English is taking over Europe, alongside business and the politics of the European Union. French is holding a solid second place, as it does elsewhere. The rest of Europe’s many language communities divide up what remains.

You can pronounce “GIF” any way you like
Despite the wishes and fiats of self-appointed regulators, linguistic variation is perfectly fine. Language is big and stretchy; it contains multitudes and embraces variety. What little confusion might arise over the pronunciation of GIF will not hurt anyone or bring civilisation to its knees. More to the point, a preference for “gif” or “jif” does not imply someone’s wrongness, stupidity, or moral deficiency.

France approves English language classes
France’s lower parliament has approved a proposal to allow universities to teach some classes in English, despite claims that it could turn French into a “dead language”.

Language change and slang

US ‘now using British-isms’ (5:02)
Professor of English Ben Yagoda and Dr Lynne Murphy, a reader in linguistics at the University of Sussex discuss British words being used in American English.

A linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds
The next time you find yourself wondering about the highest use of linguistics, or enduring the insulting grunts and groans of petulant adolescents and wondering how such noises could even be described, bring the two worlds together. Clearly, linguistics exists just so we can give a technical description of those hard-to-spell sounds that erupt from callow youths.

Language teaching and resources

25 Things Teachers Should Know About Gamification
Gamification has been a big buzzword in education in recent times. Using game-style methods to incentivize students to get their learn on can be fun and effective teaching and learning methods. … From the most simple questions (like, ‘what is gamification, anyway?) to the more complex ideas (goals and structure of using gamification in your classroom) and the history of its use (The Oregon Trail), these 25 bullet points will get you started in the right direction.

Infograph lesson 5: Flying across the globe
This upper intermediate infograph lesson looks at interesting facts and figures about bird migration.

Language technology

Google Translate now serves 200 million people daily
The service now works in 71 languages … Initially, only some language translation pairs were supported, but in 2008, Google launched the ability to translate any language to any other language. The amount of text Google translates daily is more than what’s in a million books, and surpasses what professional translators handle in a full year …

Books, science, dictionaries, words and languages

How Bilinguals Switch Between Languages
Research on bilingualism has increased in recent years as the global climate has become more intermixed … These new findings challenge the idea that bilinguals always have one dominant language.

Video

Inside a cartoonist’s world (4:23)
From cave drawings to the Sunday paper, artists have been visualizing ideas – cartoons – for centuries. New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly walks us through the many stages every cartoon goes through, starting with an idea and turning into something that connects us on a deeply human level.

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are usually based on areas of English which learners find difficult, e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc.

This week’s language tip helps with key words which are used for talking or writing about films.

Types of film
thriller: a film with an exciting story that often involves a crime
horror film: a film that tries to make the audience very scared
comedy: a film that tries to make the audience laugh
romantic comedy: a type of film that combines a love story with a comedy
drama: any serious film
costume drama: a historical film
sci-fi film: a film that is set in the future and deals with imaginary scientific developments
animated film: a film in which the characters are drawn, made by computer, or made from models
cartoon: a short humorous film in which the characters are drawn

Places where you see films
cinema: the place where you go to see films. The usual American word is movie theater.
pictures: (informal old-fashioned) the cinema
multiplex: a cinema with many screens

People who work in films
director: the person who is responsible for the artistic aspects of a film
producer: the person who is responsible for the business aspects of making a film
star: a famous film actor

Other vocabulary
trailer: a series of short sections of a film that are shown to advertise it
soundtrack: the music that accompanies a film
credits: a list of the people involved in making a film, shown at the beginning or end of it

Check out the Macmillan Dictionary & Thesaurus for more terms relating to films and types of films.

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @MacLearnEnglish or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

I’m sure I’m not alone in having really enjoyed reading this series so far, and one thing that’s struck me is how often ‘Dads’ seem to feature in people’s anecdotes on lexical encounters. Well, here’s yet another one …

My Dad, God rest his soul, was (unlike myself!) never much of a talker. Dad bought me my first ever big, chunky, English dictionary, and in the front page inscribed the message ‘To Kerry – many words, from a man of not many words’. No, Dad was much more the pensive type, which meant that when he did open his mouth, what he said was usually worth listening to. He was a talented engineer, leading a team of draughtsman in the design of military vehicles in an era when plans were drawn with pencils rather than mouse clicks. The concept of shape, therefore, was very significant for him, and when talking about this he would often express an inexplicable dislike for the word oblong. He had such an uncharacteristically strenuous aversion to the word that any mention of it would make his blood boil, saying things like ‘it’s a rectangle, a RECTANGLE for God’s sake … I can’t abide anyone saying oblong!’. As you can imagine, from such a quiet, considered individual, this reaction seemed so odd and has stayed with me all my life. So much so that, even now, I can’t bring myself to use the word for fear of him turning in his grave. I love words, I’ve even made a career out of writing about them, but whatever linguistic obfuscations I need to employ, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid using the word oblong!

In case you were wondering, oblong clearly doesn’t provoke a similar reaction elsewhere and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. It’s been around for a very long time, alive and well in British English before Big Ben was even thought about. It in fact dates back to the 14th century which makes it, sorry Dad, much older than rectangle …

About Kerry Maxwell
Kerry Maxwell works as a freelance author and editor. Kerry is author of Brave New Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the 21st Century (Pan Macmillan, 2007) and has been writing the Macmillan Dictionary BuzzWord column since 2003.

Browse the archive of Stories behind Words and get in touch if you’d like to share your story. We’d love to hear from you!

We all know the list of English personal pronouns – I/me, you, he/him, she/her, it, we/us, they/them – but there’s one word that interests me because it seems to have the function of a personal pronoun but has very specific connotations. That word is muggins, which is defined in the Macmillan Dictionary as “used for referring to yourself when you feel that you have allowed people to treat you in an unfair way”. It is typically used, wryly or bitterly, in contexts where one person finds themselves doing a task, especially an unpleasant task, because others get them to do it or duck out of doing it themselves. Here are some examples:

The first drive was to be done from Redditch to Knebworth with no support vehicle and muggins was to drive it.
Ian has other priorities; Thom couldn’t organize his way out of a paper bag and isn’t keen anyway; so here is muggins doing all the work.

As you can see, although muggins has the function of a first person singular pronoun in these examples, it has third person verb agreement. This way of referring to yourself has a distancing effect – it’s as if you are standing back and realising that you are being put upon, even as you are allowing people to treat you unfairly or actually volunteering to take on some task. Interestingly, muggins often occurs with here after it. Here is often used when talking about someone who is with you, as in “David here is an expert on computers”, so the effect is that you are talking about yourself as if you were another person.

One of the sight screens fell over, and muggins here went to try and fix it.

Muggins is also used with the, a or another determiner, not necessarily to refer to yourself, in sentences such as “I’m the muggins who has to arrange everything.” or “Let’s find some other muggins to do it.”

The word muggins apparently first occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, and probably came, for some obscure reason, from the surname Muggins, influenced by one of the meanings of mug – “a stupid person or a person who is easily fooled”. It is British, which sets me wondering how the same idea is expressed in other varieties of English. There are phrases and rhetorical questions that, sometimes at least, have a similar meaning and general flavour:

I’m the one who does all the housework.
Guess who had to clean up the mess?

What other ways, apart from I (or, if you’re a king or queen, we), are there of referring exclusively to yourself? There is the phrase yours truly, which, like muggins, is informal but, unlike muggins, does not have any special connotations:

… a magnificent sports facility which yours truly is far too old to make use of.

The formal pronoun one, though more often used to make a statement about people in general, is clearly sometimes just used to talk about your own feelings, behaviour, etc.:

One felt that the film was too short for its subject matter.

So, even a simple, basic English word like I has near-synonyms with different registers or connotations.

Most verbal humour depends on some kind of mismatch between two words or phrases and the funny or unexpected resolution of this incongruity. My last post focused on a type of grammatical ambiguity that allows two conflicting analyses of a sentence, one of them ridiculous. More often, though, humour and ambiguity play on the multiple meanings of words and phrases, or on the clash between different phraseological interpretations.

For example, a recent headline in the Bristol Evening Post read:

PUPILS GO BACK IN TIME TO RECREATE EVACUATION

The article described how Bristol schoolchildren gathered at the headquarters of Avon Valley Railway to stage a re-enactment of the wartime evacuation of children from urban centres in the east to the Bristol countryside. The idea was to give modern kids a taste of what it was like for those other children to be suddenly taken from their homes and evacuated by steam train to an unknown rural environment.

For a moment, I ‘chunked’ this headline as follows: pupils + go back (‘return to school’) + in time to recreate evacuation (‘they weren’t too late for this’). A parallel ukWaC example is:

They arrived in time to catch the midnight train to London.

But this explanation of the headline is clearly ludicrous. The intended meaning involves a different grouping altogether: pupils + go back in time (‘return to an earlier period of history’) + to (‘in order to’) + recreate evacuation. A similar ukWaC example is:

Film crews travelled back in time to uncover historic facts on Coventry’s watch-making industry.

Road signs advising motorists to slow down, like SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY and SLOW WORKERS AHEAD, are an easy target for deliberate mis-reading arising from conflicting ways of chunking the words: slow children + at play rather than the intended imperative slow + children at play. In practice, of course, the layout of such signs disambiguates them: SLOW is usually in a larger typeface and stands on a separate line.

Sometimes ambiguity occurs when there is both a phraseological and a word-by-word reading, as in this example (also from ukWaC):

She wore her shoes out dancing in the street.

The obvious reading of this sees wear out (sense 3) as a phrasal verb, while the less likely interpretation involves ellipsis – ‘she wore her shoes (when she went) out dancing’. Naturally, the possible ambiguity is resolved in the wider context.

Another kind of double meaning applies only to spoken English; it exploits the unrelated meanings of words that sound the same but are spelt differently, i.e homophones like their/there/they’re or sew/sow/so.

Sometimes the ambiguity lurking in homophones can fool you. Listening to a radio news broadcast once, I briefly but seriously believed that the newsreader said: Meat from Wales is being shipped to Japan and sold illegally. But he didn’t. Whatever I heard, his actual words were:

Meat from whales is being shipped to Japan and sold illegally.

This momentary confusion can be explained in terms of lexical priming. The juxtaposition of from Wales and to Japan reinforces my erroneous ‘two countries’ interpretation. Moreover, the noun group meat from whales is at odds with the way we normally talk about meat: we don’t often say ‘meat from lambs’ or even ‘meat from horses’, but lamb and horse-meat.

And finally, primings vary according to an individual’s life-long encounters with a word: I have strong personal and family connections with Wales but only a vague and theoretical relationship with whales. So there was no contest: this mysterious item had to be about Welsh meat. Except that it wasn’t.

In English, ambiguity also springs from homonyms – words that have the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings. Road signs, again, often employ disconcerting homonyms (not intended to be puns) such as MAJOR WORKS AHEAD (to which the response can only be Does he?) and the oft-cited CAUTION – HEAVY PLANT CROSSING, which unfailingly invokes the mental image of a huge plant tiredly dragging its dusty leaves as it slowly makes its way across the tarmac. Everyday language is full of humour, if you want to find it.

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

The 10 most scandalous euphemisms
followed by:
20 of your favourite euphemisms

More on grammar
Much discussion of language, particularly on the web, goes nowhere because those involved are very often talking about different things. In considering approaches to language, as in all else, it’s important to be clear what we’re talking about. In particular, the word ‘grammar is bandied around without much thought as to what it might be.

Language change and slang

30 days of BuzzWords
A selection of BuzzWords from Mashables, including big data, synergy, second screen, and many many more…

Language teaching and resources

Are language teachers leading the way with education technology?
There are a plethora of possibilities for enhancing language learning with technology as there are colleagues willing to help from language fora and social media. The stumbling block for many is not having the time to seek out new tools and become familiar with them, as well as the fear of relinquishing control to their pupils who may be more techno-savvy than they are.

Books, science, dictionaries, words and languages

Your Brain Catches Grammar Errors Even When You Don’t Realize It
The brain does all kinds of amazing things while you’re not paying attention (you know, like regularly remind you to breathe). But it’s also engaged in less critical but equally interesting tasks, like correcting the grammar of the person sitting across from you at dinner. A University of Oregon study has logged hard evidence that the brain processes and compensates for errors in grammar and syntax without your being aware of it.

Video

Dictionary of Numbers: browser extension humanizes the numbers on the Web (0:58)
Dictionary of Numbers is a Chrome extension that watches your browsing activity for mentions of large numerical measurements and automatically inserts equivalences in real-world terms that are meant to clarify things. For example, a story about a 300,000 acre forest fire would be annotated to note that this is about the area of LA or Hong Kong; or that 315 million people is about the population of the USA.

Get your dancing shoes on – courtesy of Puma (2:45)
The brand collaborated with some of the most high-profile freestyle dancers from around the world and choreographer Super Dave to invent dance moves for 280 words (see behind the scenes photographs by Alex Hulsey below). The Dance Dictionary also includes a comprehensive inventory of dance moves and their definitions for freestylers.

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 which learners find difficult, e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc.

This week’s language tip gives useful advice on the adjective excited:

Adjectives for describing things that make someone feel excited:
exciting making you feel excited and enthusiastic:
This is the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on. ♦ an exciting opportunity ♦ Most people find New York very exciting.
thrilling extremely exciting, often used about sporting events:
France lost to Wales 34–33 in a thrilling match in Paris.
exhilarating making you feel happy, excited, and full of energy:
I spent an exhilarating day cruising the river.
♦ an exhausting but exhilarating climb
gripping very exciting and interesting, used especially about books, films, sporting events etc that are so exciting that you can’t stop reading or watching them:
A crowd of 8000 witnessed the gripping final chapter of a remarkable contest.
♦ a gripping account of the disaster
dramatic exciting and interesting, often used about sporting events that are very exciting, especially at the end:
His side lost 6–1 in a remarkable game with a dramatic finale.

Frequent collocations
Nouns frequently used with thrilling:

battle, climax, contest, end, ending, final, finish, game, match, victory

Nouns frequently used with gripping:

account, drama, episode, story, tale

Nouns frequently used with dramatic:

end, ending, final, finale, finish, victory

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

My father, who was an exuberant talker and storyteller, used to conflate words, creating inadvertent coinages on the fly in the middle of a conversation or anecdote. He tended not to notice that he’d done it, but my brothers and I, and Mum, would pounce on them with glee.

One time he mentioned someone’s razier-like wit, presumably wit as sharp as both a razor and a rapier simultaneously. On another occasion he described a group of late-night revellers as legloose, a lovely, carefree, loose-limbed, slightly squiffy mixture of footloose and legless. Then there was interspinkled, which seems to incorporate elements of interspersed, sprinkled, and intermingled, to name but three. My favourite, though, has always been blagrant, as in ‘a blagrant lie’ or ‘a blagrant disregard for the law’, a highly satisfying combination of blatant and flagrant. I think what I like about it so much is that it seems so plausible. It sounds like it ought to be a word.

Linguistically, these would be described as blends, words formed by combining parts of two other words, like brunch (from breakfast and lunch) or the recent chillax (from chill and relax). But Dad’s versions weren’t deliberate coinages, they were simply happy accidents. Accidental or not, there’s a playful inventiveness about these made-up words that I really cherished when I was growing up, and still do. He did it naturally, like breathing.

Long before I became a lexicographer, I delighted in what you might call the joy of words: puns and other forms of wordplay, word puzzles, obscure words, made-up words. And I think blagrant (and those other curious lexical mongrels) may well be where it all started. I have wondered from time to time about sneaking blagrant in as a headword in one of the dictionaries I’m helping to write, and perhaps one day I will.

About Andrew Delahunty
Andrew Delahunty is a freelance lexicographer, dictionary editor, and reference book author. He has written and contributed to a wide variety of dictionaries and reference books, and 2013 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Andrew’s first day as a lexicographer.

Browse the archive of Stories behind Words and get in touch if you’d like to share your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Our series on English as a lingua franca continues with a post from Japan. We asked Jim Ronald, Professor of English Linguistics at Hiroshima Shudo University, to provide a perspective on Japan’s engagement with English. Jim has discussed the subject with four of his students, and they give their views here.

__________

What impact is English having on Japan? In various ways, English is profoundly affecting the lives of people in Japan, although things are often different from how they may seem to a visitor to the country. As a long-term resident here, my experience of English in Japan differs from that of most Japanese people, so I asked my four graduate students, Eiji Takeda, Sae Asaoka, Miyu Yokota and Ryota Hiura to add their voices to this account.

Eiji Takeda tells of his British fiancée’s impressions when she first came to Japan:

“One of the things she was startled by was the flood of English writing in various places. She said, ‘I don’t know why you Japanese can’t speak English when it’s everywhere here.’ She was shocked to see little girls wearing T-shirts that said ‘touch me now’, ‘creature’ or ‘love child’, or a building in Tokyo just named ‘BIG BOX’. And when she saw the signboard of the little off-licence surrounded by beautiful green rice fields in my village, ‘Liquor Shop Urban’, she was lost for words.

Living in Japan, we are almost blind to all these English words that scream out confusing messages to her and to other visitors. We might gain a vague impression from them – something lovely or stylish or modern – but very few people would stop to read them and think what they mean.”

Two related issues that do directly affect many people’s lives are English proficiency tests and workplace requirements for English.

In Japan, there are many kinds of English proficiency tests. These days, above all, the business-oriented TOEIC test, produced by an American company, is considered an important tool for measuring people’s English ability, as well as for getting a job. As many as three quarters of companies now require specific TOEIC scores as a condition of employment or promotion. As Sae Asaoka says, “We often hear people, especially university students, say ‘I want to get a higher TOEIC score.’ I used to say something similar when I was an undergraduate, but now I’ve got a relatively high score, I feel different. For one thing, a high score does not mean that someone is good at communicating in English. People just want a high TOEIC score and there are plenty of books that help them do just that. But surely the important thing is not simply to get a high score, but to enjoy learning something you did not know, to study for your own growth, to study with the goal of becoming a good language user. Pursuing these goals – enjoying learning English and finding ways to communicate better – is surely more meaningful, and will also give us higher test scores. And really, what employers are looking for are people who can use English.”

Miyu Yokota points out that while some companies just see English in terms of a test score, others have gone a lot further. “International companies, such as the clothing company UNIQLO or Rakuten which specializes in Internet commerce, have adopted English as the official working language in their offices. They are already international companies and as they plan to expand and build more branches around the world, they need a global workforce, with English as the common language for the staff from many different countries. For Japanese people wanting to work in these companies, English is essential.”

Finally, Ryota Hiura looks at English in the world of popular music:

Many Japanese bands use English words in their names, and in their song titles and lyrics. It somehow gives a cooler image than Japanese. For example, Bump of Chicken is a well-known Japanese band, but most Japanese people have no idea what the name might mean. If we try to work out the meaning, it could be about cowardice or maybe goose pimples. In either case, if this were expressed in Japanese it would sound old-fashioned or somehow frumpish. And English names like these are far from exceptional. In a recent local festival of up-and-coming bands, around 50 of the 55 bands’ names include some kind English – usually a deliberately wacky kind. It seems that a band’s name almost has to be in English in order to appeal to a young Japanese audience, but at the same time this restriction does seem to enable the freedom to be creative and playful… Here, to finish, are a few more entertaining examples of bands’ names, including their creative grammar, word breaks, and capitalization: the band apart, Hello Sleepwalkers, TOTALFAT, Scott goes for, another sunnyday, overthedogs, Indigo La End, and zippy ZIPPER.”

You may be familiar with the not-very-funny jokes based on the old formula “someone/something walks into a bar…”. They usually involve a play on words, as in ‘A drunk walks into a bar. “Ouch!” he says.’ Exactly – they aren’t very funny. But some of them make useful points about grammar:

A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.

This tells you exactly what a ‘dangling modifier’ (or ‘dangling participle’) is, and simultaneously exemplifies the problem, i.e that there is no clear grammatical subject – or ‘doer’ – of ‘finishing a drink’, so it dangles, or hangs there helplessly. The only possible candidate for subject is ‘the bartender’, but that makes no sense in light of the usual bartender-client narrative.

Joking aside, I heard this confusingly dangling participle on a radio news broadcast, and replayed the snippet several times to confirm that the reader really did say:

Police negotiated with him, minutes before being shot dead by marksmen.

Nonsense! ‘Police’ is the only available subject of ‘being shot dead’, which implies that they, not the armed gunman they’d been negotiating with, were shot dead by marksmen. The error must soon have been noticed and the script changed, because subsequent news reports did not repeat it.

It is often said that dangling participles make a sentence ambiguous, but in fact they make nonsense of it – they force the hearer/reader to construct a single, incorrect interpretation.

In contrast, there are sentences whose construction is perfectly ‘correct’ but whose grammar genuinely allows for two interpretations. In September 2011 The Independent newspaper reported that ‘giant crabs’ (‘up to a metre across’) have invaded deep waters on the edge of Antarctica, probably because of global warming, and are wiping out a large number of smaller marine species. The report goes on:

A team led by Dr Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii at Manoa found the crabs using a remotely operated submersible.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, these crabs were no cleverer than the average crustacean – it was obviously the team of researchers, not the crabs, who were using the submersible. Yet unlike the case of the dangling participle, there is nothing grammatically wrong with the alternative ‘smart-crab’ interpretation.

It is often argued that ambiguity and humour can be employed in the ELT classroom to brighten things up and make everyone smile. I was inclined to agree until I started writing this post, but now I’m less sure. The least sophisticated of readers can decipher the intended meaning of my example using a modicum of common sense and real-world knowledge. But what would I do if a student pressed me for a grammatical explanation?

I’d have to say that in its intended meaning, the sentence structure is ‘subject + verb + object + adjunct’. The adjunct (aka ‘adverbial’) ‘using a remotely controlled submersible’ is a free-floating clause and could move to the beginning of the sentence. In the sillier, more ecologically alarming interpretation, the structure is ‘subject + verb + object (although the analysis is actually trickier than this), and the clause ‘using a remotely controlled submersible’ is simply part of the pattern of the verb find, not an adjunct at all.

How complicated is THAT? The problem is that all grammatical explanations involve metalanguage – language about language – and ‘grammars’ vary widely, both in terminology and in the units of description they recognise. It would be dauntingly difficult to establish a common metalanguage with a class of non-native-speaker learners, who might not benefit much from the process anyway.

Moreover, if there’s anything worse than a bad joke, it’s a joke that you just don’t get. You look blank, still waiting for the punch line, until the joke-teller kindly takes on the grim task of dissecting it for you. By this time all humour has long since vanished.

While grammatical ambiguities are complex, it could be much easier to bring lexical ambiguity – based on different meanings of words – into the classroom. I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to discuss the various interpretations of, say, ‘He doesn’t usually wear his pyjamas out’, or ‘Go to work on an egg’. Would it?