English usage | Steve Woods

Braking bad

09/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.

However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.

Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.

You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.

The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).

The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).

Got it now?

Good! 🙂
Research shows language you speak changes your view of the world

29/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

In research that was published recently in Psychological Science, German-English bilinguals and German and English monoglots were studied to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

This research shows that bilinguals can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language in which they are operating, according to Mashable.

The past 15 years have seen extensive research on the bilingual mind, with most of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of being bilingual. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

To quote the abstract for the research paper:

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Bilingual German and Frisian police station sign. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By way of illustrating these differences, Mashable’s piece gives a handy example of these different world views

German-English bilinguals were shown video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket. The participants were then asked to describe the scenes.

When such a scene is presented to a monoglot German speaker they will tend to describe the action and the goal of the action. Thus they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. English monoglot speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action.

As regards the effect of the language being spoken on bilingual speakers’ perceptions of the world, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language in which they were given the task. Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. However, a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the UK were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

Hat tip: Katya Ford.
Post exclusive: Bristol Rovers change kit

23/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s a hidden exclusive in today’s online edition of the Bristol Post. Unknown to the fans and probably the club itself, the Post reveals that Bristol Rovers now play in “blue and white stripes“, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Post journalists, here are the three strips currently used by Bristol Rovers. Please note the only stripes are on the alternative away colours and have one thin blue stripe. The pattern used on the regular strip is commonly known as “quarters“.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Post also mentions in the article that Catalonia’s CE Sabadell FC (who are in the Spanish Segunda División. Ed.) play in a strip “similar” to that of Rovers. FC Sabadell’s current strips are shown below and yes, the home strips do look very similar, even if the teams’ respective league positions do not; Rovers are chasing promotion from the Conference, whilst Sabadell are fighting relegation.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Let’s hope the players of both teams are more on target than Bristol’s alleged newspaper of record. 🙂
Election special: Labour love hard work

16/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Vote Labour, get a lifetime of hard labour?
Political language relies to a great extent on clichés. Two of the most over-used terms of recent times is “hard work” and “hard working“, with the latter usually attached to the noun families and implying that the childless in society are incapable of arduous slogging.

With some free time on my hands this morning, I spent a leisurely hour going through the main UK party manifestos (excluding regional parties such as Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Northern Ireland parties) for the forthcoming general election looking for instances of “hard work“. The results for each manifesto are shown below.

1st: Labour 5
2nd: Conservatives 3
3rd: Liberal Democrats & UKIP 1 each
5th Green Party 0

Both my parents were unskilled manual workers who left school at the age of 14 and worked all their lives. Indeed my father once told me that on his last day of schooling, he went to school in the morning, left at midday and went straight to work for a local farmer as an agricultural labourer in the afternoon.

I remember the physical effect that hard work had on their bodies. Both were prematurely aged long before the official retirement age. My father died at the relatively young age of 67, whilst my mother, who although she lived to be nearly 82, was disabled from her mid-50s onwards by a debilitating stroke. I therefore do not regard hard work as such as the same great virtue as the closeted and cosseted inhabitants of the Westminster Village, who’ve probably never done a hard day’s physical graft in their lives.
There, their, they’re Bristol Post

12/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

The minions of the Bristol Post, possibly under strain from toiling away at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth looking for the city’s blandest news content, seem to have particular difficulty with homophones, i.e. words that are pronounced the same as another word but differ in meaning and may differ in spelling.

This was amply illustrated below by a photo gallery posted this morning on the local organ’s website.

Should the Post’s ‘journalists’ wish to cure themselves of acute homophonia, help is at hand up at Bristol University.

Its website has a handy grammar tutorial page for the illiterati on the simple differences between there, their and they’re.

To quote from that page

There is the place, i.e. not here.

Their is the possessive form indicating belonging to them.

They’re is the contracted form of “they are”.

Have you got that, Bristol Post, if so Bristol University’s site also has a useful exercise to check whether the lesson has sunk in.
Good Friday in Bristol 5

03/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

When venturing out onto Stapleton Road earlier today, an unusual sight met my eyes – an open-air church service for Good Friday, the Christian holiday commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary.

Seeing the service in progress prompted me to look at the etymology of Good Friday. From whence does it originate.

According to Wikipedia, the etymology of the term “good” in the context of Good Friday is disputed, with some sources claiming it is from the senses pious, holy of the word “good“, whilst others contend that it is a corruption of “God Friday“. The Oxford English Dictionary supports the first etymology, giving “of a day or season observed as holy by the church” as an archaic sense of good and providing examples of good tide meaning “Christmas” or “Shrove Tuesday” and Good Wednesday meaning the Wednesday in Holy Week.

In German-speaking countries Good Friday is generally referred as Karfreitag (Kar from Old High German kara ‘bewail‘, ‘grieve‘, ‘mourn‘; Freitag for ‘Friday‘): Mourning Friday. The Kar prefix is an ancestor of the English word care in the sense of cares and woes; and thus mourning. The day is also known as Stiller Freitag (Silent Friday) and Hoher Freitag (High Friday, Holy Friday) in German-speaking countries.
Election special

02/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics

Yesterday I received my poll card from Bristol City Council cunningly inviting me to put a cross on pieces of paper in the forthcoming general election and council election both being held on Thursday, 7th May.

Spot the proofreading howler on the back of the poll card!
Hygiene notice

29/03/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

In a supermarket somewhere in the UK…

Using tongs would have been more hygienic in my opinion. 🙂
Sign of spring – blackthorn

24/03/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language

This morning on my walk from home in Easton to the Bristol Wireless lab in Bedminster, my eye was caught by blackthorn blossom standing out white against the blue sky.

Blackthorn blossom in Lawford’s Gate, Bristol

Blackthorn (prunus spinosa) derives its name from its thorny nature and its very dark bark.

As its Latin name denotes, it is a member of the plum family. Its fruits – sloes – are well known for their bitterness, unless picked after they’ve been bletted, i.e. attacked by autumn frosts. Their best-known use is for making sloe gin.

Sloes. Note the thorns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The modern English word sloe comes from the Old English slāh. The same word is noted in Middle Low German, historically spoken in Lower Saxony. Similar words are found in other languages with Teutonic roots.

With its savage thorns, blackthorn has traditionally been used for making a hedge against cattle or a “cattle-proof” hedge.
The return of the spiv

22/03/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

One consequence of the current media focus (which continues today, with the Mirror describing his tactics as “sleazy”. Ed.) on the business activities of Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps (right) has been a linguistic one.

Many people have rediscovered a word which came to prominence during World War 2 – spiv.

This word has often been used by those commenting on online articles on Shapps’ dubious business activities to describe the man himself.

Oxford Dictionaries defines a spiv as:

A man, typically a flashy dresser, who makes a living by disreputable dealings.

During World War 2 those disreputable dealings usually meant that spivs circumvented the strict rationing regulations and/or could procure commodities or items that were hard to get.

The spiv was personified during my younger years by Private Joe Walker (left) in the TV comedy Dad’s Army. Walker was played by actor James Beck, who died suddenly at the age of 44 during production of the programme’s sixth series in 1973. In the series, Walker is a valuable asset to the platoon, due to his many “business” connections and his uncanny ability to conjure up almost anything that is rationed or no longer in the shops due to the war – and he will also have it in vast supply (for a price).

For a generation older than mine, the spiv was perhaps characterised by comedians such as Arthur English (right), whose usual persona in the early days of his career was a stereotypical wartime “spiv”. As a consequence of this persona, Arthur English became known as “The Prince of the Wide Boys” (meaning in this context a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing. Ed.). Wide boy is also a term that could possibly be applied to Shapps as an alternative to spiv.

As regards the origins of spiv, there are several possibilities.

Oxford dictionaries reckons it originates in the 1930s and is perhaps related to “spiffy“, meaning “smart in appearance”, which dates back to 19th century slang in this context.

Another possibility is that it’s related to “spiff“, a bonus for salespeople (especially for drapers but later for car salesmen, etc.) for managing to sell excess or out of fashion stock. The seller might offer a discount, by splitting his commission with the customer. A seller of stolen goods could give this explanation for a bargain price.

Yet another suggested origin is that it comes from the nickname of Henry “Spiv” Bagster, a small-time London crook in the early 1900s who was frequently arrested for illegal street trading and confidence tricks. National newspapers reported his court appearances in 1903-06.

Furthermore, it has been speculated that it is VIPs backwards. In addition, further speculation has it that the word was also a police acronym for Suspected Persons and Itinerant Vagrants.

Finally, there are also hints that it could have been borrowed from Romany. In that tongue, spiv is a word for sparrow, implying the person is a petty criminal rather than a serious “villain”.

Posts navigation