The virtual linguist

Rail-speak

I heard an announcement at the station earlier that the new 'leaf fall timetable' will come into effect on Sunday, and that some trains will be starting earlier. Leaf fall timetable! It reminded me of this article I saw on the BBC website a few days ago about the opaque language used in rail excuses and what it really means. Staffing problems might mean that the driver is late for his shift, and passenger action can mean anything from violence against a member of staff to a passenger sit-in or a passenger opening a door while the train is moving.

 

Theft of copper cables is a frequent occurrence, but passengers aren't told that - they are told that there are signalling problems, or that there has been vandalism.

 

See the article and hundreds of readers' comments here.

Indian summer

The weather is very balmy in much of the UK at the moment, but we haven't got an Indian summer, according to BBC weatherman Liam Dutton and Antony Woodward, author of The Wrong Kind of Snow, who were speaking on the radio this morning (listen for another week here). Indian summers are, technically, spells of warm weather in October or November that occur after cold and frosty weather. An old word for Indian summer is St Luke's Summer, and St Luke's Day is 18 October (I wrote a blog post on this last October 18, and mention Indian summers and old women's summers here). Antony Woodward said that the unexpected hot weather we are experiencing at the moment is just a warm spell, not an Indian summer.

 

The term Indian summer has nothing to do with the Indian subcontinent. The OED says it was originally (late 18th century) a North American expression, so presumably it refers to American Indians.

 

Listen to the piece for another week here.

How to spell and pronounce 'mouth'

"I'm not sure if I've spelt 'mouth' correctly", wrote a colleague in an email asking me to proofread a short text she'd written. Strange question from a highly educated editor? No, actually a very understandable question. She was using 'mouth' as a verb and, because the 'th' of the verb 'to mouth' is pronounced like the sound 'th' in the, this or either (/ð/is the phonetic symbol), she wondered whether 'mouth' had an 'e' at the end, like similar noun-verb pairs where the 'th' of the noun is pronounced like the 'th' of thing, thin or thirst (phonetic symbol /θ/), but the verb form adds an 'e' and the pronunciation changes to /ð/: teeth/teethe, breath/breathe, cloth/clothe, sheath/sheathe, wreath/wreathe.

 

Mouth is unusual in that the noun doesn't add an 'e' to become a verb, yet the pronunciation of the 'th' changes. I can't think of any other noun-verb pair that is the same. Smooth and to smooth are both pronounced with a /ð/ sound, but then 'smooth' is an adjective, not a noun. Earth and to earth, berth and to berth and froth and to froth have /θ/ in both, but no extra 'e' in the verb form.

Stephen Fry on the changing language

Stephen Fry was on the Today programme a couple of days ago (listen here for a few more days) publicising his new TV series about language (I haven't watched the first episode yet, but will no doubt write a post on it soon). He welcomed the constantly changing nature of the English language, and criticised John Humphrys, one of the Today presenters renowned for his books and strong opinions on language, for seeing only negative aspects of change.

 

To illustrate his assertions of the benefits of change, he reworded the 6.30 news bulletin from an hour earlier (which you can listen to here, if you want, - half an hour roughly into the programme) so that it sounded like a BBC news report of the 1950s, say. The actual news bulletin began: "The Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, will today set out Labour's plans for the British economy, saying a future Labour government would adopt strict rules on public spending". Fry's 'translation' into the more formal, old-fashioned language typical of the early days of the BBC went as follows: "The Opposition finance minister, Edward Balls, intends today to reveal the Labour Party's blueprint for the British economy, asserting that any future Labour administration would adhere to unswervable strictures on the expenditure of monies distributed from the public purse".

 

For the full interview with Stephen Fry and more about differences in the language of news reports now and a few decades ago, listen here for a few more days.

Naval slang revisited

I posted on naval slang and the book Jackspeak a few days ago (here), but there's a more comprehensive article on the BBC website today (here) with more examples of naval slang from Rick Jolly's Jackspeak. Here's a selection:

Grey Funnel Line: the Navy

Snotty: midshipman

Buckets of sunshine: nuclear weapons

Proctoheliosis/helioproctosis: a condition where people believe the sun shines from their backsides

Putting the Queen to bed: lowering the White Ensign at the end of the day

 

More in the interesting article.

Baloney

I've just returned from a long weekend in Bologna, Italy, and there I learnt that the word baloney in baloney sandwich is named after the town, or rather, the sausage that was first made in Bologna.

 

Baloney sandwich is not a well-known term in the UK, but here there is a sausage called polony, and that word, too, comes from the word Bologna.

 

We use the word baloney, also spelt boloney, a lot in the UK, but it means 'poppycock' or 'nonsense'. The OED says that the link with Bologna is 'conjectural', but Jonathon Green in his Dictionary of Slang refers to Ramon Adams, author of Western Words, who says that Bologna bulls are animals of inferior quality, whose meat is used to make Bologna sausage. Presumably people found the sausages inferior or 'rubbish' too, and the nonsense sense perhaps comes from this connection. Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has a different theory. He thinks that boloney/baloney comes from the Romany word pelone, meaning testicles, and refers to the analogy of balls, which is slang for both testicles and nonsense.

Pitmatic

I was commissioned to write a piece on County Durham for a magazine, not specifically anything to do with language, and I came across Pitmatic, the old language of the Durham miners. I say 'language' but it's a mixture of Durham dialect and specialised vocabulary, most of which, unsurprisingly,is technical and mining-related. Examples include: corf-batters (boys who scraped the coal out of filthy baskets), hoggers (shorts worn by miners underground), poss-tub (laundry items - soap, scrubbing brush etc) and arse-loop (a rope chair which miners sat on when repairing shafts).

 

People from County Durham are not technically Geordies (who are, strictly speaking, Tynesiders). They are termed Pit-yakkers, and Pitmatic is, or was, also known locally as Yakka. Pitmatic was originally called Pitmatical, which was a reference to both the pit (coalmine) and reminiscent of the word mathematical. Perhaps the idea was to stress the precision and scientific nature of the mining work.

 

For more on Pitmatic and the Durham dialect, see this website. Michael Quinion's World Wide Words has a good section on it too -- here.

Romansh Grischun

Romansh is one of the four official languages of Switzerland, but it is spoken by less than 1% of the population. Romansh, part of the Romance group (like French), is not actually one language, rather it is an umbrella term for a group of dialects spoken in the south of the country.

 

Romansh was given the status of official language only in 1996, but to make administering this policy easier (regarding translation, for instance) a standardised version of the language was "cobbled together" from various dialects. This standardised version of Romansh is called Romansh Grischun (RG). The standardisation policy was designed to unite Romansh speakers, but, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, a bitter skirmish has broken out in school classrooms of some Alpine villages.

 

Schools are being given grants and funds to teach RG and wean children off the dialects they speak at home. Some teachers continue to speak their own dialects, alongside RG, and some parents are annoyed because they can't understand their children's homework. Those against the policy say that it is ridiculous to spend money teaching a language that no-one speaks. Some people who want to protect the very small language Romansh are worried that if people have to unlearn their dialect and learn what amounts to almost a new language -- Romansh Grischun -- then they are just as likely to turn to German as an everyday language.

 

For more on this, see this Wall Street Journal article.

Emoticons

How old are emoticons? We tend to associate them with texting and emails, but, in fact, emoticons date back to the 19th century (see a facsimile of a newspaper article within this article).

 

The word emoticon is a blend of the two words emotion and icon. Many emoticons, eg the smiley face, transcend language and are understood in most countries. The emoticon :-) was first used in a digital context in 1982 by Scott E Fahlman of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Emoticons can be culture-specific. The three capital letters OTL in some cultures represent a kneeling person and represents failure, disappointment or despair; the O is the head, the T the body with the top of the T representing the two arms, and the L the bent legs.

 

For a bit more on emoticons see this article. Wikipedia has a good page, too.

Fashion lingo

Do you know your glittens from your jeggings, jorts or trogues? The department store Debenhams has issued a dictionary of fashion words for its staff, although it doesn't want sales assistants to use them with the general public, as most people haven't a clue what the words mean.

 

Jeggings is a word that has made it into most dictionaries as it first appeared a few years ago (jeggings - the word and the garment - are a cross between jeans and leggings). The word glittens has nothing to do with glitter, which is what I originally thought; it is a portmanteau word made up of gloves and mittens, and refers to mittens which roll back to reveal gloved fingers. Jorts are shorts with some of the qualities of jeans. Trogues are a cross between trainers and brogues.

 

Looking down the Daily Telegraph's list of fashion terms, I must admit that I shall now be looking out for mace (male lace) and mangrows (babygrows for men)!