Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Competition (UK): Win a copy of Ellen Jovin's Rebel with a Clause

For years, Ellen Jovin has carted a table, chair and reference books—first around New York City and later all across the United States—to volunteer herself as “The Grammar Table.” In doing so, she gives passers-by the opportunity to ask grammar questions, to vent about grammar (or other people’s grammar), and to learn more about English and other languages. She’s now written a book based on her Grammar Table adventures: Rebel with a Clause. I got to read it pre-publication, and this was my review:

Those who learn grammatical rules are doomed to repeat them. And, boy, do they repeat them—tirelessly, senselessly, bringing us to the point where much of the English-speaking world thinks grammar is boring or difficult or scary. Ellen Jovin is on a mission to rescue us from that joyless fate. Her generosity and curiosity about language is second only to her generosity and curiosity with the people who approach her for grammatical advice. We could all stand to be a bit more Ellen Jovin.

 

The publishers have kindly sent me an extra copy of the book to share with my readers—though I must say, it’s me who’s paying for the postage, so I’m going to concentrate my sharing efforts on my UK readers. The American readers at least have the excitement of knowing that they may run into Ellen’s Grammar Table in their public square or strip mall when she sets up her stall there.  (Rest-of-World readers: Sorry!)

 

To make giving away a book more interesting, I’m going to give it to someone who comments on this blog post with a question for Ellen, and (here’s the exciting part!) you are going to get the Grammar Table experience, because Ellen is going to respond to the questions that show up before the contest deadline.* 

 

So, to enter the competition:

  • Comment on the blog with a question for Ellen by [AmE format] October 2, 2022.
  • Sign your message with a name that will identify you (it need not be your full name) and let us know that you’re in the UK.  (You can comment without being in the UK, but you can’t have the copy of the book.) 
  • Click the ‘Notify Me’ box, so that you’ll see the response to your question AND learn whether you’ve won. If you don't see such a box, there are other ways to be notified...see the comments. 

 

After the [non-AmE format] 2 October deadline, I will put the names of the eligible commenters into a real or virtual hat and draw a winner, then announce that winner in a blog comment, with details on how to email me to claim the prize. I will send the book out to them soon after. 



(BrE) Ready, steady, ask some questions!

*Normal commenting etiquette applies. I reserve the right to delete any comments that I find rude or abusive. Any commenter will only be entered into the contest ONCE. 


AND THE WINNER IS....GRHM!!! 
I'm closing down the comments now to give Ellen a break. 

Thank you so much to Ellen for her generosity in answering the questions, and to everyone who asked a question! 


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the best language books I read in 2021

I am an inveterate life-logger. At the end of a calendar year, I like to review what I've done, what I've liked, what I've been grateful for, etc. This includes reviewing the books I've read. This year I've had the thought: why not do the languagey bits of that on this blog? So here we are.

In keeping with the life-logging, I take new year's resolutions very seriously. In 2021, I (uncharacteristically) made only one resolution: to read more books than I acquired. This was an attempt to counter two problems:
  • I have to do so much reading at work, I can lose sight of reading as a leisure activity.
  • I accidentally acquire a lot of books. 
It took active concentration to ensure I didn't acquire more books than I could read. I was careful not to mention any books to my loved ones, so as to not get any as birthday/Christmas presents (it almost worked). I (almost) only allowed myself to buy books that related to my current writing project. I only picked up books from neighbo(u)rhood giveaways (our neighbo(u)rs got very into sharing over lockdown) if they were books I could have imagined myself paying money for. 
 
I got a little serious about finding time for reading by (re)instituting 'family reading time' for 20 minutes after dinner each night and by having a two-person reading group with a friend as we slowly made it through one book together. (My friend is named Friend and we read a book called Friends together. It had to be done.) Family reading time went through better and worse patches. It got harder the later we had dinner—and the more 'normal' 2021 became, the later dinner got pushed by work and other activities. But the 20-minutes-per-day works well when it's working. 

In the end, I acquired 22 books: two that I count as 'reference' books (i.e. you wouldn't try to read them front-to-back), thirteen others about language, and the rest assorted non-fiction. Eight were free from publishers (for review, for inspection, or as payment for services), two were gifts and three were neighbo(u)hood (orig. AmE) freebies. So I bought 10 books. And kept myself from buying 100.
 
I read 21 books (not necessarily ones I acquired in 2021) and used both the reference books, so I'm cheatingly counting my 'read' count as 23. It's not the resounding success I wanted it to be, but I'm counting it as success. I'm renewing the resolution for 2022. 
 
I did more refereeing (peer-reviewing) this year than usual (including some for book manuscripts) and tons of article-reading for my book-in-progress and for a related new class I taught ("Small Words"). So, though my pile of to-be-read books has not shrunk, I've more than justified the investment in varifocal reading glasses.

That's the end of the accounting (BrE accountancy).

I'm going to start out with the best three books about language that I read in actual book form. Then I'll say something about two 2021 books that I read in manuscript and appreciated enough to provide a blurb for. Then I might tell you a bit about writing.

My best language reads of 2021

1. Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self Julie Sedivy (Harvard UP, 2021)

Let's start at the end of my year, with the book I've just finished. Julie Sedivy's Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self. Sedivy, a Czech-born and (mostly) Canada-raised linguist,  uses her personal experience as the starting point for exploring the psychological, social, and emotional aspects of being multilingual and of losing one's childhood language to attrition (then recovering it). 

I found this book absolutely perfect. The six long chapters (Death, Dreams, Duality, Conflict, Revival, Home) have none of the furniture that academic writers tend to lean on—like titled subsections,  blocks of quotation, and clunky referencing (though for those of us who want to see the research basis, the notes section is a treasure trove). Instead, the paragraphs just flow, phrase by gorgeous phrase. At one point, she's discussing her relationship with her Czech-speaking father or her French-speaking schoolmates, at another she's explaining fascinating studies on such subjects as how bilingual immigrants' languages interact with personality and memory. This includes the research supporting her observation that "it is healthy to be as hyphenated a citizen as possible, hazardous to be a cultural amputee." By the end, she's learning an indigenous language of Canada and witnessing firsthand the efforts made to revive dying languages, but only after returning to her father's home village to rekindle the language that had retreated from her as she grew up (with the help of relatives who were "about as fluent in spoken English as they were in spoken algebra"). Sedivy proposes the term homelanguage as a sister to homeland, since we live in our languages even when we or they have moved geographically.

The book is written with an empathy that never dumbs the subject down, but that constantly made (mostly monolingual) me think "I never thought of that. Of course it must feel that way." People who grew up with more than one language are likely to value the insights into the psychology of their multilingualism and the kinship across languages with other multilingual folk. But it's got to be even more valuable for those of us who grew up monolingual as part of a linguistic majority, letting us in on the meanings, consequences, and feelings of multilingualism and potentially complicating our views of what it means to know a language.

As I read Memory Speaks, I was surprised that it was a book from a university press. That probably means it's not going to be on as many bookshop or public library shelves as it should be. Please seek it out and read it. (I hope it's being translated into other languages. Especially Czech! I'm sure that would be an interesting challenge.)

Full disclosure: the publisher sent me a complimentary copy of this book.

2. A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed my Brain and my Life by Lauren Marks (Simon and Schuster, 2017)

I bought Lauren Marks' A Stitch of Time in the hope that it would give me some interesting facts and (someone else's) anecdotes for the book I'm writing on now. And it did. But like Sedivy's book, it also gave me some inkling of what it would be like to have a different mind/brain than I have (and by extension, it gave me a greater awareness of how my own mind/brain shapes my experience). And like Sedivy's book, it is a tale and exploration of language loss and recovery.
 
The author was the subject of probably my favo(u)rite episode of The Allusionist podcast—which was how I learned about the book. Marks was 27 when a burst aneurysm deprived her of almost all language. The book tells the story of her linguistic (and personal) recovery—though perhaps rediscovery is a better word than recovery. The book is so well written that you might at times doubt that she still has aphasia (certainly, not to the same extent that she did at first), but then it might occur to you: perhaps her distance from English contributes to her vivid language, just as it contributes to her appreciation for its complexity and (related) silliness.

Months later, I'm still thinking about her description of her time without language or inner monologue. She calls it The Quiet and presents it in such appreciative detail that I had to fight feeling jealous of a brain injury.

Marks' website includes some of the journals she wrote in the early stages of recovery and shows how they were translated into the prose of the book. But read the book. It's wonderful.

3. Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe by Gaston Dorren (Profile Books, 2015) 

In 2020, I bought, read, and loved Gaston Dorren's book Babel: Around the World in 20 Languages, so when his Lingo showed up in a book-rehousing post on our neighbo(u)rhood Facebook page, I became the thorn in the poster's side, checking up repeatedly on when I could come collect it from her. (Thank you, dear book-rehousing person!) 
 
Dorren's two books have similar structures. Each chapter magnifies a corner of a particular language—a corner that makes that language particular. Babel counted down the 20 most spoken languages in the world, while Lingo tours 60 languages of Europe, including the big (English), the little (Gagauz), and the made-up (Esperanto). It also connects the languages to English, giving for each (where possible) an example or two of words English has borrowed from the language and words that English might do well to borrow—because it lacks such a word. I'll share here (from the publisher's website's sample) the Lithuanian links (PIE = Proto-Indo-European, the focus of the Lithuanian chapter):

Dorren is a polyglot who knows his way around a language but also knows how to describe the most abstruse grammatical issues in clear, engaging language for those without his language gifts. While great as a cover-to-cover read, Lingo (like Babel) is a book you could dip into now and again when you need a little lift. (I spent a lot of time in [BrE] car parks/[AmE] parking lots while medical waiting rooms were closed over during lockdowns. Served me well!)

Books I blurbed

I read manuscript versions of these very good books for which I was happy to provide a quote. I'm getting tuckered out at this point in this blog post, so I'm mostly just going to give the blurbs!

 


Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever by John McWhorter (Penguin, 2021)

“Call me old-fashioned, but goshdarnit this book has an in-freaking-credible shipload of fizzy information. McWhorter’s delicate linguistic ear is put to indelicate and delectable use in this deep dive into the linguistic muck.”
 


McWhorter's book covers some classic 'swearwords' (I particularly enjoyed the demonstration of taboo words becoming pronouns), but also the N-word, whose taboo status is soundly demonstrated by the necessity to circumlocute it.


Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics: Modern Idioms and Where They Come From by Gareth Carrol (John Hunt, 2021)

"Gareth Carrol gives us an expert's tour of the hotspots where popular culture meets etymology. A rich dive into the wheres, whys, and hows of linguistic memes."

You'd be surprised how deep the stories go for very recent idioms. Great research!

 


Enough about reading. What about writing?

The blog has been rather silent for much of the year. This little burst of writing (Two posts in one week! Another planned soon!) is courtesy of a holiday/vacation made much less social/busy by the Covid in the air.

My writing energies these days are concentrated on the aforementioned book about 'small words'. I decided to write it as a challenge to myself, which is either a very good or a very stupid reason to write a book. I am enjoying it (as much as one can enjoy the very painful process of writing), but it is going much more slowly than the last book, since it's not on a topic I'd been blogging about for years.

The other main thing I accomplished in 2021(besides being head of department in crisis time, teaching new and old modules, living in a building site, and having a family life) was acclimating to my new (voluntary) job of editing Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America and getting two issues into publication.

Because of all that I've done little other writing—but for a few commissions:

One big help in 2021 was the opportunity to supervise students in work-placement positions in our department (a way of dealing with work placements while many businesses were shut down). I'm grateful to Tess Blakeway, for her help with book-related fact-checking and editorial work, and Summer Raselma for largely taking over my Difference of the Day posts on Twitter for a few months.

 

So that's my year in reading and writing. I do hope this post might direct some readers to the excellent books I've mentioned!


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the language of bridge

On occasion, I invite people whose insights I trust to contribute guest posts for the blog. On rare occasions, they deliver the goods! I hope you enjoy this one on terminology in the game of contract bridge.

 


My mother could never understand how I was allowed a (AmE) college/(BrE) university degree without learning to play bridge, but I was educated in the decade of Trivial Pursuit. I tried to rectify this gap in my education in the early 2000s. After maybe three lessons, the couple who were teaching me had a fight and that was the end of that! Maybe learning to play bridge be my retirement project. One of the dozens I have in mind. At any rate, I am not the person to tell you about bridge terminology, but here’s someone who is.

 

Simon Cochemé is an English bridge writer and is a regular contributor of light-hearted articles to bridge magazines. He has recently published a collection of the best of them in a book, Bridge with a Twist (Master Point Press). ‘Destined to be ranked as a classic, alongside its prequel, Oliver Twist.’

 

There are seven chapters on the language of bridge – vocabulary and idioms from (a)round the world. This post is an edited version of the chapter on American terminology – written with American spelling.

***

 

The Language of Bridge III

 

In which we look across the Atlantic at what the Americans have to say

 

George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde) said that England and America were two nations separated by a common language. Bridge terminology certainly proves the point. We say protect, they say balance; we say switch, they say shift; we say dummy, they [sometimes] say board; we say peter, they say echo; we say tomahto, they say tomayto; we say finesse, they say hook; we say singleton, they say stiff; we say discard, they [often] say pitch.

 

There’s more. They say push instead of flat board, down one instead of one down, ace-fourth instead of ace-to-four, set for beating the contract, and drawing trump rather than drawing trumps, as though they always played in twelve-card fits. You will still occasionally read deuce for the two of a suit, although the quaint trey for the three has all but disappeared.

 

There are some words that have yet to cross the Pond: tight, meaning doubleton, as in ‘He held king-queen tight’ and swish, meaning passed out, as in ‘The bidding went 2♠, swish’. I have also heard (but not seen in print) ‘Four hearts in the East’ where the British would say ‘Four hearts by East’.

 

Things get even more confusing with the word tap. Where we say force (as in force declarer), they say tap; but where we say tap (in plumbing), they say faucet

The most extreme of American phrases is ruff ‘n’ sluff for ruff-and-discard. I haven’t seen sluff or slough used anywhere else in bridge literature, so presumably the lure of the rhyme was too hard to resist, as it was with surf ‘n’ turf.

 

Americans like variety in the presentation of their sports results: ‘The Red Sox downed the 49ers’, for example, or ‘The Chipmunks whupped the Bears’. The English tend to stick to the ‘Chelsea beat Liverpool’ formula, with the occasional ‘Villa lost to Spurs’ thrown in. Americans [tend to] put the winning team first, whereas the English usually put the home team first. Either way, the English results are a bit boring. 

 

Sporting metaphors abound in American writing, and I have seen bridge articles where a player covers all bases, or makes a clutch shot, or plays a shut-out. I have no idea what slam-dunk means; it sounds as though you had twelve tricks on top but went one down. I have yet to find mention of a triple-double (basketball) or pass interference (American football), but I’m sure they’re out there.

 

We must fight fire with fire; difficult contracts must be played on sticky wickets and small slams hit for six Declarer must play a blinder, and overbidders should be caught offside or shown the red card.

 

There is a nice expression that I have seen American teachers use, encouraging their pupils to draw trumps before the defenders can ruff something: Get the kids off the streets.

 

The French have names for the kings on their cards (David (from the Bible), Charles (after Charlemagne), Caesar (Julius), and Alexander (the Great). I understand the Americans have noted it and like the idea. They don’t have any real kings of their own, so the debate is whether to reuse the Mount Rushmore quartet, or to go with four from the shortlist of Martin Luther, Stephen, Billie Jean, Burger, Kong and Elvis. [jk—ed.]

 

Let’s have a deal. This one features Zia Mahmood, who was (AmE) on (BrE in) the USA team against Italy in the final of the World Championships in 2009.

 

[The chapter goes on to describe a bridge deal, the bidding and play, in great detail using the American terms. It will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t play bridge. If you want to see whether the USA team wins or loses, you will have to buy the book …]

 

***

 

Lynne says: For good measure, here’s a corpus search of that last difference, in/on the team, which goes far beyond bridge:

 


 

 

Bridge with a Twist (RRP £14.95) is available at a number of online sites.

 

 

 

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Unused epigraphs

 

I love epigraphs, so I use them as often as possible in books I write. The Prodigal Tongue has one for each of its subsections. I do think I chose very good ones for in the book (buy/borrow it just for the epigraphs!), but I still have a file full of quotations that I didn't have space for.

So, in the spirit of "reuse and recycle", behold the remaining contents of that file, collected during the years of research for the book. If you don't see it here (Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, The Simpsons...), then it probably made the cut and is in the book. What I've not done here (because I cannot be spending that much time on it) is give the full bibliographic info for each quote.

Please note that I collected these to illustrate various ideologies that I'd be discussing in the book. None should be taken as my point of view.  If you want to quote them, I'd recommend you first read up  on any unfamiliar authors before you do so!


Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.

        —William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

The semanticist's dilemmas

This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
        ― Samuel Johnson

It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words.
        ― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself.
    
    ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
        ― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

 

Language marches on

A word is dead
When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

        ― Emily Dickinson

'Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.
        ― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice

        ― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets   

Don't gobblefunk around with words.
  
     ― Roald Dahl, The BFG

 

Americans on transatlantic differences/relations

the harmony between Great Britain and the United States may be as lasting as the language and the principles common to both
        — John Quincy Adams

the body of the language is the same as in England [...] it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist
        — Noah Webster, 1828

It offends them [the English] that we are not thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for not being like them.
        — Dr Henry W. Boynton, 1908   

I think we are all Anglophiles…How can we fail to be Anglophiles? Unless we hate ourselves.
        — the Librarian of Congress, 1985 

American grammar doesn’t have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddamn Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm.
       
Stephen King, On writing

whether British commentators applauded or disdained Americans’ English, they all assumed it as their prerogative to make such appraisals
        — Paul Longmore, 2005


Britons on transatlantic differences/relations

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
        — Samuel Johnson

The Americans generally improve upon the inventions of others; probably they may have improved our language.
        
— Captain Frederick Marryat, 1839

I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here
        — Charles Dickens 

I do not know the American gentleman, god forgive me for putting two such words together. 
        — Charles Dickens 

 The English and the American language and literature are both good things, but they are better apart than mixed.
        
H. W. & F. G. Fowler, The King’s English, 1906

Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated
         H. W. & F. G. Fowler, The King’s English, 1906

Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich
        — H. G. Wells

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
       
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943

The enjoyment of a common language was of course a supreme advantage in all British and American discussions
        
Winston Churchill, The Second World War  

You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. ‘Huh’, ‘hun’, and ‘hi’ in their various modulations, together with sure, guess so, that so? and nuts! will meet almost any contingency
       
Ian Fleming

American is the language in which people say what they mean as Italian is the language in which they say what they feel. English is the language in which what a character means or feels has to be deduced from what he or she says, which may be quite the opposite    
       
— playwright John Mortimer, 1989

I don't have an English accent because this is what English sounds like when spoken properly.
        — James Carr, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

 The difference between English and American humour is $150 a minute.
        — Eric Idle

It only takes a room full of Americans for the English and Australians to realize how much we have in common
        — Stephen Fry

I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.
          — Stephen Fry

To be snooty about Americans, while slavishly admiring them; this is another crucial characteristic of being British.
        — 'Bagehot', in The Economist, 2014 

When it comes to language we have nothing to learn from a nation that uses the word "randy" as a first name.
    
    — commenter at The Sunday Times, 2015

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say elevator, we say lift…they say President, we say ‘stupid psychopathic git’
        
Alexei Sayle

See also: the whole song Two Nations by The Streets

 

America(ns)

I have heard in this country, in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain.
        — John Witherspoon (coiner of the word Americanism), 1781

For America in her infancy to adopt the present maxims of the old world would be to stamp the wrinkle of decrepit age upon the bloom of youth
       
Noah Webster

In no country in the world does the law hold so absolute a language as in America, and in no country is the right of applying it vested in so many hands.
       
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 

What you write to me about American situations is no surprise to me. Without ever having been there I can give you a picture of the country as accurate as if I had been there.
        — Friedrich Hebbel, in a letter to Amalie Schoppe, 29 Dec 1855

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.
       
Mark Twain

The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world—and the most perfect users of words.
       
Walt Whitman

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them. 
        — Henry James

The American language differs from the English in that it seeks the top of expression while English seeks its lowly valleys.
        — Salvador de Madariaga, 1928

I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches.
        — Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.  

because American companies are so successful — because American ideas are so successful — they get the blame for the horrible fact of world homogenisation; for the unbearable notion that people around the world might get what they want and might want roughly the same things.
        — Justin Webb, 2008

 

The English (sometimes 'the British')

But Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange
       
Samuel Pepys

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
        — James Agate 

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.
        — Margaret Halsey, With Malice Toward Some, 1938

Let us pause to consider the English.
Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish,
because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz;
that to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is

        — Ogden Nash

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
        — P. D. James

The world still consists of two clearly divided groups; the English and the foreigners. One group consists of less than 50 million people; the other of 3,950 million people. The latter group does not really count.
        — George Mikes, How to be a Brit

Bloody foreigners are rarely called bloody foreigners nowadays, some say because the English have become more polite; my own feeling is that the word ‘bloody’ has changed its meaning and is no longer offensive enough.
      
 — George Mikes, How to be a Brit

It has still never occurred to one single Englishman that not everybody would regard it as a step up, as a promotion, to become English.
        — George Mikes, How to be a Brit

England is a land that lives by myths. And one of the greatest of the national myths is that the English are a polite race. They are nothing of the kind. Indeed, the English, never known to do anything by halves, have developed impoliteness into an art form of great sophistication and complexity.
       
John Algeo, 1990

Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations...we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough... Woe betide you if you hold your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree.
        
Louis de Bernieres, Notwithstanding, 2009

 

The French

you must hate a Frenchman as you hate a devil
        — Horatio Nelson

Southerners are snobs and condescending but it's not their fault the smell from France is starting to affect them.
        — Jack Carter (Leeds, UK)

 

The English language

In fifty years from this time, the American-English will be spoken by more people, than all the other dialects of the language.
        — Noah Webster, 1806

The most common expedient employed by democratic nations to make an innovation in language consists in giving some unwonted meaning to an expression already in use. This method is very simple, prompt, and convenient; no learning is required to use it aright, and ignorance itself rather facilitates the practice; but that practice is most dangerous to the language. […] This is a deplorable consequence of democracy.
        —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The English Language is grandly lawless like the race who use it,—or, rather, breaks out of the little laws to enter truly the higher ones. It is so instinct with that which underlies laws and the purports of laws it refuses all petty interruptions in its way.
        
Walt Whitman  

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
        — Clarence Darrow

Others may speak and read English—more or less—but it is our language not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is learnt or used
        
Enoch Powell, speech to the Royal Society of St George, April 1988

The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary.
        — cartoonist Dave Kellett

RIP RP
Goodbye RP
Let our words go free
Coo and howl
Lay flat your vowels
Ah ay ee
Goodbye RP
Tongue uncross your t's
Slang and slur
Bah and burr
They thy thee
Goodbye RP Teachered tyranny
Speed this end
Our ows to bend...
Who were he wi'? 
       
Chumbawamba

speakers of English […] tend to divide into two camps: those who suspect that they themselves misuse the language and feel insecure about it and those who think they do not misuse the language and feel rather irritated by those who do
        — Ammon Shea, Bad English

English is a global language because English speakers have been global conquerors. It’s not about the quality of English nouns and verbs, it’s about the quality of English guns and money.
        — Gretchen McCulloch

 

And finally, the linguist's dilemma...

There is a general conviction that language is not a matter for experts. We all know about language because we all use language. No similar conclusion is drawn from the fact that we all use kidneys, nerves, and intestines.
       
Anthony Burgess, Language made plain, 1975

[L]inguistics does have one thing in common with prostitution. In neither field can the professional hope to compete with the amateur.
        — Morris Halle


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Book review: The Language Lover's Puzzle Book

It's not often that I review a book in the same week that it comes into my house, but I'm happy to go directly to recommending this one. It's The Language Lover's Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos. You can probably think of someone who needs a present for these "Oh my god it's getting dark early and the world is full of germs" times. This is it!


Alex Bellos writes a puzzle column for the Guardian and has written a few other puzzle books, with mathematical puzzles a particular special(i)ty (among other things he writes). For this book, he has mined the riches of the Linguistic Olympiad movement, a great program(me) through which secondary school teams compete nationally and internationally on linguistic problems. One thing I love about the book is how responsible Bellos is in giving credit where credit is due.

The puzzles are of many types. There are straightforward vocabulary quizzes, some word games that you might have seen in newspapers (like word chains and crosswords), and the kinds of problems that get assigned in linguistics classes. Some are about English and many are about other languages. His website lists the following:

A PARTIAL LIST OF THE LANGUAGES INCLUDED

Armenian, Babylonian, Breton, Burmese, Chalcatongo Mixtec, Chinese, Dothraki, Dutch, Esperanto, Faroese, German, Georgian, Hawaiian, Hindi, Italian, Kwak’wala, Latin, Limburgish, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Navajo, Nuku Hiva, Oscan, Quechua, Sami, Samoan, Sumerian, Swahili, Tajik, Tok Pisin, Toki Pona, Twi, Warlpiri.

And not forgetting: Blazon, Blissymbolics, Braille, Old Norse runes, Lovers’ Communication System, N’ko, Ogham, Pig Latin, Stenography, Transcendental Algebra and Visible Speech.

The book has been our after-dinner entertainment for four nights now. I'm not any better than the rest of the family at the vocabulary quizzes, whose questions play to a range of different strengths among our family. The 12-year-old is loving the puzzles. (She also loves doing homework I set for my students. She might have something of an advantage over the average 12-year-old.) The puzzles tickle my brain in nice ways too, though if it were a race between me and the rest of the family, I'd be trouncing them. I just keep that knowledge in my back pocket and keep my mouth shut till the kid has found the solution. Ah, the sacrifices of parenthood. 

Here are a couple of examples. Puzzle 1 asks you to come up with grammatical English sentences in which these two-word strings occur with no punctuation separating them. 

  1. could to
  2. he have
  3. that that
  4. the John
  5. that than

(The order of problems usually doesn't go from easier-to-harder. I like that. I'd say 'could to' is much more challenging than some of the others.)

Later in the book you get this puzzle, which I'm not going to try to re-type:


 

As well as providing puzzles, Bellos gives background about the languages, linguistic and related fields. You're not just solving puzzles. You're learning a lot. Such fun.

The book is out in the UK on the 5th of November (remember, remember), but if you plan to buy it, pre-order it! Pre-ordering is an especially kind thing you can do for authors, as (in a kind of perverse way) pre-order numbers often determine which books get reviewed. Pre-ordering from a local bookshop is a nice thing you can do for all of us who want bookshops to survive the nasty times.

I'm afraid I don't know whether it will be published in North America.

About my book reviews

I receive some free books because of this blog, including this one. Thanks to Alex (whom I've never met) and the publisher for this one. These days, I choose to only review the ones I like, as I don't see the point of giving negative attention to others' work. If I don't like the book, I just don't mention it. So, please believe that I would have liked this book even if I'd paid for it. I am off to pre-order some for Christmas!

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Help me with my next book! Small words

UPDATE: This post has become too much of a spam magnet, so I'm closing comments. If you have something you want to say to me about this, please use email. 

I am moving this PS to the top, as I want to be sure it's read!

P.S. I'm happy for everyone to discuss what they're interested in in the comments, but I should emphasi{s/z}e (before I waste anyone's time!) that what I'm looking for are specific anecdotes and witty quotations (etc.) to give  'colo(u)r' to the discussion. I already know what aspects of language the book covers and the relevance of the fields I've mentioned to those aspects. I can't promise that anything offered will be used in the book, but I will be grateful for any stories/quotations/etc. offered.

Please do so in the comments here and not on email, unless there are privacy issues to consider with regard to the story. It's much easier for me to keep track of things if they're all together here.


I hope you will indulge me in an off-SbaCL-topic post. More than that, I hope you will keep me and this post in mind as you go through your days. 

Here's the deal. I'm writing another general-audience (rather than academic) book. It's rather different from The Prodigal Tongue—still about language (and mostly the English language), but without much in the way of nationalism-bashing. Its working title is Small Words and I am so, so fortunate to again have the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, which gives me time away from my day job to research and write intensively. (This is not a small thing during pandemic times when the day job is 1039% more insane. I thank my colleagues for bearing my absence with such generosity.)

For the purposes of the book, members of the category small words are:

  • linguistic elements that do things rather than mean things 
    • Another way to put this: words with non-referential meaning. They don't "point out" objects or actions or properties in reality or imagination.
    • This includes function words (aka grammatical words, like the and or and in and it and is) and many interjections (like ow or oh or hi or yes).
  • words that have three or fewer phonemes (speech sounds)
    • This often coincides with having three or fewer letters (a, of, the), but not necessarily (that, with, through).

The idea is that there are lots of books that celebrate rare words, big words, dialectal words, forgotten

P.S. I'm happy for everyone to discuss what they're interested in in the comments, but I should emphasi{s/z}e (before I waste anyone's time!) that what I"m looking for are specific anecdotes and witty quotations (etc.) to give  'colo(u)r' to the discussion. I already know what aspects of language the book covers and the relevance of the above fields to those aspects. I can't promise that anything offered will be used in the book, but I will be grateful for any stories/quotations/etc. offered.
words. Some claim to be about words you should know. I want to celebrate the words you already  people take for granted, because they tell us an awful lot about history, psychology, social relations, thinking processes...in other words, what it means to have a human mind and a human language.

Many areas of life and work are particularly sensitive to the small words. I can think of lots of people I'd want to interview for the book (and some I already have). In alphabetical order, they include:

  • comedians
  • computer/information scientists
  • editors of various kinds
  • English literature teachers/critics
  • journalists
  • lawyers
  • language (especially English) learners
  • language teachers
  • lexicographers 
  • literacy or (BrE) oracy/(AmE) speech teachers
  • neurologists —and their clients (and their clients' family support)
  • philosophers
  • poets and prose stylists
  • pollsters
  • psychologists
  • psychotherapists
  • Scrabble players—and other word-game aficionados
  • social scientists of various types
  • speech and language therapists —and their clients  (and their clients' family support)
  • translators and interpreters

I'm particularly looking for interesting anecdotes —personal or historical— that hinge on a small-word usage, misunderstanding, argument, insight, etc. 

These are the types of things that serendipity brings me when I'm reading an interesting passage in a  politician's diary, hearing a bit in a stand-up show, or noticing a line in an advertisement. This week I noticed Henrietta Pussycat's use of meow as a "small word". That helped me explain some statistical 'laws' of language. The "hooks" that I can use to explain the science of small words come to me from many avenues. 

I feel very lucky when I run across these things, because the are scattered so far and wide. But, to paraphrase the old adage "the harder I work, the luckier I get", the more I ask for interesting stories, the luckier I am in finding them.

So, please keep me in mind as you go through your days, read your books, watch your entertainment. If you come across quotations, arguments, marvellings, anecdotes about small words, could you drop me a line? If you know of non-academic folk who really should be interviewed about their relationships with small words, let me know. The best way to do that would be to leave a comment at this blog post, where I'll be able to dip back and find what people have sent me. If the information needs to be presented more anonymously, then email works.

This has been my cry for help! Thanks for reading! I'll leave you with this thought about smallness from Bertrand Russell:

There is no need to worship mere size. […] Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.



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Book Week 2019: Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet


Welcome to the final review post of Book Week 2019. In the intro to Book Week 2019, I explain what I'm doing. The 'week' has turned out to be eight days. If you're perturbed about that, I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your subscription fees for this blog.

On with the show. Today's book is:


Because Internet

Understanding the new rules of language (US subtitle)
Understanding how language is changing (UK subtitle)

by Gretchen McCulloch
Riverhead, 2019 (N America)
Harvill Secker, 2019 (UK)


Gretchen McCulloch describes herself as an internet linguist: writing about internet language for people on the internet. She actually does a lot more than that, with daily blogging at All Things Linguistic for years and being one half of the Lingthusiasm podcast team and writing on all sorts of linguistic themes for all sorts of publications. So, I expect many readers of this blog will already know her and have heard about this book. 

US Cover
I expected Because Internet to be good, knowing Gretchen's work, but I also probably (in my grumpy, middle-aged, oh-do-we-have-to-talk-about-emojis-again? way) expected it to be faddish. There have been too many just-plain-bad, (orig. AmE) jumping-on-the-bandwagon books about emojis, and I've got(ten) a bit sour on the topic. 

This book is so much more than I expected it to be. 

I should have known better. Having read and heard much of her work, I should have expected that this would be a truly sophisticated approach to language and to general-audience linguistics writing. So far in Book Week 2019, I've recommended the books as gifts for A-level students/teachers, science lovers, and language curmudgeons. This book is good for all those groups and more. 

UK cover
The key is in the subtitle(s).* This is not just a book about emojis and autocomplete (and, actually, autocomplete isn't even in the index). This is a book about the relationship between speech and writing and how that's changed with technology. It seamlessly introduces theories of why language changes, how change spreads and how communication works in a time when the potential for change is high and the potential for changes to spread is unprecedented. 

That seamless introduction of linguistic concepts is the reason I've started this book from the beginning and not skipped around (unlike for other books in Book Week—where the rule is that I don't have to read the whole book before I start writing about it). In most books about language for non-linguists, I'm able to skim or skip the bit where they talk about the basics of how language works and the classic studies on the topic and the ideas springing from them. McCulloch covers those issues and those studies (the Labovs, the Milroys, the Eckerts), but since this is intertwined with looking at how language is changing in the 21st century—because (of the) internet—it was worth my while to read straight through. The great thing about the language of the internet is: even when it looks really different from non-internet language, it's still illustrating general principles about how language, communication, and society work. But it also shows how society is changing because of technology, particularly in changing who we are likely to interact with or hear from, In the process, it gives a history of the internet that's enlightening even for those of us who've lived through it all. (I've just flipped open to a section about  PLATO at the University of Illinois. One of my student jobs was working in a PLATO lab, playing Bugs-n-Drugs [aka Medcenter] while signing people in and out. That game was not good for my hypochondria, but I have awfully fond memories of PLATO.)


Another thing to appreciate about McCulloch's book is how unreactionary it is. She doesn't set up her discussion as "You've heard people say these stupid things about the internet, but here's the TRUTH." (A style of writing that I can be very, very guilty of.) She mostly just makes her case gracefully, based on what the language is doing, rather than reacting to what other people say the language is doing. Rather than 'This, that and the other person say emoji are a new language, but they're not', she just gets on with explaining how emoji fulfil(l) our communicative need to gesture. It's a positive approach that academic linguists will have had trained out of them by the requirements of academic publishing.

This is a bit of a nerdview 'review'. Usually reviews tell you some fun facts from the book they're reviewing, whereas I'm telling you what I've noticed about its information structure. That's because that's what I really look for in books as I prepare to write a new one. In terms of information, in this book you'll learn, among other things:
  • which "internet generation" you belong to and how your language is likely to be different from other generations'.
  • what punctuation communicates in texting/chat and how that differs from formal writing
  • how language change can be traced through studying strong and weak social links and geographic tagging on Twitter
Inevitably, the book is mainly about English, in no small part because English rules the internet. But it does make its way to other languages and cultures—for instance, how Arabic chat users adapted their spelling to the roman alphabet and how emojis are interpreted differently around the world.  In the end, she briefly considers whether space is being made for other languages on the internet.

It's a galloping read and you'll learn all sorts of things.


So, on that happy review, I declare Book Week 2019 FINISHED.


* I love the transatlantic change in subtitles, since it completely illustrates the point of chapter 8 of The Prodigal Tongue: that Americans like to talk about language in terms of rules, and Britons in terms of history/tradition. I've also written a shorter piece about my personal experience of it for Zócalo Public Square.
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Abbr.

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