Language Trainers Blog

To coincide with Plain English Day last Friday, (December 9th) the Plain English Campaign announced the latest winners of its annual “Golden Bull Awards”. Each year, the campaign presents awards for the best and worst examples of English.

This year’s winners include the Met Office for using phrases such as “overnight tonight” and “temperatures really struggling,” and my personal favourite, Flybe, for this gem in a letter sent to a customer:

I believe that what has not been explained to you is that it is not a £4.50 card charge, in the process of booking a flight, you will have a booking fee which is for a Credit Card (return journey), booking fee £4.50 and Credit Card supplement £1.00, for a (one way) booking fee £5.50 and credit card charge £1.00.

Concerning a Debit Card (return flight) booking fee £4.50 and there is no additional fee for a Debit Card. for a (one way) booking fee £5.50 with no additional Debit Card charge. If you which any more details about our charges, you can call our call centre on 0871 700 2000 / 01392 268500 (from outside the UK) (calls cost 10p per minute; calls from mobiles and some networks may be higher) and one of our agent will be happy to assist you.

Regards

Flybe

Should you wish to use some nonsensical English, the website also has a Gobbledygook Generator, which is fun!

I always enjoy visiting Engrish Funny for some translation laughs. This image, from sister site Failbook, presents some interesting cultural differences.

In English, the  π symbol (meaning the number) is of course pronounced as “pi,” thus making the phrase on the t-shirt amusing to English speakers. However,  the Greek letter π is “p,” with the pronunciation the same. It’s also pronounced as “p” in French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Bulgarian and Portuguese. It seems that English is the odd one out in the way we pronounce it.

Do you know of any other languages that pronounce π “pi”?

A while ago, I wrote about the SarcMark, a proposed new punctuation mark to indicate that someone was being sarcastic. My conclusion was that people just wouldn’t get it. They would have to have it explained to them, and I sincerely doubt that someone would want to pay for the privilege of using it.

The latest attempt at expressing sarcasm in a universal form is Sartalics. Unlike regular Italics, Sartalics lean to the left to indicate that someone is being sarcastic. A team of design interns decided that it was time to introduce an easily-recognisable way to demonstrate sarcasm via Twitter, Facebook, and any text media. They hope to encourage, via a http://sartalics.com/, major companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube, Apple and Tumblr, to enable people to lean their words the other way.

The designers want Sartalics to be able to be used with any font, instead of it being its own font. I give them credit for their efforts, and I think that Sartalics will be much easier to understand than the SarcMark, but considering Facebook hasn’t even allowed basic HTML editing (e.g. bold, italics) yet, I think it will be a while down the road.

Click here to learn more, or here to join the petition.

Dinosaur Comics are one of my favourite webcomics, because they manage to be both funny and smart (and they have dinosaurs!). A recent comic discussed the sexism inherent in some words of English. It may be a carry-over from times well past, but there’s no denying that the feminine versions of many words have more negative connotations than the masculine versions.

The examples from the comic are:

Master/Mistress - both can be in charge of something, but a mistress can also be an extramarital lover (what is the male version of this word?).

Sir/Madam - both are polite ways of addressing someone, but a madam can also be a negative word meaning someone who runs a brothel, or as a descriptor for a difficult female (especially a child, e.g. “She is being a right little madam.”).

Governor/Governess - a governess should surely be the female version of a governor, but instead it is a glorified babysitter’s job. You wouldn’t catch Sarah Palin being called the Governess of Alaska.

T-Rex also uses the word polysemous, which means to have many different meanings. Feminine nouns seem to be polysemous more than masculine nouns.

Is it fair? Not really. But it seems that in order to address this problem, people are more inclined either to use the masculine term for both genders, or to create a new gender-neutral term (e.g. postal worker instead of postman, server instead of waiter/waitress). Perhaps some of the gender-specific words will fall out of usage altogether.

In the meantime, go read some Dinosaur Comics.

I’ve seen my fair share of awful translations into English, which I forgive because most of the time they are hilarious, and I imagine that the people who commissioned them probably don’t have much more than an online translator available to help them.

Sometimes, though, I come across words that look like legitimate English words, but I have no idea what they mean. Sometimes I can glean a fair idea from the context, but there are times when I just have to look up the word to see what they are talking about. I don’t know why, but people seem to pick the most obscure or out-of-date words they can when doing formal translations.

I was editing an English translation of a Chinese document and one of the sentences said that there was no disporting allowed in the office. The word sounds like the opposite of porting, whatever that might mean. Or does it have something to do with sport? Teleporting? Apparently it means “To amuse oneself in a light, frolicsome manner”. Like, to frolic. I guess the sentence wanted to say ‘no jacking around’ or ‘no horseplay’.

I remember once reading a placard in a museum that said that the museum’s city was aiming to be refulgent. This one I had no idea about at the time. There’s something about the F that makes me think it might be a negative word, but the context was completely positive. I had to satisfy my curiosity later and looked it up. It means “to shine brightly”, which I guess is a fine ambition for a city.

Have you found yourself learning new words in your own language through the efforts of non-native speakers?

A few days ago I stumbled across a Christmas-themed quiz about misheard Christmas carol lyrics. I usually start listening to Christmas music (everything from choral to Mariah Carey to Run DMC) as soon as December starts, so I thought I’d give the quiz a go.

Some of the Christmas mondegreens were pretty entertaining, but I got stalled on one which I didn’t actually know the answer to: Troll the agents you’ll tie Carol…

After realising I didn’t know the first word to the line (the rest being ‘the ancient yuletide carol’), I guessed at toll (bells are quite Christmassy after all).

It turns out that the word is actually troll. Not the ugly guys who live under fairytale bridges, or the flourescent-haired naked ’80s toys, or a pesky internet lurker, of course. Back in times of yore, to troll meant ‘to sing or utter in a full, rolling voice’ and also ‘to sing in the manner of a round or catch’. Makes sense. There’s even another blog post about it (including some more explanation about Deck the Halls).

Since a lot of Christmas carols are traditional (meaning old), I guess we don’t think too hard about their meanings these days. I do find it fun to learn new (old) words, though, and am quite pleased to say that I knew what all the other correct lyrics were. Also, Dawn we now our day of peril is my new favourite mondegreen.