| 25 August 2008 | | The cynic's guide to English Usage | Have you noticed that some companies seem to actively hate their customers? They like your money, but when you have a problem, they are simply not interested, even if if means losing you as a customer. It costs more to fix the mistake (even if it's their mistake) than it costs to find a replacement customer. However, public relations do not allow such businesses to tell dissatisfied users 'Look, we simply don't care about you, now go away.' However, if you understand the language, the message is clear enough. This simple guide might help.
'Your call is important to us.' We don't care about your call and would be happy if you were to hang up now. The calls that really are important to us are the calls to our sales department. But we don't tell people calling Sales that their call is important. We answer them instead.
'We apologise for the inconvenience.' Yes, we know the problem exists, but we cannot be bothered to fix it. Anyway, it's your inconvenience, not ours.
'For your convenience.' We want to do this in the way that is most convenient for us.
'Somebody will call you back shortly'. You will never hear from us again. And now we know who you are, don't bother calling any more. We will ignore you.
'Dear Valued customer' We can't be bothered to find out who you are and address you by name.
'In the interests of security ...' We know you have a legitimate complaint, but the magic word 'security' wins every time.
Everyone who deals such organizations will have seen or heard some of these phrases. Since you are not going to achieve anything else with your call or enquiry, you might as well see how long it takes to collect the lot. | | | | | 20 July 2008 | | A dumb thing to do | There is a charmingly naive belief among some of the politically correct that you can change how something is viewed by changing the word for it. A word or phrase which has become an insult needs to be replaced with something which is nicer (using 'nice' with its present anodyne meaning, rather than with the definition of 'nice' as exactly correct, which is the opposite of what I mean).
We forget that 'cretin' and 'moron' were once scientific words rather than terms of playground abuse. These days any teacher calling a student a moron is placing his job at risk - though I have heard the term used freely, and inaccurately, in many a staff room. Today, the correct term for someone lacking in thinking power is 'special'. This is not going to make slow thinkers any more highly regarded, sad as this is, but it probably means that 'special' is destined to mean 'stupid'.
Consider the old English word 'saelig', which meant 'fortituous' or 'blessed'. This was then linked with the idea that those with a certain kind of obtuseness can appear other-worldly and touched by the divine. Which, incidentally, is why 'dunce' comes from Duns Scotus, a philosopher who was blessed with a singularly narrow view of the world. So a child who was particularly slow of thought came to be called 'saelig'. This did not help such children to become blessed, but did cause 'saelig' to become 'silly'.
The whole exercise in giving things new names to avoid giving offence has somewhat corrupted the language (or made it purity-challenged), and is pretty pointless. I don't know many dwarves who are impressed with being called PORGS. (Persons of reduced growth.) What is needed is for the people with such appellations to fight back, claim the name that is stuck on them and wear it with pride. These days few geeks are upset at being so described, though this was originally an insult dreamed up by those more socially competent but slower of thought. Where once the word 'black' was an offensive term for a racial type, black people have challenged the use of the insult, reclaimed the word and made it a standard part of the lexicon. Though as a geek, I'd prefer 'brown', just for the sake of accuracy.
So it does not matter what we call them - until we learn to respect and treasure the slower thinkers in our community, whatever name is given to them will in time become a term of abuse. To think otherwise is just silly. | | | | | 15 June 2008 | | Oh, for #%&*!! sake .. | It can be argued that people appearing in reality TV shows are by definition stupid. After all, they have their character weaknesses shown to the entire nation just so that they can tell their friends 'I wuz on TV, I mean, like, how f***ing cool is that?' Note the bad language. Now I have nothing against swearing, and like many Britons, have a tendency to let rip with a few ripe adjectives in stressful situations. But reality TV characters have a range of swear word which is limited, mindless and boring, and which does the richness of English a disservice.
The point of swearing is to use what are known as 'taboo words'. These words point out that you are not merely saying something offensive, but that you very much mean to do so. And the natural consequence of saying something offensive is that you are going to offend. And if you are going to upset people, at least do so imaginatively.
One of the least-remarked-upon joys of English is that it has one of the largest and most flexible scatological vocabularies of any language in the world. There are rich polyphonic Latin-based adjectives (no, I'm not providing examples - use your imagination or choose your company more unwisely) and shorter, highly emphatic Germanic nouns and verbs, which like the actions they describe, can demonstrate remarkable flexibility. It's not unusual in England's polyglot community to hear people talking their native language, but switching to English when they need to draw on that language's rich stock of profanity.
The point is, if you are going to swear in English, do it properly. This is a language that gives you maximum opportunity to express yourself as violently as you please with unrivalled flexibility. It offers opportunities for alliteration, metaphor and allusion so splendid that the end product could be set to music. (And has been - look up 'Rugby songs'.) You would not guess any of this from watching reality TV show contestants endlessly repeating the one solitary swear word. I've known parrots with a larger scatological vocabulary. But then the African Grey has the cognitive abilities of a six-year-old, and thus - by some margin - outclasses many of the dribbling half-wits who disgrace the screens of our nation. | | | | | 10 May 2008 | | It's how you say it | Every now and then I get a student who says that he (it is usually a he) wants to learn to speak English 'with a perfect accent'. I sometimes point out to this aspiring linguist that there is not a single perfect accent, and an accent that would be entirely accepted in Louisiana would be incomprehensible in Kenya or Yorkshire, and the other way around. But mostly I don't do this, because I know that the ideal is always the type of enunciation sometimes referred to as BBC English. Our student wishes to be mistaken for an English gentleman, and to do so at a time when the breed, if not extinct, is at least severely endangered. So the question is – why?
There is no doubt that accent defines one Briton to another. If you meet someone from Oiksfid, and someone else from Hawksfahrd, you know not only that the two are from the same town – Oxford – but that one is a native of the city, and the second is a native of the university. The problem is that though it helps for instant identification, accent is just one aspect of one's background. It is no use adopting say, a Scots accent, unless you are prepared to go all the way and become a fake Scot. If you talk with a Scots accent and don't know what a caber or a sporran is, your little pretense will be found out in no time. However, the issue is deeper than that.
Why should a German, Italian or Moroccan not want to sound like a person of that nationality who speaks perfect English? After all, I'm assuming these individuals are proud of their countries, and they should be happy to signal it with their accents, so long as these accents do not interfere with understanding their speech. It would be a terrible world if everyone had the same accent, and England is greatly enriched by – to pick two at random - the west Indian and Polish accents which add texture to conversations overheard in the streets. So to those people with excellent English who want 'a perfect accent' I usually point out that they have one already. | | | | | 25 March 2008 | | In other (non)words | Is the digital communications revolution leading to a transformation of language? By this I don't just mean that it's changing how we speak, (though it's doing that too) but that it may be changing how we think about language. Take written English.This is essentially spoken English put on to a page. The syllables of a written word are instructions to the reader as to how they should be said, and punctuation gives further hints as to pauses and emphasis. Since I'm a traditional type of English user, you should have no difficulty in reading aloud this page up to here.
Then the other day, I received an email from someone apologizing for making a rather large mistake. To show how humbly he was apologizing, my correspondent had written 'orz'. This orz does not mean anything phonetically. It's a pictogram of a little man kneeling down with bended knees and his head on the ground. This is the latest of a series of ways of showing emotions in text, including the now common emoticons. For example (in case you have spent the last fifteen years in a mountain cave without internet access) ;) is a way of showing a wink. This is not a new development - it makes a difference whether a letter is printed or written on scented pink paper, and writing IN CAPITALS generally has the meaning 'I am shouting'. However, the net and text messaging have added a new dimension to the process.
The point is that these little comments and abbreviations are not reproducible in spoken language. In short, we now have one language which can be reproduced as sound or text, but are developing two, with the text language having distinct features which mimic things such as tone of voice and physical gestures which are present in face-to-face interactions. Note I say 'mimic' rather than 'reproduce' - the text techniques get the same effect in a completely different way.
Consider this sentence in 'txtspeak'. "We went to the Prof's lecture (zzzzz!) and found some things we did not know :o so maybe we should go more often lol." You will note that there are text interjections which convey non-verbal information, making text in some ways more expressive than a telephone chat. This is pretty certain to develop further - for instance I've seen some people putting a picture of a flame next to a statement to show that they are angry about something controversial. So text is moving away from being words on a page and getting nearer to putting the whole person on a page. Whether or not you think this is a good thing, I suspect it's going to become a lot more common. | | | |
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