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.

Can you say ...?

I generally tend to keep out off the whole language change: good or bad debate. Over the years, I've got a bit bored of explaining to people the whole concept of being a descriptive rather than a prescriptive linguist. So I tend to avoid questions about "correct" usage and discussions about falling standards. And probably like most lexicographers, I feel a little bit irked that most people think we spend our whole time looking for new words, because what else would there be to do? This week though, a couple of language change issues have caught my attention.

Facebook grammar: Anyone who uses Facebook will have come across the issue of whether to write their status updates in the first or third person. Because your name comes up at the beginning of the line, you tend to carry on the sentence, which means using a third person verb, so: Julie Moore is looking forward to the weekend. But then because it's clearly you, the first person, writing, it would then feel odd to start using third person pronouns, so you tend to switch and end up with this funny mixture: Julie Moore is looking forward to seeing my parents at the weekend. Different people approach the issue in different ways, some going for the funny grammatical mix, others just ignoring the name at the beginning and starting a new sentence. Could be a PhD research topic in there - I'm sure someone, somewhere is already looking into it!

Facebook threw a spanner in the works this week though when they slightly changed the way the text appears on screen, so that now (on your home page at least, but not when you look at your profile!) your name now appears at the top, more like a heading, and your status update starts on a new line. To me this now lends itself to the whole sentence approach and so more conventional grammar. I wasn't sure what I thought about the change and when I posted a comment to that effect, wasn't entirely surprised to get a response from a friend saying they are actually quite liked the third/first person mix! We'll have to see how it develops, especially as 'comments' (replies to status updates) are still in the old format. "New" grammar for a new medium?

Insurgence: The other new usage also came to light via a friend's Facebook post - thanks to Michelle for this one. She pointed out that she'd come across several examples recently in the media of the word insurgence being used to talk about a sudden increase in something. So one from the Tate Gallery Facebook page referred to "the insurgence of digital photography" and another on the radio, "an insurgence of autumn winds". My first reaction was that they can't possibly be right because an insurgence is a revolt or rebellion. But then when I thought about it a bit more, we do talk about a resurgence of something, to refer to something increasing again after a period of quiet or unpopularity. I guess if you take off the re-, you could talk about a surge or an upsurge in something, but somehow they don't fit quite as well. I did a few corpus searches and indeed, this new usage does seem to be out there, I came across:

we saw a huge insurgence of "cool" gamers
There has been an insurgence of books which answer
What is going on with this sudden insurgence of Norwegian music ?
as a possible solution to the insurgence of drug-resistant bacteriaThe last of these comes from an academic journal! So perhaps, after all, an insurgence of something does make sense? Is it filling a gap? I'll be keeping an eye out for it.

The end of publishing

I just came across this video on another blog I follow by a fellow writer - Shoo Rayner - and I thought it was amazingly clever. What d'you think?



Isn't language wonderful?! [Sorry, this is my first attempt at posting a video and I'm not sure how to get the size right!]

ella minnow pea

I've just finished the most wonderfully lexico-nerdy novel - ella minnow pea by Mark Dunn. It's about an island nation where people gradually lose the right to use letters of the alphabet and, of course, those same letters gradually disappear from the novel itself. It's a fascinating concept but one which could lead to a rather pretentious bit of clever-clever literature. I love writers who play with language - I was totally captured by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - but I'm also wary of writing that tries to be too clever - I hated Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller and gave up on Will Self's Book of Dave. But ella minnow pea has a totally compelling story, with wonderful characters which sweeps you along towards a gripping ending. It's a great little novel, that I'd recommend to anyone - language geek or otherwise!

Why Do We Talk?

I don't watch a huge amount of TV, but I do enjoy a good documentary. Wildlife programmes are my favourites, but I'll watch stuff about science, medicine, history, anthropology, even a bit of politics or economics if I'm in the right mood. So when my boyfriend pointed out a documentary about language on BBC2 last night - Horizon: Why Do We Talk? - it seemed worth a watch.

I did enjoy it, but I also found it enormously frustrating. It seemed to skip from one topic to another with only the most tenuous links, it confused completely separate areas of research (in particular, the two very different issues of how we physically produce speech sounds and the processing of language in the brain) and it all felt like it added up to a rather misleading picture of what we know about why - or more importantly, perhaps - how we talk. I guess it's the same though with any 'popular science' on television and I'm sure that biologists and zoologists shout at the TV during some of my favourite wildlife programmes.

I think my mood wasn't improved by the appearance of Noam Chomsky, probably my least favourite linguist, spouting his ideas about knowledge of a basic language structure being innate. I know it sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea, but after two years of studying Transformational Syntax as a Linguistics undergraduate, I came to hate Chomsky. There were frustrating hours of trying to draw tree diagrams to represent sentence structure, trying to follow endless rules about where different elements could move to, followed, in my final year, by the great man's admission that in fact there were an endless number of movement rules and his subsequent abandonment of the whole theory!

Piggies & puddies

One of the things I've always loved about the English language is its flexibility; its capacity to be moulded and adapted by the people who use it. Of course, it's used in an infinite variety of ways across the globe, but also at a more personal level, everyone has their own idiolect; their own unique range of vocabulary and style of speaking.

Last weekend, we spent a few days away with my parents and in the car on the way back, my boyfriend was commenting on the language we use together as a family; our familiolect, if you like. Every family has their own collection of in-jokes and phrases, picked up over the years. Some come from identifiable sources - my family grew up with Monty Python and various words and phrases (any reference to varieties of cheese or dead parrots, for example) trigger automatic responses. Others have become lost in the mists of time.

We also have our own vocabulary. Within my family, when we're together, we refer to feet as "pigs" or "piggies". It's a usage I'm sure is familiar to many people from the children's rhyme -"This little piggy went to market"- played, of course, using a child's toes and so, by extension, used to mean toes or feet. But we've also always referred to hands as "puds" or "puddies" (to rhyme with 'buddy') going back through my grandmother. For years, I'd presumed it was made up, until I finally came across it in the Oxford English Dictionary:

pud (noun)
a child's word for: the hand or the forefoot of an animal; a little hand or paw. Now rare.


One thing's for sure though - I know exactly where my inability to speak without using my puddies comes from - like mother, like daughter ...