Watching and seeing

A quick reflection on a quirk of collocation (words that go with each other).

I noticed the other day when my Daughter-in-law-Elect asked  'Have you watched <film_name>?' that here there was a difference between my collocation rules and hers. I  'SEE a film' and 'WATCH a television programme'. I looked in the British National Corpus, and found these results:

watch a film    number of instances:  7

see a film        number of instances: 19

But the sample size is quite small and quite old (100 million words; 1980-93). The larger and more recently-updated Corpus Of Contemporary Anerican (520 million words, 1990-2015)

watch a film    number of instances: 20 (a much smaller proportion)

see a film      number of instances: 61 (a slightly smaller proportion)

But, as we're looking at American usage in the case of COCA, perhaps these figure are more representative:

watch a movie   number of instances:  253

see a movie       number of instances:  293

And they give a much more evenly-balanced picture.

Besides, this generic vocabulary is rather suspect. I thnk it's probably likely that people would say 'I have seen The Magnificent Seven n times' or – to quote a primary school colleague of mine, of dubious taste (and no less dubious veracity) – 'I have seen The Guns of Navarone 15 times.' And I don't see how one could  frame a corpus query in a way that would catch all such collocations.

Perhaps, as the speaker who started this hare was a millennial, as they say, this just indicates the age and movie-consumption mores of the speaker. Whereas I and my contemporaries look on movie-going as going to a (big-screen) show (to see a film), younger speakers are more likely to catch their movies on a smaller screen (and perhaps watch a DVD or something streamed, or whatever these young folks do, m'lud). That could account for the much more even COCA figures.

Anyway, there goes a year of great notability (make that notoriety in some respects). See you on the other side. :-)

b

Update: 2017.01.01.15:00 – Added PS

PS And while we're on the subject of corpora, one of the many retrospective programmes that have been aired in the last week has reminded me of two things:

• Jeremy Corbyn's use of ram-packed
• my response to the question What's wrong with Google as a corpus?

Google reports nearly 17,000,000 results in a search for ram-packed. But Garbage-In-Garbage-Out. Here's BNC's search for *am-packed (as usual, just click on the link and sit back while the corpus does its stuff): spoiler – 21 jam-packed, 1 dream-packed, nothing else.  COCA has a different story: 266 jam-packed, and a single alternative; but that alternative is cram-packed (only three).

Ram-packed is an interestng neologism. It combines the idea of jam-packed with the idea of people being pushed willy-nilly into a carriage. As of 2017, I'd hesitate to call it a word; but that certainly doesn't mean it  will never be . This Google search shows that only 70-odd thousand of those 17 million results link ram-packed with Corbyn. So it's well on the way to... verbitude? Perhaps OED will name it  Word of the Year 2017.

Happy New Year. :-)

Cultural metaphor

Earlier this week, on the first of Robert McCrum's Shakespeare and the American Dream  (well worth a listen), the presenter allowed through a reference that didn't work, at first sight (hmm... on first hearing), on radio but was repaired by the context (eventually). But I didn't need that contextual clue, as I know Robert. He was interviewing James Shapiro about the importance of Shakespeare to the USA, and Shapiro described a temporary army posting in the 1840s, where to  maintain morale in a hole (I think that was the word Shapiro used) ...

<digression>
in Corpus Christi, Texas (which shares its name, coincidentally, with the place where I met (and was directed by in a stage version of Alice in Wonderland) the aforementioned interviewer
 </digression>

... the army diverted themselves by putting on a production of Othello (a fairly bold choice, in Texas at  that time). The original casting of the soldier playing Desdemona was obviously ridiculous, said Shapiro. "He was your size – too big to play Desdemona." The replacement for the part was a young Ulysses S. Grant.

Viva Verdi

I made a note of this, meaning at some stage to write about this sort of cultural metaphor, but the only other example that came to mind at the time was Verdi's Nabucco, with its Hebrew Slaves chafing at their subjugation  – famously echoing the feeling of the Italian peoples (there being no country of that name at the time, except when used as "a geographical expression"  [Metternich, I think: Wikipedia would know]). Instead of Va pensiero sull' alle dorati (that chorus) the Italian nationalists could proclaim Viva VERDI (privately [and subversively] knowing that the composer's name was an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele, Rei D' Italia). (This is covered in the English Wikipedia entry for the composer; but in the Italian version there is a whole article (admittedly not a  long one) dedicated just to this phrase: Viva Verdi.)

But the very next day, on Midweek, I heard Daniel Evans talking about how his work on The Full Monty in Sheffield (losing its steel-based industries with associated unemployment and social disruption) was  redolent of what happened to the Rhondda when he was a boy. His latest venture, Showboat is itself a piece that opened people's eyes to an issue that at the time (of its first performance) was not discussed in polite society. And it went straight for the jugular, in the first word. It's a word that is one of the last taboos, timorously hiding behind its initial. In later versions it was attenuated (to "Darkies all work on the Mississippi" I think) and when Francis Albert covered it he sang "HERE we all work...". Oscar Hammerstein, someone mentioned on this morning's programme, was using Showboat to investigate his own feelings about racial tensions and miscegenation.

I seem to remember, from background information picked up during my A-level exposure to L'Etranger, that Camus'  La Peste was really about Vichy France, the body politic being infected by Nazism. In fact it's generally true that opposition to repressive/totalitarian regimes is not infrequently expressed through works of art that use this sort of cultural metaphor. And the more I think about it the more examples spring to mind. But it's late and I must get this Out There while it's still hot (and before I think of any more).

b
PS Here are a couple more clues:

Six-footers and over involving last of many quantity surveyors (8)

Rival bench in turmoil following leader of opposition's sign of peace. (5,6)



Update 2016.04.22.16:45 – Added PPS:

PS A striking part of the McCrum programme was the statement that American  readers regarded Shakespeare as belonging in some way to them, whereas over here we think he's ours  – though I should tread carefully here, given these Blogger stats for visits to this blog: the lower extract shows all-time visits, and the one on the right shows visits in the last month – suggesting a pretty constant 3:1 bias:

This is a point that David Crystal makes in his Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation:

The forms of English spoken around the world often include traces of regional and/or dialectal morphology, phonology, lexis – all that good stuff – of the British-born speakers who emigrated hundreds of years ago.  As the note to that Crystal extract says:

This PPS has been for the most part a digression, so I'll wrench it back to my main point (about cultural  metaphors). It's not just Othello and race that is particularly relevant in the USA. Internecine conflict (that's Civil War in Newspeak) make all the "Wars of the Roses" plays apt. Besides, we are talking about  myriad-minded man (Coleridge I think, but showing off his Greek) so all Shakespeare's output is relevant. But OP makes it more so.

Update 2016.04.23.15:30 – Shakespearean PPPS

PPPS It is ironic that an article in today's Times, dealing with misattribution conspiracies, participated – in an off-hand and unknowing way – in a related misattribution. A caption to two pictures of people who've had Shakespeare's works attributed to them referred to THAT portrait of "Marlowe" (cropped so as to hide the writing that points the finger of blame).

The Pseudo-Marlowe portrait: 
a wish fulfilled

In an article with that title , published posthumously in The Letter (published annually by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge – No. 93) the late Professor Oliver Rackham wrote:

I'm tempted to observe, in the words of some Elizabethan hack

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

Update 2016.11.22.14:05 –  Added PPS

PPS Answers: TALLYMEN; OLIVE BRANCH

Smile when you say-that.

Why... is there a hyphen in the middle of the title of Liam Neeson’s new movie?

When I saw this I imagined it was a joke. There's a hyphen because either the scriptwriter or some publicist put it there. To quote President Bartlet, 'What's next?'

But no, the terrier-like writer had got her teeth into this non-issue (is that a nonissue?) and was intent on worrying it to death: she devoted to it another 500-600 words. Her penultimate paragraph was a gem (or maybe an antigem):

... I would make the argument that, regardless of its international pedigree, the movie should be called Nonstop. Non-Stop’s screenwriters are three Americans, one of its headliners (Julianne Moore) is American, and the film was shot primarily in New York (according to IMDb). Universal Pictures, the film’s wealthiest production company, is of course based in the States. Surely the country that pours the most money into a movie should get to determine how that movie’s title is spelled.

More here

(Make that spenlt....?)  And in her view the  answer to that rhetorical question is so unarguable that she doesn't even grace it with a "?" Well I don't find it that unarguable, but it occurs to me that someone could usefully read The Cherry Orchard on the subject of the value of culture and the matter of just what can be bought and sold.

There were two other posts that I wanted to comment on in this connexion (and I suspect this spelling may provoke an international incident; but MY house style requires it). I can't find them though, and didn't take notes. But I must get on..... Before which:

Notes from the word-face

I have the first tranche of the index (to #WVGTbook) ready to transfer to Sigil (as part of the process described here. But there is a good deal to be done before it sees the light of day. Broadly, I am using shades/colours to show half-a-dozen degrees of commonness, and I need to set up a <STYLE> for each one. This will make changing them a breeze (it says here – #readsUserGuide). I also need to link them to the rest of the text, something that I couldn't do with HoTMetaL Pro (my WYSIWYG HTML tool of choice). So don't hold your breath, but be assured that progress is being made.

b
Update 2014.03.10.21:20 – Typo fix. Spent passed muster a few hours ago, as it's just as annoying for some readers.

Update 2014.03.11.17:20 – Found one of those posts here
and I'll say more tomorrow.

<autobiographical_note>
I was reminded by Matt Damon saying the crucial word in the Monuments Men – which is why I have other things to be getting on with.
</autobiographical_note>

Update 2014.03.12.13:55 – Found the other one too, in spirit (no link):

The croissant post ends

Fowler... says that it’s alright to acknowledge "indebtedness to the French language" through "some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound." He means by this that English-speakers can allow themselves just a touch of Gaul: Belle-lett-ruh not belle-letters.

<rant theme="They just don't get it">
[NO NO NO  – Fowler didn't mean just that. You say it that way because the 'r' comes immediately after the 't'. To say Belle letters would just be WRONG. 'Bell letters' are things like C and G (if bells are named after musical notes)</rant>

[But I interrupted.] ...Perhaps, then, Fowler would condone kruh-san: no final T.

Although I suppose that’s an acceptable compromise, it’s one that—it must be said—doesn’t live up to New World ideals. This is America. This is a melting pot.

<rant theme="Cultural insensitivity">
[Huh. That old canard. It usually means something like 'Place where everybody coalesces into something that fits in with  MY culture.' Which reminds me of the other post I meant to write about. I still can't find it. But it was the story of a Redneck complaining at a foreign language-speaker (who had been on the phone, speaking unintelligibly): 'If you want to speak Mexican, go home to Mexico.' The reply was: 'I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English go home to England.'
</rant>

[There, I've done it again] ...In this country we aim to fully integrate our immigrants instead of creating a permanent alienated class. Let’s not ghettoize pastries of French origin, let’s Americanize them. We accepted the restaurant with open arms. We should give croissants the same treatment.

More here

'We' accepted restaurant with open arms in the late 18th/early 19th century. We accepted croissant a century later.

<autobiographical_note>
Until MrsK put her foot down, I used to keep old editions of dictionaries, so that I could keep an eye on usages like hyphens in composite words (like 'non-stop') and the italicization (etc) of foreign borrowings. Misleadingly for the hen, which is brown, the word 'blackbird' started life as 'black bird' and then became 'black-bird' before becoming completely agglutinated into one word.

From memory, the 5th edition of COED dropped the italicization of 'rôle' but kept the circumflex. The circumflex was an optional variant in the 6th edition. but has now disappeared without  trace. I haven't checked (but will) – and I expect to find that 'restaurant' has lost its italics but croissant hasn't yet†.

And on the subject of croissants, I think it was my late lamented mentor Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim) who attributed its invention to a Parisian patissier, in celebration of a French victory over the Ottomans. I believe some spoilsport has since disproved this story, but se non è vero, è ben trovato.
</autobiographical_note>

It takes time for foreign borrowings to assimilate. Stick around.

Update 2014.03.12.16:55 – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2014.03.13.15:55 – Added  this note:

†The actual story is rather different. The latest edition of COED doesn't use italics to indicate the degrees of relative  naturalization of the two words. It uses IPA symbols (which I wish some other dictionaries did: what does kruh-san MEAN FFS  – apart, of course from 'You know, like all proper Americans say, duh!)? 'Restaurant' has /rɒnt/, fully anglicized, without a nasalized 'o', but with a t (not present, according to the article, in American English).  'Croissant' has the French vowel [ɔ̃] [excuse the transcription: it was either that or  'ɔ with a ~' NOW FIXED], and no t.




Update 2014.05.01.14:15 – Added  this PS to that note  (†), and updated footer:
PS I've just remembered my first introduction to the IPA in a second-year French lesson: 'ɔ with a ~' would be wrong anyway. The crucial mnemonic is sans son sang: they aren't homophones – and croissant uses the sound used in the 1st and 3rd word (not the 'ɔ with a ~ ɔ̃' proposed by COED, but ã).

Update 2014.10.10.10:35 – Added  this PPS:
PPS
In further hyphen-related news, I've just found this undeveloped stub of a blogpost, started and discarded many moons ago:

My 2011 Christmas stocking contained a DVD  that I imagine the donors will be aghast to learn had the damning endorsement 'laugh-out [sic] loud'. What can  the copy-writer have had in mind with that hyphen? Maybe it was the typesetter (if such a person exists in the world of DVD covers) enforcing, mindlessly, a house style that said 'words that combine a verb with a preposition should be hyphenated'. Perhaps a 'laugh-out', in this hypothetical person's mind, was a bit like a blow-out, but with uncontained laughter rather than food.

That's a blow-out in the Grande Bouffe sense, of course – a feast that led to ruptured guts (like a blow-out in the motor-tyre sense) would not be funny. Well, not so as to make one laugh, out-loud or otherwise.

Update 2014.10.10.11:55 –  Fix in green

Update 2016.08.11.12:55 –  Typo fix (and deleted outdated footer).

Local colour

A radio programme last night that mentioned Bert Jansch reminded me of the song Strollin' down the highway, which Jansch wrote with hitch-hiking in France in mind. One of the verses is about reasons that drivers have for not stopping (or indeed for speeding up):

The cars won't stop for no-one
They don't think you're just a rollin' bum
They think you're an OAS spy
Gonna shoot them as they go by
No the cars won't stop, won't stop for no-one

Jansch wrote it in the mid-late fifties (one could check in a discography, but I'm on a short fuse  – preparing for the WCS tour starting tomorrow); the reference to the OAS suggests it was some time between 1954 and 1962.

But that 'OAS' has gone the way of much local colour. Do a Google search for They think you're an OAS spy, Jansch  and you get 'about 4,650' results‘; search for They think that you're a spy, Jansch  and you get 'about 50,800' – almost 11 times as many^††.

I enjoy such quirkiness. The Guys and Dolls score is peppered with bits of local colour: 'Take back your mink,' sings Adelaide, 'And go Hollanderize it for somebody else.' A guy in the Fugue for Tin Horns 'reeks of Vitalis and Barbasol'.

But references to context-specific things like this seldom survive for long. Though I have heard Bert Jansch more than once, I never heard him sing Strollin' down the highway but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he himself suppressed the 'OAS' reference in later covers. And sometimes it's the fault of the censors. [2018 clarification: In West Side  Story] Anita's

He'll come home hot and tired
So what?
No matter if he's tired
So long as he's hot
Tonight

in the Broadway show became the rather wimpish '...Poor dear/..../So long as he's here' for the film (or maybe before that, for the original cast recording).

OK, that's not a trade name. but it's similar in that it's Bowdlerized. This often happens with film musicals. In Easter Parade,

On the Avenue, Fifth Avenue
The photographers will snap us
And you'll find that you're in Rotogravure

becomes the rather insipid '...And then you'll be seen in the smart magazines', because some spineless backer^† wondered whether people would need an explanation of Rotogravure without a footnote. DUH!  Long live footnotes – life's full of the things.

<afterthought>
And while we're on the subject of musicals, and changes made by spineless backers, in the early 1940s Lorenz Hart wrote

We'll have Manhattan
the Bronx and Staten Island too...

And South Pacific
Is a terrific show they say...

with that brilliant internal rhyme. Cue the spineless backer about ten years later: 'But that's so Last Decade. We need to mention some more recent show.'

So was born the insipid

And My Fair Lady
They say is a terrific show

 (in which the word 'terrific' is a sad fossil, giving a clue to the original rhyme-scheme.)

</afterthought>

But there's packing to be done. I'll be writing again next week. And in the meantime you can – if you get a wiggle on – download the freeby (and get reviewing, perhaps...?) [2018  update: A bit late for this!😕]
b
Update 2013.07.19.10:30
^†PS 'spineless backers' – I wonder if the oxymoron was entirely accidental or whether a subconscious jester was at work.

Update 2013.09.13.11:15
PPS I've just thought of another example, from the António Carlos Jobim song Desafinado. [I don't know what happens to it in the 'translation', but as even the title is wrong (off-key doesn't mean out of tune) I doubt it]‡:

Fotografei você na minha Rolleiflex
Revelou-se a sua enorme ingratidão

‡PPS  Oh Lor'. The good news is that it has kept the Rolleiflex. The bad news is that it has introduced an irrelevant bit of cleverness:

I took your picture with my trusty         Rolleiflex
And now all I have developed is a complex

Why can't translators just GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?

<afterthought>
The original, after that 'Rolleiflex' line, has Revelou-se a sua enorme ingratidão. I wonder if in Jobim's mind there was the idea of developing a photograph – in a tray of whatever chemicals they use – with the image in the photograph slowly revelando-se. I'm not sure if the Portuguese would accommodate this nuance. If so – accidentally, I'm sure – the translator stumbled on a deeper truth. The enorme ingratidão became apparent slowly but surely, like a developing photograph.
</afterthought>

Update 2013.09.15.17:50 – added this PPPS:

^†† PPPS
I don't have an intimate knowledge of Google's search algorithms, but I suspect the larger number includes all the hits noted for the smaller number. But even allowing for this double-counting, the version without OAS is about 10 times as common.

Update 2018.04.06.11:30 – Various format  tweaks and temporal clarifications.

Anglocentrism gone mad

Today's post is based on an article in The Times a few Saturdays ago, which I can't link to without involving you in the 'To pay or not to pay?' debate. And you know how I feel about paywalls. It is an Opinion piece about the loss of languages.^††

English is not the centre of the universe, though the writer of this article seems to think otherwise. The basis of what he says is right and lamentable, and the article is perhaps laudable for saying it. Language is a key to the way we think, and every lost language is a lost key [that's me, not him, in case you're thinking of publishing The Wit And Wisdom of Bob Knowles]:

...[W]hen a native language dies, a lot of other things disappear too [ed: a bit like saving a species saving a whole ecosystem...] . Place names and family names become inexplicable. Local traditions vanish because people no longer have the words to describe  their customs. The names of plants, birds or animals unique to a particular region go too – so the natural world has to be re-catalogued all over again in incongruous Latin or English.... Let your native language die and part of you dies with it.

He might have said, I've just thought,  'Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.'

So far so true, so lamentable in content, and so laudable as journalism (if not brilliantly written); is inexplicable the right word? Yes, a linguist might explain a toponym, but what matters is that it has become meaningless – it's explicable all right, given a footnote or two. And why does anything have to be 're-catalogued all over again' (which is a bit like 'déjà vu all over again')? And is Latin's incongruity to the point?

The writer has a strange attitude to Latin in other ways:

,,, [W]e owe the glorious multiplicity of English to the mingling and mangling of Latin with all those tribal tongues. [ed He has mentioned the extinction of 'many Germanic and Celtic languages' by Latin.]

 WTF? We owe the glorious – erm... something ('multiplicity' is surely not the word: 'multifariousness' perhaps) – to a lot more than the naïve equation  

Latin + tribal tongues [whatever-the-hell THEY are] = English. 

And what does this Little Englander think Latin did throughout the rest of Europe? French, Provençal (+ N dialects, where N is a large number) Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian... need I go on?

Well I shan't. #WVGTbook calls.

b
Update 2013.06.19.18:20
PS And I'm sorry, I recognize the difficulties of verse translation, believe me, but there's a time and place for it. That place is not in the closing lines of a piece on the loss of languages – particularly when the column-width makes it impossible to format it as verse: when there's no such consciousness (this is verse, so expect a dodgy translation). For the record, I'm not a speaker of Guernésias, but I'm pretty sure (OK, absolutely certain) that these words –

Que l'lingo  seit bouan ou mauvais
J'pâlron [ed. sic  –  looks ver-r-r-ry suspect to me] coum' nou pâlait  [ed. sic –  those  verb inflexions look REALLY odd†] autefais.

– don't mean

Whether the lingo be good or bad
I'm going to speak like dear old dad.

No 'dad', no 'dear', no 'old'.

Update 2013.06.19.22:40 Added this footnote: 

† And here's why, if you really want to know. There are systematic features of Latin-derived verb endings. There are in some cases exceptions, but they tend to be noted in philology texts; examples from minority languages are  the stock-in-trade of philology – I explained here how and why I know a single word of Gascon. If there were a language that had -ron as the first person singular in the future form of a first conjugation verb (-er verbs in French, -ar verbs in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and so on‡) I'd very probably have heard of it. 'Nou' looks like we, which would make the ending -ait first person plural – which I'd very probably have heard of.  If one language had both oddities....

Update 2013.06.20.17:10 Added this meta-footnote: 


‡ And you at the back, yes you, the smart-arse who's thinking 'First conjugation? The Latin for TALK isn't first conjugation.  It's the semi-deponent loqui [whence 'loquacious'].'  The verb I'm talking about is the Vulgar Latin PARABOLARE [whence parler,  parlare, falar... etc (presumably also the Guernésias pâler {in which the infinitive ending is a guess})] Phew, three levels of parenthesis in a meta-footnote. This is navel-gazing of the first order.

Update 2013.06.21.09:45 Added this PS:
Yesterday's copy of The Times reported on an event that is tangentially relevant to the issue of the loss of minority languages – it was a local cricket match abandoned  because one side was 'gaining an advantage in an ungentlemanly way' by speaking Welsh.'  It couldn't be, I wonder, that the English-only-speaking side were losing hand over fist, and wanted a way to save face...?

The story had a fairly obvious filler in the form of a jokey translation into 'Welsh' [I'm always dubious about this sort of thing] of cricket-related terms.  One that struck me was 'Win the Ashes', which struck me at the time as a suitable name for the undertaker at Llaregub – a friend of Dai Bread (GEDDIT?) There's a reason why throwaway lines are called that.

Update 2015.07.08.12.30 – Added this note

^††
I've found the article on a site devoted to another minority language: Manx.

Update 2017.09.26.10.05 – Brushed up, and deleted old footer.