Do we ever mess up things?

At the end of last week, I came across the following on my Twitter feed:

commenting on:

Of course, it was a challenge I couldn't resist!

My first thought off the top of my head was that it was to do with the non-specific nature of the noun things. It seemed to fit into the same category as pronouns which always appear between the verb and particle in separable phrasal verbs. And right enough, further down the thread, I found others who'd come up with similar explanations:

I couldn't let it go with a corpus check though.  I used the enTenTen corpus via SketchEngine which is a web-based corpus, so quite large and quite up-to-date, but not particularly balanced (i.e. it doesn't include a range of text types/genres). In this case, I figured that balance might not be too significant - although if I had time, it'd be interesting to do the same with other corpora.

I started off by looking at the words that most frequently come between mess and up and found:

it, things, this, me, them, something, that, you, everything, us, him, anything, her

So, the expected object pronouns plus something, anything, everything (also technically pronouns, but not ones we'd immediately think of here) and the non-specfic nouns things.

Too bad they messed it up.
It's not the first time they've messed things up.
I was very afraid that I was going to mess something up.

Looking at words following mess + up with no gap between:

the, your, my, their

All of which suggest a more specific object:

She messed up the first one as well.
He messed up the sales figures for an important client.
You've totally messed up your settings.

Digging a bit further, I looked into whether the non-specific (pro)nouns ever come after the particle. 

As you can see, the statistics* lean overwhelmingly in favour of these words following the pronoun rule, but there are enough counter examples that they can't be completely dismissed as 'wrong'. 

There are a number of examples that can probably be discounted because:
a. they're clearly from non-L1 speakers of English (based on the surrounding language and sometimes, the URL)
b. messed up isn't acting grammatically as a straightforward, active verb, but either as a passive or as a modifier:
I didn't realize how messed up things were.
They did some really messed up things when they were drunk.
c. the object includes additional modifiers that make it more normal to put it after the particle – either according to Larsen-Freeman's theory about new information or just because it would be odd to have the particle so far-removed from the verb (you'd have forgotten the mess by the time you got to the up!):

I would often mess up things that seem so easy like …
I don't know how they messed up something as simple as swapping two keys.

There are, though, quite a few straightforward object final examples and as you can see from the graph, some of this set of words seem to be less averse to final position than others. As I read through them, some did sound odd to me whilst others seemed more natural. How do these sound to you?

I'm new to this so I probably messed up something.
She would purposefully mess up things for no reason.

Sometimes, I could pinpoint a meaning to do with emphasis, so in the sentence "He messes up everything", you can just imagine the extra stress on the final word.

My overall conclusion? There's definitely a strong tendency for things to follow the same rule as pronouns and from an ELT perspective, I think that's worth highlighting. Like so many language points though, what people do with language 'in the wild' doesn't always follow textbook 'rules'. The best we can say is that this pattern is the norm and anything else is clearly marked.

*I've used raw frequency scores for the graph rather than the usual 'instances per million' figure because many of these patterns are low frequency and just come out with very similar-looking scores (0.02, 0.01, >0.01) which don't tell you very much.

It’s not all about the apostrophes…

I saw a tweet recently that really made me smile:

When I meet new people, it’s always a bit of a challenge to explain what I do, mostly because I don’t do a single job. Once people get the general idea though, I find it leads to all kinds of assumptions about what a languagey sort of person must be interested in.

“Correct” grammar

As someone who spends a lot of time researching and writing about grammar norms, yes, non-standard grammar does, inevitably, jump out at me. I do automatically spot misplaced apostrophes, there/their/they’re mix-ups and sentences missing a main verb, but they don’t necessarily have me up in arms. For me, it’s all down to context. If it’s in a Facebook post or a quickie email, I really don’t care. If someone has gone to the trouble (and expense) of having something professionally printed without getting it proofread (a menu, a leaflet, a business website), then yes, it makes me sigh and roll my eyes.

Etymology

I admit that I love words. I find English vocabulary in all its wonderful variety fascinating. Am I bothered about the origins of a particular word or expression though? Not especially. Yes, understanding a bit about the roots of English can be useful, but for me, it’s functional rather than fascinating. I’m much more interested in how language is used now than where it came from. I have several unopened books on my shelves about the “stories behind words” bought as well-intentioned presents, but now collecting dust.

Trendy coinages

When I tell people I work in dictionaries, one of the common reactions is: “it must be all about finding new words”. Unsurprising perhaps, seeing as the only time dictionaries seem to be in the news is when they announce their “word of the year”: staycation or post-truth or sharenting. And yes, they’re fun, I enjoy a new coinage much as the next person, but they’re very much the fluffy, soundbite end of lexicography. As someone working in ELT, I’m much more involved in trying to explain the frequent, and yes even boring, everyday language that the average learner needs to master. Which, by the way, can be far more interesting and challenging.

The decline of English

At the same time as being excited by new coinages, people also expect me to be outraged by the apparent decline of the English language. I should be vehemently against verbing and appalled by the Americanization of English. I’m not. Language change happens, it always has (see etymology above). Of course, there are some changes that I personally embrace more than others, but asking whether I’m for or against language change seems a fairly nonsensical question to me. There isn’t some malign force out there forcing changes on us, it’s how we collectively choose to use our language that influences the direction of change.

I could go on (my spelling is rubbish, I’m not a literary type, I’ve never watched Countdown …), but I guess my real message is: I love language in my own ways.

A Talk on Twitter

Last week, I had the chance to speak at the IH AMT Conference in London. I was talking about the difference between receptive and productive vocabulary and its implications for teaching. It was a fun event with a buzzy atmosphere and an engaged audience, and my session seemed to go down well. I was also lucky enough to have the wonderful Sandy Millin live-tweeting from my session so when I checked Twitter afterwards, I found a huge flurry of mentions and retweets. This got me thinking about the implications of Twitter when you're giving talks and workshops ... what are the benefits - and downsides - of having your session tweeted out to the wider world?

On the plus side ...
- You can reach a wider audience and engage more people in the discussion.
- You get to see what the main points the tweeters picked up on were. It's an interesting exercise,  especially when you compare the tweets to the points you'd hoped to get across!
- You also get to see which ideas sparked most interest through likes and retweets, which is both interesting and provides useful feedback, perhaps for refocusing future talks.

On the downside ...

- Putting all your carefully prepared material out there online leaves you rather compromised if you plan to give the same talk again to another audience! This is especially true if pictures of key slides where there's a surprise element get tweeted ... I'll definitely have to think twice now about reusing some sections of this talk exactly as they were.

- It's easy for your ideas to be misrepresented. I have to say that all the tweeters from my session were actually really good at putting points across accurately, but the tweet that turned out to be the most retweeted wasn't actually quite what I said ...

What I did say was that 7 is considered to be the magic number by psychologists when it comes to the number of items we can retain in our short-term memory and that memory's one factor you need to consider when designing vocab activities - you need to think about how many items to focus on (not necessarily exactly 7!) and be careful not to overload students. Of course, in 140 characters, context and hedging tend to get lost ...

Overall, it was a really interesting experience and I think the pluses of being tweeted definitely outweigh the minor drawbacks. Big thanks to the IH team for inviting me and for organizing such a great event and to the whole audience - including the tweeters! - for being so engaged.

Idioms: a post of two halves (Part 1)

The other evening I’d fallen into the trap of having a quick flick through social media while I was half-watching something on TV and I stumbled across an #ELTChinwag discussion on Twitter which I couldn’t resist adding my twopenn’orth to. The discussion was about the Lexical Approach in ELT, but I came in on a thread about teaching idioms. It got me thinking on two slightly different paths:

Part 1: Teaching idioms

A contributor to the discussion made the following comment:

“one concern that we could focus too much on idiomatic lang. Most learners will prob be speaking with NNspeakers in future.”

It struck a chord as it goes to the heart of the arguments I’ve been having with editors for some years now about teaching ‘idioms’ (clarification of what I mean by that coming up), how useful they are in general and especially whether they have a place in the fairly restricted kind of format of vocabulary activity in many published materials (i.e. in a slot-filling type of context where students match them to their ‘meaning’ in a rather simplistic way).

Now before I go any further, I should clarify what I mean by an idiom. Of course, the term ‘idiom’ can be interpreted very broadly to refer to almost any fixed (or semi-fixed) chunk of language, in which case, it covers all kinds of expressions like in a moment, all the time, of course, all kinds of, etc. At the other end of the scale, it’s also frequently used to refer to the kind of colourful expressions of the ‘raining cats and dogs’ variety where it’s impossible to work out the meaning of the overall expression from the sum of its parts. And then there’s everything in-between which arguably forms a cline from the mundane and unremarkable, to the very salient and much more marked.

As someone who spends most of my working life playing around with vocabulary, it would be strange indeed if I wasn’t a big proponent of the former, ‘fixed phrase’ type of idiom. They’re absolutely essential for communication, almost no matter who you want to communicate with. What’s more, they provide learners with incredibly useful pre-formed chunks they can use to cut down the processing load required to create utterances completely from scratch every time.

Once in a blue moon?

The other end of the scale, that seems to be so beloved of coursebook publishers, I believe needs treating with more caution. The more colourful idioms (once in a blue moon, every dog has its day, have a bee in your bonnet, etc.) are particularly marked; that is they aren’t standard, neutral language that will go unnoticed, they stand out to the reader/listener and, perhaps most importantly, they do so because they often have lots of cultural associations and connotations tied up with them. Take a look at the selection of idioms below that roughly mean ‘annoy/irritate’ – who would you expect to use them and in what context? What do they tell you about the speaker and/or their intended listener? Which would the speaker use to talk about their own feelings and which about others? Which would you use?

get on sb’s nerves
get on sb’s tits
get up sb’s nose
rub sb up the wrong way
try sb’s patience
ruffle sb’s feathers
wind sb up
piss sb off
drive sb to distraction
drive sb round the bend
annoy the f**k out of sb

I could probably write a whole blog post about each one!

We all have our own idiolects, the words and phrases we use based on our background (social, cultural, regional, educational, etc.) our age, gender, etc. And we use different language based on the context, our mood and who we’re talking to. As native speakers, we weigh up our language choices all the time and (mostly) choose expressions that are just right from the context. We often couldn’t say exactly why a particular expression just fits, but our accumulated (largely subconscious) understanding of language comes into play.

Explaining all that to a learner, especially one from a very different cultural background, can be very difficult and advising them as to when, how or whether to use the expression for themselves is almost impossible. Of course, that’s true of all kinds of language (whether it’s slang or literary or whatever), but I think idioms are particularly tricky.

I’m not saying that we should avoid these idioms altogether, I’m just not sure that teaching whole sets of them apparently for productive use is terribly helpful. If they come up in a text, they can form an interesting point of discussion and help learners make sense of the same idiom if it crops up again – you wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of this blog post if you didn’t know a few idioms! -  but that’s a whole different kettle of fish from the type of activity where the learner simply has to match, well, a whole different kettle of fish to say ‘something completely different’, then try to use it in a sentence or worse still, a dialogue!

I’m not saying that as language teachers (or materials writers) we should dictate what language is and isn’t appropriate for our students to learn/use, but neither is it fair to teach language of this kind in a way that doesn’t fully explain its possible impact, leaving our students to make potentially very awkward or embarrassing faux pas when speaking to native speakers or alternatively, just elicit blank looks from other non-native speakers.

As I’ve rambled on quite long enough, I’ll break off here and come back to the other thought I had about the role of idioms in social media another day …