And then there were 4

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Carmen Ebner

After Grammar Girl’s Top 10 Grammar Myths in 2010 and the Guardian’s 10 grammar rules you can forget three years later, linguist and author Arika Okrent joins the usage problem shortlisting club with her 4 Fake Grammar Rules You Don’t Need to Worry About.

Having read quite a substantial amount about usage problems and debunked grammar myths in the past three years, I have become somewhat used to seeing those so-called old-chestnuts pop up every now and again and being declared no longer problematic. Do not worry about the split infinitive! It’s okay to say to boldly go. This is the sort of English up with which you will not put. No wait. You will not put up with.

While the split infinitive rule and the rule against preposition stranding can be found on all three lists, Okrent debunks two further, so far excluded myths on her list which attracted my attention. According to Okrent, there is nothing wrong about using they as a singular pronoun anymore. Read more on it on our blog here. The second “new” myth debunked by Okrent targets the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb. Ingrid Tieken wrote a blog post on the dying resistance of language pedants against its use, and included a poll which you are more than welcome to fill in.

Hopefully and singular they have been considered usage problems for quite some time now. A quick search in the HUGE database shows that singular they was first discussed in The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected published in 1826, while hopefully turns out to be a more recent usage problem which was first discussed in Wilma R. Ebbitt and David R. Ebbit’s Writer’s Guide and Index to English (1939). Nevertheless, it seems as if those two usage problems are gradually developing into old-chestnuts and joining the ranks of so-called shibboleths of language use such as the split infinitive and preposition stranding. Welcome to the club!

PS: My colleague is planning on reporting about this topic in more detail in our upcoming English Today feature.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Migrants: the language crisis

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Morana Lukač

Our blog posts are almost always devoted to usage guides, their respective authors, usage problems, and our readers’ attitudes towards usage. Sometimes, however, these topics touch on more general social debates. In popular and scholarly publications on English usage from the 1970s onwards it has become quite common to discuss how we talk about people and how our way of referring to a particular group reflects their place in society. Are we referring to air hostesses or cabin crew, actresses or (female) actors, the handicapped or the disabled, immigrants|migrants|refugees|boat people|expats? Anne Curzan devotes an entire chapter of Fixing English to the nonsexist language reform. The Guardian’s David Marsh takes on sexist and racist language in the ninth chapter of For Who the Bell Tolls with the title ‘Political Incorrectness Gone Mad’. (There are many more possible references, these two are lying on my desk.) Another battle is currently being fought against the language of intolerance. Although the migrant crisis is much more tangible than the language migrant crisis, words used surrounding social and political issues are essential when they contribute to people’s actions or lack thereof.

Language used with the purpose of objectifying people is not a new phenomenon and neither is the commentary on it. A research group at Lancaster University conducted a study that focused on the construction of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press over the period 1996—2006. Their findings might have as well been derived from the current news reports and the ongoing discussions. Just as Costas Gabrielatos reports in 2008, people’s migration is still referred to in terms of natural disasters. Tidal waves are threatening Europe, people are ‘swamping’ the UK according to Michael Fallon, Secretary of State for Defence, and a ‘swarm of people’ are jeopardizing the British economy and the country’s high living standards according to the Prime Minister.

Charlotte Taylor, a linguist from the University of Sussex, gives an interesting insight into the usage of different terms for describing human migration from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Whereas the word ‘expat(riate)’ commonly co-occurs with ‘American’ and ‘British’ – ‘immigrants’ are ‘illegal’, ‘undocumented’, ‘Mexican’ and ‘Chinese’. Although chosen over the problematic word ‘(illegal) immigrant’, the word ‘migrant’ is hardly neutral, and its negative semantic prosody seems to be on the rise judging from the current debates.

Some media houses have, however, recognised the linguistic problem and the fact that using particular words might foster social inaction. The Guardian has expressed its concern over the use of the word ‘migrant’, which denies people their humanity and identity, and is also highly unspecific. Al-Jazeera has refused to use the word ‘migrant’ altogether.

Whereas some might view such actions as ‘political correctness gone too far’, it is worth recalling that the same kinds of arguments were voiced when sexism, ageism, and racism were first challenged on a linguistic level.

Francois Gemenne of the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies  (University of Liege) summed it up appropriately in the Al-Jazeera discussion: “The language that we are using is really shaping the public perception of the situation.”

Refugees welcome Arsenal

Arsenal fans show support for refugees #refugeeswelcome

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Early usage guide writer a talkshow host

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

Hardly any news if the information can be readily found on the Internet, but for me it was: Bergen Evans (1904-1978), the author of A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) together with his sister Cornelia , hosted a talkshow on language. I didn’t know they had language talkshows in those days, but Wikipedia writes that Evans received an award in 1957 “for excellence in broadcasting for his CBS TV series The Last Word“.

Here we see him in action, in a TV show sponsored by a cigarette brand, something that would be unheard of today. (Imagine the headline: language talkshow sponsored by cigarette manufacturer!)

The picture is from a webpage on the Evans family, on a site called Totley History Group. On the same page, we see another picture of him, this time with his sister and co-usage-guide writer Cornelia (“Connie”):

The webpage also tells us that it took them seven years to write the book. Isn’t it all amazing! The webpage was also very helpful in determining Cornelia’s lifedates. It shows the family grave, and if I can read the numbers correctly, she lived from 1901-1986 (but please correct me if I’m wrong):

Posted in news, usage guide | Tagged , | 2 Comments

“A cool tool!”

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

This was the verdict of one of the participants in our workshop Hands on HUGE at the SLE conference at Leiden, last week.  And another wanted to know if something similar was available for French too. Well no, I replied, HUGE is unique. But go ahead, and construct something like it yourself. We’d be happy to help. The participants were wonderful: no guidance for dummies needed. Robin Straaijer’s practice searches did very well indeed. So a cool workshop it was, too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Stilman, Burt, Cutts, Howard: who are they?

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

I’ve just finished going through the list of usage guide writers in HUGE, and there are several, in addition to Sayce and Batko, that I just haven’t been able to find any information on. The sources I tried are the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the American National Biography Online, Wikipedia and WorldCat, as well as the prefaces to their books, but no luck! Perhaps readers of the blog can help? If you know more about the authors below, please leave a comment.

Here is the list:

  • Margaret Nicholson, Dictionary of American English Usage (1957)
  • John Bailie and Moyna Kitchin, The Essential Guide to English Usage (1979)
  • Sarah Marriott and Barry Farrell, Chambers Common Errors in English (1992)
  • Kenneth Wilson, Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993)
  • Godfrey Howard, The Good English Guide (1993)
  • Martin Cutts, The Plain English Guide (1995)
  • Anne Stilman, Grammatically Correct (1997)
  • Angela Burt, The A to Z of Correct English (2000)

But … if you don’t know any of these authors, perhaps you know their books? Have you ever consulted any of them? Please let us know if you have.

Posted in usage guide | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Who is Kay Sayce? Who is Ann Batko?

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

I’m trying to find out who Kay Sayce is. I know she (he?) is the author of a usage guide called What not to write: A guide to the dos and dont’s of good English (2006). The book is included in the HUGE database. But I’d like to know more, such as what made her write the book? What else does she do besides writing a book this?

WorldCat lists a book called The Zimbabwe Student’s Handbook (1989) and some other publications. So it appears that she used to be a university lecturer in Zimbabwe. Some other books suggest an agricultural background.

And I have the same question for Ann Batko, who wrote When bad grammar happens to good people  (2004). She appears to be an American writer, but I haven’t come across any other books by her or indeed any information at all. What I did find (in WorldCat) is that the book was translated into Chinese: yet another English usage guide! But this time a more modern one than Bryson’s. (See my post on Bryson in Hungary and China.)

So who are these writers, what makes them experts at the topic they write about? Can anyone help?

Posted in biography, usage guide | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Bryson in Hungary and China

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

WorldCat is a wonderful resource for our kind of work (though not always entirely reliable …). I looked up Bryson’s Troublesome Words (1984), one of “our” usage guides, to find out how popular the book was. I was trying to follow up a comment made by Deborah Cameron in Verbal Hygiene (1995) about Bryson: “… that while [his] travel books did poorly in the US, an earlier book on language had ‘sold rather well'” (p. viii). This earlier book was Troublesome Words.

But WorldCat only lists three other editions or reprints besides the first, published in 1987, 2002 and 2009. BUT it also lists the following three editions:

Bryson in China and Hungary

Apologies for the poor quality of the image: perhaps this may be an incentive to try and access WorldCat yourself … (or click on this link). WorldCat notes that the first two titles are in Chinese, and the third in Hungarian: how wonderful, Bryson translated (twice, in 2008 and 2012) into Chinese, and once into Hungarian, as recently as 2013.

I assume these translations are from the 1984 edition, so this means that an older norm of correctness is actually presented here. Perhaps it doesn’t matter (does it?). But what I’d also like to know is whether anyone knows whether the book came out in other languages as well. I’ve never seen the book translated into Dutch, but what about other languages?

Bill Bryson, can you help us here perhaps?

(Thanks Anikó, for your help.)

Posted in news, usage guide | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sitcoms and language humour

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Viktorija Kostadinova

Those who are familiar with Frasier would certainly recall that language was one of the things Frasier and Niles were nitpicky about. In one episode, Frasier manages to irritate a caller by commenting on his inappropriate use of literally: “I’m sorry Doug, can we just go back a second? You said your mother literally hangs around the house. Well, I suppose it’s a pet peeve of mine but I suppose what you mean is that she figuratively “hangs around” the house. To literally hang around the house you’d have to be a bat or spider monkey”. (You can read the entire dialogue here.) This does not end well as Doug gets annoyed and hangs up on Frasier after calling him ‘an intellectual pinhead with a superiority complex’.

The use of language jokes is not new in film and television productions. Nonstandard language, dialectal features, particular intonation patterns or peculiar ways of saying things are resources writers and actors tap into in order to depict a particular character or quality. Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady is a very good example. This is not a recent practice; playwrights and novelists have always made use of dialectal features for various effects, including humour. In the case of Frasier, for instance, his language nitpicking goes hand in hand with his pretentious demeanour. The use of nonstandard forms in literary productions is actually one way in which historical sociolinguists can study language variation in the past.

What I find particularly interesting in the scene from Frasier, however, is that the nonliteral use of literally is just one part of the reference to current language use. What is referred to here is also the practice of correcting other people’s grammar and the social value assigned to it. We see an instance of what Anne Curzan calls prescriptivist metadiscourses, or ‘conversations about the conversations about language’. In one episode of Friends, for instance, Ross and Chandler try to help Joey learn how to repel women; the advice Ross (a paleontology PhD) gives Joey, based on his personal experience, is that girls don’t like it when guys correct their grammar (which, in the context of Friends, is very much a ‘Ross’ thing to do).

It is also peculiar that other situations in which such jokes are made mostly involve the same examples: literally and whom seem to be the favourites. Parks and Recreation made the nonliteral, and exaggerated, use of literally one of Chris Traeger’s traits as an extreme optimist. In Archer, for instance, one of the running jokes is the confusion over literally and figuratively, where characters are constantly correcting their uses of literally to a point of comical confusion about what exactly is being said.

What we can learn from looking at these examples is not only how the use of literally is changing, but also how speakers react to it. Sitcoms, very much like literary productions, provide insights into the shared language norms of a community and the social value of particular language variants.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Just out: the A2P articles on Prescriptivism

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

I’m very proud to be able to announce the first substantial publication from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project: the papers from the workshop that preceded the Leiden Prescription conference, called Attitudes to Prescriptivism (A2P), organised by Robin Straaijer, Carmen Ebner, Viktorija Kostadinova and Morana Lukač.

Though not quite a special issue on the subject, the most recent issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development includes a substantial number of papers as a set devoted to “our” topic, all of them edited by Robin Straaijer:

Attitudes to prescriptivism: an introduction – Robin Straaijer

The role of linguists in metalinguistic discourse in modern Lithuania – Giedrius Tamaševičius

Prescriptivism and French L2 instruction – Suzie Beaulieu

The relationship between use and perception: the case of Catalan variants of a subject coreferential with an antecedent – Joan Costa Carreras

Folk linguistics and language teaching education. A case study in an Italian secondary school – Matteo Santipolo

Language guardian BBC? Investigating the BBC’s language advice in its 2003 News Styleguide – Carmen Ebner

Linguistic prescriptivism in letters to the editor – Morana Lukač

Congratulations all, and especially Robin (as well as Emily, who contributed to the final stages of this editorial project). And read them all!

Posted in events, news | 1 Comment

Linguistic Girl Power

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Carmen Ebner

We have dealt with numerous language issues such as the oddly misplaced apostrophe, the dangling participle and the new “like” on our blog, but what interests me in particular are the social factors that may or may not pull the strings behind the scene. Does education influence your attitudes towards the acceptability of the often preceived misuse of literally? Do younger people, described by Naomi S. Baron as the Whatever Generation, really accept anything when it comes to language usage? What role does gender play?

Gretchen McCulloch wrote an interesting piece on the role of the latter in language change arguing that young women “are the real language disruptors”. Sociolinguistics studies, such as the ones conducted by William Labov, have shown that women are the driving force behind linguistic innovation. Be it uptalk or the use of like. Women have often been blamed for these language disruptions; a term which I would like to see replaced by the more positively connotated innovations.

Rosie the Riveter

In her article, McCulloch indicates the role young women play in language innovation. What strikes me as intriguing, however, is that women, as opposed to men, have also been found to prefer standard language forms over non-standard forms, as shown by Trudgill (1974) in his study of English in Norwich. It seems as if women play a crucial linguistic role, not only when it comes to language innovation, but also to language maintenance. Read McCulloch’s article and let us have your thoughts on this subject.

Posted in usage features | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment