Language Trainers Blog

Although in theory the English that you use (whether American or British) shouldn’t matter too much these days - there is a lot of crossover, and in general the dialects are mutually intelligible - there are still debates about which is ‘better’ to use. Individuals, organisations, and even countries have their preferences, which may or may not be politically based.

I think, in general, the trend is moving from a preference for the British form, and now people seem to be leaning towards Americanised English in non-English speaking countries. This is unsurprising, as American media is internationally pervasive, via Internet, print, and film.

Living in China, I have seen that the more traditional texts, more common in smaller towns and cities, are based on British English. New books often focus on American English. Perhaps American English is being associated with being more modern (it’s certainly sometimes simpler).

From a post by Harold Raley in the Galveston Daily News:

Decades earlier, while toying with the idea of teaching English in Spain, the Spanish let me know, politely to be sure, that they — and most Europeans — preferred the British variety. Now, however, I was told it didn’t matter. Either version was fine with them. English was English.

It took many years for American English to achieve parity, and in certain regions — Africa, for instance — it still has a long way to go. But in certain ways it appears to be on the way to becoming the favored version.

In my work as an editor, a number of writers — from Canada and India — have asked me to “Americanize” their British expressions and spelling in their book manuscripts. Unlike the English language schools in Spain that rejected my application decades ago, some now actively recruit Americans.

Native speakers almost always choose the way they were brought up as ‘right’, but, if you are a non-native speaker of English: which English do you prefer?

I posted this on the Australian and New Zealand LT blog, with reference to my New Zealand accent, but I thought it was too funny not to post here as well. I’ve had some problems with voice recognition myself, but not as many as you’d think. Do any of you have strong regional accents that computers have trouble understanding?

What do you think are the most beautiful words in the English language? Does the definition include what they look like, how they sound, and what they mean? Well, someone more qualified than I am has made a list of the 100 most beautiful words in the English language. Robert Beard, long-time dictionary maker, poet, and word-of-the-day-writer, has created a list of what he thinks are the most beautiful-sounding words in the language. Their meaning may not be as pleasant (e.g. nemesis, woebegone), and some of them I hadn’t even heard of (e.g. propinquity (an inclination), imbrication (overlapping and forming a pattern)), but it’s an interesting read.

Here are some of my favourites:

diaphanous (filmy)
effervescent (bubbly)
inglenook (a cosy nook by the hearth)
mellifluous (sweet sounding)
murmurous (murmuring)
susurrous (whispering, hissing)
tintinnabulation (tinkling)

For the full list, have a look at alphaDictionary. What’s your favourite?

In what surely is a sign of the imminent downfall of modern society, Sarah Palin’s non-word refudiate has been named New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2010. Apparently, the combination of refute and repudiate has a slightly different meaning from either word, as the Oxford University Press blog says:

From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used “refudiate,” we have concluded that neither “refute” nor “repudiate” seems consistently precise, and that “refudiate” more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of “reject.”

Although Palin is likely to be forever branded with the coinage of “refudiate,” she is by no means the first person to speak or write it—just as Warren G. Harding was not the first to use the word normalcy when he ran his 1920 presidential campaign under the slogan “A return to normalcy.” But Harding was a political celebrity, as Palin is now, and his critics spared no ridicule for his supposedly ignorant mangling of the correct word “normality.”

Just because it has been named the word of the year (and, granted, a lot of people did talk about it), and it has a definition (refudiate verb used loosely to mean “reject” [origin — blend of refute and repudiate]), it doesn’t mean it will be added to the dictionary any time soon. Check back in a few years’ time, though!

The word slang has misty origins, but before being used to talk about the jargon of particular professions, social, or regional groups, it originally meant ‘special vocabulary of tramps or thieves’.

Slang still forms an integral part of the criminal subculture, and it only takes me listening to one or two hardcore rap songs to realise it (if I can make it through, of course). Terms for guns, drugs, women, cars - I only know the ones that have become mainstream. And this is sort of the point: slang keeps outsiders from knowing what’s going on. Whether it be police, spies, passersby; if outsiders are in the dark, insiders are safer.

Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn wrote a post on the New Yorker blog about a book called “The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699” (originally “A Dictionary of the Beggars and Gypsies Cant”), which, obviously, is a pretty old language resource. Although all the terms mentioned are pretty much incomprehensible these days, the beauty of them is that they were pretty much incomprehensible in their own time, too.

From the article:

You don’t have to know that “fag the bloss” is “bang the wench” to appreciate that it sounds kind of raunchy: we seem to reserve certain sounds for our feelings of disgust. [...] “Academy” was a university, but also a “Bawdy-house.” A “Blunderbuss” was a dunce and a “buffle-head” not far from it (much like “pea-goose”). Just imagine eating scrambled “cackling-farts” for breakfast! Rum, always good in a drink, was an all-around endorsement (good or fine): a “rum-beck” was a justice of the peace, and a “rum-blower” was a handsome mistress. “Blobber-lippd” implied your mouth was bordered by a thick pair, possibly so protuberant that they hung down or turned right over (yuck).

I wonder if a published version of Urban Dictionary will hold the same fascination for future generations?

Full article: The New Yorker.

For various reasons, I suspended my language lessons over the summer. I had professional and personal circumstances that wouldn’t allow me to carry on with the same teacher, but luckily I have recently been able to reunite with her and try to pick up where I left off.

Unfortunately, picking up where you left off sometimes isn’t that easy when it comes to language (and many other pursuits that involve practice or study). I hadn’t been maintaining the same level of exposure and practice with Chinese, and it took me a couple of lessons to pick up steam again. My teacher allowed me a week or two to use basic vocabulary in my output, before she started putting a bit more pressure on me.

Apparently I am doing fairly well, though, as she told me that she has had students who, after a break of a few weeks or months, have returned to her with a vocabulary containing not much more than ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’. I could still make full (and comprehensible) sentences. Of course, my break still involved speaking a bit of Chinese to people, and trying to read and listen a bit. I didn’t go back to a country that speaks an entirely different language.

So, if I ever have to have another break from proper classes, I’ll definitely try to keep exposing myself to more Chinese, so that my inevitable backward slide is down a slightly shallower slope. I don’t want to start again as a total beginner.

In what would have made excellent TV viewing (in my mind, at least), Channel 4 has ruled out the use of a weak expletive on popular word game show Countdown. When presented with the letters DTCEIASH and F, 18 year old Cambridge University student Jack Hurst came up with the longest word he could: shitface.

Despite the support of Dictionary Corner’s Susie Dent (who “told presenter Jeff Stelling the term, slang for “rude or obnoxious person” or “drunk person”, would have been acceptable.”), Channel 4 bigwigs ruled that the word was inappropriate for a daytime audience. The set of letters was cut from the show and a new set drawn.

From the Guardian:

At least Hurst, 18, can take comfort in his previous performances: the maths student won eight shows during his stint on the programme last month. He also achieved the highest ever total for the word “octochamp”, although it is likely to be his latest performance that will be most lauded by his fellow Cambridge students.

It was also noted that many people (including myself) wondered why he didn’t use that last D to make the word shitfaced.

Full article: Guardian.

I always thought my English vocabulary was fairly extensive, so it’s not often that I hear new words and think ‘why haven’t I heard of that word before?’ (this doesn’t count for technical and regional terms, of course).

Recently, though, I had trouble understanding the concept that my teacher was trying to explain to me. So I looked up the word in my trusty dictionary, and it came back with the translation ‘convene, convoke’. Convene is fine. Convoke was a different story. Revoke and invoke, I’d heard of, but convoke was new to me (it means to call together to a meeting, in a sort of formal way). Even after learning its meaning, I still find that ‘a meeting of the delegates was convoked‘ sounds really weird.

After seeing so many brilliant uses of archaic or obscure English terms used by speakers of other languages, this shouldn’t really surprise me. Often, translations in dictionaries are formal and unnatural-sounding, so I suppose it’s not completely out of the question that people who use dictionary terms might even be unintelligible to native speakers.

Even though I will probably never utter the word convoke again, I think I will just take these moments as opportunities to both improve my target language, and my native one.