During my PGCE Teaching Practice , the difference between effect and affect became an issue; one of the young adults in my class (oh yes, this was FE, they weren't children any more) had got it wrong. 'What's the difference?' the teacher asked (rhetorically – she was incapable of asking a question without supplying the Right answer). 'Effect is a noun and affect is a verb.' I bit my lip. Perhaps there was a reason for this gross over-simplification (or lie – just for the record they can each be either, but you know that. The noun effect is just much more common than the verb [the British National Corpus has 22,887 case of effect, of which a mere 137 are verbal.] Similarly, the verb affect is commoner than the noun – much more so).
Throughout my first few weeks, I heard many other teachers at the same institution saying the same thing, and began to think that there must be more to it than just one lazy teacher. Perhaps there was a website somewhere, run by Edexcel or someone, advising this Edmedioc version of the truth. As a teacher, one has to filter the truth depending on the level of the student; electricity flows from +ve to -ve until A-level and then does a volte-face (or should that be a volt-face?) – something about electrons I think. Maybe the holders of the pedagogical reins had decided that the verb effect and the noun affect were just 'un-parts-of-speech' for the purposes of their exams.
The same thing seems to have happened to the comma for the purposes of the KS2 SATS sample which filled me with deep sadness last week. I came a cropper at question 15. (Well, there were no answers given, so it was more of a quandary than a cropper. I just didn't know how they felt about commas.) Number 27 gave me the answer, because the wording of the question made it clear
My bible for matters comma-related is Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford. To quote a more recent edition than that:
Another quiz I saw more recently, with the gratification (I thought) of immendiate feedback, was the BBC's 10 questions on grammar. I got question 2 'wrong', because I have an old-fashioned affection for the sequence of tenses, and don't agree with the trendy distinction of may and might on grounds of strength of probability alone. I also got 3 'wrong', as they're wedded to the indiscriminate splattering of commas all over the place regardless. I could happily have got 4 'wrong' as well (as a cupful is a quantity), but I recognized their kneejerk predilection for infantile rules of thumb, such as If a number is nearby, say 'fewer.' I disagreed on 5 as well; and here's why. I don't rule out conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences, so I think they're fine after a semi-colon. The that/which distinction exercised in 7 is an old canard, beloved of the grammar checker in Microsoft Word but having no more credible authority behind it. Most grammarians don't bother with it. Question 9 was wrong too. There's nothing wrong with 'I was sat in the chair'. Consider 'After being led into the presentation, I was sat in a chair.' (Of course, I accept that it's often wrongly used; that's not the same as saying 'It's wrong'.)
That BBC article (and the quiz it introduces) starts by saying 'Everything that follows is debatable', But I think the BBC's '[e]verything' was unduly concessive – dare I say 'mealy-mouthed'? Many of the rules exercised in the quiz aren't debatable (although they may all be matters of register – so that there is often a discussion to be had about which rules should be adhered to in which register). There is a difference, though, between 'Everything that follows is debatable' and 'There is a discussion to be had about some of what follows.'
It's not uncommon in the world of etymology for part of a word to be misread as a separate root and then used in neologisms. So a sort of food once peculiar to Hamburg, a hamburger, was mis-analysed into the 'roots' "<sort-of-filling> + 'burger'", whence come the 'double-egg/cheeseburger' etc. And then the supposed suffix becomes a noun in its own right: So we get 'Burger and chips'
Something similar happened to the '-gate' in 'Watergate'. It had nothing to do with the way into a garden, say. (Nor, come to that, did the 'Water-' have anything to do with water, which at least the watergate at the bottom of Buckingham Street can boast –
The same sort of thing, but with the added complication of misplaced 'word'-endings, also happened with helicopter, whose roots are helico- (as in 'helix') and -pter (as in 'pterodactyl', 'lepidoptera' etc. The roots are not (as might be expected from various derivatives) heli + copter. My store of examples (helipad, heliport, mini-copter, gyrocopter....) has just been added to: heliskiing (='the sport of flying in a helicopter to a place on a mountain and then travelling over the snow on skis' CD-ROM © Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007. Text © A&C Black Publishers Ltd 2007.)
But I must get back to the word-bashing. I noticed recently (investigating the alternatives briar and brier) that the *ia* section was not as completely finished as I reported last time; it looks OK but has no links to the dictionary website. I shall have to go back and retrace my steps. I am going out, and I may be some time...
b
Update 2013.05.19:13.20: This morning on Radio 4's Broadcasting House I heard a very creative use of the '-gate' suffix: 'Swivel-eyed-loon'-gate (about an unattributed remark allegedy made during the
Tories' latest attempt at the Ferrets-in-a-sack Award).
*<autobiog subject="BobK99" date_range="1976-1978">
Previously, I called OUP the provider of 'my first full-time job'. This is not strictly true. That was the first full-time job I did after abandoning all hope of a future as a folk hero. My first full-time job before that decision was given to me by Frank Cutler (or 'Mr Cutler', as we used to know him), owner at the time of a foreign language bookshop. As that obituary goes on to say:
Throughout my first few weeks, I heard many other teachers at the same institution saying the same thing, and began to think that there must be more to it than just one lazy teacher. Perhaps there was a website somewhere, run by Edexcel or someone, advising this Edmedioc version of the truth. As a teacher, one has to filter the truth depending on the level of the student; electricity flows from +ve to -ve until A-level and then does a volte-face (or should that be a volt-face?) – something about electrons I think. Maybe the holders of the pedagogical reins had decided that the verb effect and the noun affect were just 'un-parts-of-speech' for the purposes of their exams.
The same thing seems to have happened to the comma for the purposes of the KS2 SATS sample which filled me with deep sadness last week. I came a cropper at question 15. (Well, there were no answers given, so it was more of a quandary than a cropper. I just didn't know how they felt about commas.) Number 27 gave me the answer, because the wording of the question made it clear
So, in their world, three commas (in a five-item list) were 'correct'.Insert three commas in the correct places in the sentence below.
My bible for matters comma-related is Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford. To quote a more recent edition than that:
That BBC article (and the quiz it introduces) starts by saying 'Everything that follows is debatable', But I think the BBC's '[e]verything' was unduly concessive – dare I say 'mealy-mouthed'? Many of the rules exercised in the quiz aren't debatable (although they may all be matters of register – so that there is often a discussion to be had about which rules should be adhered to in which register). There is a difference, though, between 'Everything that follows is debatable' and 'There is a discussion to be had about some of what follows.'
Report from the word-face
In my trawl through *ie* words, I've just met the word heliskier, not a headword but a derivative of heliskiing (which is). |
| Not from Hamburg |
Something similar happened to the '-gate' in 'Watergate'. It had nothing to do with the way into a garden, say. (Nor, come to that, did the 'Water-' have anything to do with water, which at least the watergate at the bottom of Buckingham Street can boast –
the handsome water-gate that had once given access to the Thames but now opens on to the Embankment Gardens– as it said in Frank Cutler's obituary* nearly 14 years ago: pause for thought...) Since that scandal (Nixon, Deep Throat, and all that) more or less any scandal can be conveniently named '<subject>gate' (conveniently, that is, for journalists and the chattering classes in general) from Camillagate to plebgate (which should really have been called Gategate). A good account was published by the BBC recently.
The same sort of thing, but with the added complication of misplaced 'word'-endings, also happened with helicopter, whose roots are helico- (as in 'helix') and -pter (as in 'pterodactyl', 'lepidoptera' etc. The roots are not (as might be expected from various derivatives) heli + copter. My store of examples (helipad, heliport, mini-copter, gyrocopter....) has just been added to: heliskiing (='the sport of flying in a helicopter to a place on a mountain and then travelling over the snow on skis' CD-ROM © Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007. Text © A&C Black Publishers Ltd 2007.)
But I must get back to the word-bashing. I noticed recently (investigating the alternatives briar and brier) that the *ia* section was not as completely finished as I reported last time; it looks OK but has no links to the dictionary website. I shall have to go back and retrace my steps. I am going out, and I may be some time...
b
Update 2013.05.19:13.20: This morning on Radio 4's Broadcasting House I heard a very creative use of the '-gate' suffix: 'Swivel-eyed-loon'-gate (about an unattributed remark allegedy made during the
Tories' latest attempt at the Ferrets-in-a-sack Award).
*<autobiog subject="BobK99" date_range="1976-1978">
Previously, I called OUP the provider of 'my first full-time job'. This is not strictly true. That was the first full-time job I did after abandoning all hope of a future as a folk hero. My first full-time job before that decision was given to me by Frank Cutler (or 'Mr Cutler', as we used to know him), owner at the time of a foreign language bookshop. As that obituary goes on to say:
(When the IBC [BK: International Book Club] had become Grant & Cutler's bookshop, a drawing of the gate decorated the firm's letterhead. Its rubric, "Close by the Watergate", did not then have the resonance that it was to acquire in the Nixon era, when some American foreign-language scholars believed that the firm was even closer to the centre of events than it actually was.)</autobiog>
Update 2013.09.30.11:10
Update 2014.05.30.17.20
And again
Update 2014.08.16.11.30
Carl Bernstein, I heard on the radio this morning, decried the use of -gate in the way described in my May 2013 update, but the one case that he blessed with his imprimatur was 'Hackgate' – not just a scandal, but a cover up involving secrecy and duplicity in high places.
(I've taken this opportunity to update the footer again.)
Update 2015.06.15.11.40
Added picture (for the benefit of Pinterest).
Update 2015.06.16.11.20
Changed picture to keep the lawyers happy.
Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2:
Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of
vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs – but
there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)
And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each
monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most
common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour
to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to
represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least
common.
Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.
Freebies (Teaching resources: over 44,640 views and well over 6,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,250 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)
** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.
Freebies (Teaching resources: over 44,640 views and well over 6,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,250 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)
** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.
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