The virtual linguist

Swine flu or H1N1?

There was a short discussion on Radio 4's Today programme this morning (listen again for a few more days here - it was on at 08.41) between two men who didn't like the name swine flu, but for different reasons. The first chap, Stewart Houston, was the chairman of the National Pig Association, which represents pig farmers, and he didn't like the name because he felt it gave pigs a bad name, and moreover, might put people off buying pork and bacon. He was being interviewed along with Steven Poole, author of Unspeak, a book about the language of politics. He felt that swine flu was too ridiculous a name for such a serious thing and that the public was reassured if serious phenomena, such as illnesses, had a serious-sounding technical name, such as H1N1, which is what the Americans have started calling swine flu.

The European Commission is worried about the adverse effect the name swine flu may have on the pork industry and so has decided to call the disease 'novel flu' - which certainly doesn't sound technical and/or reassuring. Other countries are calling it Mexican flu.

The UK tabloid The Sun refers to it as pig flu, I noticed. Perhaps they think their readers won't understand the word 'swine'. Swine is certainly an odd word to use; it sounds biblical or archaic, or possibly even slightly poetic - swineherd sounds more romantic than pig farmer. It's more likely to be used as a mild, again old-fashioned, term of abuse - You swine (ie you contemptible person). Interestingly, it's not a new word, coined specially for this outbreak. It is in the 2nd edition (1989) of the Oxford English Dictionary (as is swine influenza).

Adjectives relating to animals

It's odd that in English the adjective meaning 'pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling a particular animal' is often a very different word from the animal itself. Think of dog/canine, cat/feline and wolf/lupine. This is often because the word for the animal comes from Old English, but the adjective has a Latin root. Here are some more adjectives relating to animals, birds, insects and sea creatures:

ant: formic

bear: ursine

chicken: galline or gallinaceous

crab: cancrine

crow: corvine

deer: cervine

eagle: aquiline

fox: vulpine

goat: caprine

lobster: homarine

monkey: simian

mouse: murine

parrot: psittacine

reindeer: rangiferine

sheep: ovine

wasp: vespine

weasel: musteline

Alan Smithee and Walter Plinge

I sometimes edit books which I would be ashamed to write, and hope that my name won't be added to the credits. That sort of thing happens in other fields, too. Alan Smithee is a name used by film directors who do not want to be associated with the film. imdb.com lists nearly fifty films supposedly directed by Alan Smithee.

Walter Plinge is a pseudonym traditionally used in London theatres by actors who either do not want to be identified, or who are playing two roles in the same play. The equivalent name in US theatre is George Spelvin (or Georgina or Georgette for women).

The pen-name David Agnew was used on BBC drama productions in the 1970s. That scenario was slightly different from those above. Usually it was not that the original scriptwriter wanted to dissociate herself or himself from the project, but often major editing amendments were made by BBC production staff and they were not allowed to use their names in the credits without a long-drawn out bureaucratic process.

Thanks, Helen, for giving me the idea for this post.

110% and linguistic inflation

There was a time when if you put in 100% effort you were giving of your best. Not any more; now you have to give 110%. In an article on the BBC website it's claimed that in the US, unless you offer 1000% commitment at an interview you won't get the job.

Lexicographer Susie Dent traces this linguistic inflation back to the 1980s when ice-skating champions Torvill and Dean talked of giving 101%. Other sportspeople had to go one better, and increased their so-called commitment level to 110%.

In these difficult economic times employers are becoming somewhat sceptical of those offering more than 100%, just as those people who took out mortgages of over 100% are these days disillusioned by such large numbers.

Submariners' slang words for food

I've just spotted this article which was published in the Telegraph last week. It lists slang words for food, used by sailors on submarines. Here's a taster:

elephant's footprint - battered spam fritter

baby's head - steak and kidney pudding

teddybears' ears - prawn crackers

snorkers - sausages

pom - powdered potato

Maltese

I was trying to work out what language the couple sitting next to me on the train yesterday were speaking. She looked southern European, he was fairer-skinned. They were reading a newspaper entitled In-Nazzjon, which was written in the Latin script with a few unusual letters eg an h with a vertical line through (the news was about Manchester United, though, so didn't give much clue to the country), the language contained sounds and syllables that sounded to me a bit like Arabic or Hebrew, and they occasionally switched to speaking excellent English with each other. Eventually I decided that the language must be Maltese, and when I asked them, they did indeed confirm this.

Maltese is a Semitic language, so it is related to Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script. It is descended from Siculo-Arabic, or Sicilian Arabic, a variety of Arabic spoken on Sicily between about the 9th and 15th centuries. It is no longer spoken on Sicily. Although a Semitic language, modern-day Maltese is heavily influenced by Romance languages, particularly Italian, and also borrows many words from English. Very common and function words tend to be Semitic, while more recent words and concepts tend to come from Romance languages or English. That is why a technical sentence such as "Ġeografikament, l-Ewropa hi parti tas-superkontinent ta' l-Ewrasja" (Geographically, Europe is part of the Supercontinent of Eurasia) is easier for Europeans to recognise and guess the meaning of than a simple sentence such as "Ir-raġel qiegħed fid-dar" (The man is in the house). If you know any Arabic, you'll know that ar-rajul is 'the man' (ar is the form of the definite article al before r).

The reason that the couple found it so easy to switch between Maltese and English was that both are official languages of Malta. Malta has a long association with Britain. It was incorporated into the British Empire in 1814 and gained its independence in 1964, becoming a republic a decade later. It is a member of the Commonwealth.

Shrub and rum-shrub

I've been editing a book on food and drink this week, and came across the word shrub. No, not a bush or a plant, but a word meaning a drink made of orange or lemon juice, sugar and spirit, usually rum, which is why the word rum-shrub is also in the dictionary. The horticultural word shrub comes from the Old English scrybb, meaning shrubbery; the word scrub is obviously related, too. Shrub the drink comes from the Arabic word sharab, wine or the verb shariba, to drink. The sounds/letters a and r of sharab have been transposed to form shrub. This is a common process in language development and is called metathesis (a common example is bird, which is from the Old English brid).

The English words sherbet and syrup are from the same Arabic root.

Tiddy oggy

I've been editing a reference book on food lately, and there are masses of interesting words in it. One is tiddy oggy, or Cornish pasty. Tiddy is West Country (Devon and Cornwall) dialect for tatie, which itself is dialect for potato. Oggy is probably from the Cornish word hoggan, meaning pastry or pie, and according to most of the citations in the OED, is very much a naval slang word. Traditionally Cornish pasties contained only potatoes, not meat and onions and other vegetables, as most do nowadays.

A variant of the expression tiddy oggy is tiddly oggy. Tiddly, again, is naval slang, meaning 'shipshape, smart, spruce or comme il faut', so a tiddly oggy is a 'proper pasty'.

There's also a Priddy oggy, which is a Somerset version of the pasty (Priddy is a village in Somerset). It usually contains pork and cheese.

Pasty can also be spelt pastie. It rhymes with nasty. There is also an adjective pasty, which rhymes with hasty, and means pale-faced and unhealthy-looking. Pastie as a noun has another meaning; it usually occurs in the plural as you buy them in pairs - they are nipple covers and are popular with strippers and burlesque dancers.

For all you could ever want to know about tiddly oggies and Cornish pasties, have a look at this site.

Camfranglais

Seeing a picture of the flamboyant first lady of Cameroon Chantal Biya (here) on her way to a summit in Los Angeles, prompted me to look out some stuff I'd bookmarked recently on Camfranglais, a relatively new 'language' (it emerged in the mid-70s), which is a mixture of French, English and creole. Cameroon is a multilingual country, with over 200 languages spoken, and where French and English are both official languages.

Examples of Camfranglais include: Tu as go au school? Did you go to school?, Tout le monde hate me, wey I no know, Everybody hates me, I don't know why, and Il est come, He's come. Several Cameroonian musicians use Camfranglais, for instance Koppo, one of whose songs is Si tu vois ma go, If you see me go.

A good article on this is this BBC one. They call Camfranglais Frananglais here, although academic articles I have seen use the name Camfranglais, which is why I have called this post Camfranglais.

Slang words for police

In my recent post on ploddledygook or police-speak, I mentioned that Plod is a slang word for the police. It's not very complimentary as plod as a noun means 'a dull and laborious process or experience' (OED). There are other slang words for the police - lots of them; I found a whole Wikipedia page devoted to them, most of which I'd never heard of, even the so-called British expressions.

Pigs is another slang term for the police, and there are several other 'pig-related' nicknames eg Bacon, Rashers and Swine. The TV programme The Bill is so-called because of another slang term - the Old Bill. No-one knows for sure where the name comes from. There was a cartoon character of the First World War called Old Bill, who was dressed in army uniform and had a walrus moustache; as he appeared on recruitment posters for the Metropolitan Police, one suggestion is that the name comes from him. Another idea is that policemen used to like sporting walrus moustaches. A bill is an old, long-handled weapon used by police in the 18th century, and it is perhaps from this that the name came to applied to the police. Yet another suggestion is that the nickname comes from the initials BYL, originally on cars used by the Flying Squad.

When I was a child the term Bobby was very popular; it was a friendly, gentle term. It is rarely used now, probably because the police themselves have changed.