Outside the box

Last week, as part of the wall-to-wall election coverage (UK readers will know what I mean; non-UK readers can be extremely thankful that they are not involved in what is misleadingly called the democratic process – these guys wouldn't recognize democracy if it bit them) I heard Nigel Farrago saying 'I am outside the box'. UKIP's PR-machine seems to have leapt into action, as all the web accounts I can find have the text 'repaired' to something that uses the words 'thinking outside the box' . But I'm convinced the aforementioned populist said either 'I am' or 'We are...' – which seems to me to point the way that this idiom is likely to go (further and further from its [fairly recent] origins).

[I]ts origin is generally attributed to consultants in the 1970s and 1980s [this source places it a decade earlier] who tried to make clients feel inadequate by drawing nine dots on a piece of paper and asking them to connect the dots without lifting their pen, using only four lines:

          See more here 

But origins, as I've said before, aren't a clincher in discussions of  'what words "really" mean'.

An interesting blog from the OED stables refers to th[e] tendency to be hung-up on a supposed 'original' meaning based on etymology and calls it the 'Etymological Fallacy'.

The issue of original meaning struck me this morning when a non-native speaker of English referred to an aeroplane doing aerobatics as 'very acrobatic'. To the dyed-in-the-wool etymologically-anal word-Nazi,  any aeroplane in flight – however sedate its behaviour – is acro[Gk άκϱος ="high"]-batic[Gk βαινω [a very irregular verb, meaning "go"].  'Acrobatic', in this perverse sense of 'high-going', DEFINES the performance of  an aeroplane. But good ol' BNC lists 115 nouns that collocate with acrobatic, and none of them is aeroplane .

Tales from the Word-face

[excerpt from forthcoming offering – offered not without a certain shame-facedness (as it's not really up to scratch)]:

[HD In the first para. I mention 'the evolution of the sequel to WVGT'. As a background to this, there has also been evolution in the idea of WVGT itself. When Vowels Get Together dealt with vowels getting together with each other. Future issues will deal with vowels getting together with other phonemes (starting with the most interesting ones [as far as changes to vowel quality are concerned]: the sonorants. The Introduction goes on:] 

I'll make this issue available asap, but.... Back to the drawing board...

b

Update 2013.04.20.10:00 – Oh dear – easier said than done. Amazon have a minimum cover-price (not possible to publish a free book), and I'm blowed if I'll charge for this thing. So I went to Google Play, whose  Ts&Cs start like this:

Hmmm. I recognize the problem that the 'writer' had. S/he put  the links in a draft, and a reviewer said 'These URLs may change. What can we do about it?' The writer, of course had a deadline to meet, so rather than work something out (after all. the stuff on those linked pages constitute two out of the three documents YOU MUST READ AND ACCEPT,  so getting it right mattered). But, adopting the totally meaningless 'meaning' of  'as such' that seems to be the fashion nowadays [ignoring the fact that ‘such'  needs to refer to a noun, and that in the expression ‘as such' it needs to refer to a preceding noun], s/he strung together some words  about changing URLs and copiedNpasted a couple of parentheses regardless of how unintelligible it made the resulting 'sentence'.

As it happens they have both changed. The first gives a 404 error, and the second at least takes you somewhere – although  the pages there don't seem to use the term 'FAQ'. 

In other words, there's a lot of sorting out to do....

---

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.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Nearly 48,000 views  and  7,800 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 2,600 views and 1,050 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.

Making room

<oops purpose="update"> 

Yesterday a silly editorial slip let this post go out under a rather boring title. Well, Tempora mutantur isn't intrinsically boring; it was pretty interesting when that Latin guy first used it. But it's rather lazy now, and was a working title. Making room does a better job of justifying the gear-shift from New words for old to New markets for old. 

</oops>

In this term‘s CAM (CU alumni magazine) there‘s an article about words used to describe landscape. It‘s quite fun, though not as much as I had hoped. And my enjoyment of it was spoiled by an Introduction that made the writer sound like a Daily Mail-reading saloon-bar bore:

....and blah blah blah. "Why, in my day,"  one can  imagine him saying, "we had to read a chapter of Gibbons before breakfast!"

This is strange. The writer, Robert Macfarlane, who is reading from his new book Landmarks this week on BBC Radio 4, doesn't sound like that; he is a youngish Fellow of Emmanuel College, one-time winner of the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

He should choke on his kedgeree no more. The realities of  dictionary-publishing, rather than the corruption of Our Youth, are the issue. A saleable dictionary, whatever the market, is of finite length. The editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary aren't scheming cultural vandals who with malice aforethought "excluded" morally justified words and "replaced" them with today's ephemeral playground slang.

A modern dictionary  uses a corpus (a word-bank). Words come and go.  And in a finite dictionary the ones that are going have to make room for the ones that are coming. If, in the chosen corpus, MP3 Player occurs N times but acorn occurs N/100 times  then the writing is on the wall: acorn is weighed in the balance and found wanting. It's not a bad word, it's not a non-word, it just doesn't pull its weight in a 21st-century dictionary which records words relating to a 21st-century Junior (in that case) environment. Horses for courses.

The new words only replaced the old ones in the value-free sense of occupying the space that they (the old ones) had occupied in the previous edition. Once, that loathsome Americanism boyfriend usurped the position of swain. Language goes on, and the world of printed books tries more or less vainly to keep up.

Another instance of a passing trend that has been in the news of late (and the link is tenuous but not that tenuous) is the news that Kingfisher is back-pedalling on the DIY-front. They said on the Beeb that Kingfisher were closing some B&Q stores and opening some Screwfix ones (which cater for the trade) because the trend now was for lifestyle spend rather than DIY.

<rant>
...which explains the current spate of TV adverts (Kärcher is the latest offender, but there have been many others) that imply that a man is a ham-fisted klutz who spends hours getting tooled up and his wife saves the day by the simple expedient of spending a great deal of money. Of course! Why didn't the silly fellow think of that in the first place! DIY is so LAST YEAR.
</rant>

So the brilliant idea someone had back in 1997, helping form an association in web-users' minds between B&Q and DIY, has had its day:

extract from whois raw data: more here

Well. word-face calls; apropos ....

Tales from the word-face

I have Sigil working on Linux now. I may have said a while ago that Sigil (a WYSIWYG tool that produces EPUB files [standard mobile reader format]) was supported on Linux (which it may well have been at the time). Well, it's not. But being not supported is not the same as not working. It might mean (and does in this case) that it works but needs a bit more homework on the part of the user.

<potential_digression>
.. and don't get me started on the current lamentable trend to use on behalf of to mean on the part of.
</potential_digression>

But it's changed a good deal since I last used it, and can do much more than it could then. I need to spend some time seeing what it can do. So my earlier claim (earlier this year) to have worked out a modus operandi was a bit previous. So talk among yourselves....

b

PS And here's a clue to be going on with:

Couple at work with gin, but no energy for that sort of thing! (10)

Update 2015.04.02.09:20 –  Change from working title.

Update 2015.04.03.11:10 – Typo fixes and updated TES stats.

Update 2015.10.29.14:50 – Answer to that clue, [as if anyone needed it]: COPULATING

Update 2017.10.22.18:50 – Deleted old footer.

She ain‘t Hevae...

...she‘s my mother.

This, believe it or not, is† (or at least was) my school song. My subject line is a reference to the phrase split here over the second and third lines:

        Ad te clamamus,          exsules filii  Hevae

which was translated in the rather florid version I learnt at my mother‘s knee (or, rather, Aunty Katy‘s knee) as

To thee do we cry

Poor banished^u/d children of Eve

"Children of Eve"

But in Rossini‘s Salve Regina, which my choir will be singing next month (as an addition to the main piece), the text is "Salve Regina... Madre in ciel... de tuoi figli abbi pietà" [="Hail Queen... mother in heaven.. have pity on your children"]. There‘s no mention  of Eve in the Rossini version. (In fact the words are very different, although the two prayers have a few phrases in common.)

Which may account for two facts:

1. The printed score is entitled...
       <digression>
       Regular readers will know how I feel about 'titled'.  The rant in red here will fill you in.
       </digression>
   ...Ave Maria. which seems to be the default name for anything Marian (see here for examples). I note that Classic  FM use it to refer to Rachmaninoff's Bogoroditse Devo.
2. The Wikipedia article on this antiphon doesn't list Rossini among its many musical  setters (admittedly in a list that doesn‘t claim to be exhaustive).

Ho hum... so little time, so  many digressions, as I've said before.

Tales from the word-front

I nearly have an MO for the new book. The only cloud on the horizon is the brain-dead book creator I‘m using. I plan to see whether it  can be brought up to snuff, and to make available a smallish extract (words that include the letters *al*) in  mid-late Spring (Northern Hemisphere, since you ask ).

b

Update 2015.02.08.11:00 – Added this note:

† (...and, if my reading of the script is right, with this very tune)


Update 2015.02.08.14:40 – Added parenthesis in red.

Update 2015.02.23.10:40 – Added textual correction
^u/d I‘ve just looked more closely at that Latin text. It says "Ad te clamamus exsules, [sic] filii Hevae". So the Englished version was not just "rather florid", but had a  different spin. Without the comma, the children of Eve, being exiled, are crying; the exile is an afterthought – just a bit of background information. With the comma, it seems to me that the exile is the reason for the crying.

Update 2017.09.10.20:50 – Added PS

PS –  I‘ve deleted the old footer. And the first bit of the new When Vowels Get Together book is here.

Doublets and pairs

A recent tweet alerted me to this post, which looks at tautologies.

<digression theme="How many angels fit on the head of a pin?">
The tweet wondered whether pleonasm was the word. This is a word close to my heart, and one that – every now and then – I think I understand. 'This is both a square, and a two-dimensional plane figure having four equal sides and one right-angle'. That is a tautology: it says τα άυτα [='the same thing'] in two different ways.

But this slight change makes it pleonastic: 'This is both a square, and a two-dimensional plane figure having four equal sides and four right-angles'. If a plane figure has four equal sides and one right-angle, the other angles will be the same. A pleonasm says more than is necessary. But saying the same thing is 'more than is necessary' (and I think the is there is pleonastic; sorry.)

So there's a good deal of overlap, and often when I try to work out which applies in a particular case my brain starts to hurt. Beatus vir qui ... says 'A pleonasm is a tautology'. It's not, but I wish I didn't care.
</digression>

One of these was 'null and void' , which rang a bell whose tinkle led me to The Stories of English.
But Amazon's Read Inside feature didn't cover the relevant section (which is on pages 152-3)

<digression theme="pipe-dream" likelihood="0">
Penguin missed a trick (or more likely decided that the trick wasn't worth the outlay) with this book. It was written like a coffee-table book, with two or three sorts of text and standalone features, quite like Words: An Illustrated History of Western Language (which I had a small part in publishing – but a bigger part than I wanted [and that's a whole 'nother story] ).But Penguin just squeezed it all together with tiny margins and no kind of visual clues to what sort of text was which. The reader's never sure whether the current text is part of the main argument or part of an illustrative aside. It needs changes in line-length or font or shade of paper to make it a smooth reading experience.

<sub_digression>
In fact, the writing so obviously has this sort of treatment in mind that I suspect it was written to order for another publisher but that the contract fell through. The typescript then got bought by another publisher whose needs were at odds with the book as written. Maybe not though – who knows...?
<sub_digression>

My fantasy – though I haven't discussed this with the good Professor – is to win a large amount of money and become a proper publisher. My Rights department would negotiate with Allen Lane to acquire the rights for a properly designed book, and my Design department would make this book CanDo Publishing's lead title.
<digression>

So I turned to The Story of English in 100 Words as there's only so much new stuff you can say on this subject, and from time to time the paths trodden by one author in separate books cross. Sure enough, in the section dealing with Chattels, Crystal says this:

 

Back in the earlier book, in one of those asides (which  interrupt the flow but wouldn't if the book was designed properly) Crystal explains that they didn't choose; they went with both. Here are some of his examples (from p. 153):

Breaking and entering  (sources English/French)
Final and conclusive (sources French/Latin)
Fit and proper (sources English/French)
Will and testament  (sources English/Latin)
... etc

But both null and void are from French: null '"void of legal force," 1560s, from Middle French nul' and void 'late 13c.†, "unoccupied, vacant," from Anglo-French and Old French voide...' So why the tautology?

Crystal (of course!) answers this:

It was not long before the habit of doubling became extended to pairs of words [I think that 'pairs' is pleonastic, by the way ] regardless of their language of origin. In such pairings as null and void [knew I'd seen it somewhere]... we see French words together....

That'd better be all for now. I meant to lay into the Indendent's top ten, but as the proofs were delayed I started on the Index (for #WVGTbook for the Kindle version only). This threw up a fair few corrections‡ that I need to make in the proofs. Which'll make the proof stage more onerous than I had planned for. And I want to reach a breathing space in the Index work before I get stuck into the proofs, so I really have to go.

b

Update 2014.01.25 18.20 – Added this note:
†Maybe this is the clue: void had been around for nearly two centuries, and users felt that it needed to be given added emphasis by adding the trendy new null.

Update 2014.01.26 20.20 – Added this note:
‡Not just corrections. I'm also finding improvements I can make. One of these is an addition to the notes to the UO  notes section, to include a word that I've only ever met in one context: third-form biology (that's 'year 10' to all you young whipper-snappers). Here's the full Notes section:


UO Notes

1. Words spelt '-uous'
   The apparent randomness might be explained in this way: at first two researchers were working on these words (words spelt with an initial a-f were shared equally between /juə/ (2 a-s. 3 d-s, 1 f-) and /jʊə/ (1 a-, 4 c-s, 1 e-) . One oddity resulting from this division of work was that discontinuous is transcribed one way and continuous another. For the 17 words with initials from i-to-  the researcher preferring /juə/ was working alone. For the last 6 words, tu-v the researcher preferring /jʊə/ was working alone.
   But my use of was and were in this tale of backroom staff management  is entirely speculative; the distinctive transcriptions may have fallen either way completely by chance. In any case, the student may safely ignore the distinction.
2. fluorescent
   Macmillan English Dictionary uses the transcription /flɔ:'resənt/, but the audio sample has a similar diphthong to the one in the word transcribed as /'flʊərəʊkɑ:bən/. Meanwhile, as further evidence of the variable pronunciation of this vowel sound, the words fluoride and fluorine are transcribed with /ʊə/ but have an audio sample with a monophthong that is not unlike /ɔ:/.
3. duodenum
   The Macmillan English Dictionary gives the transcription /dju:əʊ'di:nəm/, but the audio sample gives both unstressed vowels as /ə/. Again, the student may safely ignore the distinction. Full enunciation of the diphthong is reserved for very careful speech.
4. vacuole
   The  Macmillan English Dictionary does not include this word. The definition comes from the Collins English Dictionary, which does  – as a matter of purely academic interest – use the transcription /ju:əʊ/ (with /u:/ rather than /ʊ/) for the word duo. Once again, the student may safely ignore the distinction.

---

 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: just over 44,100 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.

WTF

A COW HERD MAKES MORE

GREENHOUSE GAS A DAY

THAN A 3,000-MILE DRIVE

This startling snippet leapt out at me from a Times Magazine article just now. 'A single drover?' I thought, 'WTF!' – meaning, of course, 'What a Tremendous Fart'. Silly me, though, there was a word-space saving it from that hyper-flatulent meaning. But I wondered why the sub-editor had gone for that unnatural choice of words.

I looked in the text, and read this:

A herd of cows daily produces more greenhouse gas than a family car driven for 3,000 miles.

Now look back at the misleading subhead: it is in a 3-line box, with first and third lines very tight. 'A herd of cows' is three letters and a wordspace longer than 'a cow herd'. A monospace typeface such as Courier (in which an N takes up as much space as an M, and an I as much as an O, rather than the sort of proportional font that we are more accustomed to in print) accentuates this:

A herd of cows

versus  A cow herd

And if you made space for those three extra letters and one extra space by moving 'more' down to the second line, then that line'd be too full. So whether or not the medium is the message, the medium can certainly change the message in all sorts of risible (and/or calamitous) ways. I expect examples of the latter will come to me, but it's coming on to rain, and the washing's out.

(Just a quickie to let you know that work on V5.0 is under way, and V4.0 is still free to download!†)

b
Update, 20-13.09.29.18:00 – Added this PS:

And while we're on the subject of flatulence, I was dumbfounded by the ignorance and cultural insensitivity of the English-speaker from (or at least, resident in, Wales) who is reported as having said (one has to be careful – it was the Mail Online):

 'Just imagine how embarrassing it will be to have the word "fart" in your village's name .... I'd be humiliated every time I told someone my address'.

Oh dear.... The alleged speaker was not Hyacinth Bucket, but 'Sioned Jones' (who, with a Welsh-sounding name like that, should be ashamed of herself). OK, there'd be some sophomoric titters and photos of signposts, but that's par for the course when languages rub along together. It is, for example, only the most po-faced and socially insensitive English-speaking pedant who gives Immanuel Kant his native vowel; it's uncomfortably close to a taboo word.

The article 'explains' the problem:

Campaigners say the ancient name^‡ should be replaced because there is no 'V' in the Welsh language

And I'll spell out the URL, as it is a gem: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430414/Varteg-Wales-renamed-Farteg-villagers-fear-make-butt-jokes.html#ixzz2gIbMlC56  – which invites the rejoinder 'No, it's not the making of butt-jokes they're worried about, it's fart-jokes.'

In fact, that explanation is a bit of an over-simplification. The written Welsh language has no letter 'v'. Welsh does have a voiced labio-dental fricative phoneme, to give it its $10 name; it has a /v/, and that phoneme is represented in writing as a single letter – which explains that old Ffion joke:

<political_history egg_sucker="grandmother">
Ffion was William Hague's wife, and he was PM[correction: ] party leader at the time.
</political_history>

'Why are there two 'f's in Ffion?'/ Because there's no effin' Prime Minister[correction: ] party leader' – /f/ is written 'ff'.

In short, when languages come together,  there is scope for double entendres. I'd rather live in a world with a bit of lavatory humour than in a world bereft of its minority languages.

Update 2013.09.30.09:45 - Added this PPS

And it's just occurred to me that that Ffion joke underlines my point about double entendres happening when languages meet (and if you thought I chose it because of that I'm sorry to disabuse you): here the two languages are the meta-language that addresses spelling and the informal speech that uses such defused (and so inoffensive) obscenities as "effin'".

Update 2013.10.02.15:55 – added this note:
^† Not any more

Update 2013.10.04.10:05  – added this note:
 ^‡I've only just appreciated the stupidity and insensitivity of this subhead. I might have guessed, given that it's the Mail. The 'ancient name' is 'Farteg'. A handful of centuries (maybe 6 –7 at the outside) doesn't qualify for ancientness. Farteg was called Farteg long before the Mail's Year Zero, 1066.

Update 2012.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

---

 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.1: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU,   IA-IU, OA-OU, and – new for V4.1 – UA-UE.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 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 1570 views/700 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.

Tempora obscuratio mea

The University Arms. The OUP
colophon shows just the open book: 

This post refers to a pair of articles in last Saturday's Times, but it is hidden by those obscurantists behind a paywall. (Interesting word, 'obscurantist'; think of darkness, 'obscurity'. My first full-time employers, OUP, have a colophon that shows an open book inscribed with the words - the opening words of Psalm 27- Dominus illuminatio mea: 'The lord [is] my light':


Domimina nustio illumea - oh how we larfed! The spreading of light, that's what text-based communication is about. Not paywalls. Tempora obscuratio mea - perhaps that should be The Times' motto. [And I KNOW OUP would have wanted an italicized The in my opening line; the Hart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.]

The first article is a news item on p. 11 of the hardcopy about a decision by Mid Devon Local Authority not to use apostrophes on road names; in fact. it is making official a de facto actuality that is not unique to Devon. When I moved to my current address, in 1984, I noted (with slight but admittedly risible annoyance) that my new home was in 'Spencers Wood' [sic - no apostrophe]. And in 1979 I learnt (with similar slight but admittedly risible annoyance) that book designers don't like apostrophes in display work, thinking they're visually fussy.

But my late twentieth-century sightings of apostropho-clasm are far from original. GBS wrote

I have written aint, dont, havent, shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only when its omission would suggest another word: for example hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of papering [sic, in the Otrops article I link to below for further research. I regret having no time to find a primary source; I suspect Shaw may have used the more meaningful 'peppering'] pages with these uncouth bacilli.

(Isn't that bacilli marvellous? Bacilli were in the news at the time, because of discoveries in connection with these stick-like [Latin baculum – 'little staff'; there's that '-ulus/m' again, denoting a diminutive, as noted in a previous post] microscopic objects. Shaw was a contemporary of Fleming – who was born before Shaw but outlived him. One can imagine Shaw reading a newspaper or scientific leaflet illustrated with a slide covered with these things looking like chocolate vermicelli - and there's another metaphor, 'little worms', but that would be a digression too far). You can read more about apostrophes here, if you're that way inclined. I really can't get awfully excited about this sort of thing.

 But one of the editorialists at The Times can – oh yes. No names, no pack-drill, but I have my suspicions (think of the word 'pray' tacked on coyly after  questions in the Literary Quiz). How's this for blustering grandiloquence?

Its great virtue as a mark of punctuation [ed: my underline: useful bit of clarification here, in case we thought he was talking about its great virtue as... a table ornament?] is that it aids clarity and dispels confusion.... The residents of Mid Devon should have the uncontested right [best sort that, 'uncontested'; but has anyone contested it?] to share those benefits, [are we dealing with a Human Right here? Oh no, it's just for those happy few who have a winning ticket in the lottery of life:] which are enjoyed by the rest of the English-speaking world.

 A case in point is the unbelievably significant 'Bakers View'

The apostrophe is a punctuation mark [phew, that possible table ornament was getting uncomfortably central in my mind, glad he's cleared that up] that drives out ambiguity [shouldn't that have been 'casteth out ambiguity'?] It allows the reader to tell immediately [useful word that, 'immediately'; clearly, the apostrophe is not one of those insidious delayed-action punctuation marks] if a word or name is a singular possessive ('Baker's View'), a plural possessive ('Bakers' View') or a plural noun followed  by a verb ('Bakers View'). [Incidentally, that last one is meaningless as captalized; given the correct lower-case v, there are only two possible meanings.]

 As it happens, the news item explains that 'Bakers View' is  a new road or building overlooking a bit of greenery already called 'Bakers Park'. So if you wanted to be really anal about it there should be no apostrophe; but I don't. I don't think sane people do.

But maybe this bit of verbiage-generation doesn't happen behind the paywall. The repetitive and unnecessarily verbose editorial may have  been 'written' in response to a need to fill the space (about a third of the available – editorial – space). I'll never know. But I do recognize a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Language changes. 'Change and decay in all around I see.' It's a bit of a shame about the fate of the apostrophe. Life goes on. 'Point final' as my old French master used to say at  the end of a Dictée. I think it meant something like 'End of.'


b

Update 2013.03.24 PS * I was right about peppering. The source is George Bernard Shaw, "Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers." The Author, 1901. (It is a happy coincidence that Shaw's words come from a review of the forerunner of the very rules that I mentioned with respect to another bit of quaint arbitrariness – the italicized The in The Times though not in, for example, 'the New York Times'.) I have this information from a fuller and more reliable piece on the apostrophe than the Ostrop piece I cite in the main post. For fuller information, see here. I've taken this opportunity also to update the usage figures in the section that follows.
* Update 2013.04.05: It's here.

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