Separated by a Common Language

I find "that" a fascinating word. I have known people who insist it should always be included in reported speech clauses, for example "she said that she would be catching the next train", whereas to me "she said she would be catching the next train" is natural and unambiguous, so the sentence does not need that. However, in the sentence "He said that on this occasion he did not mind" DOES become ambiguous if you remove the "that" - "he said on this occasion he did not mind" leaves open what he might have said, or minded, on other occasions.

In my time as the editor for a technical journal, one of my most memorable discussions related to the existence of a comma in 1024. According to our house style, a number with more than three digits should be comma-separated in groups of three. Naturally, the sub marked my copy to change to 1,024. To a computer scientist, the seemingly subtle addition of a helpful comma completely changes the meaning of these four digits. With the comma, 1,024 is a meaningless number that comes after 1,023 and before 1,025. But 1024 is a magical number deeply rooted in the binary logic of computer systems. It is the number 2 raised to the power of ten. It is an element of the number series that computer scientists know as well as their own names (0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and so on). If you studied in the 1980s, a kilobyte contains 1024 bytes, but most modern vendors use the SI definition of the kilobyte, which is 1000 bytes. The sub won that particular argument, but when the paper came back from the authors, they wanted me to remove the offending comma. I did. Highly perplexed, the sub asked me how I knew. In the moment, I found it hard to explain the transformation in meaning that a simple comma could make.

I'm glad that you're including computer scientists in this. I don't have any one to suggest, but I think that you'd find that many computer languages use a lot of what you'd call small words (FOR, DO, FROM, BY, IF, etc) as part of their syntax to ensure precision and clarity. Sure, the usages are limited, but they are chosen precisely for the lack of ambiguity.

I'm not sure if this fits your criteria, but the word 'like' is used, like, all the time. I don't know why it has, like, permeated our speech but my goodness it's annoying.

You know I'm a fan of the so-called "meaningless" items (um, er, uh, like, why, etc.) which are in fact, as I know you know, not meaningless at all. Here's a fun game: take a passage of transcribed or composed speech, and replace any of these items that occur in it with any other one, and watch how the import and effect changes.

I became very interested in the difference between "of" and "from" after a conversation with a boss who spoke English as a second language. He kept insisting that "Project A is a part of Project B" and I kept arguing that they were two separate things, until I finally remembered he often confused "of" and "from" and realized that he meant to say "Project A is apart from Project B". Usually, this mix-up just leads to slightly awkward English as in "I am away of the office", but I thought it was interesting that in this case it ended up sounding like the exact opposite of what he meant.

How about crossword-puzzle creators?

'A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.' (Henry David Thoreau) Sage advice for good mental health and avoiding 'big words'

Geoff Pullum tells an anecdote about how a friendship was destroyed by a single use of the word just, a "tiny, unstressed, monosyllabic modifier":
Archived link to Lingua Franca (the Lingua Franca blog is offline, but luckily some of the posts were captured by archive.org)

(Hmm, just has four phonemes, or even five if you count /dʒ/ as two, but it still seems like a small word to me: hard to pin down, wide range of meanings, tends to be used and understood without conscious analysis.)

A colleague from India once checked with me (AmE) on whether he'd got the difference between "there are few benefits" and "there are a few benefits" right (or "there is little benefit" vs. "there is a little benefit"). He did — he'd learned it from EFL books — but it left me wondering how *I* knew it! It certainly was never taught to me in any English class.

I'm a retired professor of English Language, and for many years worked in Italy (where I now live). Students of EFL have terrible problems with small words. Whoops... yuk... bah... In many cases their bilingual dictionaries don't help.
I hope I can contribute to this - it's fascinating and I'll buy the book anyway.

I blog about words, nowhere near your level, I am more at the elementary school level. Here is a link to one of my blogs: http://www.wordrefiner.com/blog-words-for-thought/bar-car-ear-far-gar-jar-mar-oar-par-tar-war-yar-typos-hurt-your-writing We can talk more if you would like.

I actually have 3 stories.

1) You never know how regional "filler words" (um, like, oops) are until you walk by a class of ESL learners or young children and are able to identify who belongs to whom by the expressions they use. My students always used the expression "oops" a lot and later on my small kids used the expression "oopsy." I never realized how often I used this (or how many mistakes I made in a day that they all picked that up in their speech).

2) In Costa Rica, we used to give an oral proficiency test called "the John Test" in which we showed pictures and asked students to describe the picture. One of the pictures was a man with his hands in his pockets. Often, we would get the false cognate of "balls" (pocket is bolsa in Costa Rican Spanish) and students would say "in his balls." But one person told a colleague "on his balls." Amazing how one preposition makes it sound "foreign" where as another is spot on.

3) I recently texted my son about an article I had just had published and his reply was "ah okay." I was a bit insulted because he himself is currently studying for a Phd and knows it was a bit of a big deal. When I texted him back calling him on this, his reply was, "Like ahhhhhh cool, let me read it." (I'm not sure I buy that but...). But Ah can mean so much in spoken speech that doesn't come through in written speech.

I don't know if this qualifies as an anecdote, but one thing that bothers and puzzles me is why my daughter's generation (she's 23) has decided that X is no longer based on Y, it's now based off of Y. I think there may be a sea change (in the U.S., anyway) going on with verb phrases that once used the preposition on switching to off or off of -- for instance, I believe I've also seen instances of capitalize on being changed to capitalize off or capitalize off of. It vexes me.

Oh, and while I'm at it, there's whoa being converted to woah. Ridiculous that such a trivial change for such a trivial word should bother me, but it does.

This might be totally left field of what you're going for, but I've found it really interesting to see the differences in "small words" in sign language vs English. I'm just an ASL learner so a native signer/expert would be a better source, but there are different words or gestures that may fall under "small" (my first thought is the question mark wiggle) and a *lot* of small words in spoken English don't have a sign in ASL (e.g. "the").

Off the top of my head, although it's not super interesting, in my office (humanities academic publishing), there's a controversy about whether author biographies should say "John Doe is professor at . . ." or "John Doe is a professor at . . ."

I slightly prefer the latter, but the former seems to be more preferred by my fellow editors.

Lynne, Off topic, but the comment submission no longer seems to give the option to get notified by email of replies. Is that a Blogger change?

My favorite small word is "Uff da," a Norwegian expression freighted with many emotions. Literally, it means, "Oh, there!" Used primarily by people of Scandinavian origin, or people who live in the upper Midwest, to express chagrin, surprise, consternation, and similar emotions, or for unpleasant, uncomfortable, hurtful, annoying, sad, or irritating situations. Uff da is most often used as a response when hearing something lamentable (but not too serious), and could often be translated as "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." We can always tell if someone is of that heritage or from that geographic region, if he or she exclaims, "Uffda!" When a friend of Scandinavian heritage moved to Minnesota from California and worked in a high-tech office, on her first day, she heard someone exclaim "Uffda!" and she knew she was at home in the right place. There are many products using "Uffda," from license plates to coffee mugs and cross-stitch samplers. It's a great expression to use, and is sometimes shorted to just "Uff!"

As an editor (AmE, retired this year) I was continually waging war against the false economy of leaving out small words. The most memorable example: "Schedule first to be sacrificed." As written, it seemed to say, "If you want to be sacrificed, be the first to create a schedule." It was probably in a bullet list, which accounts for it not being a sentence. Small words plus "thing" made it clear: "The schedule is the first thing to be sacrificed."

Congrats on the NEH grant! They are super and kept me in ramen noodles for a whole summer while I was in law school. This sounds like a great project. I do insurance law now and while it's incredibly boring to normal people, small words take on great significance when it comes to what an insurance policy does and doesn't cover. For instance, the difference between a policy that uses the language "an insured" vs. "the insured" in terms of how a loss might be covered is mind-bogglingly vast. My firm just handled a significant (and somewhat tragic) case involving the meaning of this distinction. I'm sure I've got other examples but would be happy to help. I've really enjoyed your blog over the years.

My memory is rusty, but were not "to" and "by" important words in traditional book-keeping?

Wonderful idea for a book, and enjoyed reading both your original posting and the subsequent comments. I don't know if any of the following fall within the scope of the book, but perhaps they are useful:

One word v. two words, the difference being the white space between the two words. When spoken the native English speaker easily differentiates between the two based on context. One example is from the old gag, when is a door not a door? The answer: when it is ajar.

Two pairs of words, spelled differently with different syllabification, but when spoken with relaxed pronunciation sound identical. Example: gross receipts v. grocery seats

Two words, spelled identically but with different meanings, having different pronunciations and when written the pronunciation is determined only by capitalization: polish v. Polish

Two words, spelled the same, but with different meanings and being different parts of speech (I believe usually noun v. verb), pronounced with different syllable emphasis: COMbat v comBAT

Two words, with opposite meanings and different spellings, pronounced identically: raise v. raze

Thanks for all your comments, everyone! For some reason, I missed a bunch of Blogger notifications about them, so they all came at once. I'll be keeping these things in mind as I work in the next few months!

There’s a commercial currently on TV here in Britain for Daz detergent - a happy family dancing around in clean colourful clothes - followed by a voice saying: ‘always keep away from children’.
The missing ‘it’ would be pedantic, I suppose ....

I work as a script supervisor in film/tv and small words make a big difference to screenwriters and actors. One example I use often was one of my first script supervising gigs. The director was German, working with an English script. It was a modest budget production and the script called for a dog in several of the scenes. As they couldn't afford a properly trained 'stunt dog', the team resorted to using two very well behaved German shepherds who were owned by members of the producer's extended family - one female, and another male... and obviously they have 'visible' differences between them. There was a line in the script about the dog, something like "will you make sure he's been fed please?", the director, fearing he had caught the underside of both male and female dogs and not sure which one he would want to commit to in the edit, suggested we change the line to "will you make sure it's been fed please?"...which, obviously, implies a huge difference in the way in which the character relates to the dog. Simply by denying 'it's' gender, it feels as though they are kind of 'de-anthropormorphising?' and therefore implies the character loved the dog less than they needed to for the story to work.

Is it up to you, or down to you?

'Too' as a modal particle.

1. AmE, understood but not used in Britain: contradiction. "That is so girly." "It is not." "It is too." I am fairly certain that this is a Germanism ("doch" can have exactly that meaning).

2. BrE: emphatic agreement. "What a hideous building." "It is, too." (Also, "It is and all.")

You might consider "yes" and "no" as words that have complex and not obvious histories.

BrE, 60+. A small word that intrigues me a great deal is “even”.
I didn’t know her name.
I didn’t even know her name.
Definitely an added weigt of sentiment.

Don’t think about it.
Don’t even think about it.
An added weight of warning.

Don’t go there.
Don’t even go there.
I THINK these are different, bur struggle to explain why.

Up.

Has anyone notice how "up" is now commonly attached to many verbs, almost similar in manner to a separable prefix verb in German?

I just heard on a famous (infamous?) British baking competition that the contestants were going to "mix up the cake batter." On the American side of the pond on TV its usage is becoming rampant, along the lines of "heat up", "chop up", "save up for a rainy day" etc. If one can't use the verb with "down" then the up is superfluous.

I don't think this is new. Certainly not in the South of England, where I live. Just from gut feeling, I think the "up" is an intensifier of some sort.

Are you still gathering anecdotal referents?