A correspondent (from Radio 4's 'World At One') rings up to ask me about the origins of shellacking, which has received a new lease of life thanks to President Obama's use of it yesterday. How did shellac develop the meaning of 'thrashing, beating'? There's no obvious link, she said.
True. To see what happened, you have to know the intermediate stage in the development of this word. The original meaning of the verb 'to varnish with shellac' (a type of resin) is known from the late 19th century. Anything that had been 'shellacked' would have a nice rosy tinge. By the 1920s, in the USA, this effect had evidently been enough to motivate a slang use of the word meaning 'drunk'. Rosey, illuminated, and plastered show similar developments - all early 20th-century slang.
At the same time, drunks were also being described using such words as busted, bombed, crashed, and thrashed. So it's not surprising to see these words sharing their associations. The connotations of thrashing transferred to shellac, which then developed its later slang sense of 'badly beaten'. I've only every heard this used in US English - but all that is about to change. I predict it will turn up in the House of Commons within the next few days.
So, drink is the link.
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
On plays, parrots, and plurilinguals
A correspondent has just sent me details of a new play on endangered languages. In fact, two. It's like London buses. None come for ages, and then two come along at once.
Kamarra Bell Wykes has written Mother's Tongue, being staged this month by the Yirra Yakin Aboriginal Corporation in Perth, Australia. And Julia Cho has written The Language Archive, currently being staged in New York. You can see the post, from Peter Austin, here.
It's great to hear of these initiatives. I last posted on this subject on 8 January 2007, when I continued to bemoan the lack of arts projects presenting the theme of endangered languages and language death. My own play, Living On, was on its own then. Happily, no longer.
And another correspondent has added a fresh dimension to the famous story about the parrots speaking an extinct language, the inspiration behind Rachel Berwick's living sculpture that I mentioned in the 2007 post. You'll find that here.
And while on the subject of language diversity, another two-bus situation. Bilingualism, this time. Despite bilingualism being the normal human condition, a huge mythology has grown up around it, with monolingual communities being a bit scared of it and certainly not understanding it. Earlier this year, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira wrote a lovely little book, aimed at the general public, about the myths and realities of being bilingual, called Multilinguals are...? (Battlebridge Publications). And now she has started a blog on bilingualism. So has François Grosjean, whose fine book Bilingual: Life and Reality (Harvard University Press) also came out earlier this year. His blog is here. It seems to me that we are seeing a new climate slowly being formed.
Kamarra Bell Wykes has written Mother's Tongue, being staged this month by the Yirra Yakin Aboriginal Corporation in Perth, Australia. And Julia Cho has written The Language Archive, currently being staged in New York. You can see the post, from Peter Austin, here.
It's great to hear of these initiatives. I last posted on this subject on 8 January 2007, when I continued to bemoan the lack of arts projects presenting the theme of endangered languages and language death. My own play, Living On, was on its own then. Happily, no longer.
And another correspondent has added a fresh dimension to the famous story about the parrots speaking an extinct language, the inspiration behind Rachel Berwick's living sculpture that I mentioned in the 2007 post. You'll find that here.
And while on the subject of language diversity, another two-bus situation. Bilingualism, this time. Despite bilingualism being the normal human condition, a huge mythology has grown up around it, with monolingual communities being a bit scared of it and certainly not understanding it. Earlier this year, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira wrote a lovely little book, aimed at the general public, about the myths and realities of being bilingual, called Multilinguals are...? (Battlebridge Publications). And now she has started a blog on bilingualism. So has François Grosjean, whose fine book Bilingual: Life and Reality (Harvard University Press) also came out earlier this year. His blog is here. It seems to me that we are seeing a new climate slowly being formed.
Monday, 1 November 2010
On Shakespeare being Irish
A correspondent writes to ask what I think of Rod Liddle's piece in this week's Sunday Times. It was headed 'Irish bard? You're taking the mick'. I'd put a link in here, except that the paper now charges you a pound for the opportunity to read something you've missed. I can't believe their journalists are happy with that, as it must lose them so much readership, but that's another story...
Anyway, Rod says that 'A brilliant American academic called Paul Meier has decided that William Shakespeare spoke with an Irish accent', and he then develops the theme in his inimitable way, referring to earlier claims that Shakespeare 'had initially entitled his plays As You Like It, To Be Sure, To Be Sure; A Midsummer Night's Craic; O'Thello; and The Merry Wives of Windsor Park. Not to mention the famous Merchant of Ennis'. I love it.
But I don't love the new myth that's developing here. Paul Meier hasn't said any such thing. I know, because I've just returned from Kansas University, where I've been working with Paul on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in OP ('original pronunciation') - a reconstruction, as close as we can make it, of how the play would have been pronounced in Shakespeare's time. I've posted earlier about this (see 2 January 2010), and you'll find some of the relevant history of OP in my post of 10 January 2007, as well as articles on my website, such as in Around the Globe, which is where you'll get answers to the usual questions that arise in relation to this topic - like 'how do we know?'.
Note, first, that this isn't anything to do with how Shakespeare himself spoke. I speak with a British English accent, like millions of others do. It's possible to describe the main features of this accent without saying anything at all about the idiosyncrasies of one of its speakers. When foreigners learn, say, Received Pronunciation, they are learning a system of sounds. They aren't learning to speak like any one individual RP speaker. In technical terms, they're learning the phonology of English.
It's the same when we work on OP. It's Early Modern English phonology, and it allows all kinds of phonetic variations, reflecting the individual speakers who must have used it. Shakespeare probably spoke it with a mixed Warwickshire/London accent. Robert Armin, one of his fellow-actors, probably spoke with a mixed Norfolk/London accent. When we did an OP Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe in 2004, the actors came from various parts of the UK. All were taught OP, but this was tinged with their regional backgrounds. So you could hear traces of Scots in Juliet, Northern Irish in Peter, Cockney in the Nurse, and so on. It would have been like that in Shakespeare's day.
So where has the Irish myth come from? Mainly from YouTube. A clip of the OP production and its background has been receiving thousands of hits. You can see it here. Several people who have watched this have said that in their opinion it sounds like Irish. And before we know where we are, this cluster of opinions has become a fact.
Certainly there are some features of OP which are like modern Irish (such as the pronunciation of any like Anny), but there are also features of OP which remind the listener of the West Country of England, or Scotland, or Virginia, or virtually anywhere. When we were doing the Globe production, I used to walk around the audience in the interval and ask people what they thought of the accent, and everyone, without exception, said 'We speak like that where I come from'. There are echoes of most modern accent phonologies in OP - which is hardly surprising, as this is the phonology that lies behind them. It went across the Atlantic in the Mayflower, and to Australia, and elsewhere. If you asked me which modern accent is closest to OP, I'd have some difficulty saying. It's easier to identify the differences. No modern English accent, for example, says words like musician as 'mjooziseean'.
If you don't get your OP exactly right, then it's easy to slip into a modern accent. This is one of the things I have to focus on, when working with a company. The word for 'I', for example, is pronounced with a central opening to the diphthong - with the vowel sound of the word the. If you inadvertently lip-round that vowel, it comes out as 'oi', which is a classic feature of Irish English, often spelled that way in representations of Irish speakers ('Oi'm sure'). I think a lot of the YouTube listeners are reading that in.
OP isn't Irish. If you use or are familiar with Irish accents, you'll notice the bits that remind you of Ireland. If your background is Scottish, you'll notice the bits that remind you of Scotland. An Australian homed in on the pronunciation of yet as 'yit'. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? If so, OP is partly in the ears. But not entirely, as the many examples like musician illustrate.
I'm delighted to see that the Kansas OP project has generated such interest. It's the first full-length production of a Shakespeare play in OP since the Globe experiments of 2004 (Romeo) and 2005 (Troilus). I hope there will be more. Each time a play is done in OP, I discover fresh insights into it - new puns, new rhythms, new possibilities of expression. In Dream, for example, suddenly all the rhymes work. We've all been used to such painful modern dissonances as here, where the lines by Puck don't rhyme any longer:
Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars
Telling the bushes that thou look'st for wars,
And wilt not come.
But they did in Shakespeare's day. The vowel in wars sounded like that of stars. Multiply this by the dozens of cases in the play where lines now rhyme, and you can begin to sense the cumulative auditory effect of an OP production.
Paul Meier is planning to make recordings of the production in due course (its first night is 11 November at the university theatre in Lawrence, Kansas), which will add immensely to the still rather limited database of OP available online (at Pronouncing Shakespeare). There may also be a live stream of a performance. I'll keep readers of this blog posted.
Anyway, Rod says that 'A brilliant American academic called Paul Meier has decided that William Shakespeare spoke with an Irish accent', and he then develops the theme in his inimitable way, referring to earlier claims that Shakespeare 'had initially entitled his plays As You Like It, To Be Sure, To Be Sure; A Midsummer Night's Craic; O'Thello; and The Merry Wives of Windsor Park. Not to mention the famous Merchant of Ennis'. I love it.
But I don't love the new myth that's developing here. Paul Meier hasn't said any such thing. I know, because I've just returned from Kansas University, where I've been working with Paul on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in OP ('original pronunciation') - a reconstruction, as close as we can make it, of how the play would have been pronounced in Shakespeare's time. I've posted earlier about this (see 2 January 2010), and you'll find some of the relevant history of OP in my post of 10 January 2007, as well as articles on my website, such as in Around the Globe, which is where you'll get answers to the usual questions that arise in relation to this topic - like 'how do we know?'.
Note, first, that this isn't anything to do with how Shakespeare himself spoke. I speak with a British English accent, like millions of others do. It's possible to describe the main features of this accent without saying anything at all about the idiosyncrasies of one of its speakers. When foreigners learn, say, Received Pronunciation, they are learning a system of sounds. They aren't learning to speak like any one individual RP speaker. In technical terms, they're learning the phonology of English.
It's the same when we work on OP. It's Early Modern English phonology, and it allows all kinds of phonetic variations, reflecting the individual speakers who must have used it. Shakespeare probably spoke it with a mixed Warwickshire/London accent. Robert Armin, one of his fellow-actors, probably spoke with a mixed Norfolk/London accent. When we did an OP Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe in 2004, the actors came from various parts of the UK. All were taught OP, but this was tinged with their regional backgrounds. So you could hear traces of Scots in Juliet, Northern Irish in Peter, Cockney in the Nurse, and so on. It would have been like that in Shakespeare's day.
So where has the Irish myth come from? Mainly from YouTube. A clip of the OP production and its background has been receiving thousands of hits. You can see it here. Several people who have watched this have said that in their opinion it sounds like Irish. And before we know where we are, this cluster of opinions has become a fact.
Certainly there are some features of OP which are like modern Irish (such as the pronunciation of any like Anny), but there are also features of OP which remind the listener of the West Country of England, or Scotland, or Virginia, or virtually anywhere. When we were doing the Globe production, I used to walk around the audience in the interval and ask people what they thought of the accent, and everyone, without exception, said 'We speak like that where I come from'. There are echoes of most modern accent phonologies in OP - which is hardly surprising, as this is the phonology that lies behind them. It went across the Atlantic in the Mayflower, and to Australia, and elsewhere. If you asked me which modern accent is closest to OP, I'd have some difficulty saying. It's easier to identify the differences. No modern English accent, for example, says words like musician as 'mjooziseean'.
If you don't get your OP exactly right, then it's easy to slip into a modern accent. This is one of the things I have to focus on, when working with a company. The word for 'I', for example, is pronounced with a central opening to the diphthong - with the vowel sound of the word the. If you inadvertently lip-round that vowel, it comes out as 'oi', which is a classic feature of Irish English, often spelled that way in representations of Irish speakers ('Oi'm sure'). I think a lot of the YouTube listeners are reading that in.
OP isn't Irish. If you use or are familiar with Irish accents, you'll notice the bits that remind you of Ireland. If your background is Scottish, you'll notice the bits that remind you of Scotland. An Australian homed in on the pronunciation of yet as 'yit'. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? If so, OP is partly in the ears. But not entirely, as the many examples like musician illustrate.
I'm delighted to see that the Kansas OP project has generated such interest. It's the first full-length production of a Shakespeare play in OP since the Globe experiments of 2004 (Romeo) and 2005 (Troilus). I hope there will be more. Each time a play is done in OP, I discover fresh insights into it - new puns, new rhythms, new possibilities of expression. In Dream, for example, suddenly all the rhymes work. We've all been used to such painful modern dissonances as here, where the lines by Puck don't rhyme any longer:
Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars
Telling the bushes that thou look'st for wars,
And wilt not come.
But they did in Shakespeare's day. The vowel in wars sounded like that of stars. Multiply this by the dozens of cases in the play where lines now rhyme, and you can begin to sense the cumulative auditory effect of an OP production.
Paul Meier is planning to make recordings of the production in due course (its first night is 11 November at the university theatre in Lawrence, Kansas), which will add immensely to the still rather limited database of OP available online (at Pronouncing Shakespeare). There may also be a live stream of a performance. I'll keep readers of this blog posted.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
On a review of biblical proportions
A correspondent has just written in with a puzzling remark. The message was from the American composer David Lang, and he wrote like this:
I just read on an american website that I am quoted in your new book 'begat' for messing up a biblical reference, when I was interviewed after winning the pulitzer prize for music.
It left me totally baffled, as I never would have said any such thing. So I looked it up in my book. I found it in the section where I review ways in which the idiom touch the hem of his garment has been adapted. I list several examples, and then say:
'These days, the expression has been extended even to things that don't have hems. When Bob Dylan got a Pulitzer prize in 2008, the New York composer David Lang, who was also a prizewinner, commented: I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes. And popstar Bono is once reported to have said that his group U2 was not fit to touch the hem of the Beatles.'
To my mind, these are clever and daring extensions of the idiom. My book is full of examples of this kind. This was one of the reasons why I wrote it: to see just how far people have actually taken such idioms to heart and adapted them in everyday life. It is usually a totally conscious and creative process, and it certainly applies in David Lang's case. How do I know? Because he told me so:
'the ridiculousness of my comment was completely intentional. the interviewer laughed when I said it, which was of course the intended response. I am not sure if in your book it is better to be a voluntary bible mangler or an involuntary one but I wouldn't want you or any of your august readers to think I am any more of a dunce than I really am.'
Absolutely not. But where on earth did the notion of mangling come from?
It remained a puzzle for only a few hours. From OUP in New York I was sent a review of Begat in The Nation, the American weekly periodical which has described itself as 'the flagship of the left'. It was by a poet called Ange Mlinko. And there is the offending passage:
'Crystal even quotes the bungled puns of unfortunate individuals like David Lang, the composer who said, on winning the Pulitzer alongside Bob Dylan, "I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes."'
Bungled? Unfortunate? Note that this is the reviewer speaking, not me. But in a tweeting world, the source of the opinion can easily get blurred.
However, how extraordinary to see such a narrow-minded attitude appearing through the pen of a poet! I always thought poets were supposed to enjoy other people's creative use of language. Apparently not in her case. All the adaptations of biblical expressions - and I give hundreds of examples in my book - are called by her 'so trite and corrupted as to necrotize the language'. Wow. Her generalization, incidentally, includes lots of creative writers - my examples include adaptations from Byron, James Joyce, and Henry James, to name just three - but that doesn't matter. They all, in her words 'mangle common biblical references'.
Mangle. Doesn't that tell you everything about where she is coming from? But what a shocking shocking thing to hear from a poet.
I'm quoting there. From this paragraph:
'He [Crystal] has come not to praise good style or blame bad style but merely to cite usages and round them up in a bean-counting exercise that ultimately comes to a shocking, shocking conclusion: "Very few idiomatic expressions unquestionably originate in the language of the King James Bible."'
Well I don't see what's so shocking about stating a fact. And beans are worth counting when so many other people get the totals wrong. I've heard people say that 'thousands' of idioms in English come from the King James Bible. That's a long way from the truth. MP Frank Field has quoted Melvyn Bragg as saying that the KJB is 'the DNA of the English language' - in other words, it's there in every word we say or write. Mlinko would probably agree. She says, in one of those vague statements that sound good but which mean little, 'The influence [of the KJB] ... runs deep in the weave of things'. Interpret that, if you can.
When she does give a few examples of what she means by 'style', I see straightaway that she is talking about something which I expressly omit from my book - and spend a few pages discussing why: quotations.
'Abraham Lincoln used locutions from the King James Version in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural to lend theological resonance to his vision of justice and reconciliation. Herman Melville's biblicisms, particularly his references to Job, invoke the Bible in order to subvert the standard Christian interpretation of it ("Christ's redeeming love of mankind...is antithetical to the truth about the world").'
Yes, indeed, these are quotations and explicit allusions, and they provide a very important strand in the history of English literature. But this is not what my book was about. I always think it's bad reviewing practice to criticize an author for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had written. Mlinko knows very well I am limiting my project. She actually says, at one point:
'Idiom, Crystal acknowledges, is not the only measure of linguistic influence, and he limits the scope of his conclusion accordingly.'
But that doesn't stop her dismissing me - and all linguists, it transpires - as being uninterested in style. Ah, there's the hidden agenda!
'The "gloriousely writen" text [her allusion is to Langland in Piers Plowman] doesn't seem to be the bailiwick of linguists. If there's an offense that unites scientists and post-structuralists against a common foe, it's belle-lettrism. Yet the concern with text as texture--what we've come to call its style--is fundamental not only to the pleasure of reading but to the understanding of what is written, which at its best is a fabric: composed of many strands. Discerning those strands requires knowledge--and judgment. Style is an apotheosis: it is the revelation of any author's "construction of reality."'
I totally agree with those last three sentences. But the first is breathtaking in its ignorance of what has gone on in literary stylistics over the past forty years, much of which has been concerned with exploring the notion of texture. She's obviously had some bad linguistic encounters of the third, or even fourth kind. For my part, having written two books on style, in the broader sense Mlinko hankers after, and tried to disentangle the many strands that make up the style of the most glorious writer of all in English, it's a bit disturbing to find someone writing off a domain of critical experience so dismissively.
If the review had been just about me, I wouldn't have bothered to respond. I appreciate every review I get, positive or negative, but life's too short to reply to them all, even given the marvellous opportunity provided by blogging. But when a reviewer starts calling my quotees bunglers and unfortunate, trite and corrupted, somebody's got to defend them. I'm not expecting emails from Byron and Henry James to complain about their misrepresentation, but I hope this post will prevent others being misled in the way that David Lang was.
I just read on an american website that I am quoted in your new book 'begat' for messing up a biblical reference, when I was interviewed after winning the pulitzer prize for music.
It left me totally baffled, as I never would have said any such thing. So I looked it up in my book. I found it in the section where I review ways in which the idiom touch the hem of his garment has been adapted. I list several examples, and then say:
'These days, the expression has been extended even to things that don't have hems. When Bob Dylan got a Pulitzer prize in 2008, the New York composer David Lang, who was also a prizewinner, commented: I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes. And popstar Bono is once reported to have said that his group U2 was not fit to touch the hem of the Beatles.'
To my mind, these are clever and daring extensions of the idiom. My book is full of examples of this kind. This was one of the reasons why I wrote it: to see just how far people have actually taken such idioms to heart and adapted them in everyday life. It is usually a totally conscious and creative process, and it certainly applies in David Lang's case. How do I know? Because he told me so:
'the ridiculousness of my comment was completely intentional. the interviewer laughed when I said it, which was of course the intended response. I am not sure if in your book it is better to be a voluntary bible mangler or an involuntary one but I wouldn't want you or any of your august readers to think I am any more of a dunce than I really am.'
Absolutely not. But where on earth did the notion of mangling come from?
It remained a puzzle for only a few hours. From OUP in New York I was sent a review of Begat in The Nation, the American weekly periodical which has described itself as 'the flagship of the left'. It was by a poet called Ange Mlinko. And there is the offending passage:
'Crystal even quotes the bungled puns of unfortunate individuals like David Lang, the composer who said, on winning the Pulitzer alongside Bob Dylan, "I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes."'
Bungled? Unfortunate? Note that this is the reviewer speaking, not me. But in a tweeting world, the source of the opinion can easily get blurred.
However, how extraordinary to see such a narrow-minded attitude appearing through the pen of a poet! I always thought poets were supposed to enjoy other people's creative use of language. Apparently not in her case. All the adaptations of biblical expressions - and I give hundreds of examples in my book - are called by her 'so trite and corrupted as to necrotize the language'. Wow. Her generalization, incidentally, includes lots of creative writers - my examples include adaptations from Byron, James Joyce, and Henry James, to name just three - but that doesn't matter. They all, in her words 'mangle common biblical references'.
Mangle. Doesn't that tell you everything about where she is coming from? But what a shocking shocking thing to hear from a poet.
I'm quoting there. From this paragraph:
'He [Crystal] has come not to praise good style or blame bad style but merely to cite usages and round them up in a bean-counting exercise that ultimately comes to a shocking, shocking conclusion: "Very few idiomatic expressions unquestionably originate in the language of the King James Bible."'
Well I don't see what's so shocking about stating a fact. And beans are worth counting when so many other people get the totals wrong. I've heard people say that 'thousands' of idioms in English come from the King James Bible. That's a long way from the truth. MP Frank Field has quoted Melvyn Bragg as saying that the KJB is 'the DNA of the English language' - in other words, it's there in every word we say or write. Mlinko would probably agree. She says, in one of those vague statements that sound good but which mean little, 'The influence [of the KJB] ... runs deep in the weave of things'. Interpret that, if you can.
When she does give a few examples of what she means by 'style', I see straightaway that she is talking about something which I expressly omit from my book - and spend a few pages discussing why: quotations.
'Abraham Lincoln used locutions from the King James Version in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural to lend theological resonance to his vision of justice and reconciliation. Herman Melville's biblicisms, particularly his references to Job, invoke the Bible in order to subvert the standard Christian interpretation of it ("Christ's redeeming love of mankind...is antithetical to the truth about the world").'
Yes, indeed, these are quotations and explicit allusions, and they provide a very important strand in the history of English literature. But this is not what my book was about. I always think it's bad reviewing practice to criticize an author for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had written. Mlinko knows very well I am limiting my project. She actually says, at one point:
'Idiom, Crystal acknowledges, is not the only measure of linguistic influence, and he limits the scope of his conclusion accordingly.'
But that doesn't stop her dismissing me - and all linguists, it transpires - as being uninterested in style. Ah, there's the hidden agenda!
'The "gloriousely writen" text [her allusion is to Langland in Piers Plowman] doesn't seem to be the bailiwick of linguists. If there's an offense that unites scientists and post-structuralists against a common foe, it's belle-lettrism. Yet the concern with text as texture--what we've come to call its style--is fundamental not only to the pleasure of reading but to the understanding of what is written, which at its best is a fabric: composed of many strands. Discerning those strands requires knowledge--and judgment. Style is an apotheosis: it is the revelation of any author's "construction of reality."'
I totally agree with those last three sentences. But the first is breathtaking in its ignorance of what has gone on in literary stylistics over the past forty years, much of which has been concerned with exploring the notion of texture. She's obviously had some bad linguistic encounters of the third, or even fourth kind. For my part, having written two books on style, in the broader sense Mlinko hankers after, and tried to disentangle the many strands that make up the style of the most glorious writer of all in English, it's a bit disturbing to find someone writing off a domain of critical experience so dismissively.
If the review had been just about me, I wouldn't have bothered to respond. I appreciate every review I get, positive or negative, but life's too short to reply to them all, even given the marvellous opportunity provided by blogging. But when a reviewer starts calling my quotees bunglers and unfortunate, trite and corrupted, somebody's got to defend them. I'm not expecting emails from Byron and Henry James to complain about their misrepresentation, but I hope this post will prevent others being misled in the way that David Lang was.
Monday, 20 September 2010
On highest mountains
A correspondent writes to ask about the difference between tallest and highest in such sentences as Everest and K2 are the two tallest mountains in the world, which he has found on a BBC site. He quotes Michael Swan as an example of a grammarian who says that it has to be Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe and not . . . the tallest mountain, and is understandably confused.
Usage is undoubtedly blurred, because we frequently see such listings (very common online) as 'The Tallest Buildings in the World', 'The Tallest Mountains in the World', and so on, alongside 'The Highest...' Tallest is four times more common than highest for buildings on Google. Highest is over ten times more common than tallest for mountains, but tallest still attracts a healthy 60,000 hits.
When we look for the reason, we enter a world of technical definition. Mountains are actually measured in three different ways. (1) Sea level to the peak. (2) Base to the peak. (3) Distance from the centre of the earth to the peak. The differences are significant. Under (1), the title goes to Mt Everest. Under (2) the title goes to Mauna Kea, Hawaii, which has only 4,245 m of its 30,000 m above sea level. Under (3) the title goes to Chimborazo volcano in the Andes, only 6310 m high but (thanks to the equatorial bulge caused by the earth's spin) further away from the centre than anything else. In this approach, (1) is referred to technically as the highest mountain, and (2) as the tallest mountain.
Most people would never need to refer to (3), and few to (2). We normally think of mountains as being above sea level, so this motivates the use of highest. But the fact that tallest is also a permitted collocation will have reinforced its appearance in everyday usage, resulting in the overlap noted by my correspondent.
Other domains raise similar issues. People normally talk about tallest buildings, referring to the dimension of the building from base to roof. The highest building in the world could be a single-storey house on some mountain-top somewhere. But again there is an overlap, and there are complications, well known in the field of encylopedia listings. Does the radio mast on top of a high building count as part of the height of the building or not? It can get quite controversial when competing claims are being made for the world record. And the complications reverberate linguistically when we encounter such usages as The highest part of the tallest building is well above roof level.
Usage is undoubtedly blurred, because we frequently see such listings (very common online) as 'The Tallest Buildings in the World', 'The Tallest Mountains in the World', and so on, alongside 'The Highest...' Tallest is four times more common than highest for buildings on Google. Highest is over ten times more common than tallest for mountains, but tallest still attracts a healthy 60,000 hits.
When we look for the reason, we enter a world of technical definition. Mountains are actually measured in three different ways. (1) Sea level to the peak. (2) Base to the peak. (3) Distance from the centre of the earth to the peak. The differences are significant. Under (1), the title goes to Mt Everest. Under (2) the title goes to Mauna Kea, Hawaii, which has only 4,245 m of its 30,000 m above sea level. Under (3) the title goes to Chimborazo volcano in the Andes, only 6310 m high but (thanks to the equatorial bulge caused by the earth's spin) further away from the centre than anything else. In this approach, (1) is referred to technically as the highest mountain, and (2) as the tallest mountain.
Most people would never need to refer to (3), and few to (2). We normally think of mountains as being above sea level, so this motivates the use of highest. But the fact that tallest is also a permitted collocation will have reinforced its appearance in everyday usage, resulting in the overlap noted by my correspondent.
Other domains raise similar issues. People normally talk about tallest buildings, referring to the dimension of the building from base to roof. The highest building in the world could be a single-storey house on some mountain-top somewhere. But again there is an overlap, and there are complications, well known in the field of encylopedia listings. Does the radio mast on top of a high building count as part of the height of the building or not? It can get quite controversial when competing claims are being made for the world record. And the complications reverberate linguistically when we encounter such usages as The highest part of the tallest building is well above roof level.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
On gonna
A correspondent writes to say she had read an interview in Rolling Stone with the cast of AMC’s Mad Men, where one of the actors said they had to be very careful with their pronunciation. 'There was no ‘gonna’ or ‘shoulda’ back then [in the 1960's].' Could this be true?
It certainly couldn't. It's easy enough to check the point. These two forms actually get separate entries in the OED, and there we find gonna with a first recorded use in 1913 and shoulda with a first recorded use in 1933. (Also woulda, 1913, coulda 1925.)
Both usages are undoubtedly much older. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary has a separate section under go giving examples spelled ganna, gauna, gaunna, and ginnie. The earliest is 1806. And under have there's an example of should ha' from 1899.
Why stop there? In the 1602 Quarto edition of Merry Wives of Windsor we find Nym saying 'I should ha borne the humor Letter to her', and there are several similar examples in the literature of the period.
When it comes to linguistic mythology, it's seems it's a mad Mad world.
It certainly couldn't. It's easy enough to check the point. These two forms actually get separate entries in the OED, and there we find gonna with a first recorded use in 1913 and shoulda with a first recorded use in 1933. (Also woulda, 1913, coulda 1925.)
Both usages are undoubtedly much older. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary has a separate section under go giving examples spelled ganna, gauna, gaunna, and ginnie. The earliest is 1806. And under have there's an example of should ha' from 1899.
Why stop there? In the 1602 Quarto edition of Merry Wives of Windsor we find Nym saying 'I should ha borne the humor Letter to her', and there are several similar examples in the literature of the period.
When it comes to linguistic mythology, it's seems it's a mad Mad world.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
On updating and the OED
Several media correspondents have been in touch this week to discuss the report that the OED may not have a further print edition. Whether it will or not I can't say, but I do know that I've not looked at my print edition for years, and use the online edition pretty well every day. It includes an amazing amount of new lexical information. There are updates of various sections of the alphabet at regular intervals, as the OED team slogs on. And one of the unspoken messages to scholars that comes across from the updating is: revise.
Like many people, I've used the OED repeatedly for information about the earliest use of words. The first recorded date for a word is of special interest. One knows that such dates are artificial, because they're only as reliable as the sources that have so far been examined, but they're still the best information we have, and they point in the right direction. So I always look with extra interest when I find the OED has discovered earlier citations for words. It's especially important when people are discussing such matters as the originality of Shakespeare's vocabulary or the number of new words in an early edition of the Bible.
It's not just earlier citations that can change the totals. A different dating chronology can wreak havoc with statistics. For example, the dates of Shakespeare's plays used by the original lexicographers are now hugely out of date. Nobody these days would place Love's Labour's Lost in 1588, as the OED does; most people would opt for 1593-5. Similarly, Titus Andronicus is given as 1588 (probably 1590-91) and A Midsummer Night's Dream as 1590 (probably 1594-5). The day they revise these dates, the whole of the 'Shakespeare invented words' industry will have to be reviewed, as in many entries the Shakespearean usage will leapfrog over another citation into second place.
The totals already need serious revision, in the light of the earlier citations that have emerged. I spent a lot of space in my Stories of English reviewing the evidence for Shakespeare's invented words, based on the OED entries, and for years now I've written a regular piece for Around the Globe (the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe) on what we can deduce from such 'Williamisms', as I call them there. We now know that several of the first recorded usages assigned to Shakespeare have been antedated. Not all are in the OED files yet. Lonely isn't, for example. The OED still gives Coriolanus 1607 as a first use, but, as I point out in Think on My Words, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, talks about ‘lonely ghosts’ in her Tragedie of Antonie, and that is 1592.
I don't know when will be the best time to do a complete revision of the Shakespeare assignments. It's going to be a long job, and best done, perhaps, when a bit more OED revision has taken place. But I have taken a look at an easier topic: the number of first recorded uses in the King James Bible. In Stories of English (pp. 328-9) I say there are 55, and give a list. I've now gone through that list and checked against the latest OED entries, and the total now stands at 47. There are some additions and some deletions. For the record, here is the current list. Three of of the items (marked with *) also appear in the translations to entries in Randall Cotgrave's 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English tongues:
abased (as an adjective), accurately, afflicting (as a noun), almug ('algum tree'), anywhither, armour-bearer, backsliding (as an adjective), battering-ram, Benjamite, catholicon, confessing (as a noun), crowning (as an adjective), dissolver, dogmatize, epitomist, escaper, espoused (as an adjective), exactress, expansion, Galilean (as a noun), gopher, Gothic (as an adjective), grand-daughter, Hamathite, infallibility*, Laodicean (as a noun), lapful*, light-minded, maneh (Hebrew unit of account), miscarrying (as an adjective), Naziriteship, needleworker, night-hawk, nose-jewel, palmchrist, panary ('pantry'), phrasing (as a noun), pruning-hook, rosebud, rose of Sharon, Sauromatian, shittah (type of tree), skewed, taloned* (as an adjective), way-mark ('traveller guide'), whosesoever, withdrawing (as an adjective)
I say 'for the record'. This is one of the less-publicized benefits of a blog. There's no way I'd be able to draw the attention of Stories of English readers to the update otherwise. There may never be a second edition of the book, and Penguin isn't going to publish an updated edition just because some new facts have emerged requiring revision on pp. 328-9. So, all hail to blogs, as an updating procedure.
Like many people, I've used the OED repeatedly for information about the earliest use of words. The first recorded date for a word is of special interest. One knows that such dates are artificial, because they're only as reliable as the sources that have so far been examined, but they're still the best information we have, and they point in the right direction. So I always look with extra interest when I find the OED has discovered earlier citations for words. It's especially important when people are discussing such matters as the originality of Shakespeare's vocabulary or the number of new words in an early edition of the Bible.
It's not just earlier citations that can change the totals. A different dating chronology can wreak havoc with statistics. For example, the dates of Shakespeare's plays used by the original lexicographers are now hugely out of date. Nobody these days would place Love's Labour's Lost in 1588, as the OED does; most people would opt for 1593-5. Similarly, Titus Andronicus is given as 1588 (probably 1590-91) and A Midsummer Night's Dream as 1590 (probably 1594-5). The day they revise these dates, the whole of the 'Shakespeare invented words' industry will have to be reviewed, as in many entries the Shakespearean usage will leapfrog over another citation into second place.
The totals already need serious revision, in the light of the earlier citations that have emerged. I spent a lot of space in my Stories of English reviewing the evidence for Shakespeare's invented words, based on the OED entries, and for years now I've written a regular piece for Around the Globe (the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe) on what we can deduce from such 'Williamisms', as I call them there. We now know that several of the first recorded usages assigned to Shakespeare have been antedated. Not all are in the OED files yet. Lonely isn't, for example. The OED still gives Coriolanus 1607 as a first use, but, as I point out in Think on My Words, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, talks about ‘lonely ghosts’ in her Tragedie of Antonie, and that is 1592.
I don't know when will be the best time to do a complete revision of the Shakespeare assignments. It's going to be a long job, and best done, perhaps, when a bit more OED revision has taken place. But I have taken a look at an easier topic: the number of first recorded uses in the King James Bible. In Stories of English (pp. 328-9) I say there are 55, and give a list. I've now gone through that list and checked against the latest OED entries, and the total now stands at 47. There are some additions and some deletions. For the record, here is the current list. Three of of the items (marked with *) also appear in the translations to entries in Randall Cotgrave's 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English tongues:
abased (as an adjective), accurately, afflicting (as a noun), almug ('algum tree'), anywhither, armour-bearer, backsliding (as an adjective), battering-ram, Benjamite, catholicon, confessing (as a noun), crowning (as an adjective), dissolver, dogmatize, epitomist, escaper, espoused (as an adjective), exactress, expansion, Galilean (as a noun), gopher, Gothic (as an adjective), grand-daughter, Hamathite, infallibility*, Laodicean (as a noun), lapful*, light-minded, maneh (Hebrew unit of account), miscarrying (as an adjective), Naziriteship, needleworker, night-hawk, nose-jewel, palmchrist, panary ('pantry'), phrasing (as a noun), pruning-hook, rosebud, rose of Sharon, Sauromatian, shittah (type of tree), skewed, taloned* (as an adjective), way-mark ('traveller guide'), whosesoever, withdrawing (as an adjective)
I say 'for the record'. This is one of the less-publicized benefits of a blog. There's no way I'd be able to draw the attention of Stories of English readers to the update otherwise. There may never be a second edition of the book, and Penguin isn't going to publish an updated edition just because some new facts have emerged requiring revision on pp. 328-9. So, all hail to blogs, as an updating procedure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)