Language Trainers Blog

I recently read a great article from the Boston Globe about the demise of the simple you’re welcome. Granted, the author possibly has even higher expectations of people than I do, but she brings up a good point.  When did it become the norm for people to reply to a genuine thank you with a flippant no problem, or an equally dismissive no worries (or the Scottish nae bother)?

Etiquette is changing faster than I’d like these days, but I suppose I will admit that you’re welcome seems a bit formal for things passing someone a coffee cup.  In business dealings and customer service sectors, though, I think it’s getting bad.  I don’t want to be served by a waiter who says ‘no prob‘ when I thank him for his service.  Nor do I want to do business with someone who behaves as if we are close friends.

I think the worst for me though is that I communicate with people a lot over IM (instant messaging) channels, and instead of you’re welcome, or even no problem, I get the short form np.  Oh, that was np, but it’s clearly a big p for me to write out full words.  But anyway, that’s an entirely different rant.

Do you feel the same way about the decline of good manners?  Or is it a natural progression towards general casualness in human interactions?

My humblest apologies for choosing such a whiny topic for my last post of the year! My genuine thanks for reading; I hope it wasn’t too much of a problem!

Full article: Boston Globe.
Image: Marlie Kanoi.

Speaking of swearing, a study published last month has shown that it might actually be good for us.

Although swearing is looked down upon in polite company, researchers have begun to investigate why it’s such a common response to hurting ourselves.  A study that asked college students to hold their hands in icy cold water found that those who were told to repeat an expletive of their choice could withstand the pain longer than those who chanted a neutral word.

One suggested reason for this is that swearing is related to a ‘fight or flight‘ reflex triggered deep in the brain, and may be associated with startling or attempting to intimidate an attacker.

But cursing is more than just aggression, explains Timothy Jay, a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has studied our use of profanities for the past 35 years. “It allows us to vent or express anger, joy, surprise, happiness,” he remarks. “It’s like the horn on your car, you can do a lot of things with that, it’s built into you.”

In extreme cases, the hotline to the brain’s emotional system can make swearing harmful, as when road rage escalates into physical violence. But when the hammer slips, some well-chosen swearwords might help dull the pain.

I am quite fond of the car horn analogy.  A personal theory, too, is that we need to get attention when we’re injured.  At the very least, letting people know you’ve just stubbed your toe might get a sympathetic ‘awww’, which always makes you feel a little better.

A caveat mentioned in the article is that the more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.

Full article from Scientific American.

Besides the most basic terms in a language (greetings, numbers, how to say ‘yes’ and ‘no), swear words seem to be some of the most readily-learned phrases in foreign languages.  Just the other night, I met a Mandarin speaker whose Cantonese lexicon contained the words for ‘hello’, the numbers 1 to 10, and various ways to insult other people.  He was in the army in a Cantonese-speaking province, so this isn’t entirely unsurprising.

Why is there such a need to learn these words?  Perhaps it’s because learning other languages is sometimes so frustrating that learners want to express this.  I think it’s more that, especially in groups of younger people, swearing in a casual way is a way to connect with others, show that you are comfortable with them, and have a bit of a laugh.  As long as you choose your audience well, and don’t have conversations consisting entirely of swear words and rude gestures, I think it’s acceptable.

I’ve also found that people sometimes swear in other languages when it is inappropriate to swear in their own.  Even though many people know what the words mean, they seem to lose their potency in other languages.  For example, I’ve heard quite a few people say the German word Scheiße (scheisse) instead of the English counterpart, shit.  This has happened in social situations as well as in the workplace.

For a user-generated list of foreign swear words and phrases, have a look at YouSwear.com.  They have phrases in languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and they even have a Swear Phrase of the Day.

Do you have any other examples of people’s fantastic swearing abilities in foreign languages?

Image from Sianuska at Etsy.com.  ‘Old Lady’ is a foreign language sometimes, surely?

I found an article on Examiner.com giving some great advice for would-be travellers to non-English speaking countries.  It is obviously aimed at American natives, but pretty much all of the advice can be transferred to English speakers from other places, or speakers of any language going to a country where they speak a different one.  It even works for people who speak the same language, but different regional variations.  For example, I don’t use the term red eye to talk about a late-night flight, either.

If you are travelling in the near future, a lot of this advice would be useful to bear in mind:

* Make every attempt to at least acknowledge the mother language. Learning to say even a few words will indicate that you respect the native tongue.

* Do not use expressions or words that have recently come into the vernacular in the United States. For instance, saying you are “out of the loop” will probably put you there if you use that expression with a colleague in Colombia and letting someone know you are giving him or her a “head’s up” will probably just cause confusion in Korea.

* Watch your references. Certain words Americans say every day in conversation may be too abstract for a foreign audience. Almost all of us who were raised stateside are familiar with taking “a red eye” but there probably isn’t a single soul in Saigon who knows that expression to mean that he or she will be flying during the night.

* Repeat yourself. Being redundant may be the only way to ensure you are getting your message across so keep in mind that restating a concept by choosing other words to offer the same information twice is not only OK, it is almost always a good idea.

* Avoid speaking in a monotone. By raising or lowering your voice to make a point you may be helping to make yourself understood to someone whose command of English isn’t the same as your own.

* Watch your audience for any indication that you have lost them. For instance, if you are confronted by a glazed expression or two, you may want to back up and then slow down to keep communication flowing.

* Don’t continue talking, wondering if you have made yourself perfectly clear. Instead, ask directly if you sense you have lost your thread of communication and don’t take yes for an answer. Instead, dig deep by asking pertinent questions relating to the topic to make sure you are being understood.

+ Don’t be fooled by nods or smiles; these may not be signs that what you are saying has been understood, but rather that you are talking to a polite, if very confused, audience.

The original post also has links to advice for behaving acceptably in specific countries.  Check it out.

I’ve always found it interesting that some words and phrases, even when they have almost identical dictionary definitions, are interpreted differently by different groups of people, and even different individuals.  Sometimes I am sure that a word means a certain thing (because it’s always been used that way amongst people I associate with), and am very surprised to hear that it has different or alternative definitions in the dictionary.

Before I get carried away, I’d like to talk about an interesting Linguaphiles discussion I saw on LiveJournal yesterday.  The original poster asked people what they thought the difference was between a first language, a mother tongue, and being a native speaker.  According to narcissus1, and the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary:

… mother tongue and first language both refer to the language you acquire as a child and are most fluent in. When we use these words in everyday speech, do they include any connotations of race, culture and background? For example, if a person is Japanese does it necessarily mean that their mother tongue is Japanese? What about second and third (etc) generation immigrants who have lost the language of their parents?

Another question is, who do you call a ‘native speaker’? Again, OAL says that a native speaker is one who speaks a language as a first language. I’ve always considered English as my first language simply because it’s the language I’m most fluent in. But in my country English functions as a second language, and as a result I’ve never considered myself a native speaker of English.

A lot of the commenters seem to think that mother tongue is different from the other two, in that it carries the idea of culture and ethnicity.  I tend to agree with this, and I think that’s why it’s not commonly used as an official term any more.

I consider myself a native speaker of English, and wouldn’t hesitate to say that it was my first language.  I would say that Cantonese was my mother tongue, as my parents speak it, and I spoke it when I was very young.  My Cantonese is not very good nowadays, but should I then consider it a second language?  Was Cantonese equally my first language?

Read the full discussion for more interesting interpretations.  I’d also be interested to hear about other people’s views and experiences.

In just the last week, I’ve been involved in two separate mix-ups using the words food and foot.

In the first instance, my friend and I were heading to a bar she recommended. On the list of positives about the place was what I heard as baby food. When I obviously had no idea what she was talking about, or why you would want baby food in a bar, we discussed it further, which included some amusing miming. It turns out that baby-foot is what they call table football, or foosball, in France (and other places). I learned something new.

In the second instance, I taught a Business English class where I introduced the phrase to eat your own dog food. This is predominantly used in the IT industry, and is used when a company uses its own product in-house, before the latest version is released to the public. The practice of dogfooding has its benefits and drawbacks. Anyway, after the class, which told the story of the dog food company whose advertising campaign led to the phrase, I received some homework which repeatedly used the term dogfooting. I can’t work out what she thinks eating your own dog foot involves, but it doesn’t sound fun. Maybe it’s putting your foot in your mouth, but even worse?

I’m not sure whether the problem is with the interchangeable /d/ and /t/ sounds, the long and short versions of oo, or some combination of the two. I know with the first example, it was probably a combination of mispronunciation and my trying to hear a phrase that sounded familiar (but didn’t make sense). Just looking at the two words, you would think they would rhyme, but they don’t. It’s no wonder non-native speakers get confused.

I’m not really a fan of acronyms like LOL (laugh[ing] out loud), so I tend to stick with the written representations of laughing sounds, and the ones I usually use are hahaha (that’s funny!), hehehe (that’s kind of mean!), and hee (cute! squee!).

I’ve always thought the Spanish versions - jajaja, jejeje, jijiji - were really cute, but I have a tendency to read jajaja in a German accent, so it says ‘yes yes yes’.

Here are a few more ways* to show your humour in other languages:

Chinese
哈哈 / ha ha
嘿嘿 / hei hei
呵呵 / he he

Russian
ха-ха-ха (hahaha)
хи-хи (heehee)

Malaysian
kahkahkah (hahaha from comic books)

Turkish

eki eki (used in comics, as the older way of laughing)
muhaha (evil laughter)
nihaha (evil laughter)
puhaha, uhaha, zuhaha (used if something’s really funny)

German
hnhnhn, hmhmhm, chrchrchr (giggle)

My favourite at the moment is a Chinese coworker’s use of hohoho.  I don’t think she really means to sound like Santa Claus, but it brightens my day.

*Many of these examples are from WordReference Forums.

You’d think that the word ‘billion’ would mean the same to all English speakers, but, in fact, the two different meanings of the word are vastly different - 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 (one thousand million and one million million).  The first is the current ‘global’ understanding of the word (using the short scale, sometimes known as American usage), and the second, much larger number, uses the long scale or British usage.  As the numbers get bigger, the difference between them gets larger, as the short scale increases by thousands (e.g. a trillion is a thousand billions, or 10¹²), and the long scale increases by millions (e.g. a trillion is a million (long scale) billions, or 10¹⁸).

Most countries use the short scale, these days, but many still use the long scale.  Some countries, such as France and England, have used both scales at different times in history, so it’s important to check sources if you ever come across billion, trillion, etc in older publications.

The French word billion, German Billion; Dutch biljoen; Swedish biljon; Finnish biljoona; Danish billion; Spanish billón and the Portuguese word bilião all refer to 10¹², being long scale terms. Therefore, each of these words translates to the modern English word: “trillion” (10¹² in the short scale), and not “billion” (10⁹ in the short scale).

On the other hand, the Brazilian Portuguese word bilhão (note the alternate spelling to the European Portuguese variant) and the Welsh word biliwn both refer to 10⁹, being short scale terms. Each of these words translates to the English word “billion” (10⁹ in the short scale).  [Wikipedia.]

I think the best thing to do if you have to communicate in such large numbers is just to use the numerals instead of the words!

When I first heard the song It’s All About the Benjamins by Puff Daddy and friends, I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about.  This was back in 1997, though, when American slang wasn’t quite as widespread as it is now.  These days, I’m quite aware that benjamin* refers to a US $100 note, because of the portrait of former president and inventor Benjamin Franklin.  It’s more commonly used in hip-hop circles than everyday English, and has been mentioned on film (2002 film All About the Benjamins) and TV.  Puff Daddy (aka P Diddy, aka Sean Combs) has been credited with the first use of this term.  He even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary:

The OED lists him (as S. Combs) as the first citation (1994) for the word in the line “My pockets swell to the rim with Benjamins.” (from A.Word.A.Day.)

Benjamin* has also been used for many years in some European cultures to mean the youngest person in a family or group.  “The benjamin of the family”, “le benjamin de la famille” (French), “el benjamin de la familia” (Spanish), and “der Benjamin der Familie” (German) all mean the youngest child of a family.  It’s an older term that refers to the biblical Benjamin, who was the youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons.

*A word that is derived from the name of a particular person is called an eponym.

When I was reading about UK councils banning confusing jargon, I came across a discussion board thread which asked readers which terms they would to see “thrown into the linguistic trash can“.

An interesting post noted that the term Third World country was actually a leftover from the Cold War.  I’m not all that familiar with war terms, but this surprised me.

During the Cold War, the world was simplistically divided into three parts.  The First World was made up of NATO allies (the capitalist Western bloc), the Second World comprised the countries aligned with the communist Soviet Eastern bloc, and the Third World was essentially made up of all the rest.  The Third World, or unaligned countries at the time, were generally developing countries, although Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland were notable exceptions.  They remained neutral during the war, but weren’t considered undeveloped.

Here’s a general picture:

These days, the Third World tends to refer strictly to developing countries, no matter what their political leanings.  The First World now refers to highly developed countries with large incomes.  Both terms are difficult to define, and I wonder how useful they really are.  The term Fourth World has also arisen, to describe nomadic or nationless states or groups who are politically powerless.

Note: There is also the theory floating around that the Third World (speaking of Africa, mostly) came about following the terms Old World (Europe), and New World (the Americas).  These were terms used to match the order in which European explorers discovered the world.  It’s not an accurate origin, but it’s still somewhat logical, and probably less politically charged!