Your English isn't your grandfather's English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, words, linguistics, historical linguistics

I find John McWhorter fascinating: he digs out so many lovely examples of language usage, and writes about them so engagingly… In a prior book I reviewed in 2009 (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue) he brought to our gaze the numerous chunks of other languages that were dragged together almost wholesale to produce what we today call "English". Now in Words on the Move; Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally), he provides an antidote to the amount of energy some of us "seasoned citizens" give to decrying the trends of change in language usage (Like, you know, gag me with a spoon if I have to keep hearing that!).

That last string of phrases caused much angst in my generation when "Valley Girl" (Val Gal) talk sprawled across the nation like a lanky teen on a love seat. In particular, "like" has gone from a word meaning (as a verb) "to desire or feel affinity to" or (adjective, adverb, etc.) "similarity", into a "piece of grammar", no longer really a word, but a functional sound that has morphed from the "similarity" end of things to at least three or four uses, most particularly a kind of bullet point, such as an example on page 215:

"So we're standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles…"

"Like" has become more a signal than a word, and this isn't new, it started almost a century ago, some 30 years before the Beatniks began to say, "Like, wow, man!". The new "like" has gathered new uses to the extent that McWhorter touches on it in three different chapters and spends a dozen pages on it in his last chapter, "This is your brain on writing." This word is an example of several he discusses, that are grammatical markers and have become very hard to explain as words. They are "grammaticalized." Consider what "well" or "so" might mean when used to begin a sentence. Could you explain them to an inquisitive five-year-old? Thought not!

Gliding back to the first chapter, "The FACEs of English", we find a long discussion of the acronym FACE, used to describe the uses of grammaticalized words such as "well" or "so", which a linguist would call "Modal Pragmatic Markers" or MPM's. Here "pragmatic" most closely means "personal". Our author states that a multitude of such words are needed so that we don't just speak English, we can talk.

This brings us to a major theme of the book, the difference between written and spoken (or "talked") English. Firstly, of course, we use fewer grammaticalizations when writing. I tend to write at full speed as though I were having a conversation with you, so I almost began this paragraph with, "Now, …". Were you and I really talking together, that's how I would have said it. But even writing full speed at 50wpm or so, I edit as I go and make the written form a little more compact, and, I hope, readable. (Those who find me long-winded are saying, "Oh, really!")

He dwells much more on spelling. For example, written English has a pronunciation rule of "silent, terminal e", that it makes the vowel before the prior consonant into a long vowel. Thus we have "mad", meaning crazy or angry, in which the "a" is pronounced as flatly as possible and is often called "short A"; and we have "made", meaning constructed or produced, in which the "a" is pronounced almost like "eh-ee" and is called "long A". The author tells us that nobody would design such a system from scratch, and that it had to arise from some process. Indeed it did. He discusses the "Great Vowel Shift" on pages 152-159, using a map of the placement of vowels in our mouth to show how the "short A" of 5 to 9 centuries ago morphed into a longer "E" sound then to the "long A", and that a final "eh" sound at the end of many words was gradually dropped. Thus, "made" was once pronounced "mah-deh", as the spelling suggests, shifted through "meh-də' ", which a much shorter final syllable, shown by the schwa (ə), which is more of a tiny grunt than a vowel, and then into the one-syllable word of today. The Great Vowel shift moved all the vowels about, leading certain words that once rhymed to have different sounds now than then, and they no longer rhyme. "Water" and "after", in "Jack and Jill", used to rhyme perfectly. No longer.

Dictionaries began to be written for English very early in the Great Vowel Shift. While this didn't exactly entomb all the spellings in stone, they did tend to hold things back, and today, dictionaries of "modern English" have to trot to keep up, having been rendered out of date by our movable language just in the time needed to research, typeset, and publish them. By the way, usage of the words "typeset" and "typesetting" is dropping, having peaked in the 1980's; they are being overtaken by "key in" and "keying in". As computers get better at speech recognition, those will drop off also.

Here is side point that I enjoyed. Do you ever hear the expression "willy-nilly"? I figured out long ago that it came from "will I, or nill I", but I wasn't sure just what "nill" meant. Dr. McWhorter has the answer. A millennium or so ago, negating words was done by adding the prefix "ne-", so to "not will", or not desire, something was to "ne-will" it. To say you don't have something, you would say, "I ne-have it", but by Chaucer's time it would have been "I nave it", with "nave" pronounced "nah-veh" or even "nah-və". And Chaucer spelled it næbbe. It seems the consonants have shifted as well, but the author has left that for a future book, I reckon.

I'll forbear further nerdifying. It is a delightful book, and an incredibly informative one. I am thinking of giving a copy to a friend who is a linguist, but primarily of Chinese, not English, to see what similar trends might have occurred in Mandarin, which the Chinese acknowledge is not a written language at all: the "written Chinese" language is one that nobody speaks, but they all know how to interpret it into whatever dialect they grew up speaking.

This fellow REALLY knows how to chase a rabbit

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, wordplay, etymology

Herewith, my own definition:

To chase a rabbit - to follow a series of associations, particularly as they lead in unexpected directions. Particularly applies to rambling discussions.

The above is a pretty good metaphor for a bull session. Bull, of course, being short for bullshit, and both parts of that word have their roots and uses, both together and separate, and so forth. However, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth (AKA The Inky Fool) is a far deeper chase through brambles and weeds than I am competent to pursue. As the subtitle says, the work is circular, beginning and ending with the question of whether one can turn up a book (you can't).

Looking back, I find that the author could have closed the loop in a number of places. He is one who prefers to keep the rabbit running as long as possible, or at least until a specified word count is achieved. The 113 chapters cover 259 pages, plus another 19 of quizzes and other arcana. I think it most useful to pick 3 spots at random (and an easy cop out):

• p 27 – The phrase we find is letting the cat out of the bag, which actually has to do with someone trying to sell a pig in a poke (sack). You avoid being scammed by peeking inside, and seeing there is no pig, you let the cat out. But this was a side path in a discussion of archery, and the term point blank. No one should be surprised to know that blank in this case derives from blanc, or white in French. White is the color of the bullseye. If you are standing close enough to the target, you can hit the center without aiming high to account for gravity: you point right at it because you are at point blank range. The term bullseye is not followed, but could lead along an interesting path.
• p 58 – This begins a discussion of three names related to "justice", loosely construed, and their relation in particular to capital punishment. The names are Guillotin, Derrick, and Jack Robinson. We find that Thomas Derrick was a thoroughly bad man whose death sentence was commuted on the condition that he become the executioner for the Earl of Essex. The gallows is also called a derrick in his "honor", and the word is now applied to various kinds of lifting structures. Jack Robinson has several variously plausible sources, but the most likely is that Sir John Robinson, constable of the Tower of London, carried out executions with great efficiency, getting them over with so quickly that it was said you couldn't say "Jack Robinson" between the time you were called out and your head rolled. The final part of executions got even quicker when the mild Dr. Guillotin was placed on a commission to reform executions. Having seen a German head-chopping blade, he told his colleagues that if executions had to be done, that machine would do it best. Now even the Germans call it the guillotine.
• p 247 – The word amateur, which means lover, and why love is zero in tennis. If the gentleman who created lawn tennis had had his way, it would be distinguished from hard-court tennis by being called sphairistike, which rhymes with "very sticky". We've been spared, at least in part because tennis players didn't know enough Greek to figure out the pronunciation. But then, love? Because if you do something for love, you'll do it for nothing. I still don't like it (and the entire love-15-30-40 sequence, which makes no numeric sense, because you have to win on an advantage anyway, after winning at least 3 serves).

Now if you can't imagine how the Inky Fool gets from any of these points to the others, do just read the book. Great fun!

Words of motion, words of wonder

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, writing

Not every sentence needs them. Nearly every sentence has them. Some languages almost dispense with them. Others lavish attention on them with inflection after inflection. A Romanian friend who speaks several languages told me, "French grammar is endless!" She was referring particularly to the conjugations of verbs. When I was learning French, my fellow students and I joked that French had a hundred verb conjugations, each of which had a different way to spell the inflection, but nearly all were pronounced "-ee".

Ah, Verbs! Even in English, which is considered a language having minimal inflection—it usually uses helper words instead—many verbs have as many as six forms. Consider swim. As a child I learned, "Today I swim, yesterday I swam, and I have swum many times in the past." Then there is, "I am swimming," and, "He swims fast," and finally, the noun made from swim: "I am a swimmer."

Such verbs are called irregular today. The regular verbs simply add -ed for the past tense and past participle, though they still add -ing for present progressive, -s for third person singular present, and -er for the related noun (when one exists). Thus, spill, spilled, have spilled, spilling, spills and spiller (it exists, but is darn rare). Then we have niceties such as doubling certain final consonants and using -es rather than -s for final sibilants. This all makes learning English tricky for a foreigner (but not as tricky as French!).

Fortunately, only about a ninth (some say an eighth or even a seventh) of English words are verbs. More than half are nouns. As there are at least 14 ways to forma noun's plural (including nouns that have no plural), nouns bedevil language learners the most. But verbs come a close second; in our speech, we seldom create a sentence without using a verb, or several.

The most common verbless sentence is the admonition intended to stop a child in his tracks: "John!" This monosyllable typically implies a lot: "John, what are you doing? You stop that!" Two verbs, one including the helper are; a proper noun and four pronouns; all wrapped up in one exclamation. So even when we don't speak a verb, it comes right along anyway.

Over many years I gathered words and word forms from many sources. Then I classified them, producing a reference with nearly 61,800 words and all their forms: nouns and noun plurals, verbs with their 4 or 5 inflections, adjectives with their comparative and superlative forms, and all the common adverbs, connectives (AKA conjunctions), exclamations or interjections, prepositions and pronouns. The nouns number just over 6,750 or 11% of the lot. Adverbs outnumber verbs a little, adjectives number about 10,500, and the nouns dominate: more than 31,600 (most with plural forms).

But if you add up the kinds of words used in everyday speech and ordinary writing (not creative or formal prose, and certainly not poetry), verbs don't quite dominate, but make up about a sixth of the words used, and as the stage directors of every sentence, form a structure that would fall apart without them. Here is the prior sentence with all verbs removed:

But if you the kinds of words in everyday speech and ordinary writing [a gerund not a verb] (not creative or formal prose, and certainly not poetry), verbs don't quite, but about a sixth of the words, and as the stage directors of every sentence, a structure that without them.

Rather hard to follow, what? So when we have, as the inmate said in Cool Hand Luke, "a failure to communicate", the blame belongs to verb use, whether sloppy or pathological. (When President Clinton said, "That depends on what the definition of 'is' is.", that was pathological.) Part of the problem is the rules we probably all learned in grade school. Some rules are useful, such as those for recognizing when a verb takes a direct or indirect object. But other rules of "grammar" are misleading or simply wrong, because they are based on Latin as it was spoken by Cicero and Pliny. For example, do you remember being told not to split an infinitive? Miss Thistlebottom in your third-grade class would deplore, "To boldly go where no man has gone before." An assignment would be returned with the emendation, "Boldly to go…", but the writer of the Star Trek motto made a few millions off that phrase! In fact, in Latin it is impossible to split an infinitive, because Latin doesn't use to; Latin infinitives are single words, but every English infinitive is two or more words. English infinitives practically invite spitting! So go ahead, when you need to really split one, split away!!

The twelve chapters of Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing, by Constance Hale, take on the remnants of our faulty education. Ms Hale hopes to make us all better writers as we learn how verbs really work, and how they can make our writing better understood (or make it foggier, if that is our aim). The four verbs of the title form the structure of each chapter. After some intro, the Vex section discusses/exposes a problem, the Hex section propounds a curse upon the ensuing misunderstanding, then the author Smashes and pillories sundry blunders that made it into print, and finally she offers a Smooch to the writers whose writing keeps us reading, particularly illustrating the right way to tackle that chapter's conundrum.

This doesn't mean there are twelve classes of rules needing correction. The first four chapters are historical, outlining the development of English over the past 15 centuries into the growing, effervescing brew we now enjoy. With the right perspective we can enjoy using its capabilities fully. Thus the eight following chapters help us understand tenses and voices and moods and so forth. I particularly like the author's take on the passive voice. We can't write well without it, so the pronouncements of some to "eliminate" or "avoid" or even "eschew" using passive constructions constrain us either to overactive, hyped prose or to vapid "activese".

I think of the passive voice as akin to dietary fat. We need some, just not too much. About one-eighth of our food, by weight, can be fat. Similarly, if you scan the verbs in good writing you'll find that about one sentence in eight is some kind of passive construction. Let's see, the sentence above that begins "About one-eighth…" uses a passive construction. What would I have to do to "activize" it? How about "Fat can weigh in at one-eighth of our food," or "We can healthily consume food containing up to 1/8th fat." I think the way I originally wrote it simply scans better, and matches a common mode of speech.

Near the end a chapter is devoted to "phrasal verbs", constructions such as make up, chase down, put off and look up to. These powerful verbs need thoughtful use in our writing. They easily become clichés, and some such as meet up with (just use meet) should be avoided. Phrasal verbs often lead to sentences that end in prepositions. Thus, we find a simple, straightforward question: "Did the plant shut down?" (Dear Miss Thistlebottom, this is also a passive construction. So there!). Unless you know who shut it down, it would be incorrect to ask, "Did you shut down the plant?", even though the voice is now active and the final preposition has been "moved inward". The original question implies further investigation will follow, as it ought to (another final prep.). A goodly number of examples are discussed, and either their fallacy is explained, or they pass muster. An appendix goes into further detail.

Ah, the appendices! The six appendices do not quite set a record. Each is a short chapter (without the Vex, etc.), and well worth reading. Appendix Three in particular recommends several dictionaries. It is good to have a few. A quick look around shows that I have four English dictionaries in this room, and two bilingual ones. In the next few days as I finish clearing out my office (8 "work" days until retirement!), I'll bring home four more, including a 20-pound Unabridged (New 20th Century something-or-other), plus a Larousse's French/English for my son. I also have a couple rhyming dictionaries. I will leave behind the dictionaries of Geography and of Physics terms for my colleagues, who have been visiting to use them anyway.

This book could have been larger, I suppose, but it serves well for its aim. When we write, we usually wish to be understood. Gaining a better command of verbs will strengthen our writing. Finally, a book about English usage that isn't about "Grammar" (which really means "the way of Latin usage before it killed off the Romans")!

A verbal quibble

kw: words, pronunciation

My colleagues are all highly educated. When they consistently mispronounce a word, something is going on! It has been years since I heard this word pronounced correctly:

Decadence, noun, pronounced d-KAY-dnce (you can think of the D's as being followed by nearly unpronounced "u" sounds). The word's origin is decay. Thus the A is hard, and is given the emphasis. The word is not pronounced DECK-a-dense!

I consulted some dictionaries:

• I have on online copy of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. It has only this pronunciation (which they show as de-ca'-dence, the ' meaning emphasis).
• The 1975 edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary already has "dek'-ed-ents" as the primary sounding, with the other as secondary. However, it does indicate that the word's origin is "decay".
• The 1976 Funk & Wagnall's Standard Desk Dictionary has it the "right" way: "di-kayd'ns" primary and the other secondary, but then it switches them around for the adjective "decadent"!
• The 1979 Webster's New Twentieth Century Unabridged Dictionary (by Collins, not Merrian-Webster), and based on the 1940 edition, has things the "right" way, by my lights.
• Alas, dictionary.com has things the other way around, though at least it offers the "correct" pronunciation as an alternative.

Languages change with time and usage. I suppose I'll eventually switch.

12-plus pluralizations

kw: words, grammar

At a time I can no longer recall, I developed a love for words, as words. One fruit of this is a collection of lists of words by parts of speech. Not only so, I have classified those words that change with use. In this post I will get on record the pluralization of nouns, and the various patterns used. The table shows my analysis of 31,619 nouns. An explanation follows.

• Adding an "s": three-fifths of nouns work this way. It is the first spelling rule most children learn. Dog → dogs and cloud → clouds and shoe → shoes and monkey → monkeys work this way.
• Nouns that have no plural, or are their own plural: This plus the "add s" group make up 89% of all nouns. If you think of "water" as two words, one of them adds s, the other has no plural. That is, "waters" as a reference to numerous bodies of water is a +s plural. "Water" as a substance has no plural. "Lore" is another example; it is a kind of virtual substance also. Chemical terms (listed separately below) are also not pluralized: A word like "oxygens" is meaningless except to chemists using shorthand for "oxygen atoms" in a chemical structure.
• Changing final "y" to "ies": This is for -y words that have a consonant before the "y", such as curry → curries and ruby → rubies. I find it interesting that these outnumber the -es plurals.
• Adding "es": In singular form most of these nouns end in a sibilant sound. Examples are wish → wishes and paradox → paradoxes. A smaller number end in "o": potato → potatoes, although an increasing number of writers—currently 0.1%—add only "s".
• Changing final "man" to "men": The 205 words in this category are all compounds with -men, such as "spokesman" or "workman". Many of these are being superseded by words ending in "person".
• Irregular plurals: The 141 I have collected are a pretty comprehensive list. It includes child → children and beau → beaux and foot → feet. The "x" ones are from French, and the others came to English from a variety of languages.
• Changing final "um" to "a": This is one of those famous Latin rules. Certain common words are now almost unknown in singular form, such as agendum → agenda and datum → data. Few people know that "agenda" and "data" are plural. More people know cranium → crania and spectrum → spectra, though you do find "craniums" and "spectrums" in print these days.
• Changing final "us" to "i": Who doesn't know octopus → octopi? This is the best known Latin rule. Other examples are bacillus → bacilli and cactus → cacti and stimulus → stimuli.
• Adding a final "e": Another Latin rule, only for nouns with female gender in Latin, such as larva → larvae and nebula → nebulae.
• Changing final "is" to "es": A more obscure Latin rule. Examples are crisis → crises and analysis → analyses. The knowledge of oasis → oases and neurosis → neuroses persists mainly because other attempts to form a plural are so clumsy.
• Changing final "f" or "fe" to "ves": An example of the first is wolf → wolves; of the second, life → lives.
• Changing final "is" or "ex" to "ices": Examples of the first case are helix → helices and matrix → matrices; of the second, index → indices and codex → codices. However, a lot of "add es after the x" is being done, and these forms are likely to die out.
• The last two cases, with a total of five words among them, ought actually to be included in the irregular verbs. Pluralizing the rare noun "do" to "do's" is probably not done any more, while using "go's" as a noun plural for "go" (think, "Let's have a go at it" – could you logically pluralize that?) is so rare I have seen it only once (and not in my own writing!). Finally, the consonant doubling rule applies only to quiz → quizzes and whiz → whizzes.

If you didn't know I was a nerd before, you know it now! I know only a couple of people who know more than five of these rules. Hardly anybody cares. Lists of such facts are primarily useful for people making software to recognize and process "natural language", particularly if they need to parse older texts.

Aprotic - new to me

kw: words

Reading a report I found the word aprotic. I could guess that it refers to a chemical that cannot donate a proton, thus limiting the kinds of reactions it can undergo. Such substances make good solvents, good hosts for oxidation-reduction reactions (which operate by trading protons). A little searching confirmed my horseback hunch.

Digging around in Google Books, the earliest reference I could find is in a 1953 volume, Non-Aqueous Solvents by Audrieth and Kleinberg (seemingly earlier uses in print are instances of typos or mistaken OCR, such as 1907 for 1987. Of course the Google Books project hasn't snarfed up everything just yet).

Early usage focused on nonpolar solvents such as benzene, or non-H-bearing chemicals such as sulfur dioxide, but in more recent years polar chemicals that hold their hydrogens very tightly have been included, such as phosphazenes, which are full of NH₂ groups but do not permit any hydrogen ions to be removed. Acetone and DMSO are considered aprotic, polar solvents.

A useful word, in certain contexts, and an interesting one to have learned.

Like the river, you can't step in twice

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, words, english language

I am not one of the twitterati. I do not have a Twitter account. I have trouble enough keeping up with FaceBook and this blog! As it happens, twittersphere is the 100th word in The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal. He chose it to exemplify the continued liveliness of English, or "the Englishes" if you accept that certain patois and pidgins have become new English languages (a Chinese friend who had lived in Malaysia explained it to me: Malay pidgin is English words strung together using Chinese grammar. Thus, "Long time no see" is an exact translation of a Chinese phrase into the corresponding English words. Remember that the next time you read a product brochure written in Chinglish.).

The language alternately called Old English or Anglo-Saxon arose in the late Fifth and early Sixth Century, an amalgam of the tongues spoken by the Germanic Angle, Saxon and Jute invaders who pretty much took over the island that now holds England, Scotland and Wales. To this day, nearly 80% of everyday English words are of Germanic origin. Of course, if you count scientific and technical words, you get a larger proportion of Latin and Greek terms, but less than 30% of the population is scientifically or technically trained, so you can hardly call them "everyday".

True to this origin, Professor Crystal's compendium begins with a Fifth Century word, roe. The word referred to the roe-deer, not to fish eggs. That came much later, via another word of similar sound. Very few words of such ancient lineage survive, however. The book's second selection is from the Eighth Century. By my count, the author spread his collection over the centuries thus:

• 5: 1
• 8: 2
• 9: 5
• 10: 5
• 11: 2
• 12: 1
• 13: 9
• 14: 9
• 15: 2
• 16: 8 (The century of Shakespeare)
• 17: 13 (The century of the King James Bible)
• 18: 4
• 19: 13
• 20: 21
• 21: 5

I pride myself on a comprehensive knowledge of the language (that is, a large vocabulary), but a few of the words were unknown to me: bodgery (16th, since replaced by "bungling"), mipela (19th, from a Papuan pidgin; the intensive plural of "me"), doobry (early 20th, akin to "whatzits"), and bagonize (late 20th, waiting at baggage claim). In many of the essays, a dozen or more, perhaps 50-100, words that in some way relate are also mentioned. Thus doobry is accompanied by doodad, doofer, dooshanks, and also doohickey, doojigger, and then whatchacallit, whatchamacallit, thingy, thingummy, jigmaree, and a good many others. All just to say, "I don't know what to call it, but I know what I am looking for".

If you dig into almost any word's origin and history, you'll find surprises. The common epithet "Dude!" just means what "guy" meant a decade or so ago, but it referred to a cowboy wannabe when I was a child, and to a dandy (today we'd say "metrosexual") when the word first appeared in 1883. Like many new coinages, once it caught on, it spawned a number of related words and phrases such as duded up. The author mentions the short tenure of the female forms dudine and dudess. Here I can happily add to the author's knowledge: the proper female form, when used at all, is dudette (at least for now!).

Word play is a fruitful source of new words. Brunch is a portmanteau word, packing two meanings into one word (as Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice). Dally (from "delay") spun off dilly-dally by reduplication, which led to a host of words bearing a similar rhythm. And then there are attempts to deal with ambiguity. The pronoun "you" is both singular and plural. In the American South, y'all and a number of variants arose originally as a plural "you". The trouble is, it soon became equally ambiguous, and at least around Houston when I lived there 35 years ago, y'all just meant "you, singular", and all y'all or all-a-you-all was the plural form. And they really did say "Y'all come back now, hear?", no matter how many people were saying goodbye.

Leaving out the millions of terms such as Homo sapiens or Tyrannosaurus rex or E. coli (who knows how to pronounce "Escherichia" anyway?) that refer to specific biological species, there are still about a million words of English. Summarizing them in 100 exemplars is no small task. The good professor has done a masterful survey of the ways that words were coined and cobbled together, and dragged, cajoled and kidnapped into the English language, to form the very living tongue spoken, in numerous variants and dialects, by a third of the peoples of the Earth.

A nine by any other name

kw: words, religion, meanings, origins

I have had nearly no contact with monasticism, so it is only recently that I learned to what extent Catholic piety is tied to the old Roman concept of time. In the daily discipline of many monastic orders, there is a round of eight sets of prayers. With their approximate time of day they are

• Vigil – pre-dawn
• Laud – sunrise
• Prime – early morning
• Terce – midmorning
• Sext – noon
• None – midafternoon
• Vesper – early evening
• Compline – sunset or late evening

For a monk, you could say that "prime time" is about the time the rest of us are just getting up. But let us focus on the fourth, fifth and sixth: terce, sext and none. These words, compensating for two millennia of phonetic drift, are from the Latin words for 3, 6 and 9. In Roman Europe, sunrise marked the start of the day, and was "zero hour". A timekeeper would note when the Sun crossed the meridian, that is, when it was due south, and signal noon, or six hours into the day. Sunset was hour twelve, but was also zero hour for the night watches.

In the monastic orders that keep the old way, one or more timekeepers have the job to ring signal bells when these standard hours occur, so the monks can all pray the office of each hour. This is immortalized in a children's song:

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping,
Brother John, Brother John?
Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing:
Ding, ding, dong. Ding ding dong.

In French it is more revealing:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
Dormez vouz, dormez vouz?
Sonnez les matines, Sonnez les matines!
Din, dan, don. Din, dan, don.

In the third line, the sleeping brother, who is late with his signal, is exhorted to ring the bells! (or else!!) Poor Brother John. The ninth hour of the night, or three AM, it is tough to keep watch for the rising of a certain star that informs him it is time to ring the Vigil bells. Three other astronomical phenomena, sunrise, Noon, and sunset, are at least easier to anticipate.

I haven't learned how they determined, in any accurate way, the other times. An hour glass would only work for part of the year, because in early days, the lengths of the hours were variable, tied to the interval between sunrise and sunset, and for night watches, the opposite interval. Of course, computers can keep accurate track of any time scheme they like, for more modern monks!

Now I turn to the word that started all this investigation: None. This is not the pronoun "none", an Old English word that means "not one" and rhymes with "fun" or "done". Instead, this word rhymes with "phone" or "stone", and originates from Latin "nonus" meaning nine. Sometimes written "nones", it initially referred to the ninth day of some sequence, such as the ninth day of the month, or of a long celebration. Only in the Sixteenth century was it added to the Divine Office as a prayer-time at three PM or thereabouts.

I find it an amusing coincidence that the pronoun "none", meaning "not one", rhymes also with "nun". Thus in spelling "none" (the pronoun) matches "none" (prayer time at the ninth hour), while in pronunciation "none" (the pronoun) rhymes with "nun" (a woman with a religious vocation).

The largest homophone set

kw: words, wordplay, homophones

Air, are (a land measure), ere, e'er, err, Eyre, and heir are seven words that are pronounced the same in most regional dialects of English. I collect groups of homophones (also frequently called homonyms), and of the roughly 800 sets I have gathered, this is the largest. Nearly all the sets have two members, and only a handful have four or more. Of these seven, the two spellings that most clearly express the pronunciation for most people are air, rhyming with hair, and heir, in which the h is silent.

These words are not equally familiar, so let's define each:

• air is the stuff we breathe. The word can also refer to a popular tune, though this usage is falling out of use: "She sat at the piano and played a simple air."
  
• are as a measure of land is to be distinguished from the verb of the same spelling, but pronounced to sound just like the letter r. An are is 100 square meters, and the more familiar measure hectare is 100 ares, roughly equal to 2.5 acres.
  
• ere is a poetic preposition meaning "before". It is found at the center of the palindrome that expresses a possible thought by Napoleon in exile: "Able was I ere I saw Elba."
  
• e'er Is another poetic expression, a contraction for ever. You'll find it in some older songs, and in many hymns, which frequently rhyme fore'er with there or where.
  
• err is a verb meaning to make a mistake: "To err is human; to forgive, divine."
  
• Eyre is the surname of the heroine of the novel Jane Eyre. The name is sometimes pronounced with a more distinct y sound, but this is rather rare, and tends to make it a two-syllable word.
  
• heir is someone who will inherit. While most people assume an heir is a person's child, your actual heir is whomever you designate in your will. You do have a will, don't you? Without one, upon your untimely death, the government of the state or nation in which you live will decide who your heirs are.

Most European languages are like English in being rather poor in homophones. By contrast, Chinese has so many that, if the language were written with an alphabet rather than ideographic characters, it would be almost impossible to decipher. Even Japanese, which started out as a wholly unique language, has adopted so many Chinese pronunciations of common words that some homophone groups in Japanese have thirty or more members. Of course, this means that these Asian languages are much richer in possibilities for punning!

Ever see a single smithereen?

kw: words, wordplay

I suppose we have all heard the term "blasted to smithereens." Some years ago, I began to wonder, was there ever the singular word "smithereen"? As it happens, yes, indeed. The word is of Irish origin, and began as a name. Somehow, it morphed into a synonym for "smidgen" and similar words meaning a tiny bit. Once the phrase "blown to smithereens" arose in the 1880s, this usage came to dominate, so by 1940 or so, the singular form nearly dropped out of use.

Other words seen only, or almost only, as plural forms include

• Clothes, as in "Put on your clothes." "Clothe" is a verb, and "a clothe" as a noun is practically unknown.
• Scissors, usually "pair of scissors", though sometimes I've heard "get me a scissors". In one of his lesser known songs, Allen Sherman ("Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah") asked if "half a pair of scissors is a single sizz?". I am guessing at the spelling!
• Glasses and spectacles, as referring to eyewear, are always plural, but both words occur in singular form with other meanings.

Certain words occur in phrases beginning "pair of": earrings, pants, trousers, jeans, shoes, slippers, gloves. Most of these are less commonly used in singular form, such as "I dropped an earring", although I have never seen or heard "a jean".

Then there are collective, plural nouns such as people and police. There are instances in which "these peoples" is a valid usage, but I know of no way that "polices" can appear except as a verb.

Language is a funny beast. A language grows organically. Attempts to construct language produce, at best, niches of usage. Esperanto is the best example, and it is experiencing change as its limitations cause distress. The existence of such "always plural" (or nearly so) words indicates that there is a need for such constructs, and nowhere is it more evident than in language, that necessity is the mother of invention.

A juicy trip through the alphabet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wordplay, words, collections

Roy Blount, Jr. collects words, particularly their origins and associations. Three years ago he published Alphabet Juice, which has a very long subtitle. The title of the current volume is better-behaved: Alphabetter Juice: or, the Joy of Text. And a joy it is. As before, there is no need to read in any particular order. Indeed, throughout, a word or phrase in bold face indicates you ought to go look it up elsewhere in the book. It is a sort of hyperlink.

Each letter's section begins with a discursion—and often a digression—on the letter itself, its sound, other sounds it can contribute to, and so forth. C, for example, starts with the Sesame Street image of a cookie with a big bite taken out, passes via cookie-cutter sharks to "Cookie" as something you might call an attractive woman, then gets into the sound: kooky and cuckoo, but not why one has a "k"; then to cootch and to the similar-sounding, but much different "Coochy-coo". All that just to set the stage for thirteen short items (articles, essays, something else?), including a couple of pages of doggerel about eating crabs and lobsters (under crustaceous).

One of the longer items is gillie, girl and travels through quite a gaggle of related words and word origins. Somehow, he spends quite a bit of it upon fishing for salmon in Iceland, or rather, mostly watching a self-important master fisherman laboring to land a leg-length salmon on rather inadequate tackle.

Throughout, the author will frequently comment on whether a word is sonicky, a word he coined that he intends to carry more meaning than onomatopoeic. For example, knickknack (a great trap for playing SuperGhosts: follow an opening "k" with "k" and see if your opponent knows where to go with it) is echoic, made up of two instances of knack, an old word for snapping the fingers. This is suitably sonicky all by itself, but the author ends by stating, "Knickknacks tend to be clicky little things on the shelf." It just wouldn't be the same if your tchotchkes were called "smoofs". The word really needs all its k's.

And that knickknack-tchotchke synonymy is a large part of what the author is also about. In many languages, a word and its synonyms often carry similar sounds, and not just because "it all started with proto-Indo-European" (PIE). In Japanese, which is definitely not from PIE, the word for cat is neko. The "K" sound is the key here, as befits a small, skittery animal. Though we tend to think of our house cats as warm, soft bricks for keeping our laps occupied, they originated as high-strung mousers with a tendency to run right up a wall, particularly if there were drapes handy to ease the process. (Cat is not covered in this volume, and I don't recall if it appeared in the earlier one. This is just my fancy bouncing off his ways.)

In a closing word, the author hints at a third book that may be on the way, to be titled Alphabest Juice, but what manner of subtitle may be appended, we'll have to wait and see.

Pixie dust

kw: musings, words, proverbs

On occasion my grandmother would say, "Everybody is a bit pixillated, except me and thee; and sometimes I think thee is also pixillated." She claimed it was an old Quaker saying, in which "pixillated", from "pixie", is a nice way of saying "crazy". Though she was a Methodist, her grandmother was a Quaker. She would say it to one of us boys who was being silly.

These days you can't repeat this saying and be understood. The word "pixelated" has been coined along with digital imagery, to mean "low resolution so the pixels show", or "deliberately exaggerated pixels" as in this image.

A pixel is nowhere near as wonderful a concept as a pixie. A perfectly beautiful word has been superseded by technology.

A fun reference for mnemophiles

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, mnemonics, references

While I have been known to read the dictionary or an encyclopedia for enjoyment, I did not read all of Judy Parkinson's book yet. It is a reference book, titled i before e (except after c): old-school ways to remember stuff, and yes, the title is entirely uncapitalized.

Every language has mnemonics used to recall sundry facts. My wife knows a number of haiku and other short Japanese poems she learned, including one for remembering the years of the Asian Zodiac (2011 is the year of the rabbit), and there are two ways they remember their 72-character phonetic alphabet. One is rhythmic and starts "aa ii uu ee oo ka ki ku ke ko". The other, titled "Iro Wa", and actually spelled i ro ha, is a Buddhist poem about the transitoriness of life, which uses each character exactly once. Of course, they have about 7,500 other characters derived from Chinese that are not phonetic, which explains why 10-12 years of Japanese education are required before one can read a newspaper with ease.

In English, we have, for month duration, "30 days hath September...", the "I before E" rule for non-Germanic words (which means there are hundreds of exceptions, such as "weird" and "seismic"), and for astronomy buffs, "O Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me" to remember star classes in order: OBAFGKM. The rcent addition of classes R, N and S has lengthened the phrase with "...right now, sweetheart!"

The book's sixteen chapters cover all kinds of things, so rather than be comprehensive here, I'll keep it around and offer tidbits from time to time. Today's is this: Chapter 2 is on spelling words that are most commonly misspelled (or misspelt if you are really old-school). Most of the chapter consists of 75 rules that are almost as hard to remember as the spelling of the words. For example: "A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream" is for ARITHMETIC. Slightly easier is, for distinguishing "capital" from "capitol", "PAris is the capitAl of FrAnce; there is a CapitOl building in WashingtOn." The silliness of memorizing the phrase fixes the two in your mind. My own bottom line is that we just need to remember the hard ones, look them up if needed, and when typing on the computer, trust your spell checker, at least a little: some might be homonyms, but that is a tidbit for another day.

Latin lives on

kw: analysis, words, history

As I wrote some text for a planning meeting I was pondering whether to pluralize "curriculum" as "curriculums" or "curricula". I prefer the latter, but I was wondering which my audience would prefer. I did a Google search of both spellings, and it was hands down for the Latin plural, by 48 million to 5.2 million, an 8:1 ratio. I then had two thoughts. One was, I wonder what the history of this is, whether there is a changeover to Anglicized pluralization going on, and whether similar words would have the same history.

When I went to the Google Labs Ngram Viewer, the first pair I tried was "addendums" vs "addenda". This first chart shows the result. The Latin plural is in red, and is the clear winner, for all of the past 208 years I plotted. You can click on these charts for a double size version.


That done, I plotted "curriculums" and "curricula". This chart shows that, while there was some support for the Anglicized plural from 1920 to 1980, it has largely vanished.


Here is a pair for which the drama has yet to play out in full: "referendums" and "referenda". While the Anglicized plural is rapidly gaining ground, and the spell checker here at Blogger tells me it doesn't like "refereda", the Latin plural is still ahead as of 2008. I hope Google Labs updates their database soon. I'd like to see the 2009 and 2010 results.


Also, the plural of "vacuum" has had a strange history. "Vacua" was preferred until 1960, then underwent a precipitous drop in popularity, while "vacuums" had been slowly gaining popularity since 1920 or thereabouts. I expect "vacua" to vanish over the next 20-40 years.


One word of Greek origin has three plurals because many think it is from Latin. The Latin plural of "octopus" is "octopi" and was once preferred, but then was overtaken by "octopuses" after 1920. About 1940 some language purists proposed the proper Greek plural "octopodes", but as you can see, it never caught on. It is effectively defunct. "Octopuses" now reigns.


Finally, there is the strange case of the false Latin plural of "rhinoceros". This word ends in "-os", not "-us", yet I have heard well educated people say "rhinoceri". As this chart shows, this term has very rarely made it into print. "Rhinoceroses" has always been the appropriate plural, because the term was not taken into English from another language, but was compounded of two Greek roots as an English word about 1740 (I ran a different chart to discern this date). This and "octopus" illustrate the mental tricks we have to overcome because we have so many words from both Greek and Latin in our language.


It is fascinating, the products of modern analysis tools when you have mountains of data to work with.

Fun with words and history

kw: words, wordplay, history, graphics

Google has a useful and fun tool in its Ngram viewer! At the URL shown, a page opens up with a couple of sample words already loaded, and the default time limits set from years 1800 to 2000. For this first graph, I reset the first date to 1600 and put in a couple of words I know are historical and nearly out of use: thee and thou:

You'll need to click on these images to see all the detail. They are reduced to about 45% here. Those who are familiar with thee and thou know they are the archaic singular pronouns for "you". In this graph, we see primarily the references in literature that use Shakespearean language (the language of the King James Bible), up to the early or middle 1700s, and later on primarily those found in literature that quote the KJB or early versions of Shakespeare. Many modern printings of Shakespeare's works have replaced thee and thou with you, and removed numerous other archaisms.

While there is lots a person can do with the Ngram tool, I'll just introduce the possibilities with another example. First, I changed the collection from "English" to "English Fiction", set the smoothing factor from 3 to 1, and then put in the name of three major cities in which I've spent some time (eleven years, in the case of L.A.):

This is interesting. San Francisco is the most-mentioned city of the three prior to 1910, then New York City is neck-and-neck with it for thirty years; this is followed by NYC dropping out as L.A. rises, to run equal with S.F. after 1970. "So," I thought, "let's add the best-known Midwestern city, Chicago.":

What a difference! Since about 1870, Chicago has been by far the most-mentioned of these four, in English-language literature. To keep this short, I'll refrain from adding graphs for overseas cities, but as a hint for the US-centric: London is mentioned at least twice as often as Chicago, every year, and at that same level, steady, going back 250 years or more.

In a part of the web page that I didn't show, you are offered the chance to download portions of their word index to do your own larger-scale experiments. There's your chance to try this experiment with dozens of cities, or word groups of your choice.

Eleven ways to add a D

kw: words, english language

In a recent post, I showed that 95% of English verbs form the past tense by putting a "D" sound at the end. Here we'll look at the various ways that "D" sound is spelled, plus the sounds that are added to form the present participle, third person singular and associated noun. This will of necessity be presented in narrative form, because Blogger doesn't properly support tables.

In the lists I made of verb forms, I distinguished them into 42 categories by the patterns by which the past, past participle, present participle, third person singular, and related noun are formed. For the vast majority of English verbs, the past and past participle are the same: "Today I Start, earlier I Started, and I have Started many times." From this point, I'll show the full conjugations this way: Start//Started/Starts/Starting/Starter, where that // indicates that the two past forms are the same. In planned posts where I discuss verbs with a full conjugation, all the parts will be shown, as Swim/Swam/Swum/Swims/Swimming/Swimmer.

My numbering scheme was arrived at somewhat ad hoc. I reserved numbers less than ten (currently 0, 1 and 2) for those few verbs like Cut that re-use the infinitive in the past and/or past participle. The ones that use the "D" sound in past forms are numbered 10 through 20:

• 10: 2,748 verbs ending in "e" that add "d" to produce past forms, add "s" in the third person singular, change final "e" to "ing" for the present participle, and usually add "r" for the "performer" noun, though some change the final "e" to "or". Thus, Bribe//Bribed/Bribes/Bribing/Briber but Create//Created/Creates/Creating/Creator. For a few of these, the "r" or "or" form has become superseded by another form, such as Associate→Associate and Irritate→Irritant.
• 11: 2,538 verbs that add "ed for the past forms, "s" for the third person singular, "ing" for the present participle, and "er" (rarely "or") for the noun. Examples are Adorn//Adorned/Adorns/Adorning/Adorner and Obey//Obeyed/Obeys/Obeying/Obeyer.
• 12: 473 verbs whose final consonant is doubled before adding "ed" for the past forms and "ing" or "er", but still add a simple "s" for the third person singular. Examples are Brag//Bragged/Brags/Bragging/Bragger (though also Braggart) and Stun//Stunner/Stuns/Stunning/Stunner.
• 13: 374 verbs which are similar to Type 11 except for adding "es" for the third person singular. Examples are Bless//Blessed/Blesses/Blessing/Blesser and Crash//Crashed/Crashes/Crashing/Crasher.
• 14: 212 verbs ending in "y", for which the "y" is replaced with "ied" for the past forms, "ies" for third person singular, and "ier" for the noun, while simply adding "ing" for the present participle. Examples are Bury//Buried/Buries/Burying/Burier and Rally//Rallied/Rallies/Rallying/Rallyer.
• 15: 34 verbs ending in "e" that keep the "e" when adding "ing" for the present participle, but are otherwise formed like Type 10. An example is Dye//Dyed/Dyes/Dyeing/Dyer.
  
• 16: 8 verbs ending in "c" that add "s" for third person singular but append a "k" before "ed", "ing" or "er". An example is Frolic//Frolicked/Frolics/Frolicking/Frolicker.
• 17: 11 verbs ending in "ie" which add "d" and "s" as Type 10 but replace the "ie" with "ying" for the past participle and with "yer" for the noun. An example is Tie//Tied/Ties/Tying/Tyer.
• 18: 8 verbs for which the final consonant is always doubled. An examples is Gas//Gassed/Gasses/Gassing/Gasser.
• 19: 6 verbs ending in "y" that change the "y" to "ied" and "ies" but append "ing" and "er" for the past participle and noun forms. Examples are Try//Tried/Tries/Trying/Tryer and (this verb means to "jump or jerk in startlement") Shy//Shied/Shies/Shying/Shyer.
• 20: 15 verbs ending in "y" that follow the pattern of these examples: Pay//Paid/Pays/Paying/Payer and Say//Said/Says/Saying/Sayer.

The numbers total to 6,427 in my lists, or 95.2% of the 6,753 verbs that I have analyzed. I can see where I ought to regroup these so that all the verbs with an infinitive ending in "e" are together, those ending in "y" are together and so forth. That is a task for another day.

Note that, though there are these eleven ways the spelling is taken care of, the endings of the spoken forms all sound the same: Creating and Bragging and Trying just add an "ing" sound; Sensed and Rallied and Picnicked just add a "d" sound. So the spoken conjugation of 95% of English verbs is quite regular.

Not so irregular as one might imagine

kw: words, english language

An interest of mine that has been neglected thus far is words and how they work. Many years ago, I had sufficient free time to gather and categorize about 100,000 words, beginning with the construction of my own spelling dictionary but going quite a bit farther. Along the way, I found that there are two conflicting ways "word" is used.

Most of the time, "word" means a string of letters with a particular meaning and sound. In this usage, "start" and "started" and "starting" are thought of as different words, as are "hurricane" and "hurricanes". When one studies languages, however, "start" is considered a word that occurs in different forms due to inflection, as guided by the historical "rules" of grammar. Children learn to say, "Today I START, yesterday I STARTED, and I have often STARTED before." They also learn that while you and I START, he, she and it STARTS. Take off the ED, the ING or the S, and we have the "root word".

Every time I studied a language, whether Latin or French or Japanese, I was told that they were more "consistent" than English in some regard. This came to mind recently, and I decided to do a little checking. After all, I have my word-usage databases, lying fallow for half my life.

So today I'll consider English regular verbs. Some wags say there aren't any, which is what makes English hard to learn. My verb tables show a different picture. They contain the conjugations for 6,753 roots, which expand into about 33,000 "words". "Start", for example, produces STARTS, STARTED, STARTING, and STARTER (the latter is the -er noun form, which nearly every verb has. That is one reason there are more nouns than verbs).

START is an example of the most common of English verbs, in which the past tense and past participle forms are produced by appending ED. About 40% of English verbs work this way. Another near-40% work by simply adding D to words that already end in a vowel, such as CHASE. There are a few minor ways of appending a D or ED while deleting or doubling a final letter, that bring the total to 95% of all English verbs. If we treat English another inflected language, the two methods (adding ED or D) would be the "first conjugation" and "second conjugation" of English verbs. the other ways of adding the D sound would be considered variants. Then, even if you call all other verb forms "irregular", they total only 5% of English verbs. That is pretty small, smaller than the number of French or German irregular verbs!

I'll defer to another day writing of verbs that show other patterns, and thus could be grouped as third and successive conjugations. A final quibble while I close for the day: The Wikipedia article Verbs uses "write" for its examples. "Write" is an example of a much less common conjugation, using the pattern WRITE, WROTE, WRITTEN, plus WRITES, WRITING, and WRITER. A more regular verb such as "jump" or "start" or "create" would be a much better choice.

New coinage, but not quite mine

kw: words, definitions

I didn't quite coin this word, or at least I am not the first to coin it, but I made it up on the fly and then looked to see if it exists. It is not found in any online dictionary I've searched, so I plan to add these entries to TheFreeDictionary as soon as I complete this post:

• youthify, vt, Verb form of youth. To give something a younger appearance. past & ppt youthified, 3 pers sing youthifies.
• youthification, n, from youthify. The action or process of making something appear newer or younger.

I produced the word when writing class materials for a short course in digital darkroom techniques. The blur operation, I wrote, is used "to reduce noise or to youthify a portrait."

I remember a photographer describing the enlarger (wet darkroom) technique of making a flattering portrait of an older person. One step is to hold a piece of thin muslin halfway between the enlarger lens and the print paper, moving it so no fabric grid will show. This softens the image, making the small wrinkles disappear. Judicious use of digital blurring has the same effect.

It also reminded me of a friend who began to get cataracts at the rather early age of 45. By age 55 he had to have them removed. This was about 25 years ago, soon after the new outpatient techniques were developed. He had the procedure, and new plastic lenses implanted, and went home. He looked at himself in the mirror and asked his wife (who told me), "Where did all these wrinkles come from?" She said they'd been there a while, but his vision had been too blurry to see them. His bad eyes youthified him!

Words come from the strangest places

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, etymology

The book after this one is about collecting. Alphabet Juice is by an inveterate collector of words, Roy Blount Jr. Its subtitle, The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory, strongly hints at the level of his affliction.

This is not a book to read from cover to cover as one would a novel. Though I am just the sort to read a dictionary right through, this book is one to savor in random bits. It is linked together with bolded words and phrases, which one may take as hyperlinks to their entries. The book's content would make a great website (and perhaps it does, though I haven't found it yet). In his preface, the author presents the linguist's mantra, that "words and their meanings have an arbitrary relationship", as the straw man which he will knock about for the balance of the volume.

Indeed, beginning on page 23, he digs into arbitrary, soon stating, "Let's riffle through the dictionary: shrivel, shove, scribble …[I leave out the next 72 items]… scrounge, prestidigitation—if linguists can't hear any correspondence between sound and sense in those words, they aren't listening." Indeed, many a language would be immeasurably harder to learn if a word like mope bore no relation to the down-in-the-mouth mood it emulates. Try saying "mope" with a smile on your face. Not impossible, but it sure feels funny.

Blount doesn't just etymologize words for us, he frequently digs underneath the floor left by other lexicographers. Weird, which once conveyed fate-altering power, has become a popular synonym for strange; then he notes that it disregards the "i-before-e" rule (I have found that rule less than useful, being helpful only for Latinate-rooted words, and consistently flouted by Germanic words, which make up nearly an equal number. "Weird" is Germanic).

He discourses on the f-word, which along with the s-word was considered much less offensive in Elizabethan times, some four centuries back. It is odd that folks make so much of "4-letter words", when their siblings make up so much of common discourse: fool, snot, jump, dumb, crud, plot, sing…

He sneaks a few people in, such as Blanc, Mel, the voice of a number of favorite cartoon characters. He tells of Mel's curious response when he was in a coma for a few weeks: asked if he was OK, he was silent, but when asked if Bugs Bunny were OK, he responded in Bug's voice. Mel said, "I was dead, but my characters were alive."

While many etymologies are of the more straightforward persuasion, such as larynx, which gets but four lines, Blount clearly prefers to dig deeply. He gives us two full pages on laugh. The origin of the word needs but a few lines, but then he begins, "It is hard to write humorously about people laughing," and he's off in a whirl of literary allusions and quotes, finally disproving the proposition.

Or not. Perhaps the few authors he quotes, when added to Mark Twain, make up the sum of those who've managed the trick. But Blount proves even the more that writing humorously about lexicography—when the greatest of them all titled a lexicographer a "harmless drudge"—is no drudgery indeed but is the playground of great minds.

Words beyond words

kw: musings, words, definitions

Reading Kluge, which I reviewed yesterday, got me thinking about language. While we may have the largest number of words in the English language, there aren't actually enough of them. How else to explain the large number of words with multiple meanings? These are a source of puns, plus plenty of confusion.

One of my favorites is the word display. According to my big desk dictionary (Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, the unabridged Second Edition), the word has:

• 5 meanings as a transitive Verb (one that takes an object: "…to display a coat of arms…")
  
• 2 meanings as an intransitive Verb (no object: "…Picasso displayed last week…")
• 5 meanings as a Noun ("I brought a display of widgets.")
• and it can be used as an Adjective ("…a display card…")

This isn't the English word most prolific of meanings. The entries for cover takes up three times the column space, having 20 transitive and 3 intransitive Verbal uses, 9 Noun uses, and at least a dozen separate entries for Adjective uses such as "cover girl".

When we talk about a "word", is display one word or twelve? Is cover really thirty-plus words? It is for reasons such as these that I once proposed to a standards-making group of which I was briefly a part, that a set of unambiguous codes be invented for unique meanings, which would upon completion greatly facilitate automatic translation of documents.

Thus the word word can be a slippery concept. No wonder we need specialists to write the deathly dull, but unambiguous documents that convey agreements, treaties and contracts. It just doesn't come naturally, folks!