In the previous post on this topic, we looked at the criteria traditionally applied by dictionary-makers when considering new words for inclusion. The question is as old as lexicography itself. When he wrote his Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747, Dr Johnson noted that it is ‘not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen’. And having aired his ideas on the subject, he acknowledged that it isn’t always possible to make clear rules and then adhere to them strictly. 

The Oxford dictionary website also has a go at explaining its inclusion principles – this time by means of an elaborate flowchart which takes you through the various decision points. Having cleared numerous hurdles, the successful word is at last included in the dictionary ‘in due course’. I’m not sure I agree with every stage of this. For example, if the question ‘Is its use limited strictly to one group of users?’ is answered with a ‘Yes’, the word is consigned to a sort of purgatory where its behaviour is monitored for possible future inclusion. But dictionaries routinely include vocabulary typical of specific user-groups – the important thing is to apply an appropriate label to indicate that it is not part of the general language. On the whole, though, the Oxford chart gives a good outline of the key criteria: does the evidence come from a range of sources (what we referred to previously as ‘dispersion’), and does it have ‘a decent history of use’(the longevity argument)?

The problem is that the approach applied by both Oxford and Merriam-Webster is rooted in the past. It reflects the realities of print-based dictionary publishing – and those days are gone.

What has changed? First, what we’d call the ‘publishing cycle’. When dictionaries existed mostly as printed books, publishers would produce a new edition every four or five years. They collected new vocabulary as it appeared, but they could take the long view on whether something was worth including. We do things differently now. Consider for example the linguistic fallout of the global financial crisis that began in 2008 – just a year after Macmillan published the second edition of its dictionary. With the dictionary now mainly consulted online, we were able to add important new usages, such as the word credit crunch or the new sense of toxic (when applied to debts) – without having to wait several years. The second big change, which has been gathering pace since the turn of the century, is that the amount of evidence available to us has grown exponentially, thanks to the Web and social media. Thirdly, we’re no longer limited by space constraints. Even the largest printed dictionaries don’t have the infinite amounts of space that online media provide, so they have to be selective. That’s no bad thing: the removal of these limits shouldn’t be a licence to include just anything. But it does allow us to re-think – and broaden – our inclusion policies.

Above all, older notions about ‘what gets into the dictionary’ reflect the idea of the lexicographer as a gatekeeper, the belief that it is up to us to decide (on behalf of everyone else) which facts about language deserve the special status of  being admitted to a dictionary. This notion of the dictionary having special ‘authority’ (which it confers on the words it includes) is well-established, and still has wide appeal. But it may be incompatible with the priorities and expectations of users of the Web – especially digital natives. If a word is in common use, people expect to find it in their online dictionary, and they won’t be impressed by the argument that it first requires ‘a decent history of use’. For many users, in other words, speed and convenience, getting a useful answer now, may be more important than authority.

As in so many other areas, one of the impacts of the Web has been a challenge to the old top-down model of one ‘expert’ provider and many passive recipients. It isn’t simply a case of users expecting dictionaries to respond more rapidly to language change – many of them also want to be involved in the compilation process. (Wikipedia is the obvious analogy.) In the final part of this series, we’ll discuss the implications of ‘crowd-sourced’ dictionary content (already a central feature of Wordnik, for example, and of our own Open Dictionary), and we’ll also look at emerging language technologies which might just change everything.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. 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 helps with ways in which you can apologize or accept an apology.

Ways of apologizing
Sorry / I’m sorry:  the usual way of apologizing to someone you know well
I do apologize for… : a more polite and formal way of apologizing, used especially when you feel responsible for something that someone else has done
Excuse me: used when apologizing for something you did accidentally
I beg your pardon: a more formal way of apologizing for something you did accidentally
I/​We owe you an apology: used when you realize you have treated someone badly, for example by blaming them for something that is not their fault
Please accept my/​our apologies: used when making a written or formal apology
I/​We regret…:  used when making an apology in an official announcement
Examples:
I’m sorry I’m late, Amy. I missed the train.  ♦  I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear what she said.
I do apologize for Julie’s behaviour. She’s normally so reliable.
Oh,  excuse me, I didn’t see you standing there.
I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to interrupt.
We’ve discovered who the thief was, and it seems we  owe you an apology.
We accept that this was the company’s fault and  ask you to accept our sincere apologies.
My apologies if I have offended you in any way.
We regret to announce that tonight’s performance of ‘La Traviata’ has been cancelled.
Ways of accepting an apology
That’s quite all right / There’s no need to apologize: used when telling someone that you do not mind what they have done
No problem: used when telling someone you know well that you do not mind what they have done
Examples:
‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ ‘ That’s quite all right, I’ve only been waiting for a minute.’  ♦  There’s no need to apologize, it was an easy mistake to make.
‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ ‘ No problem, I’ll ask Rory.’

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.

The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract kind of toy for which playtime never ends.

Wordplay, in a word, is fun. It can break ice and break conventions, exercise the mind and stretch the imagination. Language, like physical play, is a medium through which we can indulge our creative instincts. Some people channel this into inventing entire languages; more commonly it manifests in our love of coining and using new words.

In an interesting post last week, Orin Hargraves wrote about fad words such as Tebowing and cyberchondria, describing them as “novel playthings” that we soon abandon “because we know that others will be coming along soon.” In a subsequent post about how words get into the dictionary, Michael Rundell described taking a familiar word and “doing something inventive with it to create a new meaning”, offering the amusing example “meerkatted to attention”.

Portmanteaus are an especially popular type of new word. Here, much of the groundwork has already been laid in the form of two or more existing words. There is a surreal kind of entertainment in seeing words joined improbably together, and when newspaper headlines join in the game, these blends spread all the faster. Any heavy snowfall nowadays is likely to be accompanied by references to snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, blizzaster and so on. There is novelty too in trendy gerunds, such as Tebowing and planking.

The last two links lead you to Macmillan’s online Open Dictionary, which offers readers the opportunity to submit new words and phrases; and to its BuzzWord archive, which looks in detail at some of the neologisms and topical terms that have leaked into more mainstream use. They show how the Internet enables us to share new coinages and verbal inventions faster and with a wider audience than has ever been possible before.

Inventing words and usages comes naturally to us, but getting one into a reputable dictionary is a rare feat. A more realistic ambition is to see a word we created attain modest currency beyond our personal use – or we can simply enjoy it for its own sake. Don’t be put off if someone says your neologism is “not a word”. Unless you’re using language in a formal capacity, it is yours to manipulate as you please. The great lexicographer James Murray wrote that “the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference”, and much of the fun is at the fringe.

The conclusion of our Plain English theme brings a guest post by Martin Shovel, a writer, animator and speechwriter with a special interest in new media and social networking. He writes regularly about language and communication on his own CreativityWorks blog and is a contributor to the Guardian’s Mind Your Language blog. He tweets @MartinShovel.

_____________

For centuries, speechwriters have been viewed with suspicion. We’re regarded as the used car salesmen of the English language usage world because we specialize in the darkest of linguistic arts: rhetoric, the art of persuasion.

The rot set in when the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato put the boot into rhetoric around the 5th century B.C. They argued that rhetoric didn’t say anything substantive about the world – it wasn’t a proper body of knowledge, like medicine or business, for example.

Instead, they characterized rhetoric as little more than a set of tools and techniques that enabled a speaker to wield persuasive power over an audience, irrespective of whether what was being said was true or false. Rhetoric wasn’t concerned with right and wrong; its aim was conviction, not knowledge or understanding.

The doubts raised by Socrates and Plato persist to this day. In fact there is still a widespread belief that rhetoric is like the US sitcom ‘Seinfeld’: essentially a clever show about ‘nothing’. Rhetoric is regarded by many as a dubious gun-for-hire, whose primary concern is entertaining and manipulating an audience, not educating or enlightening them.

At the other end of the linguistic trust spectrum, we find the relative newcomer, plain English. As its name suggests, plain English presents itself as the honest broker of the English usage world: an impartial mediator between ideas and the words that reveal them. On the Australian Plain Language.gov website, Professor Robert Eagleson states that “writers of plain English let their audience concentrate on the message instead of being distracted by complicated language”.

Descriptions of plain English, like Eagleson’s, often imply a distinction between a message and the words that express it: as if words are a window we look through to reveal the ideas that lie beyond them. Metaphorical image-rich language is seen as problematic because it has a tendency to dirty the window and obscure the message.

But if we look at the variety of ways we use language on a daily basis, the distinction between words and message melts away. Rhetoric teaches the speechwriter that how we say what we say affects the meaning of what we say, and my experience of writing speeches confirms this.

When we ask someone to do us a favour, our choice of words is critical to the success of our request. A clear, but abrupt, plain English, “pick it up!”, might cause offence. Whereas a more rhetorical, “would you be an angel, and pick up that pen for me?”, might just do the trick.

Context also plays a crucial part in our choice of words: where we are, who we’re talking to, our relationship to the person, or people, we’re talking to, and so on. If I’m talking to my wife or daughter, I might use angel, but if I’m speaking to a stranger in a noisy bar, or to my boss at work, I could end up in hot water.

We use language to perform all kinds of different tasks: we ask for things, we complain, we apologize, we persuade, and so on; and because content and style are inseparable, all of us learn to become rhetoricians, in order to survive.

The study of everyday language use teaches us that plain English is a style choice, not a privileged insight into the way language works. It’s a style that comes in handy when writing an instruction manual or a contract, but it’s of limited value when attempting to rally troops under fire, or trying to persuade the electorate to hand you their precious votes.

partner betweenness (noun)

a situation when a female partner comes between her male partner and his friends, which then causes problems in the male-female relationship.

The study found partner betweenness undermines men’s feelings of autonomy and privacy, which are central to traditional concepts of masculinity.

(Submitted from the United Kingdom)

We’ve been talking quite a bit over the last week about how words get into the dictionary … and why some don’t. This will never get into a dictionary will it? And surely it won’t trend? It’s so clumsy. It sounds strangely existentialist as well. Partner betweenness. ‘We have a situation of partner betweeness’ must surely be followed by this question: ‘What?’ After which the response must be the definition: ‘my partner has come between me and my friends, which has caused problems in our relationship’. I’ve left out the male-female relationship bit, but is that right? Forgetting the clumsy noun, is this a male-female thing? Doesn’t it happen in same-sex relationships or is there just another word for it? Also, is it always a female getting in the way? There must be a better term. Ideas? I mean, if you go in for this sort of sexism.

In Kate Atkinson’s recent novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), there’s an exchange between two of the characters. When one of them mentions a large sum of money, we read that Kelly, the other character, ‘suddenly meerkatted to attention’. Does this mean we have a new verb on our hands, to meerkat? Should it be added to the dictionary? Probably not. Atkinson is doing what most language users do occasionally (and some do quite often): taking a word or phrase the reader already knows, and doing something inventive with it to create a new meaning. In this case, it’s simply a question of making a verb out of a noun – a process we’ve discussed frequently in the blog – so the reader has no difficulty understanding the sentence. But this is what we’d call an ‘exploitation’ (a one-off, imaginative coinage) rather than a ‘norm’ (something which has become ‘settled’ in the language through repeated use), and this is one of several factors we have to take account of when deciding what to put in the dictionary.

There’s a video describing the process by which new words are admitted to Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries. It’s quite a complex procedure, and the editor who explains it says that this question – ‘How does a word get into your dictionary?’ – is the one he gets asked most often. It’s an important question, too, so we’re devoting three posts to it. We’ll look first at the ‘inclusion criteria’ which dictionary editors have traditionally used; then we’ll consider how far these are still relevant in the world of online dictionaries; and in a final post, we’ll look at emerging technologies which could eventually make this whole question irrelevant.

Orin’s recent post on Tebowing highlights the general fascination with new words, and explains why some words never make it into dictionaries. And if the public is engaged with the issue of what goes in the dictionary, journalists and reviewers are even more interested. We’ve discussed before how most dictionary reviews focus almost exclusively on new words and meanings, and this reflects an assumption that ‘getting into the dictionary’ confers a special status on the successful word. As Kerry Maxwell points out:

For many, the perception is that any word which has gained enough currency to be officially recorded is a ‘proper’ word, here to stay for the use of future generations.

Kerry’s article on how words get into a Macmillan dictionary provides a useful summary of the key issues. There are three main criteria. First, is it a ‘real’ word anyway, or is it simply, like meerkatted, an individual writer’s playful use of language? (Of course, ‘exploitations’ like this can turn into norms – and so become dictionary entries – if other people pick up the usage and recycle it often enough.) Second, what does the evidence tell us about our word’s use? Any linguistic feature (be it a word, phrase, collocation, or meaning) which occurs frequently enough over a long enough period will start to look as if it is ‘part of the language’ – and therefore to deserve its place in a dictionary.

The problem of course is deciding what counts as ‘enough’. And frequency alone is not a sufficient condition because a word may be used with great frequency in a single text – but hardly at all outside it. An extreme example is a word like droog, which appears repeatedly in the novel A Clockwork Orange (it’s part of the secret language which the main characters use, and means ‘friend’), but has never entered the general language. So ‘dispersion’ – the extent to which a word occurs in a range of different sources – is almost as important as frequency. Third, there is the question of whether the word is appropriate for the particular dictionary we’re dealing with. There’s a big difference between a major historical dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, contains over a million headwords, many of them long obsolete) and a dictionary aimed at schoolchildren. So the needs, expectations, and language skills of the dictionary’s intended users are all factors to be taken into account.

Kerry’s explanation of Macmillan’s inclusion criteria was written in 2006 – which now seems like a bygone era. At that time, ‘the dictionary’ was still (for most people) a printed book of limited dimensions, Facebook and Twitter barely existed, and language technologies in common use today were still in development. In the next post on this topic, we’ll consider how far traditional ideas about what gets into the dictionary remain relevant in 2012.

It’s over – voting has closed, the count has finished, and the UN observers have signed off the results. We’ve seen some fantastic blogs and sites in the course of the last couple of months, and now is the moment of truth for our two winners and the four runners-up.

 Best Blog

There were 50 sites in the Best Blog category, garnering over 7,000 votes between them.

The winner of Best Blog was… (OK, imagine this is reality TV, there’d be a massively long pause here…):

Luke’s English Podcast

with 1,528 votes. Many congratulations!  It was close right up to the very end, but you managed to hold off the two runners-up,

Film English (with 1,222 votes) and

ESL Pod (with 751 votes)

Best Website

Not quite so many nominees in the Best Website category (22 in total), but well over 30,000 votes cast.

Like the best blog category, this was one was close all the way through, but eventually, come midnight, the winner was…

 Wordsmith

with a massive 7,641 votes. Another close result, with the second placed site only 271 votes behind. The two runners-up are:

English Club (with 7,370 votes) and

World Wide Words (with 4,687 votes).

Congratulations to all nominees. It’s given us the opportunity to browse some fantastic sites, and I’m sure we’ve all added a few more to our bookmarks/favorites.

There’ll be a prize winging its way to our two winners, along with a winner’s badge to display on the site, and the two runners-up in each category also get badges for their sites.

If you were nominated and want a “Nominated for the Macmillan Dictionary Love English Awards 2011″ badge, then contact us at medoblog.admin@gmail.com and we’ll rush you the badge by return of mail.

“Short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all.” Thus, quoting Winston Churchill, began an editorial in The Economist that consisted entirely of one-syllable words. It went on:

“AND, not for the first time, he was right: short words are best. Plain they may be, but that is their strength. They are clear, sharp and to the point. You can get your tongue round them. You can spell them. Eye, brain and mouth work as one to greet them as friends, not foes. For that is what they are.”

The passage was written by the editor of The Economist’s own style book, which itself begins very simply: “Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible.”

I certainly agree that you should think through what you want to say before saying it. (If I disagreed publicly, I would probably have to start clearing my desk.) But clear writing does not necessarily follow from clear thought. The fact is that writing is difficult. Some of the smartest people I know are not very good writers; either their mechanics and style are underdeveloped, because they’re unused to writing, or they’re overdeveloped, writing too ripely after having read too many other writers’ over-ripe style. I’m not even sure that writing is even teachable, past a certain point; anyone can be taught to plonk through basic tunes on a piano, but it takes talent to make the thing sing. Life’s like that, and to say that bad writers should just memorise a few dictates in order to become good ones ignores the fact that the best they might do is become less bad.

So how do journalists do, as writers of “plain English”? In my self-serving opinion, I think they get a rather bad rap: it’s not easy writing as quickly as journalists must usually do. Just getting the facts across might seem easy to the outsider, but it is anything but. By and large, the fact that your newspaper is generally informative is thanks to the hard work of a lot of half-decent writers and editors putting in long hours for modest pay.

That said, how could they do better? I’ll focus on the use of metaphorical language. There are three ways to use a metaphor to get ideas across, and two of them are bad. One is to use tired metaphors, the “dying” but not yet dead ones that Orwell so disliked: prices “spike”, markets “soar” or “tumble”, angry people “fume”, people can do nothing but “bask” in admiration, and so on. The fingers almost seem to type these words without interference from the brain. Fortunately for readers, though – while we’re on the subject of plain language – such language is so conventional that it’s comfortable, like a predictable movie.

The second thing one can do with metaphor is try too hard. I dinged David Corn for doing this, counting eight different confusing metaphors for the American presidential candidate Newt Gingrich as a “destroyer”: Mr Corn had him, alternately, as a barbarian, suicide bomber, scorched-earth general, nuclear weapon, bomb-thrower, poisoner and more. And of course Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, is the master of the over-eager metaphor, as the whole internet seems to have figured out. Trying too hard is actually worse than not trying hard enough, for the reader trying to understand you.

The best metaphors are simple, clear, memorable and quite often short. Orwell wrote about those “who come flocking toward the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Whoa! I first read those words some 13 years ago, in graduate school, and I still remember where I was (in the basement kitchen of a student house in Oxford). And remember, Orwell may be known as a novelist and critic, but he considered himself a journalist and essayist.

Sadly, his kind is rare. He wrote at the slower pace of his day; now, journalists are under pressure to produce ever more – written pieces, tweets, multimedia features, blog posts and the lot – and often under the kind of time pressure that doesn’t allow for careful crafting. “Plain language” is a misleading moniker: it’s deceptively difficult. It’s worth the effort, though.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. 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 helps with key words which are used for talking or writing about names.

first name / given name: a personal name that you are given when you are born. Another British word is Christian name: The children call me Mrs. Jones, but actually my first name is Mary.
last name: your family name. The usual British word is surname: Let me spell my last name for you.
middle name: the name that comes after your first name but is not often used except to identify you formally. Another British word is second name: My second name is Victoria, after my grandmother.
maiden name: a woman’s last name before she was married: I still use my maiden name for work purposes.
nickname: an invented name that other people call you, especially when you are young: His nickname was Penguin because of the way he walked.
stage name: a name that actors use in their professional career that is different from their real name: She thought Joan Smith was too boring, so she decided to use the stage name Maria Vitalez.
nom de plume / pen name / pseudonym: a name that writers sometimes use so that their real identity is not known: She wrote all her detective novels under the pen name Barbara Greensmith.
initials: the first letters of each of your names: His initials H.I. were carved on the side of the desk.
title: an official name that you put in front of your own name that shows your status in society: Officially my title is Doctor Jones, but most people just call me Janet. ♦ When his father dies he will have the title of Duke of Cumberland.
alias: a false name that someone, especially a criminal, uses to keep their real identity secret: He went under several aliases, including Bernard Kopf and Harold Gene.

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 EnglishFacebook Page.

Madonna’s recent moonlighting stint as a dictionaries marketing executive is still paying dividends: another thousand people have looked up reductive since we discussed it last Monday, and it’s been the single most looked up word for the last two weeks.

If you remember, Madge had said of a Lady Gaga song: “When I heard it on the radio, I said, ‘That sounds very familiar. It feels reductive.’ ”

But what exactly did she mean? It’s possible that she got the wrong word, and meant to say derivative. That would have been understandable in the context, and the interviewer would not have needed to ask if this “was a good thing”.  But it would have been a much more open criticism, and by using a word like reductive, she’s managed to create a mystique around the whole business. It’s either an accidental slip of the tongue, or very clever linguistically-driven PR.