The virtual linguist

English in India

Is the craze for English in India a mixed blessing? asks Mark Tully, the BBC's former long-time India correspondent in this BBC article, which is an edited extract from his new book Non Stop India. He goes on to say that it is the knowledge and use of English that is propelling India to economic superpower status. However, the other side to this coin is that English may kill off other languages spoken in India, of which there are hundreds. Tully notes that history teaches us that the threat to Indian languages has the potential to provoke a violent backlash.

 

Article here.

Thank you on the decline

Brits are saying 'thank you' less these days, according to a survey carried out by the TV channel Food Network. It's not that they are getting ruder, but that they are opting for more casual expressions of thanks - ta, merci, and particularly cheers. One synonym that the Food Network didn't mention, and that I know I say a lot, is 'lovely', although I may accompany it with 'thanks'. Dictionaries tend not to define 'lovely' as a word of gratitude, although I notice that the Longman Online Dictionary says about the word "used to show that you are pleased with something". I hear the guard on the train repeating 'lovely, lovely, lovely' as he passes through the carriage checking tickets. I'm pretty sure that that is meant to be an alternative to 'thank you', rather than him being particularly pleased at the sight of train tickets.

Flour

There are lots of internet sites listing major differences between UK and US English - boot/trunk, faucet/tap etc - but I came across another huge minefield earlier -- flour types. Usually American recipes are 'translated' for British readers as the measuring systems are different (US uses 'cups' whereas UK uses grams), as are the temperatures (I have an electric oven, but understand temperature only in degrees Celsius; I also understand Gas Mark numbers, but I cannot fathom degrees Fahrenheit in US recipes).

 

I wanted to cook something that I found in a US recipe book, but was stumped when it said 'pastry flour'. In Britain recipes usually specify either plain flour (for bread, pancakes etc) or self-raising flour (which comes already containing a raising agent, such as baking powder, so is suitable for sponges, cakes etc). I googled 'pastry flour', but it left me more confused. In the US, as far as I could see, pastry flour seems to refer to a flour low in gluten. Well, the gluten content is rarely, if ever, highlighted on UK flour packs. Flour here in the UK is usually divided into 'plain' (sometimes 'strong plain' for heavy-duty loaves) or self-raising -- and that's it! You can buy wholemeal flour as opposed to white, but that, too, can be plain or self-raising.

 

I'm not a great cook, and my family don't expect a lot from my cooking, so I used plain flour in the recipe I was following (it was a sort of pancake where you added cottage cheese and apple to the batter mix - and in the UK I'd always use plain flour for pancakes). It tasted ok. But flour types are certainly a minefield. Cornflour is another misleading term. Here in the UK, cornflour is a very starchy product used in small amounts to thicken sauces, gravy etc. In the US, as far as I can see, it's another type of baking flour used in quite large quantities. UK cornflour is cornstarch in the US (this word is not used in the UK).

 

As for the spelling 'flour', it is related to 'flower; 'flour' was originally the 'flower' or finest part of meal, Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 does not recognise a distinction between 'flour' and 'flower'.

Financial terminology

The commonest words used in conjunction with 'banker(s)' over the last two years are greedy, disgraced and shame, according to Collins Dictionaries, and cited in this BBC article. Surprisingly, the word 'responsible' also often appears in close proximity to 'banker', but usually only because the sentence is something like 'bankers are responsible for the mess'.

 

The terms 'the 1%' and 'the 99%' have been much in evidence recently, mostly due to the Occupy movement, but they are not new terms.

 

Bankers are often referred to as 'fat cats', a term that dates back to the 1920s. The term was once used almost exclusively about bosses in the private sector, but over recent years council leaders and other public-service workers have been accused of being fat cats, too. Collins discovered that 'fat' is now the commonest adjective used with 'cat', ahead of pet, stray, pussy and scaredy, the next four in the list.

 

The BBC piece that this information comes from also considered how difficult it is to give exact definitions of financial terminology. When some people think of 'rich' people, they are referring to earnings, others consider their total wealth, while yet others regard anyone running their own business, regardless of size and profitability as rich. Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich and one of the richest men in the world apparently said in court, when asked, that it was hard for him to say whether someone was wealthy or not. Robert Frank, author of Richistan, found when he interviewed people that most people's definition of 'rich' was subjective and was often considered to be twice their own current earnings.

 

Here's the BBC piece.

I-plods

So-called 'i-plods' are to be recruited by British police forces to combat cyber crime (story in this FT article, i-plods mentioned in final paragraph). 'I-plod' is a nickname, of course. The word 'plod' is often forced into stories about the police; indeed, a plod is a nickname for a police officer, and the plod is used to refer to the police in general. Plod is a mildly derogatory term, or a term used humorously (see this old post of mine).

 

The word comes from Mr Plod, a Toytown policeman in Enid Blyton's Noddy series, which she was writing in the 1950s.

Black Friday

Today is known as Black Friday in the US, a very busy shopping day traditionally marking the start of the Christmas shopping season. I heard someone on the radio this morning saying that Black Friday is so called because this is the day that shops' bank accounts go from being in the red to being in the black. So, it is a positive epithet.

 

This explanation is also given in the OED, but the Dictionary also tells us that it was Philadelphia police officers who first referred to the day as Black Friday. They did so because of the huge numbers of shoppers and huge amount of traffic they were faced with on this day, giving them lots of headaches (they referred to Black Saturday, too). The OED's first citation for this sense is from a 1961 journal.

 

Black Friday has referred to other days and events in the past. The earliest usage of the term was in the early 17th century and was school slang for an exam day. Friday 6th December 1745 was referred to as Black Friday, too. This was the date on which the landing of the Young Pretender was announced in London (the Young Pretender is also known as the romantic figure of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a grandson of the Stuart king James II, who pretended to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland as, indeed, his father, the Old Pretender, had done before him).

 

On Friday 11 May, 1866, there was commercial panic in the City of London after the failure of the London bank Overend, Gurney & Co (very coincidentally, my last post before this one was on the Gurney bank - spooky! I only heard the name for the first time yesterday and have now come across it again barely 12 hours later). This date, too, has been described in the press up to the present day as Black Friday. The USA had their own Black Friday a few years later -- on Friday 24 September 1869; panic on Wall Street was precipitated by flooding the market with government gold.

 

Belated Thanksgiving and holiday greetings to readers in the US.

The Gurneys

The phrase 'I became as rich as the Gurneys' is a line from The Judge's Song from Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera Trial by Jury (you can see an amateur dramatic group singing it here - the line in question occurs about 2:16m in).

 

I was watching a programme on iPlayer about 19th-century bankers and their philanthropy (if you're in the UK, it's here) and Ian Hislop, the presenter, talked a lot about the Gurneys, a very wealthy banking family in the 18th and 19th centuries. I was interested to hear that Elizabeth Fry, a well-known 19th-century influential prison reformer (her portrait appears on the £5 note), was one of the Gurney sisters. It is this banking family who are alluded to in the Gilbert & Sullivan song.

Pre-loved

I saw the word 'pre-loved' in a story in yesterday's Metro, a free newspaper handed out at stations, about Transport for London donating unclaimed lost property to charity (I can't find the article online, but this one is the same story). Toys would be donated to the Salvation Army, who would distribute them to disadvantaged families for Christmas. The toys were described as 'pre-loved', a euphemism for second-hand.

 

I won't go into great detail about the history of the word 'pre-loved', as Stan Carey over at Sentence First has already written a much better account than I could write. Pre-loved is in the OED, though; it went in in March 2007, and the first citation is from a Lima (Ohio) News article of 1972.

 

What prompted me to write this post was remembering that I have seen the phrase 'gently worn' a fair bit recently, another euphemism for 'second-hand', this time referring to clothes. Less common, but still with over 7 million hits online, is the similar 'gently used'.

 

In many contexts the word 'second-hand' or 'used' has no negative connotations. Most people are quite happy to buy a used car, and shopping streets are full of charity shops selling second-hand goods. These are very popular in the UK. However, I can understand that in the context of giving presents to children you might not want to emphasise that the toys are second-hand. Being something of a cynic, I think that dress agencies (another euphemism for second-hand clothing shops), eBay sellers and the like feel that using the phrase 'gently worn' makes the item sound nearly new (another common euphemism) and thus justifies a higher price. In all my years helping out behind the counter at Scouts' jumble sales I don't remember any of us ever referring to anything on sale as anything other than 'old' or 'second-hand', and that was probably because we were charging 10 pence or so an item -- rather than it having to do with the relative wear and tear or quality of the goods.

 

It is often said that English has no true synonyms. Even if two words have the same meaning they often have different connotations or evoke different images (moist and damp, for instance). Certainly this is true about all the words that mean broadly 'old'. Clothing described as 'vintage' (or gently worn), or furniture described as antique, will probably have a high price tag; it would be a foolish seller who described an item as 'old' or 'old-fashioned'.

Squeezed middle is the word of 2011

Squeezed middle is Oxford Dictionaries’ ‘word’ of 2011. Only just, though – it won by a whisker, according to Oxford Dictionaries’ own website.

The year’s winning word (or, more accurately, lexical item – ‘word’ is a very wishy-washy word - as I once explained in this post) does not have to have been coined this year, just used a lot and representative of the mood or Zeitgeist. Most of the contenders for the ‘prize’ were sombre (despite bunga bunga and other 2011 coinings!), reflecting the general mood – Arab spring, phone hacking, occupy.

A quick straw poll of the people around me at the moment reveals that some of us – me included – had never heard squeezed middle before. Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, is fond of the expression, apparently; he uses it to refer to the groups in society who are bearing the brunt of government tax burdens.

Squeezed middle is more than just the UK word of the year – it is the global word of the year, agreed upon by US and UK Oxford Dictionary teams.

Read Susie Dent’s article on choosing the word of the year here, and for an in-depth look at the squeezed middle see this Daily Telegraph article.

Pinkwashing

Pinkwashing is a word that refers to companies that claim to be supporting breast cancer charities in order to make themselves look good, but whose main aim, in fact, is to promote their own products.

 

The term 'pinkwashing' was coined by Breast Cancer Action, who were concerned that companies who exploited the colour pink did not make it clear where any funds received would go, or that produced products that were known to be carcinogenic. Companies that have been criticised by the charity include several car manufacturers, including Ford, Mercedes and BMW (because cars produce air pollutants linked to cancer), Yoplait, which produces yogurt from milk treated with a hormone that is linked to breast cancer and KFC for selling its fatty fried food in a pink basket (high-fat foodstuffs are linked to cancer risk).

 

The word 'pinkwashing' clearly comes from 'whitewashing' (which, as the OED says, 'implies a false appearance of good'). Before pinkwashing there was greenwashing, where companies claimed -- without being able to back the claims up -- that their products supported the environment.

 

There's an interesting article on pinkwashing, including the origin of the pink ribbon as a symbol in this Forbes article.