A minor linguistic storm arose in the UK last week after a Teesside school principal asked parents to “correct” their children’s informal speech – phrases such as it’s nowt (it’s nothing), I seen (I saw, I have seen), and gizit ere (give us it here = give it to me). Dan Clayton alerted me to this story, and provides additional insights and links on the unfolding debate.

As Dan points out, the extent and passion of the responses – in online comments, follow-up articles and discussion elsewhere – “[show] what a live issue” it is. People have very strong feelings about correctness in language, but unfortunately this strength of feeling isn’t always matched by tolerance and understanding.

The teacher’s list of regional phrases and pronunciations calls them “incorrect”, which is unfortunate. They’re not standard, but this does not imply sub-standard (except, here, the your/you’re misspelling). And since standard English is often assumed to be not only “correct” and “proper” but intrinsically better than regional dialects, this attitude can foster prejudice.

Standard English has social prestige and practical utility, so students should learn it if they want to get by in the wider world. But politics aside it’s just another dialect. As Walt Wolfram expressed it in the Atlantic recently, “everyone speaks a dialect. But society doesn’t quite see it that way.”

Regional dialects – the form of language we inherit from families and peers and our early social environment – with their distinct vocabulary, idioms and speech patterns, are part of our identity and need not be displaced by more formal language that serves a particular purpose in certain contexts. We can keep both.

Children naturally pick up multiple forms of a language and learn how to switch appropriately between these “codes”. It’s the same kind of flexibility that’s reflected in our social behaviour more generally as we grow older. When we meet someone, we know when to shake hands and nod, and we know when to hug and smile. People seldom do one when the other is expected (though it does happen), and so it is with language. We tend to adjust instinctively.

In an excellent article in the UK Independent, sociolinguist Julia Snell explains why the school’s approach is counterproductive. If children are criticised for their usual mode of speech, she writes, they “may simply remain silent in order to avoid the shame of speaking ‘incorrectly’, and miss the interactions crucial to learning.” Children are sensitive to attitudes towards their speech and other behaviour; stigmatising their normal dialect cannot be beneficial.

The Teesside principal said: “We need the children to know there is a difference between dialect, accent and standard English.” True. But her own letter reveals a “worrying conflation” of these categories, as Linguistics @ Canterbury details. Why not educate children about the differences – enjoy them, study them, savour them – without condemning or repressing non-standard forms?

[image source]

A more-or-less-monthly roundup of links on language, grammar, usage, writing, linguistics and such things. Browse at will and click your fill.

Do animals have accents?

Irish language used in space.

Why tongue twisters are hard to say.

Digital Dütsch: the rise of Swiss German writing.

From corpus to dictionary: how lexicographers use databases.

A history of -ise vs. -ize.

If and when you say if and when.

Grammar rules and the persistence of ignorance.

Morality, dictionaries, and the Voice of Authority.

Men and women use uptalk differently.

The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks (*happy dance*).

Wet your whistle and whet your appetite.

How to write an academic introduction.

Laughter among deaf signers.

Why pick on adverbs?

The grammar of newspaper headlines.

When physicists do linguistics.

Is decimate the peeve to beat all peeves?

How not to test English language competence.

The Alphabet Man and his twig letters.

How did X and O come to represent affection?

Kick ass: a once-vulgar phrase goes mainstream.

Prepositions are not what they’re claimed to be.

Mother languages and identity in Zimbabwe.

Mapping languages in England and Wales.

Documenting Aramaic before it disappears.

On coherence in speech and its lack in academic writing.

Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password.

The man who couldn’t speak – and how he revolutionized psychology.

Take A Minute To Watch The New Way We Make Web Headlines Now.

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[language links archive]

LOL, the poster child of txtspk and internet lingo, began as a handy abbreviation for laughing out loud (and sometimes lots of love). But it has come to symbolise a whole mode of discourse: LOLspeak is a quasi-dialect unto itself, albeit mainly the preserve of unwitting LOLcats.

Some people even say lol offline to indicate amusement without having to go to the trouble of laughing. (I’m sure these people laugh normally, too.) But there’s more to LOL than meets the eye. Anne Curzan writes at Lingua Franca that the meaning of LOL has changed – it often doesn’t mean laughing out loud. You might have noticed this.

LOL is now a way to flag that a message is meant to be funny (similar to jk – ‘just kidding’) or to signal irony. LOL can also be a way to acknowledge that a writer has received a text – a written version of a nod of the head and a smile (“a chuckle at most,” one student told me).

I never adopted LOL myself, but I see it regularly in texts, forums, Twitter and the like, and I’m pretty certain it doesn’t convey actual laughter most of the time. Unlike Curzan, I think it retains its real-laughter sense, but it has definitely broadened in meaning: to a nod of the head or a marker of irony or humour, as she says – and more besides.

Linguist John McWhorter has been studying this. He calls LOL “the texting equivalent of black English’s yo, a nugget of new colloquial grammar establishing a warm shared frame of reference”. In a TED talk (video below), he makes a persuasive case that texting isn’t so much writing as “fingered speech” with its own grammar. An example of this grammar is LOL.

McWhorter, like Curzan, feels that LOL hasn’t meant laughing out loud for a while now (I think it still does, but only sometimes). Referring to the phrases LOL it’s raining and LOL I’m inside the library; LOL I know, it’s been a long day, he points out that “no one guffaws that much. That’s not what these LOLs mean.” He continues:

If you look at the LOLs from the perspective of a geeky linguist looking for structure, what the LOLs are, are particles which indicate that the speaker – so to speak – and the addressee are sharing a certain context of interpretation, i.e., you know what this nasty day is like; You know what it’s like being in the library. That is a piece of grammar.

So LOL has been grammaticalised. It’s now a pragmatic particle, what McWhorter in a more recent talk (not yet online) calls a marker of empathy and accommodation.

Whether used like this or in the more traditional way, LOL is not “gibberish”, as a commenter here recently complained. You don’t have to like it or use it, but it’s an interesting communicative development deserving of study, not casual contempt.

Here’s McWhorter’s engaging talk:

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How do you use LOL? Or if you don’t, how do you feel about it?

And did you notice McWhorter’s double copula? Not your garden variety is is, either!

In my recent post on the evolution of LOL, I included a video of John McWhorter, who has been studying this feature of language. One of his books, The Power of Babel, finally reached the top of my to-read mountain (more of a range, really), and I recommend it highly.

The Power of Babel is a beautifully written and soundly researched history of language that conveys expertly how language changes and what pressures (internal and external) induce that change. Its focus, refreshingly, is not on English – or on any particular language – while pidgins and creoles get prominent coverage.

We get a strong sense from Babel of how artificial are the boundaries we tend to place around and within languages; better to think of it all as a big stew, or a self-pollinating net, its elements mixing all the time to varying degrees and at varying rates. The fun chapter titles give a rough indication of the book’s contents:

McWhorter has a talent for drawing clarity out of complication, leading to such nuggets as: “Dialects are all there is: the ‘language’ part is just politics.” (He makes a long, persuasive case for the truth of this proposition.) And I liked this line on grammar and social acceptability:

Any given language chooses from an infinite array of possible grammatical configurations, on which notions of respectability are arbitrarily superimposed, meaningless to people speaking the language or even dialect next door.

One last excerpt: a fine summary paragraph on the “ineluctable imperatives” that impel language transformation (McWhorter prefers this term to evolution in the context of language change):

Once it hits the ground, a human language must and will change. Because change can proceed in various directions, once a language is spoken by separate populations, it must and will diverge into dialects. Juxtaposed with other languages, human languages must and will mix. Torn down to its bare essentials, if needed as a medium of full communication, a human language must and will rise again as a new one.

For more information on the book’s contents and style, see Angela Bartens’s review at Linguist List.

Reading a review of the 1983 fantasy film Hundra (a feminist knockoff of Conan the Barbarian), I came across a pretty unusual word, albeit one that almost looks perfectly normal. Film historian Paul Mavis, at DVD Talk, says the film’s creators:

set about to make a spoofy fantasy adventure thats focus would be on a gorgeous, blonde, man-hating super-warrior who was subservient to no one.

Few readers would pause over that thats: its meaning is clear in context, and it draws little attention to itself, its ungrammaticality thoroughly overshadowed by the line’s sensational imagery. Who’d be distracted by the subtle asymmetry of English’s relative pronoun system when there are man-hating super-warriors striding about?

Editors, that’s who. And this is one reason I like reading texts that (presumably) aren’t professionally edited: you never know what kind of morphological oddity will appear. And it is a curio: scouring vast language corpora for thats produces only false negatives – apostrophe-less that’s.

Centuries ago, English had various word endings for relative pronouns’ different grammatical cases. For instance, that was þæt, which in the possessive (aka genitive) was þæs. Jonathon Owen has a good rundown of this at Arrant Pedantry. Over time, English lost these inflections and was left with a diminished set – which is why whose and of which now do the work of þæs.

Hundra (1983)

You can see why even a native speaker and competent writer, for whom whose didn’t come readily to mind (or who felt, erroneously, that it was wrong for a non-human antecedent) might instinctively fill the gap in “an adventure ___ focus would be…” with thats. In a parallel world, it could have developed as a normal part of the relative pronoun system.

But it didn’t, and unless I see thats a few more times, I won’t expect a resurgence. That and which simply don’t have genitive forms like *thats or *which(e)s available in modern standard usage. The option of whose or of which is an imperfect state of affairs, but there it is. Hundra‘s tagline, “She will not be tamed”, goes double for English.

Update:

Arnold Zwicky, by email, has brought to my attention an article by Neal Whitman at the Visual Thesaurus which looks at possessive that’s among other things; and a brief post by John Lawler at Linguist List in 1993, which subsequently featured in at least two books on syntax.

[click to enlarge]
 

From the “Frazz” archives – comic strip by Jef Mallett.

Time for another language linkfest. They grow quickly when I turn my back, one link giving rise to another. Anyway, it’s the usual mixum-gatherum of items relating to language, linguistics, words and books. Happy reading.

How to save wet books.

Cataloguing -og vs. -ogue.

“In love with he.”

How trustworthy are our intuitions about words?

Raising a deaf child.

Lip-reading: seeing at the speed of sound.

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”

Multilingual swearing preferences.

Silencing Irish.

Punk, brat, jerk, barbarian: the origins of 10 insults.

A vanishingly unlikely language peeve.

“My linguistics dreams are intense and vivid.”

Helllloooo, wooord lengtheningggg.

Wikipedia’s language distribution.

March forth and enjoy / 269 / Grammar Day haiku.

NBC pronunciation standards of the mid-20th century.

Dr Seuss and the OED.

On synaesthesia: “T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures.”

Manufacturing moral panic over linguistic integration.

Pronouncing skeletal.

8 new and necessary punctuation marks.

Literary graffiti from around the world.

Mammet, Muppet, and other puppetry words.

Mapping the languages used on Twitter in New York.

Word usage mirrors community structure on Twitter.

John Wallis and language invention.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.

A philosopher burns his Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cyberlinguistics: recording the world’s vanishing voices.

A dictionary – and cultural record – of Iu-Mien.

Which is worse,, a double comma or an unclosed bracket? (such as this

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[Archived language links]

From io9 last week, “Every language needs its, like, filler words”:

“Sigh language” is a lovely idea; as typos go it is unusually appealing. Kelly (@potterarchy) on Twitter suggested in jest that io9 may have been referring to this “sigh-off” between actors on the UK TV show Never Mind the Buzzcocks:

A sigh language isn’t even very far-fetched, given that some languages have channels of communication that use whistling and humming. Think of the subtle shades of exasperation, tedium, relief, exhaustion and wistful longing that can be conveyed with a well-shaped sigh.

It seems the sort of thing a science fiction writer might already have described – with neighbouring populations conversing through sniffs, yawns, gurgles, and what have you – but nothing springs to mind.

*sigh*

Alexander John Ellis (1814–90) was a musicologist, philologist and phonetician whose approach to language was systematic and descriptive. He gave primacy to speech over written forms, writing in chapter 1, vol. 1 of his magnum opus On Early English Pronunciation (1869–89) that “a real, living, growing language”:

has always been a collection of spoken sounds, and it is only in so far as they indicate these sounds that other symbols can be dignified with the name of language.

Henry Hitchings, in The Language Wars, says Ellis carried with him a variety of tuning forks (among other things kept in the 28 pockets of his greatcoat), the better to measure the pitch of musical instruments he encountered; and, perhaps, of voices – Ellis said a vowel sound “is properly a musical tone with a definite quality or timbre”.

A few lines after the quotation above comes an astute passage on the mutability of language:

Spoken language is born of any two or more associated human beings. It grows, matures, assimilates, changes, incorporates, excludes, develops, languishes, decays, dies utterly, with the societies to which it owes its being. It is difficult to seize its chameleon form at any moment. Each speaker as thought inspires him, each listener as the thought reaches him with the sound, creates some new turn of expression, some fresh alliance of thought with sound, some useful modification of thought with custom, some instantaneous innovation which either perishes at the instant of birth, or becomes part of the common stock, a progenitor of future language. The different sensations of each speaker, the different appreciations of each hearer, their intellectual growth, their environment, their aptitude for conveying or receiving impressions, their very passions, originate, change, and create language.

This view shows Ellis’s appreciation of just how immediate, dynamic, and democratically distributed is language change. Like it or lament it (or lose no sleep whatsoever over it), language change is something in which everyone plays a part whenever they speak or write to someone else.

On Early English Pronunciation is available on Google Books and the Internet Archive.

[image from Dr Wallich’s Studio, Kensington, 1868, part of the Tucker Collection, via the London Mathematical Society]

Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome, viral, clinical, [X] on steroids, and others – not exactly an epidemic (that’s another one), but a significant set all the same.

For example: a detective novel I read lately (Angels Flight by Michael Connelly) contained the phrase: “the senseless and often random violence that was the city’s cancer”. Intuitively we understand the cancer metaphor, but we might never have thought about it analytically. You’ll be glad to know that someone has.

Janet Byron Anderson, a linguist and medical editor, has written a book about these words. Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language looks at how medical terminology has “migrated from hospital floors and doctors’ offices and taken up dual citizenship on the pages of newspapers, in news reports and quoted speech”.

Byron Anderson finds western media “saturated with clinical topics and medical themes, which have flooded thought with inordinate interest in health and disease”. I don’t know about “saturated”, but I take her point. She acknowledges that medical metaphors are nothing new, but provides a contemporary survey of their scope with particular reference to newspapers in English-speaking countries.

Here, for instance, is a note on the cancer metaphor:

In Sick English a social group (eg. society) is the body that cancer invades. If a trend or situation threatens any part of a group and has the potential to spread (metastasize) throughout it, the phenomenon is called a cancer, or cancerous. . . . A sense of inevitability and impending doom pervades the descriptions.

For each “Sick English” term, the author explains its clinical features and how these have been preserved (or not) in non-clinical use, fleshing out the material with etymological and other linguistic notes, and illustrating her points with several examples taken from the wild.

Sick English aims to show how the eponymous lingo is “systematic and patterned”, and to explain why some medical terms and conditions (such as hypertension and diabetes) have not made the leap into generalised use while others have. There are nice insights into the subtleties of the broadened meanings. I enjoyed the discussion of surgical strike, a metaphor

drawn from the precision with which clinical surgeries are performed: A surgical procedure targets specific organs or tissues, and the surgeon tries to avoid damaging adjacent organs or tissues.

This explains its appeal in military use – to reassure the public that only the target will be destroyed, leaving innocent people unharmed. But as Byron Anderson writes, “the military objective is unrealistic because inadvertent civilian casualties and destruction of untargeted structures do occur”. She cites a military reporters stylebook by Isaac Cubillos that says there’s “no such thing” as a surgical strike and advises journalists to avoid the term.

Speaking of precision, Sick English needs better proofreading. There is anomalous capitalisation, a missing full stop and quotation marks, typos (they’ve have; Wattterson), orthographic inconstancy (2005 – 2009 vs. 2008-2009 vs. 2008–2010), and inconsistent spacing throughout, all of which was distracting. My editing fingers also twitched at the redundancy in a line saying a doctor, “and opponent of the expanded use of rosuvastatin, deplored such expansion.”

The book could also have been fact-checked more rigorously. It claims cholesterol doesn’t have an adjective like cholesterolic (calling it “hypothetical, non-occurring”), but cholesterolic has hundreds of hits in Google Scholar. And though Lucy Kellaway’s column is syndicated in the Irish Times, she is not “an Irish business reporter” – she’s British.

In spite of these minor shortcomings, Sick English is an engaging, useful and well-written monograph. It shows concisely (50 large pp., excluding references) how western society has become increasingly fixated on health and disease, and how this is reflected in the metaphors we use. It is likely to be of interest to writers and editors, especially journalists, and also to general word- and society-watchers.

[Disclosure: I received a review copy of the book from Ms. Byron Anderson.]

Last month I wrote about the dramatic, grammatic evolution of LOL,  referring to two talks on texting by linguist John McWhorter in which he describes LOL’s shift from straightforward initialism (“laughing out loud”) to pragmatic particle marking empathy and shared experience.*

One of McWhorter’s talks was not online at the time, but it appeared yesterday and is well worth watching if you’re interested in texting as a form of communication:

What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That’s what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk.

McWhorter discusses the differences between speech and writing and how they bleed into one another, and he demonstrates some of texting’s emerging structures and innovations, for instance slash as a “new information marker”.

He also tackles the myth that texting implies a decline in our linguistic abilities (an argument developed in more detail in David Crystal’s book Txtng: The gr8 db8). Says McWhorter:

What we’re seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they’re using alongside their ordinary writing skills – and that means that they’re able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That’s also true of being bidialectal, and it’s certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today – not consciously, of course, but it’s an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.

Here is “Txtng is killing language. JK!!!”:

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* My post was since translated into Chinese,  if anyone would like to read it that way.

To keep at bay the ever-present danger of running out of things to read on the internet, here’s a selection of language-related links I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks.

For hardboiled hacks and editors: Grammarnoir 5.

How pointing makes babies human.

Cucumber map of Europe.

Animated pop-up books.

Kán yu andastánd wot aim seiing?

A classical alphabet in rhyming form.

The genealogical etymology of scalawag.

Instead of awesome.

Fadfixes.

The psycholinguistics of CAPTCHAs.

Anzac, possie, furphy: words from Gallipoli.

Paper vs. screens: the reading brain in the digital age.

GloWbE, a new 1.9b word corpus of global web-based English.

Real rules vs. grammar myths (PDF).

Our many synonyms for death.

On newspapers’ use of illegal immigrants.

What’s the collective noun for collective nouns?

Language structure is partly determined by social structure.

Analysing elephant signals and gestures.

Copyediting principles.

Language, like immigration, is “thoroughly untidy”.

How Vesalius’s anatomical metaphors broke the mould in 1543.

Archive of the indigenous languages of Latin America.

Twitter language map of Melbourne.

Endless rewriting.

Killer Bs.

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[Archived language links]

Caxton is a new blog about language from Barrie England, an Oxford graduate who has studied English literature, foreign languages, and older varieties of English. It is named after printing pioneer William Caxton, who, as Barrie writes, “by using technology to reach a wider public . . . can be seen as the progenitor of the digital age”.

Barrie wrote Real Grammar before its host pulled the plug; I’ve linked to it here in the past, most recently to his post on the rise of Swiss German dialect. Some of you may also know him from his insightful comments at Sentence first.

Since setting up Caxton and importing his old posts, Barrie has been blogging regularly, offering astute and balanced observations on such subjects as the value of linguistics, the early shapers of English, education, reflexive pronouns, dialects, grammar, and Jacques Brel. Rummage around and you’ll find all sorts of good material.

If you’re interested in the usage, history, politics, and beauty of English – or language generally – I recommend visiting and bookmarking Caxton. I’ve also added it to the links in the sidebar of this blog.

An impressively silly debate resumed this week over the “correct” pronunciation of GIF. Steve Wilhite, who invented the format, prefers “jif”, and at the recent Webby Awards he shared this opinion (tongue presumably in cheek) through a projected GIF set to Richard Strauss.*

Mr Wilhite knows the OED accepts both common pronunciations, hard-g /gɪf/ as in gift and soft-g /dʒɪf/ as in gist. (As do other dictionaries and all right-thinking people.) But the lexicographers, he told the New York Times, “are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

End of story? Well, no. This is English: it’s messy. It misbehaves.

I’ve written about the pronunciation of GIF before, but a lot of people are still confused about it. There’s no need to be. Wilhite may have invented the GIF but he can’t decide its pronunciation for everyone. Each of us gets to choose how we say a new word, and most people say GIF with a hard g – unsurprisingly, given the sound’s dominance in English words containing the letter.

Language being democratic, hard-g /gɪf/ is therefore the dominant usage. But “jif” is a significant variant, equally standard and clearly preferred by some communities. A few people say the letters “gee eye eff” (5.4% in my poll), and there’s no one to stop you calling it “geef”, “cif”, “jife”, even (ermahgerd) “gerf”, or “Gruffalo” or “Gorgonzola” if the mood takes you. Some of these might raise eyebrows, or hinder comprehensibility, but they won’t get you arrested.

As I said on Twitter, the fuss over GIF’s “correct” pronunciation is partly a result of people thinking there can or should be just one right way. This may be a legacy of standardisation, which privileged certain usages over others, often for wholly arbitrary reasons. The prestige and propriety associated with Usage 1 can give rise to the impression that Usage 2 is necessarily inferior. Not so. If you’ve been universalising your biases, you can stop now.

Despite the wishes and fiats of self-appointed regulators, linguistic variation is perfectly fine. Language is big and stretchy; it contains multitudes and embraces variety, even if some of its users don’t. What little confusion might arise over the pronunciation of GIF will not hurt anyone or bring civilisation to its knees. More to the point, a preference for “gif” or “jif” does not imply someone’s wrongness, stupidity, or moral deficiency.

Is this the last word on GIF? Hardly. As long as a language is alive, there is no last word. Maybe GIF in the future will rhyme with ref. In the meantime, you don’t have to adopt the inventor’s preference. He did us a great technical service, but he’s not the boss of English. You’re the boss of your own English. GIF is in the public domain: say it any way you want.

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* Have you heard the Portsmouth Sinfonia’s rendition? My favourite.

The much-loved “jive talk” scene from the comedy film Airplane! is an amusing if slightly improbable demonstration of how a single language – in this case English – can accommodate varieties so divergent as to be mutually incomprehensible.*

A more plausible form of the phenomenon appears in John McWhorter’s book The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, in which the author recounts an incident that neatly depicts the existence of such varieties in a language, one perfectly transparent to him and the others increasingly unintelligible.

The dialects in question are Standard English and Guyanese creoles. McWhorter was at a conference when he entered an elevator with his dissertation advisor; another Guyanese man hopped in at the last minute:

They started out speaking Standard English, largely in deference to me, but as the elevator went up and their conversation became gradually warmer and more spontaneous, they started gliding into increasingly more creole layers of their speech repertoire. The higher we went, the less of their conversation I could grasp. I lost the first sentence above the fifth floor; by the tenth, all I knew was who they were talking about; by the eighteenth, all I knew was that something was really funny and that it probably wasn’t me. By the twenty-fifth floor, when we got out, they might as well have been speaking Turkish. Yet to them, they had never stopped speaking “English” – they had simply traveled along a continuum of creolized varieties of it leading away from the lone vanilla variety I grew up in.

What I like about this anecdote is the incremental but radical spontaneous morphing of the language, along with the readymade metaphor (an elevator) in which the continuous shift takes place.

Ethnologue’s page on Guyanese Creole English also notes the “continuum of variation from basilectal Creole to acrolectal English of the educated”.

* Sometimes this communicative shortfall hinges on a single word, as in the famous case of William Caxton’s egges/eyren.

Another month means another selection of language and book links, the latest batch including tiny libraries and great secrets, badgers and Moo Fields, jive and wiki. Something for everyone, I hope.

Slim Gaillard’s jive dictionary.

Preserving the Texas German dialect.

Favourite sentences.

The world’s tiniest library.

(Not counting Marc Giai-Miniet’s.)

On slipping a phrase into the language.

Throwing cold water on “ultraconserved words”.

Phonetic analysis of Marge Simpson’s disapproval-sound.

Watching badgers, not inhaling: 10 scandalous euphemisms.

Explaining the Latin jokes in Asterix (h/t LanguageHat).

Indian languages as a primer on historical linguistics.

The Pig Latins of 11 other languages.

Wiki: a word’s journey.

“Vegetarian-fed.”

What can we learn from children’s writing?

The role of editors in codifying Standard English.

“Because I say so!” The trouble with Gwynne’s grammar.

Cunning Geo, Moo Field: amazing place names of Orkney and Shetland.

How learning a foreign language reignites the imagination.

N.K.Y.S.A. (Nobody knows your stupid acronym.)

On descriptivism and grammaticality.

Why do we say Yeah, no?

All the headlines from The Simpsons.

“Herein lies the great secret: Thought is made in the mouth.” (A Dada manifesto by Tristan Tzara.)

[language link archives]

Jealousy and envy are in some ways interchangeable, in other ways not. Dictionary definitions overlap but differentiate the words differently. Coverage of their respective meanings is strangely absent from most major usage guides, so this post may help clarify matters.

Having long admired Nicolas Roeg’s film Walkabout, I recently got around to reading its source: James V. Marshall’s book of the same name, first published as The Children in 1959. It explicitly observes a jealousy–envy distinction, which gives me a good excuse to explore these near-synonyms in more detail.

In Marshall’s novel, Mary and her brother, Peter, are lost in the outback when they meet an Aboriginal Australian boy* who helps them find food, water, and shelter. Mary is pained at being unable to meet Peter’s and her own survival needs, and feels excluded when her brother learns some of the other boy’s vocabulary:

Subconscious twinges of jealousy had been tormenting her. She had been hurt, deeply hurt, at his so quickly transferring his sense of reliance from her…

When the older boy sets about lighting a fire, Peter joins in the business of preparing it, eagerly gathering bits of debris for fuel, at which “[t]he bush boy clicked his teeth in approval”:

From the edge of the pool Mary watched them. Again she felt a stab of jealousy, mingled this time with envy. She tried to fight it: told herself it was wrong to feel this way. But the jealousy wouldn’t altogether die. She sensed the magnetic call of boy to boy: felt left-out, alone. If only she too had been a boy!

Jealousy, mingled with envy. What exactly does Marshall mean? Some discussion of the words’ usages and niches should help us establish this. Note, though, that the semantic lines are often blurred in practice – as the quotations below (all from COCA) will show.

Some say jealous is always negative (it has the same root as zealous), whereas envy can be positive. So for example, jealousy of someone’s status or achievements would imply resentment or ill will, while envy of such things could be more like grudging desire, or may suggest wistful regret or the possibility of emulation:

The oldest, Cain, murders the younger Abel out of pure jealousy. Cain viewed Abel as God’s favorite, the one who inhaled all the love in the room and left nothing for his brother. (Alice Camille, Dads Behaving Badly)

I envy them, you know that. I envy their youth and their dedication. That’s what we should have done at their age, Jackie, come out here and build the land. We got caught up on a treadmill, in the rat race. I’m proud of them. (Brenda Naomi Herzberg, Women in Judaism)

Sometime, however, it seems the other way around, with jealousy used positively and envy negatively:

I’ve always been as jealous of Betts as Ginger is. Not of her smarts so much as her discipline, her courage to imagine she might actually get what she wants. (Meg Waite Clayton, The Four Ms. Bradwells)

A contemporary of his once told me that every American writer Price’s age gnashed his teeth in furious envy at the reception the book received. (David Guy, Ardent Spirit, Generous Friend)

A semantic division more often described is that we’re jealous of things that are ours or (we feel) should rightfully be ours, and envious of things that belong to others.

So we might jealously guard our own reputation, situation, or possessions – a jealous relationship being a possessive one – but we would envy someone else’s:

Yet I felt a feral, jealous ownership of my body. (Kseniya Melnik, Closed Fracture)

All the wives admired Bob’s dashing good looks and expressed their envy. (Janis Hubschman, Everything and the Moon)

But again this nuance is often ignored. There is a clear asymmetry here in that envy is rarely if ever used to refer to something of one’s own, but jealousy does encroach on envy’s purported territory and can refer to other people’s positions, possessions or qualities:

Her eyes were the same, those blue-green eyes everyone used to be so jealous of. (Sara Shepard, The Visibles)

You know how I know how good an artist is? When I have pangs of jealousy when I see their work. (Nicole LaPorte, Brunch at Jeffrey’s)

The distinction is quite plain in the context of sexual or social jealousy: we may be jealous of our partners or friends because we fear losing their attentions to another:

I got so jealous when the two of you became friends. (Katya Apekina, Maureen and Marjorie)

Her boyfriend likes me more than he likes her, and she’s the jealous type. (Linda Castillo, Gone Missing)

Sexual envy, by contrast, would be about coveting another person’s attributes. (Envy comes from a Latin word having to do with looking maliciously; it owes its second syllable ultimately to the same videre that gives us vision.)

Bryan Garner says careful writers use jealousy only in “contexts involving affairs of the heart”, and envy “more broadly of resentful contemplation of a more fortunate person” (A Dictionary of Modern American Usage). The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) advises similarly but more inclusively:

Jealousy connotes feelings of resentment toward another, particularly in matters relating to an intimate relationship. Envy refers to covetousness of another’s advantages, possessions, or abilities.

Envy is also used in the sense of being the object of others’ envy: your first-edition Poe might make you the envy of your book-collecting friends. Or:

His recorded output would be the envy of many musicians. (David Rubien, Jazz Homecoming)

When I was eight, he hired me as an errand boy, a position which made me the envy of the town. (Joel Fishbane, A Clever Science)

Another way of putting this is enviable, which means “to be envied”: She has an enviable gift for putting people at ease. Don’t confuse it with envious, which means “feeling envy, or characterised by envy”: He looked enviously at the shop display.

Envious feels more formal to me than jealous, and it’s definitely less common: corpus figures show jealous used 4–5 times more than envious. (The data are about equal for jealousy and envy, partly because envy functions as both noun and verb.)

The informality and familiarity of jealous might be why I sometimes hear it abbreviated slangily to jeal or jeals. I’ve yet to encounter an equivalent for envious.

Returning to Walkabout’s description of Mary feeling “jealousy, mingled this time with envy”, we can conclude that she is jealous of her brother’s attentions or allegiance having moved (however superficially or temporarily) onto the older boy, and she is envious of their being boys and getting to do what boys may unselfconsciously do.

It’s a nice distinction, and if you’re a writer it’s one some readers will appreciate your making. But if your friend won front-row tickets to a show you wanted to attend, my guess is you’d be much more likely to tell them you were jealous than envious. Some might call that a semantic lapse, but I wouldn’t.

*

[Image: Invidia (Envy), one of the Seven Deadly Sins, by Giotto di Bondone, ca. 1305, via Wikimedia Commons]

* After researching (PDF) the terminology, I felt this was the least problematic phrase to use here.

Folk etymology is when a word or phrase is changed – phonetically, orthographically, or both – to better fit a mistaken idea about its origin. It’s why some folk call a hiccup a hiccough: hic-cough may seem more plausible or comprehensible. The original impulse, says Arnold Zwicky, is “to find meaningful parts in otherwise unparsable expressions”.

Asparagus officinalis, also “sparrow grass”

So asparagus is sometimes written as sparrow grass, much as chaise longue → chaise lounge and coleslaw → coldslaw (which also count as eggcorns – sort of distributively limited folk etymologies). Many remain incorrect or restricted to small groups, but some become standard: penthouse came from pentis, lapwing from lappewinke, and hangnail is a modified Old English agnail.

Most people would probably assume that shamefaced comes from “shame-faced”, but the word was once shamefast, literally “restrained by shame” (fast as in “held firm”). The idea of shame manifesting in a person’s face motivated and sustained the alteration.

Some specialists restrict folk etymology to the process of transformation, but in lay contexts it’s also used to refer to the results, or to the false origin story itself. In any case, it’s about how we replace relatively strange elements in a phrase with more familiar ones which we then concretise in spelling or pronunciation.

Foreign words are a common source of folk etymologies. Belfry came from Old French berfrei, the ensuing ‘l’ forms being reinforced by association with bells. Spanish cucaracha led to English cockroach, while woodchuck (another name for the groundhog) probably derived from the Algonquian word ockqutchaun, according to the American Heritage Dictionary.

Acronyms real or imaginary also beget folk etymologies, or more strictly false ones, especially when their origins are obscure. Thus, posh is said to be a backronym of port outward, starboard home, but there’s no evidence for this; ditto golf from gentlemen only, ladies forbidden. SOS was chosen for its convenient communicative pattern, not as shorthand for save our souls/ship – these phrases were applied later.

This is too much fun not to join in, so I sometimes invent my own spurious etymologies. The following recycled tweet is not so much a folk etymology as a reverse eggcorn:

Zombie comes from misanalysis of some bee, after a formidable insect emerged unexpectedly alive following extreme hibernation.

Backstory: As a child I had posters covering my bedroom walls, and in cold weather a few flies would secretly snuggle in behind them and wait for warmer days, at which point they would scratchily (and yes, creepily) crawl out again like tiny creatures of the undead.

OK, so bees ≠ flies, and whether they hibernate is debatable, but this is no time for zoological pedantry. Send me your eggcorns and false and folk etymologies, actual or concocted on the spot. Let silliness be no object.

[image from Wikimedia Commons]

The number of subscribers to Sentence first has doubled in the last few months. If you’re new here, welcome, and if you’re a veteran reader, thanks for your endurance. The blog placed respectably in bab.la’s recent poll/competition of top language professionals’ blogs. Thank you to bab.la and all who took time to vote.

My Twitter page also placed well. Its focus is on language, mixed with books, chat, general and specialist links, and miscellany. If you tweet, feel free to follow or say hello. I pop in and out most days. Blog and Twitter both made bab.la’s overall list of top language lovers, which you might like to browse for a random assortment of linguaphiles.

And so to business, or rather fun: a roughly monthly set of language-related links I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks. There’s a lot here, but I try to be picky. Some I’d have blogged separately about were I not so busy editing, so hopefully they’ll make up for the relative scarcity of new posts here at the moment.

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Does grammar matter? Stop asking silly questions.

English is no longer the language of the web.

What’s wrong with the passive voice?

How emo got political.

Suffix-ception.

A homonyms quiz.

The Ogham stones of Scotland.

Not all distinctions are equally valuable.

Unsent emails from a lexicographer.

Think similar; or, the nouning of adjectives.

The coupling of speech and gesture appears to be ancient.

Are you incentivized to avoid incent?

A bleisurely look at our fondness for blends.

The secret history of cracker.

Is the Voynich Manuscript structured like written language?

Female doctor or woman doctor? How about neither?

A brief history of swearing (podcast, 25 min.).

Çapuling: the swift rise of a new word.

Medieval pet names.

In polite defence of ‘No problem’.

Where does the phrase nest egg come from?

What is an accent?

Cyber’s new life as a standalone noun.

Standard English is a continuum, not an absolute.

The new language of social media photos.

The etymology of goblin.

Shitstorm in a (German) dictionary.

Since vs. because: on clarity and made-up rules.

Light Warlpiri, a (relatively) new language in northern Australia.

Samuel Johnson’s notes on the letters of the alphabet.

Teenage hyperpolyglot: an interview with Timothy Doner (9½ min.).

Dissecting the meaning of Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

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[archive of language links]

The kinds of things relative pronouns refer to in modern English can be divided roughly as follows:

that – things and people

which – things, but not normally people

who – normally people, not things, sometimes animals or human-like entities (“animate but not human”, says Robert Burchfield; “having an implication of personality”, says the OED)

When it comes to relative pronouns, animals often aren’t accorded the same grammatical status as people. We’re more likely to say The crow that was here than The crow who was here, though of course it varies with the speaker, type of animal, and context.

So I was struck by a line in last week’s Galway Advertiser reporting the recent entry of the dormouse to Ireland’s ecology (we already have the wood mouse and house mouse):

Dormice are woodland animals, who nest in shrubs and hedgerows, particularly those containing hazel (as their name suggests) or brambles.

I haven’t looked into it, but I’d bet that of references to dormice in equivalent contexts, at least 95% would use that or which rather than who.

Not everyone supports this extended use of who, but it is defensible; the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage quotes lines by John Updike (“the hamster who had died”) and Stanley Kauffman (“Tonto is his cat, whom he walks on a leash”) showing its literary acceptability.

Dormice of the world, welcome to Ireland – and to the Grammatical Who Club.

[image source]