The War Against Error, Take 2

Not too much of note happened in the last week of November 2015. Infoplease defines it with its two termini : the downing of the Russian aircraft in Turkey on the 24^th  and the beginning of the Climate Talks on the 30^th (both of which may come to generate much of import in the future (the latter for good and the former for ill) – but in between  the world news cupboard was bare. So the Independent published a strange filler:

The 58 most commonly misused words and phrases

(58; not a solecism more, not a solecism FEWER, as Jeffrey Archer might have observed.)

The piece starts out promising to be a review of  Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style:

The book is like a modern version of Strunk and White's classic "The Elements of Style," but one based on linguistics and updated for the 21st century.

Hmm. I'm not convinced by this use of linguistics as if it were some kind of magic added ingredient – Now with added Linguistics, they say, much as the makers of Pedigree Chum used to say Enriched with nourishing marrow-bone jelly in the '60s (not sure why that illustration swam up from the mental depths). Writing a style guide using insights provided by a study of modern linguistics (not "based on linguistics" whatever that means) is a good idea. I don‘t think "like ...Strunk and White..., but ... based on linguistics" quite does justice to the idea.

But the last six words of this sentence (a paragraph later) let the cat out of the bag (revealing it to be a pig in a poke...? a mixed metaphor too far, perhaps):

We've highlighted the most common mistakes according to Pinker using examples directly from his book along with some of our own.

As a result, it's impossible to identify the source of some of the slips (many of which I suspect aren't Pinker's, although I detect in some of his preferences that linguistic conservatism common in countries with a history of British colonialism: Canada, USA, Australia, India...).

You might be shocked by how many words you've been very slightly misusing.

it warns in the sub-headline. Well, no and no. I first discussed such nostrums here. More recently I wrote this. But this topic seemed worth yet another visit.

There is, in this list, a clutch of the Usual Suspects disinterested/uninterested, hung/hanged...

<autobiographical_note>
which I can never read without hearing, in my mind's ear,  Rex Harrison's

By rights he should be taken out and hung

For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

in the soundtrack recording of My Fair Lady. Oh how we larfed.
</autobiographical_note>

... depreciate/deprecate, flaunt/flout, irregardless, practical/practicable, proscribe/prescribe, protagonist/proponent, unexceptional/unexceptionable, effect/affect (which I looked at a couple of years ago in a post entitled "Enother old favourite"}, lie/lay...   AHA

<eureka certainty="iffy">
Perhaps alphabetization/lack thereof in  the Independent's list is a clue to the provenance of different items: Pinker's are alphabetical and the Indy threw in a few at the end to make it up to a round ... hmm, not so much...58.
</eureka>

But there are odd omissions and strange choices, identifying a problem area but citing an uncommon  symptom – credulous, for example, rather than credible whereas the chief solecism I've met is incredulous/incredible (which aren't mentioned). BNC finds 35 cases of credulous and 428 of credible but 171 of incredulous and 1174 of incredible. OK, a total of 1345 instances of incredulous/incredible don't imply that many instances of confusion, but they far outweigh those for credulous/credible (3:1) – that's three times more occasions of sin (as my RE teacher would have said).

The fatal inter/intern confusion

And has anyone ever used urban myth to refer to someone like Al Capone,  confused meretricious with meritorious, or used New Age to mean futuristic? Does anyone confuse averse/adverse, inter/intern...? Maybe they do in Canada.

Also, there are assertions of "mistakes" that aren't mistaken, as for example:

Cliché  is a noun and is not an adjective

OK, some people believe that; British English dictionaries assert it. But Merriam-Websters, for example, accepts it as either a noun or an adjective. I suspect the Indy's simple (and simplistic...

<linguistic_mechanism>
Incidentally, this is how these once-decried (first deprecated, then depreciated, and ultimately accepted as standard) confusions commonly bear fruit. Cases arise where either is acceptable; and the process grinds on. And not just with words; also with grammatical forms. Guy Deutscher, recounts in The Unfolding of Language how the 'going to' future arose from usages that referred to both travel and futurity:  'they are going to see him'. More of this in an update...
</linguistic_mechanism>

 ...) "A not B" does not reflect Pinker's careful academic aloofness. I suspect that the careful avoidance of etyma (who could define "meretricious" without referring to ladies of the night?) derives from Pinker's studious avoidance of the Etymological Fallacy – discussed in several Harmless Drudgery posts. This "A not B" approach reflects that of the Reichenau Glossary, discussed here: VESPERTILIONES was right; CALVAS SORICES wrong. But, irregardless, a French bat is a chauve-souris. 

So I must read Pinker's book; surely the Indy's howler-ridden piece can't do justice to it?  Who knows what Santa may bring?

b

PS And here are a couple of clues:

Profoundly disappointing: baby's male – begone! (7)
Parental – sort of care before parturition. (8)

Update 2015.12.21.11.10  – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2015.12.22.11.50  – Added picture; really must get an artist 

Update 2016.04.06.17.25  – Added answer to 2nd clue (still working on the first...anyone?) and removed footer.

PS PRENATAL

Update 2016.07.30.12.15  – A couple of typo fixes. I STILL can't get that first clue. 

Sensing Style

Some time ago I wrote (here) about a review of Steven Pinmker's The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (another candidate for the pipe-dream entertained in this post).

<aforementioned_pipedream>  

<original subject="David Crystal, The Stories of English">
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.
</original> 

In the case of the Pinker book, a large section (about 30%, I'd guess, though the tabulated sections are interspersed with full text) is presented in four columns:

 Word/Usage  Preferred Usage  Problematic Usage  Comments/
                                                 discussion/                                                             advice

The printed width of the page, net of margins and inter-column spaces, is about 4 in / 10 cm.

<I_know_I_know> 
If I were showing off my (slight) understanding of book design  I'd be using the printer's measures of points and picas; but why send my readers off on a voyage of either confused ignorance or web searches?
</I_know_I_know> 

In the nature of things, the fourth column is the fullest. But with such a tiny column width (the columns are more-or-less evenly distributed) there is often a single word on a line, and the comment section continues its frantic okey-cokey for an inch or two (sometimes even more), accompanied to the left by three blank columns. The Sense of Style would be a good deal more stylish (not to say readable) if it were redesigned.
<aforementioned_pipedream> 

Steven Pinker's advice is generally sane:

In considering questions of usage, a writer must critically evaluate claims of correctness, discount the dubious ones, and make choices which inevitably trade off conflicting values

And sometimes his advice is amusingly pithy: "Look it up" he says (more than once, I think, but I didn't  take notes).

I have to admit that a number of issues I blamed on the Independent's review (which was a filler, topped up with a number of the reviewer's pet hates) – even one that I pooh-poohed in this cartoon...

...were Pinker's. In my defence, though, Pinker refers to the confusion of the participles (interred vs interned) and the review (I think – the original seems to have been truncated)  refers to the inter/intern pair.

I don't agree with everything Pinker says (and indeed there were bits of it that I didn't follow; I was  on holiday, and it isn't your typical holiday read). And sometimes his side-swipes are unargued and capricious: on presently (used to mean now) he writes "About half the Usage Panel [of the American Heritage Dictionary] reject it, but for no good reason". I suspect that he himself accepts it (and it seems to me possible that he rounded up that "about half").

And sometimes he glosses over an interesting issue: of  flaunt/flout he writes

A malaprop based on the similar sound and spelling, together with the shared meaning "brazenly". 

Hmm???. What is shared is part of their meaning, an aspect of it. If they shared the meaning they'd be synonyms (which they're not, as Pinker obviously knows). Initial fl- is a phonesthetic marker. There is a family of fl- words that have to do with flamboyance of movement or something else. They share not a meaning but an aspect of their meaning, and flaunt and flout just happen to be most readily confused:  flounce,  flip,  flop, maybe even  fly,  flame  flamboyant... But phonæsthesia (the way sounds suggest things,  the basis of onomatopœia) might not fit in the tiny column width; so Pimker has to cut corners. (Seriously, I think he sometimes trivializes an argument or misses a trick just because of that pesky column width.)

Generally, though, the book is worth  reading (and referring to).

But the garden calls.

b

Update: 2018.07.18.08.45 – Added two words (underlined) to ante-pre-penultimate para; I had been making the same mistake as the original reviewer of Pinker's book: "Now with added Linguistics". In my case the added ingredient was phonesthetics.

Numbers

Time for another of my periodical looks at Harmless Drudgery‘s vital statistics.
In  Oct 2016 I wrote of the previous 2 years and 3 months:

It would be unrealistic, I think, to expect a similar near-doubling readership over the coming 9 quarters;  and, besides, it takes quite a bit of (writing) effort to maintain interest – which is at odds with the original purpose of the blog [which, longer-term visitors will know, was to support my other writing efforts].

In April 2015, in a PS to this) I had written of a record average of daily visits of 55. Well, 55 schmifty-five. The average for this month so far is about four times as much – over 200. The trend started about Christmas 2016, followed by another up-tick at Easter 2017, leading me to think that maybe my key demographic was teachers, who saved their recreational blog-reading for the school holidays, but page visits in May are already (after about two-thirds of the month) almost as high as the total for April (5,147).

HD stats, courtesy of Blogger

And while we're on the subject of numbers, I have long felt something that grates on my ear as "just American"...

<digression>
(pace Susie Dent, whose Americanize!: Why the Americanisation of English Is a Good Thing on Radio 4 last Saturday neither was  particularly persuasive nor had to be; I don't need persuading. I prefer -ize myself where admissible – certainly NOT in the lamentable cases of *televize or *analyze, for example  And incidentally, I suppose the inconsistency of that programme's title [Americanize but Americanisation] was intentional)
</digression>

...needed further attention – preferably on the basis of numbers. My source as usual is the British National Corpus (BNC) and its much bigger and more recently updated transatlantic cousin the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). My first three searches seemed to confirm my prejudice:

BNC:

sooner rather than later (just click and sit back while BNC does its thing) 65
sooner than later (just click and sit back while BNC does its thing) 6 

COCA:

sooner than later (just click and sit back while COCA does its thing) 105.

QED. Sooner than later could be assigned, along with I could care less (and incidentally I don't buy Steven Pinker's irony argument – but I don't have time to trace the reference, given the length of the grass) to the Expressions that don't make sense in American English pile.

But COCA is more than five times the size of BNC, so I might have expected a frequency for the preferred form of more than 5 times 65 – well over 300. So I looked again in COCA.

sooner rather than later (just click and sit back while COCA does its thing) 486

So what was demonstratum was not what was demonstrandum. Based on those corpus figures, sooner rather than later is more than 10 times as commonly used by British English speakers/writers than sooner than later. But among American English speakers/writers the predominance is similar; just more less pronounced – less than half the ratio of sooner rather than later to sooner than later. And perhaps the preference is on the wane – taken up by a smaller proportion of linguistic ground-breakers on this side of the Atlantic; the sort of comparative-historical corpus query that could prove that though is beyond me.

Enough. Biomass destruction is the hors-d'œuvre of the day, and the mower awaits.

b

PS – a clue to be going on with:

• VIP? Mark; a nut, when crushed. (6,5)
  

Update: 2017.05.22.22:40 – Added PPS

PPS – Whoops; got the polarity of the comparison wrong, fixed in bold.

Update: 2017.05.26.14:10 – Added PPPS

PPPS – I said I'd write more about Americanisms. I find it hard to say anything new, because I've been fighting this prejudice for so long and in so many different forums.

<digression>
(And there's another one – pluralizing of words with a clear Latin provenance. I'm with Fowler on this one, as I've said before. He wrote:

 ...that all words not English in appearance are in English writing ugly and not pretty, and that they [HD: Latin plurals] are justified only (1) if they afford much the shortest or clearest, if not the only way to the meaning ... or (2) if they have some special appropriateness of association or allusion in the sentence they stand in.

A consequence of the practice of using English endings is that you avoid solecisms such as syllabi; incidentally, for what it's worth – not a lot for writers of English – the Latin plural of syllabus is syllabūs [or a u with some such diacritic – we didn't need them for the exam, so like any self-respecting school-child I ignored them.)
</digression>

A few years ago I wrote here:

...Less well-informed commentators go so far as to say - when asked the difference between authorise and authorize -

No difference at all ... only that americans spell it different cos they feel the need to be different . The correct spelling is with an -s-

Oh dear. In one such discussion I said

There's nothing unBritish about the spelling 'apologize'. It has been the house style of The Times for well over a hundred years, and is used by many large and influential publishers (Oxford University Press, for example). I'm tired of being accused of flirting with modernity and excessive American influence, just because I use a spelling that millions of British people use (so long as they haven't been got at by generations of school-teachers peddling misinformation).

That may have been true of The Times at the time of writing, but 'the times they are a-changin''. A few cases of '-ize' pass the scrutiny of the subs' eyes - especially when there is a strong etymological justification - as in the case of 'baptize' (where there is a zeta rather than a sigma in the original Greek); but fewer and fewer.

But to quote the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors

The first line is crucial:

WHERE verbs can be spelled with either an -ize or -ise ending...

American and British English speakers simply disagree over that can: not, say we, in a case like televise; to give it a z would be to suggest that there was the noun or adjective telev - and if you televized something you made it either more like one (in the case of the noun) or just more televvy (in the case of the adjective).

The rest, as Professor Brian Cox might say, is science (sic).

Progress with Unity (or was it Nancy?)

Wordwatch

I can date with some precision my first exposure to the horrid "going forward" (in the meaning from now on (which saves a few characters, saves one syllable, doubles the opportunities for sensible line-breaks – go-ing? for-ward? – and has the added advantage of NOT MAKING YOU SOUND LIKE A TOTAL WALLY).  I was reminded of this quite unexpectedly when I happened to see a flurry of tweets such as these:

Not being a close follower of a Presidential Election that's not going to take place for another nine months – we haven't reached Peak Bull$h*t  yet, not even close – it was news to me that she was even in the running for nomination (until she wasn't).

In September 2001 Ms Fiorina, in only her second year as CEO of HP (or "H-P" to use the rather quaint style favoured by the Wall Street Journal) made her play for Compaq (the shrimp that had engulfed the Bostonian lobster that I had started to work for in 1984, acquired by Compaq in 1998). A short time after her arrival in my world (probably in late 2001, or possibly early in 2002 – I have a feeling that she may have wished us well for the Holiday period, but I wouldn't swear to that memory) she spoke to her worldwide empire in a huge video conference. I was one of the few hundred employees crammed into the canteen at DEC Park – or the employee cafeteria at Worton Grange as we were corporately adjured to call it. But we were one little outpost; questions were phoned in from all over the world.

Revenons à nos moutons  – "going forward". In that video conference (a description that grossly overstates its interactivity – it was really a TV broadcast with a few carefully sanitized phoned questions tacked on at the end) Ms Fiorina outlined her view of HP's future (which didn't include the bit about her being kicked out in 2005), and during this rose-tinted vision she used the phrase going forward several times. The first time she used it –  although it was not difficult to interpret, because of English's (and most [if not all?] other natural languages') use of the space → time metaphor – it took a moment to sink in; had she really said that? Well, she had, and went on to do so several times more. Maybe it was current then in the American business world. But it is now, even in the UK.

I referred in my last paragraph to 'the space → time metaphor' . I think I've provided examples of this somewhere in my earlier posts. I'm sure I've come across it in works by David Crystal and Steven Pinker (not in collaboration [!]) But links to these will have to wait for an update 'for I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles...' (you get the idea).

b

Update 2016.02.16.15:55 – Added PS:

PS. Here are some of the links I promised.

The Pinker one is from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (edition-specific reference; other editions are available) p. 191 et passim:

The similarity between space and time is limpid enough  that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity  also shows up in everyday metaphors, where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time.

My post was about transport rather than space, though speed (space/time) is central to that idea. Here's a taste:

He [Ed: Brian Foster, in The Changing English Language] writes:

'Cavalcade', etymologically a procession  of horsemen, has given rise in American English to a series of words in which the -cade element denotes the idea of 'spectacular display', e.g. aquacade, musicade and motorcade. Of these only 'motorcade' has penetrated into British use.... It remains to be seen how productive this ending will be in Britain....

Well, he was writing in 1968 (or before), so I think we can stop holding our breath;  -cade's hopes of becoming a productive suffix in British English, can wave forlornly to that slow-moving motorcade, or cortège, that follows many a linguistic speculation like this.

But elsewhere automobile-based metaphors pervade the language. A person who is not at their best can be said to be 'not firing on all four [cylinders]'. Rather than rush you can 'put the brakes on' (or, with a nod to former times, you can 'hold your horses'). If you're in a hurry you either 'put the pedal to the metal' (which must come from American English, as the wordplay is better with an American accent) or 'step on it' or 'burn rubber'. The point where, for the walker 'the shoe pinches' is where 'the rubber meets the road'. And while we're on the subject of tyres, assessing the suitability of something in a desultory way, with no clear intention of buying it (either literally or figuratively) is 'kicking the tyres'. People who need to get moving should 'get their a$$ in gear' and someone who's making progress is 'going through the gears'.

I must have dreamt the Crystal quote, or – more probably – just can't find it. Anyway, the metaphor is clear and suggestive, or to use Pinker's word limpid, which I'll trump, if I may be so bold, with a word I've just come across: NITID. This word, defined by Collins as (poetic) bright; glistening deserves, I think, a new lease of life. The Collins Usage Trends graph shows this sad decline (meteoric, in the falling-rapidly sense). In the 18th century the word must have been on everyone's lips:

Where was I? Commonness. The future is in front of us; the past is behind us – everyone knows that. And I'll bet that no language teacher could ever have taught the past tense without pointing back over their shoulder. En seguida ['following'], sur-le-champs ['on the field' – hmm, not sure how that one works; perhaps it's the field of battle, where you have to make split-second decisions...], langsam ['lengthily', to mean 'slowly']... there must be hundreds (thousands?) more.

Update 2016.02.17.12:55 – Added PPS:

1965 coat of arms

PPS. I've just realized that my subject line (Progress with Unity...) makes little sense to anyone not having knowledge of my early drafts. The word progress suggested itself to me as a possible meaning for going forward – "as we  progress". Progress with Unity is the motto of the Borough of Ealing – "QUEEN OF THE SUBURBS" as  it was once known.

1902 coat of arms

In the '60s, with Ealing, Acton, and Southall conglomerated, the burghers of Ealing realized that they needed a new coat of arms; the old one, granted in 1902, was reworked. "The boring old elitist Latin obviously had to go – but hang on, what did it mean anyway?"

Coincidentally, it exemplifies that space/time metaphor this blog was looking  at earlier: "Look back [and] Look forward". "Well," said that burgher (talking in the Swinging Sixties) "Look back? Where's THAT at? But Look forward – that works."

So, ironically, the new motto does "Look back", in that it keeps the idea of looking forward from the 1902 version.

b

A brace of wuggen

This tweet caught my attention the other day:

 

And in that article I was particularly interested in this:

...dog is one of a number of English words for animals (all ending in –g) of obscure origin and without cognates in other European languages...; they include hog, stag, pig, and the second element of earwig.

(Read more here)

That 'include' represented for me a challenge; perhaps dag (a runt), shag (the bird that lays eggs inside a paper bag but famously ISN'T a cormorant), bug, and possibly even hag and old lag if the G-ending group extends to human animals: look for an update for news of further research.

<PS>

I haven't found this dag in any online dictionary. Maybe it's dialectal; it's the word behind Dick King-Smith's Daggie Dogfoot, so-called because he was a dag with a misshapen foot. And I should underline the uncertainty betokened by all those perhapses and possiblys. I'm pretty sure my hag speculation is wrong, for a start. The jury's out on the rest...

</PS>

Jean Berko Gleason is a distinguished psycholinguist – perhaps not a household name, though her brainchild, the 'Wug test', is perhaps better known (at least among people with an interest in linguistics). The 'Wug test' is a means of investigating the internal development in children of morphological rules.

Professor Berko Gleason (she now uses both names, though when she wrote the Wug article she was plain 'Berko') invented  a world inhabited by invented creatures; children were shown pictures, told that 'this sort of creature is a wug', and asked to identify groups of these creatures. English has lots of ways of pluralizing a noun – no change (sheep, fish...), change -us to -i (radius → radii...), add -en (ox → oxen [or do something else involving '-en' {child → children, brother →  brethren...}]), change -ex or -ix to -ices (matrix → matrices)^† etc, but by far the most common device is to add an s (though this simple idea hides several options [/s/ {rabbits}, /z/ {gardeners}, /ɪz/^‡ {radishes}]^‡‡. What is the word for 'more than one wug'? Wugs, of course, with /gz/.

As that article says:

A critical attribute of the test is that the "target" word be a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child will never have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which he has presumably has never heard) is wugs, has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals .

Wikipedia article. See Berko's 1958 article here.

A pseudoword , with no actual real-world reference.... And many of Berko's inventions do have no real-world reference:

(Excuse the PDF formatting glitch.)

But as a psycholinguist Berko would certainly have met the idea of phonesthesia (which I discussed here:

...I was listening the other day to John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff at Thirty, which included an interview with Steven Pinker. Pinker introduced the word – new to me and to John Lloyd (whose cv in Wikipedia for some reason omits reference to one of his earlier  professional productions, Paradise Mislaid [get it?]) (As it was one of the highlights of my misspent youth, I'd better get editing....) – Pinker introduced the word (I was saying) phonesthesia, more vulgarly known as 'sound symbolism'. Phonesthesia, says Pinker (the discussion of this feature lasts for a bit more than a minute, starting at 18'40") is 'the way that the sounds of words remind you of what they refer to'. And the example he uses is 'sn-' words - snout, snuff, sneer, sneeze, snooty.... - all which have something to do with noses.

)

I wonder whether Berko chose wug entirely at random, or whether she knew as a linguist that a monosyllable ending in g had a good chance of being an animal – or whether, as a native-speaker of English,  she just knew.

b

^† And sometimes this rule is nuanced by other considerations: some people (myself included) prefer to use  'indexes' for the plural of 'index' when it refers to the reference bit at the end of a book, and 'indices' for the plural of 'index' when it refers to ², ³, ⁴, etc.
^‡In some pronunciations /əz/. I'm not conscious of an accent that uses both variants to distinguish meaning, but I think I've heard accents that use both. Berko's 1958 article uses /əz/, which – I imagine – is the preferred variant in American English.
^‡‡No prizes for recognizing the Peter Rabbit reference, but a certain feeling of smugness would not be inappropriate.

Update 2014.07.01.16:25  – Added <PS>...</PS> section.

Update 2014.07.01.16:25  – Added ^‡ note.

Update 2021.06.06.10:25  – Deleted old footers

The bookcase has landed

The diary entry

Long before the date in 1951 when my mother, whom Saints preserve, wrote in her diary the less-than-flowery 'Robert^† was born', she had a corner bookcase. It had the characteristic of all such handed pieces of furniture (MrsK has inherited a chaise longue quite like it in this respect): it never fits. Or, more accurately, it fits perfectly very occasionally. It did in the first home I remember, where it housed a number of small-format books (the shelves are rather dinky) – notably a dictionary that would only fit diagonally (with a spine that reflected this mistreatment), a number of green Penguins, the Ogden Nash book I quoted from in an earlier post (I remember wondering what 'Thoughts Thought After a Bridge-Party' was about, although I enjoyed the rhyming of canteloupe' (whatever that was) with  'a lioness opening up an antelope'), and a book of comic verse that included a ballad starting: 

Prope ripam fluvii solus

A senex silently sat

Super capitum ecce his wig

Et wig super ecce his hat.

My big sister, who was just starting Latin at school, translated for me. It was not a very exciting story; it involved an old man sitting by a river wearing a wig and a hat. The first action was 'Tunc blew zephyrus...'; and, to cut a long story short, everything ended up in the water; and the moral was 'Mehercle, you're gratus to that'.

When we were divvying up her [my mother's] post-mortem chattels, it was decided that I should have the bookcase. But, as I said, it didn't fit in most places; in particular, it didn't fit in the life of a young man in his thirties. But last month it came home, as I'd finally found a room where it would fit, and my big brother, who'd been minding it for over thirty years, brought it back to what I like to think of as its home - the place where some of the contents I remember (small format, do not forget that, Best Beloved) were being kept.

The other books that had caught my young attention were a pair of slim volumes by Ivor Brown, called A Word in Your Ear and  Just Another Word, published in the early 1940s, and adhering to the Book Production War Economy Standard. They are charming compendiums of words that just happened to interest Mr Brown – published by Jonathan Cape, now swallowed up by Random House, who published them at a time of trial. (Incidentally, I think there may be a relation between troubled times and the publication of whimsical books like this;  Gallimaufry: A hodgepodge of our vanishing vocabulary was published in late 2006, when the capitalist boat was starting to rock, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language was published in late 2011, a little over a year after the onset of George Osborne's reign of terror, or as Wikipedia in its section on 2011 puts it 'Osborne's policies caused continuing concern as a series of bad data indicated the deteriorating state of the UK economy.'... Maybe there's a blog idea here... <thinks>). Ivor Brown's two gems  are now in the bookcase, in my study.

I was reminded of these books while I was listening the other day to John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff at Thirty, which included an interview with Steven Pinker. Pinker introduced the word – new to me and to John Lloyd (whose cv in Wikipedia for some reason omits reference to one of his earlier  professional productions, Paradise Mislaid [get it?]) (As it was one of the highlights of my misspent youth, I'd better get editing....) – Pinker introduced the word (I was saying) phonesthesia, more vulgarly known as 'sound symbolism'. Phonesthesia, says Pinker (the discussion of this feature lasts for a bit more than a minute, starting at 18'40") is 'the way that the sounds of words remind you of what they refer to'. And the example he uses is 'sn-' words - snout, snuff, sneer, sneeze, snooty.... - all which have something to do with noses.

Here's where Ivor Brown comes in:

...[W]hen the snob is spurning or rebuking his supposed inferiors, he conforms  to the habit of his first letters. Here is a catalogue of proud, contemptuous 'Sn's' – sneer, snub, snicker, sniff, sneap, snotty or snooty,  snub, snuffy. Sneap is the most dignified of these, a word of pedigree as well as pride. Falstaff used sneap for rebuff: 'I will not undergo this sneap without reply'....It is regrettable that snub should have grown so far in favour as to make us forgetful of sneap...Snirrup or snurp is (or was) a Northern term for turning up the nose.

As seun as she fund I depended on labour
She snirpt up her nose and nae mair leuked at me.

occurs in a Cumbrian ballad.

Just Another Word, sv SNEAP, SNOB, AND SNUB

When I first read this, I thought sn- words were unique in this quality, a belief that seemed to be confirmed when Steven Pinker gave this as an example (talking over 70 years later – which I thought was long enough for scholars to think up other examples). But he did give another one: cl- words often refer to gathering things together: clutch, clench, clasp, class, cling....; the same does not apply to all such words, though I suspect it's hard to clamber or climb without clutching something on the way. And, now I think of it, nonsense verse and other sorts of word play exploit phonesthesia: 'Oh frabjous day!' free and fruitful, marked by frantic celebration* – rather like what I feel about about the bookcase and its new-found and long-lost familiar contents, those two books..

b
† She had yet to learn that my name is 'Bob'.

Update 13.03.13:15.30: a few tweaks, and new TES stats
Update 04.04.13:12.20: * And joyous, of course. Note to self: never underestimate the intricacies of comic verse.

* Update 2013.04.05: It's here.

Update: 2013.10.02.16:05 – Footer updated
Update 2013.11.10.10:30 – Footer updated
Update 2014.10.05.14:30 – Footer updated again (but not yet with today's figures – naughty TES), and added this PS:
PS
Another common source of examples of phonesthesia is words that start st- : steady, sturdy, staunch, stalwart, stout, stolid, stanchion, staddle stone, staid, steadfast .... And, I suspect, stud – in the sexual sense if not the fixing. I was reminded of this in last night's Crimes of Passion, when Eje had been caught out in circumstances that could suggest straying from loyalty to his new, and extraordinarily (not to say implausibly) nosy wife Puck. The programme is subtitled, but I couldn't help taking in (although the nearest I know to Swedish is a smattering of German, Best Before November 1969) the Swedish word he used in his defence. This surprised me rather, as he seemed to be using a word cognate with stud. But no, he said stödjande [='supportive'] (I tested the subtitle against Google Translate.)

But the 'Google translate' test isn't really enough. When you translate, you have to do something about the imagery as well; I said a bit more about this here. An over-protective, interfering, fierce woman (xanthippean is the word  – which I didn't call out at the Wilde Theatre the other night (in response to a challenge to find a word beginning with X other than xylophone, X-ray and xenophobe [much to the relief, no doubt, of my companions but that's another story]) kept telling her daughter not to slouch. I think the subtitle said 'slump'  – not quite the right word. But then she said 'You look like a sack of flour' – not quite the right image. In this context (my father and his sister Katy were sticklers for deportment, in a gentle sort of way) the only simile I've heard is 'You look like a sack of potatoes'.

Update 2015.03.25.22:30 – Added picture of the diary mentioned in the first para.

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 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:  over 46,200 views  and over 6,225 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 nearly 2,350 views and 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.