Harking back

 

I've been harking back...

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(an interesting expression that I've only recently found out about, from this Etymonline entry:

The reason for my investigation was that I heard  someone saying 'harkening back' and thought 'Hang on, what's it go to do with harkening? Surely it's a different sort of hark – no idea what sort though.' More of this quandary anon – but I'd better finish my sentence or people may think I've lost it (as if that ship hadn't already sailed).

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...to a successful prediction I made here. (To be precise, that 2021 post implied the possibility of an error I had warned against in a letter to The Times the year before,  about a 'sounds-like' pronunciation aid they had published in an article about Kamala Harris:

As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English...

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(Viz: Harris herself and the journalist, not a Times hack but the American writer of a syndicated article)

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Heavy users of the Internet may have come across the term RSS feed, whose derivation is explained in this Merriam-Webster note: 

During my professional life I only ever met 'Really Simple Syndication'. (Software engineers were fond of such demotic explanations; another was PGP – 'Pretty Good Privacy'.)
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...So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid...

...). Ever since (and my memory for mispronunciations is positively elephantine)  I have been noting speakers of British English falling into this trap; they have, presumably, read this article, or perhaps some other article (maybe the BBC reporting Harris's guidance, and thus misguiding speakers of BE). The latest two are Clive Myrie (whose introduction to Mastermind must surely qualify for the "Self-important Pillock of the Year" award, if only there was one)...

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(and on the subject of Clive Myrie, who  wrote that 'your BBC' nonsense, and how can he bring himself to deliver it? 'We've got you covered...You think you're winning...'. Who is this shapeshifting  you?)
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...and Alexander Armstrong (though that was on a repeat of Pointless, so he may have learnt the error of his ways by now). 

'Hark back' has a long history, during which it has been more common than 'harken back' by varying factors – about 3:1 in 2022,  about 40:1 some 100 years before,  and usually somewhere between those extremes

 

But in the last about ten years 'harken back' seems to have got (a lamentable [in my view]) new lease of life. (This detailed snapshot relating to the last few years gives a gentler slope to the change, as the x-axis (or do I mean y?) is so magnified. But in the last 10-odd years 'harken back' has risen from 25% ( that's ¼ in old money)  as common as 'hark back' to 37% (well over ⅓). I wonder why (it being an abomination, as I've said)

My initial feeling (well trained by Archie – my grandfather, an old presbyterian dominie with the strictest of views about the language) was that the Americans were the guilty parties. But look at these Ngrams:

From  38%  up to 59% over the 22 years from 2000 to 2022 (as recent as the Google Ngram Viewer gets) – about 1% per year (less if you compound it). This is a steady small increase.

Meanwhile, in BE:

 

From 0.05% up to 18% – a much steeper climb, almost the same in absolute numbers, but starting from a much lower base; speakers of BE, seeing a bandwagon, have jumped on it.

Enough already.

PS

While we're on the subject of revisited predictions, I'm not saying 'I told you so' (because I didn't) or that I smelt a rat when I saw the infamous doctored Trump rabble-rousing speech (which I didn't), but when the Beeb fessed up  I wasn't surprised (except for the obvious 'Surely Auntie wouldn't  do that'). The intonation in  the crucial 'sentence' which, unlike most sentences, started 54 minutes before it finished) sounded strange – but I put that down to  the idiosyncracy of Trump's delivery, rather than a ham-fisted edit by someone doesn't deserve the description 'journalist', bringing the BBC into disrepute. I suspect cock-up rather than conspiracy: I agree with what Alastair Campbell said on a recent The Rest Is Politics – that someone, at a late stage in the edit (which wasn't biased) needed some background snapshots; maybe they asked an intern ([HD: this is not Campbell's supposition, it's mine]; anyway, not a serious political contributor); besides, Trump's $1bn is for the birds. As Armando Ianucci said on today's Strong Message Here, the edit was 'sloppy'; rather than 'biased'.

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But the damage is done. I was watching Global Eye  on BBC2 the other night, and found myself wondering if the reportage could be relied upon – of course it could, but still it left a horribly uncertain feeling (like having survived an earthquake and waiting for the next aftershock). Shame...

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