It's National Grammar Day!
Apparently created by the folks who brought us the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG).
The National Grammar Day site initially looked annoyingly prescriptivist to me, but their Top Ten Grammar Myths suggests that they're more flexible than I had given them credit for.
I continue to be intrigued by the differences between British/American English and Indian English.
I also wonder regularly if some of the grammatical problems I see in submissions written by South Asian writers are merely examples of Indian English. Some day, I should sit down and read more published South Asian writing to try and get a better feel for Indian English.
(I've read a few novels by South Asian authors, but not enough for a representative sample yet.)
See also: the online Dictionary of Indian English; 108 varieties of Indian English; a 2004 paper from Language in India on linguistic majority-minority relations in India; and a page of audio pronunciations of English words in New Delhi.
That last, btw, is from the extremely useful-looking Accents of English from around the world website. I hope to spend some time poking around there and listening to pronunciations in the future.
I was recently discussing various words for "mother," and it occurred to me that words/spellings like mama, momma, mom, ma, and mamma have different connotations to me.
MW11 lists them all as synonyms or spelling variants, and sometimes I don't especially notice any difference between them. But if I'm paying close attention, I expect them to be used by different kinds of people. (Especially in prose fiction; in speech, I can't tell the difference between the "mama" variants.)
I think the connotations are more obvious with other variations; for example, not many adults use "mommy" except when talking to small kids; terms from other languages ("amma," "mère," "maman," "madre," etc), when used in English prose, also have particular connotations; "mammy" has very specific connotations in the US; "mum" and "mummy" and "mam" and "mater" are mostly British; etc.
But I think even for the quasi-synonymous group of American English terms I listed in the first paragraph above, the connotations vary by person, at least to some degree; for example, I've seen a story's narrator indicate that "mom" is a word used only by fairly young people, which doesn't match my experience.
So I'm curious: what different connotations, if any, do these words (and others like them) have for you? Are the connotations mostly about age, about class, about geographical region, about culture? Or is there no particular pattern?
In the past few days, I keep seeing people misuse the phrase "that of" in the same kind of way, apparently for emphasis. Like this:
* My primary concern is that of earthquakes.
Where the speaker meant to say that their primary concern is earthquakes themselves; but that's not what "that of earthquakes" means.
Here's one possible way to test whether you've incorrectly put "that of" in a sentence that has the structure "My A is that of B":
The problem with the above test is that there are some borderline-inappropriate uses that pass the test:
* My subject tonight is that of grammar.
* The company's core business is that of computer graphics.
In both cases, you could argue that the sentence is correct, and both cases sort of pass my above test: "My subject tonight is the subject of grammar"; "The company's core business is the business of computer graphics." But in both cases, the "that of" is redundant.
So here's another test, probably better: just cut "that of" from the sentence, and see if the sentence still makes sense; if it does, then you were probably misusing "that of."
I think there's a subject/object confusion at the heart of the misuse; in the standard use of "that of," the B in the phrase "that of B" is a person or organization that owns (or to which can be attributed) the thing named by A.
Here's an example of how to use "that of" correctly:
His premise was that of Newton: that matter and energy are distinct.
In other words, his premise was the same as Newton's premise.
I imagine this is yet another case where my prescriptivist side will have to learn to live with the new phrasing; I suspect it's becoming more widespread over time. But it bugs me.
Of course, for all I know, the usage I'm objecting to has been around longer than I have; I don't currently have any easy way to check on that. If any of you know, let me know.
(Wrote this back in March, but neglected to post it.)
Is there a name for the particular kind of term-shortening where a term or phrase is abbreviated to its first component, even if that's not the important/meaningful part?
The most common example of this that I see is "Social," short for "Social Security number." As in, "What's your Social?" An abbreviation that includes the words "Security" or "Number" seems like it would make a lot more sense.
I've also heard "Microsoft" for "Microsoft Word." As in, "I wrote it in Microsoft" or "I fired up Microsoft and wrote a letter."
And "Internet" for "Internet Explorer," though that's arguably a different kind of thing; lots of people don't really understand the concept of a web browser.
Another common one: "wiki" for "Wikipedia." Again arguably a different kind of thing; many people don't know what a wiki is, and aren't aware that there are others.
It also seems to me that the "-gate" suffix, meaning "scandal," is somehow related, though that connection may just be in my head. But it does share the idea of extracting part of a term ("Watergate") and using it as shorthand for a much larger meaning.
I suppose these are all more or less synecdoche. One could argue that "society" for "high society" and "the throne" for "the king/queen" are just as strange; they've just been around long enough to be commonly accepted.
Still, my gut feeling is that there's something more/different going on here than just garden-variety synecdoche.
Over at Language Log last week, linguist Geoffrey Pullum posted an entry titled "Yale sluts and Princeton philosophers," about a threatened lawsuit over a Yale fraternity's writing a sign saying "WE LOVE YALE SLUTS."
Pullum's entry is primarily a fairly standard "damn those PC people who are trying to stop our precious freedom of speech!" post, thinly disguised as being of linguistic relevance through a couple of arguments about the use of language. And, y'know, I agree with him that our society has too many lawsuits. And he later retracted some of the political stuff that I found most annoying about his post, after he found out more about the situation; also, he linked to Jane Achson's subsequent guest entry that makes some compelling points about harassment. It's worth noting that there have always been legal limits on Americans' freedom of speech.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about; this is my language blog, not my political blog. So what I want to say here is that in that particular entry, Pullum (whom I normally have a fair bit of respect for) was so focused on making his political point that he fumbled a couple of language-related arguments. And the reason I want to talk about those arguments is that they're arguments that I see pretty often; so my point here is not primarily that Pullum shouldn't have made these arguments, but rather that nobody should be making them.
This got very long, so I'm continuing after the jump.
A USA Today blog entry from Kevin Maney, dated 5 April 2006, has the following headline:
Apple and XP: Has hell frozeth shut?
I'm wondering whether this was an intentional mangling of the more traditional "Has hell frozen over?", or whether the author just got confused.
But either way, I suspect it's a good example of people's tendency to use "-eth" and "-est" endings without really understanding how they were used in older versions of English.
"-eth" or "-th" was for the third person singular present tense. "-est" was for the second-person singular.
So: "I freeze"; "thou freezest"; "he freezeth." But: "I froze"; "you froze"; "she froze".
"Frozeth" just plain isn't a word. And "more than that, it never was one!" (he paraphrased randomly).
I always had a vague idea that "distaff" referred to a woman specifically in the role of wife. Turns out it just means female more generally, or specifically maternal. MW11 gives the example phrase "distaff executives"; okay, if it just means "female" then that makes sense, but it sounds somehow condescending to me.
As does the usage that made me go look the word up in the first place:
A distaff trio sued Scott's firm in a Bay State court[....]
--"Scott's Wal-Mart Told To Stock Morning-After Pill," article in Forbes, 15 February 2006
A WisCon panel description recently included the phrase "The antidistaff companions and compatriots of the Lady Poetesses[....]" From context it was clear that "antidistaff" meant "male" rather than "anti-female."
"Judge Alito has been a judicious judge and my confidence he will be a judicial justice is based on my personal knowledge of the man and my belief his judicial temperament is rooted in his personal character," said Yale law professor Anthony Kronman, who said he was a Democrat.
--"Alito Hearing Over, Vote Set for Next Week," by Liza Porteus, Fox News, Friday, January 13, 2006
I can't tell whether that's a typo, a joke, a misquote, or something else. I'm guessing that Kronman meant to say Alito would be a judicious justice; "judicial justice" is something of a tautology. On the other hand, I can imagine that Kronman said the line as quoted, intending some less-common meaning of "judicial." Such as: "arising from a judgment of God." (MW11, def. 4). Or, more seriously, I can imagine he might have meant something like "suited to the job of judging"--though perhaps "magisterial" would be a better fit in that case.
For the Lord shall shod us in hooves of bronze and horns of iron[...]
"shod" is actually the past tense of "shoe," so "shall shod" is a misuse.
