Language Trainers Blog

Language is constantly evolving, so it’s quite natural that certain words will be replaced and updated. When you read Shakespeare, for example, there is often an index of words to refer to since they are no longer in use today. A new survey has found that text speak is diminishing the usage of such traditional British words. The study of 2000 adults was carried out to mark the launch of Planet Word, the book which accompanies the series of the same name.

J.P. Davidson, the author of Planet Word said: ”This could be viewed as regrettable, as there are some great descriptive words that are being lost and these words would make our everyday language much more colourful and fun if we were to use them. But it’s only natural that with people trying to fit as much information in 140 characters that words are getting shortened and are even becoming redundant as a result.”

The book lists a top 20 of the unused words.

1. Bally: A word from 1885 - a euphemism for bloody

2. Laggard: An 18th Century word to describe someone who lags behind or responds slowly

3. Felicitations: To express congratulations

4. Rambunctious: Boisterous or unruly

5. Verily: From Middle English, simply means true or in truth

6. Salutations: A welcome greeting

7. Betwixt: Originated before 950, and means neither one nor the other

8. Lauded: From the Latin laudāre, to praise

9. Arcane: Known or understood by very few

10. Raconteur: A person skilled in telling stories, originated in the 19th Century, from the French verb, raconter, to tell. Most known now from Jack White’s band, The Racounteurs

11. Cad: An ill-bred man, originates from 19th Century, derived from the word Caddie

12. Betrothed: The person to whom one is engaged

13. Cripes: An expression of surprise

14. Malaise: A vague or unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness

15. Quash: To put down or suppress completely; quell

16. Swell: Originates before 900 from the Middle English verb swellen, meanings include the verb to inflate and an adjective which describes if something is excellent

17. Balderdash: From the 1590s, it was originally a jumbled mix of liquors (milk and beer, beer and wine, etc.), before being transferred in 1670s to ’senseless jumble of words’

18. Smite: To strike, deal a blow

19. Spiffing: From the word spiff, meaning well-dressed, means superb

20. Tomfoolery: Foolish behaviour

Are there  any words you’d like to see banished to history?

Tomorrow is the concluding part of a fascinating five part BBC documentary series called Fry’s Planet Word. In this series, Stephen Fry explores aspects of linguistics and how we learn and how our skills develop, and he travels across the world investigating different languages. I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but each episode is quite a broad range of different topics under the umbrella of a different theme for each episode. For example; in episode one, entitled “Babel,” Fry covers sign language, animal communication, visits the Nilotic speaking Turkana tribe in Kenya, speaks to a psycholinguist, and explores talks to man who taught his son Klingon as his first language! The programme is not a tool to help you learn other languages, it’s rather a study of linguistics, and will be of interest to anyone studying languages as further information. The series is shown on BBC2 and you can also catch up on iPlayer. Here’s a taster on Youtube.

Have you been watching? What are your thoughts?

I’m reading a collection of essays by David Sedaris called Me Talk Pretty One Day. Some of the essays, including the title one, are about his struggles as an American visiting a small town in France and trying to pick up some of the language (there, in Paris, and in New York City). His partner speaks French, so that leaves him as the only non-French speaker in the town (something that I can relate to, though not so much with French).

He starts off pretty much only knowing the word for bottle opener, which he uses with all the local merchants. He proceeds to type all of his new words (using an old-fashioned typewriter) onto index cards, which he then keeps in a box. His progress is quite slow, and with example words like exorcism, slaughterhouse, and sea monster, I can sort of see why. However, his choice of vocabulary doesn’t stop him from trying to use it with the locals, which I can respect.

His method of keeping new words together allows him to state that at the end of his sixth trip to France, he had learned 1,564 words, which he held all together in a box. I rather liked this statement, and the concept of knowing precisely what your knowledge was.

I don’t know how many foreign words I know, but I would kind of like to. Do you keep track of your progress in any countable way?

Google’s NGram Viewer allows anybody to create quick graphs showing word and phrase frequencies in books going back to 1800. The tool searches a database of words from over 5 million  books, and you can filter for American English, British English, English fiction, Chinese, French, German, and Russian.

Although it has its restrictions, such as not giving us accurate information about spoken usage, it’s a great analysis tool. One of the Wall Street Journal’s blogs did a Christmas analysis to see whether the PC phrase ‘Happy Holidays’ has infiltrated the world of books. A quick graph generation later, and it seems that ‘Merry Christmas’ is still way out in front. It also seems that around 1900, people started capitalising the ‘merry’.

When I filtered for British English only, it seems that ‘Happy Holidays’ is almost never used. The tool is case sensitive, though, so there has been some use of ‘happy holidays’, but these could have been in more general sentences, rather than as a greeting. In British English, ‘h/Happy Christmas’ is much more common than in American English, and ‘happy Christmas’ was almost as popular as ‘Merry Christmas’ at a few points in time. It seems that the use of ‘happy Christmas’ is on the decline recently, though.

In other Christmas-related news, while Father Christmas and Santa Claus are about equally popular in British literature (and both much more popular than the Easter Bunny), American literature uses Santa Claus almost exclusively (with Father Christmas being about as common as the Easter Bunny).

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.

This is another one of those posts where I admit something shameful, and then somehow turn it into something educational. I hope.

So, I have read the first book in the wildly popular (with teenage girls) Twilight series. I did it out of a combination of morbid curiosity (forgive the pun), and the need to know exactly what it was that I was making fun of. A little part of me even hoped that I would be pleasantly surprised. However, Stephenie Meyer has managed to write a story that is ripe for the mocking, and she hasn’t even written it well.

Luckily for the non-fans, the awfulness of the books has spawned quite the few entertaining reviews (including Alex Reads Twilight and Mark Reads Twilight). One of the ones I found surprisingly educational is the tumblog Reasoning with Vampires. Dana, the author, comments on and sometimes rewrites sentences and passages from the series, rather than reviewing chapters or entire books. Not only is it entertaining and enlightening (yes, he is a 100+ year old dead guy trying to date as well as not kill a teenage girl who is basically unlikeable), but it has proved to be a good resource for people who are looking to improve their own writing skills. You would not believe how many actual errors (spelling, punctuation, grammar) exist in the text, even if you ignore the questionable writing style.

Especially after reading some of these reviews (is it bad that I spent so much time doing so?), I won’t be able to respect the word sparkle for the foreseeable future. Luckily, Firefly fans like me have shiny instead.

Here’s a good example of what you can expect on RwV:

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.

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.

(Or, Angelina Jolie does it too.)

I don’t usually keep up with tabloids, but I noticed a story about Angelina Jolie’s love for the Russian language, and had to see what was going on.  She’s had to learn the language for upcoming film Salt, and says that while she struggled with getting the difficult pronunciation right, she loves the sound of the language, as well as loving to speak it.  ”I find it a very interesting sound because it can be so hard and strong and also very sensual and very beautiful,” she said.

While some commenters bring up the sort-of-justified point that she’s only learning lines, not how to actually converse, she did have to do some work to get her pronunciation right.  She mentioned constant practice and work with a vocal coach who would record the lines for her to listen to at home (a method I am a big fan of).  Even if you don’t completely understand what you’re saying, listening and pronunciation drills will help your fluency immensely.  So, while she may not actually speak Russian, she is able to speak in Russian.  Good for her.  I haven’t even tried to decipher the alphabet yet!

Source: Us Magazine.

On the major Chinese television network, CCTV, newscasters have been told to stop using commonly-understood English acronyms in their broadcasts.  Instead of using short forms like NBA and WHO, TV presenters have been told they must use the full Chinese translations, which are sometimes very long and might in turn be confusing to viewers.  If newscasters accidentally use the abbreviations, they must use the full translation immediately afterwards to establish what they are talking about.

The reasoning behind this move is that government officials do not want the Chinese language to be infiltrated by English and become some sort of mongrel in a few years.  I’m not sure how likely that is to happen, but it is somewhat reminiscent of the Académie française’s crusade to keep French pure.

I don’t know if this move will help maintain the grand traditions of the Chinese language, but it definitely won’t be saving the CCTV (err, China Central Television) anchors any time.

Source: CNNGo.