The virtual linguist

Health and safety and language problems

Migrant workers in the UK construction industry risk injury through a lack of knowledge of English. Such workers often have no experience of construction work before coming to the UK, so are not necessarily familiar with hazards and safety procedures as a matter of course.

I picked up a health and safety trade magazine on the train today that someone had discarded, not expecting to find anything relating to my field in it, but there was an article in it entitled 'Making health and safety a world language'. One of the problems is that migrant workers often end up working for rogue employers who don't pay much attention to health and safety. The Health and Safety Executive works with churches and community groups to reach migrant workers, but a professor speaking at a recent construction industry conference said that going to Polish shops and pubs frequented by Poles was the best way of getting the safety message across (to Poles).

Many employers use pictures to get across important information eg a picture of a bad practice such as a badly placed ladder, or someone not wearing a helmet with a big red cross through it. This usually works fine, although there is always the danger that cartoon-type drawings are not taken very seriously.

Another academic speaking at the conference advised construction companies to exercise caution when using interpreters, and to be sure they are using a qualified and competent interpreter who doesn't translate 'plant and machinery' as 'flower and machinery'.

I was interested to see the term 'elf and safety' used in this particular trade journal. 'Elf and safety' is used by certain newspapers in a derogatory sense, usually in connection with a trivial story about games of conkers being banned, or children having to wear goggles to use glue in the classroom. The magazine was not using the term seriously or as a realistic alternative to 'health and safety' but clearly recognised the image the Health and Safety Executive has in the public imagination.

Parliamentary Select Committee on official language

The proceedings of the Parliamentary Select Committee on official language (mentioned here) which took place a couple of weeks ago with Professor David Crystal, the sketch writers Matthew Parris and Simon Hoggart, and Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign on the panel were televised and can be seen for a few more days on BBC iPlayer (here - am not sure if it is available to viewers outside the UK).

Professor Crystal was reasonably understanding of and sympathetic to politicians, saying that all groups, not just politicians, used jargon. He said that it is easy to criticise politicians' language, but a lot harder to come up with something to replace the current state of affairs. He also said that ideally we need good models of English for politicians to follow.

Examples of unacceptable language given by the panel, and by the MPs questioning them, included words that on the surface sound simple and comprehensible, but that are in fact meaningless, eg core values, vision. Then there were the sound bites eg train to gain, patient pathways. Also, there were words and phrases which did not mean what they sounded as if they meant eg care in the community, entitlement, guarantee. There were the euphemisms eg the government no longer talks of subsidising the railways, but always says 'investing in the railways' and the unemployed have become job-seekers in government-speak. Examples of gobbledegook were given, too, eg quality of outcomes framework and rising horizons.

Hendiasys

AskOxford's word of the day today is hendiasys, which is a figure of speech in which a single idea is expressed by two words joined by 'and'. The example given by AskOxford is 'nice and warm'. Other examples would be kith and kin, sick and tired, house and home, assault and battery. Hendiasys is often used by writers for literary effect eg 'Sound and fury' in Macbeth sounds more impressive than 'a furious sound'. The word has a Greek origin and literally means 'one through two'.

According to Wikipedia (although the word is not in OED) there is also the phenomenon, hendiatris, which means 'one through three'. Examples given in Wikipedia include 'wine, women and song' and, from Henry V, 'Cry God for Harry, England and St George'.

You can sign up for AskOxford's word of the day by email here.

Chris Eubank's lisp

Several newspapers have carried the story of Chris Eubank's decision to have his teeth fixed in order to cure his lisp, but the BBC page gives interesting information about different types of speech problems. Eubank is, or was, a champion boxer. He was often mocked in the press because of his lisp so it might appear that he is embarrassed by it. However, he also wears jodhpurs, a monocle and a bowler hat, so he doesn't seem to be concerned about attracting attention generally.

Eubank's lisp means that he is unable to say the letter S (unfortunately, he was set up when he was guest presenter on Top of the Pops, when he was asked to introduce Suggs singing Cecilia at number Six). Other speech impediments explained by the BBC article mentioned above are dysarthia (defective articulation, according to the OED definition), rhotacism (inability to say R), apraxia (inability to say correctly what you mean), cluttering (repeating syllables or phrases several times), dysprosody (poor rhythm and intonation) and selective mutism (refusal of a child to speak in certain situations, eg in school).

Cocooning

The radio's business reporter stopped his interviewee on the BBC's Today programme this morning when the latter mentioned the word 'cocooning' . They were talking about Pay TV, I think. Sentences like 'he was cocooned in his study', or 'we cocooned ourselves in a blanket' seem fine to me, but I, like the reporter, found a sentence like 'more people are cocooning these days' odd.

Perhaps it's an Americanism creeping into British English. I see from Wikipedia that the term cocooning was coined in the 1990s by a trend-spotter who predicted that people would go out less and entertain themselves by staying at home. In the 90s people had already given up going to the cinema in favour of renting videos. But at least they walked to the shop. Now they don't need to leave their sofa; they can download films, or order DVDs online. The large supermarkets deliver their weekly shopping, and pizza and other takeaways are delivered to the door. And of course they 'meet' their friends online via Facebook and other social networking sites, so don't need to go out to socialise. I googled the term on the Google news page, and it has made the occasional appearance in British newspapers. I think an Australian commentator made the most pertinent common I've seen (here - it's a long article, scroll down near to the bottom - six paragraphs up) when he described it not so much as cocooning but 'fortressing'. 

New words enter the German dictionary

About 5,000 new words have been added to the latest edition of Duden, the respected German dictionary. Many of them are English and include eine After-Show-Party and eine No-Go-Area. The words are feminine because they mirror the gender of the German equivalent, I assume - it has always been die Party, and 'area' is die Gegend. It girl has also entered the dictionary and is neuter, since the gender of girl in German is neuter - das Mädchen (that's because the suffix -chen is always neuter). Twittern has entered the dictionary too - the English word with a German verb ending, so 'I twitter' will be ich twittere.

Words with German roots have gone into the dictionary too. There's Kreditklemme, credit crunch, Komasaufen, binge-drinking and Hüftgold, love handles. Then there's Kuschelkurs from kuscheln, meaning 'to cuddle' and Kurs, a course. That means 'a softly softly approach' in English, I presume. See here for more.

The traffic of words is not completely one-way. The German word über is used a lot in English these days. 

Can women be avuncular?

In an article in The Guardian last week, the former head of the Fawcett Society and soon-to-be head of the government's Family and Parenting Institute, Dr Katherine Rake was described as 'a calm avuncular presence'.

The definition of avuncular is 'of, belonging to, or resembling an uncle'. So it is hard to see how the word could be used to describe a woman. Avuncular comes from the Latin avunculus meaning maternal uncle ie brother of one's mother. There was a Latin word for paternal uncle, which was patruus, but there is no related adjective in current usage. The OED only has the two obsolete nouns patruel, defined as 'a child of a person's paternal uncle' (that's cousin these days, isn't it?) and patruity, 'the condition of being an uncle'.

There are plenty of references on the internet to materteral, which comes from the Latin matertera, maternal aunt. The definition is 'characteristic or typical of an aunt'. It is, however, described as being humorous (as well as rare) by the Dictionary, so in that sense it cannot be considered an opposite of avuncular, since avuncular is not used humorously. Avuncular is quite a positive word, although if you're younger than middle-aged you probably don't appreciate it. The Latin word amita meant paternal aunt, and it is from this word that we get the modern aunt.

Funnily enough, this is the second time this week that I have written about relatives. If you haven't already seen it, regular reader Shuchi made a very interesting comment re the use of the word auntie in India.

Easy words, complicated definitions

People often have a laugh at Dr Johnson's expense by citing his definition for network, which is "Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections". If you didn't know what a network was, then looking it up in the dictionary wasn't going to be a lot of help!

Well, Dr Johnson is not the only one. This is a definition I have copied verbatim from the Oxford English Dictionary. What word do you think it refers to?

Connecting two clauses loosely or anacoluthically, the relative or dependent clause being imperfect (the part omitted being suggested by the principal clause); giving the effect of the ordinary rel. pron. with ellipsis of a preposition, an infinitive, etc.: cf. 7. (Now considered slipshod.)

I'll tell you the answer in a minute. But it's a very common word, a word that no-one would ever look up in a dictionary because everyone knows what it means. There must be hundreds of (internet) pages of the OED that never get searched for because they relate to simple words, which everyone understands. I love looking at those pages because I often find the most fascinating gems - often an obsolete meaning, or a dialect meaning.

The paragraph above is the Dictionary's blurb about the word that. I looked up the word anacoluthically and the Dictionary's definition is "in anacoluthic manner". Very helpful! So I looked up anacoluthic and found this definition "Of or pertaining to anacoluthia". Great! Anacoluthia, it turns out, is "A want of grammatical sequence; the passing from one construction to another before the former is completed". Here is one of the citations (dated 1875) relating to that in this sense: "If you will only see things..in the light that we see them". In other words that is used here ungrammatically to replace 'in which'.

I'm being a bit unfair to the OED, as that august dictionary is not designed to be a common-or-garden dictionary of meanings. It likes to comment on all usage over the centuries. The word that is not as interesting as some other words, but nevertheless, there are some interesting snippets. That only started to differ in meaning from this around the year 1200, and it is thought that this was due to the influence of Norse. That one is used disparagingly of a woman, according to the Dictionary (and that's not a historic meaning - the last citation is 1980). (Here I must say that I have yet to come across a full paper page of the Dictionary where somewhere on it there is not a word which describes a woman disparagingly!). That was previously used as a plural instead of those, especially with numbers ("There's that ten guineas ..." is from a 1768 citation, and I must say, I think plenty of people use that in the same way today.) That in US slang, as in to be all that means 'great'. You can also be all that and a bag of chips.

Grandfather

This phrase was in an email I got earlier "We don't grandfather any article ...". That was the first time I'd ever seen grandfather used as a verb, but I discovered it is in the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition "To exempt from new legislation or regulations, usu. because of some prior condition of previously existing privilege". To be honest, I haven't a clue what that means. I think in the email I got it meant "judge an article written today by old standards".

I couldn't help looking up other family members to see if those words could be used as a verb too. Of course, the verbs to mother and to father are quite common, but there is also to grandmother, to brother, to sister and to cousin which are all related to the noun, and tend to mean "to treat as (or as if one were) a grandmother (brother, sister or cousin)". Aunt is only a noun, but a very interesting noun. In Shakespeare's day it meant both a gossipy old woman and a bawd, procuress or prostitute (cf Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale "Are summer songs for me and my aunts, As we lie tumbling in the hay"). In the 17th century students from Oxford called Cambridge University their 'Aunt' and vice versa. The BBC is affectionately known as Auntie and aunt appears in a few mild exclamations eg my giddy aunt, my sacred aunt, my holy aunt or even just "my aunt". Then there's an Aunt Edna, a lowbrow theatre-goer, an Aunt Emma, an unenterprising croquet player, Aunt Sally, a fairground game or the wicket-keeper in cricket, and 'my Aunt Fanny', used in sentences expressing disbelief eg Tell that to my old Aunt Fanny.

Nephew and niece are nouns only and there's not much to say about them, except that they can also mean the illegitimate son or daughter of a priest or other churchman. There is a verb to uncle which means to cheat or swindle.

New words in the Oxford English Dictionary

Another batch of words was added to the OED in June. The fact that they are new words in the Dictionary does not mean that they will be new to you, however; it takes a while for words to be spotted, recorded then entered in the multi-volume dictionary. Here are some nice ones:

bupkis: (North American slang) absolutely nothing, zilch

car-booter: (will mean nothing if you're not British) someone who attends car-boot sales (ie second-hand sales, usually held out of doors) as a buyer or seller

fudgicle/fudgsicle: (US) a chocolate ice lolly

Hiberno-English: people of English descent born in Ireland or living there; also the English language as spoken or written in Ireland (Irish English has just entered the Dictionary too, with the same definitions. That's not a new expression; there's a citation from 1617)

jakey (chiefly Glaswegian slang) a person who drinks a lot of cheap alcohol, especially a homeless person

searchability: the quality of being searchable

swotty: overly studious

turducken: (US) a dish which consists of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey

The last two presidents of the USA have made their contribution; the words Bushian, Bushism, Bushist, Clintonesque, Clintonian and Clintonista are now in the OED.