Memories are made of this

Part of my repertoire of random odd memories is that I revised for my Greek O-Level ...

<glossary audience="millenials and post millennials">
GCSEs are an amalgam of GCE O-Levels and CSEs (though I bet the official line would involve using  a much longer and nuanced explanation than the bare word  amalgam).
</glossary>

...on Broadstairs beach.

Detail from this site

This is a sufficiently incongruous juxtaposition of ideas for it to stick in my brain. I trotted the memory out again today, and in the process put some flesh on the bones – stuff I hadn't associated with the memory before.

<digression>
A book I recently read pointed out that when we remember something it is not the event itself that we recall, but our most recent recollection of it. Teachers know this, and keep reminding their charges that revision needs  to be little and often. If you start your revision in week two of a course, you won't go far wrong.

<autobiographical_note>
Or, as my Tai Chi teacher's husband says, if you want to commit a movement to memory, practise it before you get home – park the car and do it (if only mentally –  although ideally physically).
</autobiographical_note>

Stupidly, I kept no note of the book's title, or even its author (although I do remember that he was an  Argentine...).
</digression>

First, the dramatis personae: the  name of one participant stuck in my mind  – I don't know why, but I imagine sex may have been a factor (I was 17, and she was a trainee teacher, so Katie George may well have been a PHI [Person of Hormonal Interest]). She was a New Zealander (or Australian?), supporting a world tour with bouts of teaching. In 1968...

<authority type="PPS">
This is an easy one. Forty-odd  years' worth of CVs  have meant that this datum-point  has been  recycled again and again.
</authority>

... she was working at my old Primary School.

But where did she fit in –  maybe my little sister was there at the ti...? No, the dates don't work. That's when another memory kicked in: my mother (whom saints preserve [and they'd better]), was a dinner lady there, and she had a talent for picking up young waifs and strays.

Now, the date. It was in the middle of a fairly extended exam period, so it must have been late Spring/early Summer – which narrows it down to the Whitsun holiday (as it was in those days; now it's the Late Spring Bank Holiday), probably the Monday (3 June).

So there we have it; the memory gets better and better – although of course the more detail it accumulates the greater the risk of false memory.

Ho hum – I should be revising for my concert on Saturday. Don't miss it.

b

PS: And here's a clue:

• Sweet singing in the choir? After a fashion! (8)

Update: 2018.03.23.10:50  – Added inline PPS

Water, water everywhere

<plug object="choral concert">
Tonight – or,  by the time I hit the Submit button, last night, probably – my choir will start rehearsals for its first concert of the new term, when we'll be singing Elijah. When this was first suggested I thought I could use my secondhand copy of the score. The choir's instructions were

I think those of you who have a previous Novello version of the Elijah score may be able to use it ...

My old copy of Elijah,
alongside the 1957 programme

But as my previous edition's original sale price had been 7s. 0d. I thought I'd better use a new score. I'm quite attached to my old score though. Its previous owner, who sang with South Chiltern Choral Society, (and who I suspect was a language teacher, because he used my trick of using IPA symbols to make pronunciation notes) had kept the programme from their concert in 1957:

  Anyway, if it's as good as our our last Elijah over 10 years ago...

Elijah is a work of enormous excitement and dramatic force....The response of the chorus to their self-inflicted woes [BK not WCS's; the Israelites'] captured every nuance of their emotional turmoil and the semi-chorus sang with winsome sensitivity.)

Wokingham Times, April 2005

...it'll be a perfect way to spend a winter's evening at the Great Hall Reading.
</plug>

But what has this to do with  water (mentioned in the subject line)? Well those self-inflicted woes all stem from a drought:

...there shall not be dew nor rain these years, there shall not be dew nor rain  but according to my word.
(note cursey typeface)

Be that as it may, water – specifically water-based metaphors – has been on my mind. And drought is a good point de départ. When a source of something (there's another: a source is a spring – the watery kind ) runs low it dries up, or dwindles to a trickle. (on reflection, I suppose I could probably also have highlighted RUNS LOW; the low could refer to the level of a liquid in a container). And when a speaker loses their flow ...

<digression theme="fluency">
On the subject of flow, I am often asked – as a speaker of more than one language – if I'm "fluent in X". When you're fluent in a language words flow (without apparent reflection) from your mouth. "Am I fluent in X?" Hell, I'm not even fluent in English (although I am, as they say,  a 'native speaker'.)

<meta_digression>  

Stephen Fry, in the last edition of Fry's English Delight, distinguished between early and late bilinguals – a distinction I'm not sure about. For me, to be  bilingual a child has to be raised in a household where two languages are naturally spoken.  A man who, in later life, made a point of learning (not acquiring, to use the linguistics word for what a child does) Yiddish  (this was one of the examples given) is not, by my lights, bilingual. Maybe my lights are on the blink though. Maybe...

In my youth I was a social contact (and colleague of sorts) of Michael Portillo, erstwhile Cabinet Minister (and now sporter of multifarious jackets on a television near you). His father was Spanish. His Spanish was very good. In 1971, in Madrid, I met his cousin – who agreed; but, she added, 'habla como un libro'  ['like a book']. Maybe this wasn't original; maybe it's a traditional family description, but I give her as the source because she it was who said it to me. 

Does this make him bilingual? (Of course, he may be, depending on the linguistic environment he grew up in). 

</meta_digression>

</digression>

... their speech dries up, just as an actor may simply dry.

So much for speech; many water-related metaphors relate also to immersion (which itself is probably one... yup). If you're on uncertain ground (whoops: mixed metaphor warning) you're out of your depth; and maybe there are things going on under the surface – still waters run deep. You need to keep your head above water. And if you go against prevailing attitudes you swim against the tide; if you change your mind you row back, or in some circles (the sort where a lazy person rests on his oars, or doesn't pull his weight), you back-water ("backwater" does duty in another metaphorical sense with regard to a place where nothing much happens [oh yes, my use/non-use of hyphens is both intentional and deliberate (and if you think that's pleonastic, look 'em up)]. Or you could just go with the flow.

The word immersion itself suggests another metaphor, about language learning  – another source of watery metaphors: students acquiring vocabulary by osmosis, teachers drip-feeding information. And not just language-learning;  skills and information may leak from other disciplines. I'm sure many more such examples will come to me.

But I have other fish to fry. Before I go though, I'll share a thought I've had about bascule bridges. (That gear-change could have been smoother [via water ⇒ river ⇒ bridge], but this isn't The One Show.) Since seeing the hydraulic mechanisms that make Tower Bridge work, I no longer see it as two arms waving up and down but as a pair of asymmetrical see-saws, with their longer arms meeting, Each longer arm (half the roadway) tips up as water slooshes into the arm you can't see.

<digression theme="tai chi, nothing if not eclectic">
I use this image to reinforce the idea of weight draining from one leg into the other, so that upward movement doesn't involve muscular effort (in the rising leg).
</digression>

And where does this fit in, metaphor-wise? Well the French for see-saw (American teeter-totter) is une bascule.

b

PS: Here's a clue:
Thinker about body. (7)

Update: 2015.09.05.12:30  – Added picture, and fixed a rogue its (sorry about that,  it's not that difficult, I know, but I'm always doing it).

Update: 2015.09.14.10.55 – Added this PPS:

PPS Here's another water-based metaphor – not a current one, but still striking. Not having read Strait is the gate I don't know how – or whether – it survives translation [come to think of it, it's so striking that any translator must surely have kept it in] but La Porte Étroite includes this image. A person who has been blind from birth imagines birdsong as the sound of the environment [horrid over-functional word, but I don't have the text in front of me – the air? the world?]  boiling with joy and excitement.

Update: 2015.09.19.16.55 – Added this PPPS:

And, on  the subject of boiling, I happened on this one this morning...

<spoiler_alert>
...while doing today‘s Polygon in The Times.
</spoiler_alert>

Ebullience. As Etymonline says,

 ...from Latin ebullientem (nominative ebulliens) "a boiling, a bursting forth, overflow," present participle of "to boil over"...

More here from Etymonline .



Update: 2017.10.10.10.45 – Deleted old footer.

When Kant can

More than a year ago (March 2013 is the date on the draft), I made a note about an Italian interpreter on a news programme – no more specific reference, but probably The World at One or the Nine O'clock News:

/hæz tʊ bi:/ - sounded negative - not vowel, but voicing indicates polarity: /hæs tə/ vs /hæzn tə/

I wonder what this meant... Aha – got it. It follows from a point that I became aware of a while ago.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1979" theme="assimilation">

<digression theme="assimilation">
A few days ago this appeared in the twittersphere:

I suspect (the results aren't out yet, but here comes a spoiler) the process whereby /gri:n/ and /kəʊm/ combine to form /gri:ŋ kəʊm/ is assimilation (well, I know it is, but I don't know whether this will be a good enough answer; they might want me to say whether it's progressive or regressive, and I must have nodded off at that part of the lecture...). Assimilation happens when some feature of a speech item (typically voicing or place of articulation) changes to match that of an adjacent item. Anyway, where was I...?
</digression>

The first proper book that I worked on after moving on from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations  (when I was just temping to see me through my first winter as a freelance polymath) was Geoffrey Sampson's Liberty and Language. It was either here, or in his next book or in editorial discussions in connection with it (unlikely, as they were pretty one-sided ), that he made the observation that it was almost as if there was a new modal, /tə hæftə/ [to haffto], because the voicing of /hæv/ assimilates to the unvoiced /t/ of the 'to' that always follows it (in this modal use). He had even heard a politician saying 'it's a question of haffing to'.
</autobiographical_note>

When a person is involved in a conversation, many things are going on. Apart from the social and physical things (eye contact and so on) and contextual information surrounding the actual event, the participant's brain is having to process a bewildering amount of information [stay with me here, I'm coming back to that Italian interpreter eventually]. Somewhere – I'm pretty sure it was in Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language – I saw an account of a conference that set out to analyse a few hours of recorded language. The proceedings of the conference, in the event, were published under the name The First Five Minutes – which contained a book's worth of analysis; the publisher had decided that analysis of all the data would make the book unpublishably big.

In a live speech event, the hearer has a vast amount to do. Which brings us to the Italian interpreter that started all this. The brain of the hearer starts perceiving speech sounds, and then parsing^† them, as soon as possible. Making guesses about where a speech event is going is the only way of participating in a conversation. If you wait until all the inputs are in, and then work out what you want to say in response, and then work out how to say it, you'll have missed your turn^‡ (experto crede  [that's Latin for 'trust me, I know what I'm talking about'].)

So what the listener does is take in clues and cues about what's going to happen^††. In the pair "/hæstə/ ['has to'] versus  /hæznʔtə/ [hasn't to]" the first clue to the negativeness is the voicing of the /z/; the hearer, in the press of efforts to understand what's coming, thinks 'here comes a negative'.

Now, when that interpeter said /hæz tʊ bi:/ I heard the voicing of the /z/ and thought 'Here comes a negative'.

<digression>
The assimilation of the /z/ to the /t/ in the positive involves  voicing rather than place of articulation  – as in the case of /gri:ŋ kəʊm/  (from that #Phonetics quiz) or perhaps (in tribute to my alma mater) I should say /gri:ŋ kɪŋ/ [that's a 'Greene King' reference; if you don't speak fluent IPA don't worry {And I don't mean Greene King IPA, of course}].
</digression>

The inappropriately enunciated /tʊ/ isn't just wrong in an understandable way, it is plain misleading. This (distant, now) speech event underlines something I have often noticed, both as a student of foreign languages and as a teacher of English: one of the features of connected, live, language use is knowing when not to over-pronounce; getting everything right, at the word level, is going to result in getting it wrong at the sentence level.

More recently, the problem of distinguishing between positive and negative arose in the UsingEnglish forum devoted to Pronunciation and Phonetics, but there are things I need to be getting on with; so that will have to wait for an update.

b

Update 2014.05.17.19:00 – Added PS:

PS
That UsingEnglish discussion started with the question What is different between "can" and "can't" when say them.. The question reminded me of my unfinished blog (which, now I think of it, has a title that has made no sense at all until this Update ). The questioner asked:

I am just wondering how English-speekers distinguish these two phases (or words). It seams the only different is the hard-to-heard "t". Then why the language choose this way to indicate total opposite meaning?

As I (eventually) answered, the problem is specific to American English:

Of course, the problem doesn't arise in Br English (though I'm sure many others do ): /kæn/ versus /kɑ:nt/ - and whatever happens to the /t/ the vowel is still distinct..

So I left it to an American contributor to answer before I stuck my oar in.

After correcting 'different', he (I assume he's a he) said

The answer is that to those who know the phonemes of English, the "t" is not at all difficult to hear. When you try to learn a new language, you are forced to begin with the phonemes you are used to, since those are all the phonemes you know. They are all the phonemes that have been relevant to discriminating meaning in the languages you know. But if the foreign language uses other phonemes, your ear is not programmed to hear those other phonemes, because they have never been relevant in your past experience.

I felt this was a bit over-dismissive of the questioner's 'hard to hear[d]', so I leapt to the questioner's defence:

I wouldn't question Newbie's 'hard-to-hear'. I remember in the late '50s being very confused by Perry Como, in 'Magic Moments', singing 'Time can't erase the memory...'. [T]he context (particularly the phrase 'erase the memory') makes it clear this is 'can't'; but I had never met the expression at the time. I suppose this just reinforces the point about  phonemes; I didn't know the phonemes of Am Eng.

But another American English speaker has now added weight to my defence:

It's not uncommon to have to say "I'm sorry - did you say 'can' or 'can't'?" 

I'm not sure what to make of this. Until I read that latest response I thought native speakers could always tell, and that the first answer's 'phonemes of English' just meant 'the phonemes of American English' . Now I'm not so sure.

Update 2014.05.19.11:30 – Added this note:

^†I can feel the eyebrows jerking up here, particular among readers of an age to remember the old Parse and explain exercise in schools (which makes those readers older even than ME – their English teachers would have insisted on 'older than I'). 

 <autobiographical_note date_range="1963-1968" theme="schoolbooks">
I was just on the cusp, with a mixture of prescriptive and more permissive schoolbooks. As our Latin master was Father Provincial [="Big Cheese"] of the Salvatorians (Society of the Divine Saviour), the school had fingers (tentacles?) in many ...erm...pumice stones?; so we tended to get young besuited trainees among the cassocks, flown in for a term or two here and there. These preferred the more permissive/expressive books and parts of the syllabus.
</autobiographical_note>

But by 'parsing' I don't mean 'third person singular of the pluperfect' sort of parsing; I mean simply taking bits of linguistic input and trying to imagine syntactic structures that they might fit in: 'Who's doing the <verb>-ing?, rather than 'Is that the subject of the main clause?  – which, when you think about it, amounts to more or less the same thing.

Update 2015.10.20.12:40 – Added this note, and a few afterthoughts in maroon:

^‡ On re-reading 18 months after the fact, I realize that I was using a semi-technical term here  – semi because although it doesn't really look like one, I was using it to refer to something with technical connotations. I think it was Grice who introduced the notion of a turn in a conversation, although I wouldn't be surprised if it was an idea that he'd been knocking around for many years before Grice propounded his Maxims. (But don't take this as Gospel: my linguistics studies just pre-dated Grices's popularity in linguistics circles [although he was publishing "in my time", and I'm sure I'd have come across him if I'd been a more diligent student]. My acquaintance with Grice [understanding of him would be a bit of an overstatement] is derived from some mugging-up I had to do before teaching an AS set [as described here].)

Update 2015.10.22.09:40 – Added this footnote

^††The idea of reacting (as a listener) ahead of hearing the whole message was underlined on the TV news last night. The interviewer asked something like 'Is there any risk to British security in China's involvement in ...<whatever>?' the Chinese spokesman, speaking in English, said 'Absolutely not.'

But the normal intonation for 'Absolutely not' is one rise and fall: ↷. But he said

'↘ Absolutely... ↘ ...not'

and for a split second [until he said the second word] I thought he was making a most undiplomatic admission. (One would think that a speaker of a tone-language might have been aware of this  – but I suppose there's no reason to think that skill with his sort of intonation (where tones affect meanings of single words) implies sensitivity to mine (where intonation patterns affect overall meanings of utterances).

Update 2015.10.22.12:55 – Added this PPS

PPS On reflection (as frequently happens after a Tai Chi lesson)  this expectation (of 'intonational sensitivity') was unreasonable. As an  ESOL student this Chinese-speaker would have met (and possibly drilled) the use of  'Absolutely' as a standalone response. In this case, the intonation is ↷. So he might have thought of this as the canonical intonation pattern for 'Absolutely',  and this might well have been reinforced by the fact that this intonation pattern is a close match to the Chinese rising-and-falling pattern  – 'L1-interference' as we say in the trade, when a feature of a learner's mother-tongue influences their learning of another.

Update 2018.06.17.10:55 –Added clarification in red.

Stalking the stork

Cycling along the Old Basingstoke Road  this morning I saw a cluster of photographers with long lenses trained over the fields. A friend who had spoken to them told me they were looking at a stork (a Great White as it happens [not THAT sort of Great White, silly]), and I mused about the possibile irony of a Twitterstorm leading to Birders (I doubt if they'd call themselves Twitchers) mobbing a bird.

After my Tai Chi class (which had been my destination) I had a look on Twitter to see whether that irony had really happened. And it hadn't. Twitter had a few hits for Spencers Wood's Great White:

Hardly a Twitterstorm – scarcely a tweacup-ful. I may have missed a couple, but there were only ever a handful, spread out over four hours. Those dozen or more photographers I had seen must have had some pre-Twitter network.

I didn't see the stork, but I saw its photographers. I wonder whether that counts as a '#LifeTick' to quote the second-last of those tweets. Hardly. But it made me think of an inconsequential musing that occurred to me recently – not consequential enough to merit a blog-post all to itself. It was about Erdős numbers.

These have become quite a Thing recently, though it hadn't seeped through to my neck of the academic woods by the early 'seventies (when the Professor may still have been productive, if any of his 1,525 papers was published that late in his life – he was born in 1913

<digression>
a contemporary of my mother^†, as it happens, though Erdős enjoyed a longer education, she having left school in 1925; she was, after all, only a girl, and my grandfather (whose wife Bertha Fergusson, had proudly preceded him carrying a suitcase bearing the admonitory initials BF), a school-master [or dominie

<meta-digression theme="dominie">
Was a 'dominie''s class, I wonder, full of dominees [<boo-boom tsh>
I thangyou]
</meta-digression>

I should perhaps say in the appropriate argot], was amply equipped to teach her enough to get her a job as a shorthand-typist, she's pretty bright after all.

<meta-digression theme="autobiography/shorthand">
I still recall her shopping lists, written in Pitman's shorthand. Perhaps my first brush with phonemes was the /t/ stroke that represented 'tea'.
</meta-digression>

Forgive him. He was born in the 19th century.
</digression>

). In brief they are a measure of mathematical proximity: if you've co-written  with Erdős, your EN is 1; if you've co-written with someone with an EN of 1, your EN is 2; etc.... As he recedes into the history of mathematics, ENs are getting higher. Wikipedia says the mean (at some time of writing [though the primary source is given as a web-page updated Feb. 2014]) is 3.

My contribution to  Erdős-related-angels-on-a-pinhead-speculation is this: if you co-write with several other authors, several or all of whom have an EN, how do you calculate your EN? Do you just take the lowest and add 1 to that, or do you do something fractional? To take an unrealistically simple example, if you have two co-authors each with an EN of 3, is your EN 3.5? Hmm.

b

PS Another plea for reviews of Digraphs and Diphthongs . (And if you didn't download a copy while it was free, DM @WVGTbook for a review copy) I'm really unsure of what to do next (apart from DIY, that is).

Update 2014.05.08,17:55 – Added this PPS:

^† Belatedly, this update rubricates^‡ what would have beeen her 100th birthday, if the world had had that good fortune.

^‡ I've borrowed this, with appropriate anglicization, from Borges' rubricar. Well, maybe it's not his exactly – I dunno – but if he didn't coin it he used it in a memorable way.

---

 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, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

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

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 40.300 views  and well over 5,600 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 well over 2,000 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.

Scale drawing

Two snippets that aren't worth a post on their own but that I don't want to get away:

Scale

While we were watching cricket during the last rites (aka 'match') of the Ashes tour, my daughter asked me where Hobart was. Breezily I said it was close to Sydney, and as an afterthought I said that the meaning of 'close' in that context was a matter of scale. Trying to flesh this caveat out a bit, I later looked in an atlas, and came up with this way of describing the actual distance.

Hobart is at 42°52′50″S 147°19′30″E  and Sydney at 33°51′35.9″S 151°12′40″E. In other words, if one were to pitch the same question in the northern hemisphere, and Hobart were in Orkney 59°00′N 3°00′W, Sydney would be roughly where Penzance is (50.1279°N 5.5107°W): 
about 9% of latitude and I cheated a bit about the longitude because the latitude was so neat and 
anything more Longitudinally Correct would be in the sea.

Drawing

Well, lápiz actually, but 'scale pencil' doesn't trip off the tongue so neatly. 

My Tai Chi sesssions resumed this week, for the first time this year and we were joined by a new 
student. During our introductions, we learnt that he had a background in tango dancing and our 
teacher was quick to say that there were similarities between that and Tai Chi. I didn't think this was 
any more than a conversational gambit, to make the 'new boy' feel at home.

Later though, while we were doing a Chi Gung exercise sometimes referred to as pencil rolling ,
our  new-found tango correspondent said it was like the /læpɪs/ (because of the English vowels I didn't
immediately put 2 and 2 together). The 2s in question were lápiz and pencil-rolling.

In matters of balance, pencil-based metaphors come readily to mind.

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 37,250 views  and 5,200 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 1867 views/867 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.







 

Hearts may fall as well as rise

My Ji Qong teacher  – not a native speaker of English – was talking yesterday morning about some improvements she's having done to her kitchen. 'Now I can see out, and when I see the garden my heart sinks.'  From the context (we were exercising outside on a coldish and not particularly bright November morning) I knew that she meant the opposite; but what's that – 'my heart leaps'?

This made me think about collocations with heart. I did a search in the British National Corpus for 'heart' followed by a verb. Of the nearly 3,000 hits, 'heart sank' came a very respectable third, after 'was' and 'is'. With the addition of 'heart 's' at no. 11, these 3 account for over a fifth of all instances.

Meanwhile, 'heart leapt' was down at no. 17 and 'heart leaped' well below that at no. 31. And closer inspection of those numbers yielded an interesting bias. Of the 30 instances of 'leapt', 25 had the source 'W_fict_prose'; and of the 15 instances of  'leaped' 12 had the same source. And of those 37 'W_fict_prose' hits, in 29 cases (over three-quarters) the possessor of the heart is a woman. Now I don't know precisely what 'W_fict_prose' is, but perhaps I could be forgiven for guessing that the jackets are predominantly pink.

But what about the other verbs? Looking at just the top 51 (all the collocations with 10 or more hits) there are these indications of a dysfunctional or uneasy heart:

• thumping – no. 8
• thudding – no. 10
• attacks – no. 13 (the mesh of my search net should obviously be finer; hearts don't attack!)
• stopped – no. 14
• racing – no. 18
• lurched – no. 20
• pounding – no. 22
• hammering – no. 25
• missed – no. 26
• thudded  – no. 28
• jumped – no. 29
• bypass – no.40 (another anomaly that shows how I need to brush up my search skills)
• bleeds – no. 41
• ached – no. 43
• sink – no. 45
• sinking – no. 49
• skipped – no. 50
• stop – no. 51 (an appropriate end to the list)

Meanwhile there are a similar number of 'unmarked' ones (with connotations that are neither positive not negative) like turn and seem; and just a handful of unequivocally positive ones: just leap, to accompany the past forms. English hearts just don't seem to have a particularly positive outlook.; swell and swelled are down at nos. 67 and 99 respectively. I wonder if this is a particularly Anglophone bias. I invite comments from speakers of other languages.

I should really see how COCA compares. But times a-wasting and I've got a long weekend (when I'll be off-line) to prepare for.

b
Update 2014.02.08.20:20 – Updated footer

---

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 37,250 views  and 5,200 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 1867 views/867 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.