The virtual linguist

Idler Academy Bad Grammar Awards

An open letter from a group of academics to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, won the inaugural Bad Grammar Award, sponsored by the Idler Academy, last week. The judges objected to a number of phrases in the letter, including "demands too much too young", on the grounds that 'young' can't be an adverb. I must say that the phrase doesn't sound too bad to me -- I am probably remembering the 1979 Specials song, Too Much Too Young. Perhaps that influenced the writers of the letter, too. It's a lot more catchy than the version suggested by Nevile Gwynne, one of the judges - 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much'.

 

Runners-up were Tesco for "for using adjectives as nouns and failing to put hyphens in the right place", and London Transport for "mixing gerunds and infinitives on a safety sign".

 

I have looked in vain for the actual examples of these crimes on the Idler website (here - it's interesting and worth a look), so I can't repeat them. Nor, are they in the Guardian article, where I got the rest of my information from.

 

Actually, there are no set rules for hyphenation in English, and it is notoriously difficult to specify what part of speech some words are, so the judges' were merely expressing their opinion.

 

Here's the story.

Dragged or drug?

A tourist guide I was listening to today said something like "They drug his body ..." (she was talking about the desecration of graves and buried bones during either Henry VIII's time, or Oliver Cromwell's - or both, I forget exactly now). The guide had a North American accent. It was quite obvious from the context that she meant 'dragged', but I had never heard the past tense form 'drug' before. However, it is given in the OED, which says:

"drug also occurs as a past tense and past participle form of drag v. in nonstandard and regional use (especially U.S. regional (southern and Midland)); drugged is also sometimes found in U.S. use."

 

Moreover, there is another entry in the OED for the verb drug, defined as "to pull forcibly, to drag". This verb is described as being a Scottish or southern English regional form. Drug is also listed as a form of the past participle. Although the first two citations are dated a1250 (a = ante ie before) and c1405 (c = circa ie about), the OED says it cannot be sure whether the verb drug or drudge was intended, as both were spelled drugge in earlier times.

The suffix -en

The suffix -en indicates a number of things in English. It appears at the end of past participles of many strong verbs (eaten, written etc); it ends many verbs formed from adjectives with the sense 'to make ... or to become ...' (deepen, brighten etc); it can indicate a diminutive, eg chicken, kitten (maiden is also in this group); and it can form an adjective from a noun, particularly a noun denoting a material (woollen, wooden etc).

 

In Old English -en also denoted the feminine form of some masculine nouns. So, gyden was the Old English goddess, mynecen was nun (from munuc, monk) and wylfen was a she-wolf (from wulf). The only surviving word in modern English of this type is vixen; the Old English was fyxen.

 

In Middle English -en replaced the -an of some Old English plurals. The only surviving member of this group is oxen, the plural of ox; in Old English oxa was one ox, and oxan the plural. A thousand years ago there were others: name, naman; tunge, tungan, eg. Children and brethren do not belong in this group, although these are plurals ending in -en. Childer was once a variant form of child, and brether was a variant form of brother, and an -en was later added to these words to form the plural.

 

Ukraine or the Ukraine

Ukraine is in the news this week because of Euro 2012, the football championships, and there was an interesting article on the BBC website about why what used to be known as 'the Ukraine' is now just Ukraine. The Ukrainian government is keen to stress that the correct name is Ukraine, without the definite article. Krai in Russian means 'edge' or 'border', so Ukraine was initially so named because it was 'on the edge of the Russian empire'. Another name for Ukraine during the days of the tsarist empire was Little Russia, a term which the 19th-century Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol often used. The Ukrainian government wants to get rid of 'the', presumably, to get away from any connotations of 'on the edge'.

 

These days we usually say Congo, Sudan and Lebanon, whereas it used to be common to say the Congo, the Sudan and the Lebanon. Professor Mark Liberman, quoted in the aforementioned article, thinks that the 'the' goes back to the original reason for the country's names - they were named after a geographical feature, such as the Congo river, the Sudan desert, or the Lebanon mountain range (and we usually keep 'the' with river names - the Thames, the Nile etc). It occurred to me that perhaps that is why, closer to home (on Merseyside), we say both Wirral and the Wirral - I suppose 'the Wirral' was originally short for 'the Wirral peninsula'.

 

You cannot leave 'the' out of the country names the United Kingdom or the United States - the 'the' is needed before the nouns 'kingdom' and 'states'. This is probably the reason why we tend to say 'the Netherlands' - nether means 'low', so the Netherlands means 'low countries'.

 

Here's the full article.

The Queen's English Society to close

The Queen's English Society, which promotes 'proper English', is to close, according to this article in today's Independent. It is apparently proving difficult to find people to take on responsibility and committee roles. Rhea Williams of the Society explained the demise as being down to the fact that "People don't want to join societies like they used to". Actually, that's not true - a recent article in the Daily Mail talked about how Women's Institute membership is thriving. That's mainly because the WI has moved with the times and is becoming more inclusive; a notice in my local shop window advertises a local 'jam-free WI', and a branch has recently started up in a maximum security women's prison, according to the aforementioned Daily Mail article.

 

One of the dangers of setting yourself up as a prescriptivist organisation, and offering advice on English grammar and usage to other people, is that you tend to get hoist by your own petard. On the Queen's English Society's sister website, the Academy of Contemporary English, there is an article about the misuse of the word 'like'. Unfortunately, Rhea Williams, chair of the Queen's English Society, uses 'like' wrongly herself in the sentence I quoted in the previous paragraph ("People don't want to join societies like they used to"). According to the QES' own guidelines, she should have used the conjunction 'as'. Another sentence I spotted on the Society's homepage was "The QES is by nature a prescriptivist organisation, because to adopt a wholly descriptivist approach, would render our existence to be meaningless." The verb 'render' is correctly followed by a direct object (our existence) and an adjective (meaningless) - not an infinitive, as in the QES sentence (to be). Moreover, there is no need for the second comma in that sentence.

 

Like it or not, there are fashions in grammar and pronunciation. Many of the grammar rules some people consider immutable in fact date back only to the 18th century or later (the idea that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition, for instance). The names Crufts and Harrods are spelled these days without an apostrophe, but they used to have one - the apostrophe is just dropping out of fashion in the days of the internet and URLs, which do not lend themselves to apostrophes. As for pronunciation, well even the Queen herself does not necessarily speak the Queen's English - her vowel sounds have changed over the years and she has been known to use the occasional Estuary English twang.

 

Here's the Independent article, and here's the website of the Queen's English Society.

Shakespeare's grammar

When people talk about Shakespeare's contribution to the English language, they usually refer to the words he used. His works contain the first recorded use of many words, including bandit, dwindle, excellent and tranquil. That does not mean that he coined the words, just that no-one can find any written evidence of them before him. An academic from Strathclyde University has said that Shakespeare was no more inventive than his contemporaries when it came to vocabulary, but where he was really innovative was in the grammatical constructions he used. One example is his use of adjectives to describe inanimate objects; talking of horses and their "proud hoofs" was ground-breaking at the time.

 

Here's a Daily Telegraph article on the subject.

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.

Favour vs favours

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, was described in an article in The Independent a few days ago as a man on whom Mrs Thatcher's favours fell. The full description was:

"Johnson, by contrast, has been disarmingly nonchalant about his peculiar, anachronistic personality ever since he emerged into the fierce sunlight of Thatcher's approval as her favourite right-wing journalist. Like all the men on whom her favours fell, he had not only intellect but charisma."

 

A couple of days later there was a correction in the newspaper's Errors & Omissions section. As editor Guy Keleny wrote, Mrs Thatcher bestowed her favour on people, not favours.

 

What a difference an 's' makes. Favours in the plural has a particular meaning, albeit slightly old-fashioned these days. As the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) explains, the word favours in the plural is "used with reference to a woman allowing a man to have sexual intercourse with her". This is also in the OED, but it doesn't give a definition as such, merely uses the word 'euphemistically' to introduce a number of citations eg one from Thomas Medwin (author of Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron) in 1824: "One who had bestowed her favours on many".

Wreaked havoc or wrought havoc?

You'll see both 'wreaked havoc' and 'wrought havoc' in many newspaper articles today, discussing the unrest in some cities. Which is correct? Strictly speaking, both are. 'Wrought' is often erroneously thought to be the past tense of 'wreak', but it isn't; it is an archaic past tense form of the verb 'to work' (as in 'wrought iron', for instance). The reason why both 'wreaked havoc' and 'wrought havoc' are ok is because the expression 'to work havoc' used to be common, so, of course, its past tense was 'wrought havoc'. Now, however, those newspapers and websites which use 'wrought havoc' (such as this BBC page) never use 'work havoc' in the present tense.

Injunction

The verb from the noun collection is collect, there is demonstration and demonstrate, reduction and reduce ... so injunction and ...?

 

Although rarer than the noun injunction, there is a verb 'to injunct' and it has appeared in some newspaper reports recently eg 'Has the rush to injunct gone too far ...?' asks this Guardian article (about half-way through) and '... Sir Fred Goodwin [...] had no right to injunct information ...' in this FT piece (third paragraph).

 

The OED describes the verb 'injunct' as colloquial. It is first attested only in the late 19th century, so injunct is a newer word than the noun injunction. The OED definition is 'to prohibit or restrain by injunction'.

 

Injunction, on the other hand, is first attested in the early 16th century. The first definition given in the OED is 'the act of enjoining' and, indeed, the noun 'injunction' comes from the verb 'to enjoin' (= to join together), which is a couple of centuries older. The legal sense, which we use today, namely a restraining order, was also in use in the 16th century.

 

The term for the situation when the longer word comes first, and then loses a suffix to become a shorter word, is 'back-formation'. Burgle is a back-formation from burglar, editor is a back-formation from edit and pea is a back-formation from pea.