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.

In 2011, there were 252 searches for the word reductive in the Macmillan Dictionary. So in the 7 days from 13th to 19th January inclusive, we would have expected to see 5.

In fact, we had well over 2,000 individual searches for the word reductive.

The reason, it would appear, was a comment made by Madonna with reference to a Lady Gaga song, Born This Way. In the course of an interview with Cynthia McFadden on ABC Radio, Madge said:

When I heard it on the radio, I said, ‘That sounds very familiar. It feels reductive.’

The interviewer, sensing that this might be a veiled criticism of Lady Gaga, asked if this was a good thing. Madonna ‘smiled coyly, took a sip of tea and said, “Look it up.”’

And a lot of people did just that.

The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had obtained stories by hacking into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and crime victims.) ‘Can anyone remember,’ she wondered,  ‘the last time a man was accused of “simpering”?’

She’s right. Corpus evidence suggests that simper is used three or four times as often about girls and women as about boys or men. Not only that, where the word is used about men, there’s sometimes an implication that they are not ‘real’ men (that’s why they simper): we hear from an American writer about ‘Simpering Frenchman Jacques Chirac’ (apologies to our French readers), and there are several cases of gay men described as simpering too. This happens a lot: the only people who flounce in and out of rooms are women (overwhelmingly), and gay men (occasionally) – but never heterosexual men. (I’m just reporting what the data tells us, so don’t shoot the messenger.)

As always, the co-text is instructive: simper appears with adverbs like flirtatiously, seductively, or sweetly, while other verbs found in the vicinity include fawn, pout, blush, and giggle – all words associated (whether we like it or not) with women. This example from the corpus gives a good flavour of how simper is typically used:

She preferred male company … and had no time for giggling, simpering girls who cared for nothing but gossip and the price of hair ribbon.

As Jane Martinson pointed out, the example given in the Macmillan entry has a female subject (She spoke in a simpering tone), and this takes us back to an issue we discussed last year, during Gender English month: should dictionary editors ignore the evidence and show a man in the example (as a way of combating gender stereotypes), or do we record what we find? No easy answers here, though we have to balance our gender-neutral instincts with a description of usage that’s true to the data.

Much has been written about words that blatantly insult women: slut, harpy, bitch and the like. But simper belongs to a more interesting category – words which belittle women, but which do it just subtly enough that (some) men think they can get away with it. Something similar is happening with feisty, another ‘suspect’ word mentioned by Martinson. Again, the data backs her up: feisty is overwhelmingly used about women, and the nouns it frequently modifies include heroine, redhead, tomboy (=honorary male), lady, gal, and even filly. On the surface, it conveys admiration – but this is qualified by the implication that ‘She did well – considering she’s only a woman’.

There is much more to be said on this subject. A man who is quiet and reserved, for example, tends to be described as taciturn – a word rarely applied to women – or even ‘the strong silent type’: both positive descriptions. A woman of the same type is just quiet, and probably also shy or even mousy. Or even simpering … Well, maybe we’ll come back to this another day. Oh, and thanks to Jane Martinson, too, for adding another word (twarrumph) to our growing collection of Twitter-inspired vocabulary.

Memory game: progressive deletion on board

Background
‘Key phrases’ are everywhere in Business English – they are a large part of the language input for communication skills. They need practising, and this is one of many posts to help do that.

Activity
1 Write up on the board a series of numbered key phrases from the last lesson. For example, some phrases for beginning and ending a telephone call, or writing an enquiry email, or developing an argument in a meeting.

2 Point to phrase #1 and ask students to chorally repeat the whole phrase a couple of times. Say it yourself first as a model then conduct with your hand (a quick sweep round the room) to indicate choral repetition.

3 Now wipe out just a couple of words, to leave blank spaces on the board inside or at the end of the phrase. This time don’t give a model before the choral repetition – you want the students to remember the words. So just say ‘one, two, three’ and then use the quick sweep action to conduct choral repetition again. It’s the same phrase so students should have no problems remembering it just yet.

4 Continue wiping out words from phrase #1, one or two at a time. Each time follow with a sweep of your hand to conduct choral repetition. Repeat until all the words are gone and the students are just looking at the number 1 on the board followed by a completely blank space. They will still manage to repeat the phrase on your cue, and this should begin to produce some amusement.

5 Move on to phrase #2 and repeat as above until it too is just a number on the board followed by a blank. After the students have successfully chanted that phrase, go back and point at #1 again, and again give a sweep of your hand. The fact that they can still chant phrase #1 even though the board is blank should definitely provoke laughter.

6 Continue like this, and after each new phrase has been completely wiped out (leaving just the number) and chanted successfully, go back randomly to revise all the others. The idea is that at the end you will have only the numbers left on the board, with blank spaces after all of them. Pointing to the spaces should bring choral repetition with a lot of laughter!

More tips & techniques
If you would like similar tips and advice, visit the ‘Lexis‘ section of my website PaulEmmerson.com.

Following on from Andrew Delahunty’s great blog post last week, I notice that there is also a crossover of sporting terms into the more ordinary world of work. To take just one example, the national sport of football – there are many phrases commonly used there that we tend to use in the office. Here are some example sentences:

I’ve called this meeting to kick around a few of the ideas about the Crimplene Project.
There are quite a few suggestions in play and I suggest we tackle them in order.
Our managers have queered the pitch by reducing our development budget for the next quarter.
If we cannot compete on a level playing-field with our competitors, it will put us at a disadvantage.
Our latest marketing campaign completely backfired and we ended up scoring an own goal.
This new employee is a great team player.
If we can’t agree on the latest proposal, then we’ll be back to square one.

A game of football can be seen as a ritualized battle, a quest for a goal, full of sublimated violence and complex rules and behaviours. The game has its heroes and villains, just as in real life. Even people who don’t particularly like (watching) football can identify with its purpose and themes, so it seems natural that specific terms from football cross over into everyday life, and, as Andrew illustrates, vice versa. Whatever your goal in life, the journey towards achieving it can be compared to a game like football, where you need talent, effort and fair play to win the day. We like to think that there is justice in our society, that bad behaviour will be shown the red card and that there will be whistle blowers brave enough to expose such lack of sportsmanship.

To the learner of English, an appreciation of sport and its parallels with everyday life are internationally recognized, so feel free to sprinkle your vocabulary with a few appropriate sporting terms. Football would seem a particularly good choice, for wherever you go in the world, there is often someone there who is a Manchester United supporter.

Just been reading this great article about how journalists, especially sporting journalists tend to use the phrase ahead of, where the word before would suit better. This month, What’s your English? concentrates on sporting English, and sporting people have many fascinating and entertaining ways to describe and discuss their great passion. There is a definite culture to sportspeak as both Stan Carey and Andrew Delahunty have illustrated. One of my favourite phrases is at the end of the day. It would be more correct to say ‘at the end of the game’ or even ‘to sum it all up’. It also seems common for men to infantilise each other; the lads played well today, or this is the first Olympic final for this 22-year old British lad. What makes me giggle though, is the way they talk about injuries. Here sports people are doing the opposite of using too many words and actually using too few, to great comic effect in my view. If someone injures their hamstring, this situation is referred to as follows: The lad’s got a hamstring. They don’t bother to say that it is a torn or pulled hamstring, just a hamstring.  Along these lines, it is possible to have a groin and a shoulder, or a knee and a wrist. Tee hee …

This week, many of you have been searching the Macmillan Dictionary for the word acquaintance. I’m not sure how successful you will have been initially, because this word was often typed in without the first ‘c’. I can see how easy it is to make this mistake. In English, the letters ‘qu’ make the phonetic sound kw, so that first ‘c’ seems redundant.

Acquaintance, in the sense of someone you don’t know that well, is a fairly formal word these days and young people tend to use words like friend or mate instead (the latter is used in British English).  Many classic works of English literature, from the 19th and early 20th centuries in particular include references to acquaintance. In fact some of the more famous quotations about acquaintances were coined around this time, such as:

“Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.”
Ambrose Bierce
“We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.”
Logan Pearsall Smith

We should perhaps take a longer view about our own acquaintances though, after all:

“The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.”
Logan Pearsall Smith

OK, not literally. I would hate to think that my little blog was responsible for an increase in petty violence around the world! I am referring to the entertaining and useful site Google Fight. The site was originally created as a fun way to find out which names, phrases or things are most popular on the Internet, although Google Fight is also a useful tool for the language learner. Not sure whether gaol or jail is the most popular spelling of that particular word? Fight it out. You can also make a fight to discover more about the way English phrases are used, for instance ‘take me to the cinema’ versus ‘bring me to the cinema’, the ‘winners’ are bound to be the most natural way of phrasing something and so a really useful guide to the learner. Check out this great article by Jamie Keddie on onestopenglish for more information.

It would seem that many of you are involved in some sort of legal wrangle at present. The word hitherto has recently been searched for rather a lot in Macmillan Dictionary and this is a classic legal term – hence my suspicion! I like this word and think that rather than it being unusual and nebulous, it is well-suited to what it describes. Hither is the old word for here so it translates literally as ‘as far as here’, here meaning ‘now’ in this sense. As you can see its meaning is quite precise and so lends itself well to legalese, where there are many conventions governing the exact meaning and possible interpretations of certain words like this one, that is used much more often in a contract than it is in everyday conversation. Other such words are albeit, aforementioned, de facto and habeus corpus.

Ah…rest, we could all do with a bit more of it and yet it can be such a rare commodity in our busy modern lives. The title of this article lists three words starting with rest…but beware! – one of these words has a quite different meaning. Restful, a lovely word describing something that helps you to chill out. When you reach the chill zone, you could be described as resting. Restive, however, is quite a different matter. It means the opposite of the other words, suggesting that instead of feeling calm and still, you are in fact fidgety with pent up energy and eager to get moving. Restive is often used wrongly, to mean seeking relaxation, so be careful not to make this mistake, or you might find yourself being dragged out for a bit of hill-walking, when all you want to do is flop onto the sofa!