The virtual linguist

The goddess of English

There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 yesterday entitled The Goddess of English about English in India (listen here). The 'goddess' in the title is the deification of the English language by some Indians, primarily the poor and the Dalits, or people formerly known as 'Untouchables'. The goddess wears a sari, and a straw hat, holds aloft a pink pen and is modelled on the Statue of Liberty. English is seen by these people as a passport out of poverty and social exclusion, and the key to social mobility and access to power.

 

The programme gave a brief historical background to the adoption of English as the medium of education in India. It was Lord Macaulay who promoted it in the 1830s, in opposition to those who promoted Sanskrit or Persian. Macaulay objected to the caste system and saw English as a unifying medium which should be available to all sectors of society. English as the language of unity is still an argument used today by proponents of English learning and teaching, given that Hindi is used by less than half of the population and is mainly restricted to the north of the country.

 

Today many poor people scrimp and save to send their children to English-medium schools. But the teaching is often poor, as the teachers' knowledge is not that good, and the children are not exposed to English in their life outside school (as opposed to pupils of more expensive English-medium so-called convent schools, who do hear and maybe communicate in English at home). Some adults spend half their salary on English evening classes, although standards are patchy here too. A businessman interviewed explained why; if a person can speak good English he or she will easily get a job, even without academic qualifications in other subjects. On the other hand, someone with good qualifications, but poor English is likely to receive a lower salary - the language of academia, the judiciary, government and bureaucracy is English.

 

Here's the link to the radio programme.

Bounce and bouncing

Many slang or informal words meaning ‘big’ are related to hitting or striking eg thumping, whacking, strapping, and whopping. Bouncing, too, is often used with the sense ‘big’ (a bouncing baby is a healthy, vigorous one), since the original sense of the verb ‘bounce’ (in the 13th century) was to beat or thump. In the 16th century its meaning widened to include noise or sound – the OED definitions include “to make a loud explosive noise; to talk loudly or bigly” and “to slam or bang (a door)”. At around the same time the phrase “to bounce it” was used of women dancing and bounce also acquired its current meaning (as the OED has it, “to bound like a ball”). To bound meaning 'jump' only appears in English in the late 16th century. It has a French origin (bondir), whereas to bounce seems to be linked with Dutch (bonzen, to thump) and Low German (bunsen, ditto).

World War 1 Trench talk

Cushy, bloke, conk out, lousy, and fed up were all words and phrases that were either coined during the First World War, or were popularised and became more widely known, according to an article in today's Sunday Telegraph, publicising a forthcoming book Trench Talk: Words of the First World War.

 

The authors examined letters sent from the trenches, as well as newspaper reports and official military documentation, to track changes and additions to the English language over the duration of the War. Soldiers' language has always been rich in slang, and they often find themselves talking about new things and new situations.

 

The inclusion of words denoting failure, such as dud and wash-out, give an idea of how the men saw the War progressing, and the words lousy and crummy (now meaning 'bad' but the originally referring to being lice-ridden) give an idea of conditions at the time. The conflict gave rise to new words to describe death and being killed, such as pushing up the daisies, snuffing it and having gone west.

 

Men from all walks of life were thrown together in the trenches, so, for instance, words that had previously been confined to the criminal underworld, such as 'rumbled' and 'knocked off', entered the mainstream. Nationalities lived side by side too, which had an effect on the language. Prior to the Great War the term keepsake had been common, but during this period the French word souvenir usurped its position. Officers who were sacked were described as becoming 'ungummed' from the French dégommer. This later became 'unstuck' in English. North American troops contributed the words 'cooler' and 'swipe'. Bint, meaning girl, came from Arabic and the Middle East campaign, and Indian soldiers contributed cushy (from khush, pleasure) and Blighty (Britain, from bilati, meaning 'foreign'). Even the enemy's army contributed new words to English - strafe and ersatz entered English from German.

 

Here's the article, with some interesting readers' comments, too.

Pronunciation of new Chinese leaders' names

The recent new batch of Chinese leaders has meant that the BBC has had to provide pronunciation guidelines on their names to their newsreaders and presenters.

 

Pronunciation is anglicised in order to help all staff get the names right. So, the anglicised pronunciation of Xi Jinping is written SHEE jin PING, where the syllables written in capital letters are stressed. There are, however, always difficulties when laying down guidelines for pronouncing Chinese names, as there are some vowels and consonants in the Chinese language which do not exist in English (the Chinese have the same problem when it comes to transliterating English words such as cup or London because of the short vowel sounds). Chinese is a tone language, but BBC presenters are not expected to convey, or indeed even recognise, this level of phonetic subtlety.

 

For more on this, see this BBC piece.

Oxford Dictionaries 2012 Word of the Year

Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year was announced the other day. It's omnishambles (which I wrote about earlier this year here), meaning "a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged and is characterised by a string of blunders and miscalculations".

 

One of the reasons the word was chosen is because the word has developed a life of its own, independent of the tv programme The Thick of It, where it was coined originally, and has spawned new variants, including Romneyshambles (with reference to Mitt Romney) and omnivoreshambles (with reference to a proposed badger cull in the UK), plus the adjective omnishambolic.

 

Other words on the shortlist were Eurogeddon from the world of economics, and green-on-blue from the military. Given that the Olympics were held in London this year, a couple of Olympic-related words also made the shortlist - Games Makers (the volunteer helpers and participants) and Mobot (a celebratory gesture associated with Mo Farah). The success of the erotic book Fifty Shades of Grey meant that mummy-porn also made the running. Social media is still responsible for new words in the language, a couple of them also candidates for word of the year: second screening (watching a tv while tweeting or reporting on it via another screen eg laptop or smartphone) and the acronym YOLO (you only live once).

 

Here's the full article from Oxford Dictionaries.

Zombie

I heard a trailer on the radio for a programme on zombie companies (see here). Zombie companies are those companies that owe money but are able to pay off the interest on the debt only, not the capital.

 

The OED has not yet caught up with the new uses of the word zombie yet. It last added a new definition at the zombie entry in 2006, and that related to zombie computers, which are computers which a third party (eg spammer) gains control of without the knowledge of the user. Other expressions now in use in the financial sense include zombie banks, zombie countries, zombie households, zombie mortgage holders, and zombie families.

 

The original meaning of zombie, according to the OED, was (and is still used in this sense) "a soulless corpse said to have been revived by witchcraft". The word zombie is of West African origin. The OED makes reference to the similar words in the Kongo language: nzambi god, and zumbi fetish.

Porridge

"Government turns prison policy into another kind of porridge" was the headline of this article in The Daily Telegraph earlier this week. 'Porridge' is British slang for a prison sentence. Supposedly the term is an allusion to the fact that porridge is, or used to be, a common food in prison. However, in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the author suggests that porridge might be a pun on the much older slang word for prison, 'stir'. The OED makes reference to this, as well.

 

The first citation for this meaning of 'porridge' in the OED is a 1950 entry from The Lag's Lexicon, compiled by Paul Tempest. The reference is to prisoners describing a judge as 'dishing out the porridge (or gravy)', namely giving a heavy sentence. The Lag's Lexicon is cited thirty times in the OED, including at the entries banged up (locked up), bung (bribe), cozzer (policeman), Richard (young woman), snout (tobacco) and grasser, grasshopper and squealer, which all mean 'informer'. Tempest's citation says that grasser is short for grasshopper, which is rhyming slang for copper, (which can either mean policeman or police informant, according to the 'copper' entry in the OED). At the entry 'grass', there is a citation from Against the Law by Peter Wildeblood, who says that grasshoppers is rhyming slang for 'shoppers' ie "people who go to the cop-shop and squeal on their friends".

Should Brown Willy change its name?

Two opposing groups in Cornwall are arguing as to whether the highest peak on Bodmin Moor, which has been called Brown Willy for a long time, should revert to its original Cornish name Bronn Wennili, which means 'hill of swallows'. Brown Willy is an example of a Hobson-Jobsonism (see this post), whereby a word or phrase in another language has been adapted to look and sound English.

 

The BBC website has more on the story here.

Macmillan dictionaries to go digital

Macmillan has announced that from 2013 Macmillan dictionaries will only be available online (see this press release) - they will not be producing them as physical books any longer. Macmillan's research has shown that most people get their information via their computer, tablet or smartphone, which explains their decision.

 

Macmillan Dictionaries editor-in-chief Michael Rundell says in his blog that "The digital platform is the best platform for a dictionary" and "exiting print is a moment of liberation". He also says "But probably the biggest benefit of being online is that the dictionary is always up to date". Well, that would certainly be a good advantage if it were true, but, alas, it isn't. On 9 December 2010 I received a reply from a senior Macmillan employee in reply to a comment I had made saying that the Macmillan Online Dictionary definition for Inland Revenue (namely, "the government organization responsible for collecting taxes in the UK") was out of date. The government organization responsible for collecting taxes in the UK is actually called HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC for short) and has had that name since 2005, when Inland Revenue merged with HM Customs and Excise (as their website confirms). The Macmillan employee thanked me for my comment and said (I'm copying and pasting here) "yes, you're right. We need to update that entry. We should also check any other government department names". Well, they did not update the entry - it's 6 years out of date now - and I doubt that they checked other government department names.

UK Scrabble champion

The top-scoring Scrabble letters are Q and Z, which score 10 points, then comes J at 8 points, I think, but none of those letters appeared in the highest-scoring words played during the UK Scrabble championship. The key to getting a high score, by the look of this review of the final, is to make 7-letter words and get rid of all your tiles, because then you get a bonus of 50 points. Words played by the two finalists that scored over 70 points were alienee, begonia, claimer, dossers, edgiest and valeria. In case you were wondering (I was!) alienee is an old-fashioned word for 'grantee', claimer is a horse-racing term and a velaria is an inner ceiling in a theatre.

 

Blank tiles are probably even more valuable than the Q or Z in a game of Scrabble, and, indeed, two blank tiles feature in the word NEONATES (see the winning board here), which scored 71 points, even though all the letters in the word score only 1 point individually. A neonate is a newborn infant.