The virtual linguist

Jolly-hockey-sticks and Cockney sparrow

"She's all jolly-hockey-sticks and he's all cockney sparra" is a sentence (in the 5th paragraph) of this comment piece in the Sunday Mirror, referring to Ann Widdecombe and her dancing partner on Strictly Come Dancing Anton du Beke.

 

A jolly-hockey-sticks type is always a woman, and specifically a hale and hearty, no-nonsense type of woman. I wrote on this phrase a couple of years ago here.

 

A sparrow is usually a common bird, but there is another definition, according to the OED -- "a chirpy, quick-witted person; used especially of a Londoner". A Cockney, of course, is a Londoner. The spelling 'sparra' is meant to represent a Londoner's pronunciation.

Castle or rook in chess

The chess pieces which are placed on each of the corner squares at the start of a game are called rooks or castles. I don't play chess, but it seems clear to me why the piece is called a castle, as it looks like a castle battlement. However, why rook?

 

The rook in this sense is not the crow-like bird. This is an old Germanic word and has cognates in other Germanic languages. Rook in the chess sense is ultimately from a Persian word ruk, meaning chariot, and entered English via Norman French. Early chess sets with pieces shaped like chariots have been found in Asia and Europe, and in the medieval era in the Near East and Europe the commonest shape for the piece resembled a stylised pair of horses, according to the OED.

Shakespeare in the original pronunciation

A group of actors is putting on a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream next month at Kansas University. It will be the first time that a Shakespeare play has been performed in its entirety in the original pronunciation in North America.

 

Professor Paul Meier has collaborated with Professor David Crystal to get the accent right. You can see a clip from the performance, and hear both professors here. The accent to my ears sounds a mixture of West Country and Irish. In the late 16th/early 17th century accent word rhymed with sword, near rhymed with there and qualities rhymed with eyes.

 

More about David Crystal and Shakespeare's pronunciation here.

Mrs Grundy

This sentence "... the Mrs Grundies of the Queen's English Society, for example, protest too much" appears in the final paragraph of this piece in today's Daily Telegraph about lexical and pronunciation changes in English. The whole article is interesting and follows on from my post of yesterday about words whose pronunciation is changing.

 

A Mrs Grundy, according to the definition in the single-volume Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE), is "a person with very conventional standards of propriety". Incidentally, the dictionary gives the plural as Mrs Grundys. The OED definition is rather more picturesque "a personification of the tyranny of social opinion in matters of conventional propriety".

 

Mrs Grundy refers to a character, a farmer's wife, in the 1798 play Speed the Plough by Thomas Morton. She never actually appears in person, but is referred to constantly by the other characters, particularly by Dame Ashfield, another farmer's wife. This snippet is just a few lines into the first act:

Dame Ashfield. And I assure you, Dame Grundy's butter was quite the crack of the market.

Ashfield. Be quiet, woolye? aleways ding, dinging Dame Grundy into my ears—what will Mrs. Grundy zay? What will Mrs. Grundy think—Canst thee be quiet, let ur alone, and behave thyzel pratty?

 

The main dictionaries on my bookshelf all take a different approach to this word. Mrs Grundy is a headword in the ODE. Grundy is also a headword but readers are referred to the Mrs Grundy entry. Collins Dictionary does not have Mrs Grundy, but it has more or less the same definition ("a narrow-minded person who keeps critical watch on the propriety of others") at the entry Grundy. It also lists the derivatives Grundyism, Grundyist and Grundyite. Chambers Dictionary does not have Grundy or Mrs Grundy, but has Grundyism as its main entry with the definition "conventional prudery". The OED (not on my bookshelf, but on my computer!) has the headword Grundy and the derivatives Grundified and Grundyish, as well as those mentioned above in Collins.

The changing pronunciation of English

There were a couple of items on this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 about how the pronunciation of certain words is changing (listen here for another week). Younger people are far more likely to rhyme says with days and pronounce ate as eight than are their parents (whose pronunciation rhymes with fez and net), and to stress the o of kilometre and the second o of controversy, words which older people are more likely to stress on the first syllable. Other words whose pronunciation is changing, according to John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at UCL, include poor, tour, sure, harass, garage and create. Aitch, the 8th letter of the alphabet, is increasingly being pronounced haitch these days.

 

There is nothing new about the pronunciation of words changing. In a 1928 guide to pronunciation issued by the BBC the final syllable of pristine rhymed with line, combat sounded more like cumbat, respite was stressed on the first syllable and the second syllable sounded like spit and finance was stressed on the final syllable. There are more examples in this article.

 

The British Library is compiling an archive of different, modern pronunciations and visitors to a forthcoming exhibition on the English language can record their voices reading a set passage from the popular children's book Mr Tickle, which has been slightly adapted to include words whose pronunciation is known to be in flux.

 

More on this subject in this BBC article.

New words in Collins Dictionary

Recent political events have made their mark on the English language, and Con-Lib and Cleggmania have entered the latest edition of Collins Dictionary, as have the expressions 'broken society', frequently used by David Cameron, and bigotgate, a reference to a gaffe made by former prime minister Gordon Brown.

 

People's preoccupation with advertising, television and the celebrity culture is reflected in the new additions to the dictionary, too. BGT, the acronym for the popular show Britain's Got Talent now has its own entry in Collins, as has simples, used in a TV ad for a price comparison website. Two recent Celebrity Big Brother housemates were accused of having a fauxmance, or a fake romance, and fauxmance has also gone into the dictionary.

 

Twitter went into the dictionary last year, and tweetup went into the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, but now tweet tooth (a strong desire to send a tweet), tweet-out (a greeting sent to a friend via Twitter) and tweetheart (a Twitter user admired by others) have entered Collins Dictionary.

 

Other entries include:

funemployment: the condition of enjoying being unemployed

ghost estate: a housing estate that was being built but was then left in an unfinished state due to the recession

greige: a colour between grey and beige

intexticated: distracting from driving because you are sending or receiving a text message

birther: someone who believes Barack Obama was not born in America

Chindonesia: China, India and Indonesia seen as a unit

 

100 places that shaped the English language

The charity the English Project has launched a campaign to find the hundred events and places that are the most significant in the development of the English language. Examples include Lakenheath, Suffolk (because a medallion dating back to 475AD providing the first evidence of written English was discovered there), York (invaded and ruled by the Danes who left a lasting legacy on the language), Guildford (because of the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, believed to have been written by Nicholas of Guildford), Bolingbroke, Lincolnshire (birthplace of King Henry IV, the first English king since the Norman invasion to have English as his first language), Lichfield (birthplace of Samuel Johnson), Menlove Avenue, Liverpool (birthplace of John Lennon) and many more.

 

You can submit your own suggestions to the English Project and read the up-to-date list here. The Sunday Telegraph had a report on it here.

 

Keep and mistress

There has been a high-profile alimony case in India recently (which was also reported on the BBC website), where two senior Supreme Court judges referred to a man's mistress as a keep. A senior female lawyer strongly objected to the term keep, saying she found it personally offensive, and regarded the judge's words as being in extremely poor taste (see this Times of India article).

 

The specific 'mistress' meaning of the noun keep is not in the OED; the nearest definition is one that Edmund Spenser used, namely "that which is kept; a charge". However, the phrase 'kept woman' is not uncommon, and is often used humorously these days, as, indeed, is kept man. The OED also has the definition "one who keeps a mistress" at the headword keeper, which it describes as obsolete and it has the entry keeperess, one of whose meanings is "a woman who keeps a man". Similarly, at 'keeping' one of the senses is "the maintaining of a mistress or lover".

 

There are dozens of words in the OED which are synonyms of the word 'mistress', or which have been at some time - with the 17th century being the heyday for such vocabulary. Here are some: buttered bun, convenient, doxy, fancy-woman, gimmer, jilt, jug, kittock, leveret, liberty-wife, lie-by, Lindabrides, minion, minx, mule, natural, night piece, nobsy, peculiar, pinnace, pop, poplolly, pug, pure, sooterkin, special, tackle, underput and wanton.

Dialect words in the OED

There are some dialect words in the OED, but by no means all words used in all dialects are in the Dictionary. As the preface to the 2nd edition says: "... a dictionary has definite limits: lexicographers must, like naturalists, 'draw the line somewhere', in each diverging direction. They must include all the 'common words' of literature and conversation, and such of the scientific, technical, slang, dialectal, and foreign words as are passing into common use and approach the position or standing of 'common words', well knowing that the line which they draw will not satisfy all their critics".

 

Below are some nice dialect words from the OED, together with their definitions. I didn't scour the Dictionary for these; I found them in Chapter 7 of The English Language by Robert Burchfield. Whether they are 'common words', as mentioned above, is a moot point ... Some of them are included because they have, or had, other meanings in Standard English.

 

ran-tan: to condemn and humiliate (a husband) publicly for beating his wife, typically by causing a disturbance outside his house by beating pots and kettles, singing and chanting loudly, etc., and sometimes also by beating him, chasing him from the town or compelling him to ride the stang. ('Riding the stang', by the way, is defined thus: to be mounted astride of a pole borne on the shoulders of two men, and carried through the streets for the derision of the spectators)

piggle: to fiddle or toy with

pit yacker: a coal miner

pussivanting: fussing, meddling

scrunty: stunted, shrivelled

 

The aforementioned book chapter only looked at words beginning O to S, so there are no doubt plenty of other delightful dialect words elsewhere in the Dictionary.

 

Jane Austen's spelling

There are several articles in today's papers (such as this one in the Telegraph) about Jane Austen's poor spelling, grammar and punctuation and country bumpkin accent.

 

Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University has studied Austen's hand-written manuscripts and thinks that her editor, probably William Gifford, was as much responsible for the author's success as Austen herself. He was something of a pedant and turned Austen's rambling and misspelt prose into a polished version suitable for publishing.

 

Professor Sutherland says that Austen's spellings show the influence of her Hampshire burr on her writing. For instance, she spells tomatoes 'tomatas' and writes 'arraroot' instead of arrowroot.

 

What are authors - and indeed anyone - to do when they need to spell a word correctly? Look in a dictionary, of course. The dictionary that Jane Austen would have used would have been Johnson's, as that came out in 1755 and Austen was writing in the early years of the 19th century. The only trouble is that tomato and arrowroot are not in Johnson's dictionary. The OED (not available to Jane Austen) has five citations, dated between 1759 and 1887, where tomato/tomatoes is spelt tomata/tomatas. The spellings tomates and tomatos were also in use at the time, as indeed was the normal spelling tomatoes. So, Jane Austen was not alone in her spelling variation.