The virtual linguist

Power verbs

Regular reader Alan emailed me details of a book he'd found in his local library - Power Verbs for Job Seekers. I'm grateful to Alan - especially as this blog post is mostly the result of cutting and pasting from his email.

 

The right verbs, according to the author (a business school professor):
• make you unforgettable
• powerfully demonstrate your value
• attract employers like moths to flame

 

Some of the verbs, eg abound, earmark, postulate could be described as useful to know - although whether they are 'power verbs' as such is a different matter. However, I cannot help imagining that the likeliest response to someone using some of the verbs or sentences in the book would be 'what a pretentious berk!' Here are some of the examples, kindly supplied by Alan:

One good quarterly report has not absterged the concern of investors
He lucubrated by dedicating himself to nearly constant learning
The external auditors oppunged our accounting records
The emergency data centre imbricated out in-house data centre during the blackout
Too many people have styleflexed their communications styles (a comment which, as Alan says, can be made of the author of this book!)
This ingenious marketing plan recrudesced this slumbering organisation
If she had not titivated she would not have felt as confident for the presentation

 

Alan kindly looked up some of these words in the dictionary, but couldn't find some, even in the OED (eg oppunge and lucubrate). The only one of the above group I had heard of - and probably used - is titivate, but when I think of someone titivating I think of them standing in front of a mirror fussily patting their hair or powdering their nose. This book claims 'titivate' means 'dress up smartly'.

Dog's letter

The Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day today was dog's letter, defined as "A name for the letter R (from its resemblance in sound to the snarl of a dog)".

 

It got me wondering which other letters of the alphabet had a nickname. There's the NATO phonetic alphabet, of course, plus the names of the letters linked to their sounds (bee, em etc), but nothing as picturesque as 'dog's letter'.

 

There is a term in the OED for the letter C with a cedilla, and that is ceceril. There's also the obsolete essefirme, a letter S. Upsilon is the Greek letter Υ, υ, representing the vowel u, and izzard is an old word for the letter Z.

 

Researching the topic in the Dictionary earlier, I came across these other letter-related words, which I shall try and squeeze into my conversations this week ...

 lambdacism: A too frequent repetition of the letter L in speaking or writing.

metacism: a definition from Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary is given in one of the citations - "the too frequent use of the letter M".

 

And I also like the definition from another dictionary (the American Dictionary of the English Language by Joseph Emerson Worcester), given among the citations at the balbuties entry: "vicious pronunciation, in which b and l are substituted for other consonants".

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.

Mrs Thatcher in the dictionary

There are certain words associated with the late Mrs Thatcher and, not surprisingly, this connection is reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary. Iron Lady went into the Dictionary in 1993, with the first citation dating from 1976. Under the entry for Society, Mrs Thatcher’s oft-quoted belief that “There is no such thing as society” is there. It is not attributed to her, however, but to Tony Blair in a 1988 Times article. One of the definitions of wet is “a politician with liberal or middle-of-the-road views on controversial issues (often applied to members of the Conservative Party opposed to the monetarist policies of Margaret Thatcher)”, but the word had been used with this sense since the beginning of the 20th century.

 

Mrs Thatcher was responsible for the change in verb form – from a noun to a verb – of the word handbag, and of the introduction into the Dictionary of handbagging. It is described by the OED as ‘jocular’ and is defined: “to subject to a forthright verbal assault or to strident criticism; to coerce in this way”. She is also directly responsible for the coining (by others) of the word leaderene.

 

There are more than twenty other words in the OED where Margaret Thatcher is mentioned in a citation. Some don’t come as a surprise, for instance, at the Schoolmarm entry, she is described as having “the bearing of a school ma'am, an inability to suffer fools”, and she is also given as an example of an agelast (someone without a sense of humour). At Abominator she is mentioned in a Guardian Weekly quotation as someone who is “a sincere abominator of the Soviet system of government”. Thatcher’s Britain, Thatcher’s child, Thatcheresque, Thatcherism and Thatcherite are also in the OED.

 

Unrelated to her political career she appears in the entry for Chemical (referring to her original career, when she supposedly invented ‘whippy’ ice cream) and also in the entry for Scotophobia. No, she was not afraid of the Scots – scotophobia is a fear or dislike of the dark, and Mrs Thatcher apparently suffered from it.

Neologisms

There was an interesting piece on the BBC website the other day about neologisms (newly coined words) in the field of technology, and how annoying many people find them. It was written by Tom Chatfield, author of Netymology.

 

Chatfield makes the point that there is nothing new about people objecting to new words. In the 16th and 17th centuries people criticised the use of inkhorn terms, words derived from Latin. These days we might wonder what they were complaining about, since we are quite happy with dismiss, celebrate, ingenious, capacity, antiques, prodigious and other words once termed inkhorn.

 

In the 19th century the poet William Barnes (about whom, coincidentally, I wrote recently - here) also railed against the use of words formed from foreign prefixes, suffixes and whole words, again without much success, since we still use words he disapproved of such as preface and photograph.

 

One of Tom Chatfield's favourite neologisms is the Cupertino effect, which refers to the word your computer or phone automatically changes something you've written into, because it thinks you mistyped. Cupertino is the Californian city where Apple is based, and an early spellchecking program once converted cooperation into Cupertino, when someone typed it. Other examples are of computers and phones changing Freud into fraud, and soonish into Zionism. I can identify with this, since I discovered only recently, to my horror, that, although I had been signing off text messages with Sx (S for Susan, my name, plus a kiss) my phone converted this abbreviation to the word Sex. I now know why I received such interesting replies!

 

Objection to new words, and a belief that there are sufficient existing ones, goes back to well before the 16th century mentioned in the BBC piece. I've been reading a book lately about the 8th-century English monk Bede, and it mentions Hisperic Latin, which referred to writings comprising learned Latin words created by Irish monks of the time. Wikipedia refers to these words as 'curiously learned', whilst the book I was reading described them as 'bizarre' and part of a 'cult of the grotesque'.

Eurobabble

EU translator Jeremy Gardner appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme yesterday (listen here, about 52:13 m in) to talk about his collection of almost 100 'Eurospeak' words and phrases, which he comes across in his job. EU officials don't talk about cows, sheep and goats, but bovine animals, ovine animals and caprine animals (see this old post of mine looking at adjectives relating to animals). Another example given was 'voluntary modulation', which is something to do with farming.

 

One reason for the preponderance of such nonsensical phrases is that most EU officials are writing in a language that is not their native language, so their English is affected by their first language. On a positive note, most of them understand what is meant - even if native English speakers don't. FT journalist Alex Barber, who also appeared on the programme, gave an instance when a hapless British diplomat corrected a grammatically wrong and meaningless phrase used by his colleagues in a meeting, only to be overruled by the chair. He said that Herman van Rompuy, president of the European Council, once extolled the virtues of 'asymmetric translation' ie countries' representatives translate words in different ways depending on what goes down well at home (so, for instance, the British and the Germans talk about economic governance, but the French talk about economic government).

 

There are more examples from Jeremy Gardner's EU-Speak dossier here.

William Barnes

William Barnes was a 19th-century English poet and philologist who tried to persuade people to use Anglo-Saxon words, rather than words imported into English from French, Latin, Greek or other languages.

He is cited many times in the Oxford English Dictionary, but mainly for Dorset dialect words, which he used in hundreds of poems. Otherwise, he is cited at the entries for push-wainling (a Barnes invention for ‘baby’s pram’), rede-craft (logic), and sundriness (diversity).

In his book on grammar, Outline of English Speechcraft, he replaces Latin-based words for grammatical terminology with Old English equivalents. So, a verb becomes time-taking, a noun a thing-word or thing-name, an adverb is an under-markword, plural is somely number, genitive is the offspring case, and subjunctive is hinge-mood.

Other nice words he offers Old English alternatives for include:
bendsome, for flexible
doingsome, for active
matter-lore, for chemistry
nipperlings, for forceps
sound sweetness, for euphony
thoroughshining, for diaphanous
unbreathpenned, for inarticulate
unfrienden, for alienate
wortlore, for botany

Pope tweets in Latin

The Pope has made his first tweet in Latin - he already tweets in eight modern languages. He wrote "Orare semper, iustitiam factitare, amare probitatem, humiles Secum ambulare", which translates ""pray constantly, do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with Him".

 

There were an interesting few minutes on this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 (here) where commentators discussed the merits, or otherwise, of Latin on Twitter. Although Latin is said to be a concise language, the Pope refers to Twitter in Latin as pagina publica breviloquentis (concise, public page), which itself is not a particularly concise phrase.

 

Peter Jones from the Friends of Classics said an alternative translation would have been to use the Latin for chirrup or twitter in the avian sense, which is pipiare. He said a translation of Twitterati would be pipiantes, the present participle. When asked for his advice about a tweet in Latin, he suggested Juvenal's phrase Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes (loosely translated as 'Many suffer from the incurable disease of tweeting').

 

Listen to the BBC piece here, and read the story here.

If Houses, Why Not Mouses?

I was contacted recently by Damian O'Brien, the author of the recent book on word origins If Houses, Why Not Mouses? Amazon let me read the first few pages online (see here), and I must say I was intrigued, not least because of Damian's own background - he studied Sanskrit and Ancient Iranian at Oxford University, with studies of Gothic thrown in, and he was writing to me from Iraq - and also because of his statement in the introduction that one of his favourite sentences is dōmidēdum smakkabagm glaggwuba, which is Gothic for 'we judged the fig tree exactly'.

 

The book is very erudite, and looks at ancient languages but it is peppered with chatty snippets of more down-to-earth information and does not assume a knowledge of the phonetic alphabet or ancient languages. Points covered in the book include 'Why do we rear children?', 'How exam is related to synagogue', How vodka and otter are related' and 'Where did the l in could come from?'

 

I bought the book, but haven't read it yet. I expect I'll find plenty of ideas in it to cover on my own blog in the future.

 

Here's the Amazon (UK) page, and here's an interview with Damien from another site.

Puns

You may groan when someone makes a pun, but it's unlikely that that will stop the perpetrator from punning in the future. Punning has a long history, and is a technique that has been used by the most illustrious of historical figures. The ancient Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that the use of puns indicated an intellectually supple mind, and was a sign of rhetorical skill. Shakespeare frequently uses puns, too, for instance in Hamlet, in the scene between the grave-digger and Hamlet, where the grave-digger makes puns on the different meaning of the word 'lie', and in As You Like It, where Shakespeare plays on the words hour and whore, which were pronounced identically at the time (see this old post). Jesus Christ used puns in his native Aramaic, for example in his statement 'upon this rock I will build my church', a pun on the name Peter and the ancient Greek word for 'rock', petra.

 

Most of the above comes from an interesting piece on the BBC website this week about the history of paronomasia, or wordplay based on punning. Commentators have always argued about the hidden meaning and purpose of puns, and have disagreed as to whether they are good things or not. Freud felt they were a sign of weakness, used instead of uttering unpleasant truths.

 

One clever pun I came across recently - while touring Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam - was this one, sent by Frederick the Great of Prussia, to Voltaire:

The top picture is an invitation, which, if you spell out the mathematical sum reads:

à sous p à cent sous si (sous means 'under', and cent is 100)

which is a pun on à souper à Sanssouci (to supper in Sanssouci).

Voltaire's response, Ja! is not the German word for 'yes' but is another pun:

J grand, a petit (large J, small a), pronounced in French j'ai grand appetit (I've got a large appetite).

 

Here's the BBC article.