Benedicite

In a choral singer's life, the pronunciation  of Latin is bound to become an issue. People learn one way in school, and can't help being infected. Fortunately, in the Venn diagram of my life,  Church Latin (which I started to ... enunciate at the age of about 7, as described here), school Latin (there are several of course, but mine was Church-Latin-speaking), and the Latin used in the study of Romance Philology (Vulgar Latin), all coincided.

I can't claim to know the whole story, but there are at least four gross variants – old and new Classical systems, Church Latin, and Germanic or continental Latin; there are probably more. And these are further compounded by  national phonemic peculiarities (sounds that are excluded – made effectively unpronounceable – as a necessary part of the acquisition of a mother tongue) such as those I mentioned here.

I  discussed one of the many problems arising from this clash of pronunciation regimes here. But in this post I want to talk about an old system that has almost died out but was once widely taught both in the UK and of course in many schools around the world in the British Empire (ensuring that the colonies paid at least twice for the dubious accolade of the imposition of the Pax Britannica).

Ask the search engine of your choice about Benedicite and you will be told this:

If you're not a user of the IPA, I recommend pressing the little loudspeaker doofer (in your browser that is, not on my screen-capture).

Elsewhere I wrote:

<autobiographical note>
In a choir I used to sing in, there was a great kerfuffle about how one should pronounce Benedicite. It couldn't have mattered less, as it happens, since that word does not occur in the [Ed: English] text.  But in  Benjamin Britten's world (and particularly at the school he went to when he went there) the first "i" (but not the second) had this same /ɑɪ/ diphthong.

<PS date=2017>
Benedicite was just the name of a canticle he was familiar with in the Book of Common Prayer: "Bless ye the Lord".
</PS>

</autobiographical note>

The first i has the same /aɪ/  diphthong as the mori that ends that poem: as I said here (a post that unaccountably has attracted nearly 1 in 3 of all 100,000+ page visits that all HD posts have enjoyed over the last 5 years):

... in the school where Wilfrid Owen learnt his Latin, the last two lines rhymed...

<WHOOPS>
The words are "old lie/mori", but it is an internal rhyme, I now see, as "Dulce" doesn't – as I had thought – start the last line.
</WHOOPS>

...(and they may have scanned as well – I dunno; even  if they didn't they probably did in schoolboy-speak, where the stress  is often inverted in memorized (and drilled) Latin. Think of aMO aMAS aMAT..., whose actual stress [Ed: on the first syllable] is attested by most [if not all] Romance languages [aimer, amar, amare, etc. etc].)

(Naturally, if you know and remember and love the poem with the sound /'mɔ:ri:/ don't let  me interfere. In my house there are many mansions/let a thousand flowers bloom/etc.)

Many examples in legal Latin show a similar vowel sound: prima facie (/praɪmә feɪsi:/), decree nisi (/naɪsaɪ/).... The same system of diphthong vowel sounds accounts for habeas corpus (/heɪbiәs.../) among others (although later "corrections" may have been made, especially in parts of the world where the English legal system was adopted).

But I have promises to keep, and files [sic] to weed before I sleep.

b

PS: A few clues:

• Do about 50, not completely. (6)
• Used up exemplary piece, in which to be used no longer. (9)
• Publish electronic Bible version? (7)

Update: 2017.10.07.15:30 – Added PPS.

PPS Just heard one on the radio (a misquote, FWIW, but enough to remind me: anno domini (the second i with an /aɪ/ sound). In fact, this phrase may have been the catalyst for the misquote, now I think about it: it was "laudato domini" ( for "laudate dominum"): <some-latin-stuff>o <more-latin-stuff>i).

But laudato means "to|by|with|from the praised [one]"; and domini means "of the lord". Put them together and... well, I imagine a Latin scholar could find a context that they would fit in, but that ain't me, babe.

Update: 2017.10.29.17:30 – Added PPPS.

And another (recalled by a Radio 3 playing of I was glad: "Vivat Regina".

And those answers: PARTLY, DESUETUDE and EVULGATE. Sorry about the "in which", which I'm afraid seems to have been an accidental typo.

Update: 2017.12.09.12:45 – Added P⁴S.

Last one: ex gratia (/'greɪʃə/)

Update: 2018.02.19.11:30 – How many Ps for Pete's sake, and didn't he say...?

The ghost of  "Last One Yet-to-come": verbatim (/vɜ:'beɪtɪm/)

The price of education

... or rather the cost of its omission.

Some bumf has just plopped onto my doormat  (is any other verb possible, I wonder? – things might thud if they're particularly heavy, but otherwise plop it is)...

STOP PRESS: BNC and COCA checked

 Yes; they can fall, drop or land; 

and lie or be, of course,
but I was thinking particularly of falling. 

... listing donors  to college funds. There is a list showing percentage participation by year of matriculation whatever that is  – presumably percentage of matriculands giving, rather than the percentage (given by each year) of the total given (which, come to think of it, can't be so, as the average for all years since 1942 [before which there are a few odd nonagenarians] is 14%).

It would only be to be expected that there would be a bell curve, with earlier years tailing off and later years rampimg up (as graduates find either their Heavenly  reward or their feet, respectively).  My own year, 1971, does quite well: since then, only two years have exceeded its participation rate, and one has equalled it:

But something happened in 1998 (and I think the Chancellor of the Exchequer knows something about it: tuition fees). Since 1998 the average has fallen to single figures; graduates presumably think Pay more? I should cocoa. You've already had N thousand (where N is typically somewhere between 10 and 100 – at a guess; the NUS probabl;y has more exact figures). And that average is raised by the anomalous 2009, when the reported rate is (dubiously?) more than twice the mean.

Of course, this is a tiny sample, and says nothing  – prima facie – about state funding or its shortfall; but it strikes me, anecdotally, as at least suggestive.

<autobiographical_note theme="Primary School" relevance="tenuous">
In the mid-late '50s I met my father on his return from the 2nd Unit photography for No Time to Die. I remember the BOAC bag he was carrying  at Heathrow, where I met him, but not much else; I had just started school.  The film was released in 1958, so I expect the 2nd Unit work was finished in 1957, or even 1956. At the airport I met and shook hands with Bonar Colleano, reaching up from my height of about 4ft.

The cast and crew list at IMDB credits him as The Pole, which doesn't suggest immense stardom, but I was convinced he was (anachronistically*) a megastar and didn't hesitate to drop his name at school at the earliest opportunity. The first time, there was no sign of recognition. No accounting for the ignorance of SOME people, I thought, and went on to my next name-drop-ee. It took 4 or 5 such attempts for me to get the message that Mr Colleano's was not a name to conjure with.

<afterthought>
Perhaps, I have just thought (with the benefit of hind-sight and Wikipedia), that as many of my schoolfellows were Polish (my father had moved to Ealing because  of the film studios, but Ealing was also a magnet for Poles, because the local church had a "Polish Mass" even in those pre-vernacular-Mass ...

<background>
This is reminiscent of an issue I discussed a while ago here, explaining about the introduction of  the vernacular after the 2nd Ecumenical Council in 1966, but also discussing the inherent foreignness of familiar Church Latin texts spoken with foreign phonemes.
</background>

...days) maybe their parents sheltered their children from this portrayal of The Pole. More likely, though, he was just a bit-part player who nobody had heard of anyway.
</afterthought>

That list also contains the rather enigmatic (APSEUDONYMOUS?) credit

"Cyril J. Knowles

...

photography: second unit (as Cyril Knowles)"

</autobiographical_note>

Foggy Nomination

Regular readers may remember Foggies, my award for spectacularly bad writing. As I wrote here

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.

It goes to Michael Gove for his review of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny  in The Times of 25 February 2017. The whole thing is worth a read for its consummate display of self-serving doublethink (hoping to atone for his own craven kowtowing to The-Clown-With-The-Orange-Countenance) and obfuscation. But two notable "sentences" are these:

He compares Trump's behaviour at campaign rallies to the deployment of the SS and brackets Trump's stump speeches with the "shamanistic incantation" [quotes sic, but what does he mean ? Hitler's incantation, or the crowd's, or the crowd saying "Hitler"? – probably Hitler leading the crowd. but in what way is this comparable with deployment?] of Hitler. He also compares Trump's attitude to any opposition to Hitler's approach to critics and feelings of fear on the streets of the US today to totalitarian terror in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Phew. Fifty-seven words and but a single resting place for the weary parser. The last thirty-three-word string is a labyrinth of to's (nearly 1 every 7 words ' – sort that lot out). I finally worked out that the first comparison ends at critics, and the second is between the sadly unparallel feelings of fear and totalitarian terror (whatever THAT is); only the 3rd and 4th to are the comparison  sort. Now I'm  not a stickler for "compare... with" as some language Nazis are, but since Gove did use with in the first sentence, switching to to in the second is at best mindless elegant variation and at worst an unforgivable attempt to trip the reader up.

As Sheridan père (I think it was) said (and as I may have quoted before –it being a favourite of mine)

We write with ease to show our breeding

But easy writing's curs't hard reading.

Hmm... That's enough for now. I'd like to see how Gove's writing in this article measures up to his own prescriptions (as Education Minister). But that will have to wait for an update.

b

---

* Collins English Dictionary supplies this usage graph:

Crash--testing for dummies: hidden mesages

A little over a year ago I wrote,  in defence  of using an INTELLIGIBLE transcription system when writing about pronunciation, I ranted thus:

Excuse my use of IPA symbols...

<rant flame="simmer">
I have ranted about this before, somewhere  in the UsingEnglish forums, but I can't find where. So some readers may get a sense of déjà-lu  – but probably not. (And I did mean -lu.) Anyway, here I go again. 

When you know your audience (and that word is crucial  – when people can hear you) it's OK to say things like 'lear sounds like leer'. 'Sounds like' is meaningful only if there's a known sound to compare. But when you're writing – say, in an online forum – it's not so easy. What  if one of your readers has just learnt bear, pear, tear (NOT the lachrymal sort) or wear, so that the /eǝ/ sound is uppermost in their short-term memory of English sounds? You've told them that leer is pronounced  /leǝ/. 

Or suppose one of your readers mispronounces law as /lǝʊ/  –  a common enough mistake in an ESOL classroom   –  and you write that a word  'sounds like law'. Again, you've misinformed them. And I don't think that's too strong a word, at  least not in a language-teaching context.  If the teacher wants to communicate something, it's part of the job to make sure it's understood correctly. 

People complain about 'having to learn a whole new alphabet'. That's nonsense, particularly in the case of English  – which can be adequately transcribed using the letters of the alphabet (most with 'their own' sound – b ⇨ /b/, k ⇨ /k/, s ⇨ /s/, and so on) with a dozen or so new symbols). The system can be taught in a few lessons, makes dictionaries infinitely more informative, absorbing and rewarding, makes modelling and  correcting sounds easier and clearer, supports increased learner autonomy.... And yet many learners (and even quite a few teachers, to my utter bewilderment – as I can't conceive of learning a new language [except by total immersion] without using the IPA) resist the idea of learning/teaching IPA symbols. 

</rant>

And now the Mail has done it. Not that I'm surprised; I don't know of a more obscurantist publication. But it reminded me of  my ire. Unfortunately I failed to strike while the ire {SIC] was hot, and now the guilty party has covered his traces – a table that showed (?! perhaps show isn't quite the verb I'm looking for) how a word was pronounced in different regions, using a home-grown "system"  of phonetic transcription  based entirely on regular alphabetical characters (revealing, for the linguistically aware, more about the writer's accent than about the speakers').

I find it interesting how much a meaningless document can convey about the writer. A recent tweet alerted me to the latest parliamentary howler (the phrase crying out to Heaven for vengeance comes to mind from a God-fearing background, though I admit that an element of exaggeration may  have crept in there).  It is an opposition motion followed by a  hotch-potch of words masquerading as an "amendment" in the sense codicil that emasculates and sucks the life out of a document:

Exhibit A: the Motion

Exhibit B: the Amendment

Out of interest, I ran the text through the Text Analyser at Using English.com. Exhibit A shows the analysis of the original motion. Exhibit B is the analysis  of the amendment. They are broadly comparable – even to the word-count. They both have a preponderance of 2-, 3-, and 4-letter words; in fact the amendment has a slightly bigger proportion of them. But the amendment has a greater Lexical Density (defined in the tool's help  page in this way:

The lexical density of a text tries to measure the proportion of the content (lexical) words over the total words. Texts with a lower density are more easily understood.

). The two texts are equally easy to understand (? – I would suggest that the total lack of punctuation [57 words without so much as a comma.... Can they seriously expect anyone to make sense of that?] in the amendment makes it significantly harder to understand; in fact it seems to me almost impossible to even parse: "into which will take place" ...???) But when I asked 'Can they seriously expect anyone to make sense of that? ' I expect the answer was  

"NO, OF COURSE NOT.  
MAKING SENSE IS NOT THE POINT, SILLY.

WE ARE KICKING DUST
IN THE EYES OF THE OPPOSITION"

The importance of the amendment becomes more apparent when (as they will be when put to the House): the motion and the amendment become one text. The Fog Index nearly doubles.

This is no surprise, given that the Fog Index is defined like this: 

The Fog Index is a readability test designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. It uses the following formula:

Reading Level (Grade) = (Average No. of words in sentences + Percentage of words of three or more syllables) x 0.4

If Fog Index is so closely linked with sentence length, and you double the word count without adding any punctuation...

There's  more to be said about that amendment, but the final  crop of blackberries is waiting to be picked, and fruit crumble doesn't taste the same if your fingers aren't tingling with splinters (whatever's in the freezer. :-)

b

PS A couple of clues:
Turn winch to have a good chat. (7)
Catchphrase uttered softly and repeatedly: gin, perhaps. (7)

Update: 2017.01.06.16:10 – Added PPS

PPS –The answers: CHINWAG, MANTRAP

Making whey (with whetstones?)

Almost a year ago I wrote here about words making way for other words in dictionaries. My use of the evanescent word burgher ...

<digression>
whose evanescence...

<meta_digression>
longtime readers may remember that I wrote here about the inchoative infix -ISC- {with its legacy of  English words that contain the letters 'sc' and have something to do with a  beginning or gradual process}
</meta_digression>

...has been dragged out over more than a century
</digression>

... led me to think, not about words replacing others but words dying out while others become more popular – even though they're completely  unrelated.

<digression>
This happened in the case of let (meaning obstacle), because of a pun caused by the Great Vowel Shift (which led to the words for obstacle – as in without let or hindrance or a let in tennis...

<rantette>
... and gawd 'elp me I'll swing for that tennis commentator who insists on saying "let-cord" (which is, for the record, hyper-correct)...
</rantette>

... and (not because of the vowel this time, but because of RBP's careless conflation of the sounds [w] and [ʍ]* into a single /w/ phoneme) in the case of whet (meaning sharpen).  

* [ʍ] is the "whispered" /w/, sometimes represented  in print as hw – still apparent in the spelling "wh" (making the word whispered strangely appropriate). 

AND I'VE COLOURED IN THIS STACK OF DIGRESSIONS 

TO MAKE IT SLIGHTLY EASIER TO MAKE SENSE OF. 

</digression>

In that blog I wrote of  "the burghers of Ealing"  – which itself seemed rather strange.

<digression>
Incidentally, burghers collocates with the and of about 10 times more frequently than burgher, as this BNC search shows; and for some reason the burghers of Ealing seems much less resonant than the burghers of Hamelin.
</digression>

But while I was looking up the spelling here I glanced down out of interest at the Usage Trends – which made me wonder what occasioned the change. Was the relative neologism burger involved?

The word burger was shortened from hamburger in 1939 – that is, 1939 was the earliest attested usage; it was no doubt gathering a head of steam throughout the inter-war years.

Here is what Etymonline says (about hamburger, as burger just has a terse cross-reference):

hamburger (n.) 

1610s, Hamburger "native of Hamburg." Also used of ships from Hamburg. From 1838 as a type of excellent black grape indigenous to Tyrolia; 1857 as a variety of hen; the meat product so called from 1880 (as hamburg steak), named for the German city, though no certain connection has ever been put forth, and there may not be one unless it be that Hamburg was a major port of departure for German immigrants to United States. Meaning "a sandwich consisting of a bun and a patty of grilled hamburger meat" attested by 1909, short for hamburger sandwich (1902).

So in 1902 hamburger sandwich was attested in American English; and a few years later the unrelated [w e l l... the burg- part of it was, via the placename, but the concepts burger and burgher are unrelated] burgher started to dwindle in  popularity.

Started to dwindle? How do we know? Collins helpfully lets you specify different extents for a word's changing fortunes, and taking the word frequency back another two hundred years we see something of a roller-coaster. The general trend was up throughout those first two centuries, though with many ups and downs; and there was a marked peak at about the turn of the century. But the story has been one of fairly consistent decline throughout the twentieth century and beyond – which I think justifies my use of the word started.

Of course, many other things have changed – politics, various kinds of context... Besides, I am the last (excuse the hyperbole, maybe ante-pre-penultimate) to make the rookie mistake of confusing correlation with causality. And anyway, the slide in frequency was well under way before the abbreviation was coined.. Still, it all strikes me as rather THINGish.

b

Always mount a scratch monkey

Tales from the word-face

Today's subject line is the punchline of a joke (or maybe anecdote?) that I heard in the halcyon days of DEC (and there's no doubt a good reason for naming a particularly enjoyable  period after a kingfisher [for that is what a halcyon is]; but I don't have time for the resear... Heck, why not go mad?...

<digression>
halcyon days

noun

a period of peace and happiness; an idyllic time; also, a period of calm weather during the winter solstice
 

Word Origin

Greek Alkyone a legend of fourteen windless days

 ... says Dictionary . com, so it was the other way around I guess, the bird being named after such windless days – and in mid-winter, rather than those lazy crazy hazy days of summer.... But, hang on, the truth is rather more interesting:

halcyon (adj.)

"calm, quiet, peaceful," 1540s, in halcyon dayes (translating Latin alcyonei dies, Greek alkyonides hemerai), 14 days of calm weather at the winter solstice, when a mythical bird (also identified with the kingfisher) was said to breed in a nest floating on calm seas....

says Etymonline. Hmmm. For Further Study.... (as they used to say in the world of Nets-N-Comms standardization.
</digression>

I don't remember the joke, but I do remember it involved disaster recovery. Which has been on my mind since my little android thingy fell and broke its screen. That is, I was involved, but I didn't want it to fall; or break its screen for that matter.

But I had a day-old backup of my WVGTbk2 work, so I've only lost *il* words starting with s or the beginning of t. Not too bad really, and it's now all in the hands of the insurers. But normal service has taken a bit of a hit.

The silver-lining is that it's  forced me to start to get to grips with Linux.

bye for now.

Oh, and just because someone on Radio 4 this morning, talking about poetry,  provoked it...

<rant likelihood_of_deliverance_from_this_evil="none">
It's geneAlogy for Gad's sake. If you speak American English, you can stand down, as the American English /ɑ/ of anthropology is not unlike American English /æ/ of genealogy – not the British English /æ/, which is a whole nother thing. Sometimes my British English ear tells me they're identical. [I'm sure they're not, but the process of acquiring British English involves us in learning not to hear phonemic differences in languages that don't interest us {as speakers, that is, not scholars}])
</rant>

 b

PS A clutch of clues

• Look in the centre of Galway for a patch over the water. (8)    GALLOWAY
• Low centre of gravity takes cutting of holly. (4)                      VILE
• End of bow with misinformation about Resistance. (4)           FROG
• Musician, heathen (obvs.) (8)                                               PAGANINI
• Alteration embracing beginning and end of leptocephali,         ALLITERATION
  in the spirit of this PS. (12)

Update 2016.06.21.12:50 – Added answers in red and deleted footer (getting there, slowly)

Pet rocks and gonks

The new girl (ducking and covering here  )  on Woman‘s Hour  last Tuesday, interviewing the co-authors of The Hillary Doctrine...  discussing Hillary Clinton‘s success or otherwise in advancing the cause of women‘s rights in a context of international diplomacy, got  her wires crossed on the subject of pet rocks. At first she thought they were just rocks, and one  of her interviewees corrected her – "pet rocks" –  without noticing that the cultural reference had misfired. In  her summary after the interview she repeated the misunderstanding – easy  enough to do, given the almost unfathomable inexplicability of the phenomenon.

Pet rocks were the brain-child (which might be a bit of an over-statement – although the idea A fool and his money are soon parted has a certain weight –  of an American businessman:

Pet Rocks were a smooth stone from Mexico's Rosarito Beach.^[3] They were marketed like live pets, in custom cardboard boxes,^[3] complete with straw and breathing holes for the "animal."^[1] The fad lasted about six months, ending after a short increase in sales during the Christmas season of December 1975. Although by February 1976 they were discounted due to lower sales, Dahl [HD: the man responsible]  sold 1.5 million Pet Rocks for $4,^[3] and became a millionaire.^[4][5][6]... 

^{So says Wikipedia} 

A ‘pet rock' - like a Gonk, but less cuddly

It became fashionable in the late '70s to use this phenomenon as a way to disparage the efforts  of fellow-businessmen. If one Vice President felt that another Vice President  ...

<explanatory_note theme="separated by a common language"> 

(in the world of US business there are almost as many VPs as there are professors in the Groves of US Academe)  

</explanatory_note>

...was spending unwarranted amounts of money on a project that had no intrinsic worth but attracted attention and resources away from real business opportunities with a reasonable prospect of justifying the investment in them,  they would call it a pet-rock project ...

<digression> 

Come to think of it they would almost certainly have omitted the hyphen, to judge from this – but I‘m old-fashioned  enough to think it‘s worth making a distinction between a compound noun and the attributive adjective formed from it.

</digression>

This usage – of course – leaked into business jargon throughout the world. I first heard it in the mid-'80s, in the mouth of (oh yes) a ‘VP‘, who flew over to  inspect the UK outpost once or twice a year. But the usage was new enough for the speaker to know that he had to explain it. In fact he probably knew that wacky concepts like this would always need explaining for a Transatlantic audience.

b

PS
<crossword_clue>
Fielder‘s cry of congratulation, with twice the energy, might become comfortable. (4-6)
</crossword_clue>

PPS
Two more observations of metathesis (use the word cloud in the right margin to get some background). This could have been an update to a very old piece, but these thoughts have only struck me recently.

1. Along with Cavalleria Rusticana (which I mentioned in a recent  update to this) an interesting thing often happens to Bachianas Brasileiras. The ending  -eiro, common in Portuguese, is derived (by way of metathesis) from the Latin ending -ARIU(M) – there‘s that r again [one of the usual suspects  in the field of phonological  environments that encourage metathesis]. But often (I‘m tempted to say usually, but maybe I‘m being over-pessimistic) announcers of this Villa-Lobos piece try – all unbeknownst – to ‘repair‘ this evolution by saying brasilieras. But the i, which used to come after the r, only takes one step further away   – coming to rest before the vowel that precedes the r.
2. Whenever I see a poplar tree (Latin name populus) I think of the Portuguese choupo (what an exciting life I lead.... You may wonder how I cope with all the excitement). I have observed before how a Portuguese ch often comes from a Latin PL But where‘s the PL in POPULUS? There‘s a p and an l all right, but . . .
   
   Well attentive readers will remember  what often happens to unstressed vowels between consonants: some_prefix-cope (apocope, I think,  or else syncope). The vowel gets dropped  – leaving a pl (poplus), but in the wrong place for choupo. Then metathesis takes over, and moves the ch to the front of the word. [That's the letters; the phoneme is /ʃ/ rather than /ʧ/.]

Update: 2015.09.14.15:45 – Added clarification in red, and this solution to the PS.

^†OK, time's up: WELL-HEELED.

---

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 e cvowel 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:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 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.

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.

New tales from the word-face

It has been a long time. But slow (infinitesimally slow, a cross between Zenoic [I doubt if there‘s any point looking for that in a dictionary of all places] and Brownian motion]) progress is being made with The Second  Book. I‘m not trying to replicate the processes I used for WVGTbook. I‘m seeing What‘s Out There (quite a lot, and some of it even works), and what can be done with it.

The software assistance can be great fun, notably predictive text. I have mentioned before the hypersensitivity of my keyboard, and its tendency to latch on to one letter. The predictive text thingy goes out of its way to suggest improvements. My favourite so  far is this:

But, progress: I‘ve found something that converts XLS files to HTML, and after several attempts I think I‘ve got to a stage of usability. Here was the first try:

proofOfConcept.html

Promising

          <digression>

(and by the way interesting – the /w/ phoneme  sometimes, and more or less systematically [when it does]  makes the vowel sound it precedes behave differently: ban can tan ... etc but swan and wan, calm farm marm ... etc but swarm and warm, bap cap tap ... etc but swap [WAP  is exceptional, like some other acronyms],  carp harp tarp ... etc but warp, and so on. But this does not happen invariably: back knack sack ... etc but no change for quack or whack...)

           </digression>

but not  much of a  prognosticator for heavy work. So I moved on to poc2.html.

One of the problems with the first book was the coding of the notes; the indices weren‘t hotlinks to the  notes (which I think would make it more likely that the notes would be read). This was a shame, as I think the notes are ‘the  best bit‘. In my XLS file (using Google Sheets and not Excel) I attached notes to individual words as XLS Comments, hoping that the converter would do something sensible with them (rather than just dropping them into the bit-bucket, as it did – oh well, I‘ll just  have to  keep playing). Here it is without notes:

poc2.html

Anyway, tempus, predictably, has fugitted. I just wanted to  let people know the game was afoot.

b

---

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.

Fings ain't what vay used to fink

David Cameron, doing a Khruschev, but in Brussels (and not doing the full discalced version – he kept his shoes on, though he prodded the lectern with a comparable mixture of stage anger and impotent bluster) was reported as saying people who thought he'd pay his dues 'had got another thing coming' (that link is to just one report, but I haven't seen  a 'think' version in any other report). I thought I'd never heard this mangling^‡ before, but I obviously had, as Google reports that it's almost 50 times as common as the original: thinK – just over 100,000 hits, but thinG – well over 5,000,000. What had spared me from an awareness of this lapse was what phonologists call assimilation (I've mentioned this before, here). In brief, /g/ and /k/ are articulated with the tongue and the teeth in the same relative positions, but /k/ is not voiced. The voiced /ŋ/ at the end of 'thing' assimilates to the unvoiced /k/ in 'coming', and my sensitivity to this vulgarism (I'm ducking and covering as I write this) is spared.

Interesting, but...*

A similar thing happens ( but without assimilation) with 'scoring off his own bat', which notches up only 45,000-odd Google hits, as against nearly 300,000,000 for the meaningless 'off his own  back'.

<digression theme= "that is to say...">
...well, not assimilatiom to another phoneme. I think it was John Trim (mentioned elsewhere in this blog: let the word-cloud do its thing if you're interested)  who pointed out that a speaker's  simply closing his/her mouth at the end of an utterance could make a final consonant 'assimilate' to the appropriate bilabial phoneme, so that both 'off his own bat', and 'off his own back' might sometimes sound as though the speaker  were saying 'off his own bap' (which would be no less meaningless than 'off his own back'.)
</digression> 

A cricketer scores 'off his own bat' when he hits a scoring ball –  it is not an 'extra' (added to his score in various circumstances). The expression can also be used when a tail-ender, while scoring very few 'off his own bat', plays a crucial role by supporting a batsman in a valuable partnership.

But I've heard people who should know better (regular club cricketers) say 'off his own back'. Perhaps that seemingly fanciful 'off his own bap' sound really is relevant: people hear 'bap' and supply a noun that suggests effort and support...?

Yet another such cuckoo-like displacement has happened – but with more reason – to the archaic 'for aught I know', which racks up less than 3,000,000 Google hits as against 'for all I know's nearly 90,000,000. But in this instance the change has unarguably happened. What's more, the all version makes sense.
I mentioned this before, in a note in When Vowels Get Together V5.2, referring to

(... the less common words aught and fraught – not included in the main /ɔ:/ section, as even the most advanced student is unlikely to need these. They might very occasionally meet them, but chiefly in the idioms 'for aught I know' and 'fraught with difficulty/problems/danger...'. Even then, in the first of these the archaic 'aught' – meaning 'anything' – is often replaced by 'all'; the British National Corpus lists 55 instances of  'for all I know', but only 2 for the earlier form.)

<digression theme="Word and Yosser Hughes"^†>
In fact the words 'not included in the main /ɔ:/ section' are wrong there. I need to fix it. But good old reliable WinWord has prevented me from making a quick fix. The sources are in .epub format, and Sigil (the tool that I use to edit them)  is not installed at the moment. What seems to have happened is that WinWord has taken advantage of Sigil's absence, shouldered its way to the front (of  the metaphorical crowd of onlookers scratching their heads at the sight of this exotic filetype) and said 'Ah, .epub, I can  handle that. Just leave it to me.' And messed it up royally. I shall have to restore from backup.
</digression>

Here though, shunning Google, I used the much smaller but in some ways more authoritative corpus BNC. Google is hugely bigger, but has no quality control and very low criteria for inclusion; sometimes garbage in leads to garbage out.

Time to go.

b

^† A pretty obscure one, this. This should put you on the right track.

Update 2014.10.27.09:50  –  Added PS
^‡ PS
Do I have to add a rider about 'mistakes'? Here is one one of the many accounts I have given of how language develops by the anointing of what was originally a mistake. It's just that I'm not going to reach for the ointment [to do the anointing] before anyone else.

Update 2014.10.28.10:05   –  Added PPS (tweaked in further update, 2014.10.29.16:00)

* Some of you may have noticed that this analysis slides uneasily between /g/ and /ŋ/, and doesn't work unless the speaker comes from Bradford and says /θɪŋg/. There is an issue here that people who didn't learn English as a Foreign Language are unlikely to have noticed. For a German student once (she was bothered by her jung/junger as compared with our 'young/younger') I compiled a list (by no means complete) of '-nge' spellings. I'm thinking about  this, but time doesn't allow at the moment. Here, to be going on with. is that list (the first hanger  looks like a typo. but life's too short...):

/ŋǝ/	/ŋgǝ/	/nʤǝ/
	anger
		arrange
[bang =>] banger
[bring =>] bringer
		change
[clang =>] clanger
	conger (eel)
		danger
	finger
		flange
		ginger
[hang =>] hanger
	hunger
	linger
[long…	…but] longer
		mange (connected with…
		…) manger (…but very remotely)
		[plunge =>] plunger
		[range =>] ranger
[sing =>] singer
[sling =>] slinger (rarely used on its own, but in various composite words. e.g. “mud-slinger”, “gun-slinger”)
		[strange =>] stranger
	Tonga
[wing =>] winger
[young…	…but] younger

Update 2015.09.25.11:05   –  Added PPPS

PPPS As this issue has been resurrected at the UsingEnglish forum, I've had another – possibly relevant  – thought: think is rarely (if ever [ignoring the expression have a think]) a countable noun. Hearing 'another think coming' the temptation is to parse the object as a countable noun – which makes thing a good candidate.

---

 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 47,100 views  and wellover 6,300 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.