Psst, guys. Can we talk about the English Language?
Yeah, I know it’s your native language, and I am very grateful that you allow me to use it, really. I love the heck out of it, finding it far more bendy than Portuguese, the language I first learned, or even French or German or any of the languages I learned after.
The truth is that before I fell in love with the US, before I fell in love with my husband, I fell in love with the English language. By the time I’d studied it for two years, I was thinking in English. Sometimes even out of class.
Oh, I’m not going to say I don’t make stupid mistakes in it, most of them due to what I’ll call “auto-complete” fingers and “Sound typing.” What this means is that often I type in the first letter of a word and my fingers auto-complete the rest. For instance, going over Darkship Renegade for the tenth time or so (I swear) I noticed the sentence “The first time he’d killed me” – yeah. Yes, it should be “kissed” and don’t even ask me why my fingers think kill is more likely than kiss in the stuff I write, okay? I don’t want to know. As for sound typing, this manuscript is awash in way instead of weigh (and, weirdly, vice-versa) and more distressingly, because my accent is worse in typing than in speaking (yes, I know) leave instead of live.
Mind you, I know the difference between all of those words, and it would not occur to me to confuse them in the cold light of day. It’s just while I’m following a thread of emotion or concentrating on describing a scene, the fingers go on their own and they’re remarkably dumb fingers. And of course, I’m the world’s worst proofreader for my own stuff, unless it’s about ten years old.
I also have some genuine English As Second Language mistakes – most of these relate to never knowing if something is on or in (stop giggling you!) because English uses those in idiosyncratic ways. Also I’m never sure idiomatically when to use “the” or the possessive. Like… “She moved the chair” or “she moved her chair” I can usually figure out the nuances of, but if you get to body parts… Is it “He moved the arm that had been restraining me” or “He moved his arm that had been restraining me”? (Yes, I know that’s the world’s most awkward phrase. It’s six am, I’m uncaffeinated and I was kept awake an hour in the night by some teen who stood in the middle of the street and yelled crazy stuff. – No, not my teens. I checked. I counted them. Why? Because they sleep walk, and sleep-shouting wouldn’t be past them. But they were both snug in their beds. Probably not with visions of sugarplums, but I’m not swearing to anything.)
So, okay, I’m not without sin, and I’m not throwing stones, but listen here, lately y’all have been torturing this poor language, and I don’t like it.
When I taught English before I got married, I made a little cardboard model of a coffin, which I mounted on an axle, suspended between two supports, kind of like when you spit-roast something. Then I put a handle on the top. Then I told my students this was William Shakespeare’s coffin.
When my students butchered the language in particularly egregious ways, I used to grab that handle and give them the visual of Shakespeare spinning in his grave. (What? Well, they all gave me gifts and stuff when I quit to get married, so they must have LIKED me, right?)
Ya’ll routinely do stuff to the language that would grant a half turn on that handle. Half turn because I figure it’s your auto-complete fingers. Or perhaps your sound typing.
So, I’m not going to beat you about the face and head over things like alter instead of altar. I will confess that it drives me beyond nuts, because of the image. For some reason when I read alter I see the table at the veterinarian clinic. If this is in a story I’m judging and on the first paragraph, you’re going to have to work hard to remove that image from my mind. Just remember, if what you mean is altar — an elevated place or structure, as a mound or platform, at which religious rites are performed or on which sacrifices are offered to gods or ancestors – you shouldn’t be able to put ation in front of it and have a real word.
In the same way I’ve grown resigned to y’all using capitol instead of capital. Yeah, it’s annoying, but I figure it’s because you have a capitol in your capital, and against that a mere ex-English-teacher cannot stand. Remember capital is where government is, and therefore it’s spelled with to as, because it’s a as in a*s.
But then there’s the stuff you guys do that no human being should to a language which hasn’t done them any harm. You take words and make them mean the opposite of what they should mean. And this is when I reach for the handle of the coffin to make it spin.
Take, for instance descendants. According to dictionary.com which, before you ask, is in fact RIGHT, it means: a person or animal that is descended from a specific ancestor; an offspring.
PLEASE read that and memorize it. Please stop telling me stuff like “my descendant in the twelfth century was an earl” because I’m a science fiction writer, and when you say stuff like that I immediately see time travel and it causes terrible disorientation. The word you’re looking for is ANCESTOR (a person from whom one is descended; forebear; progenitor.) If you need a way to remember this, please keep in mind that many cultures practice ancestor worship, while we might be the only one, in certain sectors of society where people have one single kid far too late, that is on the edge of descendant worship.
And while being on edge – yes, my darlings? What? Look, I’m female and I’ll be fifty next year. I think at this point, if we could weaponize me, the world would tremble. So listen – note I did not write that we’re on the precipice of descendant worship (though in this case it might be, in a moral sense, apposite.)
So, why didn’t I say that? All the hip people say that. Yesterday, some serious article, quoting some serious economist informed me that we’re not yet on the precipice of job creation. The odd thing is that he didn’t mean this was good news. A president who shall remain unnamed because I was preparing to send rescue parties to the earthquakes around Stratford-Upon-Avon told us we were on the edge of a precipice of achievement. (Okay, then, he might have meant what he said. I’m so not going there.) And tons of other, exquisitely educated individuals among you have started using this. STOP it, just STOP it.
Since then I’ve seen this usage crop up everywhere and I’m getting REALLY tired of it. Yes, it’s a long word and it sounds learned. But if you feel like using it, please remember according to dictionary.com, which is somewhat unclear, precipice is: 1. a cliff with a vertical, nearly vertical, or overhanging face. 2.a situation of great peril: on the precipice of war.
Number two gives you the clue for how number one is meant. You guys are thinking of it as when people are riding in old west movies and come across a wall where the terrain goes up, right? Well… blame it on old dictionary.com. But the second gives you a clue to how they actually mean it. It’s more like the coyote in Road Runner cartoons. He’s running on the road, runs off the edge, and then realizes he’s running in mid-air and phuit, down he goes, a huge distance. That, without the sound effects or coyote is a precipice.
So, trust me, you don’t want to be on the precipice of great achievement. And you certainly don’t want to be on the precipice of job creation (though we sort of are.)
Stop saying that. Or not. I hear that Great Britain has hooked Shakespeare’s coffin into the electrical grid. It’s powering London.
According To Hoyt 
Actually, after that particular presidential example,it’s been powering the whole of South-East England!
:D
Al An dea’Bibliomaniac
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Allan, given how their efforts for green (adj., unripe, unready) energy have worked out, this is probably a good thing.
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I wonder what “Valley Girl Speech” does to Mr. Shakespeare. [Wink]
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Can I be the first to point out (while running as fast as I can) that you can’t put “ation” in front of “alter” and get a real word either. Ationalter would presumably have the bard spinning in reverse. And I’m gone.
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PFFFF. Making fun of the direction impaired is NOT nice. See, to me that’s “behind”
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Hmmm… well, you misspelled Y’all once, but you spelled it correctly the other time, and you used it correctly, you didn’t commit that maddening sin against Southern American English of using the collective y’all when speaking to one person and not meaning it to refer to his kin and friends. Bill Faulkner is not currently spinning.
Capital and capitol. I never can keep those straight.
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I used to work in a field with lots of English-as-a-second-language colleagues, who would come to me with many questions on a theme of “why do you say x in English?” and I’d have to explain about Norman men-at-arms trying to get dates with Saxon barmaids. Plus, as the famous saying goes, English does not “borrow” words from other languages. It follows them into dark alleys, hits them over the head and goes through their pockets for lose syntax. Meaning it is perfectly convenable for me to say “The head honcho (Japanese) on this project is running amok (Malay) because he can’t get the cash (Chinese) and he really wants the kudos (Greek) if it goes well.”
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Ah, English. The mother tongue, the wayward bastard child of the world’s languages. Especially American English, which is an etymological black sheep amongst the rest of the Queen’s dialectal subjects. I do love being descended from mostly British ancestors, and declaring English as my first language. I also am glad I was born in America where we have the freedom to evolve, adapt, and sometimes even abuse our language as we see fit. The results aren’t always pretty, but then, liberty isn’t meant to be aesthetical. Keep rolling Shakespeare, keep rolling.
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Larry, as a freedom-loving American, I emphatically reject “aesthetical” for reasons of aesthetics.
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Ah cain’t say as ah much disagrees wit y’all. Being as how ah is an outtawork accountant, when ah sees “capital” ah thinks of it as thuh differential ‘twixt a company’s assets and liabilities, or p’haps thuh initial funds invested to start a bizness.
Although, as an aficionado of things British, I also tend to hear that word with an exclamation point, suggesting something has been perceived as having great merit, of being truly excellent.
Then, as an American, I ponder over the merits of capital punishment for those who abuse the language/
The simple fact is that Americans, as Henry Higgins lamented, don’t speak English. (Neither do most of the Brits, but that’s a different musical.) Nowadays I doubt they even make as much effort to teach it as when I was young and ga … chipper. It would astound me if 7th grade English teachers at even the best schools inflicted diagramming sentences upon their students, as was done to me in the wilds of coastal West Byrdginia. Learning the rules of grammar is hard, especially at an age when you’re starting to seriously note that boys and girls have some peculiarly interesting differences. ESPECIALLY when the teachers represent a pedagogy obsessed with facilitating development for multi-modal learning styles in a participatory environment rather than actually, y’know … teaching. RULES are, like, so much a tool of the fascist patriarchal hegemony, y’know?
As for not knowing the difference between verge and precipice, well, some really really smart people aren’t so smart as they think they is (I am minded of a line employed by Harry Turtledove: “If they were half as smart as they think they are, they would be twice as smart as they are.”) The thing is, when some not particularly bright children are repeatedly informed they are “smart”, “bright” and “clever” they are not typically smart, bright or clever enough to recognise the steaming pile they’ve been handed is redolent of rotted grass and draws flies. In this country it has long been recognized that “you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him very much.”
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I’ve long maintained we don’t speak English in America, but Anglic. And no, they don’t teach sentence diagramming in schools anymore. My daughter, who wants to be a writer, and I were discussing one of her sentence constructions and when I couldn’t get through to her why it was awkward I started diagramming it and she was astounded, she’d never seen that before.
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“It would astound me if 7th grade English teachers at even the best schools inflicted diagramming sentences upon their students”
Be astounded! My kid was doing that… Actually, I think she did that in 5th or 6th grade? (And my mom, when she taught at the private school I attended, did it to her students. I’m not sure if it helped me or not; once I knew how to attribute all those dangling clauses (for the way we did it, they did dangle down beneath that which they modified), I could, well, run amok with ’em, and figure that anyone who knew the rules would follow along. I think I’ve mostly reined (NOT REIGNED!) that in.)
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I suspect that, because Americans are a generally sarcastic people, disrespectful of assigned authority, a great many words have had their meanings inverted, e.g., Sure, boss, moving that pile of bricks to the other side of the lot is a really great idea.
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As a note on the usage of y’all, if your intended target is multiple groups, you should use its plural – “all y’all”. This is tricky to get correct sometimes.
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“All y’all” is a horrible neologism that should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. Anyone saying that when I grew up in Texas… Well, laughter at the poor furrin’r would result. :p
Kids these days. Stephen F. Austin would be revolving in his grave.
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As a recommendation for all those who love the English language and appreciate finely nuanced distinction in words and phrase usage, please look into the writings of NY Times columnist (he was the sole conservative voice on their OpEd page for decades), “language maven” and former presidential speechwriter (okay, for Nixon) William Safire. Many of his weekly On Language columns for the Sunday Times magazine remain available online [ http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/s/william_safire/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=Safire&st=cse ] and many have been collected into books, available at very moderate price (I picked up many of them from the remainder table, and I doubt the demand has greatly increased since his demise — Safire would probably advise using “death” and clearly explain why) through Amazon [ http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_14?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=william+safire+on+language&sprefix=William+Safire ].
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Youse blokes and sheilas orta try some Strine. She’ll have ya lookin for the brown cords like yer had the trots without a dunny.
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Good heavens. Strine!
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I once spent a memorable afternoon in the bar at a cricket pitch, listening to two Australians and an East (London) Ender discuss the game. At least I think they were discussing the game — I’m quite sure there were batters, bowlers, overs, and other technical terms emitted as part of the flow.
I learned nothing. Perhaps next time I can listen to a similar discussion in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, mind you, but it would undoubtedly be easier for me to get the meaning of an occasional word or phrase.
Regards,
Ric
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Ric,
Aussies – like their ancestors and distant cousins (mostly from East London and Ireland as far as influencing the language goes) – take a perverse delight in making the language jump through hoops no self-respecting language would touch with a ten foot barge pole. Metaphors are mixed with gleeful abandon, what starts as a comparison or rhyming slang loses the bit that explains the terminology (or the bit that actually rhymes), and uses everything in both a “standard” form where it means what it says, and an “ironic” form, where it doesn’t – but you’ve got to know from context which is which.
The idea is that you can call your boss (originally overseer) a bastard poofter and since you also call your best mate that, he’ll think it’s a compliment….
Of course, it doesn’t help that a lot of the Aussie, Brit and Kiwi sporting metaphors come from cricket (this is one of the reasons I giggle inside when ‘Merkins complain that baseball is slow. Try a game that can last 5 days, be completely engrossing, and still not have a conclusive result).
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So many years ago that I no longer recall when nor where I heard it, I caught an argument that the reason for a proclivity for profanity among certain sub-groups of English speakers (notably the Welsh and Irish) is that the native languages of those speakers (Gaelic) tended to impose or require a particular rhythm to their speech, and the insertion of profanity was an effort to fit English to their natal speech rhythms.
I’ve no idea whether that is Ebonics-like twaddle or valid linguistic theory, but in my limited explorations of other tongues I have noticed that it is more effective when one can capture the rhythms of those languages, just as it helps to hold one’s face in certain ways characteristic of the language’s native speakers. That may merely be a psychological ploy to put oneself into the language, but even if so I suspect that it works in both directions.
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I quite like the cricket (among the folk who introduced it to me the article is obligatory), at least as it is normally enjoyed in Australia. One can go out on the veranda and observe the players directly, or repair to the club and sit in a comfortable armchair, warding off the heat with the traditional g&t or (having carefully observed the other patrons) the appropriate brew. It’s also possible to have a leisurely dinner, before or after an enjoyable session with one’s SO, and perhaps wash the car, and return to find the same players at “seventy-five Not Out”, whatever that means. The whole thing appeals to the procrastinator in me. Perhaps one day I should make an effort to learn the rules. Assuming there are any; having delighted in several rounds of Mornington(?) Crescent, I wonder if that isn’t indicative.
One of the peculiarities of English is that it’s the only language I’m aware of in which one is expected to have an accent. There are social implications of particular accents, but not nearly to the degree one finds them in, e.g., French, and it’s routine to expect that an educated English speaker may be one of the various flavors of British or American, Australian, Kiwi, or even Indian, without deep prejudice as to just how educated one’s interlocutor may be.
Regards,
Ric
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Um… Portuguese has accents too and educated people often have accents. Now, where I come from well… the accent from the village I grew up in sort of like opening your mouth and coming out with a DEEP South accent. Say Alabama. I got so tired in college of opening my mouth in class and having people stare and giggle. One of my professors looked like she’s smelled something really bad and said “Ah, you must be from Aguas Santas” and after that I was “the little Miss from Aguas Santas.” (Rolls eyes.)
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That’s off-center to what I was trying to express.
My native accent is/was Deep South, but I’ve lived in enough places and am enough of a natural mimic to lose most of it in public, although my wife used to laugh at me when I was on the phone to my parents or somebody else Back Home — by a couple of minutes into the conversation I’d reverted completely. The few words of German I know are in Thuringian dialect, which is similarly ill-regarded.
But there’s One True French, and somebody learning French who doesn’t imitate it is too stupid to learn the language properly. A similar situation exists with Hochdeutsch. At that, it’s better than Spanish, in which there’s One True Tongue and every native speaker is confident that it’s his. Japanese is very like French or German in that respect. The very name of the One True Chinese connotes an elite subgroup — I’ve had more than one Chinese tell me that Westerners shouldn’t even try to learn Mandarin, because they sound like mushmouthed fools.
In English? You, for instance, make pronunciation “errors” and occasionally drop Portuguese syntax into a phrase, where it flails and spits like a cat dropped into a swimming pool. Does it make you sound stupid to a native English speaker? NO! not at all — the reaction of an educated native speaker is “bright person from somewhere else, interesting”. The effect carries over to our own subgroups. I’m quite sure, for instance, that there are variants of the Scots accent, but a person from Montana or Texas doesn’t know them; the accent tells us something about that person’s origins, but nothing about their education or sophistication — that has to wait on the content of the conversation.
There may actually be a One True English, but if there is, it’s a Platonic ideal no native speaker closely approaches. One perhaps counterintuitive result of that complexity is that the barrier to entry is low to nonexistent — it’s sometimes astounding how little and how bad English can be and still be comprehensible. Even if the person learning can’t remember the English word for some concept and substitutes his own, there’s at least a fair chance that the word has been borrowed before and its root (at least) is understandable in context. That doesn’t identify the speaker as stupid or low-class; it just means he isn’t familiar with the details, and native English speakers look at one another, shake their heads, and think, “even as you and I.”
Regards,
Ric
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Okay — point taken. But actually Portuguese also never had one “true integration” into “one true accent” — Lisbon tried it after the civil war, but it never took. Worse, Portugal never developed a “standard” vocabulary for official occasions. You know those phrases we all joke about, like “return your seats to the upright and locked position”? In Portugal, depending on where the plane is from, you might have “return your sofas to the vertical and close the lock” or “Make sure the couch’s backs are straight and locked” or “bring your chair to the acceptable position…” It makes translating that type of thing — and financial documents, and scientific documents — which I used to do for a living before running away with the writing circus NO END of fun.
The French are actually weird. They started suppressing their linguistic variants waaaayyyyyyy back in the 10th century and of course they’ll freeze you in place for a wrong syllable.
As for my pronouncing things… occasionally, inexplicably, I hit one thing right. Most of the time, as my alter ego’s (the succubus, natch! Though a succubus who’s gone monogamous, sad beasty) in Kate Paulk’s Convent) my accent careens all over Europe with occasional drops into Eastern portions. If I sound very Iberian, I’m furious.
Syntax — no, I rape Portuguese syntax too. Regularly. I think it comes from having learned seven languages during my formative years. I USED to think in all seven, flying into German and out of it into French, then dipping into Italian for a bit of relaxation before returning to English. I’ve cured myself of it because it makes it really hard to talk. You keep going ‘does this person understand…” before you speak. The occasional French word or Latin remark still surfaces in my writing and speech, like a fly caught in amber, but it’s mostly English in there now. Except that the past practice left bad habits or scars or something. I sometimes think my brain is crosswise to the world.
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The capitol/capital is a pairing that I feel is very unfair to inflict on poor students in America. It always makes me wonder if, in a fantasy or SF world, the capital of a country (or world?) should be the capitol, because, well, it’s the most important part.
(My pet screaming peeve (adjectives adjusted to taste) is then/than errors. What’s worse is that I never made those myself, until I saw them all over the place. Now I occasionally make them. It’s horrible. I want to cry when it happens.)
My auto-complete fingers will complete what I’m reading above what I’m writing (so words mysteriously end up in two places in the same sentence, and only one place will make sense), and confuse lower-case “p” and “b.” I confuse those two when handwriting, too. Capital P and B? No broplem. Er, problem.
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King and kind. And yeah, I’ve been infected with then/than confusion. And with its/it’s. I KNOW the difference, my fingers just don’t. Oh, and whose/who’s
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As to the alter/altar problem (my bugaboo is homonymical errors), I read some e-Slush wherein I saw the phrase “She altared her robe and knelt before the alter.” Was not the little red line under her word a clue that something was wrong? Do these people not run a spell checker on their writings afore sending them off to be viewed in the great wide world?
Also, on the subject of descendent/ancestor, I believe that descendent/antecedent would be a more reasonable pairing. In my mind ancestor works better with offspring. Though, illogically speaking, the most grammatically correct pairing with descendent would be ascendent, as descend and ascend are antonyms. :)
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No, this is a unique American confusion descendent/ancestor because we come close to descendant worship. Ancestor means of course “going up” as well as before (well, both meanings are embedded in it) and Americans just rebel at the idea that their ancestors are above and their descendants below them. But if you think of a drawn genealogy table, you’ll see the sense of it. As for your alternate forms, as I told my students (over and over and over again) “Stop saying it’s stupid. Language is an organic system. It’s not LOGICAL.”
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“[W]e come close to descendant worship”?
THAT explains the massive generational debt we are bestowing upon our descendants, protecting them against the evils of wealth. “It’s for the children!”
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RES — total inability to make the connection is as fundamental a requirement for “soccer mom” status as the XOR function is to computers.
Regards,
Ric
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Well, yes, we ARE totally dysfunctional. Did you ask? Supposedly we’re taking on this debt because “it’s better for society and children” — gags. I once started a short story in which my kids’ generation was hunting mine (well, mostly boomers, but also mine) with dogs. They had realized the con, you see… I never finished it. Who would publish it? It was called “No One Here Gets Out Alive.”
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Heck, that sounds like a wonderful idea for a short story. Why don’t you finish it, and toss it up on Amazon? I’ll bet it becomes really popular?
Wayne
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WHO would publish it? Start with REASON Magazine. Or, y’know, publish it yourself … “Publishers? We don’ need no steenking PUBLISHERS!”
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Oh, I know, that … now. I started this years ago.
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Just sayin’ …
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