On bringing books back from the grave

The correspondents that motivate these posts have multiplied over the past few weeks, as the realization dawns among teachers and students in the UK that grammar (or at least a Govian interpretation of grammar) is back. Leaving aside the question of how poorly the subject is being presented - that’s a topic for another day - I've been inundated with requests for advice about how to cope with the demands suddenly being placed upon teachers, many of whom have had little opportunity to accumulate the kind of knowledge they need to implement the directives. An email that came in this week was typical: its subject line was ‘The subjunctive - a cry for help’. And I write this post after talking to a ‘grammar day’ in Buckinghamshire - the first I suspect of several that will be organized this year, as English advisors try to assuage the grammar panic that I sense is widespread.

The first signs of this panic appeared following the publication of the draft documents last year. And it was then that I decided to reintroduce the wheel, in the form of the series I published at the request of Longman in the early 1990s, when the National Curriculum for English was first presented. It was called Language A to Z, and consisted of two student books (aimed at Key Stages 3 and 4) and a Teacher’s Book, containing an alphabetically ordered set of all the language terms mentioned in the government documents of the time - about 200 relating to grammar, and another 200 or so on other linguistic topics. In fact, the books ended up being used at all sort of levels, from KS2 to A-level. But this is all history, as Longman let them go out of print after a few years.

The situation today seems to be exactly the same as the situation in the early 1990s. There is a renewed concentration on terminology - ‘naming of parts’ - and a focus on structures, with a sad disregard for context, meaning, and use. Indeed, the clock has gone further back than that - more like it was in the 1960s. Regrettable as that is - and I don’t underestimate the importance (or the difficulty) of continuing to argue for change - the urgent question is how to help the situation for teachers right now. I've therefore spent the past few weeks revising and updating Language A to Z, and, thanks to the collaboration of the Librios publishing platform, making these available again as e-publications. The two e-books were launched today - a single integrated student book, and a companion teacher’s book - and they will also be shortly available as pdfs and as print-on-demand items.

My whole website is being redesigned, as a consequence, and things look a bit like a half-built house at the moment, but I wanted to get the books out there as quickly as possible, in the hope that they will help. They can be accessed here. In due course, other books requested from my out-of-print backlist will be made available in this way. The next two, which will be available later in March, will be Words on Words and Language Play. If the blogger link doesn't work, for inexplicable reasons, the URL is http://www.davidcrystal.community.librios.com.

On the Linguistics Olympiad

A correspondent writes to ask about the linguistic equivalent of the Olympic Games. He means the International Linguistics Olympiad. This is one of 12 International Science Olympiads, held annually since 2003. Each year, teams of young linguists from around the world gather to solve puzzles in language and linguistics. The last one, the 10th, was held in Slovenia, when 131 contestants in 34 teams represented 26 countries. This year, the event will be hosted in Manchester, 22-27 July. Information can be found at Linguistics Olympiad.

The puzzles are great fun. What happens is that teams are presented with a chunk of linguistic data from a language - in the last Olympiad, data from Dyirbal, Umbu-Ungu, Basque, Teop, Rotuman, and Lao - and the challenge is to find the system behind the words. For example, you might be given a set of verbs containing regular and irregular forms, and you have to work out what's going on.You don't need to be a linguistics specialist to solve the problems. As the organizers say: ‘No prior knowledge of linguistics or languages is required: even the hardest problems require only your logical ability, patient work, and willingness to think around corners’. And there are some past problems at the website to illustrate the point.

Dick Hudson, who’s on the UK organizing committee, tells me that British involvement started only recently, but numbers of participants have hugely increased, from 500 in 2010 to nearly 6000 this year. The British Olympiad has three levels of difficulty, so it can reach pupils as young as 12 as well as the more advanced sixth-formers. There’s been a really enthusiastic response, apparently, but the event still isn't as widely known as it ought to be - hence this post.

When teaching linguistics at Bangor and Reading, we used to set ‘morphology problems’ each week. They’re fun, because they are a close encounter with the reality of languages, in all their glorious irregularity. And nothing, to my mind, beats the satisfaction of solving one.

On giving advices

A correspondent writes to ask whether he can write advices instead of pieces of advice in a report.

Advice is certainly one of those uncountable nouns that's developing a renewed countable use in present-day English, along with researches, informations, and the like. What surprises people is to realise just how long-standing the countable usage is. In the case of advice, the OED has citations dating from the 15th century. ‘Getting good advices’ appears in one of William Caxton’s translations (1481). We are not talking downmarket usage here. The Duchess of Newcastle in 1664 talks about being ‘attentive to good advices’. And here’s Gibbon in 1796: ‘These are so many advices which it is easy to give, but difficult to follow.’

The examples continue right down to the present day, but the 18th century saw a shift away from the countable use when prescriptive writers took against it, preferring a partitive expression (such as piece of advice) - and also against other such nouns, such as information, which also had a long history of countable use (with citations from the 15th to the 18th century). Advices fell out of use in standard English, accordingly, but retained its identity in regional speech. The OED has some modern quotations, but they are all Caribbean and South Asian.

What seems to be happening is that the original instinct to use advice and the other words in both countable and uncountable ways is reasserting itself. People who have not been influenced by a prescriptive mindset in school are most likely to use it – which mainly means the millions learning English as a foreign language. Often the countable usage is reinforced by an analogous countability in a mother-tongue (as with informations in French). But it would be wrong to see the renewed plural use as solely an L2 phenomenon, as it is present in regional dialects, both national and (as the OED recognizes) international. I suspect it will become a standard usage again one day. In the case of informations there are signs of this already happening, in that the legal profession continues to use the plural form routinely in various special contexts. But advices isn’t standard yet, so in formal writing I would say stick with the partitive form for the time being.

On forgiving

A correspondent writes from the US to ask whether I've encountered the expression ‘a forgiving recipe’. He heard it recently, looked it up in dictionaries, and couldn’t find it. ‘Is it an Americanism?’, he asks.

No, it isn’t. Nigella’s website, for instance, talks about ‘the most forgiving recipe for banana cake ever’, and there are plenty of other examples from both sides of the Atlantic. I don’t know how long it’s been around, though, and it would be interesting to track down an earliest citation. I asked two cooks in my family whether they knew the expression and neither did, so my feeling is that it’s a fairly recent usage.

I’m not surprised that it receives no separate mention in a dictionary, as dictionaries don’t provide a systematic guide to the collocations that belong to a particular meaning. And in the general sense of ‘easy’, ‘safe’, ‘comfortable’, forgiving has been used in a wide range of inanimate contexts – workplaces, enterprises, timetables, climates, surfaces, lights, clothing, and many other nouns have all been described in this way. Quite a common collocation is with piece: a forgiving piece of clothing / machinery / meat... So, as long as a dictionary illustrates from some of these, the broad sense will be covered.

A forgiving recipe, it seems, is one which does not require exact measurements, where some ingredients can be substituted without the result being affected, or where a cook can get it wrong and it still turns out OK. I'd have thought that, in the context of cooking, this usage has moved away sufficiently from the general sense to warrant its appearance as a separate dictionary sub-entry. A couple of dictionaries are already taking notice of it, and I don't think it'll be long before we see it in all of them.

On a new Babel

As the situation caused by my family illness is slowly resolving (successfully), I am dipping my toe into the academic water again, albeit tentatively. But not without first thanking those of you who sent me messages of concern, which I very much appreciated.

The motivation for this first post comes from a new publishing venture, which I’m delighted to see emerge. Way back in the 1970s, I tried to persuade various publishing houses to launch a full-colour illustrated language magazine, to meet what I felt was a rapidly growing popular interest in the subject. On the analogy of History Today, I wanted it to be called Language Today, and approached Longman publishers accordingly. They were mildly interested, but the idea never took off. Cambridge University Press, on the other hand, were interested, but in a more focused notion, which eventually appeared as English Today, with Tom McArthur as founding editor. A couple of other short-lived attempts to produce a popular language mag followed, such as Language International. But for some time now there has been nothing ‘out there’.

And now, at last, there is: Babel, an initiative from linguists at the University of Huddersfield, and its first issue, which has just become available, is doing what I always hoped such a magazine would do. I wish it well.

On 'at all', at all?

A correspondent thinks he hears at all used ‘at the end of every question one is asked nowadays’. He comments: ‘I reckon it is the bad habit of always trying to lengthen the question when posed by people with little confidence. Recently I was asked in the baker's if I wanted my bread sliced "at all?" It was all I could do to refrain from replying "oh, about half-way through, please".’

I haven’t heard it as much as he seems to have, I must say. But I do recognize the usage, especially where I live, in Holyhead, where a lot of Irish people live, and many more pass through the port. It’s long been a usage in Irish English - and also in the Caribbean - where it’s heard in statements as well as questions:

An Irish example: ‘It’s the greatest fun at all.’ (i.e. it’s wholly the greatest fun)
An American example: ‘Use one statement at all.’ (i.e. only one statement)

OED has citations of this use from 1375.

The usage in negative constructions also has a similarly long history, as in no problem at all and he can’t dance at all, where it means ‘to any degree’. These have entered standard English. And the same point applies to the earliest interrogative use, where the phrase has a range of meanings, such as ‘in any way’ or ‘for any reason’. First citation here is 1566.

Did you go there at all?
Why should people care about football at all?

The usage which my correspondent has noticed developed out of this. Here the phrase is used to modify the question, and has the sense of ‘in any event’ or ‘indeed’. From a pragmatic point of view, we might gloss it as ‘may I ask? or ‘would you say?’. It softens the force of the question. It might have something to do with lack of confidence, as my correspondent thinks, but more likely it will be functioning as a politeness marker. Here are some OED examples (the first one is from James Joyce, in Dubliners):

Is he a priest at all?
Can we see him at all?

And - to my mind the most fascinating one of all - the reduplicated usage:

How is he, at all at all?

I take this to be a selection of two of the range of meanings expressed by the form, for emphasis: ‘How is he indeed, may I ask?’. I think I’ve even heard it used three times, but I can’t remember where.

I don’t know if the usage is increasing among people who don’t have an Irish or Caribbean background, but I wouldn’t be surprised, given the popularity of TV series in which Irish speech has been prominent, such as Father Ted.

On Fifty Shades of Grey, or is it Gray?

The correspondents corresponded with vitality yesterday. A 5-minute interview with Jim Naughtie on the Today programme on Radio 4 about my new book, Spell It Out: the Singular Story of English Spelling, led later in the day to an extraordinary outpouring, almost confessional at times, from listeners about their problems with spelling. And this started at 7.20 in the morning. Whoever would have thought it?

As the day wore on, the pace increased. Lunchtime saw another interview, 10 minutes (I was told) on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2. It became nearly half an hour, as the volume of texts, emails, and phone calls caused the editors to keep the item going. Only the 1 o’clock news stopped it.

And then BBC News Online, wanting a comment about the new abbreviation Ebacc (for English baccalaureate). I do deal with the spelling of abbreviations in the book, though this one is too new to get a mention. The reporter wanted to know what I thought about the reaction that the abbreviation sounds like a disease. I’m not surprised. New abbreviations inevitably echo their ancestors. For ‘e’, there are three chief echoes: e-coli, e-mail, and e-numbers. The first is fairly negative; the second fairly positive; and the third (for Europe) mixed. But as bac is already an abbreviation for bacillus, that’s the one most likely to come to mind. The association won’t last for long. Familiarity with abbreviations soon breeds content, and in a few months time, I predict, the medical associations will have been forgotten.

But, back to Spell it Out, which during the day crept up the Amazon charts. By the evening it was Number 4 in the best-selling list, ahead of Fifty Shades of Grey and its friends, and just behind Gordon Ramsay. Maybe I should have called the book Fifty Shades of Grey, or is it Gray?: the Singular Story of English Spelling.

Spelling competing with cooking and sex. I say again, whoever would have thought it?