Cynthia is our project assistant (you will find her sitting in the middle in the picture under About this blog). If you want to read about what it was like for her to arrive in Leiden as a student, read the interview with her on the University of Leiden’s News & Events page.
We have added a new page to the blog; it’s called Features. While our blog posts are usually short and to the point, we occasionally want to post longer pieces. These features can take different formats: they can be a longer book review, an exposé on a public discussion, or an essay arguing a point. If you like to write a feature for us, get in touch!
The first feature, called Bridging Green & Garner, has already been posted, so have a look at it to see what it’s all about. More to follow, we’ll keep you updated in the posts!
Today, I managed to get hold of a copy of the first edition of Walton Burgess’s Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Pronouncing, and Writing the English Language, Corrected, New York. It was published in 1856, and it is, to my knowledge at least, the first American English usage guide. The text itself can be found in Project Gutenberg, and I refer to it in my Introduction to Late Modern English (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009:5; Edinburgh University Press).
I’d be interested to hear if other people have written about it.
The book is also available, in pdf, in Google Books. (Thanks to Robin for this.)
This is to remind those who are interested in attending the Prescription conference here at Leiden in June next year that the deadline for the call for papers is on Sunday (15 December). We have had quite a few very interesting abstracts already, and hope to receive more.
Details as to the conference itself will be published on the LUCL website this week. For now I can say that the conference fee will be €100 (€30 for students) for those who register before 1 May, and €120 (or €40 for students) who register after that date. Registration details will follow shortly.
Is prescriptivism a topic among the general public, one of the target groups of our research? I would say: yes. For reading David Lodge‘s Deaf Sentence (Penguin 2008), I came across this:
… he [son-in-law] thinks you must be silently criticising his English all the time because you’re a Professor of Linguistics.” I laughed at that, because modern linguistics is almost excessively non-prescriptive, but I suppose there might be some truth in it. Peter is from a working-class background, speaks with a perceptible local accent and uses the occasional dialect word … I tried to put him at ease next time I saw him by attacking Lynne Truss’s bestselling book on the apostrophe, but only succeeded in upsetting him – it turned out he is a devout believer in Truss and uses her book as a kind of bible (p. 82).
I would say that there is nothing wrong with being a “devout believer in Truss” (or is there?), but it is interesting to begin with that David Lodge raises the issue to begin with.
Any other examples, references to Truss or Fowler or the like?
I’m working on a publication history of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, along the lines of R.C. Alston’s Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to 1800. For this, I need to have information on the publication of reprints of the book, for all three editions.
On my most recently acquired copy of the book (€1 only, at a local charity book shop), there is the following information:
Hugely popular already in its first year of publication, in other words, and reprinted four times within the next decade, twice with corrections. So my edition dates from 1937, and contains corrections to the first edition. My other copy of the book, which is not in very good shape, is a first edition.
Please help me get more data like this: take your Fowler from its shelf, and let me have what information you find on the flyleaf. Jointly we can produce an overview of the book’s publication history, so it will be possible to assess its popularity.
Thanks to S.W. Leefers for the following: “My copy from 1934 matches the reprints given above”: click on the links to view the images for the 1st edition, 2nd edition, 3rd edition.
One of the things I’m interested in connection with the research for the Bridging the Unbridgeable project is John Honey, the author of Language is Power (1997) and the earlier pamphlet The Language Trap (1983) (as well as several other publications). Honey’s publications were pretty controversial – to put it mildly – and much has been written about them in the public press as well as in reviews of his work. If you search for John Honey in this blog, many references that illustrate this will come up.
One of my colleagues in linguistics assured me that the debate about Honey’s controversial views had died down along when Honey died himself, which, as we now know thanks to Cynthia Lange’s research, must have happened around 2002.
Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
Keeping this blog allowed me to take a measure of the current interest in Honey and his publications, and on the basis of the data provided on search terms to get to the blog I can see that for the past thirty days, 13% of the search terms through which readers accessed the blog included a reference to John Honey or his publications.
Among the search terms there were john honey, john honey language is power, does accent matter john honey, john honey the language trap, john honey prescriptivism, john honey trudgill and john honey language inschool. The most peculiar search term found was john honey is english an african language – I have no idea what happened there. All this confirms, against the assertion of my colleague, that John Honey and his writings are very much a topical issue in research at the moment.
For my own part, I’d like to get in touch with whoever is doing research on Honey, as I’d like to hear what they think about the debate surrounding his publications. Perhaps we can exchange views on this controversial man that will help put him and his work into a more neutral, rather more objective perspective in the light of what was going on in the British educational system during the 1980s and 90s.
Usage guides seem to be a typical English language product. As for Dutch, I was only aware of the existence of Eten, vuren en beuken: keiharde regels voor interpunctie by Wim Daniëls, a Dutch version of Lynne Truss’s Eats shoots and leaves. A not very successful publication, strangely enough, in complete contrast to its English parent.
Until Saturday, when I stumbled upon a booklet called Groter als. Nieuwe regels voor het Nederlands van nu by De Taalclub at an Amnesty International book sale in Leiden, where I live. It takes an amazing approach: presenting 95 pages of alphabetically arranged Dutch usage problems, it discusses the issue, and then takes a decision. In doing so, it offers readers very clear usage advice, of the kind: from now on, both are possible. Examples are the contested word order of auxililiary + past participle or vice versa, which is largely variable in Dutch (is geweest/geweest is), or the grammatical gender of the diminitive for “girl”, meisje, which may be neuter but is intuitively feminine.
But who are De Taalclub? All it says in the introduction is that the proposals presented in Groter als are supported by a large number of people (p. 12). Does anyone know? Has anyone read the book? And for those who cannot read Dutch, is their advice, which I’d like to stress does not represent an “anything goes” approach, acceptable?
NOTICES: The page “Related blogs” has been replace by a blogroll in the sidebar. The page “Language Calendar” has been nested under the page “Events”.
Image from wsj.com
There have been many interesting articles about language use related to the 2012 presidential election in the U.S. Some of my favorites include this recent one on the ‘mass-nounification of vote’ by Ben Zimmer and this one on the use of the phrase ‘razor tight’ by Arnold Zwicky – which has also been noted by Steven Colbert among others.
I’m not a superstitious person. However, for some reason, I wanted to wait until the election results were in before mentioning my favorite 2012 campaign language issue: the punctuation of President Obama’s campaign poster, ‘Forward.’
This potentially-momentum-undermining period/full stop has received quite a bit of media attention. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, linguist George Lakoff is quoted as supporting the conventional correctness (if not effectiveness) of the period in this context – as ‘forward’ is an imperative – while Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty, was more reserved in her assessment. In the same article, a Republican representative referred to the period as ‘sort of a buzz-kill’. Meanwhile, perhaps the most salient and humorous quote related to the offending punctuation mark came from Obama-advisor Austan Goolsbee: ‘[i]t’s like “forward, now stop”’. (One might also note his use of like.) And David Axelrod had this tip for the president’s campaign: ‘[t]ell them just to put two more dots on it, and it’ll seem like it keeps going.’
Image from Politico.com
There have been plenty of note-worthy instances of English usage in the 2012 election cycle in the U.S. – as this N.Y. Times article, which was mentioned on the blog yesterday, demonstrates. However, for me, the use of the period featured in ‘Forward.’ is special. In the past few years, I’ve noticed what seems to be an increasing proliferation of periods and pauses in informal English.
Image from bureauvandam.nl
I was pleased to find some cross-linguistic support for my feeling in a Dutch book by the wonderful cabaret performer and writer Paulien Cornelisse. Her recent book, En Dan Nog Iets, is filled with funny insights into different aspects of everyday language use – some of which were compiled from her columns in the NRC.next, Klare Taal, and the NRC Handelsblad. Cornelisse writes at one point (pp. 44-45) about the trend she has noticed in the speech of 16-year old young women: To scatter. Pauses. Incessantly. Throughout. Their informal speech.
It would be interesting to hear whether readers of this blog have also noticed this possible period/pause trend in writing or speech in English or other languages. I’d also be very pleased to receive information on language use in political campaigns outside the U.S. Specifically, I’m curious about whether the punctuation of political posters attract this degree of attention in other countries as well.
The 2012 election cycle in the U.S. has been rather exhausting for many who have followed it. But, as far as I’m concerned, quotes like this one from campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt (found in the WSJ article mentioned above) make it all worthwhile: ‘Stay on your toes—anything could happen, […] Do not be surprised if we introduce a semicolon.’ A good semicolon joke can compensate for a lot.
Bridging the Unbridgeable 