The virtual linguist

Lovely jubbly

John Sullivan, the creator of the long-running sitcom Only Fools and Horses, has died. The series had some great lines, and some of the characters' catchphrases have become classics, eg 'what a plonker'.

 

The phrase 'lovely jubbly' (meaning "great, fantastic") was coined by Sullivan as one of Del Boy's favourite sayings. It is now in the OED, which says that it derived from a 1950s advertising slogan for a soft drink called Jubbly (that slogan was actually 'lubbly jubbly').

 

Such is the power of the phrase that it has spawned new senses of the word. The original sense was a response to success or anticipated success, and on Only Fools and Horses Del Boy frequently rubbed his hands together in delight, or anticipated delight, as he uttered it. The OED says of this sense:

The phrase is freq. used to suggest typically English (esp. London) attitudes and behaviour, or questionable business dealings like those of the South Londoner, Del Boy Trotter.

 

Soon after 'lovely jubbly' started appearing regularly in episodes, it gained another meaning, namely 'money': the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Slang has the phrase 'lots of lovely jubbly'. Having started as an interjection, it then became an adjective.

 

Lovely jubbly has various spellings, some of which aim to reproduce the South (Sarf) London accent, eg laaverly jubberly.

 

Here's a BBC article about some of Sullivan's other well-known catchphrases, both from Only Fools and Horses and also from Citizen Smith, which he also wrote.

Ho-hum

I was flicking through the Daily Mail pages earlier and spotted the word 'ho-hum' used twice: once in a fashion article (here), "'Parisian style is an attitude, a state of mind. Between rocker and ho-hum bourgeois, a Parisian is always first, never second" (don't ask me what that means!), and once regarding the TV talent show Britain's Got Talent (here) "Yet Saturday night’s Britain’s Got Talent was very ho-hum".

 

I don't think I've ever used the word 'ho-hum' but, if the number of hits on Google News is anything to go by, it's very common.

 

I happened to have two online learners' dictionaries open in my browser; Longman Online has as its definition "used to say you are bored" and Macmillan has "something that someone says to show they are slightly bored or cannot think of anything else to say". Neither of those definitions covers the senses that 'ho-hum' is used in most of the articles on Google News. For one thing, generally, nobody is actually saying 'ho-hum'; it is used as an adjective to mean 'boring'. There is even a news story in Californian newspapers (eg here) about a robber nicknamed the 'ho-hum bandit' (because he is so cool and laid back, I think). Many of the Google hits are sports reports describing various ho-hum matches, and a business article talks of leaders' ho-hum performance.

 

Of course, learners' dictionaries usually cover only the main meanings of words. The OED says that ho-hum can be used as an adjective meaning "dull and routine". It also has a link to 'hum' alone, whose very picturesque definition is "An inarticulate exclamation uttered with the lips closed, either in a pause of hesitation or embarrassment, or as expressing slight dissatisfaction, dissent, etc". The OED gives alternative spellings: hem, h'm and um.

 

Morning dress

The British prime minister, David Cameron, has said he'll be wearing a lounge suit instead of a morning suit at next week's royal wedding. A morning suit consists of a jacket with tails, waistcoat, trousers and often a top hat. An ordinary tie or cravat, not a bow tie, completes the outfit.

 

Morning dress developed from a gentleman's riding outfit in the late 18th century, riding being a morning activity at the time. The tails were specially designed for ease and comfort on a horse's back so the material of an ordinary jacket didn't bunch up or otherwise get in the way. The morning coat developed from and was considered a more informal version of the longer and more impractical frock coat. These days morning dress is worn at some daytime social events such as Royal Ascot and very upmarket functions. David Cameron should probably wear one at the royal wedding; after all, you don't get much posher than that. Very many ordinary bridegrooms and their best men and close family choose to hire morning suits for their own weddings.

 

Morning dress is considered formal daywear. The equivalent dress code for the evening is black tie (centred on a dinner jacket or tuxedo) or white tie (very formal, consisting of a tail coat, white bow tie, white waistcoat and wing-collar shirt).

 

There's an interesting article about the difference between lounge suits and morning dress on the BBC website here.

 

Titfer

'Philip Treacy on the power of a good titfer' is part of the headline of this Daily Mail piece. Philip Treacy is a milliner, and a titfer is slang for 'hat'. Titfer comes from Cockney rhyming slang 'tit for tat'. Like many rhyming slang phrases, the final rhyming word is omitted (see this old post) - so we say 'have a butcher's' to mean 'look' because the full expression was originally 'butcher's hook'.

 

As for the origin of 'tit for tat', this expression probably was originally in the form 'tip for tap', the sense being 'one blow in retaliation for another'. Tip for tap was in use in the 15th century, whilst the first recorded use of 'tit for tat' was by Tudor playwright John Heywood in the 1550s. Tit for tat is mostly used these days in response to dismissals of diplomats, as in this recent headline "US expels Ecuadorambassador in tit-for-tat move".

 

As I said above, Philip Treacy is a milliner. The word milliner comes from 'Milan' as I mentioned here.

War Horse on Broadway

The successful British play War Horse has transferred to Broadway. It's an American cast and they are speaking in British accents - mainly West Country. On the Radio 4 Today programme on Saturday (listen for a couple more days here) there was an interview with the voice coach Barbara Berkery (who wasn't involved with War Horse but she trained Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love and Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones's Diary).

 

One of the actors said they had had voice and sound exercises - things like 'how now brown cow'. Barbara Berkery said the key thing was plenty of time -- she spent five intensive weeks with Renee Zellweger. She said that anyone in theory could learn another accent but actors are easier to teach because they are used to adopting different voices and personae. Many ordinary people resist any attempt or pressure to change their accent because the voice is so fundamental to identity; these people use their accent as a barrier to maintain an 'us and them' situation. Other people adapt their accent if they move to another area or mix with people from other parts of the country.

 

Here's the short BBC piece.

Top 100 football words

Fabio Capello's much quoted statistic that he only needs a hundred words of English to speak to his team got a lot of media coverage (I covered it too - here). The Daily Telegraph reported that Cambridge University Press had used a computer to analyse hundreds of thousands of football reports to see which words were the most useful in this area. They excluded little words like the, and, for etc which top any list of most common words.

 

Ball was number one in the list. Here's the top ten:

1 – ball

2 – cup

3 – player

4 – Game

5 – Match

6 – Win

7 – Lose

8 – Play

9 – Team

10 – Goalkeeper

 

Words 97-100 paint an illuminating picture of football in this country:

97 - Defeat

98 - Disappointment

99 - Humiliation

100 - Sack

 

For the top hundred words used in football news reports see this Telegraph article and if you're a real glutton for punishment and want to see the thousand most frequent football words (not ranked) see here.

I saw him walk or I saw him walking

Someone asked me whether there was a difference between 'I saw him walk along the road' and 'I saw him walking along the road'. Both are grammatically correct, but there is a slight difference in meaning. When saw (or another verb of perception eg hear, notice) is followed by the base form of the verb, or the infinitive without 'to' (as 'walk' in the sentence above) the emphasis is on the result of the action. When the -ing form is used the emphasis is on the process, or the continuation of the action.

 

The difference is perhaps clearer in the sentences 'I saw him do it' and 'I saw him doing it', and it is clearer still in 'I saw him drowning but he was rescued just in time'. You definitely need the -ing form here; 'I saw him drown but he was rescued just in time' is not a possible sentence, as the form 'drown' shows he couldn't possibly have been rescued.

Quiche

I'd always looked on quiche as a typically French word; after all, it's a French dish, the pronunciation is French and quiche Lorraine comes from the French region of Lorraine. In fact, the OED says the word may well come from the German Kuchen, cake.

 

Lorraine is on the border between France and Germany and has been annexed and re-annexed by the two countries for much of its history. It is now part of France, but the dialects spoken in the region are Germanic, as are many of the villages' names.

 

K isn't a very common letter in the French language, but qu is the French spelling of the sound. The ch of the German Kuchen is pronounced like the ch in the Scottish word loch, but the French, when they adopted the word, gave it the usual French pronunciation ie sh. The English word cake is ultimately from the same root as Kuchen and quiche.

Crash vs accident

Crash Not Accident is a RoadPeace campaign to change the terminology used when talking about traffic collisions. RoadPeace is the national charity for road crash victims. The organisation objects to the term 'accident' being used to refer to all collisions, including those where a driver is convicted of causing death. In this way RoadPeace wishes to promote accountability.

 

I saw this item in The Guardian's style column. A member of RoadPeace had asked The Guardian to change its language as he said that the word 'accident' has judgement embedded in it. The Guardian style editor disagrees and feels that accident is a neutral term, whilst crash and collision might suggest that someone is to blame, and therefore might cause legal problems for the newspaper. The column is here.

 

For the record, the OED definition of 'accident' is: "An unfortunate event, a disaster, a mishap". The definition of 'crash' is: "The act, or an instance, of crashing" (and the definition of the verb 'to crash' is: "to suffer damage in an accident"). The OED definition of 'collision' is: "The action of colliding or forcibly striking or dashing together; violent encounter of a moving body with another".

Score

There are several different meanings for the word 'score' -- a mark or a notch, a line, a result in a game, the number twenty, written music, and other regional meanings -- but all of them ultimately come from the same source.

 

The word comes from the Old Norse skor, meaning notch or tally. The musical sense is said to come from the practice of joining staves on a page by drawing lines between them. The meaning 'twenty' came about because shepherds and cowherds, when counting their animals to check they hadn't lost or gained any, counted to twenty then made a notch or mark on a stick, and started at the number one again. See this fascinating Wikipedia page on shepherds' old counting systems used in different parts of Britain.

 

I was prompted to look up 'score' this morning, as I am currently writing a set of grammar notes for a French beginners' course, and I thought I would explain the French for 80, quatre-vingts (literally four twenties), by comparing it to the English four score. A counting system with the number 20 as a base is called a vigesimal system, and I wrote on this here.