The virtual linguist

'Txt-spk' poster in London schools

There's nothing like ungrammatical or misspelt English to get Middle England frothing at the mouth. Today's Mail on Sunday received dozens of responses to its article concerning posters on netiquette and internet safety which have been put up in London schools. Typical readers' reactions were: 'a total waste of time, money and space', 'pathetic', 'laziness' and 'load of rubbish'. The title of the poster was 'Top tips for pupils: safe surfing at home and at school', written in standard English, then there were nine tips, basically saying 'be careful', written in text-speak.

I couldn't understand most of it, either, but then I'm not one of the target audience. Moreover, these tips relate to behaviour in chatrooms and when using the internet, so they are written in the language of chatrooms and the internet. The kids aren't being taught history or English literature using text-speak, nor are they being advised to write their exams or apply for jobs using this form of language. This is an extra resource; it's not replacing text books or standard-English-speaking teachers.

Tesco and '10 items or less'

Tesco, a big UK supermarket, is to change the wording on signs at some of its checkouts from '10 items or less' to 'Up to 10 items' in response to a request by the self-appointed language watchdog, the Plain English Campaign, and to 'avoid linguistic disputes'. Linguistic disputes! I wish! I'm a frequent shopper at Tesco, and can't recall ever hearing anyone having an argument about linguistics there!

There are a couple of things to say about this story. First of all, the phrase 'ten items or less' is not necessarily wrong. The website Ask Oxford has this explanation regarding less and fewer: 'This can be tricky when referring to quantities. For example, we say less than six weeks, not fewer than six weeks, because we are not referring to six individual weeks, but to a single period of time lasting six weeks.' (See http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/lessfewer?view=uk ). Ten items is a quantity, so it could, therefore, be argued that the phrase 'ten items' in 'Ten items or less' is regarded as a single amount.

That's not my only niggle with the rewording story, however. If anyone thinks that 'Up to 10 items' is clearer than the old version and completely unambiguous, they are in for a nasty surprise. I would be happy to bet that people's definitions of 'up to'  are very different. If I have ten items in my shopping basket, can I use this checkout? Some people will say 'yes' and others 'no'.

Many forms ask you to tick up to 3 boxes. Most people would agree that you could tick 3 boxes if you wish. But could a 16-year-old travel cheaply if the sign said 'Half price for children up to 16'? Chances are, no. Many big organisations and companies are well aware of the ambiguity of the phrase 'up to', which is why most train companies say 'Children (aged 5 to 15)' or 'Children aged between 5 and 15'.

Kent Reliance Building Society has a Wishmakers account (no apostrophe), which is described as 'an easy access savings account for children up to 16 years of age'. Further down the page is the sentence 'On their 16th birthday, the balance of the account will be transferred to a new account of their choice'. (http://www.krbs.co.uk/wishmakers.aspx ). So, Kent Reliance Building Society would expect me to have a maximum of nine items in my shopping basket to use the fast-track till.

The mental health organisation Mind says this on its website: 'In 2002, the population of the UK was an estimated 59.2 million. Children aged up to 16 made up 20 per cent of the population (11.8 million), while young people aged 16-24 amounted to 11 per cent (6.5 million)'  (http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Factsheets/Children/Children+and+Young+People+and+Mental+Health.htm ). It's clear that Mind, too, thinks that the phrase 'up to 16' means 'less than 16'.

I anticipate more 'linguistic disputes' in the future. But it has got Tesco in the news now, and will do so again, so no doubt they are happy!

Sarah Palin's children's names

Sarah is a traditional name, Governor Palin's husband's name is Todd, which isn't that unusual, so how did they come to choose their children's names? The boys are Track and Trig, and the girls are Bristol, Willow and Piper.

In an interview in the US People magazine (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20222685_2,00.html) Todd Palin says that the name Track was chosen because their families were all keen athletes. I thought at first that perhaps the baby's name Trig was short for trigger - Sarah Palin is keen on shooting, I believe - but Todd Palin says trig is a Norse word meaning 'strength'.

I suspect the names all have Alaskan links. I read somewhere else that there is a great uncle Trig, who is a fisherman, and baby Trig's middle name, Paxson, is the name of a tiny Alaskan community. Willow and Bristol Bay are places in Alaska, too. In the People interview, Todd Palin says of Piper, that it is a cool name. It's not that rare, and was in the list of top 250 girls' names in the USA in 2006. That might have something to do with the fact that Piper is one of the sisters in the television series Charmed. I note also that Willow is a character in another popular TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I can't believe that Sarah Palin named her daughters after television characters. Surely, with her busy life, she can't have time to watch TV too!

Sarah Palin, former 'fisherman'

Sarah Palin, John McCain's newly announced running mate, is described in many articles I've seen today as an ultra-conservative. Journalists and politicians like to slap simplistic labels on people, but from what I've read, it strikes me that Sarah Palin is a more complex character than the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist she is made out to be. She eloped twenty years ago, and combines a demanding job with five children, so she's clearly not the stereotypical little wifey.

How does she feel about being called a former fisherman, I wonder. I thought at first that the phrase 'she has worked as a commercial fisherman' in an article in the Daily Telegraph today (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/republicans/2646949/Sarah-Palin-profile-Former-beauty-queen-was-an-unlikely-choice.html) was a cutting and pasting mistake from a piece describing her husband, but I found her described as a fisherman in other publications too, including Time (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1837510,00.html).

There is an entry for fisherwoman in the OED, and it's not a recently added sop to gender equality - there's a citation for the word from 1816. It's not exactly an everyday word, admittedly, the reason being that fishing is presumably a male-dominated industry. Anyway, there is a tendency for occupations to move away from having a 'man' and 'woman' version eg policeman/woman and fireman/woman and replace these with a single gender-neutral term (police officer and firefighter). So what would Governor Sarah Palin call women like her, I wonder. Fishing operative sounds woolly and fishing person sounds silly. Fish catcher might do, perhaps. There is also the old word, fisher. Maybe that will be brought back into the language.

The spelling of supersede

A team of editors and lexicographers at Collins dictionary publishing house claims that supersede is the most misspelt English word. It is spelt wrongly 10% of the time, they say, which I think is pretty good going. I used to mark GCSE papers and reckon that the word restaurant was misspelt by well over 50% of candidates.

The reason we find it hard to spell supersede correctly, writing a c instead of the second s, apparently, is that we are influenced by words such as precede and intercede. It's quite true that supersede is a one-off. There are just eight words in the Oxford English Dictionary ending in -sede and all but supersede are obsolete. But what great words they are! There's essede, a war-chariot used by the Gauls, obsede, an old version of obsess, possede and repossede, old forms of possess and repossess, sede, an old version of seat and ypurchasede and ypressede, Middle English forms of purchased and pressed.

In Middle English, which was spoken between the 12th and 15th centuries and was the language of Chaucer, past participles began with the letter y (eg ybegunne, yfallen).  The y spelling developed from the Old English prefix ge- (eg geboren, which became yborn, meaning born).

Another of the top five misspelt words, according to Collins, is phlegm, but how many instances are they talking about, I wonder. How often would your average person want to write about phlegm?

In my research on crosswords, it's interesting to see which words fox many people. They often give up on a puzzle soon after getting the answer broccoli, professor, harass, tariff or another word where there is doubt about whether there is just one consonant or whether it is doubled. The commonest mistake is to get the single and double consonants the wrong way round. The resulting word fits the space for the answer okay, but makes adjacent answers impossible to get!

As for the top five spelling mistakes, my guess would be that the answer would be different for each profession. The top howler made by estate agents has to be 'sort-after' instead of 'sought-after'.

Same word, different languages

Today I was asked to come up with a word that was the same in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Dutch to be used on the packaging of a CD-Rom of puzzles and word games (the CD content was different for each country, but the manufacturer wanted to use the same artwork for the packaging). They asked for a word of six or seven letters in length, to fit into an existing template.

It was a surprisingly difficult task. First I tried words ending in 'o' or 'a', but there was usually at least one language that was different. Enigma was okay in most languages, but in French it's enigme (with an accent on the first 'e'). Radio, sauna, koala and taxi, which are pretty universal, were too short - and, anyway, they didn't have much in common with the subject matter of the CD. Some words were too closely associated with one particular language - origami, bolero, allegro. Tennis has one 'n' in Spanish, and there are lots of other words which differ by just one letter. I thought 'domino' would be perfect, but then found out that dominoes wasn't one of the games on the CD, so to have it on the packaging might cause confusion. Bikini is understood in all the relevant countries, but might suggest a product for women. I thought safari might be a good compromise. I thought eureka might be even better - but then found that my German dictionary translated it with an h - heureka.

Luckily I don't have to make the final choice. I submitted a list, and the distributor, or manufacturer, can decide. Now I understand why multinationals often make up words for their brands - Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Adidas, and so on.   

Sporty types and stereotypes

Epithets used in the press to describe Britain's Olympic competitors, who returned home today, include heroes, swimming sensation, awesome, golden boy (and girl), triumphant, victorious and record-breaking. Quite right too! The accolades were well deserved.

Running 20,000 miles around the world in five years is pretty awesome, too. That's what Rosie Swale Pope has done. She arrived home today, too. And what nouns and adjectives did the newspapers use to describe her? Pensioner, Forrest Gump grandmother, supergran, 61-year-old grandmother and injured gran!

Bhutto's widower and Robin Lakoff

In 1975 Robin Lakoff published the influential Language and Woman's Place, which claimed that men and women spoke differently, and that terms which refer to women often have negative connotations. Lakoff compares the two sentences 'Mary is John's widow' and '*John is Mary's widower' (she added the asterisk at the beginning of the second sentence to mean that the sentence is impossible). Lakoff writes that 'the bereaved husband is no longer described in terms of his wife' whereas 'women are always defined in terms of the men to whom they are related'.

There have been many newspaper  headlines over the past couple of days referring to Benazir Bhutto's widower, so does Lakoff's assertion no longer apply? Has language become more gender-equitable in the past 30 years? Lakoff said that 'widow' was far more commonly used than 'widower', and that is still the case; 'widow' gets about eight times as many hits on the internet as does 'widower'. I wish I'd googled 'widow' and 'widower' last week, as I suspect the ratio would have been much higher - many of the 'widower' hits today refer to Pakistan's forthcoming presidential election. I can't help feeling that a man is only described as someone's widower when the woman was the stronger and more well known of the couple, as Benazir Bhutto was.

On the subject of the word 'widower', I'm grateful to my colleague Monty for pointing out a very interesting characteristic of the word. Usually it's the feminine form of a pair of words which adds a suffix - prince/princess, usher/usherette etc, but with widow and widower, it's the other way round. I can't think of any other example in English.

Fancy street names

Thirsk Town Council in North Yorkshire has rejected the street names put forward by a housing developer, claiming they are too fanciful. The names in question are De Stutevill Drive, Mowbray Way, Daubeney Close and De Braose Lane, all being the names of former Lords of Thirsk.

Naming streets after old Lords is not the problem. Minutes of the town council meeting held earlier this month show that a Mr John Bell is to do some research into other old Lords of the Manor, presumably to find four with less fancy names. Councillor Freda Roberts was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying: 'It would be quite impossible to explain to somebody on the other side of the world that you lived in De Stutevill Drive - even people in another region of this country would struggle'.

Struggle with what, I wonder. If Councillor Roberts means pronunciation, I wonder how often residents of Thirsk need to tell people on the other side of the world their full address. Moreover, I have no doubt that many people in other countries would find Thirsk itself difficult to pronounce.

A quick internet search has opened my eyes to the tricky business of thinking up new street names. Greenwich Council will reject names that can be easily modified on a street nameplate to cause offence. West Wiltshire Council likes 'phonetically sounding names'. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea advises that words of more than three syllables should be avoided. North-East Lincolnshire Council even has an Address Intelligence Officer.

Flogging trial and Hobson-Jobson

Manchester Crown Court has been the scene this week of the trial of a man accused of forcing two boys under the age of 16 to flog themselves with an adult-size zanjeer, a whip with blades attached. The incident took place earlier this year during the Islamic month of Muharram, when a group of Shia Muslims gathered to commemorate Ashura, the anniversary of the death of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson Husayn in battle in AD680.

This is the event which gave rise to the term Hobson-Jobson, which forms the title of a wonderful dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases, published in the 1880s by Colonel Sir Henry Yule and AC Burnell. Hobson-Jobson was an expression coined by the rank-and-file British soldiers in colonial India and was, according to Yule and Burnell's dictionary, 'an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram - "Ya Hasan! Ya Hosein!"'

Hobson-Jobson then became the generic term for the process of anglicising foreign words. This is Chambers Dictionary's definition: 'the modification of names and words introduced from foreign languages, which the popular ear assimilates to already familiar sound (sic)'. Yule and Burnell's dictionary contains lots of examples of the Hobson-Jobson phenomenon, including juggernaut (from the Sanskrit Jagannatha, Lord of the Universe), gymkhana (probably from the Hindustani gend-khana, ball-house or racket court) and shampoo (from the Hindustani champna, to press or knead).

Other words in English which have undergone the Hobson-Jobson process include Jerusalem artichoke (from Italian girasole, sunflower), plonk (cf French vin blanc) and woodchuck (from the Cree name for this animal, wuchak or otchock).