I cannot stress enough

Last night on the BBC television news the newsreader – who was, incidentally, a woman, though this sort of slip is not in the immortal words of Wossname [one of the usual suspects in the field of iambic pentameters; Shakespeare...? Milton...?...] A malady most incident to maids'   – got her intonation wrong.

Maybe it was a typo in the auto-cue, maybe it was a mis-reading.

It was caused by a not very common (but still quite common) phrasal verb: rein in: this is pronounced with the dying fall on the ↘in. But the context was a piece about Magna Carta, with its associations with kingship. So reined became reigned in the mind of the auto-cue-writer-or-newsreader-no-names-no-packdrill.

And, as my last sentence cunningly showed ...

<self_congratulation> 

I have to admit I'm fairly pleased with this, although I did cheat a bit, by using reign as an object: in real life, 'reigned in' is a fairly rare occurrence, except in sentences like 'King John reigned in the 13th century' or 'Charles I reigned in an atmosphere of suspicion' or 'The young king's uncle reigned in his stead' or 'The pre-revolutionary kings reigned in complete oblivion...'.... Hmm. For 'fairly rare' read 'not uncommon'. 

</self_congratulation>

...when reigned is followed by in like this, the stress falls on the verb itself: '↘reigned in....'

So the newsreader said 'Magna Carta ↘reined [sic] in the powers of the monarchy' with 'in the powers of the monarchy' having a single intonation pattern, with pitch starting to rise at 'in' , reaching the top of the curve at the first syllable of 'monarchy' and then falling rapidly:

So she said

                               

Whereas what she meant to say was

I don't know whether she even noticed that what she had read out was meaningless. If she did, she hid it well. But there's a lesson to be learnt here: a speaker's  intonation affects the way listeners understand the message. In this case, it forces the listener to assume a different spelling.

If I remember aright, the single intonation curve on 'in the powers of the monarchy' (in the wrong reading) marks what is known to linguists as 'a phonological word'; but...

<health_warning> 

...my understanding of theoretical linguistics terminology is a good 40 years out of date at best, and at worst I may have got the wrong end of the stick.  

</health_warning>

If this sort of thing interests you, you could start here.

But there are nettles to be grasped – and not the figurative sort; I am thinking biocide in the vegetable patch. Though I am reminded (not clearly enough to remember the exact wording) of a politician on the radio last weekend talking about 'grasping the nettle by the horns' or 'taking the bull by the nettles'. I think the precise wording was better than either of those, but you get the gist.

b

Update 2015.06.1914:30.15.30 – Added PS

PS On Tom, Dick, and Harry

I don't know where I heard it first,...

<autobiographical note>
though it was probably in the Raised Faculty Building,  le Corbusier's contribution to the Sidgwick Site
</autobiographical note>

... but it's striking how often examples adduced in Linguistics discussions tend to involve violence. The default passive-voice example, for ESOL teachers, is

The boy kicked the ball

rather than 

Jane kissed John.

Anyway, the example I want to look at now –  to reflect on how intonation can radically affect meaning – is this, which I would attribute if I could. 

<autobiographical note>
It may have been mentioned in a lecture by the then Doctor, now Professor, Erik Fudge (though he may have read it somewhere else):
</autobiographical note>

Tom hit Dick and then Harry hit him.

On the face of it this might be a tale of righteous retribution taken on Tom by Harry's friend Dick:

There are two violent interactions with two agents and two patients, denoted by two similar intonation curves –  rising/falling from/to more-or-less the same levels.

But change the intonation, keeping the same words in the same order, and a rather darker tale of both Tom and Harry ganging up on Dick emerges:

The first curve denotes Dick's suffering, but that suffering is not finished yet; the second curve starts a bit higher than the and but not as high as Tom  – Dick's travails are not finished yet, and the end of the intonation curve is lower than the first. There's an up-tick in the intonation to mark the pause between blows, but the general sense of the whole sentence is downward.

I have no idea (with my ESOL teacher's hat on) of how to teach this intonation; like most useful language skills it can only improve with exposure, practice, and if possible immersion.

Today we have naming of parts

A recent visit to the Royal Armouries at Leeds began with an impressive display of massed mortars - but rather small ones. Such weapons often get a friendly-sounding  nick-name. In 1945 there was Little Boy (much friendlier than, say, 'Genocidal Jenny'*), followed by Fat Man.

In the previous round of Beggar-my-neighbour-no-make-that-blow-him-to-bits, the pet-name Big Bertha had become popular, applied to various bits of heavy artillery. It strictly applies to one particular howitzer named after the heiress Bertha Krupp (according to various sources, for example Bull  and Murphy [now out of print but you can pick up a second-hand copy for a mere 250 smackers!] though this attribution is pooh-poohed by Willy Ley, writing in the Journal of Coastal Artillery, Feb, 1943 (says Wikipedia, and life's too short to chase down killjoys like that - who cast doubt on perfectly plausible bits of etymological trivia).

Big Bertha was one of the kanonen that came out of the Krupp works. One of the earlier bearers of the name, before Krupp's became the largest private company in the German empire, was known as 'the Cannon King'. The image of the cannon had been used centuries earlier by Spanish soldiers (conquistadores, I think, though the dates in The Etymological Dictionary call this into question) used to describe a sort of long straight valley of a kind unknown to them in their homeland. They called it un cañón, borrowed into English as 'canyon' - Spanish ñ being the conventional manuscript abbreviation for an original Latin -NN-. So in English we now have both 'cannon' and 'canyon', both derived from the Latin for 'reed'. So the tradition of giving unthreatening pet-names to weapons had been, in a sense, pre-figured by using a weapon's name to refer to an unthreatening rock-formation.

As early as the fifteenth century the metaphorical tide had changed direction, with  Mons Meg. Two centuries later there is said to have been Humpty Dumpty, but the East Anglia Tourist Board appears to have started the hare (I'm afraid that's what it is - and Tourist Boards [and the tourism industry in general] have a lot to answer for when it comes to disseminating dubious folk-etymologies) in 1996. Albert Jack, in Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes, retells the story. In a previous book (The Real Story of Humpty Dumpty, now out of print) he claims to have seen two lost extra verses, which further substantiate the derivation. But the alleged 'lost verses' are not in the style of the  ... canonical (sorry) rhyme, as is argued in an article with the unequivocally sceptical title 'Putting the “dump” in Humpty Dumpty' in the BS Historian.

So I started out with one of those 'plausible bits of etymological trivia' I mentioned earlier, but now have my doubts. It was an interesting journey though, and the use of pet-names for weapons of war is beyond dispute.

b

Update, 25 November 2021: PS I've just thought of another word derived from  Latin CANNA [='reed']. This is not world-shattering news; I'm  sure the Indo-European word bank is full of them. But this particular one offers a pleasing contrast to the noise of cannon: it is the French for fishing-rod, canne à pêche (this, incidentally is the first time I've linked to a foreign-language web-site - not very helpfully  I imagine, and some of my readers may not speak French - but I couldn't resist the opportunity).

Update 2016.08..08.12:55 – Added footnote

^* This joke is almost certainly anachronistic. Little Boy was dropped in early August 1945. As Wikipedia says, in its article on Raphael Lemkin:

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on December 9, 1948.

Bilingual plaque in memory
of Rafael Lemkin

Little Boy  was named, presumbly, some time before August 1945, but – given the timescales on The Manhattan Project – not long before. That Lemkin article's first paragraph calls Lemkin "a lawyer of Polonized-Jewish descent who is best known for coining the word genocide....[which he did] ...in 1943 or 1944".

So, if the word genocidal had been available for the naming of Little Boy, it would have been a pretty close-run thing.

Homonymic schomonymic. They're puns already

Gwynneth Lewis, the first Welsh Poet Laureate, on the radio just now said that Dafydd ap Gwilym had done something /frɒm ðə geʔ gəʊ/. And because her accent was quite broad, and I was expecting lilting things like /’let.tə/ for ‘letter’, I misheard in a way that suggested a reptilian version of ‘from the horse’s mouth’. But geckos don’t enjoy the same position as horses in figurative English, so I was momentarily flummoxed.

But she wasn’t in the least aware of any possible pun; the perpetrators of puns often aren’t, particularly when the pun is in the mind of the listener – and depends on over-interpretation of an accent that the speaker, quite naturally, sees as unimpeachable. Perhaps the most interesting puns are ones like this – where the speaker is unaware of the pun (or ‘homonymic clash’, as I learnt to call puns when I was studying at the feet of Doctor (now Professor) Erik Fudge. [Sic]

+ various updates to the footer, the most recent being on 2013.10.06.12:05

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