A winning word
WANT to know what real bliss is to a dedicated word nerd?
It’s a brand new dictionary, to be pored over, and even pawed over, for the linguistic treasures within. Trouble is, dictionaries – even those frustratingly abridged editions – are horribly expensive.
There are several on the shelves chez Godson (the beloved is as big a word nerd as I am). There’s his battered Oxford, which has accompanied him across continents and through numerous newsrooms, my Oxford Illustrated and – a more recent acquisition – my abridged Collins.
I’ve always thought of Collins as a bit of a bland upstart. Getting one didn’t alter my opinion.
I’d always been an Oxford girl but that had to change when I joined the Daily Dispatch, whose rules dictate that Collins is the “house” guide to English. What I didn’t know – until I took ownership this week of a brand, spanking new edition – is that I’m really a Chambers girl at heart.
The beautiful book – all 1,904 pages of it – is a quirky delight. First published in 1872, Chambers’ original aim was to appeal to everyone. As the UK Independent says in its review of this one: “Its 12th edition still has no truck with word snobbery, and boasts more entries and definitions than any other single volume English dictionary.”
And indeed it does – 620,000 words, as opposed to the Concise Oxford’s 240,000.
No starchiness here, either. The academically correct definitions and derivations are often accompanied by a wry description, as in the case of (chocolate) éclair, which it describes as “long in shape but short in duration”.
A special “red section” singles out such delights as “words that never were”, “extinct words”, “words that merit rescue”, and “insults”, as well as crossword code-breakers, indispensable two-letter word solutions, top-scoring Q and Z words for Scrabble lovers, etc.
Weighing in at around 2.5kg and costing some R500, I’d have really had to think twice about buying it, but – lucky me – I didn’t have to. It cost me just one word – mellifluous.
Well, one word and a tweet.
You see, among the “Twitterers” I follow is @FoxedQuarterly – tweeted by the dedicated bibliophiles who run independent London bookstore Slightly Foxed, started several decades ago by novelist Graham Greene’s nephew.
Send us your favourite word and its meaning, they tweeted in early December, and you could win a Chambers Dictionary.
So I did. The first one that popped into my head, in fact: “Mellifluous – flowing with sweetness and honey.”
The Foxed Quarterly folk answered immediately: “Very nice,” they said. “Here’s another: “goluptious” (delicious, voluptuous).
“That’s mellifluously goluptious, I’d say, wouldn’t you,” I tweeted back.
The flurry of competing tweets that followed put me in the doldrums. They were so odd that mellifluous – always a favourite of mine for its feeling on the tongue and its delicious descriptiveness – began to feel decidedly ordinary.
There was, for example, “tuftaffety” – taffeta with tufted pile, apparently. And “hornswoggle” – to trick and deceive.
When “callipygous” was tweeted, I knew all was lost. Who, after all, could resist a word that means “having beautiful buttocks”?
As I’d guessed, the Foxed Quarterly folk couldn’t. Happily, though, there were two copies of Chambers to be won, and the other one was mine.
Happily, too, my London-based daughter stoically lugged the weighty beast along with her when she came to visit me in South Africa this week.
What a mellifluous start to my new year! – Stevie Godson
(A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch
6 Comments »The dodgy roots of English …
Picture by Thomas Shahan 3
“English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
(Anonymous)
Pardon my kummerspeck
Evolution, American-Style by Mike Licht
IT’S almost the end of another year, and the beginning of a stream of best-of lists – songs, books, websites, gadgets – in fact, almost anything you can think of.
As a complete and utter word nerd, my own favourites are the dictionary top 10 word lists. Oxford Dictionaries were first out of the starting gate this year – and what a disappointment theirs is.
Their word of the year – chosen, incidentally, by both the US and UK versions – is “squeezed middle”!
Quite apart from the fact it’s a phrase and not a word, I’ve never heard of it. Have you?
The obscure – to me, anyway – phrase “took it by a whisker”, says the OD blog, as there were so many that could have qualified.
My favourite Language Log linguist, Geoffrey K Pullum, is also pretty miffed that for the past couple of years, Oxford Dictionary’s “word” of the year has been a phrase.
“I want to argue that this is a mistake, not just because they have chosen an utterly undistinguished item, but because what they have chosen is a straightforwardly compositional phrase, one that couldn’t be argued to be a lexical item at all … squeezed just means ‘squeezed’, and middle just means ‘middle’, and if you put the two together you have the literal meaning. It is ridiculous to think of putting this in a dictionary.”
Quite.
The phrase is, he says, “a UK Labour Party politician’s feeble phrase for denoting an allegedly squeezed and put-upon class trapped in between the welfare riff-raff below … and the fat-cat billionaires above.”
It’s a phrase used by politicians to make everyone think they’re part of the suffering masses … and “oil them up for voting”.
Overall, the Oxford’s top 10 is not a jolly set, they admit, (well, apart from the Berlusconi-inspired “bunga bunga”, which is jolly graphic if you’re into orgies, I reckon) adding: “In a year like this, it is hardly surprising that the tone is a sombre one. Financial hardship and protest on an unprecedented scale have scored our language deeply (and no doubt many others, too).”
Those others include “Arab Spring”, “occupy”, and “fracking”.
Following hot on the Oxford’s heels, as it were, The Hot Word online dictionary’s readers have also been influenced by this year’s worldwide political turmoil. Their altogether more mundane top 5 contenders are “winning”, “occupy”, “spring”, “jobs”, and “austerity”.
Global Language Monitor reckons “occupy” is 2011’s word of the year, with “Arab Spring” the top phrase.
“Deficit”, “fracking”, “drone”, and “non-veg” (huh?), make up their top 5, but number 6 has to be my own favourite – now I’ve discovered it, that is.
It’s kummerspeck, taken from the German but “seeing wider acceptance in English”, says the monitor’s website.
Quite apart from the fact that the word rolls off the tongue so roundly, its meaning is particularly appropriate for me right now – “excess weight gained from emotional over-eating”- a squeezed middle, you might even say, which is why I’m adopting it immediately. – Stevie Godson
(A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch)
Curse? Not bloody likely!
Image by lovingshiva
SOMETIMES I could just curse the postal service – especially when a reader’s letter goes missing as I figure if someone takes the trouble to write to me, the least I can do is acknowledge the effort. Talk about “snail mail” becoming “fail mail”.
It seems to have happened – according to a note received by one of my colleagues – to a letter about a column I wrote about the benefits of swearing, not as part of regular conversation but when you hit your finger, toe or whatever.
And even though I’m not a huge fan of swearing, I’ll admit I’ve been known to let slip a few “naughties” in my time (I was in the music business, after all). The claim about the efficacy of expletives wasn’t my own, though, it was from one of those seemingly pointless studies some universities appear to constantly churn out.
The reader says she finds the way swearing has evolved an interesting “side-light on language”.
“In the ‘old’ days,” she writes, “one swore with serious intent, calling God to witness the truth of your statement, etc, or damning a soul to hell, and so on.
“This became trivialised as we later read of ‘God’s bodikins’, which came from God’s body; ‘zounds!’ from God’s wounds, and so on.
“Later again, we just had ‘hell’ and ‘damn it’ … and ‘Jesus’ became ‘Jeez’ or ‘Gee-whiz’.”
And the boundaries, as the letter writer says, are constantly being pushed further.
Well, as they apparently would have said in 1914 England, isn’t that the pygmalion truth!
That was after the UK’s then most famous female star, Mrs Patrick Campbell, shocked the nation by swearing on stage, according to the latest MacMillan Dictionary Blog that just dropped into my e-mail inbox as a seemingly synchronous addition to the subject.
Never mind the fact that at 49 she was a little long in the tooth for the part, Mrs Campbell appeared as the ingénue Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s famous play, Pygmalion. Not that he minded – he said he wrote the part specially for her. And, in any case, no other actress of the day would say the then-taboo word.
The line she uttered? “Walk? Not bloody likely.”
It was scandalous at the time.
“The word pygmalion was used for decades afterwards as a jocular substitute expletive,” explains the blog.
And although “bloody” may seem tame to most people today, it apparently still has the power to shock.
“Just a few years ago [2006], its use in a tourism campaign in Australia caused a considerable fuss,” says MacMillan, noting that the Aussie prime minister couldn’t bring himself to speak the offending line: So where the bloody hell are you?”
The tourism minister had no such problem. “It’s the great Australian adjective. We all use it, it’s part of our language.”
As a “colloquial intensifier”, I’d say it’s pretty innocuous. What do you think? – Stevie Godson
(A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch)
2 Comments »Eggcorns are no yolk
A NEWSPAPER sub-editor’s lot is not always a happy one. Some of the boobs that slip into newspapers give readers a chuckle, at least. One of my favourites, spotted in a Johannesburg paper some years ago, was an obituary for a departed society doyenne. She was, said the report, a “grand old lay”. What a difference a “d” makes – or, in this case, a missing one!
Not a tribute the family could cut out and keep, I would say.
Of course, if it’s your job to catch such clangers, forget the chuckles – it’s enough to give you the chills.
These days, newsrooms are shrinking faster than cling-film held too close to a flame and reporters are under as much pressure as “subs” as we all battle the daily deadlines constantly threatening to whiz past.
Not letting a single boo-boo slip by is what I would (euphemistically) call challenging.
Many times the spectre of what we might have missed has given me the middle-of-the-night chills. It’s not too cool for the beloved, either, who often finds himself shaken out of his sleep by me suddenly sitting bolt-upright.
“What’s wrong,” he’ll ask with a start. “Nightmare? Burglars?”
Of course, he’s usually drifting back to sleep by the time I start to tell him.
As one of my newspaper’s “final eyes” – when I’m not busy writing my regular column, that is – eggcorns, as they’re called, are among my biggest worries.
They’re those pesky words that are correctly spelt but incorrectly used.
Among my proudest “saves” are restless driving (instead of reckless), and lentils (lintels) – a truly novel description for the horizontal supports across the top of a door or window.
There’s lots of towing (toeing) of lines going on, too – that’s when someone’s not flaunting (flouting) the rules! But my absolute favourite is pre-Madonna. Not, as you may think, some Old Testament person but a temperamental prima donna.
“Giggles aside,” says Mark Peters in Good Magazine,“the point of eggcorn-collecting isn’t to make fun but to shed light on the ways people – including you and I – make meaning out of stuff we know and stuff we’ve heard.
“Mind-bottling”, “jar-dropping” and “lame man’s terms” are all eggcorns – a type of common and somewhat logical language goof named after a misspelling of “acorn”, he explains.
As Language Log’s Geoffrey K Pullum, who’s credited with inventing the term, says: “It would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to material already known. One could say that people should look things up in dictionaries, but what should they look up?”
Some of them make it into the lexicon in their own right – for eggcorns must always make a kind of sense. Piggy-back is one example although the original phrase, apparently, was “pick-a-back”.
Linguist Peters admits: “As a language columnist, writing teacher, and rabid word nut, I hunt for eggcorns in all seasons but have no immunity to laying my own.”
“Review mirrors” was one of my best bloops – but maybe it wasn’t so bad. After all, it’s what drivers do when they check them out, isn’t it?
Want more examples of eggcorns? Check out the Eggcorn Database (yes, there is such a thing!). – Stevie Godson
(A version of this column was first published in the Daily Dispatch)
Image by JD Hancock
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Confessions of a Left-Handed Man …
… An Artist’s Memoir
By Peter Selgin
Reviewed for the New York Journal of Books by Stevie Godson
IT’S no wonder Peter Selgin gleaned the title of this book of memoir from that ultimate Renaissance man Michelangelo—he’s something of a Renaissance man himself.
As Mr. Selgin tells it: “On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, in the central panel of the most famous painting by that other Renaissance lefty, God, floating on a cloud of purple silk, bestows life on the first man, Adam, through the fingertip of his right hand. Adam, however, who has been created in God’s image, accepts the gift with his left hand.
“Michelangelo knew what he was doing. According to the Roman poet Isidorus, a secret blood vessel runs directly from the index finger of the left hand to the human heart—the heart, not the brain. God wished to bypass the intellect and launch his spark straight into the heart of man, who reaches out to lend Him a hand. The left one.”
Like Michelangelo, this artist, author, playwright and academic is even an inventor of sorts—as was his own father, who worked full-time as an electronics inventor—“though I invent completely impractical things out of words and paint, and that only work on paper”.
And work they do, seducing, in the case of his writing, with words which vividly evoke the nostalgia of an American childhood, as well as the regular tribulations of life, as they touch, enlighten and often amuse.
Made up of a collection of beautifully wrought autobiographical essays, Confessions of a Left-handed Man reads as seamlessly as if it were designed as a full-length work.
Peter Selgin was an eccentric child—if you’re a TV viewer, think “The Wonder Years” meets “The Big Bang Theory”—but that was perhaps inevitable, given that his Italian immigrant parents were somewhat idiosyncratic themselves. The books in his home were mainly in his father’s favourite languages—French and German. His beautiful but English-challenged mother’s beloved Italian pulp magazines didn’t count at all. So when in 1971 Mr. Selgin lost his “literary virginity”, he was instantly and completely smitten.
It was hardly surprising: Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm’s racy, heroin-junkie subject matter was heady stuff even for adults in those days, let alone 13-year-old boys:
“To read novels was to run far from home, to hop freight trains and shoot heroin and murder someone’s husband for their life insurance and fall in love with dark angels . . .”
Tawdry as this first love affair with literature may have been, how glad we are that Peter Selgin was tempted into it—and fell head over heels. Without such an addictive beginning, that boy may never have grown up to become a writer of such great substance. — Stevie Godson
Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir by Peter Selgin
ISBN-10: 1609380568
ISBN-13: 9781609380564
244 pages
University of Iowa Press
Peter Selgin is currently the Viebranz Distinguished Writer in Residence at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York. Winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction for his story collection ‘Drowning Lessons’, Selgin has also published a novel, ‘Life Goes to the Movies’, and two works on the fiction writer’s craft, ’179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers’ and ‘By Cunning and Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers’. He has been a winner and three-time semi-finalist at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference.
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Meet Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins
Pic by left-hand
THERE are lots of dos and don’ts when it comes to English but one of the things I love most about it – despite my underserved reputation as a bit of a pedant – is that there are quite a few maybes, too. The art of the matter is, of course, knowing when they’re okay.
Enter Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins.
I’d all but forgotten that delicious phrase and those happy creatures, so I was delighted to come across them again in a throwaway mention by New York Times resident grammar guru Philip B Corbett, who rightly defines them as representing the “rules that aren’t”.
Miss BerthaThistlebottom was an imaginary bad-tempered spinster schoolteacher – many of us have known them, I’m sure – created by Philip B’s predecessor, Theodore M Bernstein.
An intractable stickler for grammar, her hobgoblins were broken grammar “rules”, which were enough to throw her into a froth of fury.
Never split an infinitive, she would insist as she rapped her students over the knuckles with a ruler. And never, ever end a sentence with a preposition. Heaven only knows what she’d make of “verbing”. She certainly wouldn’t google it!
Old Theodore created her for his book Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage, in which he debunks many of the outdated, impractical regulations so beloved of grammar grouches which “lack flexibility and evoke fear, confusion and frustration in writers”.
None is one. In fact, Miss Thistlebottom would be horrified to know that it’s often more than one, too! As The New York Times’ own style guide points out, “despite a widespread assumption that it stands for not one, the word has been construed as a plural (‘not any’) in most contexts for centuries”.
But (and I can picture poor Miss Thistlebottom rolling over in her grave at the start to this sentence) hobgoblins can be very liberating.
As Theodore M himself said: “At the extreme right are the purists, the standpatters, the rigid traditionalists who brook little or no change and who go by the rules — as many rules as they can recall or invent. They may not speak or write brilliantly, but they are grammatically unassailable —except when they forget some rule or misinterpret one … At the extreme left are the permissivists, the heretics who argue that there is no such thing as ‘correct’ usage.”
In the middle, of course, are those of us who, like Theodore, believe that the written word should, above all, be easy to read and understand.
Of course, that’s where the “don’ts” come in and among my personal bugbears are dangling participles.
One phrase I had to rewrite recently – a couple of details changed to protect the guilty – was this beauty:
“Peppered with amusing anecdotes from the legal annals, the judge even plays armchair detective by solving long-forgotten cases.”
I can just see him sitting in that armchair with the words sprinkled all over his head. – Stevie Godson
(A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch)
Comments »Zulu Zulu Golf – New York Journal of Books Review
“‘What does matter is that a lot of people died because I killed them, and I lived. That is what I set out to do and that is what I accomplished . . . to all those people I’ve killed, I am sorry you died, but f**k you all and damn the rest.’”
Read the rest of Stevie Godson’s review
Comments »Apostrophe abusers nabbed
ALL’S well that ends well – almost – in the case of the punctuation-challenged Old Navy T-shirt advertised for sale to US college students last week.
Lets go, it announced, to the horror of perfect punctuators worldwide. And now it’s gone – nabbed by the “Grammar Police” and taken into custody, say the makers, while they work on a corrected version.
Announcing the annual Stamp out Gobbledegook Awards*, (or Soggies, as we like to call them).
Send us your Soggies
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