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

Media must use correct English
There’s been quite a bit on the blog recently about coinages and neologisms. This Korean commentator takes a very severe view on Konglish.

Language change and slang

Literally – the much misused word of the moment
It’s like literally so misoverused. But whereas Jamie Redknapp gets the word nonsensically wrong, writers such as James Joyce knew exactly what they were doing with it.

Tiger bread renamed giraffe bread by Sainsbury’s
The UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has renamed its tiger bread “giraffe bread” – and all because a three-year-old wrote to them pointing out that the bread’s crust resembled a giraffe’s spots more closely than a tiger’s stripes.

Language teaching and resources

Polysemy in Winnie-the-Pooh and other stories
Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders. (“What does ‘under the name’ mean?” asked Christopher Robin. “It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it.”)

Spelling “stationery” and “compliment”
English has many pairs of words that differ only by a letter or two and are easily confused. Here are some handy tips to help you remember the spellings of two of these sets of words.

Books, words, languages, and science

The gift of tongues: what makes some people learn language after language?
How many languages do you speak? In a new book on people who speak huge numbers of languages, Michael Erard says that “true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few”.

Science decodes “internal voices”
Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.

Video

16 different ways to say “I like it”
In this video the winner of our Macmillan Love English Award for best blog, Luke’s English Podcast, takes you through some of the many different ways of expressing your appreciation in English.

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.

Impact is part of the core vocabulary of English, ranking as a three-star red word in Macmillan Dictionary. Yet it is subject to constant dispute and ire, appearing frequently in lists of pet peeves and inspiring lengthy discussions in usage dictionaries. Why is this?

The noun first denoted a physical strike or collision, such as the impact of a meteorite; the verb impact and adjective impacted are older still, dating at least to the early 17th century. Then the word took on figurative meanings – as words tend to do – conveying influence or effect. In recent decades these usages surged in popularity, attracting criticism as they spread.

Many years ago, while doing research for a medical company, I began to hear impact used often as a figurative verb both transitively (“the decision impacts us all”) and intransitively (“it will impact on future sales”) where I would have expected affect, influence, impinge on or similar. I developed a distaste for the usage – to me it was inflationary corporatese.

Michael Rundell, in a comment to my post on webinar, says our response to a word may be “coloured by the circumstances in which we first heard it … this ‘primes’ us to think of it in a particular way.” This idea, he writes, is addressed by Michael Hoey’s theory of lexical priming, which contends that “as we acquire vocabulary it becomes loaded with the contexts (linguistic, generic and social) in which we repeatedly encounter it”.

Hoey describes it as a kind of “subconscious noticing” of the many different aspects of how a word is used. This information, once absorbed, influences (you might say impacts) our feelings about the word, and how and whether we use it. Thus was my reaction to impact shaped in part by the environment in which I heard it.

I’m not alone in rejecting impact for sounding like management speak – the usage note at American Heritage shows the extent of lingering hostility. Presumably, most of the usage panel would recoil from this charity sign I recently read about: “Help impact a child, donate your vehicle”, which for me conjures up dreadful images.

While I don’t plan to adopt these usages, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. Objections on grammatical grounds are baseless; so are complaints based on newness, since the usages are old. All are well-established now, though not in literary texts. Bill Brohaugh goes so far as to celebrate the verbing of this “poster child of a supposedly rapidly deteriorating language”.

We have a tendency to generalise from our feelings, leaping too easily from “I dislike this usage” to “This is wrong” or even “No one should ever say this anywhere.” It’s natural that we would want to universalise our preferences, but it’s not very reasonable or practical. Better to examine why we might object to a legitimate word. This can have a surprising impact.

No doubt you’re familiar with the following line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. In a comment to my recent post about hopefully, Marc Leavitt quoted it in relation to the strange persistence of outdated and unfounded rules of grammar and usage.

Most people know the kind of bogus grammar rules I mean: Don’t start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction; Don’t end a sentence with a preposition; Don’t split infinitives. Usage myths are less widely known but circulate perennially in writing circles and among those who enjoy collecting pet peeves. For example: you can’t say drive slow or different than; decimate can’t mean destroy most of; aggravate can’t mean irritate; and so on.

The last two – complaints about decimate and aggravate – fall prey to the etymological fallacy: that a word should or must mean what it meant originally or long ago, and maybe in another language altogether. The fallacy does not take account of linguistic change, and rests on the false idea that words cannot or should not change their meanings.

These restrictions have no basis in grammatical correctness, yet they have survived for generations, passed on from teacher to pupil or stickler to stickler-in-waiting. They have been called “classroom folklore” (Joseph M. Williams), “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins” (Theodore M. Bernstein), and “zombie rules” (Arnold Zwicky).

We don’t have to like or use new words and usages. I don’t use literally to intensify figurative statements, because it weakens its literal sense – and what other word means literally so literally? But I don’t gnash my teeth over people using it loosely; people have been using literally non-literally, sometimes literarily, for literally centuries. Besides, it can be funny.

Growing up, I developed a temporary dislike for singular data, but it didn’t take much research and reflection (and yes, data) for me to realise that there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. So I’m fine with either form, depending on context. Notice that no one complains about singular agenda or stamina nowadays. But please, resist singular criteria for now.

Correctness is primarily a matter of convention, and conventions change. Consistency should be applied only as far as common sense carries it. If we want to do justice to words, it’s necessary sometimes to adapt to shifts in their meaning and usage, and to update our ideas of what’s acceptable, where, and why.

When people lament the state of the English language, they often criticise new vocabulary, such as the slang, buzzwords and jargon that arise from young people, advertising, and technology. But new vocabulary marks linguistic change only in a relatively superficial way. Significant changes in language happen more slowly.

In a short video for Global about how the internet is changing language, David Crystal points out that English has remained essentially the same since the advent of this technology. Grammar and spelling have not mutated – though variant forms and new styles are now more visible – and the common vocabulary has grown only slightly, relative to its total size.

Slang, however, is always an active frontier. Traditionally, lexicographers have been cautious about including new slang, because so much of it is ephemeral. Slang dictionaries are different, of course, and nowadays some dictionaries have websites that allow more flexibility in what can be recorded. Macmillan Dictionary’s BuzzWord and Open Dictionary pages exemplify this by showcasing (and, in the latter case, inviting) words and usages of recent or limited currency.

When popular slang is added to a print dictionary, it can attract considerable media attention. Informal acronyms like OMG and LOL make for catchy, quirky headlines, but unfortunately at the expense of substance. In his recent article “Why say pundigrion when you could say pun?”, Michael Rundell regrets that when it comes to lexicography, newspapers “seem incapable of focussing on anything but trivia”.

The disproportionate interest in peripheral aspects of lexicography can fuel a widespread misunderstanding of it, and of language generally. Time and again, people get bothered about dictionaries “trying to be cool” or even “losing their dignity” simply by including current or recent slang. But dictionaries catalogue and define the words people use; coolness doesn’t enter into it (except in the appropriate entry).

The 19th-century linguist William Dwight Whitney said slang combines “exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making”. Most of it fades quickly, but there is always a chance that it won’t, particularly if it captures something vital about a particular culture, subculture, or time.

Innovation in language, just as anywhere else, is a sign of health. The slang condemned by strict linguistic conservatives, far from indicating a decline, rather suggests an interest in language and a creative enthusiasm that propels it in new directions.

Gender English month continues with a guest post by Aneta Naumoska, a Lector of Contemporary English Language at the “Blaze Koneski” Faculty of Philology in Skopje, Macedonia. Aneta’s first book, Gender Marking in the English Language, was published in December 2010. Her particular interests lie in the field of Sociolinguistics. She is also an avid Twitterer (@ELTane).

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The strict feminist ideals of revolutionizing the so-called masculine English language have been looked upon by some in a favorable way, while others simply disagree by complaining that such an immense language change will only bring about “sloppy” euphemisms. As Michiko Kakutani has noted (1):

Certainly no decent person can quarrel with the underlying impulse behind political correctness: a vision of a more just, inclusive society in which racism, sexism and prejudice of all sorts have been erased. But the methods and fervor of the self-appointed language police can lead to a rigid orthodoxy – and unintentional self-parody – opening the movement to the scorn of conservative opponents and the mockery of cartoonists and late-night television hosts.

Nonetheless, there have been a multitude of attempts (around 80) by grammarians over the past 200 years to coin new words that will free women from their position of being lexically obscure, yet maintain grammatical competence. Many have advocated gender-free – or epicene – pronouns (such as ne, ter, thon, heer, hiser, en, et, ip), which have one form to indicate either sex, but without any success, which is the reason why they were quickly labeled “the words that failed.” On this topic, Dennis Baron states that “epicene pronouns are not transparent, unambiguous, or easy to use; they are phonetically and visually awkward; and they are the creations of a feminist conspiracy” (2).

Prescriptivists find the gender-specific pronoun he to violate the rules of pronoun agreement (hence the emergence of epicene pronouns), and they have the same objection to the singular they used as a replacement for the generic masculine or the third person singular it. Employing a plural pronoun to refer to both singular definite and indefinite nouns (everyone, somebody, anybody) is a clear example of semantic agreement, but not grammatical agreement. Jespersen and Quirk are both tolerant on this issue, but accept the existence of singular they only for informal constructions.

In the second half of the 20th century, The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English listed over 40 outrageous examples of unlikely replacements for several everyday terms: e.g.:

amen-aperson, freshman-freshperson, history-herstory, human-huperson, manhole-personhole, manipulating-personipulating, manslaughter-personslaughter, manners-personners, mantle-persontle, nomenclature-nopersonclature, sportsmanship-sportsoneship, etc.

Miller and Swift have given quite an attention-grabbing solution (3):

Searching the roots of Western civilization for a word to call this new species of man and woman, someone might come up with gen, as in genesis and generic. Like the words deer and bison, gen would be both plural and singular. Like progenitor, progeny and generation, it would convey continuity. Gen would express the warmth and generalized sexuality of generous, gentle and genuine; the specific sexuality of genital and genetic. In the new family of gen, girls and boys would grow to genhood, and to speak of genkind would be to include all the people of the earth.

What do you think? Are these solutions for a gender-free English language appealing? Or are they simply over the top and unrealistic?

Notes

1 Goshgarian, Gary. Exploring Language, 7th ed. 1995. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers
2 Baron, Dennis. Grammar and Gender. 1986. New Haven: Yale University Press
3 in Goshgarian, 1995

This post contains a weekly 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 and language change. Please contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include.

Global English

Iraqi aircraft maintainers learn English
The Iraqis advanced quicker than any of the instructors expected. Though they still use a translator at times, English is now the primary language spoken during class.

The Pentagon’s foreign language frustrations
As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.

English learning drive ineffective in state
GUJARAT: Many may not be aware that the state government had once embarked on an ambitious English teaching drive for colleges across the state.

Latino voters respond more to English ads
English-language print ads have a greater impact in mobilizing Latino voters than Spanish-language print ads, U.S. researchers found.

Language Change and Slang

Which words should be thrown out of the English language?
While I think the English language can do without “succedaneum” or “woolfell”, and words always come and go, what has been tragic is the way that some other words have been zombified.

Digital shift is killing Japan’s best English books
This year, new English-language books from Japan will slow to a trickle now that two of the more popular publishers, Kodansha International and TokyoPop, have closed their doors.

Improve your English

Words that have different meanings in British and American English

Why is English such a difficult, funny Language? Homonyms
The bandage was wound around the wound…

Books, words, science and the history of the English language

Funny English Errors
a new book of unconsciously humorous uses – and misuses – of English.
‘In preparation for the channel crossing Caesar built 18 new vesuls vessils vesles botes.’

Dictionary detectives track origins of Old English
University of Toronto scholars are meticulously documenting a version of the English language that is no longer living.

Loanwords: Major periods of borrowing in the history of English
If a little too academic for bank holiday weekend reading, just scroll down to peruse the words borrowed from the different periods.

The Norman conquest of the English language
At first the English withstood the Norman attack of 1066. But soon they succumbed to the invaders, as did their virile language of record.

Though coined in the 1930s, the expression political correctness came of age during the Eighties, initially – as we saw in Part 1 – as a neutral or even positive term. Nowadays, it is an all-purpose term of disparagement, and its application goes far beyond the realm of language, which was its original focus. For some stunning examples of its current use, I can recommend the website of the so-called ‘Association of British Drivers’, a fanatically pro-car organization which interprets any move to reduce car dependency (such as introducing bike and bus lanes) as evidence of ‘political correctness’. Here are a few gems from their website:

Speed limits should be ‘based on road safety principles, not political correctness’
Bus lanes are usually ‘imposed’ in cities because this is ‘perceived as the politically correct thing to do’
Concern with the environment ‘is simply the latest form of political correctness’

And so on, and on. For good measure, the Association’s list of favoured  ‘Links’ includes several websites devoted to attacking ‘political correctness’. The meaning of the expression has clearly broadened to the point where some people  explain almost anything they disapprove of as a symptom of political correctness.

How did we get to this point? Long before ‘PC’ became a target for outright hostility, it was often the object of ridicule. For example, the way we refer to someone with a physical disability has changed several times in the last 30 years or so: first, the highly offensive crippled gave way to handicapped, but then that was also seen as offensive (it appears to equate disability with incapacity), so the preferred adjective became disabled. But disabled is not without its critics, who dislike its focus on what a person can’t do rather than what they can. This has led to newer expressions such as physically challenged and differently abled. It’s an example of what linguist Stephen Pinker has called the ‘euphemism treadmill‘, and not surprisingly, these constant changes in ‘politically correct’ terms have attracted a certain amount of mockery. As the entry in the Macmillan Dictionary shows, challenged is often used in humorous combinations to refer to people who are short (‘vertically challenged’), bald (‘follically challenged’), old (chronologically), badly-dressed (sartorially), or with bad teeth (dentally). And our corpus includes numerous other examples, like these:

I didn’t think of myself as fat – just a bit horizontally challenged perhaps
He’s not dead… he’s electroencephalographically challenged.
George the Fourth, and Caroline of Brunswick, his hygienically challenged, and even more disreputable wife…

Most of this is good-natured, and in fairness, there are cases where the goal of avoiding offence at all costs can have absurd consequences. This definition of the word crone (not from the Macmillan Dictionary) leaves us in no doubt that it’s not a good thing to call someone, but fails to explain what the word actually means:

an offensive term that deliberately insults a woman’s age, appearance, and temperament (offensive)

This degree of circumlocution provides ammunition for those who like to portray a commitment to non-sexist language as a form of censorship. It’s what they call ‘political correctness gone mad’, and it’s interesting to note that while use of the term political correctness appears to be declining, the variation with gone mad is, if anything, becoming more frequent. The British tabloids regularly report some new outrage, like this one:

THE BEATLES are the latest victims of politically correct censors. The PC brigade have decided the Fab Four’s 1967 track When I’m Sixty-Four could offend Jehovah’s Witnesses. And the reason? The song mentions birthdays, which Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate.

Stories like this are usually based on the flimsiest of evidence, and seem to exist mainly as an excuse for a ‘what’s the world coming to?’ moan – the use of brigade here is typical of this kind of discourse (we have over 50 citations in our corpus for ‘the PC brigade’). The term political correctness initially described a use of language which took care not to cause needless offence, and has now been appropriated by a fairly narrow group who apply it indiscriminately to whatever they dislike about the world.

In a recent post about the role of dictionaries in matters of language and gender, Michael Rundell wrote that they “shouldn’t take sides in any area of language use” but that “in some cases this is unavoidable”.

Dictionaries record how language is used, so they can’t simply ignore sexist and discriminatory usages – or new terms that supersede them – no matter how objectionable some people might find them. But by tagging words and adding usage notes, dictionaries can point out controversies, indicate that a word is non-standard or politically incorrect, and trust to readers’ judgement.

For example, the Macmillan Dictionary definition of fireman makes explicit mention of its masculine gender – lest it be thought the default, as it once was. Not so long ago, fireman and air hostess would have been common generic terms for people in certain lines of work. Nowadays, gender-neutral options like firefighter and flight attendant are increasingly preferred.

Before an expression falls into disuse and another takes its place, there can be a period of tension over their respective advantages and acceptability. As people debate such questions, they seek guidance from authoritative sources like dictionaries, which track meanings as they shift and drift and settle anew. Lexicographers’ responsibility in this regard is illustrated in a wry cartoon by Hans Stengel.

One of the arguments against gender-biased terms like fireman and chairman is that they suggest that these roles – and the power and bravery and other virtues associated with them – are the exclusive or particular preserve of men. Sexist terminology often takes the male as norm, the female as derivation or deviation, and men have long considered themselves the quintessential type: Joe Public as “modern man”, putting in man-hours with his manpower.

Men’s longstanding cultural dominance may be seen in the tendency for woman-related words to take on negative connotations far more than do man-related words; Michael’s article mentions several. “Man-words” may be jocular or daft but they are rarely abusive. Little wonder that exclusively female coinages (like do-it-herselfer, girlcott, and femivore) often embody “ideas of empowerment”, as Kerry Maxwell notes in her MED Magazine article on women and new words.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American Usage says,

Society’s attitude toward women, not lists of new taboos, will continue to do the most to set the pace of change.

Dictionaries follow the people’s lead. English belongs to no one and to everyone, and whoever uses it gets to play a part in its constant evolution.

This week’s ‘language in new media’ post looks at the origins of the English phrase reading the riot act.

Now understood as a scolding or telling off, usually administered by parents or teachers to unruly children, being read the riot act used to have far more serious connotations.

Listen to excerpts and view contemporary artists’ impressions  of 18th and 19th century riots via the BBC’s Voices from the Old Bailey.