Showing posts with label German. Show all posts
Showing posts with label German. Show all posts

off-piste, off the beaten track/path, off base

Thought I'd dip into the 'to-be-blogged' e-mailbox and click randomly for the next topic, and wouldn't you know it: the thing I clicked on, a five-month-old note from Jan Freeman, is about off-piste, which I used in the last post, leading to some off-piste (and off-piste) discussion in the comments there.

So, here I am discussing it again, but that's (orig. AmE) okay because I like things to have their own posts and because it leads me to a few other off- expressions.

Off-piste has both literal and figurative uses in BrE. A piste (pronounced 'peest') was originally the path beaten by a horse or mule, but was extended to the area of play in fencing and to prepared/designated ski paths. Piste has other uses in French, but English has taken those particular meanings.

The English-French hybrid off-piste usually refers to skiing*; skiing off-piste means leaving the designated path. [Though the UK isn't a great skiing destination, that doesn't keep Brits from skiing--remember: they get a lot more holiday/vacation time than Americans, many go on package holidays where they (AmE) rent/(BrE) hire the equipment, and the Alps are just over there...] I won't say that American skiers never say (off-)piste, but the ones I know don't. They talk of ski runs, not pistes. I assume that the skiing terminology differences between the US and UK stem from the fact that the British rarely ski in their own country and so the terms they use are sometimes borrowed from other European languages. Meanwhile, Americans tend to ski in the US and have come up with their own English words for things. So Americans wear ski bibs (or overalls), while UK skiers have salopettes, from French. Americans do cross-country skiing, but my English in-laws call it langlauf (from German) and others in the UK (more officially) call it Nordic skiing (but also cross-country skiing).

The figurative meaning of off-piste is very British and seems to be relatively recent (the OED doesn't cover the figurative meanings). So, figuratively, off-piste is any deviation from what is expected. Some examples from the interwebs, courtesy of GloBWE:
  • I'm a fan of wine from off-piste regions. 
  • tell them exactly what you want, while still remaining open to any slightly off-piste suggestions 
  • Goldie's debut looked to slick jazz-funk and soul for off-piste inspiration
As you can see here, off-piste works well as an adjective, but it's also used adverbially:
  • To the rescue Domaine Guenault Touraine Sauvignon 2011 (7.99), from the Bougrier's own property -- the conversation was much better, though one of our number went off piste and really rated the Muscadet with it, especially the cockles. 
So in this case one drinker didn't follow the path set by others and had a different wine. (That's an informal BrE use of rated -- to mean 'rated highly'.  I really thought I'd covered that before, but it seems not.)

Similar to off-piste, but not as useful as an adjective, is the phrase off the beaten [noun].  The choice of noun in that phrase differs by continent. The US and Canada prefer off the beaten path at a rate of about 3:1, while the UK and Ireland prefer off the beaten track by about 5:1 (again using GloWBE).

In all these figurative expressions, going off the path gives the connotation of trail-blazing excitement (reminding me of the AmE use of maverick) or, at least, interesting idiosyncrasy.  This is in contrast to another sport(s)-related figurative off- adverbial: (orig.) AmE off base. This comes from baseball, where a player (on the batting team) is safe while on a base. If you're not on a base, a member of the fielding team can put you out by tagging you with the ball (or by some other means). So, in the figurative sense, something that is off base is not where it should be; it's misguided and wrong and may put you in a position where you (or your idea) can be disregarded, as in (still from GloBWE):
  • Dawkins was way off base. He is so busy being the leader of the New Atheism that he has no idea what is going on behind him. 
  • your predictive powers and knowledge of the economy have thus far proven to be so far off base that it's a whole new game in another stadium
The phrase is known in BrE, but much less used, and certainly not with the extension of the baseball metaphor as in the last example.

In the American corpus data, many uses of off base try to pre(-)empt judg(e)ment, as in:
  • feel free to correct me if I'm off base...
  • I may be off base here but...
One can use off-base as an adjective, as in off-base assertions, but it's far more often used as the adverbial phrase. The hyphenated adjective is more common in its literal use for 'off (of) a military base' (e.g. an off-base apartment).


And with that, I'm off...



*It seems only fitting that in a post about off-piste, I should go off piste. And so I will, to share a harrowing tale of third-grade injustice. We were playing a game in class where two teams had to challenge each other to think of and spell words with double letters.  I challenged my opposite to come up with a word with double-i.  The teacher said I couldn't do that unless I could think of a word that had double-i. So I whispered "skiing" in her ear and she said I couldn't use that because it was not an English word. (She was a Norwegian immigrant and claiming it for her language. Never mind the -ing.) When it was my turn again, I challenged my opponent to find a double-u word. Again, the teacher challenged me. Again I had a word in mind (vacuum). But this time she wouldn't let me use it on account of me being a (orig. AmE in this sense) show-off. Look where that's got(ten) me. Forty years of bitterness.
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Spiro Agnew

Better Half was listening to a Radio 4 quiz show earlier in which a question was asked about former US vice president Agnew, whose first name, Spiro is from Greek.

"Spy-ro Agnew!" I shouted. "Who calls him Spy-ro Agnew?"

"I've only ever heard him called that," replied BH.

This isn't the first famous American's name I've heard mispronounced on these shores. Another is Edward Sapir, as in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In the UK, the last syllable of his name rhymes with ire and in the US it rhymes with ear and gets the main word stress. Whenever I lecture about him/the hypothesis, I preface it with "I know you've been hearing SAP-ire, but he was American, so I think he deserves the American pronunciation sap-EAR, don't you?" (He emigrated from Germany at age 5, so I think we can call him American.)

Now, of course, Americans pronounce names from other languages, including British English, in 'wrong' ways as well. There's a long discussion (with no real academic merit or answers!) about the difference between American and British pronunciations of Van Gogh at Yahoo answers. The residents of neither country should allow themselves to become smug about name pronunciation, as there are some that are "wrong" in both places.

The issue, to my mind, is respecting actual people by pronouncing their names the way they were intended. Granted, we have to work within the limits of our knowledge and pronunciation abilities--most non-English names I pronounce are a pale imitation of their bearer's pronunciation of them. If your native language doesn't have the sounds or the sound-combinations in another person's name, then you do the best you can. And if you've never heard a name pronounced (or only heard it pronounced incorrectly), you can't do anything but have a stab at it, relying on the spelling. So, though most Welsh people named Davies pronounce their names Davis, most Americans can't be expected to know about that.

But I do feel that I can give the BBC a little bit of a hard time over Spiro Agnew. News-broadcasting organi{s/z}ations create and use guides to pronunciations of names, and many dictionaries (including many on-line ones) provide the correct pronunciation. (One wonders whether and how Agnew appears in the BBC's list.) One problem, of course, is that the newsreader/presenter has to reali{s/z}e that the pronunciation they know might not be right before they'll have reason to look it up. The other problem, discussed well at Language Hat, is that such lists can be full of mistakes.

Let's end with a fairly unrelated anecdote from my days in South Africa. I phoned to order a pizza, and spoke with a speaker of (white) South African English.
Me: I'd like to order a small marguerita (AmE: cheese pizza) to collect (AmE: pick up).
Pizza Man: What's the name?
Me: Lynne.
PM: Sorry?
Me: Lynne.
PM: Could you say that again?
Me: Lynne.
PM: Really sorry, could you spell that?
Me: L-Y-N (I didn't see the point of confusing anyone with the -N-E)
PM: Ah! Lunn!


As I said, you do the best you can with the sounds you have.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)