| 15 July 2010 | | Not liking | 'So I'm in the house, and she's like 'Why you here?' and I'm so not getting it, so I'm like 'what you on at?' And she's totally in my face like 'It's ten in the morning'.'
This comes from a comedian's monologue I heard on TV. By and large, I like innovations in language. 'I'm so not getting it' is an acceptable substitute for 'I'm really confused' and 'she's totally in my face' is the sort of vigorous English Shakespeare might have approved of.
But, as our comedian friend might have asked, 'What's with the 'like'?'
This usage seems to be replacing 'said' in what loosely passes as the minds of some vocabulary-challenged individuals. Really, this is language just above the 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' level - it's about as basic as communication can get while still using words. The speaker is either telling us that he can't say 'demanded', 'enquired', 'explained' or 'shouted' or he's telling us that he can't be bothered to do so.
If someone tells me 'I'm like 'what you on at?'', what does this actually mean? How is the speaker 'like' this? Did he say these words? Did he say something similar to them (but more grammatical) or, as I rather suspect, did he grunt and assume a confused posture?
The point is that some new usages in English add punch or extra meaning to the language, and are definitely to be welcomed. Other words are linguistic weeds in the garden of vocabulary, which can spread and choke out colour and variety. 'Like' is one of the latter species. It takes a whole category of words which have complex shades of meaning and replaces them with a single, basic one-size-fits-all monosyllable.
This happened a generation ago with the word 'nice'. Anyone who has winced as an elderly aunt says 'It was a nice afternoon so we went for a nice walk to a nice cafe and we had a nice chat and a nice cup of tea' will know what I mean.
This usage is now dying out, as people realize that 'nice' as an all-purpose adjective means that the speaker is incapable of adequate vocabulary usage, and possibly also incapable of rational thought. If people were to realize the same thing about the misuse of 'like' that would be, well, nice. | | | | | 14 May 2010 | | From Thence to Shopaholic | We tend to think that languages evolve in only one direction, becoming more sophisticated and complex as the years go by. If this were indeed the case, English would be an even more complex beast than it is already. However, a quick look at the language shows that it is devolving as fast as it is evolving. Consider for example the words 'whence' and 'thence'.
'Whence' means 'from where'. So we can say, for example 'He returned to whence he had come' But we don't. Instead we tend to say 'He went back to where he came from', which is longer, less elegant and less grammatical. 'Thence' means 'from there'. So in the past we might say 'We went to London, and thence to Leeds'. These days, for some reason we use 'thence' only to present a logical conclusion. 'His alibi is solid, thence we can agree he is not the murderer.
Hence (from here) we find useful words which have been kicking around in the language for at least 500 years suddenly old-fashioned and out of style. And this happens for no obvious reason apart from the fact that the longer, clumsier version requires slightly less thought.
While the language is devolving in this direction, it seems to be evolving in the direction of mashing two words together to make a new one. Such creations are called portmanteau words, and they are multiplying like rabbits. Think of infotainment, edutainment, workaholic, shopaholic, metrosexual, chunnel, staycation and hundreds more. It's a quick and easy way to explain a concept, and for all its current popularity, it's certainly not a new one. (My personal favourite is 'spiced ham' which became 'spam' which mutated to mean unwanted messages on the internet.)
So even as 'whence' devolves to 'from where', people are having fun getting other words to evolve into new and complex forms.
Odd, isn't it? Almost confuzzling. | | | | | 20 March 2010 | | Better English | One of the things about studying English is that you end up studying other people's languages too. And just as you get ideas from other people's cookery, or the way they do their garden, there are several things from other languages which English could usefully adopt.
Consider pronouns for example. We have already done the language a disservice by abandoning the very useful second person singular. This was 'Thou, thee, thy'. And very useful it was too. These days when someone asks (for example) 'Do you want to come to lunch?' one has to diplomatically try to find out whether the 'you' is just the person to whom the question was addressed, or the people he is with as well. 'Lunch with thee' makes it clear that just one person is invited.
And some languages also have an inclusive and exclusive first person plural. If someone says 'We are rich' I'd love to know that this includes me, but the speaker is probably talking about herself and her family. So, to prevent my being disappointed yet again, it would definitely improve the language if English had a pronoun meaning 'we, but not you', and another meaning 'we, including you'.
Also, I love the way that Italian suffixes add extra meaning to words, so a 'cenina' is a 'little dinner' (dinner is cena) but a 'cenone' is a ten course extravaganza. Or consider the word 'bella', or 'beautiful'. In English we can say ' a beauty', but the Italians have 'una bella', 'una bellina' and 'una bellona'. The English version is very beautiful, but the Italian is bellissima. English has never been shy about adopting words from other languages. Let's start stealing a few pronouns and suffixes as well. | | | | | 5 February 2010 | | Name that decade | This is my first blog of 2010, and it leads to an interesting question - how are we going to say this new decade? The last nine years have been a real mouthful, as we have had to say them in full. 'Two thousand and nine' was the last in the series, so the question is whether we are going to keep on with this cumbersome habit and call this year 'two thousand and ten' or go back to the convenient shorthand of the last century, and call it 'twenty ten'.
The thing is that there are no rules and no consistency. The year a hundred and one years ago is not called 'Nineteen hundred and nine' but 'nineteen oh-nine'. If we could have had 'twenty oh-nine' for last year this would have been convenient and consistent with this naming system, but it never happened. So please, for the sake of generations unborn this century, let's go back to the short form and start calling this year 'twenty ten'. All together now, because it's in the balance. I've heard people using both 'two thousand and ten' and 'twenty ten' but although I think 'twenty ten' is winning it needs all the help it can get. This is your chance to change history...
Then comes the next question - how will the decade just ended be known? (And yes, I do know that technically it ends on December 31st 2010, but that's not the point.) So far the best effort anyone has come up with is the 'naughties'. This sounds cute and fun, but is just wrong for what has been a terror-stricken decade with creeping government intrusion into every area of life. Nasty, certainly, but naughty it wasn't. My own suggestion would be 'the zeroes' which has a suitably nihilistic sound to it. However,we'll just have to see. One of the wonderful things about English is that no-one makes the rules. It all just sort of shakes down, and eventually there is a form that everyone uses. The way of saying the year is a sort of demonstration in miniature of how language is created.
But please, not 'two thousand and ten'. | | | | | 25 November 2009 | | About single pease | In the greengrocer the other day I saw courgettes stacked under their American name of zucchinis. This set me to wondering why they are not called zuccinos. The original word comes from Italy, where they do indeed call a courgette a zuccino, and since the 'c' sound in the Italian is said as 'ch' it's no surprise that it came to be spelled this way. But since zuccini is already a plural, why create a double plural with zucchinis?
The reason is of course, that the glorious mess known as English has never been very good at following rules.
Consider the humble pea. Here's how the word came about. In Middle English there was a word 'pease' which was a collective noun for the things, rather as 'rice' describes more than one grain of the stuff. However, some time in the seventeenth century, people decided that 'pease' was the plural of 'pea', and so the word 'pea' was invented. This is a process which language experts call 'back-formation'; taking an existing word, and creating a new word from non-applicable rules of grammar. In the past we used to also have a 'Portugee' to describe a singular member of the Portugese community. The usage did not catch on, which is a pity, as we now have a Briton and and a Spaniard, but 'a person from Portugal'
Personally, I'm all in favour of making such singulars when needed. One does occasionally need to describe a single pea - for example when explaining to a child that one has rolled off her plate while she was watching TV, and it now must be excavated from the sofa. In fact I'd bring back the Portugee, and add the ri - a single grain of rice - and a chee for one lump of cheese. | | | |
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