Love in the time of corona

The big news today is that Mr T, the Neanderthal sporter of bling, is treading on peoples' toes Big Time. Trump's edit of his notes for this speech was reported in the Washington Post, with this photo of his notes:

His defence of this deliberate rabble-rousing was disingenuous and plumbed new depths of insensitivity. The World Health Organization's feelings  were made abundantly clear in this tweet:

I write abundantly not because I'm particularly partial to the cliché (if something is going to be clear in any way, the odds are strongly in favour of abundantly ...

 <COCA_NUMBERS>
Search for *ly clear in this corpus. abundantly is second only to perfectly.

Meanwhile, in this much smaller corpus, dedicated to British English, both  perfectly and

abundantly are deposed by a brand new number one – absolutely (which clings on to fifth place in COCA). "Go figure", as I gather they say in contemporary American. (In my teaching days I'd've called "abundantly clear"  a strong collocation).
</COCA_NUMBERS>

...as the adverb of choice) but because it has long been the WHO's position on the naming of viruses. Generally, it's unfair (and misleading) to name a virus after a place. The pandemic known commonly as Spanish flu came from everywhere but Spain (Africa, USA, France):

In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France; in Freetown, Sierra Leone; and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts. The Spanish flu also spread through Ireland, carried there by returning Irish soldiers. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship. 

wikipedia

It was an accident of non-alignment. Cases in Spain only got reported because they could be.  If only they'd had wartime censorship Spain might have avoided that stigma.

But is place relevant in the case of the Coronavirus? Tom Standage, in Go Figure reported (with no source, but quite plausibly) that a majority (6 in 10) of infections that affect humans started life in other species. (Wikipedia has an article on cross species transmission, which may well point to a source if you want to trawl though it.)

And an obvious source of cross species transmission is wet markets – where all manner of animals are thrown together  in painfully cramped conditions (a crate of chickens,  say,  piled next to a crate of piglets). Such markets aren't peculiar to China, though I suspect most take place in south-east Asia; with a fair few in South America and Africa – and chiefly in the developing world. Articles calling for such markets to be banned or suppressed in some way (like this one or this) are becoming more strident.

"But you can't ban them – they're part of our culture" cry the users. Well bad things need to be banned. And stigmatizing them is a good way of ensuring their demise. If it's a question of  weighing the health of billions of people (and, coincidentally, that of the world economy) against the way of life of a few million, I know where my money is.

Though I hate to appear to side with Mr T, I don't mind the virus being given a name that stigmatizes its source; not geographical, though. The "wet market  virus", perhaps.

But it's a lovely day. I shouldn't be cooped up in here...

b

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.

Let‘s get quizzical

You could do worse than to read this....(but that does not exclude the possibility of the writer‘s doing better). Shame. As so often,  the writer‘s heart is in the right place. I have said elsewhere that stuff that goes down well on the net...

<digression type="pps">
At the time of writing there are 31 generally approving comments.
</digression>

..., even when imperfect, is often enlightening (provided that one treats it like a gourmet rather than a gourmand).  For example, of one piece I said:

As I often find, blog posts can be worth reading – even though the writing sets my teeth on edge [and after this there's what I regard as a rather pleasing digression about Monteverdi, not included here but you may like to judge that pleasingness for yourself here].

The aforementioned post is a list of grammatical lapses to avoid. This sort of thing is a bit of a bugbear of mine (see here and here, for example), but this one isn't an out-and-out lip-curler. Also, the author had the luxury of a proof-reader, which exposes my own unaided effort to 'ovifacial disfigurement'; (OK – I risk getting egg on my face). It does, though, fail to pass muster in a number of respects (while generally offering good advice).

Here are a few nits:

Nit 1

Quite. I discussed this here

As I said there:

Ermm, up to a point. When I've heard it ["affect"" as a noun] used in real life

<digression theme="crossword_clue">
I'm a cold prat, mixed up and shunning daughter – suitable treatment for Lear? (10)
OK, this one calls for knowledge of a trade-name, so I'm giving the answer in a footnote.‡ [Citalopram]
</digression>

it has meant the ability to feel 'emotion or desire', or – as COD puts it – 'emotion or desire as influencing behaviour'

So it's a bit of a shame that, having got it right about each word being syntactically two-faced, it gives examples of only the more common uses, and gives a misleadingly curtailed definition for the noun 'affect'.

What‘s more, what has ‘desired‘ got to do with anything? Admittedly "desired effect" is a common collocation;  this search of BNC suggests that  if you say or write "desired" followed by  a noun there‘s a good chance that the noun will be "effect". Instances of "desired effect" outnumber the combined total of the next four most common collocations. But the desire of the ‘effecter‘ has only an incidental effect on the... erm... thing.  

Nit 2

Indeed. But again in the effort for brevity something's been left on the cutting room floor. 'A basis for comparison [sing/plur]' isn't really good enough. Criteria are a set of things (e.g. values) that form a basis for judgement. 

Speaking of which ("e.g.", that is)...

Nit 3

It is? Someone's been remembering their Latin lessons a bit over-enthusiastically; "That is." And the example given for 'i.e.' is just wrong.; i.e. doesn't mean 'As a result, or 'Consequently'. In an expression of the form "A i.e. B",  A and B have to be syntactically and/or semantically parallel; for example 

"... the design  came out differently than [...sorry about that – I‘m trying to be even-handed (using the original example) – although "differently than" sticks in my craw] his vision – i.e. the results did not reflect his intentions."

Nit 4

 

Yes; but 'to be certain of' is unfortunately ambiguous (do I mean 'unfortunately'  – or 'flamboyantly'?).

Nit 5

Yes; but it's a shame the writer missed my favoured 'loth' (mentioned here).  Maybe it's not an option for Americans (poor mites!); and of course the related and under-used 'nothing loth'.

Nit 6

Yes. My mnemonic is 'a pal is a person'. So what is the 'example' supposed to exemplify? It‘s OK – it exemplifies a possible use of the word. Possible – just not the one in question.

Nit 7

 

Up to a point. It rather depends on what your feelings are about defining and non-defining relative pronouns; or, rather, on what your chosen house style dictates. In some views either of these can be used of a person, 'who' in a non-defining clause and 'that' in a defining one. Not everyone has swallowed Strunk and White hook, line, and sinker (if that's this nostrum's source, as I suspect; whenever a native speaker of American English pontificates about grammar, S&W is the prime suspect in my view). Perhaps this is a British English thing – because of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer we're more tolerant of syntax that some regard as archaic. I‘m one of the people THAT [ahem] don't mind either way.

Anyway... Time's wingèd chariot  is, as ever, snapping at my heels.

b

PS – Having used the tag crossword clue to point to an old one, I feel I should...
Island clobbered Uncle Sam (9)

Update 2015.02.14.17:20 – Added afterthought in red.

Update 2015.02.15.11:55 – Added embedded PPS.

Update 2016.03.10.16:05 – Crossword answered, and deleted footer:

LAMPEDUSA

'Ah me' surplus...

... a gag that isn't original, but first saw the light nearly 50 years ago; and the one person who heard it  is sadly not around to complain about the repetition (not that she would have); RIP.

Operating system-wise, everything is fine. I am now a three-o/s user: Windows 7 on the PC, and two laptops – one Android and one Linux. In the fullness of time I shall be an Open Systems person.

But power-tool-wise things are neither hunky nor dory; and the villain of the piece is Wolf. I have been sold a pig in a poke.

<digression>
I should  have known; wolves and pigs are famous for their incompatibility.

But I'm the one who's doing the huffing and puffing.  

</digression>

The first warning was the one online review (among dozens of glowing ones) that warned about the power planer's cutter – for that is the power tool at issue – being skew-whiff (as was the replacement the maker sent).

But I ordered it anyway. Which is when the Ah-me surplus began mounting up. First of all, it had no User Guide enclosed. So I used my default medium:

To give Wolf their due, they responded promptly. I now have a PDF of what they call a manual and expect hardcopy in the post.

<rant>

As a reformed Technical Writer (well, retired actually –  although there‘s plenty of work out there, if only the makers of DIY stuff would WAKE UP) ...

<meta_rant>
and that's another thing: when you start a sentence 'As a ...' make the subject match up FFS.  A lot of hot air is wasted on the iniquity of the dangling participle. I try to avoid them, but they're often not crucial to a misreading. If someone says 'Walking across the playground the chemistry lab came into his view', that's a bit of a shame; but nobody in their right mind is going to envisage an ambulatory chemistry lab. But this 'As a...' issue matters. I just received mail from KDP about the New Deal VAT regulations. Naively, I thought it might clarify my tax liabilities. [Hollow laugh.]

 As a publisher with Kindle Direct Publishing, the European Union (EU) tax laws have changed regarding the taxation of digital products (including eBooks).

I wanted to know if I or Amazon was the publisher of  my stuff in the eyes of the EU. But could I hope for enlightenment from this  belated [it arrived the day after  the changes came into effect]  advisory? Could I bu@@ery?!  Do they not pay people to write this stuff?

</meta_rant>

...I am pained by standards of technical writing. My experience was mostly in the field of software, and mostly for System Managers rather than end users  – real-life punters, that is – but many of the issues are the same.

Lists, for example:

• not too long (about 7 items, plus or minus 2^† ideally). 
• made up of items that are syntactically parallel
• numbered if and only if there is a point to the numbering (for example, sequentiality); and if the sequence has more than 9 steps
  
  • Break it down into chunks.
  • Tell your manager – again – about writers needing to be involved in the design of the User Interface.
  )

There are exceptions of course. But this ‘Guide‘ (which should really be in Braille, for all the light it casts) breaks every guideline in the book. The items in some of its lists  – numbered or bulleted on what seems to be an entirely random basis – run well into double figures.

But regardless of its structure, its language is indescribable. Here are just three examples:

When  you are setting, installing or [sic, no comma] or putting the electrical tool down, make sure that you never touch the planing tool.

As it happens, after much thought, I have worked out what this means: 'the planing tool' at the end of the sentence is a component of 'the electrical tool'. But before I recognized the polysemy of 'tool' (its having more than one referent) I was potentially immobilized by the instruction to adjust the thing without touching it. It was like a parlour trick: 'Can you get the <thing-one>  into the <thing-two> without <apparently-necessary-action>?'

Check the machine, loose part [sic] and accessories for damage incurred during transportation.

This was in the 'Guide', so I couldn't of course, check before my tweet, but helpfully it (the 'set of operating instructions') included  the words 'set of operating instructions'. Come to think of it, it would make sense if there were two documents: a User Manual and Guide and a 'set of operating instructions' – with one pointing to the other as something whose presence was to be checked. But I've spent long enough trying to make sense of what they sent me. Besides, any possible second document would presumably be no less indecipherable than the one I've got (in fact I now have two copies: the promised  hardcopy arrived [just a photocopy of the PDF – so ... no  chance of clearer graphics]).

And 'damage incurred' is a pretty ... challenging? collocation. This BNC search shows no instance of incur among the collocates. Of course, BNC is pretty small. I tried to expand the search to the less authoritative but almost infinitely bigger Google, but the search for 'incur damage' (tout sec [=Fr for 'just that', roughly]) automagically picks up the perfectly acceptable 'incur damages'.

Use the extraction equipment for sucking out the wood shavings! [sic: {obviously quite important}]

What this means is anyone's guess.

</rant>

I could go on (and on [and on...]), But lexicography awaits.

b
^†This oddly specific number is no accident – see Miller (1956) as an academic might say. The rest of us can pick the bones out of Simple Psychology's explanation of short-term memory.

PS My 'image of the year so far' – only 7 days in, I know, but still – is Kipling's 'grinning like a coal-scuttle', which I heard this morning in BBC Radio 4's Just So Science (which I heard with much more appreciation than on my first reading [in short trousers...

<autobiographical_note>
and I can be sure about the trousers, Best Beloved, because I first read the Just So Stories when I was in the Cubs – for whom Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa et al (all with /ɑ:/ in the first syllable, IF you please, Walt) had special significance.

In fact, elements of the uniform referred to the Just So Stories; for example, the cap could be adorned with one or two stars, depending on satisfactory performance of various skills ...

  <digression>
 One of  those skills was Run with a message. I imagine the person who dreamed it up was thinking of  carrying messages on a battlefield. But the interpretation my Pack  used didn't involve running  at all (which suited me fine); a cub with a starless cap was given a message at the end of one meeting and  had to memorize it for the following week. To this day I can't hear the words 'St Malo' without completing  the fragment of travel brochure that they used: "charming walled city on the Emerald Coast of Brittany".  

</digression> 

– and the stars represented the opening eyes of a baby wolf cub. Being in the Cubs was an experience that I associate with cold knees...

<autobiographical_note>

] ...of the book).

Update 2015.01.07.16:00 – Added this note:

Brief Tale from the Word-Face

On my initial trawl through words that contain *al* I have reached a word whose inclusion in Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced learners  (that's the paperback rather than the online thing, but still...) raises an eyebrow; it is cytomegalovirus. Call me old-fashioned, limiting my students by unnecessarily low expectations, but I really don't expect a learner, however 'advanced', to need a specific definition of that sort of word. They may indeed come across it in what used to be called 'broadsheets' (before they all newspapers started trimming their sails) but they will by other elements of cultural education have learnt to break that daunting word down into  cyto- + megalo- + virus, (incidentally sorting out the stresses in that polysyllable), and supplying a specific dictionary entry just impedes that progress.



Update 2015.01.08.12:15 – Added this...

Conclusion

OK, the User Guide is rubbish; but that doesn't explain the whole problem. Bad documentation leads to bad practice. Given that the PDF was useless, I had to rely on the  tool itself. There was an image pointing to what seemed to be  a retaining nut. (On another tool I had, such a nut was a safety device: unless it was tightened, the motor wouldn't run. So I assumed that it was necessary to be in control of this nut-like thing.)

The image had two extremities; one was a spanner, the other was a finger pointing. I interpreted this – as did MrsK – as meaning ‘Use a spanner to undo this‘.  And the list of parts included the word wrench^†. If the User Guide itself had not been missing, I might have interpreted this image as meaning ‘Here is the spanner. Pull it out gently, using only your finger and thumb.‘

But I didn't. Assuming the promised wrench was missing too, I used a spanner, and tried to turn it. This picture shows the result:

Which I hope explains my rant: my lips are sealed, though, expletive-wise. [But really, they might as well ship these things  pre-broken  – it'd save a lot of bother.] 

Update 2015.01.09.14:10 – Added this note:

^†The actual words – in an apparently numbered list, which has  nothing but the number '1' 5 times – are 'tightening wrench', which suggests the question 'Is there another sort?'

Update 2015.01.10.15:00 – Added digression in blue.

Update 2015.01.22.23:15 – Added clarifications in maroon.

Update 2015.06.15.11:15 – Added wolf cub (that's what they were called then) picture

Update 2018.04.15.18:30 – Fixed a typo or two, and reworded (after I‘d worked out what I meant). I still think the  word sequence was OK in those instructions for writing lists, but sequentiality makes it easier to parse the parenthesis.

FOGgies (pt 4)

(The story so far: the FOGgies are annual awards for outstandingly bad writing. The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.

Waves of apathy for the FOGgies – reflected in the Blogger statistics – have persuaded me, rather against my will (as bad writing is a favourite topic of mine – indeed, I'm a practitioner^† when I take my eyes off the prize [communication]: effective writing takes time – to put an end to the FOGgies apart from an end-of-year summary. But before the book is closed here's just one more.)

The FOGgy for Hasty Sub-editing (or 'Can they really have meant to write that?) goes to The Times for:

[Banks ran out of dollars and ...] cracks in the Kremlin elite spilled into the open yesterday [...when a 20 per cent fall in the rouble caused panic in Moscow.]

The judges said

"This snippet (sandwiched between two related facts) was in the one-sentence opening paragraph in a piece on the front page, whose chief function  was to point to three other articles on inside pages of The Times of 17 December. The article was presumably cobbled together from several sources – at least two or three, probably half a dozen or so. First sentences in such articles are a common source of oddly mixed metaphors.

In this case, the bread of the sandwich is about the financial details. But one source, presumably, provided the social and organizational background – particularly the Kremlin elite . The tRoubles affected the structure of this elite, emphasizing pre-existing cracks in it (in the structure, not in the elite –  saying they're in the elite suggests that the Beautiful People have serious cosmetic problems). And the cracks didn't spill; whatever the structure of the elite was holding back, bottling up, or possibly hiding, is what 'spilled into the open'. But whereas that source –  with its discussion of the fabric/structure of the Kremlin elite, cracks in it, and what was behind them (waiting to  'spill out') – probably dealt with all this in several paragraphs, here it has to be distilled into a single clause. Individual words survive, but are shoved into uncomfortable collocations.

This sort of article isn't designed to convey much in the way of content, so the reader isn't seriously incommoded by cracks in the structure (not of the elite but of the sentence). When you think about it though, it is quite heroically mixed up; and the image of suppurating sores on the faces of oligarchs is distracting to say the least."

Tales from the word face: a New Hope

After a year's fallow period (which involved only a few months spent on When Vowels Get Together: The paperback and the occasional spasm of 'marketing') I'm now thinking about a companion-volume to Digraphs and Diphthongs. It will be another step in the When Vowels Get Together story; in fact it's made me realize that the 'Get Together' bit doesn't have to imply (as I at first intended) getting together with each other. So the When Vowels Get Together family has various potential members – vowels getting together with other vowels, vowels getting together with stops, with fricatives... . When I'm done, it could be roughly what I had in mind when I started on my Dictionary of Vowels and Their Sounds back in 2011 when I produced my entry for the ELTons 2012. The planned book (with a number of specimen chapters) was shortlisted –  as regular readers already know –  but did not win. (My '15 minutes of fame' [more like seconds] are at 19'17"- 19'30" of that video, or those with less time can scroll down to the foot of that page. ).

The first of these companion-volumes is going to deal with the sounds of vowels in conjunction with sonorants. These are listed here as /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /l/, /r/, /w/, and /j/; in fact, as that page is devoted to SAMPA (a non-IPA transcription system – which works, up to a point, for English while using the characters used on an old typewriter), the characters used there are not IPA symbols and the slashes are editorial (that is, my fault). But, apart from  /ŋ/, (which in SAMPA is 'N', and which, with mnemonic felicity, is known to the Windows Character Map as 'eng') all the characters work for an IPA transcription.

Previously, I mistakenly used the term  liquids, included /h/, and excluded the nasals. I may still include /h/, as – while that phoneme is correctly a fricative – an 'H' interacting with a vowel commonly does not represent a fricative. So I plan to stick with the title 'WHIRLYGIG', and I'll see what I can do about the nasals.

After Christmas I plan to publish a provisional schedule.

b

^†Somewhere in the HD annals (search for "Winston Churchill" if you want to track it down) I did a pastiche of bad writing and contrasted it with a memo from Churchill to the War Cabinet (about how he wanted communications to happen in the, if you'll excuse the expression, WC). It was extraordinarily easy to write, given my background in Technical Writing. The recipe was simple: think of what you have to do to enhance readability, and do the opposite.

PS: Your clue for today is: Response: corporal's first to be promoted in initiation. (8)

Update 2014.12.20.17.30  – Added this PPS:

PPS The mention (in that footnote – †) of Churchill is in this post.

---

 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 48,600 views  and nearly 6,550 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 2,400 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.

FOGgies (pt 2)

(The story so far: the FOGgies are annual awards for outstandingly bad writing. The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.)

The award for Most Misleading Use of Headlines goes to the Back Heathrow campaign for their outstanding headline:

HEATHROW EXPANSION TO SPELL THE END OF YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT?

Autumn 2014 flyer (I could probably find an online version on their website, but that'd make me an accessory after the fact)

The judges said

The multiple layers of misdirection in this headline are easy to overlook – which is what makes it so effective as a piece of propaganda. The use of the infinitive suggests that the expansion is a done deal. The word spell – oddly inappropriate when you think about it – has a subliminal implication of 'correctness'. Here are the first 4 results in a BNC search for spell followed by any adverb:

1		SPELL WHEN	8
2		SPELL CORRECTLY	6
3		SPELL WELL	3
4		SPELL PROPERLY	2

The most frequent collocation is a bit off-the-wall ,  but its score of 8 (in 5 of which 'spell' is a noun) is easily outweighed by the total of the next three. The word spell has the implication 'Here comes an expression of rightness' (the word 'right' comes 15th – you can run the search by clicking here). Admittedly, BNC is quite a small corpus; it only finds a total of 46 (and nos. 2-4 account for a quarter of those); but none of those is 'spell wrong/erroneously/mistakenly...'. That is not to say the collocation 'spell wrong' is impossible; it's just a good deal less common than 'spell right": Google has nearly 3 times as many "spell right"s ('About 209,000') as "spell wrong"s ('About 82,300').

The '?' at the end is a master-stroke; we suspect the answer's NO by the way, as it would be to other questions, such as – for example

BRANSON TO GIVE AWAY £5000 VIRGIN AIRWAYS VOUCHERS TO ALL-COMERS?

This unsupported claim is picked out in a sub-title, this time graced with quotation marks – implying that someone had actually voiced it (rather than that it sprang randomly from the fevered imagination of the 'writer'). And, as so often with such call-outs, it misquotes the text anyway, apart from giving it an unwarranted full-point:

And why would our young people want to be 'boosted'. Scrumping, I'll be bound – little hooligans.

Enough for today.

b


PS, but before I go, here's another clue:

Successful final break shredded root vegetable without a name? Not I!  (9)

Update: 2014.12.14.11:10 – Added explanatory bit at the beginning.

---

 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 48,200 views  and over 6,500 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 2,400 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.

A born-again nincompoop

<rant>
My choir's latest venture is – among other things – Howard Goodall's Eternal Light. So of late I've been browsing on YouTube for recordings. And, posted as a Comment after one, was this:

I can't say I'm sure exactly what having a problem with something involves. but here are a few issues that occur to me:

1. 'theological issue' (l.1)
   This is self-important twaddle
2. 'Goodall writing' (l.1) 
   erm, he didn't. There are disputes about who did  but Goodall is out of the frame – he wasn't even born when it first appeared in print (1938).
3. 'It ends with...' (l.1)
   The words in question come much earlier too,{Oops  – I misremembered.}
4. 'statement' (l.2)
   It's not, it's an imperative, although I have to admit that it is followed by a statement.
5. 'I understand' (l.2)
   If he'd closed the quote, I'd have had a chance of understanding too.
6. '...the nuance' (l.3)
   The mind boggles. He has misunderstood so much that the nature of this nuance is a matter of some interest.
7. 'portray' (l.3)
   This should win some sort of prize for oddness of collocation. How, I wonder, does one portray a nuance? Perhaps he's confused nuance with nuage, so that when writing that it 'fails miserably' he's suggesting that Goodall is no good at drawing clouds...
8. 'Jesus' (l.3)
   What? Who said anything about him? I think maybe he's confused it with that source of so much error, Holy Scripture. For the record, Jesus didn't have a grave. He had a tomb, (Sceptics would point out that it's easier to 'rise from the dead' if you're entombed rather than interred.)
9. 'PLEASE' (l.4)
   Lord deliver us from posturing like this! To whom is it addressed, for Heaven's sake? Does he have some psychotic fantasy of being forced by Someone to act against his will, so that he has to beg '...allow me to sing?' No doubt he hears voices too, poor chap. 
10. 'Most discerning christians [sic]...'  (l.5)
    While not being one myself, I know quite a few discerning Christians, none of whom would 'have a problem' with that (though they might wish that I hadn't put the boot in quite so hard – they'll forgive me though; that's what they do, after all!)
11. 'SHOULD' (l.5)
    In the words of Oliver Cromwell
    I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
    

But amid this detailed stuff  I'm in danger of missing the general point: this is a work of ART. If Goodall had written the text, he'd have been perfectly free to write anything that produced the musical effect he wanted. And while we're on the subject of oft-misinterpreted authoritative texts, didn't the Founding Fathers have something to say about this sort of freedom?

b

</rant>

Update 2014.10.02.22:45  –  retraction in the colour of shame.

Update 2014.10.09.12.45  –  added this PS
PS
Well, that was better out than in. But to remove the aftertaste of bile, here's a bit of levity –  a letter I've just sent to Faber Music (publishers of the piece). I imagine it won't get past the triage exercised by the unpaid intern who no doubt monitors the information@fabermusic.com mailbox.

My choir is singing this piece next month, and I'd like to report a typo that you could perhaps correct if there's a reprint.

In bar 3 of Factum est silentium the text has 'et vidi septem illos angelos' and the number is repeated correctly elsewhere. After the fourth angel has blown his trumpet, the mortals wonder what terrible things will happen at the sounds of the trumpets of the remaining 'trium illorum angelorum'. There's little doubt that the number is septem.

But in bar 6 it has 'Et septum angeli' as though St Jerome had a benign form of Tourette's Syndrome: 'And partition angels...'!

All the recorded versions I have heard repeat this error, and I regret that my own choir will follow suit: a rogue  u in a quaver at this speed isn't worth spending precious rehearsal time on. But I'd like somebody to get it right sometime. ['I have to believe...']†

b 

PS And in case anyone says 'This isn't Classical Latin. What does he know?', the answer is 'Quite a lot'. I studied Vulgar Latin (precisely the Right Sort of Latin, as the text comes from the Vulgate) at Cambridge (at the time, coincidentally, that Tom Faber was a Fellow of my college).

† This will certainly go over the head (between the legs?) of the intern. It's a reference to the text of the movement that follows Factum est silentium.

Update 2017.06.07.15:00  –  Removed old footer .

Moving heaven and earth

On Saturday week I shall, ojalá, deo volente, weather permitting, etc, be singing Verdi's Requiem [details of the concert here or, after the 29 June 2014, here], and in preparation for the concert I was browsing the text the other day. Here and there in the Latin, despite various teachers' efforts, there is a word or words that I don't understand; and I thought I would wile away [see here if you think that's a typo – the footnote, and the Update arising from it ] the time on a bus journey going through the translation.

But it turned out that that word (translation) calls for a pair of quotation marks (or perhaps that should be QUOTATION MARKS...? " "...? ) The publisher prints a note at the beginning:

...Permission must be obtained from the publishers if it is wished to perform the work in this new English translation..

Can any choir have wished this fate on themselves? And I imagine the publishers had (realistic?) visions of money changing hands; why else would they require formal written permission? The mind boggles.

Most such works have the self-awareness to call themselves 'singing versions' or something of the kind. The problems are obvious. Take the first word, 'Requiem'; three syllables. Most singing versions just have 'Re/qui/em' – good enough. But our man at Ricordi, Geoffrey Dunn, it says here, knows better: 'Rest and peace'. Hmm.

Rest and peace eternal give them, Lord Our God; and light for evermore shine down upon them. 

'...and light for evermore shine down...' Why, for heaven's sake? The Latin is a straightforward noun phrase: lux perpetua. Most singing versions (and indeed prose translations, as I remember from a misspent childhood) content themselves with 'perpetual light'. But not Mr Dunn; 'change for change's sake' is the order of the day; I imagine he would translate that as Ars gratia artis, though I'm not convinced that ars is the same thing as 'change'. Not content with a simple adjective for perpetua he contorts the original prayer into an inverted monstrosity featuring an adverbial phrase. Besides, he has removed the prayerful mystery of that perpetual light. Dunn's could be a torch powered by a nuclear reactor.

Elsewhere I have asked 'Why can't translators just GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?' Moving on to the Sanctus, not having time for a detailed critique:

Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua

Easy enough: 'Heaven and earth are full of your glory', right? (Or, if you must, 'Full are heaven and earth...') . But Mr Dunn needs something more. Another idea perhaps?

Earth and heaven are full of echoes to Thy glory

Once again, this meddlesome 'translator' has removed the prayerful mystery of the original. Gloria tua is an ablative – 'with your glory'. Mr Dunn has asked himself  'But what's making the noise?' Echoes of course!

But having got his teeth into a device (introducing new ideas^‡‡), he won't put it down. The second time those words appear, he goes one better:

Earth and heaven are full of echoes praising Thy glory

And what can have been his reason for swapping 'heaven' and 'earth' around? 'Heaven and earth' is what corpus linguists call a strong collocation... a very strong one. The British National Corpus has 66 cases of 'heaven and earth' and only 3 of the inverted form. The Corpus of Contemporary American shows slightly more tolerance for the inverted form (340 plays 26 in a much bigger corpus) but 'heaven and earth' is normal.

There are things native speakers just know about ordering words: native speakers of English just don't say 'the red big bus'. ESOL students learn a rule about this sort of thing, but native speakers don't have to. Most of them don't know it. Teachers of ESOL know it (or in some cases  [!] know where to find it). But when you change the order you are consciously doing something different: 'No, not the green one, the RED big bus'. (Even there it sounds pretty odd; I think I'd say '... the big RED bus'; but contrastive stress can change otherwise fixed word orders.)

So rather than dismiss Dunn's order out of hand, we should perhaps consider what sort of exception he's trying to make. Is the music involved, perhaps? Looking at the music introduces yet another variant (on pp. 143-4 of the Ricordi edition):

Heaven and earth fill with echoes,  praising Thy glory

And perhaps the music explains the change back to 'heaven and earth'. A lot is happening in the music here, and the 2nd choir don't have the words at all. But the sopranos in the 1st choir are singing a descending scale; for them  to sing 'Earth and heaven' would be plain contrary.

The idea of a tune influencing the words suggested to me the bass line on p. 207 of the Ricordi edition. Heaven and earth are involved here too, but not in the Pleni sunt coeli... context; it is the cosmic disaster (a pleasingly apt word, given the derivation from the Latin astrum [='star']^†) that strikes on the Dies irae. From coeli starting on a G (and flirting for a bar with notes as high as C) the basses drop down an octave for the word terra. And what does Mr Dunn's 'translation' do here?

When the high heav'n and all the earth are ... (all on the top note) and  
shaken (on the lower G)

This really is contrary. You've got a high word ('heaven') and a low word ('earth') simply  crying out to be reflected in the music. Verdi showed the way. But Mr Dunn knew better.

An observation about Fauré's word painting is at the back of my mind, but it'll have to stay there for the time being – an update, perhaps...? But for now I must get back to learning the music. Don't miss the concert!

b
Update 2014.06.22.16:45 – Added this note:

^†When Shakespeare called Romeo and Juliet 'star-crossed', I wonder whether he was tipping the wink to the more erudite in his audience: 'Here comes a disaster'.  The word désastre was only borrowed from French in the late-sixteenth century, so if so it was a pretty trendy bit of wordplay.

Update 2014.06.23.11:15 – Added this  PS:
PS to footnote: But maybe I'm overestimating the relevance of erudition in this context. At the time, probably the lowliest of the groundlings knew that astrology and disaster went hand in hand. The existence of the new borrowing  is not relevant (silly me).

Update 2014.06.25.15:00  – Added  this PPS:

On the subject of word painting (which I think is the expression for writing musically suggestive settings), as a foil to Verdi's setting of the words 'heaven and earth', this observation about Fauré's setting of those words occurred to me.

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth  seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes).

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of  Libera me.

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.'

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will^††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom.

<PREscript>
Well over a year ago I wrote  a piece about prescriptive grammars (the ones that say you're doing everything wrong and tell you how you should oughter).

In it I wrote a longish digression about what I was singing at the time. It seems rather (indeed, more...:-?) apt here, so here it is:

My choice of 'listen out' as an example [of a phrasal verb – see the full context here] is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem [and THIS season, Verdi's], which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano solo tune^‡ marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

Then the speaker thinks better of this impertinent fortissimo interruption, and repeats Exaudi  – but piano. The id then reasserts itself with the next word fortissimo: 'No I'm  not going to be quiet and reverential.' The internal dialogue between the super-ego and the id is reminiscent of Gollum's arguments with himself. 

^‡ ...Fauré made the elementary mistake of not making this a solo – though it is a sweet and angelic-sounding tune sung by the sopranos. Apologies for this lapse ( – he was only young! [not so young, I was thinking of his Cantique de Jean Racine, written while he was still at school])
</PREscript>

Update 2014.06.26.09:50 – Added gloss to Dum veneris, and typo fix.

Update 2014.06.27.11:25 – Added this note:

 ^††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

Update 2014.06.29.19:45 – Added this PPPS:
PPPS One last Geoffrey Dunn horror, but I don't have the text any more. Having written above about Exaudi (the bit in red) I was listening out (!) for the treatment of this verb. As I said, I don't have the text to hand, so I'm not sure of his word for latronem [= Sp: ladrón] in

Et latronem exaudisti

I'd've said something like 'and who heeded [see above for why it's not just 'heard'] the thief'. But our Geoffrey turns the syntax inside out and makes it 'and the robber won Thy pity'. Oh dear...

Update 2014.06.277.31.18:50 – Added this note:

 ^‡‡ On re-reading I see that he has form for this: in the first line of the piece he does it twice – Requiem → 'Rest and peace'; Domine → 'Lord Our God.

Update 2014.08.10.16:15 – Added this PPPPS:
I've run out of handy footnote symbols, so you'll have to do a bit of DIY to place this. It's 2 or 3  screens down (but YMMV), where I talk about 'the red big bus'. A recent Slate post addressed this point, in what it announces as

A long fascinating article—or is it a fascinating long article?

I  expect it is, though I confess I haven't read it carefully.