| 15 January 2012 | | Sometimes I don't like you | Not you personally, of course. Nor 'you' collectively, since the readers of this blog are by definition a splendid group of individuals with superb discrimination in their grammatical taste. No, it's the word 'you' itself with which I take issue.
Now, the purpose of language is to convey ideas from one brain to another as clearly and elegantly as possible. (Yes, I know that advertisers and politicians subvert this noble intention for their own foul purposes, but the basic point remains.) The trouble with 'you' is that this word is becoming an all-purpose personal pronoun which obscures the clarity and precision of the words it replaces.
'You' as a personal pronoun does an excellent job of describing 'those people I am addressing who are not me'. This is all well and good. The rot started about two hundred and fifty years ago, when 'you' began slowly to push 'thee' out of the language. Only in some parts of the world, such as sensible Yorkshire in England, can one ask a friend at work 'Art thee coming for a drink with me this evening?' without having to explain directly or indirectly that one is not inviting everyone else in the office - which is what 'Are you coming for a drink?' actually does.
Almost every English speaker has at some time had the embarrassing and delicate job of finding out if a description, invitation, or insult applied to an individual or a group. The simple use of a second person singular would have removed all doubt and ambiguity. We should bring it back.
We should also bring back another victim of 'you' - the impersonal pronoun 'one'. I discovered this the other day, when I discovered that a certain setting on the toaster results in the production of inedible charcoal. Wishing to share this information with a family member,I remarked conversationally 'You should never use this setting.' The family member assumed that I was allocating culpability for the appalling smell and bluish fog in the kitchen, and became indignant and defensive. Had I sensibly used the impersonal pronoun 'one', a degree of unpleasantness could have been avoided.
Likewise it makes more sense to say 'one should wrap up warmly when travelling in Siberia', rather than 'you should wrap up warmly when travelling in Siberia' as is the usual modern usage. Firstly, you may never want to go to Siberia, and secondly, for all I know, you personally have the constitution of a polar bear and are perfectly capable of wandering around Siberia in shorts or a bikini.
My suspicion is that 'one' has fallen from popular favour because it is literally part of the Queen's English. Given her majesty's fondness for the impersonal pronoun, one becomes shy of using it for fear of either appearing to give oneself airs, or even to be mocking the queen. However, at times 'one' is the ideal pronoun to use, as the previous sentence demonstrates - since obviously none of that sentence applies to you. (I mean you, the person reading this now, not 'you' of all the others who frequent this blog.) | | | | | 10 December 2011 | | Christmas | In our ever-changing language 'Christmas' (Christ's mass) is steadily being replaced by the bland non-religious expression 'the holidays'. It will be interesting to see if this is in time abbreviated to something more convenient, just as 'Christmas' had become 'Xpmaess' as early as AD 1100. (In Greek the 'Xp' is read as 'Chr'). Another change over the centuries is that girls called Natalie were originally born on Christmas day - 'natalia' means 'birthday' - but these days Natalies are born at any time in the year.
I'm particularly fond of gifts - I mean the word, though I also like presents. The word is from the very ancient base 'ghaben' which became the old English and Germanic 'gift'. A gift is something you receive without payment. In English this came to mean a present, and in German to mean poison, which may or may not tell us something about the English and Germans.
However, the verb of 'gift' is 'give' and this is also undergoing some interesting developments. Many of the things you receive without paying for them are unwelcome. Someone can give you a cold, and a low doorway can give you a bang on the head. Therefore, particularly among those relentless linguistic innovators, the Anmericans, we now have 'gift' as a verb. You give someone a dirty look (for instance) but you gift them a present. This has the advantage of distinguishing between things people get for free whether they like it or not, and things people get for free that they are supposed to like.
As often happens with Americanisms, what we have here is not a complete neologism (new word) but the repackaging of a word already long in use. 'Gift' as a verb has a long history in its past participle form as 'gifted' - as in 'a gifted child'. 'Gifted' in this sense means given particular intelligence or talent by fortune or divine influence. With the new use of the word people can also be 'gifted' by their fellow citizens. Which may or may not tell us something about Americans. | | | | | 15 November | | Changing English | There is a joke among computer programmers - 'How did God manage to create the world in seven days?' The answer is 'No installed user base.'An 'installed user base' is those people who already use a computer program. They and their computers have very clear and fixed ideas of what the program should do and how it should do it. So any update to a program which has an installed user base has to do things in a certain way, even if that way is outdated and illogical.
The keyboard of an English-language computer is a good example. The story goes that the original typewriter on which the average keyboard is based was a fairly slow machine. If the secretary tried to type too fast, the keys got jammed up. So the original keyboard was designed to slow the typist down. And now, in an age where keyboards can cope with speeds ten times faster than any human could type, we stick to that same original keyboard. Why? Installed user base. Too many people have learned to type on these keyboards to want to change them.
It goes without saying that English as a language has the world's largest installed user base. By almost any logical approach, English is a mess. We have spellings that do not match with pronunciation, and words that can be verbs, nouns or adjectives depending on where they go in the sentence. Some words have the same spelling and pronunciation but have totally different meanings while very different words are identical synonyms. For some strange reason we have dropped the second person singular from the language, and have to make do with the plural 'you'. Those are just some of the highlights of the linguistic disaster that millions of people speak every day.
The reason for the mess is that English has evolved without planning or direction for about a thousand years. Everyday language contains incompatible spellings and grammar from French, German and Latin - to name only the most important. Yet every attempt to reform English grammar and spelling has failed. The installed user base is too large and too stubborn to change. English speakers like English just as it is. Is this a bad thing? Some of the greatest writers of English have not simply overcome the quirks and idiosyncrasies of English, but have used these quirks to add depth and emotion in a way that would simply be impossible with a mechanically perfect language. Look at any Shakespeare script to see what I mean.
And of course, if English was straightforward and logical, it would be easy. Then you - the English language learner - would not stand out as someone who has mastered this complicated language. And I - the English professor - would have to look for a real job. | | | | | 15 September 2011 | | Concerning a matter of concern | One can make the case that English is becoming a simpler, less sophisticated language. Those who say this (and I am not completely convinced), claim there are two basic reasons. One is that television and newspapers want to reach the widest possible audience, and therefore deliberately use language which everyone can understand. The other is that there is a fashion for anti-intellectualism among intellectuals. This leads to even highly intelligent individuals talking in a child-like fashion, like, duh, because it's so major that you don't big yourself up, you know.
One result of the current trend is that our vocabulary is becoming more limited. Words which used to have distinct meanings are becoming synonyms, something which the media happily promote. 'Healthy', for example, is pretty much a lost cause. When a commercial promotes a breakfast cereal as 'healthy' we know this does not mean that the breakfast cereal has no major illnesses and is physically fit - which is what the word 'healthy' means. Instead the advertisement is trying to tell you that the cereal is good for our health (which is what the word 'healthful' means).
Then we get policemen and politicians talking of things which are 'concerning' when they mean that they are 'of concern'. With policitians this is, well, of concern, since these are people who use words for a living. Alternatively a cynic might point out that politicians distort the meaning of words for a living, so perhaps this is not after all a surprise.
One misuse which intrigues me is the use of 'less' for 'fewer'. These days you will often hear that 'there are less people going to the club', or 'there are less cars on the road'. Obviously they mean 'fewer' since the people and the cars are not somehow reduced, though their number may be. So why is it that no-one ever makes the same mistake with the opposite form? People never say 'there are too much people at this club' or 'that book costs too many.'
A final hint for journalists - another group who are meant to be good with words. 'Careen' does not mean 'run out of control' - as in a news report of the other day which reported that a car 'careened' into a crowd. The word which should have been used is 'career'. 'Careen' means to tip to one side. Motorbikes careen around corners all the time. In fact it would be dangerous if they did not.
It will be interesting to see if this trend continues, and if English does end up as a less versatile language as a result. One thing is certain - however much language purists such as myself object, these linguistic shifts will happen regardless of how we feel. Or should that be 'irregardless'? | | | | | 15 July 2011 | | 'Correct English' ? | Here's a question I was discussing with another EFL teacher the other day. Should one teach 'proper' English, or English as it is commonly spoken? That last question is also an example of what I mean. I wrote 'Should one teach ...?'; however, in modern English the impersonal pronoun is generally replaced by the second person. A native speaker will often say this phrase as 'Should you teach ...?'. So the question is which form should an EFL student learn?
Another example (and there are many more) is the use of 'whom'. This is a word fast disappearing from contemporary English. If native English speakers routinely say things like 'I don't know who he gave it to', should a student essay be marked down for not using 'whom' in the same context? English speakers generally ask 'Where from?' yet we are still teaching students to say 'From where?'
To some extent, one has to teach the kind of language a student needs to learn. If the student wants to simply communicate in clear, unambiguous spoken English then teaching the version of the language that is routinely mangled on TV and in everyday conversation may be the way to go. There is no point in teaching the proper use of 'whom' to someone (to use a real-life example) working on a construction site whose most urgent need is to understand the rich stock of profanity with which his colleagues colour their conversation.
On the other hand, a student may be a lawyer or otherwise working in a field where exact and grammatical usage of English is essential. It can make a great deal of difference to a contract if a nominative pronoun is used where an object pronoun is actually required.
Also, English is evolving. (Or devolving, according to my colleague.) These days it is no crime to carelessly split an infinitive, and we'll leave a preposition at the end of a sentence if that's where it ends up. Were a subjunctive to be used in casual conversation, it would seem more odd to some native speakers than the 'incorrect' form. So should EFL teachers teach what English is going to become, or what it was in the past?
When Jerome K. Jerome wrote 'Three Men in a Boat' he was criticized for using 'so much modern slang that his text is almost unreadable'. To a modern reader, most of that slang is simply part of the language and Jerome's English simply seems more up-to-date than other writers of his time, who now seem somewhat dated and quaint.
There is no simple way to resolve this dilemma.
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