The virtual linguist

Dictionaries on Just a Minute

There was a cracking line-up on Just a Minute on Radio 4 this evening -- Graham Norton, Paul Merton, Julian Clary and Terry Wogan. One of the rounds was 'The Dictionary' (listen again here for another week - it's episode 4, and the round in question occurred just after 13 minutes in). Of course, it was utterly whimsical and surreal, with nothing sensible said at all -- but it was funny. Paul Merton said he'd looked up the word antediluvian recently (it means 'old-fashioned' or, literally, 'before the flood'). Julian Clary had looked up 'obfuscate' (obscure or befuddle).

 

The whole show was good tonight, with perhaps the funniest round being 'A good catch', immediately after 'The Dictionary', thanks to Julian Clary's innuendos.

 

Origin of the word Oscar

Oscar-winner Colin Firth was on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning (at 07:50; listen again for another week here) after his triumph yesterday. He said that winning the Oscar was a 'relief' as now the word Oscar can be mentioned -- previously people had only referred to it indirectly (eg the big one, the big O), never by name.

 

The nickname 'Oscar' for an Academy Award was first used in the 1920s. The earliest citation in the OED is 1934, and the Academy itself used the term officially for the first time in 1939.

 

There are various stories concerning the origin of the name. In one, Bette Davis was supposed to have coined the term after her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson. Another story is that it is named after the late-19th-century king of both Sweden and Norway, Oscar II. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the origin is uncertain but it might be named after the 20th-century American fruit and wheat farmer, Oscar Pierce. He was the cousin (although she called him 'Uncle Oscar') of the librarian, and later executive director, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick.

Question about ability in Scots on the 2011 census

Residents of Scotland will be faced with a new question on the forthcoming census. Question 16 asks whether the person can understand/ speak/ read and/or write English/ Scottish Gaelic and/or Scots (see the official Scottish census site here).

 

Scottish Gaelic and Scots are defined, for the benefit of those residents who don't know:

Scots is the collective name for Scottish dialects known also as 'Doric', 'Lallans' and 'Scotch' or by more local names for example 'Buchan', 'Dundonian', 'Glesca' or 'Shetland'.

Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language, descended from Old Irish, which is one of the national languages of Scotland. It is also commonly known as Scots Gaelic or Gáidhlig.

There is also a short paragraph about the history of Scots and how it differs from English. Examples given are more/most (English) vs mair/maist (Scots), cry (English) vs greet (Scots) and disgust (English) vs scunner (Scots).

 

There is also a link to a special website, which has been set up, Aye can, where those needing to answer the question on the census can hear and read Scots and find out more about it.

 

The pronunciation of controversy

The traditional pronunciation was CONtroversy, with the stress on the first syllable, but more of us Britons are now saying ConTROversy, according to British Library research. The pronunciation of other words has changed -- schedule is now often pronounced 'skedule' and patriotic pronounced 'pay-triotic'. Those two changes are in line with American pronunciation, but what is interesting about the 'controversy' shift is that ConTROversy is not the American pronunciation, so the change has nothing to do with copying an American accent.

 

Other words have resolutely maintained their British pronunciation -- Britons are showing no interest in pronouncing attitude the American way ('attitood', instead of 'attityude') and are sticking to 'garridge' (garage) rather than the American 'garaahge'. Despite the Gershwin song (You say 'eether' and I say 'eye-ther') there is no Atlantic split between the two pronunciations, with both pronunciations being popular in the US and the UK. 'Scone' is interesting; almost all Americans pronounce it to rhyme with 'bone', but there are two pronunciations in the UK -- to rhyme with 'bone' and to rhyme with 'gone' -- and, as I said in this post, we can get very excited about which is the correct version.

 

For more on this story see this Daily Telegraph article.

'All who sail in her' or 'all that sail in her'

A Welsh friend of mine (who blogs as Taffdancer) keenly follows the news from Wales. Today Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton were launching a lifeboat in Anglesey, and my friend asked me whether William had made a mistake in saying 'God bless her and all that sail in her' (you can hear him on this video), instead of 'all who sail in her'.

 

Most grammar books say that 'who' should be used in relative clauses when referring to people. However, the respected Michael Swan in his best-selling Popular English Usage says that 'that' is often used instead of 'who', especially in a conversational style, and he gives as examples 'She's the only person that understands me', 'where's the girl that sells the tickets?' and 'he's a man that people like at first sight'.

 

Moreover, Acts 27:24 of the King James Bible has the phrase "lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee". Perhaps that is where Prince William got his grammar from.

 

Womanly and manly

This is part of the OED definition of 'womanly': "Possessing the attributes proper to a woman; having the qualities (as of gentleness, devotion, fearfulness, etc.) held to be characteristic of women". And this is part of the OED's definition of 'manly': "Having those qualities or characteristics traditionally associated with men as distinguished from women or children; courageous, strong, independent in spirit, frank, upright, etc".

 

So, then, which of the two words do you use to describe a strong and independent-in-spirit woman?

Non-words in children's reading tests

New reading tests for six-year-olds in England may well in the future include non-words such as 'koob' and 'zort', according to this article (thanks to my son, Rory, for sending it to me). This is a 'synthetic phonics' approach, where 'synthetic' here refers to the synthesis, or blending, of sounds; children sound out the individual letters of words, c...a...t for instance, and then run them, or blend them, together to read the whole word.

 

Previous research studies have usually shown that children who learn to read using this method do very well and score higher marks on tests than children who have learnt using other reading methods. However, the tests usually consist of individual and unrelated words - children are not being asked to read meaningful texts - and critics of the scheme say that reading is as much about understanding and forming opinions about what is being read, which the phonics method does not promote. A similar programme in the USA, the Reading First Program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, found that it had a positive effect on reading and decoding, but no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension (see the report summary here - in pdf format).

International Mother Language Day 2011

Today is International Mother Language Day, sponsored by UNESCO, whose aim is to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism (UNESCO page here).

 

I have not found anything in British newspapers about it (although The Guardian had this article a couple of weeks ago), but it was well covered by the Indian and Pakistani press as well as by the press of some other countries, in particular countries which are worried about some of their languages losing ground to English (as is the case with India and Pakistan; see this article, for instance, which talks about there being at least 27 endangered languages in Pakistan), or to another language (eg Russian in Ukraine; see this article).

Bunga bunga revisited

I wrote recently on the expression 'bunga bunga' and speculated on what it might mean. Well, it is still in the news, and on this morning's Broadcasting House magazine programme on BBC Radio 4, a woman appeared who claimed to know exactly how the term came to be used in connection to Berlusconi (listen here for another week - the piece is 28:49 minutes in).

 

Sabina Began is a German actress now living and working in Italy, and she claims that 'bunga bunga' was Berlusconi's nickname for her, and was a term of endearment meaning something like 'sweet'. Apparently, Berlusconi would say playfully to her 'You are a monkey', and she would reply 'Yes, I'm bunga bunga'. She would organise parties for him as a 'suprise'. 'Bunga bunga' was supposed to be their secret code, according to Began, and in reality is 'something nice', and completely unrelated to sex with young girls. Mind you, Began also said in the programme that 'Berlusconi is like Gandhi', 'he's incredible', and 'he just wanted to help'!

Euergetism

You don't often see the word 'euergetism' in a tabloid newspaper, but it appears in today's Mail on Sunday. It was used by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, when he called for wealthy people to fund civic projects and public services. It means the same as philanthropy and derives from the Greek verb 'to do good things'.

 

Boris Johnson studied Classics as a student, and is clearly very knowledgeable about classical history and literature. However, much as 'euergetism' sounds an ancient Greek word, it isn't. There is no entry for the word in the OED, and I can come up with no 'hits' in a search of a couple of databases - the Times digital archive, which goes back to the 18th century, and another database which covers 19th-century newspapers (by the way, I can use these databases with my local authority library card, and if you live in the UK, so, probably, can you -- just go to the 'Online Reference' section of your local library's website). Google Labs Ngram site of digitalised books has no record of the word before the 1960s. Wikipedia says that the word 'euergetism' was coined in the 1920s by the French historian A Boulanger. Unfortunately, there is no hyperlink for Boulanger, and Wikipedia gives no other information about this person. Googling the name isn't very helpful, as Boulanger is such a common French name, however, it is perhaps the historian André Boulanger who is meant. He was writing in the 1920s and his key work seems to be Aelius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d'Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère, which ties in with the classical references.