Mike Tanner Articles about Words

A Shitstorm

Words are Levers

Words are hooks, words are levers

There's a debate raging in my town over whether or not to replace the existing planted-grass school football field with what used to be known as Astroturf. One side has already won a crucial victory: the local paper calls the new alternative, "turf."

Turf is what we call a racetrack, or half a fancy dinner (surf and...). Turf is short and punchy and feels organic. If they had called it 'plastic' or 'fake grass' or 'artificial turf', every conversation would feel different before we even started.

What to call the new diamonds that are being manufactured in labs, not dug out of the ground under horrible conditions? Some want them to be called 'artificial diamonds' or not diamonds at all. Others might prefer 'flawless' diamonds (because they are) or 'perfect'.

Is it a 'course', a 'group' or a 'club'? It might be all three, but the word you choose will change the anchor and thus the leverage that word has going forward. Are you a 'consultant', an 'advisor' or a 'coach'?

Engineers and doctors and other scientists seem to think they're skipping all of this when they use precise, specific language. But the obvious specificity and the desire to scare off untrained laypeople is in itself a form of leverage.

For politicians and others that want to re-invent the language for their own ends--you can work to plant your hook anywhere you choose, but if you torture the meaning and spin, spin, spin, you risk being seen as a manipulator, and all your leverage disappears. If your hook finds no purchase, you have no leverage.

On the other hand, the great brands (Pepsi, Kodak, etc.) planted words that meant nothing and built expensive fortresses around their words, words that now have emotional power.

The only reason words have meaning is because we agree on what they mean. And that meaning comes from associating those words with other words, words that often have emotional anchors for us. This isn't merely the spin of political consultants. It goes right to the heart of how we (and our ideas) are judged.

(From Seth Godin - his newsletter is worth subscribing to - here)

Grammar Nazis

The New Yorker carried a story last week about a translator in Brussels who is dismayed at the way English is being used in EU publications. The article termed him “a protectionist in a world of linguistic free trade”. He nonetheless acknowledged the temptation of using “an incorrect form when that form is more widely comprehended”.

I like these phrases. They are a vivid way to describe an attitude that is common and that I understand. It’s mistaken, even so.

Likening linguistic purism in English to trade protectionism is an interesting metaphor but there’s an economic analogy I’ve just made up that I consider more accurate. It’s the gold standard. This is a monetary system tied to the value of gold. Under a gold standard, such as Britain possessed till 1931, the currency is freely convertible into gold at a fixed price. As an economic principle, it’s a terrible idea but some people find appealing the notion that paper money should be backed by something with tangible value.

Similarly, many people believe that linguistic usage should accord with an external standard of correct English. This is the premise of the translator in The New Yorker. Though he’s prepared to make pragmatic concessions to usage, he regrets that in repeating a construction that is widely understood he may thereby be using an “incorrect form”.

My approach to language is different. It’s possible, of course, to make mistakes in grammar or orthography but it’s not possible for general usage to be wrong. The only evidence we have of what makes up the English language is how people write and speak it. If an “incorrect form” is more widely understood than an alternative construction, it isn’t incorrect. It’s what the language is.

Amateur grammarians who insist otherwise are a menace. Among them, there is no greater irrationalist than N. M Gwynne, author of the recent bestseller Gwynne’s Grammar: The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English. In this ineffably silly book, Gwynne insists (emphasis in original): “The rules always have a logic underpinning them.”

In my experience, people who loudly assert a correspondence of grammar with logic usually lack training in either field. What drives them is instead a superstition that English must fit certain Latin syntactical patterns. These aren’t rules of logic at all: they’re just the way Latin turned out.

Take the rule of what’s called the nominative predicate used with the verb “to be”. Under this rule, you’re making a grammatical mistake if, on arriving home, you yell: “Darling, it’s me!” The verb “to be” is known as a copula, which links the subject with a predicate. According to the rule, the case of the predicate after a linking verb should be in the same case as the subject, so you should say: “Darling, it’s I!”

This purported rule is ignored by almost all native English speakers. It makes no sense, therefore, to condemn “it’s me” as incorrect. It makes no sense either to declare it illogical. The rule isn’t a law of logic. It isn’t even a convention of English, as you and I don’t observe it. French doesn’t have it (“c’est moi”) and there’s no reason for English to have it either.

Multicultural London English

A NEW language can be heard on night buses, street corners and at school gates in east London and is now so widespread that it threatens to drive Cockney from its traditional home, according to scientists.

For eight years linguistic researchers have been tracking the development of new patterns of speech in multicultural areas including London, Birmingham and Manchester. It was originally nicknamed “Jafaican” because the language used was presumed to be a fake version of the Caribbean dialect. But scientists now believe it is a new hybrid that combines slang with a different pronunciation — just as Cockney does.

The scientists, who are led by Paul Kerswill, professor of socio-linguistics at York University, believe that what they call Multicultural London English (MLE) is a dialect combining elements of West Indian, South Asian, Cockney and Estuary English. “That’s an important point,” Kerswill said.

“There are two things going on: youth slang, which a lot of people use. But there are [also] core users of MLE and to them it is a dialect and an accent. It doesn’t have to have slang in it. It’s a new kind of Cockney in a way.”

The work of UK rap artists, such as Dizzee Rascal, who are heavily influenced by black music from America, have helped to spread the influence of the dialect.

Idris Elba, the actor, who was born in Hackney, east London, also boosted the use of slang and street dialogue with his portrayal of the Baltimore gangster Stringer Bell in the television drama, The Wire.

Much of the slang of the new dialect is Afro-American or Jamaican in origin, such as “blud”, “blad” or “blood” to mean friend; “bare” to mean very; “sick” meaning good and “ends” meaning neighbourhood. But the pronunciation does not have the same origins.

A longer “ah” sound takes the place of “i” so that “like” is pronounced “lahke” — which has no equivalent in Jamaica. “It is an extension of just using the slang,” said Kerswill.

“All of these features have arisen out of the huge mix of languages and accents heard in some parts of London. This means they are home-grown.

“It’s the slang that gives it a Caribbean or American feel and its use in British hip-hop adds to this impression, too.”

Londoners traditionally drop their aitches — for example ’orse instead of horse — but in MLE the aitch is never dropped. Not all traces of traditional Cockney have been lost. The habit of using a glottal stop between vowels, as in “wa’er” or “le’er” for “water” and “letter”, is retained, as is the use of f and v for “th”, as in “fink” and “muvver”.

Kerswill said: “A lot of the core speakers are in the East End of London, where they have low opportunities, and so one of the mechanisms when people find themselves unable to make progress in life or [are] discriminated against is to speak differently, to use that as an exclusionary strategy.”

The exclusion comes not just from the slang and the pronunciation but also from the rhythm of speech.

English is usually spoken with a stress-timed rhythm, where syllables are stressed at regular intervals of time. Speakers of MLE use a syllable-timed rhythm where each syllable is given equal stress.

Young people tend to adopt the dialect during their secondary school years and it develops particularly in areas where more than 50% of pupils have English as a second language.

In Hackney the MLE dialect has input from Creole influences, from the former colonial English of Pakistan and Nigeria, from Cockney and from television.

The nature of the dialect and the difficulties some users have in switching to standard English have raised concern about their ability to find jobs.

Caroline Goyder, a public speaking coach, told The Economist magazine last week that she sees a growing number of school leavers who fear they are incomprehensible in job interviews.

The Harris Academy in Norwood, south London, banned its pupils last month from using certain slang words that form part of MLE. The action was backed by David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham.

Kerswill, however, believes young people can “code switch between more strong versions of MLE and standard English”.

Can he speak to young people in MLE? “I don’t speak to youngsters very much,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t know how to speak to them.”

Don’t frarp in your gruds

LINGUISTS have uncovered new forms of slang born of family banter.

Researchers found hundreds of newly invented words — including 57 for a television remote control — as slang blossoms among all generations and social groups.

While all languages evolve over time, experts say English is changing more rapidly because of its global prevalence and liberal immigration policies that have exposed it to foreign influences.

Tony Thorne of King’s College London, author of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, said: “Once associated with enclosed communities such as the prison, the army barracks, the factory floor and the older public schools, more recently slang has escaped its boundaries and is running wild.”

In the latest edition of the dictionary Thorne has included a new category of informal speech used by families that was originally identified by researchers at Winchester University and called “kitchen-table lingo”.

While slang is often used by young people as a way of excluding adults, this form of subversive linguistic informality is born of collaboration between the generations.

The words are often used to inject a note of silliness into the domestic routine with names such as “blabber”, “zapper” “melly” and “dawicki”, which are all used for the remote control.

Families have also invented words for everyday items or situations. These include “grooglums”, the bits of food left in the sink after washing up, “slabby-gangaroot”, the dried ketchup left around the mouth of the bottle, and “trunklements”, the personal possessions of a grandparent.

Other examples include “splosh”, “chupley” or “blish” for a cup of tea, “gruds” for underpants and “frarping” for the act of scratching one’s backside.

Bill Lucas, professor of learning and a trustee of the English Project at Winchester University, which catalogued the family slang words, said: “A lot of these words are inspired by the sound or the look of a thing, or are driven by an emotional response to that being described.”

Most slang still comes from the fast-moving linguistic innovation of young people, with many words emanating from the street jargon of the Caribbean. Examples include “choong” and “peng”, meaning attractive, and “blud” for friend.

The word “merk” originates from American street gangs where it is used as a verb to describe murder but it has evolved to mean “to humiliate” among west London teenagers.

Other words and phrases used by teenagers, such as “totes devz” and “amazeballs”, feature in the new dictionary as do “nim-nim-nim”, describing boring adult conversation, and “meh”, a verbal shrug of indifference.

Internet-savvy mothers have also emerged as slang artists with words such as “boyf” for boyfriend, “hubz” for husband and “soz” for sorry now in common use.

Texters are using abbreviations such as “YOLO” (you only live once), “LMAO” (laughing my ass off) and “CBA” (can’t be arsed).

Teenagers are also adopting old-fashioned words picked up from grandparents as “gran slang”. Thorne said he found teenagers using words such as “reek”, “trek”, “luka” (from lucre), “galavanting” and “rapscallion” as new slang.

Some say slang undermines language, lowers educational standards and damages the career prospects of young people. Jean Gross, who has advised the government on children’s speech, said teenagers were becoming unemployable because of their limited vocabulary.

In 2012 Sheffield Springs Academy in South Yorkshire banned students from using slang on school premises and promoted the use of standard English in a drive to improve their employment chances.Other schools have pursued similar policies.

Thorne, however, points to the inventiveness involved in creating slang and says studies have shown that those who use slang are often more literate.

The poet Benjamin Zephaniah described slang as a positive force. “I see slang like martial arts,” he said. “So long as you have strong foundations, you are free to improvise.”

Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University, who has written about the evolution of language, said: “There is nothing inherently inferior about slang but it doesn”t cross boundaries very well.

“So if you want to get on then you have to behave like the majority group or those in power who are setting and marking the exams or providing the employment.”

Borrowed Words

Welsh and Cornish have had so little impact on the English language that they are less influential than Hawaiian, Turkish and Icelandic, a senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary has discovered.

Philip Durkin, deputy editor of the dictionary and author of Borrowed Words, found that Welsh is 30th in the chart of languages that have lent words to English, and Cornish is 45th.

Cornish, which has given about 40 words to English, is ranked behind Swahili, Zulu and Occitan, a French relative of Catalan. Scottish Gaelic, ranked 28th, has lent not far over 100 words.

Dr Durkin believes that the lack of influence of Celtic languages is probably because of snobbery among the Anglo-Saxon invaders, who arrived to find a native population that had invented almost nothing for which they did not already have a word.

Some of the few words in English with Welsh roots are gull (seabird) and penguin, which comes from pen gwyn (white head), which the Welsh may have used for the Great Auk. Other words from Welsh include coracle (small round boat), corgi (breed of dog) and possibly baby.

From Cornish we have wrasse (a type of fish), oggy (Cornish pasty) and fogou (a house dug into the earth). “It shows how important questions of prestige are, and how little the Anglo-Saxons felt the need for Celtish words for naming things,” Dr Durkin said.

The Anglo-Saxons were much haughtier about borrowing words from Celtic languages than the French, who not only took more words but ones that are used more commonly. They also gave more respect to Viking invaders, Dr Durkin said. “The number of Scandinavian words that are in the English language is not high, but they are used much more frequently. For example they, get, give, leg and sky all come from Scandinavia.

“That reflects the fact that Viking invaders were at least on level terms with [the Anglo-Saxons]. It probably helped that the language that the early Scandinavians used was structurally very similar.”

One reason why Celtic words struggled to gain influence may have been the economic collapse that took place after the Roman occupation. “Towns pretty much collapsed entirely by the time the Anglo-Saxons came along,” Dr Durkin said.

By far the biggest sources of loan-words are Latin, which has given English about 40,000 words, and French, which has given more than 20,000. Hawaiian is responsible for more than 80 words, including aloha (a form of greeting), hula (a type of dance that gave rise to the hula hoop) and ukulele (a four-stringed instrument).

Scrabble Dictionary

The word blog was coined in the spring of 1999 by Peter Merholz. “I've decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as wee’-blog. Or ‘blog’ for short,” he wrote. The declaration was noticed by tech writer Keith Dawson, who added an entry for blog in his online newsletter Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. “I like that it's roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting,” Merholz told Dawson. “These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”

A few months later, the Web-based writing application Blogger was released. As use of Blogger and similar tools spread, blog crept into public dialogue. Lexicographers began amassing citations from media and popular culture. Blog was Merriam-Webster Inc.’s Word of the Year for 2004 and it was added to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition in 2005, as a noun. The six-year span from coinage to inclusion was one of the fastest for the Collegiate. “In the past, it was measured in decades,” Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski says.

Sokolowski and his colleagues are now presiding over a much more rapid coronation of a word: a single addition to the company’s Official Scrabble Players Dictionary that will be picked by the public over the next month. The campaign is being conducted along with Hasbro Inc., which owns Scrabble, and the North American Scrabble Players Association (of which I am a member). Through March 28, people can nominate words for inclusion in the OSPD on a Hasbro page on Facebook. The submissions will be whittled to 16 finalists, which will then face off in a March Madness-style bracket. The winner, to be announced April 10, will be included in an update of the Scrabble dictionary to be published in August.

So what does this little game of crowdsourced lexicography signify? Is it a relatively harmless publicity stunt aimed at goosing sales of a dictionary and a game, and of increasing awareness of the world of competitive Scrabble? Is it a fun and progressive way of recognizing the changing nature of language and usage in the modern world? Or is it a slippery-slope desecration of the sober and important business of lexicography? It’s all of those things.

First, some background. There’s an assumption that the words in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary are a collection of letter strings invented by the players themselves. They’re not. The OSPD was first published in 1978 and included words two through eight letters long found in any of five standard college dictionaries in print at the time: Merriam-Webster, Webster’s, Funk & Wagnalls, American Heritage, and Random House. The OSPD was updated in 1991, 1996, and 2005. Only Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary was used for the 1991 and 1996 updates, while three additional dictionaries were included in the most recent. The new, fifth edition of the OSPD will add words from post-2005 revisions of the Collegiate and two new sources, the Oxford College Dictionary (2nd edition, 2007) and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition, 2005).

The 2005 OSPD update added a total of around 4,000 two- through eight-letter words. The 2014 update will add around 5,000. Even more words will be playable in competitive Scrabble because the game is governed by a separate list that includes offensive terms plus nine- to 15-letter words. Including plurals and inflections, that source, the Official Tournament and Club Word List, is expected to grow by as many as 19,000 words, swelling the total number of playable words in Scrabble in North America to nearly 200,000.

Compiling those words took thousands of hours of work by a committee of Scrabble players who, scouring the source dictionaries page by page, recorded words not in the current lexicon. Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers are editing the list now. The 2005 update included two game-changers: QI (a Chinese life force) and ZA (slang for pizza). This time around, Scrabble will gain four new two-letter words: DA (a father), GI (a karate uniform), PO (a chamber pot), and TE (a note on the musical scale), plus lots of other neologisms, tech words, and slang. (Scrabble players write their words in uppercase.)

Every one of the new words went through a long vetting process. Merriam-Webster’s Sokolowski says words need to meet three criteria before gaining official imprimatur: widespread use, increasing use over time, and an easily discernible definition. Lexicographers take an annual census of words, noting their rising or falling usage. There’s a cautious patience to the process, which is why the addition of words to dictionaries lags their use in culture. “You don’t want to enter a word that ultimately will fall from use,” Sokolowski told me. “We want to see words that are going to have staying power.”

The public is great at coining and popularizing words. But it’s not necessarily good at predicting which ones will stand the test of time. As Sokolowski notes, adding a word “does confer a kind of status” and, as quaint as this might seem in a world of diverse online word look-ups, lexicographers still take seriously the idea that dictionaries should reflect culture over time, which is why they’re particular about what gets in and what doesn’t. Words can be faddish, and not all fads deserve memorializing between the pages. So even though there are citations for twerk dating to the early 1990s, the word might wind up, Sokolowski says, like twist, the dance from the 1950s—a momentary trend.

And that’s the risk with Hasbro’s new-word contest. “Scrabble makers invite players to stick some bullshit word in the dictionary,” the Onion’s A.V. Club headlined. Voters could elect a word - possibly twerk - that might never reach the magic threshold lexicographers desire. It could wind up playable forever in Scrabble but not findable in any of its dictionary sources, a collection of scarlet letters that at once besmirch the art of lexicography and make a mockery of the process by which words enter the game.

Scrabble players are divided. One the one hand, they understand that Hasbro is a company that wants to generate publicity for its brand and sell more boards and apps. An occasional descent into cheesy marketing is consistent with most corporate retail values, and it’s certainly not foreign to Scrabble. Plus, while grounded in lexicography, the Scrabble word list contains plenty of weird-looking letter strings. “Obviously they are linked to the language, but so few of the words that the top players routinely use are words that normal people use in normal conversation that they might as well be random words,” a player named Winter wrote in a lively discussion on Facebook. “So I would add CROMULENT and EMBIGGEN in a FLIVJART.”

On the other hand, competitive Scrabble players have long viewed the game as less like Monopoly and more like chess. Letting the public pick a new word is akin to letting it pick a new Monopoly token, a cheap gesture that detracts from the seriousness of the game. What next? Hyphens and apostrophes? And while the Scrabble word list is by no means sacrosanct, at least it’s determined by an objective process, one that’s being subverted here. “My ‘values’ on something like this involve establishing logically defensible baseline principles and then consistently applying those principles, not opening things up to the masses indiscriminately for (what looks a lot like) a publicity stunt,” my friend Dan Wachtell wrote on Facebook. “Aren't we the ones who value the integrity of the dictionary?”

But Scrabble organizers say that if a word contest helps move players away from their Words With Friends app and into Scrabble clubs and tournaments, fantastic. And, as one official told me, it’s only one word. Competitive players are posting on Facebook words they’ve wanted to see in the dictionary, like injera, an Ethiopian bread, ribeye, nucleic, seedings, and ch (an archaic English dialect form of I playable outside of North America, where the game is owned by Mattel). The lay public is suggesting lots of Urban Dictionary entries and leetspeak, like dingledorf, emotypo, and pwn. It’s offering words already acceptable in Scrabble, like APP, WAZOO, BISCUITY, GUESSTIMATE, and EVITE (which means to avoid, accent on the second syllable); words that have been added to the Collegiate since the last OSPD update, including ACAI, BROMANCE, CHILLAX, and GOOGLE; and words that I’m guessing will be in this year’s Collegiate update and therefore excluded from the contest, like selfie and hashtag.

Safeguarding against quone or kwyjibo winning what amounts to an online popularity contest are Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers. The 16 words chosen for the final tournament have to be playable under the rules of Scrabble, so forget about OK and TV (abbreviations) or Zamboni (proper noun).* They also have to meet Merriam-Webster’s internal standards, with plenty of existing citations. That means the finalists are likely to be on their way to inclusion in the Collegiate dictionary someday. “We’re looking for real words here,” Sokolowski says.

I read through all of the entries to date. Once you cull the ineligible words and the nonsense, the candidate pool is a lot smaller than you might think. Here’s a possible Sweet 16: bestie, blondie, derp, ew, internet, janky, min, ohmigod, onesie, slumdog, spork, squee, twerk, ur, whassup/whazzup, zen.

If you want the new word to be both lexicographically defensible and highly useful in Scrabble, vote for ew or zen. The latter has until now been excluded as a proper noun, but Sokolowski says there are plenty of lowercase citations. “It’s on the shortest of the short lists,” he says. But he’s even more excited about ew, for which citations go back to the 1970s. “It’s absolutely valid. It’s an interjection with a real meaning. It’s used in lots of sources. It’s a great example of the kind of word that we watch closely for entry.”

As a bonus, if ew wins, Sokolowski says, Scrabble is likely to get eww. And maybe euw and ewww too.

English Globish

YANG YUANQING, Lenovo’s boss, hardly spoke a word of English until he was about 40: he grew up in rural poverty and read engineering at university. But when Lenovo bought IBM’s personal-computer division in 2005 he decided to immerse himself in English: he moved his family to North Carolina, hired a language tutor and - the ultimate sacrifice - spent hours watching cable-TV news. This week he was in São Paulo, Brazil, for a board meeting and an earnings call: he conducted all his business in English except for a briefing for the Chinese press.

Lenovo is one of a growing number of multinationals from the non-Anglophone world that have made English their official language. The fashion began in places with small populations but global ambitions such as Singapore (which retained English as its lingua franca when it left the British empire in 1963), the Nordic countries and Switzerland. Goran Lindahl, a former boss of ABB, a Swiss-Swedish engineering giant, once described its official language as “poor English”. The practice spread to the big European countries: numerous German and French multinationals now use English in board meetings and official documents.

Audi may use a German phrase - Vorsprung durch Technik, or progress through engineering in its advertisements, but it is impossible to progress through its management ranks without good English. When Christoph Franz became boss of Lufthansa in 2011 he made English its official language even though all but a handful of the airline’s 50 most senior managers were German.

The Académie française may be prickly about the advance of English. But there is no real alternative as a global business language. The most plausible contender, Mandarin Chinese, is one of the world’s most difficult to master, and least computer-friendly. It is not even universal in China: more than 400m people there do not speak it.

Corporate English is now invading more difficult territory, such as Japan. Rakuten, a cross between Amazon and eBay, and Fast Retailing, which operates the Uniqlo fashion chain, were among the first to switch. Now they are being joined by old-economy companies such as Honda, a carmaker, and Bridgestone, a tyremaker. Chinese firms are proving harder to crack: they have a huge internal market and are struggling to recruit competent managers of any description, let alone English-speakers. But some are following Lenovo’s lead. Huawei has introduced English as a second language and encourages high-flyers to become fluent. Around 300m Chinese are taking English lessons.

There are some obvious reasons why multinational companies want a lingua franca. Adopting English makes it easier to recruit global stars (including board members), reach global markets, assemble global production teams and integrate foreign acquisitions. Such steps are especially important to companies in Japan, where the population is shrinking.

There are less obvious reasons too. Rakuten’s boss, Hiroshi Mikitani, argues that English promotes free thinking because it is free from the status distinctions which characterise Japanese and other Asian languages. Antonella Mei-Pochtler of the Boston Consulting Group notes that German firms get through their business much faster in English than in laborious German. English can provide a neutral language in a merger: when Germany’s Hoechst and France’s Rhône-Poulenc combined in 1999 to create Aventis, they decided it would be run in English, in part to avoid choosing between their respective languages.

Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School says that “Englishnisation”, a word she borrows from Mr Mikitani, can stir up a hornet’s nest of emotions. Slow learners lose their self-confidence, worry about their job security, clam up in meetings or join a guerrilla resistance that conspires in its native language. Cliques of the fluent and the non-fluent can develop. So can lawsuits: in 2004 workers at a French subsidiary of GE took it to court for requiring them to read internal documents in English; the firm received a hefty fine. In all, a policy designed to bring employees together can all too easily have the opposite effect.

Ms Neeley argues that companies must think carefully about implementing a policy that touches on so many emotions. Senior managers should explain to employees why switching to English is so important, provide them with classes and conversation groups, and offer them incentives to improve their fluency, such as foreign postings. Those who are already proficient in English should speak more slowly and refrain from dominating conversations. And managers must act as referees and enforcers, resolving conflicts and discouraging staff from reverting to their native tongues. Mr Mikitani, who was a fluent English speaker himself, at first told his employees to pay for their own lessons and gave them two years to become fluent, on pain of demotion or even dismissal. He later realised that he had been too harsh, and started providing lessons on company time.

Nuance and emotion, or waffle?

Intergovernmental bodies like the European Union, which employs a babbling army of translators costing $1.5 billion a year, are obliged to pretend that there is no predominant global tongue. But businesses worldwide are facing up to the reality that English is the language on which the sun never sets. Still, Englishnisation is not easy, even if handled well: the most proficient speakers can still struggle to express nuance and emotion in a foreign tongue. For this reason, native English speakers often assume that the spread of their language in global corporate life confers an automatic advantage on them. In fact it can easily encourage them to rest on their laurels. Too many of them (especially Englishmen, your columnist keeps being told) risk mistaking their fluency in meetings for actual accomplishments.

Irony

Irony. The term people love to use... incorrectly. On TV, in literature, between friends — people misapply and misuse the word a million times a day. Even the pop anthem dedicated to the trope gets it wrong (or does it?). But you oughta know all this by now.

The fight over what is "ironic" and what isn't can be traced all the way back to Biblical times when Eve said to Adam, "The irony is that I don't even like apples." Adam took exception, and thus began the greatest of language debates.

More recently, this debate took hold of our entire office, pitting friend against friend, coworker against coworker, intern against another company's intern because we only have one intern. To save the company, we decided to get to the bottom of this once and for all with an illustrated guide to the difference between irony and mere coincidence.*

*Note to the dogged usage experts: We're only concerned with the definition of Situational Irony here — the most confusing of all the different kinds. We know that Rhetorical, Dramatic and Cosmic Irony exist and we trust that you can google them.

Depends on whether there are repairmen in there or not. Illustration: Lindsay Mound

The main point to remember about Situational Irony is that it is a direct result of an action intended to produce the opposite effect. An easy way to distinguish between irony and unlucky coincidence is to check if there's an action or intention involved.

An elevator company's out-of-order elevator may be a bummer, but it's not strictly ironic. It's just an unfortunate and surprising juxtaposition of facts. Of course, if an elevator repairman broke the machine while performing preventative safety measures, we'd make the leap from coincidence to full-blown irony.

Illustration: Lindsay Mound

Meg felt lonely, so she organized a support group to help her feel better. When no one came, Meg felt even more alone than she did before. (Don't worry Meg, there are restaurants made just for you.) Here's a great example of Situational Irony. Meg took an action that was supposed to alleviate her loneliness, and the result was the exact opposite of what she intended. Sad, but truly ironic.

Got it? Good. That's all for the usage lessons for today. And don't worry, we won't lecture you about how you misuse the word 'literal.' We'd rather leave you with this pun instead.

The Future of English

LAST week’s column looked at how machine translation (MT) has—and has not—improved. Free services like Bing and Google Translate can give quick-and-dirty, mostly-correct translations for tourists and the curious most of the time. For professional uses, machine-translated material must be post-edited for both accuracy and style. With restricted subject matter, MT systems can be trained to choose the best translations for words with multiple meanings. This is why (for example) the European Commission uses MT extensively. The legalistic language of the European Union may be impenetrable to outsiders, but the narrow range of bureaucratic language makes translating it much easier.

All this is getting better as computers get faster, storage cheaper and software smarter. But MT has improved only gradually, not in the revolutionary leaps and bounds seen in other fields. It is an example of the truism that machines find it easy to do things humans find hard (vast maths problems), and yet find it hard to do things humans find easy (language, natural movement).

No one knows how MT will look in 25 years. But that doesn’t stop us from guessing. At the TAUS conference on MT in Dublin last week, Johnson was invited to debate with Nicholas Ostler on the lingua franca of the future. Mr Ostler is a historian of the long sweep of languages’ lives. His most recent book, “The Last Lingua Franca” (reviewed here), laid out the arguments he presented in Dublin. English is actually shrinking, in percentage terms, as a mother tongue. (Other languages’ speakers are having more babies.) And foreign languages associated with dominating groups (first colonial Britain and then hyperpower America, in this case) can stir resentment, so it is not guaranteed that people in the future will always want to learn English.

Meanwhile, Mr Ostler has high hopes for MT. All of that increased computing power should mean that, for the vast majority of the world’s people, the quick-and-dirty translations available from the likes of Google can only get better. In the long run, MT will be a better option for most people than slaving over learning English for years. Most people, after all, spend most of their lives working and living in their native language.

Johnson presented the case for English (a predictive case, not a hoped-for one): English has a reach and penetration unlike any language in history. It is now spoken by twice as many non-natives as natives, increasingly shedding its association with America and Britain. (When a Swede negotiates with a Brazilian taxi driver, or a Hungarian attends a conference in Poland, they are not thinking of American foreign policy when they pragmatically use English.) Schools are introducing English at earlier and earlier levels: Denmark is beginning English in first grade, and Zurich has chosen to teach pupils English before French, the second-biggest language of Switzerland. As much as it may chagrin French-speakers, such decisions are entirely practical and can be expected in ever greater numbers.

The effect of this, Johnson predicts, is that the lock-in English now enjoys will only get stronger. Crucially, English will begin to be taken for granted. Every child will one day get it in school (as every child in China now does). They will hear so much English in early years that acquisition of a decent fluency will be easier and easier. Technology isn’t only helping machine translation. It is giving children around the world television, music and movies in English.

Ambitious families will ensure that their kids see as much as possible, as early as possible, so they speak English not just competently, but fluently and comfortably. And those kids will increasingly choose English themselves. It opens up social networks; there’s a lot more on Twitter if you speak English. English even opens up games: youngsters round the world learn English to chat while they play online games like Minecraft and Worlds of Warcraft. This early and frequent exposure to English will mean the effort to learn, which Mr Ostler describes, begins to seem a lot less wearisome. It is simply part of the environment, something that billions of children will know a decent bit of before they even begin their first class. And as they progress up the grades, incentives will kick in, as pupils hear again and again how many doors English will unlock for them. Add to that an ever-strengthening network effect: the more people who speak English, the more useful it is to speak English. It is hard to see what will stop this momentum in the next few decades.

Decimate and Refute

We’ve reported this week on the resignation of Peter Oborne, the political commentator, from The Daily Telegraph. Oborne claimed that the newspaper had allowed its commercial interests to interfere with its editorial coverage. My interest, for this column, is in a couple of points of linguistic usage.

In his letter, Oborne complained that the Telegraph’s foreign desk “has been decimated”. In its reply, the newspaper said that it maintained a strict division between its editorial and its advertising departments, and that “we utterly refute any allegation to the contrary”.

Pedants had sport with these comments. They insist that decimate and refute are verbs with precise meanings and that they had been misused by Oborne and his former employer. These complaints about usage are very common. In both cases, I discount them.

Let’s take decimate first. Simon Heffer, in his book Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write … and Why it Matters, laments that it’s a “word that people insist on wrenching from its correct etymology”. Noting its origin in the practice in Roman legions of killing every tenth man to quell rebelliousness, Heffer says: “Its correct sense in English, therefore, is the reduction of the strength of a body of people by ten per cent. It does not mean more or less than that…”

Oborne’s complaint was that the Telegraph foreign desk had been wantonly cut. On Heffer’s reading, that’s a solecism. Heffer is wrong. How do I know? Because I’ve looked at the evidence of usage. The supposedly “correct” definition of decimate has been used only rarely in English since the word entered the language in the 17th century. Even then, it’s been confined mainly to historical contexts: the Roman legions and also the Earl of Essex’s military campaign in Ireland. The wider rhetorical sense used by Oborne (to destroy or reduce a large proportion of something) has a weight of history behind it. Its first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1663 and writers have used it that way ever since.

As Oborne is an enthusiast for the sport, I offer him this reference from PG Wodehouse’s cricketing novel Mike and Psmith: “But Mr. Downing saw in his attack [of illness] the beginnings of some deadly scourge which would sweep through and decimate the house.” And here is George Bernard Shaw in his preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma: “Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.” You can go ahead and use decimate in the same way. There was nothing wrong with Oborne’s usage.

As for refute, pedants insist that this can only mean prove wrong. Sam Leith, a former Telegraph journalist, noted on Twitter that Telegraph sub-editors would once “have corrected ‘refute’” in the newspaper’s statement. The Telegraph, he said, meant deny rather than refute.

Not so fast. Refute has two senses, not just one. It so happens that one of those senses is disputed. That doesn’t make it wrong. Almost all usage guides that I’m aware of count the deny sense a mistake. Yet, as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage rightly notes, that sense is “very common, and the contexts in which it occurs are standard”. And as I note in, ahem, my own usage guide, the historical evidence of usage is more nuanced than the sticklers suppose. The extended meaning of refute emerged well over a century ago and is always clear from the context. The Telegraph has endured much criticism this week, but I’ll defend its use of language.

Swearing

Analysis for The Times suggests that the average Briton uses at least four obscenities a day and that they have become markedly more common over a generation. Philosophers and linguists say that society is increasingly tolerant of swearwords and that at least one in every 1,700 words in spoken and written British English is an expletive.

Of the 7,000 to 20,000 words people utter every day, between four and 12 will typically be obscenities. The nation’s favourites are, in order of popularity: bloody, f***ing, s***, f***, bugger and bastard. Authors have also become more trigger-happy. According to Google Ngram Viewer, which measures the frequency of words in digitised books, the word “f***” appears once in every 170,000 published words, 23 times more often than in 1965. Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading academic linguists, said the obscenity trials that dogged books such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover would seem bafflingly out of place in the 21st century. “It’s clear that the use of taboo words has increased dramatically since the 1960s, though one doesn’t even have to look up the data, knowing about all the famous censorings and court cases — Lady Chatterley, Lenny Bruce, Henry Miller, John Lennon, et cetera — which would be moot today because the words are so common in print,” he said. Footage leaked this week from a BBC documentary appeared to show an MP swearing loudly at Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, in the Commons.

During a session of prime minister’s questions last June, a cry of what sounded very much like “sanctimonious c***” was heard from what was believed by some to be the direction of Anna Soubry, a Tory defence minister. She denies having used the words.

Swearing on TV, meanwhile, has become so commonplace as to be unremarkable, from Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen tirades to Dame Helen Mirren’s assertion at an awards ceremony last year that “40 is good, 50 is great, 60 is fab and 70 is f***ing awesome”. The statistics were produced by Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of English at the University of Nottingham, from the Cambridge English Corpus, a databaseb of books, sound recordings and transcripts held by Cambridgeb University Press. “The biggest change of all, in recent decades, has of course been the frequency of the taboo words in the film and broadcast media,” he said. “Almost anything goes: the C-word occurred in a recent episode of Wolf Hall.”

Rebecca Roache, a philosophy lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London, said: “Being offended by swearing is a bit like being offended by homosexuality. People are free to be offended by what they like, but their offence should not be translated to restrictions of the liberty of others.”

Verbing of Nouns

Here’s a passage from an article in the London Evening Standard this week: “Channel 4’s Michael Crick tweeted: ‘A confession. I have been using the words ‘empty chair’ as a verb. This is awful. I will try to stop doing so’. Grammar expert and author of Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide To English Usage Oliver Kamm reassured Crick, tweeting: ‘Verbing of nouns & noun-phrases is constantly happening in English & is totally legitimate.’ ”

Crick is far from alone among political journalists in using empty chair as a verb. It’s used in the context of the planned television debates in the general election. If the prime minister declines to take part, the broadcasters may depict him onscreen with an empty chair. Hence, they will empty chair him. This usage is not awful, as Crick maintains. Using nouns as verbs has a long history in the language; I guarantee that it’s a practice you adopt too, even if you’ve never used empty chair as a verb.

Because English is a largely uninflected language, it’s easy to take a noun and “verbify” it. Linguists refer to these as denominal verbs. In his book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker notes that pedants (“language mavens”, as he ironically terms them) have objected through the ages to this practice, and gives several examples of verbified nouns that have been denounced at one time or another in the past century: to caveat, to nuance, to dialogue, to parent, to input, to access, to showcase, to intrigue, to impact, to host, to chair, to progress, to contact.

Some of these denominal verbs sound awkward but others are in everyday use: to contact, for example, is a very useful verb, given the many ways in which technology allows us to communicate. Pinker estimates that around a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns. How about button, sleep, and dream, all of which are both nouns and verbs?

Why, then, do some people have problems with using nouns as verbs? I suspect that it’s due to the mere novelty of a neologism. Yet that’s not a good reason for decrying a particular usage. Moreover, many denominal verbs are in fact much older than their critics suppose. Pedants often decry the use of loan as a verb and mutter darkly about the incursions of “Americanisms” into the language. Yet loan has been used as verb in English for at least 800 years. Style guides used to furiously object to host as a verb, yet that too has a long history in English (“Such was that Hag, unmeet to host such guests,” wrote Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queen more than 400 years ago).

A further objection is made by Simon Heffer, who maintains in his book Strictly English that “rather than causing the language to expand, such terms will only shunt perfectly serviceable ones out of the way and into desuetude”. I don’t take this seriously. English speakers (not just Times readers but all users of the language) are well able to keep in their heads the separate categories of noun, verb, denominal verb and a range of synonyms or near-equivalents.

If you don’t like a verbified noun, as Crick dislikes empty chair, then there’s no obligation for you to use it. There’s nothing wrong with such terms, though, and they are succinct and immediately comprehensible. I must at least give Heffer credit for consistency: he maintains that “can I access your website?” is wrong, because access is a noun and not a verb. You will be on safe linguistic ground if you ignore his advice.

Your Personal Taste Doesn't Matter

To dislike a word is not the same as saying it is wrong or doesn’t exist.

“Is impactful a real word?” This was a question put to me in an interview this week by Stuart Varney, a Fox Business News presenter, who was disturbed that one of his colleagues had employed this adjective. I was able to assure him that, despite his scepticism, impactful is indeed a real word.

We can always tell whether a word exists in English by consulting the lexicographical records of the language. That doesn’t mean you have to use it. I doubt that I’ve ever written impactful before today and I’m unlikely to write it in future, in The Times or anywhere else. In that respect, I share Mr Varney’s stylistic preference.

Yet saying you dislike this word on aesthetic grounds is not at all the same as saying that a word is wrong or doesn’t exist. In a living language, new words are continually being coined. It isn’t up to the compilers of dictionaries whether they accept something as a word. If it’s in general use, it’s a word, and the dictionaries record this fact.

In fact impactful is not a new word but it is quite a recent one. There are one or two examples of its use from newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s but it became much more common in the 1970s. Anne Curzan, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, has written about it. She doesn’t especially like the word on aesthetic grounds and notes that it isn’t a precise adjective (is it an impact for good or ill?); yet neither of these considerations is relevant to whether impactful is a real word. Professor Curzan is a member of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary; she has no doubt that, if asked about impactful in a future survey, she will rule it as being acceptable even in formal written usage.

That’s a wise judgment. I’d do the same if I were in her position. And I’d defend my position with one or two other arguments.

First, people who object to impactful as an adjective often mistakenly assume that it’s just a piece of business jargon. In fact, it’s used a lot more widely (its disputed use on the Fox programme was in the context of the weather) and impact has been widely employed as both a verb and a noun for centuries. It may seem surprising but impact entered the language as a verb before it did so as a noun: its earliest recorded use as a verb is from 1601, according to The Oxford English Dictionary.

Second, it’s not a strong argument against a word that it’s imprecise. One of my sparring partners in the language debate, John Humphrys, has written: “The more clearly we express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity.” And he assumes this is self-evidently a linguistic gain. Yet why should it be? Why should I not seek a word that applies to a range of circumstances or has a range of meanings?

The verb to contact, once scorned by pedants for its imprecision, is useful precisely because it leaves open the means by which contact is made. Similarly, when I tell my colleagues that I’m just going out to the bank, they know I’m attending to my paltry savings rather than taking a stroll beside the adjoining river, even though the noun bank has alternative meanings. The English language, as ever, is richer than its declared guardians allow for.

Fowlers

Achingly trendy hipsters, nubile starlets and the mispronunciation of the letter Hare just some of the aberrations ridiculed in the latest edition of an influential guide to language.

Readers fretful about crumbling standards will be relieved, and possibly amused, that the compiler of the latest edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage has admitted to being overcome by grumpiness at some of the 250 new entries.

Jeremy Butterfield said that he was unable to hide his disdain while writing entries such as “awesome”, “challenging” and “issue” — all of which are classified as clichés. So annoyed was he by the use of “like” as verbal punctuation that he suggested violence may be an appropriate response.

The entry notes that “many people below the age of, say, 25 — or rather more if they are American — seem incapable of constructing a single affirmative sentence without at least one ‘like’ in it”.

“Overuse will cause listeners outside the speaker’s immediate social circle, wider social group or age cohort to ignore the content of the message, to assume that the speaker is little short of brain-dead, or, in extreme cases, to wish they had a discreet firearm to hand,” he added.

Mr Butterfield said that his inner “grumpy old man” caused him occasionally to abandon strictly descriptive definitions, as favoured by most professional compilers, and become prescriptive, as Henry Fowler had been in his 1926 edition.

His entry for “achingly” features a jibe at “superficial and gushy” journalists who use the word to describe someone’s attempt to be hip, rather than something that causes actual pain. “That raises — at least in my literal mind — the question whether being fashionable, hip, etc causes physical discomfort for the person who is, or the journalist who wants to be.

People who use ‘nubile’ to mean sexually attractive rather than marriageable are condemned as “ancient lechers”, but the most inflammatory definition may be for dropped aitches.

Mr Butterfield wrote: “To pronounce the letter H in this way has long been considered a mark of ignorance or illiteracy, despite the fact that in certain parts of the UK that pronunciation has always been standard. It appears that in the inexorable move towards making British English more demotic, such a pronunciation is now favoured by people born in the Eighties and later and will, presumably, in time prevail, unspeakably uncouth though it may appear to older RP [received pronunciation] speakers.”

'They' is singular or plural

It is legitimate to criticise other people’s use of English. You need to make sure, however, that your criticism can be backed up by evidence. Otherwise you’re fair game for counter-criticism.

That would have been my advice (if he’d sought it) to a gentleman called Rob Franek of The Princeton Review, an American company selling advice to students on preparation for educational tests. The company was in the news last week for issuing grammar materials criticising Taylor Swift, the singer, for supposedly mixing up pronouns in her lyrics. The line that they criticised was this: “Somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe ‘em.” In fact, they got it wrong; the line, as Swift caustically pointed out, was this: “Somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.” Here’s where Franek comes in. The hapless executive maintained, in a television interview, that even though his company had misquoted Swift, the criticism still stood. Swift had, he claimed, made a grammatical error: “If we look at the whole sentence, it starts off with ‘somebody’, and ‘somebody’, as you know, is a singular pronoun and if it’s singular, the rest of the sentence has to be singular.”

Oh dear. Franek’s objection is that they and them cannot be singular. In misplaced loyalty to his colleagues, he thereby showed himself up as a linguistic ignoramus. I believe that Swift refrained from pointing this out but, where language is concerned, I don’t share her forbearance.

The best case you can make for Franek’s howler is that there are plenty of sticklers who would agree with his objection to singular they and them. In his book Strictly English, Simon Heffer writes: “We have no single pronoun to cover the phrases he-or-she, him-or-her and his-or-her. An attempt has been made in the last century or so to fill this void with they, them and their. I regard that as abominable and want no part of it.” Heffer is a well-read man and I find it hard to credit that he believes singular they and them to be a recent linguistic development. The convention goes back at least as far as the Middle English of Chaucer and has been used by some of the greatest writers in English. I can cite examples from all of Jane Austen’s completed novels, for example.

My case is not only founded on the precedent of usage, however. The Princeton Review and other sticklers have simply misunderstood how English treats the pronoun they. Yes, they is plural, but it is also singular. It can be either. Or it can be neither. It may be something that linguists term a placeholder, namely a filler word (such as whatchamacallit or thingamajig) denoting someone whose identity is irrelevant or unknown. That’s precisely how Swift is using the pronoun in her lyric. There’s nothing wrong with her grammar.

If you doubt my argument, consider this sentence: Everyone returned to their seats. I’ve taken this example from Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instinct. Sticklers would maintain that this sentence is ungrammatical, because everyone is singular. Yet, as Pinker points out, the supposedly correct alternative offered by sticklers ( everyone returned to his seat) is no solution at all, for it implies that an entire audience returned to a single seat. The indefinite pronouns everyone or somebody by definition do not refer to any specific person but to a group. It is entirely grammatical to use they in this context.

Taylor Swift has shown herself to be far more adept at grammatical analysis than her pedantic critics. Good for her.

‘Linguists investigate facts; sticklers neither know nor cite them’

“He takes throughout his book the most liberal position I have ever seen in a book on writing — even insisting that ‘between you and I’ breaks no rule of grammar.” This sentence comes from a review in The Oldie magazine of my book Accidence Will Happen. The reviewer is NM Gwynne, author of the bestselling Gwynne’s Grammar, and I have to concede that his review is far more generous than I had a right to expect given what I say about him in the book.

I quote Gwynne’s sentence to indicate where public debate about language goes wrong. It’s not true, as he suggests, that there is an argument between “liberals” like me and “traditionalists” like Lynne Truss, Simon Heffer and John Humphrys. While I like to think that I’m an easy-going sort of chap, that’s not the reason for my judgment that between you and I accords with the grammar of standard English. It’s nothing to do with my temperament; it’s about evidence.

Popular guides to English usage rarely cite evidence. That’s not an oversight. Sticklers believe that “proper English” (their term, not mine) is defined by a set of rules that you can work out using logic and analogy. Heffer writes in his book Strictly English: “As a professional writer, I happen to believe that the ‘evidence’ of how I see English written by others, including professional writers, is not something by which I wish to be influenced.”

So to these authors, the evidence of how English is used is immaterial to determining what constructions are possible. That’s bizarre. Yes, grammar has rules, lots of them. And the only way to find out what they are, and thus judge what is grammatically correct in standard English, is to listen. Gwynne can insist all he likes that the English phrase per capita is “illiterate” and that it should be per caput (seriously, that’s his view) but no linguist would agree with him and no one who wishes to avoid being laughed at should follow his fantastical advice.

That is the ground of the language debate: not degrees of tolerance but facts. Linguists investigate facts; sticklers neither know nor cite them. In no other area of journalism or letters is a determination to ignore evidence permissible for people who set themselves up as authorities. It’s strange indeed.

With this in mind, let’s look at that question of the case of pronouns. Almost every usage guide says that a phrase like between you and I is ungrammatical; and almost every usage guide is wrong. I note a recent letter in The Guardian whose author may have been influenced by this dismal literature. She says that thank you for taking John and I to lunch is ungrammatical, and that you can tell this by “using the test of removing the other person”. That is rank bad reasoning (in fact, in the technical sense that pedants would approve of, it’s begging the question).

If you remove the other person from that construction ( and hence are left with thank you for taking I to lunch), you’ve altered it. Yes, a single pronoun would have to be in accusative case ( me) but John and I is not a single pronoun: it’s a coordinate phrase in object position. It’s common in English to use a nominative as final coordinate. The letter’s author accidentally admits this by concluding that the supposed grammatical rule she’s outlined “is broken time and again in both written and spoken speech”.

Exactly; and doesn’t that tell you something about the “rule”? It tells you that the rule isn’t real.

Power of Words

Homer himself could hardly have written anything more evocative. “The battlefield has never witnessed an act such as theirs” runs one line; the warrior, like “a wounded lion plunged into the battle”. According to another poem, the jihadist will “rush by like a torrential stream . . . will sweep through the land like a flood”. Elsewhere, the poetry is more graphic, and more honest: “I will fasten my explosive belt / I will shudder like a lightning bolt.”

Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, has spent four years visiting Yemen to study how jihadists are recruited to al-Qaeda (although her research could just as easily apply to Islamic State). Would-be martyrs are won over not by YouTube films of beheadings or Twitter feeds but by epic poetry. Such poetry has even played a part in recruiting impressionable westerners. Dr Kendall believes that one way of countering jihad would be to write poetry with an opposing message. “I’m not suggesting this should be written in Langley or at GCHQ,” she says. But she is suggesting that poetry could fight back against extremism. At first glance this seems absurd: what can a couplet do against a suicide vest?

For decades, poetry in the West has been a delicate, de-boned pursuit; safely trapped between the tedious pages of Faber anthologies. Even when poetry was in the mouths of angry young men, as it briefly was in the Fifties, their worst transgressions tended to be against spelling and capital letters rather than capital crimes. Modern poetry is not the sort of thing to inspire violence; TS Eliot’s Waste Land is hardly likely to make you want to kill anyone, except perhaps yourself.

But heroic violence was there, once, and is clearly there in Homer. When Achilles met an enemy on the battlefield he “rushed against him like a lion, a ravening lion that men are fain to slay”. The similarities with classical Arabic poetry are striking.

Elsewhere, he is a wounded lion while Homeric warriors fight, “like a mountain torrent, swollen by winter rain, that floods across the plain . . . so Ajax . . . stormed tumultuously over the field, slaughtering men”.

In Yemen, contemporary poetry suggests that the warrior, like the verses that inspire him, will live for ever. The revered ancient tradition in which it is written makes the modern violence respectable — even glorious. Guns are replaced by swords; motorbikes (fashionable in suicide attacks for a while) become “trusty steeds”; incompetent attacks are rewritten as victorious battles. And poetry smooths over awkward arguments. “Where logic fails,” says Dr Kendall, “poetry steps in.”

It makes you wonder a little at our veneration of glory-seeking Achilles. He too was given the choice between glorious death or long but inglorious life; he too chose death, camping outside the city of Troy for a decade to kill its inhabitants. When his fellow Greeks finally captured the city after his death, they raped and enslaved its women. Sound familiar?

Yet Achilles has long been used to put fire in the bellies of warriors. Alexander the Great revered him, sleeping beside a copy of the Iliad that had been annotated by his tutor Aristotle. When in 1915 Allied soldiers were billeted in Gallipoli, almost on the site of ancient Troy, they saw themselves as fighting a second Trojan war. They set out over the wine-dark sea with Homer in their hearts. What they found instead were some of the worst conditions of the First World War. Even then they clung to Homer. There is a famous scene in the Iliad in which Achilles, having learnt of his friend’s death stands and shouts at his enemy. A flame — a sign of divine favour and his fury — appears on his head. “Stand in the trench, Achilles,” wrote the young classical scholar Patrick Shaw-Stewart when sent to Gallipoli, “flame-capped and shout for me.” Elsewhere, he asked, “Was it so hard, Achilles / So very hard to die?” Shaw-Stewart was killed in 1917.

Many may scoff at Dr Kendall’s suggestion that poetry can be weaponised and used to any effect against the extremist killing machines of radical Islam. But then it was poetry that stopped us indulging in mindless slaughter. Classical poetry took men all too willingly to the trenches but it was poetry that taught us to mistrust “the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori”. And it was poets who taught us that men in modern warfare don’t die like lions, they die like cattle.

Can I? May I?

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago for the Wall Street Journal. It was about English usage, on the themes of my book Accidence Will Happen. I argued: “The range of legitimate variation is wider than you would imagine. Yes, you can use ‘hopefully’ as an adverb modifying an entire sentence; and you can use ‘they’ as a singular generic pronoun; and you can say ‘between you and I’. The pedants’ prohibitions on constructions like these are not supported by the evidence of general usage.”

For the published version, the editors replaced each of the three uses of can in that paragraph with may. That’s fine by me. I was glad to write the article and every newspaper has its own house style. It’s the responsibility of copy editors to ensure consistency across the newspaper. Neatly, their alteration of my own wording illustrates my contention that stylistic preference is not the same as “correct English”.

Some people would argue that my use of can for may was a confusion, and that the Journal generously saved me from public humiliation by correcting me. Samuel Johnson appears to have been the first to formally stipulate a distinction of can from may “as power from permission”. Modern sticklers do this too. Here, for example, is Bernard Lamb, a campaigner against the supposed decline of standards in English usage, in his book The Queen’s English and How to Use It (2010): “May I? requests permission. Can I? asks whether I am able to do something.”

Is this right? No, of course not. No one except the most obdurate of pedants reliably observes this purported rule. The correct answer is given by the linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum in their textbook A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (2005): “Some people insist that can is not to be used in a deontic sense [ie relating to obligation and duty] — that permission should be expressed by may instead. There is absolutely no truth to this claim about can. . . No evidence whatever supports the view that the deontic use is in some way incorrect.”

That last sentence is the reason I can say with confidence that the linguists are right and the purists are in error. It’s about evidence. That’s the stuff that linguists work with. People like Dr Lamb don’t cite evidence: they just assert and repeat things that are at best mere preferences. Their supposed rules of proper English are more often factually incorrect assertions about the language.

The evidence on the deontic use of can is voluminous. That definition is established in modern English, even though the first citation for it in the Oxford English Dictionary is as late as the 19th century. (It’s from Tennyson’s play The Falcon, in which Lady Giovanna asks: “Can I speak with the count?”) I’d be surprised if you don’t use it in speech, even if you follow Dr Lamb’s edict in writing. It’s less formal than may in the sense of permission, which is why I use it in a newspaper column. Opinion columns (as opposed to, say, obituaries or court circulars) are typically written in a fairly informal register.

Because the dialect I write in is the British variant of Standard English, I sometimes miss nuances in other varieties of the language. To check American usage, I consult Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, where I find this laconic observation: “The can/may distinction is a traditional part of the American school curriculum. The fact that the distinction is largely ignored by people once out of school is also a tradition.” Case closed.

New Scrabble Words

Dame Judi Dench’s surname has been ushered into the Scrabble lexicon as competitive players turn to street slang for more chances to get out of a tricky spot.

Dench’s name — one of 6,500 words added to the official Scrabble word list — is no longer considered a proper noun after being turned into a euphemism for “excellent” by Lethal Bizzle, the grime musician whose real name is Maxwell Ansah. So successful was Ansah at popularising the word that he turned it into a line of clothing with slogans such as “Stay dench” and “Dench till I die”.

Amateur Scrabble players may flinch at the introduction of slang words such as “bezzy” (best friend), “lolz” (laughs at someone’s misfortune) and “shizzle” (American slang for sure or s***), but those at competition level care less about rules of standard English than about how they can play the awkward letter “z”.

The Collins word list, compiled by British editors and used in competitions outside North America, features dozens of abbreviations that were outlawed under the original game rules.

Examples include “devo” (short for devolution), “obvs” (short for obviously), and “ridic” (ridiculous). Common misspellings are also considered legitimate, especially if they feature letter tiles that are hard to play. “Wuz” is now allowed despite apparently being drawn from hillbilly English. Foreign words, which were outlawed by the rules until at least the late 1960s, are also included. Cinq, French for five, is included on the English list.

Quirkier imports introduced to satisfy players’ need to play “q” and “z” tiles include “coqui” (a type of treedwelling frog), “paczki” (a Polish doughnut) and “qinzhee” (a shelter made from hollowed-out snow).

Compilers also had to rule on the spellings of expressions of surprise, anger and disgust. “Augh” and “yeesh” are recognised as noises of frustration, “blech” and “eew” are the correct spellings for disgust, “grr” is anger and “waah” is the sound of wailing.

Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins, which is a subsidiary of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, said that slang words were easier to verify than in the past. “Dictionaries have always included formal and informal English, but it used to be hard to find printed evidence of the use of slang words. Now people use slang in social media posts, tweets, blogs, comments, text messages — you name it. So there’s a host of evidence for informal varieties of English that simply didn’t exist before.”

Perhaps already today you’ve FaceTimed your bezzy. Even if you haven’t, though, it’s worth knowing the term for talking to someone online using the FaceTime application, and the diminutive for “best friend”. Though these neologisms may sound obvs ridic to a newb ( obviously ridiculous to someone previously unacquainted with them), they are among lotsa dench ( many excellent) new words added to the official Collins Scrabble list.

If you find the opportunity to use these words, you’ll score high. And if you can recall a word denoting a shelter made from hollowed-out snow (a quinzhee, as you ask) and have the letters for it, you’ll do even better, amassing no less than 29 points. No need, then, to schvitz ( sweat).

Purists, at least among non-Scrabble players, may object that these are not real words and serve no useful purpose. Yet they are and they do. They are real words because they have made the transition from invention to use, and thence to the dictionary. No one determines what is a real word apart from people who use it. If it’s used, it’s a word.

Some of the new words recorded by Collins would be appropriate only in a few contexts beyond the Scrabble board. That is because they are informal words used mainly in social media by a younger age group. There is no need to go yeesh! ( interjection expressing frustration), let alone blech! ( interjection expressing disgust), at such linguistic additions. English is always in flux and has incorporated new words throughout its history.

Perhaps the pace of change is quickening with new technologies for communication but that is no impoverishment.

Otto Jespersen, the great Danish scholar of English grammar, argued in his book Efficiency in Linguistic Change (1941) that language constantly strives to greater expressiveness. Scrabble contestants can appreciate his case.

New Words

Language is wonderfully expansive and fluid—constantly mutating and forever evolving to better represent our lives and culture—and yet frequently inadequate. There are countless concepts, feelings, and situations, not to mention emerging technologies and gadgets, that don’t have a particular word to describe them. So, as proprietary speakers of a language, we have the right to invent what currently does not exist.

“Everybody who speaks English decides together what’s a word and what’s not a word,” said the lexicographer Erin McKean in her 2014 TED Talk. “Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other.” If we all agree that a “selfie” is a photo one takes of oneself, then that’s exactly what it is (doesn't mean we have to like it!).

“You should make words because every word is a chance to express your idea and get your meaning across," added McKean. "And new words grab people’s attention.”

Truncation

Selfie (self portrait => selfie): “Let’s take a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower!”
Insta (Instagram => Insta): “My Insta is mostly selfies from France."
Simple truncation is the shortening of long words, sometimes accompanied by the addition of a diminutive. It's totally fab!

Grammaticalization

lol (pronounced phonetically): “I lolled at your YouTube video!"
gonna (from “going to”): “I’m gonna eat later.”

When invented words lose their essence of madeupedness, they're sometimes used in a way that is slightly different than originally intended. For example, the Internet abbreviation for the phrase “Laugh Out Loud” was first pronounced L-O-L (el oh el) and was used almost exclusively as a stand-alone exclamation. LOL would be its own message, indicating that the speaker was literally Laughing Out Loud. Over time, however, LOL's semantic meaning changed (as did its capitalization), shedding its implication of a vocal guffaw in favor of mild amusement. It also grammaticalized into a different part of speech: lol can now be used as a verb with a full conjugation, as in “I was lolling” or “I lolled.”

Gonna developed from “going to,” and now exists as its own word with its own rules of usage. Gonna represents intention, but, though it comes from “going to,” cannot imply movement. You can say “I’m going to the store,” but not “I’m gonna the store.” Thus gonna is used in a way that is different from its phrasal ancestor.

Neosegmentation

chocoholic: “She’s a total chocoholic; she eats like 10 Hershey bars a day!”
Bridgegate: “lol how is Chris Christie going to run for president after Bridgegate?!”

The “-holic” and “-gate” suffixes, now meaning “addicted to” and “scandal,” respectively, both developed from a part of a word that was excised and then attached to others. “-ic” was added to “alcohol” to yield the meaning “pertaining to alcohol.” Alcoholic eventually came to mean “person addicted to/dependent on alcohol.” This “-holic” suffix was then affixed to many other words with the “addicted to” meaning, as in "shopaholic." Similarly, the “-gate” in Watergate came to represent scandal, such as the fallout over politically motivated lane closures in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This process sometimes hinges on synecdoche: the entire meaning of the Watergate scandal must be imbedded in “-gate.”

Compounding

duckface: “Why do people think that doing duckface in selfies looks good?”
manspreading: “I can’t sit on the subway because that dude is manspreading :(”

In general, compounding is a mashup of two words (in the case of longshoreman, there are three!), like “mash” + “up” to make “mashup.”

Blending

brunch (breakfast + lunch): “It’s 11 am on a Sunday; let’s go get brunch!”
drunch (drunk + brunch): “It’s 11 am on a Sunday and I want to simultaneously drink and eat; let’s go get drunch!”
listicle (list + article): “I read such a great listicle on Slate about making up new words!"
Blending is the combination and mixture of two words to yield a new one. These are sometimes referred to as portmanteaus.

Backformation

edit (from the noun “editor”)
burgle (from the noun "burglary")
babysit (from the noun “babysitter”)

This is the process by which new words are formed from existing ones by chopping off affixes like -er. Most commonly, a noun is shortened to yield an action verb, like in the examples above, however adjectives are fruitful source material for backformations as well (snark from snarky).

Borrowing from other languages

ninja (Japanese)
kumquat (Chinese)
gauche (a personal favorite) (French)

Borrowed words may not technically be new, but they're new to us, and those that are transliterated into English are new to the Latin alphabet.

Functional shift

friend (noun to verb): “Hey, can you friend me?”
text (noun to verb): “I hate Facebook; why don't you just text me?”
like (verb to noun): “Look how many likes my Insta has!”

Why should a noun stay a noun? Verbify it!

Acronym

tbt (Throw Back Thursday): “I always post a baby picture as my tbt”
OOTD (Outfit of the Day): “Just posted an OOTD selfie”
lmao (Laughing My Ass Off): “omg that’s so so funny lmao”

The first letters of the words in a phrase are used to make the acronym, many of which are employed more in text-speak than spoken English. By the way, "acronym" is used colloquially for both acronyms (which can be pronounced as words, like NASA and scuba) and initialisms (which are sounded out letter by letter, like OMG and OOTD), which sends some quibblers into conniptions.

English In Italian

They have long complained about the British taking over every inch of the Tuscan hillsides but Italians may have been distracted from attacks on another front. Guardians of the Italian language, working to update and improve it since 1612, are convinced that the language of love faces its greatest ever danger.

As right-wing Italian politicians bemoan the arrival of Eritrean, Syrian and Nigerian migrants, the sober and suited experts of the Accademia della Crusca are more concerned about turning back the tide of English words destroying beautifully constructed sentences.

Words like “management” and “slot machine”, for example.

“The thing that really gets me is when Italians on TripAdvisor use the English word ‘location’ to refer to a place,” said Claudio Marazzini, head of the academy. “My first reaction is to laugh, my second thought is to act.”

Mr Marazzini and the linguistic elite have decided enough is enough. Tomorrow they will hold an emergency summit to halt an invasion they claim threatens the foundations of culture.

“We will set up a quick-response commission to go after politicians, bureaucrats and journalists who bring English words into our language, so we can hand them Italian equivalents to use instead,” he said. “It’s too late to do something about ‘car sharing’, but we need to find Italian words in a hurry for ‘quantitative easing’.”

Experts tracking newly arrived English words are struggling to keep up as Italians looking for saucy underwear head for “Il sexy shop”, mafia godfathers are called “il boss”, a football manager is “un mister”, talent shows are “i talent”, reality shows are “i reality”, a TV drama is “una fiction”, and people go online to “twittare”, while politicians gather in parliament for “question time”.

In a rearguard effort earlier this year, 70,000 Italians signed a petition demanding an end to the trend after the Italian navy chose the recruitment slogan “Be cool and join the navy” and the mayor of Rome launched a new motto, “Rome and you”, for the city. In Milan, the decision to promote the city’s Expo with the slogan ‘Very bello’ drew catcalls.

“The success of English is shocking,” wrote Gilda Rogato, an Italian academic. “When Julius Caesar landed in Britain around 2,000 years ago, English did not exist. When the Normans invaded, it became the dialect of uncouth servants, making way for French. Now it’s the language of the planet.”

Linguists single out Matteo Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, for helping the invasion after he named his labour legislation the “Jobs Act” and promoted his “Spending review”. His spoken English, however, leaves much to be desired, as shown in last week’s encounter with David Cameron, when he appeared to say “It’s a really, really, really pleasure.”

According to Gianluigi Beccaria, the linguist and author, Italians who struggle in English but drop English phrases into conversion display a mixture of “snobbery and provincialism”. “It’s considered fashionable, but the French and Spanish do it a lot less,” he said.

The phenomenon of English taking over the Italian language has also been noted by The Oldie, which this week carries an article from an amused English expatriate. “Today a route that takes you past the Green Life Bio Concept Store, Lele’s barber’s shop, the farmer’s market, the Tech It Easy gift emporium, a bank offering personal finance, and a sexy shop offering sexy toys brings you not to Willesden High Street, as you might expect, but to the Colosseum,” the article remarked.

Renata Grieco, an English teacher in Rome, claimed it was a two-way street, blaming the English for perpetuating the problem with the constant use of Italian words in everyday sentences. “Why do trendy English people talk about having a gelato or a biscotto when they could just say ice cream and biscuits?” she said.

Experts say they are happy to accept English words when no Italian exists, particularly in high technology and finance, where the Italian equivalent of “holding company” is the ungainly “financial company that controls more than one firm”. But English has also invaded the fashion industry — a bastion of Italian culture — so Italians go looking for a “look” that is “molto fashion” when they indulge in “lo shopping”.

The familiar words

Box — a garage for one car
Bomber — a football centre forward
Baby parking — a crèche
Ticket — a payment for medicine
Mobbing — workplace bullying
Smoking — a dinner jacket
Footing — jogging

Different to - Pedants Wrong Again

“‘Different to’ cannot be acceptable,” wrote Tina Stagg, a Times reader, on our letters page this week. “The concept implies a moving away from the original, a divergence, so logic demands ‘different from’.”

Ms Stagg was commenting on our excerpts from How Good is Your Grammar?, the new book by Professor John Sutherland. Her judgment and reasoning are very common in style guides. Thus Simon Heffer, in Simply English: An A to Z of Avoidable Errors, declares briskly: “Something is different from something else, not to it or, even more abominable, than it.” Bernard Lamb, in The Queen’s English and How to Use It, warns: “People sometimes use inappropriate prepositions . . . Different from is logical and is preferred, while different to is not.” NM Gwynne, in Gwynne’s Grammar, goes one better by calling different to not just inappropriate but illiterate.

These books are long on assertion but short on facts. In his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), HW Fowler calls it a superstition to believe that different can’t be followed by to. He faults the “logical” objection to the construction as a hasty and ill-defined generalisation. After all, what about the constructions averse to, dissimilar to or other than? Are these also inappropriate and illiterate?

Fowler has many admirers (including me) and his defence of different to has been influential. Slightly to my surprise, the philosopher Michael Dummett (in his didactic Grammar and Style) is clear that both different from and different to are correct. He terms different than an Americanism (and I’m sorry to say that, from him, it’s a mark of disapproval) but in fact that construction too is entirely legitimate. How do I know? Because they’ve all been used, over centuries, by fluent writers of the language. The Oxford English Dictionary gives to and unto as prepositions with different as early as the 1520s. Among its citations are Thomas Dekker from 1603 (“Oh my deare Grissil, how much different Art thou to this curst spirit here”); Oliver Goldsmith from 1769 (“The consuls . . . had been elected for very different merits, than those of skill in war”); John Henry Newman from 1848 (“It has possessed me in a different way than ever before”); and William Makepeace Thackeray (“The party of prisoners lived. . . with comforts very different to those which were awarded to the poor wretches there”). In my book Accidence Will Happen, I give further examples of different to in the works of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, GK Chesterton and Anthony Trollope.

You get the idea. The constructions different from, different to and different than are all long established. Whichever of them you prefer will be acceptable and appropriate in any form of writing. Why, then, do usage guides frequently insist that only different from is correct? The reason, unfortunately, is that not many of them deal in evidence.

When I debate questions of English usage with other language pundits (Simon Heffer is a periodic opponent), I’m accustomed to hearing from them a grudging acknowledgment that “language changes”. It does indeed, all the time, yet my principal objection to the purported traditionalists is not that they fail to adjust to change: it’s that they’re heedless of the way disputed constructions have been used in the past as well. The great lexicographical reference resources in English such as the OED are works of scholarship: they’re records of facts, not collections of arbitrary edicts, about the language. Consulting them, you’ll often find that usages condemned by current pundits have in reality been used by English speakers for centuries. So it is with different to and different than.

Verbified Nouns

Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, explains in the current issue of Prospect magazine what he’d do if he ruled the world. He would, among other things, “outlaw abuses of the English language that encourage sloppy thinking . . . I would also outlaw the use of nouns as verbs.”

Well, good luck with that. I don’t wish to miss Lord Browne’s joke; his comments are intended to be ironic. Yet a tone of mock indignation is very common in punditry about language. In his article, Lord Browne recommends the bestselling guide to punctuation by Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which adopts such language throughout. People who confuse it’s with its, says Truss, “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave”. Writers like Simon Heffer and John Humphrys are constantly lamenting some perceived decline or barbarism in standards of English (Humphrys jocularly prescribes capital punishment for such linguistic transgressions as dangling participles). Yet many of the purported illiteracies that sticklers rail against are established features of the language. So it is with the use of nouns as verbs.

Take the words loan, phone, chair, gift, impact and host. All of these are nouns; and all of them are verbs too (and they may also function as other parts of speech). Linguists refer to these verbified nouns as denominal verbs. Some people fiercely object to them. In a speech some years ago complaining about the influence of American English, the Prince of Wales lamented that “people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be”. Yet there’s no linguistic reason why nouns shouldn’t be turned into verbs, or vice-versa.

For example, here’s a sentence from this week’s Sunday Times: “It was good of the anonymous family to loan them to the Hugh Lane and Limerick’s Hunt Museum for so long.” The author is referring to a set of paintings. You know exactly what the verb loan means but many style guides would condemn it as a needless variant of lend. Not so. Loan as a verb has been in the language for longer than loan as a noun; the first citation for it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1200. As recently as the 1960s, style guides would routinely condemn host used as a verb, yet that too is a usage that’s been in the language for centuries. (“Such was that Hag, unmeet to host such guests,” wrote Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene in 1598.)

I could cite many verbified nouns that are widely condemned as recent coinages or Americanisms yet are long established in the dialect of standard British English. That still isn’t the principal reason why Lord Browne is mistaken to condemn “nouns as verbs”, though. Rather, it’s that English speakers constantly use the same word for different functions. The word wrong, for example, is a noun, a verb, an adverb and an adjective, and that doesn’t exhaust its possibilities. (Some people don’t realise that it’s an adverb and so mistakenly believe that spell it wrong is bad English.) The practice of verbing nouns is so much a part of English that we naturally recognise what someone means by it even if we’ve never heard the word used as a verb before. If I tell you I’m marmalading the toast you’ll understand it instantly, on the same principle as buttering the toast.

When people condemn certain verbified nouns, they’re really just expressing an aesthetic preference. That’s all right; we all have these. Don’t confuse personal dislikes, however, with “words that shouldn’t be”.

Meaning is not determined by etymology

“Serious injuries caused by headphoned pedestrians being oblivious to hazards around them have tripled in a decade,” wrote Carol Midgley in her times2 column this week.

What’s wrong with that sentence? The answer is that there’s nothing wrong with it, but oddly enough the celebrated Fowler’s Modern English Usage would fault it in at least three respects (not counting Carol’s excellent and economical attributive adjective headphoned). First, pedestrians being is a construction Fowler would call a fused participle: he’d insist that pedestrians must be marked with the genitive case (so pedestrians’ being) for the sentence to be grammatical. Fowler is mistaken on this but it’s not the issue I want to discuss here.

Second, Fowler would criticise our use of oblivious. He notes that the word’s “original sense is no longer aware or no longer mindful, not simply unaware or unconscious or insensible”. Well, so it is. The word comes from the Latin obliviosus, meaning forgetful. A word’s meaning is not determined by its etymology, however (linguists refer to this notion as the etymological fallacy). Fowler does allow that the word “has strayed beyond recall from the area of forgetfulness into the wider one of heedlessness”, but he still calls it a misuse and a mistake.

Third, connected to his insistence on the “true” meaning of oblivious in the sense of forgetful, Fowler would criticise us for following it with the preposition to. He’d want it to be oblivious of instead.

All of these judgments are taken from the second edition of Fowler, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers and published in 1965. I’m a fan of the book and often cite it but this is a good example of its limits. It makes no sense to insist on a “correct” meaning of a word independent of the way it’s used by native speakers of English. Many words have acquired additional meanings that sticklers deplore but are nonetheless common (such as disinterested in the sense of uninterested rather than impartial, or enormity in the sense of great size rather than of wickedness). Oblivious is an example of a word whose supposedly mistaken meaning has become overwhelmingly the dominant one. Almost never do you hear someone use it to mean forgetfulness. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for it in this newer sense comes from 1854, so it’s hardly a novelty. It quotes among others the poet Walter de la Mare in 1926: “Above them, as if entirely oblivious to their ranting, a glazed King Edward VII stared stolidly out of a Christmas lithograph.”

In my book Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English (which I ruthlessly disclose is published this week in paperback and available from fine stores everywhere) I advise that either sense of oblivious is legitimate and that it can be construed with of or to. My purely stylistic preference (not a rule, as Fowler would have it) is to distinguish the two meanings by using oblivious of in the sense of forgetfulness and oblivious to otherwise.

Yet I fear that I may have been too hidebound and conservative in my recommendation here. When one sense of a word has become so common that you can be certain it’s what the writer intends (as in Carol’s depiction of pedestrians heedless of traffic), it’s asking for trouble to use it any other way. If you want to use oblivious in the sense of forgetful, feel free: if it’s your preference, I won’t criticise you. By now, however, it’s probably safe to conclude that this older sense of the word has been superseded in general usage.

Bob Dylan Puns in Science Papers

From a stem cell investigation titled “Like a rolling histone” to a germination study titled “Knockin’ on pollen’s door”, the world’s research output since the 1970s has increasingly seen the clunky insertions of Dylan lyrics.

While the first use of Dylan in the research literature was in 1970, with an article in the Journal of Practical Nursing titled “The times they are a’ changin’”, a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal found that it was only after 1990 that the practice became commonplace.

“It was quite an extraordinary trend,” Carl Gornitzki, librarian at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said. “There were a few in the Seventies, some in the Eighties, from the Nineties it rose exponentially”. Favourite papers he found included, “Dietary nitrate — a slow train coming” and a study on the generation of neurones from bone marrow titled “Blood on the tracks: a simple twist of fate?”

Ordinarily one would expect such jokes to be spotted in the publication process, during which colleagues pledge their time to read journal articles in their field and remove mistakes. So if fellow scientists had not been indulgent it would be all over now, in peer review.

This clearly did not happen. Instead, the scientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that to date there have been at least 727 Dylan references in the literature, of which 135 were a variant on The Times They are a’ Changin and 36 were Blowin’ in the Wind.

The discovery means this trend represents the first demonstration of a coherent scientific conspiracy to get puns into journal articles. In other words, it is subterranean wordtrick news.

Mr Gornitzki became interested in Dylan lyrics when he discovered that his colleagues had a competition to insert as many as they could. “Four of them have a small contest. It’s quite subtle. They send an email to each other when they manage a Dylan citation in papers. The eventual winner will buy lunch.”

He wondered whether this behaviour was more widespread. “As this paper shows, a lot of people are doing this,” he said. “In particular, The Times they are a-Changin and Blowin’ in the Wind are common. A lot of articles use these as the start of an editorial about something in the medical world changing. Some journals who do this are obscure, but others are quite famous.”

Six of the references were from the prestigious journal Nature.

The work goes some way to rebalancing the doctor-Dylan relationship. “Recent evidence suggests that Dylan has a great deal of respect for the medical profession,” Gornitzki and his colleagues write in the BMJ. “In fact, in the song Don’t Fall Apart on me Tonight, recorded in the early 1980s, Dylan laments: ‘I wish I’d have been a doctor/ Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost/ Maybe I’d have done some good in the world/ ’Stead of burning every bridge I crossed.’ But does the medical profession show the same respect for Dylan? The number of articles citing his work suggests that it does.”

Now that Gornitzki has shown just how prevalent the practice is, will that be the end of it – or will he just encourage more? “Maybe every researcher feels he or she is unique in doing this,” said Mr Gornitzki. “Maybe now the citations will go down.” Equally though, it could be possible, he suggested, that the practice could spread to other artists such as Abba.

If it does, then it seems reasonable to say that the puns, they are a-changing.

Literally

I frequently refer to Fowler’s Modern English Usage. In the often ill-informed genre of style guides, Fowler stands out for its sensitivity to language and wit. A new (fourth) edition of this celebrated volume was published this year, edited by Jeremy Butterfield. He’s done an excellent job, and I can recommend his efforts as a Christmas present for the language lover in your life.

Not all columnists agree with me, though. I note that a pundit in the Daily Express wrote this week that “when an alleged ‘new usage’ is merely a misuse motivated solely by pure ignorance, I feel it is the duty of all right-thinking English speakers to oppose it”. His target was the new Fowler’s sanction for the non-literal use of literally. A few years ago Nick Clegg provoked pedants by saying: “You see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.” That’s the type of construction I mean. Though Mr Clegg was attacked for supposedly misusing literally, the new Fowler notes that such usage is a way of emphasising metaphors and figures of speech.

That’s right. Critics who insist that literally must have only one meaning (“in a literal sense; with exact fidelity of representation”) misunderstand how language develops. Mr Clegg used literally not mistakenly but as an intensifier. Other words in English have followed the same course: absolutely, totally, clearly and really, among many others. There’s no good linguistic reason to object to a construction like (let’s imagine a footballer’s complaint) I was literally gutted when I missed that penalty.

We all use intensifiers, and it’s worth being clear what these are. I’ve seen even a dictionary (admittedly an online one) define an intensifier as an adverb that gives force or emphasis. That’s inaccurate. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has a useful discussion of intensifiers, making clear that these can come from several parts of speech and grammatical categories. I’ve used adverbs so far (which, it’s important to remember, don’t necessarily have the suffix –ly). It’s common also to find adjectives used as intensifiers. The Oxford English Dictionary finds an example from Bernard Shaw of utter used as what it calls a trivial intensifier ( it’s utter bosh). Likewise, English speakers naturally turn to nouns ( what the hell is going on?), pronouns ( that newspaper column is itself a load of rubbish) or even prepositional phrases ( what in the world was that columnist thinking?) as intensifiers.

You can see from examples like these that intensifiers often introduce an element of informality into prose. That question of formality or informality of style is the question you should judge on when to use them. In the fairly informal register of a newspaper column, let alone of conversation, I’d think it perfectly proper (see what I did there?) to use an intensifier. As often happens, pedants who object to the use of non-literal literally are ignoring that issue of register and focusing instead on a single supposedly “correct” meaning. That’s not how language works. We can always ascertain from the context how a word that has dual or multiple meanings is being used. In the case of intensifiers, it’s peculiarly easy to do this. No one ( literally no one, if you prefer) misunderstood Mr Clegg’s much derided comment as referring to extraterrestrial intelligence. It was a vivid figure of speech, and there aren’t enough of these in politicians’ pronouncements.

Words We Need

(London Times 1)

Did you wake especially early this morning to hear the birds sing? Or come up with a particularly ridiculous plan last night, thanks to a drink or two?

When faced with the challenge of expressing what had happened, did you find yourself struggling for the right word? If so, there is a very good reason: it is because you are British.

A Swedish speaker, on the other hand, would have had no problem describing how he got up early to hear the dawn chorus: it is called gokotta. The Germans have a word for a daft plan dreamt up under the influence of alcohol: schnapsidee.

There are some feelings, it seems, so removed from our everyday emotional vocabulary that the English language does not have a simple word for them. A psychologist has drawn up a list of some of the most striking words about beauty, positivity and wellbeing that have no easy equivalent in English. They range from mbuki-mvuki, a Bantu word meaning to shed one’s clothes in order to dance without inhibition, to gigil, from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, meaning the desire to squeeze or pinch someone because they are loved.

Tim Lomas, of the University of East London, said that he had used a “quasi-systematic search” to find 216 words in a variety of languages for publication in The Journal of Positive Psychology. His paper aimed to “provide a window on to cultural differences in constructions of wellbeing, thereby enriching our understanding of wellbeing,” he wrote. “A more ambitious aim is that this lexicon may help expand the emotional vocabulary of English speakers (and indeed speakers of all languages), and consequently enrich their experiences of wellbeing.”

Some of Dr Lomas’s words express ideas so un-British that the absence of an equivalent in English is not surprising. Fargin, for example, is a Yiddish work meaning to glow with pride at the success of another. Tarab is Arabic for musically induced ecstasy or enchantment. Solarfri is the Icelandic for a sun holiday, when workers are granted unexpected time off to enjoy a particularly sunny day — which, obviously, could never catch on in Britain.

There are other words, though, which would be so useful here that the lack of an English equivalent seems a mystery. Utepils, for instance, is the Norwegian word for a beer that is enjoyed outside — which, even if summer never actually arrives this year, could still come in useful. Perhaps one could have an utepils with the feestvarken, Dutch literally for party pig, meaning the person in whose honour a party is given.

The northern Europeans are particularly good on words for cosiness or warmth. Hygge is the Danish/Norwegian word for a deep sense of place, warmth, friendship and contentment, while peiskos, in Norwegian, means, literally, fireplace cosiness. (London Times 2) World languages provide a wealth of succinct terms for our emotional states It is hard to think of a word more immediately useful than Schnapsidee. This is a German term meaning an ingenious plan hatched while drunk. One application of this principle might perhaps be mbuki-mvuki, a Bantu word meaning to shed clothes to dance uninhibited. It’s conceivable but unlikely that the outcome would be cafune, which in Portuguese means tenderly running fingers through a loved one’s hair.

These are among 216 words assembled by Tim Lomas, an academic at the University of East London, in The Journal of Positive Psychology. His aim is to stress to English speakers the riches of expressions in other languages to denote emotional states. He maintains that while the phenomena they describe are universal, their lack of a direct or easily expressible equivalent term in English will enhance our emotional vocabulary.

It isn’t strictly true that the words assembled by Dr Lomas are untranslatable. Rather, they don’t have a one-word equivalent in English. This isn’t surprising. All societies have language in immense grammatical complexity. Indeed, its universality has led some scholars to conclude that language is the realisation of an innate human faculty. Linguists have no truck with the idea that some languages are inherently richer than others.

Switzerland, for example, has (among others) native speakers of German, which easily combines words into compounds, and native speakers of Romansh, which can’t do it so readily. This doesn’t make German more precise. And any language can in principle purloin words from other tongues (known as loan words). English speakers have done this throughout their history and Dr Lomas’s research neatly provides new candidates. In short (or rather in Spanish), it gives content to sobremesa — meaning when the food is gone but the conversation is still flowing. Prost.

C20 Shibboleth

Haitian immigration to the Dominican Republic took off during the early 20th century. Faced with drought, Haitian peasants would cross the border to work the zafra, or sugar-cane harvest; many stayed and put down roots.

During the Trujillo regime, antihaitianismo was public policy. In 1937, on direct orders from Trujillo, the Dominican military committed an act of genocide, ordering laborers in the borderlands to say the word for “parsley” and executing those whose pronunciation betrayed their Haitian origins. As many as 20,000 people were killed in what became known as the Parsley Massacre.

Still, overpopulation, poor infrastructure, and the lack of wage labor continued to drive the most desperate Haitians across the border into the Dominican Republic.And it’s back across this border that many have crossed, since some 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent were stripped of their citizenship in 2013.

Vanishing Dialects

The days when a linguist might be able to tell someone’s birthplace from the way the word they used for a small piece of wood caught beneath the skin have ended as English dialects have merged.

In the 1950s someone with a woodrelated injury might have referred to a spool, spile, speel, spell, spelk, shiver, spill, sliver, splint or splinter. All but two of those terms have faded out of use, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge, who have found that all Britons are increasingly speaking like southerners.

They found that almost all of the 30,000 people who downloaded their English Dialects app preferred the term splinter, with one exception. People who grew up in the northeast continued to say spelk, in defiance of the trend that has resulted in the disappearance of shiver from Norfolk, sliver from Suffolk and spill from the Welsh border.

The researchers, who developed the app with help from academics in Zurich and Berne, compared their data with the Survey of English Dialects, a tenyear field study in the 1950s set up by the University of Leeds.

Pronunciation has also become more uniform for words such as arm, which is increasingly pronounced without sounding the letter “r”. The Leeds survey, which excluded Wales and Scotland, found that England was divided by a diagonal line from the western edge of London to Shrewsbury. People to the southwest of the line did pronounce the “r” and those to the northeast, excluding pockets around Newcastle and Manchester, did not. The newer app found that most people omitted the “r”, although there were areas of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Greater Manchester where about half of people pronounced it.

Adrian Leemann, a linguistics researcher at Cambridge, said that there was further evidence of the influence of London and the southeast in the pronunciation of scone, which is increasingly pronounced as rhyming with “gone” rather than “stone”.

“More and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the southeast do,” he said. The cause is unclear, but is probably the result of greater mobility and the influence of broadcast media.

Dr Leemann’s team found that some dialects were disappearing rapidly, although people from the northeast were “more resistant to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect”

Apostrophes

Here’s the beginning of a column by Ben Machell in The Times magazine a fortnight ago: “One of the biggest lies a manwill ever tell you is that he is ‘dreading’ going on his mate’s stag do. Men do not dread going on their mates’ stag do’s.”

The headline for the piece? Seven things you need to know about stag do’s.

I noticed that Ben took flak on social media and in online comments for that apostrophe. One reader commented underneath the article: “Do’s? It’s dos. What is a greengrocer’s apostrophe doing in The Times?”

The apostrophe was fine. If, in total disregard of our relative expertise on the subject, the magazine’s editor had commissioned me instead of Ben to write about stag do’s, I’d have written it the same way (which is also in accordance with Times style). Let me explain.

This is a question not of grammar but of orthography: the conventions for writing a language. It may sound an obvious point but surprisingly it’s not always clear to zealots for “correct” English. For example, Simon Heffer, my periodic sparring partner in the language wars, says in his book Simply English: An A-Z of Avoidable Errors: “This punctuation mark [the apostrophe] is one of the most essential indicators of meaning in our grammar.”

That’s totally untrue. The apostrophe has no grammatical function and is certainly not essential to meaning. Sure, there are right and wrong ways of using an apostrophe but the mark is just an orthographical convenience. The apostrophe doesn’t exist in the spoken language ( the cat’s bowl is pronounced the same way as the cats’ bowl) but meaning doesn’t thereby break down. Indeed, it didn’t exist in written English either till the 16th century, when it entered the language from French as a printer’s mark to denote an elision.

Gradually the apostrophe was adopted as a genitive marker too. But the conventions for its use only settled down in their current form in the age of mechanised printing from the early 19th century. Inconsistencies abound. The apostrophe in Mary’s denotes possession but it doesn’t in it’s. That’s an accident of history; there’s no logic to it. Writers commonly used it’s as a possessive between the 17th and 19th centuries. Shakespeare did it. Here’s Ferdinand, prince of Naples, in The Tempest: “This Musicke crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury, and my passion / With it’s sweet ayre . . . ”

The usage is wrong now. It wasn’t then. And what our commenter on Ben’s article refers to as the greengrocer’s apostrophe (namely, pluralising a noun that ends in a vowel by inserting an apostrophe) was once orthographical convention too. It was standard for 18th-century plurals of nouns that ended in a vowel ( opera’s rather than operas) or a sibilant ( genius’s rather than geniuses; push’s rather than pushes).

Let’s get back to Ben’s revelries. Nouns that end in a vowel are unusual in English. It makes intuitive sense to use an apostrophe when pluralising these. We don’t usually do it but it’s defensible to ensure clarity. In fact, it’s more than defensible: it’s what almost everyone does. It’s common practice to refer to p’s and q’s rather than ps and qs. Even Simon Heffer does this. He writes: “Plurals require no apostrophe, though I would make one exception for the sake of clarity: which is when one is writing about individual letters of the alphabet.”

That’s sensible. What should determine use of the apostrophe is clarity. It’s how the mark came into written English in the first place. And for clarity’s sake, I’d apply it to stag do’s too.

BBC and Pronunciation

The early years of the BBC in the 1920s and 1930s were a time of pioneering broadcasts, noble values — and heated arguments about the word “vegetable”.

Squabbles and class sensitivities were rife at Broadcasting House, according to a book about the corporation’s pronunciation committee that gives details of the anguish over how announcers should say garage, whether margarine should have a hard or soft “g” and the number of syllables in vegetable.

A BBC memo from 1935 asked: “Shall we follow the modern tendency, or shall we go back to four syllables? The question seems to me to be complicated by the fact that I think at present it is more or less a class distinction. The middle and upper classes make the elision, whereas the working class pronounce all four syllables.” The quandary was resolved by a Miss Simmond, assistant secretary of the advisory committee on spoken English, who declared that she “must side with the lower classes: four syllables please”.

Jurg Schwyter, author of Dictating to the Mob and professor of English linguistics at the University of Lausanne, found that the most divisive word was ski, which was the subject of three rulings. The committee, whose members included George Bernard Shaw, first chose “shee” after the Norwegian pronunciation in the late 1920s before changing to the French “ski” in 1930 and back to “shee” again in 1934.

The BBC stood firm over “margarine”, which it recommended should have a soft “g” despite protests from Unilever that it should have a hard “g” because it derived from margaric acid and that that version was in general use “among educated speakers”.

Professor Schwyter said that there were eternal squabbles over words such as again (agen or again) and garage. “It seems that by late 1930 ‘garage’ was given its UK passport,” he said, “as the minutes of the committee’s tenth meeting record, ‘The committee substituted GARREDGE for their previous recommendation.’ In other words, the loanword was anglicised.”

The BBC also campaigned to maintain the “purity of the language” and tried to eliminate homophones, so that shaw, shore, sure each sounded different. Evidence suggests that it had to admit defeat.

The committee was suspended in 1939 and the BBC now advises its presenters only about how to pronounce names of people and places.

Emojis

Whatever purists say, emojis are a sophisticated and evolving means of communication that should be celebrated.

The BBC translates some of its news stories into emojis Fears that traditional standards of English will suffer are wrong

From page 2 In 1887 a Jewish-Polish ophthalmologist called LL Zamenhof created a universal language. His home town of Bialystok in present-day Poland was divided into Russian, Polish, German and Jewish communities, each of which spoke a different language and refused to speak any other.

A “means of international communication”, the idealistic eye doctor decided, might bring these groups together, and so he invented Esperanto, a language that combined the best of the rest.

It never caught on. Today there are fewer than 2,000 people who have spoken Esperanto from birth. But Zamenhof’s vision has come to pass in a way he could never have anticipated, in the form of hundreds of tiny pictograms attached to digital messages, tweets and texts.

Emojis are the new universal language, and the fastest-growing method of communication in the world. The lexicon of emojis has swelled from 176 in 1999 to more than 1,800 images, regularly used by more than 90 per cent of the world’s online community.

The emoji (Japanese for “picture character”) was born when a Japanese pager company sought to add colour and emotion to otherwise bald textual communications. That idea has spawned an entire internationally recognised vocabulary of ideograms depicting, among other things, weather, facial expressions, animals, flags, the Vulcan hand salute, birthday cakes and love.

Last year the Oxford English Dictionary declared the “tears of joy” emoji to be the word of the year. Another 38 emojis were added to the set last year by the Unicode Consortium of tech companies, which standardises emoji usage and ensures that a symbol sent from one operating system appears the same on another: in 2016 these included a pregnant woman, a rasher of bacon and Mother Christmas, Mrs Santa Claus.

The emoji has become a defined auxiliary language, but evolving and adapting as all genuine languages do. Moby Dick has been translated into emojis. Emoji Dick may lack some of the subtlety of Melville’s original (“Call me Ishmael” is rendered as a telephone and a man with a moustache), but it is very funny. Sony is developing an animated emoji film. The BBC translates some news stories into emojis. The Pope has his own emoji . Last year a Frenchman was sentenced to six months in prison for threatening his girlfriend by sending her a gun emoji.

Inevitably, some language purists loathe emojis. As the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes: “It is a failing of human nature to detest anything that young people do just because older people are not used to it or have trouble learning it.” Every stage of the digital revolution in language — email, text, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat — has been greeted with the prediction that language will be destroyed. The Prince of Wales was at it this week. “In these days of texting and various social media apps, the wellconstructed sentence is under mortal threat,” he moaned.

The same sort of dire prophecy was made, in the 19th century, about the impact of sending telegraph messages that omitted prepositions and articles. The age of wireless had no negative impact on the language. The preposition is alive and well. Some have attacked emojis as mere hieroglyphics, pointing out that the Ancient Egyptians were unable to convey complex emotions in symbols, while the Greeks, with their abstract alphabet and adaptive vocabulary, could express and write down intricate literary ideas. That fails to understand how most people use emojis.

The symbols do not supplant or denude language, but supplement and enhance it. The pictograms do not replace words and thought, but add visual colour. It is as if the Ancient Greeks also had hieroglyphics at their fingertips, a way of writing and illustrating writing simultaneously.

Emojis offer nuance to blunt textspeak, providing humour, sarcasm and surprise, communicating across language barriers. In speech, facial expression and intonation add meaning to the words we utter; emojis, properly used, do the same for the hastily written text. Emojis, like all languages, reflect and adapt to the real world, and carry emotional and intellectual weight. Emojis of humans now come in a variety of skin colours; professions may be symbolised in either gender (or none), although women, who use emojis more than men, remain under-represented in the lexicon. Some 15,000 redheads presented a petition to Apple demanding a ginger-haired emoji. Politics and commerce influence this emerging language. Private citizens and commercial companies can apply to the Unicode Consortium for the adoption of new emojis. Tesco was at the forefront of the campaign for a cheese emoji. When Apple replaced the gun emoji with a water pistol , it provoked protests from the American gun lobby. Since a toy gun emoji sent from an iPhone could appear as a handgun on an Android device, the change also raised the possibility of lethal misunderstandings.

But ultimately the little ideograms narrow differences among people. I can send an emoji to someone in Bialystok, with whom I have no other language in common, and be sure of being understood.

The rapid evolution of the world’s first properly universal language would have evoked an astonished response from LL Zamenhof; but also, surely, a (smile emoji).

Evolving Dictionaries

THERE is something comforting in a dictionary: right angles, a pleasing heft, reassuringly rigid covers. A new one is tight, a bright sheaf of discoveries yet to be made; an old one is a musty but trusted cosy friend. A good dictionary is the classic school-leaving gift from ambitious parents to their children. A great dictionary might even be passed on through several generations.

But maybe the most reassuring thing about a dictionary is its finite nature. A small dictionary contains all the words you need to know, and a really big one seems to contain all the words in existence. Having one nearby seems to say that the language has boundaries, and reasonable ones at that.

It might surprise dictionary-owners to know that most lexicographers do not think of their subject in this way at all. The decision to impose a page-count on a dictionary is in fact a painful one. Definitions can almost never cover the full complexity of a word, even in huge dictionaries. And even more painful is leaving words out simply for reasons of space.

Many readers think that something is a “real word” if it’s “in the dictionary” (raising the question of which of the hundreds of English dictionaries they mean). But lexicographers don’t like to regard themselves as letting the trusty words in and keeping the bad guys out. Erin McKean, who left traditional lexicography to found an online dictionary, Wordnik, explained why she chose a format that could allow virtually limitless entries: “I don’t want to be a traffic cop!”

Lexicographers prefer to think they are a different kind of cop: the kind in the title of John Simpson’s “The Word Detective”, published in October, a memoir of his time as editor-in-chief of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Mr Simpson’s lexicography career began in the 1970s, scouring books for example usages and writing them down on notecards. (The original OED was published in alphabetically consecutive volumes between 1884 and 1928; Mr Simpson worked on the supplement of new words and meanings.) In 1982 a new boss shocked the then-editor with a plan to computerise the dictionary’s ways: both the lexicographic work itself, with digital research files, and its outcome, an OED on compact disc. But that wasn’t the final shape either: by the end of Mr Simpson’s tenure in 2013, the OED’s flagship product was a website with entries richly linked to one another and updated at regular intervals.

A dictionary is really a database; it has fields for headword, pronunciation, etymology, definition, and in the case of historical dictionaries like the OED, citations of past usages. Its natural home is one that allows the reader to consult it in any way that makes sense. Look up a single word. Or look up all the citations by a single author. Or those which share a root: only such a tool can tell you that the OED knows of 1,011 words ending in –ology, against 508 with –ography.

When a new word like “grok” appears or the meaning of a word like “marriage” expands, as it has recently, readers need not wait for years for a new print dictionary. Once the new word or meaning seems here to stay, it can be added in an instant. The OED is conservative: a rule of thumb is to wait until a word has hung on for at least ten years. But the principle is to catch all of the language in use, and not merely to admit the good words, whatever those are.

Ten years is still a long time. Lexicographers, aware that people still look to them for guidance on what is a “real” word and what isn’t, whether or not they like this role, can still be conservative. Those who long for a conservative dictionary should seek one, but this is not the only way of doing things. “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” first appeared as a chunky three-volume work of historical lexicography in 2010, with over 100,000 entries. But Jonathon Green did not hang up his hat when the books hit the shelves; he went on to add an online edition that was to be continually updated.

At the free-for-all end are the online and completely crowdsourced dictionaries from Wiktionary to Urban Dictionary. Whatever one may think of the latter—which includes terms of rank racist and misogynist abuse as well as a broad fare of drug- and sex-related terms—it is useful, allowing oldies to find out what their kids are talking about. That may be an inversion of the old dictionary, the graduation present—but discovery, in whatever format, is after all what dictionaries are for.

Trump Lies and Magical Thinking

“THERE’S A NEW Hillary Clinton in town,” CNN reported on June 3, 2016, the morning after her foreign-policy-turned-Trump-takedown speech in San Diego. 'Donald Trump's ideas aren't just different,' Clinton chided earnestly, 'they are dangerously incoherent. They're not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.'

For supporters, the speech marked the moment the notoriously careful politician found her footing. And in an important sense it did, field-testing what would become a staple campaign strategy: letting Trump's words 'speak for themselves.' As Brian Beutler wrote shortly after the election, the Clinton camp's approach to Trump was to not overestimate him - just show the people his words, the thinking went, and the politics would take care of themselves.

The belief that words speak for themselves is characteristic of what English Studies scholar Keith Green terms the 'scientific' linguistics that dominated the nineteenth century - a theory of language animated by literalism: 'literal meaning was seen as its core or essential meaning, a meaning that is not altered significantly by the vagaries of its use.' Like containers, words were thought to carry a clearly identifiable meaning, and neither the context of their use nor the fact that people used them in a number of ways altered it. From this perspective, all language was subject to verifiability; taken literally, Trump's words and utterances were either true - facts - or they were false - lies, or else 'incoherent.'

Using an opponent's own words against them was no novel political strategy, of course. But against Trump, it seemed, the approach was especially well suited; it would be impossible for voters to see his obviously falsifiable claims as anything else. Inconceivably for so many, however, Clinton lost the election. While explanations for the loss abound in the weeks and months that followed, none found fault in the linguistic assumptions that informed much of the resistance against Trump: that language was subject only to literal verifiability. They weren't wrong on technical grounds, of course - Trump's traffic in verifiable falsehoods is indeed difficult to overstate - but instead on ethnolinguistic ones. In other words, we must consider how words and language often live different cultural lives outside of literal interpretation.

And it was this other life of words that began attracting the interest of scholars beginning in the early 20th century - an interest that resulted in a growing consensus that viewed language as not rational, rather than as irrational. As anthropologist Stanley Tambiah put it, 'Language is an artificial construct' whose strength is that its form owes nothing to external reality; it thus enjoys the power to invoke images and comparisons, refer to time past and future, and relate events which cannot be represented in action. Under this new ethnolinguistic regime, even verifiably 'false speech' carried meaning that could not be reduced to its technical or objective falsity.

Among the first substantive ethnographic inquiries to advance this view was initiated by the famed Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s, who took interest in a particular kind of false speech often considered an exemplar of irrationality under scientific linguistics, often pejoratively referred to as 'magic spells.' Captivated by the rituals and practices that permeated the daily life and agricultural methods of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, Malinowski documented them in meticulous detail, most notably in his 1935 two-volume ethnographic opus, Coral Gardens and Their Magic. If you understand what he's saying, you'll understand Donald Trump.

One system of magic of particular interest to Malinowski, called vilamalia, the 'magic of prosperity,' contained a rite known as kaytum-la bubukwa, the 'pressing of the yam-house floor,' which was performed before and after the Trobrianders' ceremonial yam houses were filled. In Trobriand society, yams were not simply a staple food source, but sat at the center of a complex system of exchange and display, associated as they were with power, wealth, and prosperity. As often comes to mind when we think of a magic spell, a ritual wielder - here, the tovilamalia - enacts a formulaic but precise combination of words and actions intended to bring about a desired outcome. In the case of kaytum-la bubukwa, the spells, uttered publicly, were composed of words that shared in their emphasis the qualities of heaviness and durability, while binabina - volcanic stones, 'the pressers of the yam-house floor' - were placed on the floor of the yam-house, similarly punctuating traits of permanence and weightiness. Together, the words, actions, and ritual objects were mobilized toward anchoring or mooring the yam-house down by making it, as well as the yams stored within them, fat, weighty, durable, and lasting.

Taken literally, rites like these only appeared to confirm the childlike status of the 'primitive' mind. The native believed, the thinking went, that words contained the force of natural or mechanical causality - that is, that a magic spell could perform the physical task of rendering yams weightier than they had already grown in the ground, or that bringing a heavy item (binabina) into contact with another (the yam-shack) would result in the transference of the desired qualities (heaviness, durability) from the first to the second. The intended goal of magical practices like these, Malinowski's contemporaries assumed, were akin to those of modern science - an effort to accomplish physical tasks, but erroneously, with words.

While Malinowski recognized as verifiably false the belief that words alone could have direct causal force, or that the contiguity of items enabled the physical transference of qualities from one to the other, he was no more convinced that the Trobrianders were unaware of this, as his colleagues had taken for granted. Designating observable social phenomenon as unintelligible or irrational did not constitute an explanation, he thought, but only substituted it, signaling a forfeiture of the observer's willingness to understand the practices in question. Believing that the Trobrianders were in fact rational actors insofar as they had and pursued practical interests - however much these might differ from our own - he considered other possible ways that their magic spells could be true, or somehow rendered pragmatic or sensible activity.

His caution rewarded, Malinowski found his answer where anthropologists tend to - among their informants. 'Whereas the objective facts reveal to us that the whole performance is directed at the yam-house, at the food accumulated there,' Malinowski wrote stiffly, 'the natives maintain that the magic acts on the human organism.' Self-consciously metaphorical then, 'the real subject-matter of magic influence' were the Trobrianders themselves.

As Stanley Tambiah explains, the rite was intended to 'restructure and reintegrate the minds and emotions of the actors' in a cultural context where the belly is the receptacle of emotion and understanding ('It is the belly that 'hears and ‘understands’ the rite”), where yams are the foundation of wealth (“It is better to let the yam rot than to deplete the stock”), and where abstention from food is virtue (“to have little food or to show hunger is shameful”). Challenging the core assumption of scientific linguistics, Malinowski advanced an approach to language in which the meaning of words and utterances were determined by the wider context of the situation. From this perspective, the use of language in general — from magical spells to technical instructions — was always to elicit a practical effect or outcome, however obscured from view this practicality might be. The relevant question about the power of words, then, was not one of verifiability, but of efficacy — not whether a spell or utterance was true, but whether (and how) it worked.

For the Trobrianders, the “magic of prosperity” had the practical effect of reminding community members that yams sat at the center of a wider universe of social value and reinforced members’ sense of accountability toward it — yam shacks should be full, and bellies empty.

Such instances of “social magic,” however, are far from exceptional, and are as much a part of mainstream American society as any pre-capitalist one. Indeed, one of the most ubiquitous obsessions of recent American (professional) middle-class culture fits the character of such practices precisely — running. As anthropologist Grant McCracken argues, “[P]art of the regime of physical health that has held sway since the 1980s in North America may be attributed to this effort to make the self more capable, more resourceful, more mobile. Running, which was recently such a fad […] was undertaken not for its own sake but in the pursuit of improved performance.” In other words, he says, “movement of one kind” — physical — is thought to enable “movement of another” — within a career, for example.

Just as the Trobrianders mobilize contrasting metaphors of emptiness and fullness for the purpose of ritually emoting allegiance to their way of life, running in certain American contexts implicates a broader universe of value in which the dual metaphors of mobility (good) and stagnation (bad) factor prominently. The point, of course, is that while it may come as a surprise to many that running might have as much to do with professional success as it does physical health, this should not be taken to suggest that the belief that running has an impact on professional mobility is irrational or impractical. While few Americans would concede that running somehow automatically leads to career advancement, many would likely agree that it can “restructure and reintegrate” their minds and emotions toward this goal — a process that may well effect real outcomes.

From the “magic of prosperity” to the “magic of running,” then, it’s clear that — at least under the right circumstances — one can “do things with words,” as the philosopher of language J. L. Austin would later expound. Magic — and specifically magic words — can have material effects, and technically false speech can carry truthful meaning. Still, however, the question remains: Why is it that Trump’s words sound like nonsense, lies, and bloviation to some, and righteous truth to others? For his supporters, in other words, what has rendered Trump’s speech magical — and what has been the practical effect that Malinowski argued could be stimulated by such speech?

Answering these questions begins, at least, by challenging the widespread certitude that Trump voters simply blindly swallow his lies. In rare recognition of this possibility, Politico’s Michael Kruse writes the following in his essay, 'Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway' - a rumination on his time spent with Trump supporters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania:

“The change you’ve been waiting for will finally arrive,” [Trump] pledged. It was what they so badly wanted to hear. On November 8, 2016, in Cambria County, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton by nearly 38 points. By last week, though, John George told me that despite what they might have said, people here didn’t really believe Trump would make good on all his promises. “Deep down inside,” he said, “I don’t think anybody thought the steel mills were going to come back.” George is the owner of “George’s Song Shop” downtown […] [He] is a Democrat, but he voted for Trump, and he would do it again, he said.

As readers may have noticed, Kruse’s discovery here closely mirrors that of Malinowski — that “the natives maintain that the magic acts on the human organism.” And again, maybe this isn’t so surprising. We can no more assume that Trump supporters’ undying allegiance to him necessitates literally believing everything he says than we can that Catholics’ participating in communion — partaking in the blood and body of Christ — are literal cannibals. That is, the metaphorical factor — at least at some level — is self-consciously understood as giving expression to a larger truth (in the case of Trump, a deeply-felt betrayal).

Metaphor employs what Tambiah calls the “evocative or emotive” use of language, wherein “words [become] signs for emotions or attitudes.” In such cases, the “referential power” of words — that is, their literal facticity or truthfulness — is “secondary.” As Salena Zito has written, Trump’s obvious lies and outlandish hyperbole “drives fact-checkers to distraction” — a comment presumably intended to goad readers into asking how fact-checking could possibly be considered a “distraction.” While “the press takes him literally, but not seriously,” Zito writes, “his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Now consider just a few of the powerful metaphors that have factored centrally in Donald Trump’s speeches: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” citing the “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape”; we are “bleeding jobs from our country” and must “take our country back”; the United States is “a piggy bank that’s being robbed,” and “we can’t allow China to rape our country”; the “flood of refugees” represents a “Trojan horse,” and “ISIS has spread like cancer”; and, perhaps most successfully, we must “drain the swamp of corruption in Washington, DC.”

For both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, a coinciding message explained their cross-over appeal in a context of the staggering political and economic inequality that began to change the structure of feeling concerning fairness in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — that “the system is rigged,” and that average, wage-earning Americans were being “ripped off.” The difference between the two candidates, of course, was who they claimed was ripping them off. For Bernie, it was corporate America and the super-rich (reflecting his domestic focus), and for Trump it was immigrants and other countries (reflecting his foreign focus) — overlapping only in their contempt for the political class of both parties who facilitated the theft and “bad deals.” As American historian Jackson Lears argues, “Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual — the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington.”

With Clinton’s primary defeat of Sanders, however, this verifiable truth appeared to have no other available vessel than Trump. His solutions may have been almost everywhere technically wrong — which did not necessarily escape his supporters’ attention — but his keen awareness that the moral basis for decades of bipartisan (neoliberal) “politics as usual” was facing a historic crisis of legitimacy made him their liar. As a noted professional “wonk” more practiced at tending trees than forests, however, Clinton appeared tone-deaf to the context of her candidacy, and undeterred by her earned reputation as symbol of this politics as usual.

And her campaign slogan did little to mitigate voter skepticism. While “Stronger Together” would no doubt have constituted an effective messaging pillar, it’s being made to carry the weight of the entire campaign only reinforced how manifestly out of step the Clinton camp was with the context of the situation. While Trump manipulated how many voters thought about the political and economic context in order to fuel enthusiasm around his ability to address their very valid concerns (often using race and xenophobia to do so, but also the “bi-coastal elite” and existing “political class” of both parties), Clinton ran a campaign preoccupied with slaying dragons — particularly related to identity — that Trump had created for precisely for this purpose.

In this way and others, Clinton epitomized what law scholar Joan C. Williams calls “the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables.” And the impact of the latter is difficult to overstate here; writing Trump voters off as racists, says Williams, “is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.” For many then, the Clinton campaign gave off the frustrating impression that while decades of regressive economic policy and the uneven impact of industrial decline was unworthy of serious focus, the question of whether or not sushi and yoga were acts of cultural appropriation might merit careful consideration.

But it was perhaps Clinton’s refusal to move beyond “fact-checking” as a mode of engaging Trump and Trump-leaning voters that most fueled their resentment and distrust. This approach not only presumed these would-be voters’ literal belief in everything Trump said — implying that they were duped, misled on the facts, or irrational — but contained the added conceit that Clinton understood the facts necessary to fight for what was best for them, even if they didn’t. The contradiction at the heart of her candidacy was clear. How were Trump supporters to square her espoused dedication to an expert-oriented and evidence-based approach to policy-making with the dramatic inequalities of the existing economy about which she had relatively little to say? Playing the perfect foil to Trump then, Clinton was doubtless a crucial component in the transformation of Trump’s lying words into magical ones.

But Clinton also stood as an ideal proxy for the growing class-culture war that is now a major feature of American politics. After all, the target of the long-building eruption of resentment and distrust that Donald Trump hijacked turned out to be not so much the rich (for their greed) as it was what Barbara Ehrenreich termed the “professional-managerial class”, including the media, whose lifestyle has come to stand as a distinctive marker of urban, upper middle-class arrogance and smugness — and yes, economics as usual.

As Joan Williams cogently explains, “[M]ost blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day.” Full of responsible opinion, the salaried elite are quick to advise those left behind by the new economy, for example, that they need to “adapt” — all the while being contentedly buoyed by it. “Talk about insensitivity,” Williams writes in response to a New York Times article in which men with high school educations are advised to take on “pink-collar” jobs in the absence of other work. “Elite men, you will notice, are not flooding into traditionally feminine work. To recommend that for [working class] men just fuels class anger.” Examples abound.

For many voters then, Trump, much like Sanders, represented a political candidate tailored for the times, for this context: one in whom a diverse constituency of post-industrial, wage-earning voters could entrust their aspirations for a better life without also obligating them to accede the lifestyle or cultural milieu of the professional-managerial class. As Williams argues, the dream of the working class “is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money.” In this context, fact-checking was not an arrow in the quiver of a shrewd campaign strategy, but another stone in the shoe of a drowning one. Clinton became, in other words, a talisman through which expressions of linguistic literalism (e.g., being “fact-checked”) could be mobilized by Trump as a marker of class belonging, identity, privilege, and exclusion.

So what does Malinowski have to say about the upcoming midterms and the 2020 presidential race? First, context is vital to grasping the meaning of language. Instead of prompting us to double down on our certainly that Trump supporters are wholly and simply misled on the facts, irrational, or pathological — the backward “primitives” of our time who erroneously believe that magic words have automatic effects — their ongoing support for Trump in spite of the degree and volume of his verifiably false utterances should constitute cause to reconsider our assumptions about the wider context. Crucially, this context is one defined by truly staggering (and growing) political and economic inequalities, and an historic pervasion of distrust among broad swathes of the electorate on both sides of the aisle.

For all the calls that Democratic Party leaders have made for more truth and less “fake news,” their unwillingness to mainstream policies that reflect the scale and gravity of the very real inequalities that define mainstream American life is rather peculiar. As two historians recently noted, explanations of the “realignment of American politics and the migration of working-class whites to the Republican Party…usually focus on how politicians from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump have exploited white backlash against racial and cultural liberalism. The flip side of this is the deliberate, long-term strategy by the Democratic Party to favor the financial interests and social values of affluent white suburban families and high-tech corporations over the priorities of unions and the economic needs of middle-income and poor residents of all races.” Indeed, the rise of Trump is far more the consequence of Democratic Party failures than Republican successes.

Second, the complexity and diversity of language use everywhere is challenging to grasp, but it’s clear to those who study it that verifiably false speech can carry meaning that is not reducible to its technical or objective falsity. Nor is it factual to say that magical speech — again, at least under the right circumstances — can elicit no real outcomes. Trump may be using language in an unfamiliar “magical” way, but closer consideration reveals that it’s more a part of our daily life than we often realize — used in contexts as routine as running and communion. While the successful use of magical speech may differ between the Trobriand and American cases — in the former deployed in order to honor an intact social contract, and in the latter to mobilize a response to a betrayed or broken one — the aim of the ritual wielder remains the same: “to restructure and reintegrate the minds and emotions of the actors” by ritually mobilizing culturally specific values, moods, and metaphors toward some determinative action or expression.

Alternatively, Clinton’s early assumption that Trump’s words would “speak for themselves” — as well as her later fixation on “fact-checking” (a term now dominating the center-left resistance) — was grounded in a distinctively 19th-century view of language. Believing that language could only be interpreted literally, she sought to correct Trump supporters rather than listen to them. Whereas Sanders engaged Trump supporters by arguing that Trump was the wrong answer to the right question — that average middle and working-class America was being fleeced — Clinton offered no such dignified pathway to their coming on side.

In light of this, the literalist certitude that fact-checking and labeling Trump a “liar” are unassailable tactics for resisting Trump demands reconsideration. Undertaken in isolation, the “Truth-O-Meter” approach not only plays into the dichotomy of truth and falsity that energizes Trump’s cries of “fake news,” but places him and his words at the center of the story where what is needed is his and their decentering, or contextualization. Is not Trump a predictable (if intensified) result of the very unresolved inequality and cultural division that preceded him? If so, Trump is neither “aberrational,” nor “sui generis,” nor “ex nihilo,” as has been repeatedly claimed. Focusing only on his literal words and distinctive willingness to lie naïvely frames him as the problem, rather than a symptom of a much larger structural politico-economic malaise that will no doubt produce worse political figures if left unresolved.

Trump has promised a lot of heavy yams. But understanding the meaning of this promise from the point of view of his supporters requires viewing it in its proper, wider context.

Swearing

Only very innocent readers — cloistered nuns, perhaps — will be surprised to learn that more than 60,000 swear words were broadcast last year in Britain. My reaction: only 60,000! Our culture and our politics is a stew of profanity. Some may deplore the decay of public morals. But there is joy in swearing.

If our language’s highest pleasure is Shakespeare, its second highest pleasure is its swear words. English, with its abundance of plosive and fricative sounds and its versatile syntax, might have been designed for profanity. German is too sinister. The European romance languages are too beautiful (the Spanish puta madre sounds like a kind of rose; the French putain sounds like a cake you might buy in a patisserie). English swear words are comic, heartfelt and charged with ancient malice.

I do not advocate ubiquitous obscenity. Only the stupid are amused by excessive swearing. But we should remember to savour an aspect of our language that is often deplored and too-little relished. For obscenities are strewn through English landscape, nature and history. Man of London’s medieval street names cannot be printed in a 21st-century newspaper. A heron was once a shitecrow and a dandelion a pissabed. When we swear we use the most ancient parts of our language. “Arse” is old English, as are several worse words. “Bastard” (first recorded in 1297) is my favourite. I pronounce it with the flat vowel of my Geordie upbringing but I can still recall the childhood thrill of my father’s sophisticatedly southern “bahhhstad”.

Good swearing is subtle enough that such differences matter. The linguist Geoffrey Hughes called swearing the cousin of poetry: “The language is highly charged and very metaphorical; extreme, pointed effects are created by alliteration or by playing off different registers against each other, and rhythm is very important.” Consider the force and versatility of “the f-word”. The spittle-flecking initial “f” released into a short vowel’s gasp of frustration before the final satisfaction of the plosive “ck”. Shouting it has been shown to reduce pain. It can be used as a verb, an adverb, a noun, an adjective, a modifier, an intensifier and an interjection. It is a valid exclamation of love, dismay, rage, astonishment, happiness, agony and grief. We are likely to hear it or to utter it at the greatest and the most tragic moments of our lives. A vulgar one-word sonnet.

English swearing, I submit, is funnier than American swearing because of the ironic, defeated tone of our national humour. Christopher Hitchens believed that the words “f*** off” were “the British Empire’s second greatest gift to the world”, after football. Shout them anywhere and someone will know what you mean. When a Greek newspaper was moved to insult our prime minister from its front page, the f-word carried force in a country with a different alphabet. This is not perhaps the “global brand” we would aspire to. But nowadays we must take what we can get.

Profanity is a good measure of a culture’s animal spirits: its appetite for argument and confrontation. The great flowering of English literature in the late 17th century coincided with an efflorescence of obscenity. “You starveling, you elf-skin, you dried-neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish!”, Falstaff tells Prince Hal. A character in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour exclaims, “I am the rankest cow that ever pissed.” (In the disparity between those quotations you glimpse the reason Shakespeare not Jonson is our national poet.)

Our own time is hardly Shakespearean but it is as rude and quarrelsome as any in English history. If the strife is wearying, the consolation is that political invective has not been so vibrant since the 18th century: woke, gammon, terf, melt, libtard, snowflake. The accompanying paradox is that curses are most potent when linguistic freedoms are threatened by elaborate or repressive social codes. Shakespeare’s culture was one of puritanism and cringing courtly deference — indeed, swearing was outlawed in England only a few years after his death.

Our own age of profanity coincides with po-faced new language rules and a proliferation of fake and insincere speech: progressive euphemisms, academic jargon, focus-grouped corporate apologies and the evasive Today programme circumlocutions used by harried politicians. Four-letter words are little dynamite charges under the tyranny of careful speech. The swearing in Succession and The Thick of It is so funny because governments and corporations are meant to speak with perfect anodyne blandness.

Incessant and elaborate obscenity is best left to geniuses of the order of Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong. If the first enemy of effective swearing is the prude, the second is the too-prolific curser impressed by his own social daring. To preserve the force and the pleasure of swear words we should use them justly and ideally with a respect for comic timing. As for the prudes: I suspect those who refuse to see that there is pleasure in swearing do not really like the English language. They are the heirs of sterile Victorian politesse, not of the great profane and polluted river of English which runs from Chaucer through Joyce and on into the present. That vulgar and glorious inheritance.

Words

A Shitstorm

Words are Levers

Grammar Nazis

Multicultural London English

Don’t frarp in your gruds

Borrowed Words

Scrabble Dictionary

English Globish

Irony

The Future of English

Decimate and Refute

Swearing

Verbing of Nouns

Your Personal Taste Doesn't Matter

Fowlers

'They' is singular or plural

‘Linguists investigate facts; sticklers neither know nor cite them’

Power of Words

Can I? May I?

New Scrabble Words

New Words

English In Italian

Different to - Pedants Wrong Again

Verbified Nouns

Meaning is not determined by etymology

Bob Dylan Puns in Science Papers

Literally

Words We Need

C20 Shibboleth

Vanishing Dialects

Apostrophes

BBC and Pronunciation

Emojis

Evolving Dictionaries

Trump Lies and Magical Thinking

Swearing

Other Resources

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