The virtual linguist

Predictive texting

Still on the subject of texting, I feel that whoever compiled the dictionary within my mobile phone lives in a completely different world from me. My phone predicts the likely word after I have keyed in the first three letters. I was due to go on holiday with a friend and texted her about her luggage. After keying in 'lug' the phone suggested Lugo. I googled Lugo and discovered it's a Spanish city or the current president of Paraguay. Now, why would anyone with a phone bought in Britain be more likely to want to say Lugo rather than luggage? I realise that luggage is British English, but even so - how many Americans discuss the Paraguayan president in their texts?

Yesterday I texted a friend to arrange to meet outside a particular art gallery. After I keyed in 'gal' the phone predicted 'gals'. I typed another 'l' and this time the prediction was 'galling'. I continued with an 'e' and this time was presented with 'galled'. (Is galled really a more common word among texters than gallery?) Keying in 'r' led to 'galleried'. Even when I got to the end of my word, the phone hadn't and suggested the word 'gallerying', a word which doesn't even come up much on Google.

Earlier today I wanted to key in 'have' but wrote a 'u' instead of a 'v' by mistake. My phone predicted the complete word 'haugesund', which is a Norwegian city. I can pretty much guarantee that not many of my compatriots are texting about that place.

Text poetry

I have just returned from a weekend in Liverpool where the Institute of Linguists held their annual Members' Day. The keynote speaker was Professor David Crystal and the subject of his talk was texting (he has just published a book Txting: the Gr8 Db8). He referred to the South-African born (but now UK-based) poet Norman Silver, who has written many books for children. These are two of his text or txt poems, taken from David Crystal's article in the January 2008 issue of ELT Journal (the article can also be read on David Crystal's site).

txt commndmnts

1   u shall luv ur mobil fone with all ur hart

2   u & ur fone shall neva b apart

3   u shall nt lust aftr ur neibrs fone nor thiev

4   u shall b prepard @ all times 2 tXt & 2 recv

5   u shall use LOL & othr acronyms in conversatns

6   u shall b zappy with ur ast*r*sks & exc!matns!!

7   u shall abbrevi8 & rite words like theyr sed

8   u shall nt speak 2 sum1 face2face if u cn msg em insted

9   u shall nt shout with capitls XEPT IN DIRE EMERGNCY+

10  u shall nt consult a ninglish dictnry

langwij

langwij

is hi-ly infectious

children

the world ova

catch it

from parence

by word of mouth

the yung

r specially vulnerable

so care

shud b taken how langwij

is spread

symptoms include acute

goo-goo

& the equally serious ga-ga

if NE child

is infected with langwij

give em

3 Tspoons of txt

b4 bedtime

& ½ a tablet of verse

after every meal

Eight-eight ways of saying left-handed

I was tidying my desk a couple of days ago and found a 1970 article from The Times about a project mapping English dialects (as you can see, I don't tidy up very often! Just joking! I think it was a reprint). Researchers had travelled through 313 localities, each about 15 miles apart, and they had found 88 different ways of saying 'left-handed'.

Just about all the words are derogatory eg cack-handed (cack is excrement), caggy-fisted (caggy means 'decaying, unfit for food'), cow-pawed, cuddy-handed (cuddy is a donkey), gammy-palmed (gammy means 'lame'), keck-handed (keck is a variant of 'cack'), scram-handed (scram means 'withered') and squiffy (which means either 'drunk' or 'askew'). There's also south-pawed, which is originally US in origin and the incongruous Marlborough-handed, for which the OED has the 1893 citation 'People who used their tools awkwardly were formerly called 'Marlbro-handed vawk', natives of Marlborough being traditionally famed for clumsiness and unhandiness.'

Even in standard English (and other languages) the word 'left' has negative connotations. We talk of someone who can't dance as having two left feet and a left-handed compliment is actually an insult. The English word sinister comes from the Latin word for 'left'. Gauche in English means clumsy, and it just happens to be the French for 'left'. Right, on the other hand, is a synonym of correct and justice. An ambidextrous person can use both hands equally well, but even this word is 'anti-left' from a lexical point of view. Ambi means 'both' and dexter 'right-handed', so an ambidextrous person is a person with two right hands!

There is an opposite - ambisinistrous, which is, as it were, a person with two left hands ie clumsy. The OED has the tantalising citation from 1863: 'In wedlock, he [Prince of Wales].. was certainly more than ambisinistrous'.

Spurious words in the OED

Occasionally dictionaries get it wrong. Once a word goes into the Oxford English Dictionary it never comes out again, and that is why there are some 'non-existent' (or what the OED calls 'spurious') words in there still. This is what the OED has to say about them:

Occasionally ‘ghost’ words find their way into print and into dictionaries. Typically these are the result of misreadings of manuscripts or of typographical errors by printers. The Dictionary includes a number of these, labeled as ‘spurious’ entries, when the words have been used incorrectly in former editions of texts or have otherwise achieved some spurious existence.

 

Here are some with their 'definitions' (and my comments in brackets):

gofysshe: Error for gosysshe, silly, stupid (it was originally a misprint in a Chaucer edition)

herebode: Army messenger (error due to 17th-century antiquaries)

icre: Error for dicre = dicker, the number ten

minulize: Editorial misreading of minutize

momblishness: Muttering talk (editorial emendation of momblynes, itself a misspelling of moubliemies, ne-moubliemies being forget-me-nots)

topinch: (erroneous emendation of 'to pinch' in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor)

European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages, an initiative organised by the Council of Europe and the European Commission. It is also a day when we can expect that we Brits will be berated in the media for our supposed hopelessness at learning foreign languages. We don't even need the media to criticise us for our linguistic shortcomings; most of us will do that for ourselves.

Well, I am going to debunk that myth, or perhaps I should say I intend to vilipend it (and thus use one of the words on Collins endangered list). People born in Norway, Egypt, Poland, Mexico, China and most other countries do not face a dilemma when deciding what should be the first foreign language they learn - it has to be English. It's not even as if they choose English so they can cope in Britain or the USA; an Italian and a Pole will communicate in English, as will a Japanese person when speaking to a Greek. Resources are targeted at learning English in these countries. For us it is a different matter. When your native language is English, which foreign language should you learn first? Spanish? French? Chinese? Many schools offer four or five foreign languages and resources have to be spread more thinly.

When we talk about other nations being good at speaking languages, what we mean is that they are good at speaking English. You just try finding a Greek language class in a small town in Latvia, or a Latvian class in Japan. Here in Britain there are dozens of languages on offer at colleges and adult education institutes - and they are perennially popular. I can learn Czech, Turkish, Arabic, and even Welsh or Irish at a college about ten miles from me in south London. If I'm prepared to travel to central London, I'll have a very wide choice of classes in my preferred language.

Alphabetism

One of my favourite bloggers is Language Hat (see Blogroll). It's not only his posts that are erudite and interesting; so are the readers' comments. In yesterday's comments discussion turned to words made up of initials. An acronym is the term for a word such as NATO or asbo (anti-social behaviour order) which reads like a word, as opposed to a set of initials such as BBC or OED where each letter is pronounced individually. The correct term for this latter group is initialism. 

I thought I remembered seeing the word alphabetism used as a synonym for initialism in one of David Crystal's books. I did a bit of internet research to see if I could find the reference. I couldn't but I did find a handful of blog posts (here, for instance) and an old BBC article which used the term alphabetism in a tongue-in-cheek way, and by analogy with words like ageism and sexism, to mean discrimination on the grounds of the first letter of your surname. 

The theory that people whose name begins with one of the early letters of the alphabet are more successful than Messrs Unwin, Wittering and Zigo sounds wacky (to those of us with names in the first half of the alphabet, anyway!) until you start thinking about it. The leaders of the three main political parties in Britain are Brown, Cameron and Clegg. There have been 21 prime ministers since 1900 and the surname of 11 of them begins with A, B or C (in reverse chronological order - Brown, Blair, Callaghan, Churchill, Chamberlain, Baldwin, Bonar Law, Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman and Balfour). The figure goes up to 12 if you count the Marquess of Salisbury, whose real name was Robert Cecil.

Politicians who quit to 'spend more time with their family'

Ruth Kelly, Transport Secretary, resigned from the Cabinet today, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family. Admittedly, she has got four children under the age of eleven, but my rather cynical reaction is 'Oh, yeah?' and 'Pull the other one'.

Spending time with the family is the favourite euphemism of politicians who: a) fear they are about to be sacked, b) have major disagreements with the prime minister on policy (and thus fear they are about to be sacked) c) expect to lose their marginal seat in the next election and thus jump first (it gives them more time to find a cushy directorship) or d) are about to have an illicit affair made public.

Norman Fowler, a member of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet, was supposedly the first politician to give the 'spend more time with the family' line when he resigned in 1990. Surprise, surprise, he was back two years later once Thatcher had gone. Alan Milburn's sudden resignation as Health Secretary in 2003, when he, too, claimed he wanted to spend more time with his family and get a better work-life balance, was equally short-lived - he returned to the Cabinet two years later. Ruth Kelly is said to disagree with Gordon Brown on policy; moreover, she is MP of a marginal constituency and current polls suggest she will lose her seat in the next election (so that's points (b) and (c) above).

Pirate English on Facebook

I have my son, Rory, to thank for today's post. He has changed the default language on his Facebook page to Pirate English, added a few days ago in honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (!). Now he doesn't 'write on (or look at) someone's wall', he scrawls on (or pillages) their plank. 'Friends' are me hearties, 'look for friends' is scour fer mateys, 'view photos of me' has become spy me portraits, 'edit my profile' is mangle me swag, '3 hours ago' is 3 tides arrrrgo, 'about' is arrrrbout, 'yesterday' is that thar day, '1 event' is 1 grog fest sighted from the crow's nest and 'show more posts' is now peer into ye past, arrrr .... Visitors to the page are invited to Avast, make yerself known! when they arrive and abandon ship when they log out.

It's clever, amusing and leads that thar scurvy cabin boy, Rorrrry to waste even more time on Facebook when he should be swabbin' the decks, arrrrgh!

Collins Dictionary and endangered words

Various celebrities have been enlisted in a campaign to save 24 words which are under threat of being left out of the next edition of Collins Dictionary. Collins' rationale is that they don't feature often enough in their corpus of billions of words of text, so the current poet laureate, plus various politicians and media personalities have vowed to use the words in their poetry, speeches, tv programmes etc to bump the words up the rankings.

The words are rare - they include niddering, fubsy, mansuetude and caliginosity - but, what I'd like to know is why these words have been singled out. Take 'niddering', for instance. The two entries in Collins Dictionary (6th edition, 2003) immediately preceding 'niddering' are Nidaros (the former name of Trondheim) and nidation (another name for implantation). The two entries immediately following 'niddering' are niddick (dialect word for nape of the neck) and niddle-noddle (nodding or to nod rapidly or unsteadily). Are those four words any less rare than niddering?

I was surprised at some of the comments made by journalists and readers, many of whom had the attitude 'So what? There are far too many words in English anyway'. I was reminded of George Orwell's Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where undesirable words were eliminated from the language and 'reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum' (from the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four).

We don't worry about a surfeit of words in other contexts. My New Oxford Thesaurus of English has over 100 synonyms of the noun 'fool' and 50 words meaning 'grumpy'. I have never heard anyone suggesting we cull these groups to about 30, to match the number of synonyms for 'intelligent' and 'good-natured'.

How Down's syndrome got its name

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, this weekend is so-called Open House weekend in London when lots of buildings of architectural interest are open to the public free of charge. Today I visited a building that is not generally open to the public - the Langdon Down Centre Trust on the borders of Teddington and Hampton Wick to the south-west of London.

The centre was formerly known as Normansfield, and was a private hospital for people with learning difficulties from the 1860s till just after the Second World War, when the hospital became part of the National Health Service. It was founded by Dr John Langdon Down, and it is from his name that we get the term Down's syndrome.

Langdon Down was born in 1828 in Torpoint, Cornwall. He went to work at what was then called the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill, Surrey and while there took photographs of all the patients in order to study their facial features (over 200 photos survive). He identified a group of patients with similar features and called them Mongols or Mongolian idiots. The term 'idiot' was in common use at the time, and Langdon Down referred to the Greek origin of the word and its sense 'private or lonely person'. He was attracted to this professional field because he wanted to help those people who were often condemned to a life of loneliness, having been shunned by their families.

In 1868 Langdon Down opened Normansfield with about 20 patients and by 1891 there were 150 residents. His wife Mary was an intelligent and talented manager and she was greatly involved in running the home. The Langdon Downs were an enlightened pair; they only employed staff who could play a musical instrument, help teach the boys cricket, act or who had other skills which the patients could benefit from. The main reason the building featured in the Open House weekend was because it contains a rare example of a private Victorian theatre complete with the original scenery. Plays and musicals were put on by outside companies, but the patients acted in shows too.

In 1961 a group of eminent specialists working in the field of disability wrote a letter to the Lancet objecting to the name Mongolism. They advocated dropping the term and made several suggestions for an alternative - Langdon Down anomaly, Down's syndrome anomaly, congenital acromicria or trisomy 21 anomaly. It was the editor of the Lancet who decided that the term Down's syndrome should replace the old name. In 1965 the World Health Organisation officially designated the condition Down's syndrome and that has been the position since.