The virtual linguist

Impact of King James Bible

The Sun may not realise it, but when it described Aston Villa as a team which 'refused to give up the ghost', it was using a phrase from King James Bible. Likewise the Daily Mirror and its description of the actress Tilda Swinton as 'a law unto herself'.

 

These days most of us do not read the Bible on a regular basis, and a 2009 survey found that only a little over a third of the population knew the parable of the prodigal son. In past times, however, people of all ages and socio-economic groups read the Bible regularly - or at least heard it in church, so absorbed the language of it.

 

An article on the BBC website looks at the language of the King James Bible and how it has influenced modern English. It says that the Bible is more or less a literal translation, so the Hebrew expressions are translated word for word, giving us the vivid idioms that we wouldn't expect in English, such as 'by the skin of one's teeth' and 'the land of the living'.

 

David Crystal found 257 expressions in the King James Bible that are used in modern English, and only a small minority of those expressions made their debut in the Bible, most having been copied from earlier translators. Crystal also found that there are relatively few coined words in the Bible -- two examples are battering ram and backsliding.

 

For the full article see here.

1500 words for 'stupid'

I mentioned Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang in a recent post. Today he had an article on the dictionary in the Mail on Sunday.

 

The dictionary took him 17 years to compile. There are over 5000 slang expressions devoted to crime and criminals, over 4500 devoted to drink, drinking and drunks, and nearly 4000 devoted to drugs. Green notes that almost none of the 2480 expressions relating to women are complimentary, whereas the 2183 expressions referring to men are 'often self-aggrandising'.

 

The Mail article is long and informative. We learn that the words and phrases booze, broke and better half were all used in the 16th century.

 

Slang started off as a secret language -- often used by criminals to stay one step ahead of the law. Once everyone knew what you were talking about, you had to coin new words. It's exactly the same nowadays, except that the internet means that people get to know meanings far more quickly than in the past.

 

Green concedes that slang is not appropriate for all occasions, but he disagrees that using slang is a trait of the inarticulate. After all, with 4500 synonyms for 'drunk' and 1500 for 'stupid', slang can hardly be considered a limited vocabulary.

 

For the full article and more entries from the dictionary, see here.

Anglicisms in Russian

Russian has adopted many English words over the past couple of decades. Sometimes these are seen as young and trendy -- so for instance, you'll hear the words tineydzhery (transliteration from the Russian spelling of teenagers -- the y is the standard plural ending in Russian) and dress-kod. Many of the new English words are to do with finance and capitalism (eg steyk-kholdery, or stakeholders, and riteyl, retail), since Russian didn't have these words during the Soviet era, or, if the words existed they often had negative associations, or had a pre-revolutionary, tsarist quaintness about them.

 

Not everyone is happy about this. Some linguists try and weed out the more inappropriate or vulgar anglicisms, usually those that sound like an unpleasant Russian word (like gadget -- transliterated as gadzhet -- since gad means 'filth' in Russian). Last year the federal anti-monopoly service stepped up efforts to ban the use of foreign words in advertising, and a Japanese sushi chain that advertised a 'Happy New Menu' and a sports chain that advertised its 'new collection' were prosecuted.

 

Despite this objection to the use of anglicisms when speaking or writing Russian, there is, at the same time, a move to improve the language skills of Russian workers. A strategy document recently unveiled by the Russian government said that the aim by 2020 was for 20% of public workers to be fluent in a foreign language, and from next year all newly recruited bureaucrats should be fluent in English.

 

This story appeared in yesterday's Guardian. Read it here.

Anti-tech words

The BBC has a piece today on made-up techie words sent in by readers. There are some very clever suggestions, eg:

dot con: the process of making money from the internet

memail: emails I send to myself as reminders to do things

spamnesia: failing to reply to friends' emails because your computer thought they were spam.

 

More here.

Falderal

I love to go a-wandering,
Along the mountain track,
And as I go, I love to sing,
My knapsack on my back.

 

If you've ever been a member of Scouts, Guides, Brownies, any church groups, or been on jolly coach trips, you have probably sung the above song hundreds of times (if you're over 50, that is). It's called The Happy Wanderer (although, as far as I remember, we never knew that at the time).

 

What I want to ask you is .... what do you sing next, after the first verse above? I thought I was singing 'folderee, folderah', but I've noticed different versions on internet sites which give the lyrics: val-deri, val-dera and faleri, falera, for instance.

 

I've just come across the entry falderal/folderol in the OED with the definition "a meaningless refrain in songs", so this must have been what we were supposed to be singing all those years ago. If you put the word (or write it as 'fal de rol') in a search engine, you will find lots of different songs containing the refrain. The first recorded usage is in the Irish playwright George Farquhar's 1701 work Sir Harry Wildair. A hundred years later a falderal had come to mean also a gewgaw or trifle. The spelling of the word has always been pretty flexible -- and sometimes very flowery, as in another OED citation, this time from Robert Browning's poem Mr Sludge, the Medium in his Dramatis Personae collection: "Fol-de-rol-de-rido liddle iddle-ol".

 

The song is originally German (called Der Fröhliche Wanderer), was written after the War, and became wildly popular after it won the 1953 Llangollen International Music Eisteddfod. I have just discovered, amazingly enough, that it was in the charts in the week I was born -- in German!! (Listen to a snippet here). You can see the German lyrics, hear more versions and read more about this song than you probably want to know here.

The worried well

A phrase that has been cropping up a lot in news reports lately is 'the worried well'. It has been used lately to describe people who clamour for a flu vaccination even though they are not particularly in a high-risk group. Generally speaking, the worried well are those who go to their doctors because they are worried that they might have, or catch, something, even though they are fine at the time. There is clearly a lot for people so disposed to worry about -- a book on sale at Amazon is entitled 1000 Tips and Traps for the Worried Well.

 

The phrase 'worried well' was coined in 1970 by Dr Sidney Garfield in an article published in Scientific American (and reprinted here in pdf format). Garfield was involved in healthcare and medical insurance. He realised that when medicine was on a 'fee for service' basis, people avoided visiting the doctor -- and their health often suffered as a result. By changing to a pre-payment system, people were happy to come to the doctor and were probably likelier to consult a professional at an earlier stage. He could see that there was a downside to this system, however, and this is where he used the term 'worried well' -- to describe a possible flood of worriers into doctors' surgeries using up time and resources that could be better spent on genuine patients.

App is word of the year

App (short for application and referring to a computer program) was declared 'word of the year' by the American Dialect Society a couple of days ago. It narrowly beat 'nom', as said by Sesame Street's Cookie Monster as he wolfs down something delicious. Junk, WikiLeaks and trend also made the final shortlist.

 

Tweet was the word that won last year, and Google was 'word of the decade'. Winning 'words' in previous years have included 9/11 (in 2001) and e (in 1998; yes, just the one letter e, as in email, ecommerce etc).

 

Anyone could nominate a word and submit it to the American Dialect Society. Tea bagger, refudiate and mama grizzly were all nominated. Refudiate got a special mention in the 'most unnecessary' category, along with ironic moustache (facial hair worn as a statement of retro hipsterdom) and star whacker (imagined celebrity killer, as alleged by actor Randy Quaid and his wife). In the 'most creative' category were spillionaire (person made rich by money from BP’s spill clean-up fund), and prehab (pre-emptive enrolment in a rehab facility to prevent relapse of an abuse problem).

 

Full story and more words here.

Hussy

I was watching an old TV episode of Poirot on YouTube last night. Agatha Christie was writing in the 1930s and 40s and her English is often very quaint. In the episode I saw, Hastings, Poirot's affable but bumbling sidekick, described a young woman as a 'hussy'. 'Hussy? What is hussy?' asked Poirot. 'Well, you know,' went on Hastings, embarrassed at having to bring sex into the conversation, 'someone who's no better than she ought to be'.

 

I don't suppose that explanation helped Poirot very much. Hussy, however, has a very interesting history. It is a reduction of the word 'housewife' (by the way, I should have mentioned the word 'housewife' in my recent post on 'wife' being the Old English word for 'woman' generally, as this is what the 'wife' of housewife is). The original meaning of 'hussy' in the 16th century was "the mistress of a household; a thrifty woman" (OED). It then suffered the fate of many words that relate to women, namely, it underwent a process of pejorisation. A century later it referred to a rustic woman or to a woman of low social status, and by the 18th century it was being accompanied by adjectives such as 'impudent' or 'bold' and gained the definition (OED again) "a disreputable woman of improper behaviour. These days the commonest adjectives that go with it are 'brazen' and 'shameless', although these expressions are often used humorously, it must be said.

These kind of questions or these kinds of questions?

A correspondent asked me whether it is ok to say 'these kind of questions'. The usual advice given regarding sentences such as these is that they are ungrammatical, and it would be better to say 'this kind of question', making everything singular, or 'these kinds of questions', making everything plural.

 

However, the 'these kind of' structure is very common in speech, and there are as many examples of 'these kind of' as there are of 'these kinds of' in the British National Corpus. The OED tells us that the phrases 'all kind of'' and 'no kind of' were once treated more or less as adjectives, and since adjectives don't inflect in English, the 'kind' in these expressions never varied, even when followed by a plural noun. Shakespeare, for instance, writes in King Lear "These kind of knaves I know". And Jane Austen wrote in Sense and Sensibility "I know so little of these kind of forms ...". 'Kind' is related to the word 'kin', and since 'kin' has no plural, or, rather, it is already a sort of collective noun, so 'kind' was considered plural in meaning too. I've found one citation containing 'kinds' in the plural in Johnson's Dictionary; it's "Thus far we have endeavoured in part to open of what nature and force laws are, according to their kinds" from Richard Hooker, who was writing in the late 16th century, but it wasn't used much before this, as far as I can ascertain.

 

My advice is to stick to the 'these kinds of questions' structure, but don't worry too much if you say 'these kind of' -- you're in good company!

Do-gooding or doing good?

I was watching Ian Hislop's Age of the Do-gooders on iPlayer earlier (you can watch it on iPlayer until 27 January here if you are UK-based) and he used various words and phrases based on the phrase 'to do good'. One of them was 'do-gooding'. I looked this up in the OED and the word was first attested in the 1930s, when it entered the language both as an adjective (do-gooding people) and a noun (the tax burden of the do-gooding).

 

This word can sound rather odd to a native English speaker, as the suffix -ing usually is tagged on to verbs, so it would be more intuitive to put -ing on the verb do, rather than the (here) noun good. However, hyphenated words are often treated as a whole unit and behave like single words. Mothers-in-law is the correct plural of mother-in-law, but you do hear and see 'mother-in-laws' (perhaps because it sounds fine to our ears as 'my mother-in-law's visit' is perfectly grammatical).

 

Apart from do-gooding, the OED also has the nouns do-goodism, do-goodery and the very common do-gooder, as well as the adjectives do-good and do-goody.