I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The first is about a term you might not be familiar with but whose profile seems certain to grow: Mx – a new gender-neutral title.

Mx, which has been in use since at least 1977, made headlines lately because an OED editor said it might be added to that dictionary soon. (So far, Macmillan appears to be the only major dictionary to have done so.) Increasing use of Mx will lead to more recognition of it, both public and official, but since it’s still quite niche I aimed mainly to cover the basics, link to resources, and make the case for its linguistic, political, and cultural value:

To date, Mx has been accepted by various local councils, universities, banks, law societies, the Royal Mail, and government services such as the NHS and HM Revenue and Customs. Clearly it is gaining momentum.

Mx has been adopted by many people who don’t identify as female or male. (Non-binary people can complete a survey on the topic here.) Such preferences should never be assumed – for example, it’s not obligatory for transgender people, but rather an option they may or may not find suitable. Speaking of preferences, Mx is usually pronounced ‘mix’ or ‘mux’, the latter reflecting a sort of stressed schwa, like the options for Ms. When I asked about it on Twitter, Mx-users confirmed both pronunciations.

Or it may be pronounced as an initialism, ‘em ex’. The post also looks briefly at some of the parallels between Mx and Ms, and at the challenges of consciously engineering language.

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Ludic language and the game of grammar surveys a subject close to my heart – or rather a cluster of subjects in the intersection of language and play:

Play is something we associate with children, but there’s nothing intrinsically childish about it, and language offers a large and inviting board on which to do it. This aspect of language helps explain the longstanding tradition of verbal play in informal discourse – what we might call ludic language, from the same root (Latin ludus ‘sport, play’) as ludo and ludicrous. And it’s popular in languages around the world – the latest Ling Space video has some great examples.

Structured language games are another feature. Puns and riddles allow for variation atop a familiar template, while Scrabble, rebuses and tongue twisters are perennially popular. Nor is the playful use of language always trivial…

The post lists additional examples of language play of various structural types. This includes recent online fads like doge and can’t even, which seem deliberately ungrammatical, and I speculate on what motivates the subversive element of this linguistic behaviour.

Older posts can be found in my archive at Macmillan Dictionary.

Here’s a self-explanatory bit of silliness from Twitter yesterday. There were requests to assemble it somewhere, for convenience and posterity, so I thought I’d reproduce it on Sentence first.

I’ve replaced the quotation marks I used on Twitter with italics; other than that it’s identical. The tweets are all linked, so you can also read them by clicking on the date of this introductory one:

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A is for ARBITRARY: a sound’s tie to meaning.
B is for BACK-FORMED, like dry-clean from dry-cleaning.

It is CLEFT that C is for, the clause now divided.
D is for DESCRIPTIVISM, objectively guided.

E is for ETYMON, whose etymon is Greek.
F is for FRONT, like the vowels in sneak peek.

G is for GRIMM’S LAW, a pattern of sound shifts.
H is for HIGH-RISING TERMINAL, where sentence pitch lifts?

I is for INFIX, edumacational or sweary.
J is for JUNCTURE: I, Mary? I’m airy.

K is for KINSHIP terms: uncles and aunts.
L is for LEXICOGRAPHY, drudgery’s romance.

M is for METATHESIS – how brid became bird.
N is for NONSENSE: sleep furiously, green word!

O is for ONOMASIOLOGY, obsessing Roget.
P is for PHONOTACTICS: possible sounds in what we say.

Q is for QUESTION TAG – self-explanatory, isn’t it?
R is for REDUNDANCY, which you need not omit.

S is for SCHWA, the scourge of spelling bees.
T is for TRIPHTHONG, when vowels come in threes.

U is for USAGE: how we use language.
V is for VARIANT, like saying hang sangwich.

W is for WUG and its mythical plural.
X is for XENOGLOSSY: another myth, this one neural.

Y is for YOD-DROPPING – have you heard the nooz?
Z is for ZERO-DERIVATION, a neologist’s enthuse.

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Thoughts and observations are welcome in the comments – as are alternative couplets if you take I for INSPIRATION.

Update:

GH Halceon has recorded a very charming reading of this, which you can hear on his blog.

For your weekend reading and viewing pleasure, a selection of recent language-related links from around the web:

Love letters to trees.

How to design a metaphor.

Two medieval monks invent writing.

The United Swears of America, in maps.

On the political power of African American names.

Asperitas: the first new cloud name since 1951.

The emerging science of human screams.

Telegraphic abbreviations of the 19thC.

Secret language games, aka ludlings.

Managing weight in typeface design.

Zodiac signs for linguists.

A stone talking to itself.

A world of languages (infographic).

Argotopolis, or, a map of London slang.

Discussing Chicago style and subversive editing (video).

Linguistic errors are a routine part of cognition.

Women and men use hashtags differently.

On resurrecting a childhood language.

Name signs in the Deaf community.

Anglo Saxon London map.

Spellism.

Who ‘flaunts’ what?

The science of word aversion.

On the functions and future of emoji.

How English is changing German grammar.

Accent tagging – YouTube’s citizen dialectology.

Allen Ginsberg on censorship and the politics of language (video).

Is there a shift from writing back towards orality?

How new words are spreading across the US.

A sociolinguistic history of cup and mug.

Sarcasm on the internet is srs bsns.

The case for lowercase internet.

The evolution of profanity.

How did we get the heebie-jeebies?

A handy list of bogus grammar rules.

How sign languages make use of the feet.

Merriam-Webster’s index of backwards words.

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Temperature and tone: how climate may affect language.

Why Indian-Americans dominate spelling bees.

The phonetics of pop-punk singing accents.

On the ‘supremely leisurely’ start of writing.

A giant corpus of Reddit comments.

And finally, phonological illusions:

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(Lots more in the links archive.)

New books mean a new book spine poem, aka bookmash. This one has a language theme.

[Click to enlarge]

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Broken words spoken here

Broken words spoken here:
Swearing, texting,
The unfolding of language,
Native tongue lapsing
Into a comma –
You just don’t understand.

 *

Thanks to the authors: Helen Hodgman, Mark Abley, Geoffrey Hughes, David Crystal, Guy Deutscher, Suzette H. Elgin, Bill Walsh, and Deborah Tannen; and to artist Nina Katchadourian.

Tannen’s book featured in a post here in June on gender differences in listening signals, while long-time readers will have seen another Guy Deutscher work, Through the Language Glass, in my earlier bookmash ‘Forest of Symbols’. Elgin’s feminist ling-sci-fi Native Tongue is the one I read most recently; I haven’t yet got to the first three in the stack.

Older book spine poems are here. Feel free, as always, to join in.

A houseboat is a type of boat; a boathouse is a type of house.

This illustrates a common pattern in English morphology: the rightmost part of a compound (houseboat) is usually the ‘head’. In other words it’s the centre or larger category, functionally equivalent to the overall compound, and what precedes it (houseboat) modifies or specifies it. So we say English is ‘right-headed’.

But the semantic relationship between the parts can’t be inferred automatically from their arrangement, as this charming/disarming Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro shows:

Right-headedness is a feature of Germanic languages. Romance languages tend to reverse the order: chaise longue is a type of chaise, lingua franca a type of lingua. Either way, when a compound includes the head it is called endocentric – the centre is internal. In exocentric compounds the head is missing or external: a bigmouth is not a type of mouth and an egghead is not a type of head – both refer to people.

Editor and historical linguist Brianne Hughes studies a remarkable subset of exocentric compounds called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun (V-N) compounds. Mercifully, and memorably, she calls them cutthroat compounds, or cutthroats for short. These are rare in English word-formation but have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.

Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy, a scarecrow scares crows, a turncoat turns their coat, rotgut rots the gut, a pickpocket picks pockets, a sawbones saws bones (one of the few plural by default), and breakfast – lest you miss its etymology, hidden in plain sight – breaks a fast. The verb is always transitive, the noun its direct object.

[poster of Robert Bresson’s classic film Pickpocket (1959) via this collection]

Despite the familiarity of these examples, only a few dozen are current in modern English. It’s because they conflict with the right-headedness of English, Brianne writes in her master’s thesis (‘From Turncoats To Backstabbers: How Headedness and Word Order Determine the Productivity of Agentive and Instrumental Compounding in English’), that cutthroats’ productivity will never surpass that of ‘backstabber’ compounds, which use the far more usual N-V-er pattern. We’re ‘book readers’, not ‘readbooks’; ‘word lovers’, not ‘lovewords’.

Cutthroats largely constitute ‘a treasury of nonce words’, having peaked centuries ago. Survivors tend to be peripheral, found in slang, regional dialects, and children’s short-lived innovations. But Brianne is on a mission to catalogue them and has recorded several hundred, including such malicious archaic marvels as want-wit (stupid person), spoil-paper (bad writer), whiparse (abusive teacher), eat-bee (bird), lacklooks (unattractive person), stretchgut (glutton), clutchfist (miser), and catch-fart (servant who walks behind their master).

One I’ve always liked is smell-feast, meaning someone who sniffs out a feast and comes uninvited to share in it. The OED’s first citation for this word, from 1519, refers to ‘smellefyestes, lycke dysshes, and franchars [who] come vncalled’. Franchars derives from franch, an obsolete word meaning ‘feed greedily’, while the more transparent ‘lycke dysshes’ counts as another cutthroat. Here is Brianne on their general status:

Cutthroats are freely productive in Romance languages, which have a V.O. (verb-object) structure and are left-headed. English, which is V.O. and right-headed, has slight native productivity (Clark et al, 1986) that has been amplified and augmented by French borrowings (e.g., coupe-gorge [cutthroat] and wardecorps [bodyguard]). English has been slowly producing new cutthroats since the 1200s up through 2015, mainly in the form of nonce personal insults. Most cutthroats are obsolete slang, but about 40, including ​pickpocket​, pinchpenny, rotgut​ and​ spitfire, are commonly known in Modern English.

Hunting them down and determining their cutthroat status can be tricky, since there’s no formula to determine how a compound’s parts relate to each other. This is the subject of a presentation Brianne will give at the SHEL/DSNA conference in Vancouver in June (‘Does a Slingshot Sling Shots? Difficulties in Identifying English Cutthroat Compounds’), from whose Abstract the quotation above is taken. For more on this see Laurie Bauer, ‘English Exocentric Compounds’ (PDF).

Finding them is aggravated by the fact that they tend not to appear in standard dictionaries or well-documented areas. But they do clump semantically: mainly as insults, occupational names, and provincial nature-words. Brianne divides them into six categories: people (insults, occupations, insulted occupations – sometimes as surnames); games; tools; food and drink; plants and animals (including twitchbell, which James Joyce incorporated into Finnegans Wake); and adjectives such as lacklustre, breakneck, and breakteeth (= ‘difficult to pronounce’).

So far she has identified 846 cutthroats, and maybe more by the time you read this. Finding one can lead to another, thus kill-priest (port wine) → strangle-priest → strangle-goose​ →​ saddle-goose →​ saddle-nag. Some verbs recur: break, turn, lack and pick all appear in over a dozen, choke in at least five: chokepriest (thick Italian soup), choke-sparrow (bearded wheat), choke-dog (hard cheese), choke-children (bony fish), and choke-jade (a place in England).

The pattern, though rare nowadays, is not completely unproductive in English. Children go through a phase of compound acquisition in which they invent cutthroats spontaneously before dropping the habit again. By email Brianne shared a few modern ones she has spotted in comics and other pop cultural domains, such as Princess Tinglepants, Professor Stealwater, and pesterchum (a messaging app). Among her vintage favourites, complete with her glosses, are:

Kick-shins: a children’s game

Swingebreech: a haughty swaggerer (who swings their hips while walking); related: shit-breech, quakebreech, shuffle-breeches

Fuckbottere: occupational last name where fuck means ‘strike’ and bottere is butter – an agrarian worker. (I believe one of the earliest instances of fuck.)

The insulting kinds, Brianne says, ‘cut right to what makes people unlikeable’. She loves their brutal honesty and finds that they tend to stand out and endure despite their low productivity. She feels cutthroats of all kinds have been unjustly overlooked, only ever ‘briefly mentioned in English compounding chapters, with the same examples over and over. Why aren’t there more? Why do they exist at all?’ These questions she addressed in some detail in her thesis.

I salute her quest to shine a light on what she calls a shadowy footnote of English morphology, and I highly recommend this short talk she gave in 2013, which offers more examples of cutthroats both contemporary and archaic, celebrates their curious nature, and briefly documents their shifting popularity over the centuries:

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You can download the slides here. For a historical overview of exocentric V-N compounds in English and German, see Volker Gast 2008 (PDF):

There was (probably) a certain inventory of relevant items even before the Norman conquest, esp. in proper names and epithets. Under French influence, the pattern was ‘upgraded’, i.e. it became more productive and frequent and was used in more (esp. higher) registers. The productivity of exocentric V-N compounds increased steadily in the 14th and 15th centuries and reached a peak in the 16th century (e.g. kill-courtesy, lack-brain, lack-beard in Shakespeare). From the 17th century onwards, its productivity decreased considerably, resulting in the status quo of the contemporary language, where an inventory of relevant forms is still preserved, but hardly any new words are created.

The decline of exocentric V-N compounds was accompanied, and perhaps partly also caused, by a strong increase of ‘synthetic compounds’ of the form N-V-er. The two types have existed side by side for many centuries, sometimes providing alternative terms for one meaning (e.g. breakstone [1688] and stone-breaker [1827]). However, at the time of the Industrial Revolution synthetic compounds gained ground and took over great parts of the denotational domain previously covered by exocentric V-N compounds.

Gast looks at other European languages in a subsequent paper (PDF), which includes this graph showing the diverging fates of V-N and N-V-er compounds in English:

(Synthetic is explained here.) Finally, if you want yet more exocentric pleasure, watch Chris Magyar’s half-hour comic talk where he riffs on why exocentric compounds appeal to him and why twinkletoes most of all:

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Update: Follow-ups at Language Hat, Fritinancy, and The Life of Words, and reposted in shorter form on Slate’s Lexicon Valley.

Deborah Tannen, in her 1991 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,* describes how easy it is for a speaker to get the wrong idea about a listener’s behaviour if the listener is of the opposite gender.

Referring to ‘A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication’ (PDF), a 1982 paper by anthropologists Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker, Tannen notes that women are more likely to ask questions and give more listening responses: using ‘little words like mhm, uh-uh, and yeah’ throughout someone else’s conversational turn to provide ‘a running feedback loop’.

The cybernetic analogy is apt, since Tannen adopts the terms messages and metamessages from the great Gregory Bateson, describing metamessages as ‘information about the relations among the people involved, and their attitudes toward what they are saying or doing and the people they are saying or doing it to’. Thus:

Not only do women give more listening signals, according to Maltz and Borker, but the signals they give have different meanings for men and women, consistent with the speaker/audience alignment. Women use ‘yeah’ to mean ‘I’m with you, I follow,’ whereas men tend to say ‘yeah’ only when they agree. The opportunity for misunderstanding is clear. When a man is confronted with a woman who has been saying ‘yeah,’ ‘yeah,’ ‘yeah,’ and then turns out not to agree, he may conclude that she has been insincere, or that she was agreeing without really listening. When a woman is confronted with a man who does not say ‘yeah’ – or much of anything else – she may conclude that he hasn’t been listening. The men’s style is more literally focused on the message level of the talk, while the women’s is focused on the relationship or metamessage level.

Tannen’s useful and admirably clear book shows that women’s and men’s communicative styles aren’t just different but are often actively at cross purposes. And because most people assume a great deal and tend to extrapolate others’ inner states and attitudes based on their own behavioural patterns, including linguistic ones, misjudgements are extremely common.

Conversely, if we are more aware of different styles of communication, not least the significant differences between the major ‘genderlects’, we can foster better conversations and mutual understanding, and suffer less unnecessary confusion, hurt, and dissatisfaction. Tannen continues:

To a man who expects a listener to be quietly attentive, a woman giving a stream of feedback and support will seem to be talking too much for a listener. To a woman who expects a listener to be active and enthusiastic in showing interest, attention, and support, a man who listens silently will not seem to be listening at all, but rather to have checked out of the conversation . . .

You Just Don’t Understand gave me the insider-outsider feeling I sometimes get when reading works of primatology. Men typically are concerned with status, specifically their position in the hierarchy of a given set of humans. I’ve known men who were endlessly preoccupied with being perceived as the alpha male in a group, or resentful that they weren’t, while it seems I’m anomalous in not giving two hoots about status or hierarchy.

Tannen concedes that her book’s generalisations risk reductionism and obscuration of differences (as does my simplification of gender as binary here), but she succeeds in reaching conclusions that are by and large fair, insightful, thought-provoking, and helpful. She also uses anecdotal evidence to telling effect.

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* First published by Virago Press, whose name I discussed briefly in a recent post about slur reappropriation.

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The first is about a term you might not be familiar with but whose profile seems certain to grow: Mx – a new gender-neutral title.

Mx, which has been in use since at least 1977, made headlines lately because an OED editor said it might be added to that dictionary soon. (So far, Macmillan appears to be the only major dictionary to have done so.) Increasing use of Mx will lead to more recognition of it, both public and official, but since it’s still quite niche I aimed mainly to cover the basics, link to resources, and make the case for its linguistic, political, and cultural value:

To date, Mx has been accepted by various local councils, universities, banks, law societies, the Royal Mail, and government services such as the NHS and HM Revenue and Customs. Clearly it is gaining momentum.

Mx has been adopted by many people who don’t identify as female or male. (Non-binary people can complete a survey on the topic here.) Such preferences should never be assumed – for example, it’s not obligatory for transgender people, but rather an option they may or may not find suitable. Speaking of preferences, Mx is usually pronounced ‘mix’ or ‘mux’, the latter reflecting a sort of stressed schwa, like the options for Ms. When I asked about it on Twitter, Mx-users confirmed both pronunciations.

Or it may be pronounced as an initialism, ‘em ex’. The post also looks briefly at some of the parallels between Mx and Ms, and at the challenges of consciously engineering language.

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Ludic language and the game of grammar surveys a subject close to my heart – or rather a cluster of subjects in the intersection of language and play:

Play is something we associate with children, but there’s nothing intrinsically childish about it, and language offers a large and inviting board on which to do it. This aspect of language helps explain the longstanding tradition of verbal play in informal discourse – what we might call ludic language, from the same root (Latin ludus ‘sport, play’) as ludo and ludicrous. And it’s popular in languages around the world – the latest Ling Space video has some great examples.

Structured language games are another feature. Puns and riddles allow for variation atop a familiar template, while Scrabble, rebuses and tongue twisters are perennially popular. Nor is the playful use of language always trivial…

The post lists additional examples of language play of various structural types. This includes recent online fads like doge and can’t even, which seem deliberately ungrammatical, and I speculate on what motivates the subversive element of this linguistic behaviour.

Older posts can be found in my archive at Macmillan Dictionary.

Here’s a self-explanatory bit of silliness from Twitter yesterday. There were requests to assemble it somewhere, for convenience and posterity, so I thought I’d reproduce it on Sentence first.

I’ve replaced the quotation marks I used on Twitter with italics; other than that it’s identical. The tweets are all linked, so you can also read them by clicking on the date of this introductory one:

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A is for ARBITRARY: a sound’s tie to meaning.
B is for BACK-FORMED, like dry-clean from dry-cleaning.

It is CLEFT that C is for, the clause now divided.
D is for DESCRIPTIVISM, objectively guided.

E is for ETYMON, whose etymon is Greek.
F is for FRONT, like the vowels in sneak peek.

G is for GRIMM’S LAW, a pattern of sound shifts.
H is for HIGH-RISING TERMINAL, where sentence pitch lifts?

I is for INFIX, edumacational or sweary.
J is for JUNCTURE: I, Mary? I’m airy.

K is for KINSHIP terms: uncles and aunts.
L is for LEXICOGRAPHY, drudgery’s romance.

M is for METATHESIS – how brid became bird.
N is for NONSENSE: sleep furiously, green word!

O is for ONOMASIOLOGY, obsessing Roget.
P is for PHONOTACTICS: possible sounds in what we say.

Q is for QUESTION TAG – self-explanatory, isn’t it?
R is for REDUNDANCY, which you need not omit.

S is for SCHWA, the scourge of spelling bees.
T is for TRIPHTHONG, when vowels come in threes.

U is for USAGE: how we use language.
V is for VARIANT, like saying hang sangwich.

W is for WUG and its mythical plural.
X is for XENOGLOSSY: another myth, this one neural.

Y is for YOD-DROPPING – have you heard the nooz?
Z is for ZERO-DERIVATION, a neologist’s enthuse.

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Thoughts and observations are welcome in the comments – as are alternative couplets if you take I for INSPIRATION.

Updates:

GH Halceon has recorded a very charming reading of this, which you can hear on his blog.

The A–Z has been featured on the linguistic blogs Superlinguo, All Things Linguistic, and Sprachlog.

For your weekend reading and viewing pleasure, a selection of recent language-related links from around the web:

Love letters to trees.

How to design a metaphor.

Two medieval monks invent writing.

The United Swears of America, in maps.

On the political power of African American names.

Asperitas: the first new cloud name since 1951.

The emerging science of human screams.

Telegraphic abbreviations of the 19thC.

Secret language games, aka ludlings.

Managing weight in typeface design.

Zodiac signs for linguists.

A stone talking to itself.

A world of languages (infographic).

Argotopolis, or, a map of London slang.

Discussing Chicago style and subversive editing (video).

Linguistic errors are a routine part of cognition.

Women and men use hashtags differently.

On resurrecting a childhood language.

Name signs in the Deaf community.

Anglo Saxon London map.

Spellism.

Who ‘flaunts’ what?

The science of word aversion.

On the functions and future of emoji.

How English is changing German grammar.

Accent tagging – YouTube’s citizen dialectology.

Allen Ginsberg on censorship and the politics of language (video).

Is there a shift from writing back towards orality?

How new words are spreading across the US.

A sociolinguistic history of cup and mug.

Sarcasm on the internet is srs bsns.

The case for lowercase internet.

The evolution of profanity.

How did we get the heebie-jeebies?

A handy list of bogus grammar rules.

How sign languages make use of the feet.

Merriam-Webster’s index of backwards words.

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Temperature and tone: how climate may affect language.

Why Indian-Americans dominate spelling bees.

The phonetics of pop-punk singing accents.

On the ‘supremely leisurely’ start of writing.

A giant corpus of Reddit comments.

And finally, phonological illusions:

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(Lots more in the links archive.)

New books mean a new book spine poem, aka bookmash. This one has a language theme.

[Click to enlarge]

 *

*

Broken words spoken here

Broken words spoken here:
Swearing, texting,
The unfolding of language,
Native tongue lapsing
Into a comma –
You just don’t understand.

 *

Thanks to the authors: Helen Hodgman, Mark Abley, Geoffrey Hughes, David Crystal, Guy Deutscher, Suzette H. Elgin, Bill Walsh, and Deborah Tannen; and to artist Nina Katchadourian.

Tannen’s book featured in a post here in June on gender differences in listening signals, while long-time readers will have seen another Guy Deutscher work, Through the Language Glass, in my earlier bookmash ‘Forest of Symbols’. Elgin’s feminist ling-sci-fi Native Tongue is the one I read most recently; I haven’t yet got to the first three in the stack.

Older book spine poems are here. Feel free, as always, to join in.

In idle half-hours I’ve been watching Danger Mouse on a DVD I picked up for the price of a croissant. As well as being enjoyably daft and wryly amusing, it’s a trip down memory lane; my sister and I loved the cartoon as children.

Browsing its Wikipedia page, I see that it was even more popular than I supposed, placing third (behind The Muppet Show and The Simpsons) in a UK Channel 4 list of the top 100 children’s TV shows of all time. It had a fantastic theme tune too:

Puns and silly wordplay are a constant (‘Shooting star? Crumbs! I didn’t even know they were loaded’). In an episode titled ‘I Spy With My Little Eye…’, written by Brian Trueman and directed by Keith Scoble, there is an exchange rich in overt linguistic humour, excerpted here.

The three characters featured are the main three ‘goodies’: Danger Mouse, aka DM, ‘the world’s most famous secret agent’; his hamster sidekick Penfold, ‘the world’s most useless assistant’; and Colonel K, DM’s boss, a chinchilla who resembles a walrus.

DM and Penfold have been to the Arctic to stop their toadly nemesis, Baron Greenback (pictured below with Nero, his pet caterpillar) from melting the ice caps and flooding the world. Back in London, DM tells Colonel K how he managed to communicate with a group of Laplanders (who are depicted in a regrettably racist and lazy fashion).

Colonel K: Can’t understand how you understood ’em.

Danger Mouse: It was a bit tricky, Colonel, but fortunately I speak seventeen Eskimo dialects.*

CK: Ah, good show.

DM: And they spoke the eighteenth.

CK: Oh, bad show. So uh, uh–

DM: Well, I translated into Ancient Egyptian, out of that into Old High Dutch, into Bulgarian, French, Urdu and… back into English.

CK: By jove! And that did it, did it?

Penfold: No, Colonel, I mean, that’s Morse code!

CK: What’s Morse code?

P: ‘Didit, didit, dah dah dah dah didit’!

CK: Chap’s off his rocker. I mean, DM’s command of languages solved the problem!

DM: No, Colonel. We just settled for sign language.

CK: Ah.

What exactly DM means by sign language is unclear: perhaps gesture, or more likely some mythical universal sign language that one or some of the Laplanders happened to command. DM himself speaks dozens of languages fluently, but the route of translation he follows is fanciful – at least, I don’t see any system behind it.

I especially like how the tag question Did it? is transformed through reduplication into Morse code, and the fact that dialects are cited rather than languages – a distinction seldom observed in children’s cartoons, as are references to Urdu and early Germanic tongues.

Apparently in certain translations the show’s name had to be changed to retain the ‘DM’ emblazoned prominently on the protagonist’s outfit: Donnie Murdo in Scots Gaelic, Dzielna Mysz ‘Brave mouse’ in Polish, Dundermusen ‘Thundermouse’ in Swedish. It was recently rebooted, but I have no plans to see the new episodes.

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* On the use of Eskimo as opposed to Inuit or other terms, see this discussion by linguist Linda Lanz, and this usage and etymological note at the American Heritage Dictionary.

A great many people are unsure what the passive voice is, and what (if anything) is wrong with it. That wouldn’t be such a problem, except that a lot of those people misidentify and misrepresent the passive voice from positions of authority – whether they’re authors of writing manuals or journalists in need of a rhetorical scapegoat.

This is why you’ll often find writers deploring the passive while using it naturally in their own prose, blithely unaware of the double standard. For example, The Elements of Style says, ‘Use the active voice.’ But the first paragraph of E.B. White’s introduction to the book has five transitive verbs, four of which are (perfectly unobjectionable) passives.

‘Fear and Loathing of the English Passive’ is the name of a recent paper (PDF; HTML) by linguist Geoffrey Pullum on the passive voice. He has followed it with a series of six short videos on the topic (whence the image above). I’ve embedded them all below, for convenience.

So if you’ve ever wanted clarity on the passive voice, set an hour aside. This instructive and entertaining series systematically explains the different types of passive and the rules of their use, then catalogues writers in eminent positions leading their readers astray. With the right information you can avoid the same fate.

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Thanks to Gretchen McCulloch at the ever-excellent All Things Linguistic for alerting me to the videos. If you fancy wandering deeper into the grammatical rabbit hole, see further discussion and links here.

Deborah Tannen, in her 1991 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,* describes how easy it is for a speaker to get the wrong idea about a listener’s behaviour if the listener is of the opposite gender.

Referring to ‘A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication’ (PDF), a 1982 paper by anthropologists Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker, Tannen notes that women are more likely to ask questions and give more listening responses: using ‘little words like mhm, uh-uh, and yeah’ throughout someone else’s conversational turn to provide ‘a running feedback loop’.

The cybernetic analogy is apt, since Tannen adopts the terms messages and metamessages from the great Gregory Bateson, describing metamessages as ‘information about the relations among the people involved, and their attitudes toward what they are saying or doing and the people they are saying or doing it to’. Thus:

Not only do women give more listening signals, according to Maltz and Borker, but the signals they give have different meanings for men and women, consistent with the speaker/audience alignment. Women use ‘yeah’ to mean ‘I’m with you, I follow,’ whereas men tend to say ‘yeah’ only when they agree. The opportunity for misunderstanding is clear. When a man is confronted with a woman who has been saying ‘yeah,’ ‘yeah,’ ‘yeah,’ and then turns out not to agree, he may conclude that she has been insincere, or that she was agreeing without really listening. When a woman is confronted with a man who does not say ‘yeah’ – or much of anything else – she may conclude that he hasn’t been listening. The men’s style is more literally focused on the message level of the talk, while the women’s is focused on the relationship or metamessage level.

Tannen’s useful and admirably clear book shows that women’s and men’s communicative styles aren’t just different but are often actively at cross purposes. And because most people assume a great deal and tend to extrapolate others’ inner states and attitudes based on their own behavioural patterns, including linguistic ones, misjudgements are extremely common.

Conversely, if we are more aware of different styles of communication, not least the significant differences between the major ‘genderlects’, we can foster better conversations and mutual understanding, and suffer less unnecessary confusion, hurt, and dissatisfaction. Tannen continues:

To a man who expects a listener to be quietly attentive, a woman giving a stream of feedback and support will seem to be talking too much for a listener. To a woman who expects a listener to be active and enthusiastic in showing interest, attention, and support, a man who listens silently will not seem to be listening at all, but rather to have checked out of the conversation . . .

You Just Don’t Understand gave me the insider-outsider feeling I sometimes get when reading works of primatology. Men typically are concerned with status, specifically their position in the hierarchy of a given set of humans. I’ve known men who were endlessly preoccupied with being perceived as the alpha male in a group, or resentful that they weren’t, while it seems I’m anomalous in not giving two hoots about status or hierarchy.

Tannen concedes that her book’s generalisations risk reductionism and obscuration of differences (as does my simplification of gender as binary here), but she succeeds in reaching conclusions that are by and large fair, insightful, thought-provoking, and helpful. She also uses anecdotal evidence to telling effect.

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* First published by Virago Press, whose name I discussed briefly in a recent post about slur reappropriation.

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The first is about a term you might not be familiar with but whose profile seems certain to grow: Mx – a new gender-neutral title.

Mx, which has been in use since at least 1977, made headlines lately because an OED editor said it might be added to that dictionary soon. (So far, Macmillan appears to be the only major dictionary to have done so.) Increasing use of Mx will lead to more recognition of it, both public and official, but since it’s still quite niche I aimed mainly to cover the basics, link to resources, and make the case for its linguistic, political, and cultural value:

To date, Mx has been accepted by various local councils, universities, banks, law societies, the Royal Mail, and government services such as the NHS and HM Revenue and Customs. Clearly it is gaining momentum.

Mx has been adopted by many people who don’t identify as female or male. (Non-binary people can complete a survey on the topic here.) Such preferences should never be assumed – for example, it’s not obligatory for transgender people, but rather an option they may or may not find suitable. Speaking of preferences, Mx is usually pronounced ‘mix’ or ‘mux’, the latter reflecting a sort of stressed schwa, like the options for Ms. When I asked about it on Twitter, Mx-users confirmed both pronunciations.

Or it may be pronounced as an initialism, ‘em ex’. The post also looks briefly at some of the parallels between Mx and Ms, and at the challenges of consciously engineering language.

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Ludic language and the game of grammar surveys a subject close to my heart – or rather a cluster of subjects in the intersection of language and play:

Play is something we associate with children, but there’s nothing intrinsically childish about it, and language offers a large and inviting board on which to do it. This aspect of language helps explain the longstanding tradition of verbal play in informal discourse – what we might call ludic language, from the same root (Latin ludus ‘sport, play’) as ludo and ludicrous. And it’s popular in languages around the world – the latest Ling Space video has some great examples.

Structured language games are another feature. Puns and riddles allow for variation atop a familiar template, while Scrabble, rebuses and tongue twisters are perennially popular. Nor is the playful use of language always trivial…

The post lists additional examples of language play of various structural types. This includes recent online fads like doge and can’t even, which seem deliberately ungrammatical, and I speculate on what motivates the subversive element of this linguistic behaviour.

Older posts can be found in my archive at Macmillan Dictionary.

Here’s a self-explanatory bit of silliness from Twitter yesterday. There were requests to assemble it somewhere, for convenience and posterity, so I thought I’d reproduce it on Sentence first.

I’ve replaced the quotation marks I used on Twitter with italics; other than that it’s identical. The tweets are all linked, so you can also read them by clicking on the date of this introductory one:

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A is for ARBITRARY: a sound’s tie to meaning.
B is for BACK-FORMED, like dry-clean from dry-cleaning.

It is CLEFT that C is for, the clause now divided.
D is for DESCRIPTIVISM, objectively guided.

E is for ETYMON, whose etymon is Greek.
F is for FRONT, like the vowels in sneak peek.

G is for GRIMM’S LAW, a pattern of sound shifts.
H is for HIGH-RISING TERMINAL, where sentence pitch lifts?

I is for INFIX, edumacational or sweary.
J is for JUNCTURE: I, Mary? I’m airy.

K is for KINSHIP terms: uncles and aunts.
L is for LEXICOGRAPHY, drudgery’s romance.

M is for METATHESIS – how brid became bird.
N is for NONSENSE: sleep furiously, green word!

O is for ONOMASIOLOGY, obsessing Roget.
P is for PHONOTACTICS: possible sounds in what we say.

Q is for QUESTION TAG – self-explanatory, isn’t it?
R is for REDUNDANCY, which you need not omit.

S is for SCHWA, the scourge of spelling bees.
T is for TRIPHTHONG, when vowels come in threes.

U is for USAGE: how we use language.
V is for VARIANT, like saying hang sangwich.

W is for WUG and its mythical plural.
X is for XENOGLOSSY: another myth, this one neural.

Y is for YOD-DROPPING – have you heard the nooz?
Z is for ZERO-DERIVATION, a neologist’s enthuse.

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Thoughts and observations are welcome in the comments – as are alternative couplets if you take I for INSPIRATION.

Updates:

GH Halceon has recorded a very charming reading of this, which you can hear on his blog.

The A–Z has been featured on the linguistic blogs Superlinguo, All Things Linguistic, and Sprachlog.

For your weekend reading and viewing pleasure, a selection of recent language-related links from around the web:

Love letters to trees.

How to design a metaphor.

Two medieval monks invent writing.

The United Swears of America, in maps.

On the political power of African American names.

Asperitas: the first new cloud name since 1951.

The emerging science of human screams.

Telegraphic abbreviations of the 19thC.

Secret language games, aka ludlings.

Managing weight in typeface design.

Zodiac signs for linguists.

A stone talking to itself.

A world of languages (infographic).

Argotopolis, or, a map of London slang.

Discussing Chicago style and subversive editing (video).

Linguistic errors are a routine part of cognition.

Women and men use hashtags differently.

On resurrecting a childhood language.

Name signs in the Deaf community.

Anglo Saxon London map.

Spellism.

Who ‘flaunts’ what?

The science of word aversion.

On the functions and future of emoji.

How English is changing German grammar.

Accent tagging – YouTube’s citizen dialectology.

Allen Ginsberg on censorship and the politics of language (video).

Is there a shift from writing back towards orality?

How new words are spreading across the US.

A sociolinguistic history of cup and mug.

Sarcasm on the internet is srs bsns.

The case for lowercase internet.

The evolution of profanity.

How did we get the heebie-jeebies?

A handy list of bogus grammar rules.

How sign languages make use of the feet.

Merriam-Webster’s index of backwards words.

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Temperature and tone: how climate may affect language.

Why Indian-Americans dominate spelling bees.

The phonetics of pop-punk singing accents.

On the ‘supremely leisurely’ start of writing.

A giant corpus of Reddit comments.

And finally, phonological illusions:

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(Lots more in the links archive.)

New books mean a new book spine poem, aka bookmash. This one has a language theme.

[Click to enlarge]

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Broken words spoken here

Broken words spoken here:
Swearing, texting,
The unfolding of language,
Native tongue lapsing
Into a comma –
You just don’t understand.

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Thanks to the authors: Helen Hodgman, Mark Abley, Geoffrey Hughes, David Crystal, Guy Deutscher, Suzette H. Elgin, Bill Walsh, and Deborah Tannen; and to artist Nina Katchadourian.

Tannen’s book featured in a post here in June on gender differences in listening signals, while long-time readers will have seen another Guy Deutscher work, Through the Language Glass, in my earlier bookmash ‘Forest of Symbols’. Elgin’s feminist ling-sci-fi Native Tongue is the one I read most recently; I haven’t yet got to the first three in the stack.

Older book spine poems are here. Feel free, as always, to join in.

In idle half-hours I’ve been watching Danger Mouse on a DVD I picked up for the price of a croissant. As well as being enjoyably daft and wryly amusing, it’s a trip down memory lane; my sister and I loved the cartoon as children.

Browsing its Wikipedia page, I see that it was even more popular than I supposed, placing third (behind The Muppet Show and The Simpsons) in a UK Channel 4 list of the top 100 children’s TV shows of all time. It had a fantastic theme tune too:

Puns and silly wordplay are a constant (‘Shooting star? Crumbs! I didn’t even know they were loaded’). In an episode titled ‘I Spy With My Little Eye…’, written by Brian Trueman and directed by Keith Scoble, there is an exchange rich in overt linguistic humour, excerpted here.

The three characters featured are the main three ‘goodies’: Danger Mouse, aka DM, ‘the world’s most famous secret agent’; his hamster sidekick Penfold, ‘the world’s most useless assistant’; and Colonel K, DM’s boss, a bulky chinchilla who resembles a walrus.

DM and Penfold have been to the Arctic to stop their toadly nemesis, Baron Greenback (pictured below with Nero, his pet caterpillar) from melting the ice caps and flooding the world. Back in London, DM tells Colonel K how he managed to communicate with a group of Laplanders (who are depicted in a regrettably racist and lazy fashion).

Colonel K: Can’t understand how you understood ’em.

Danger Mouse: It was a bit tricky, Colonel, but fortunately I speak seventeen Eskimo dialects.*

CK: Ah, good show.

DM: And they spoke the eighteenth.

CK: Oh, bad show. So uh, uh–

DM: Well, I translated into Ancient Egyptian, out of that into Old High Dutch, into Bulgarian, French, Urdu and… back into English.

CK: By jove! And that did it, did it?

Penfold: No, Colonel, I mean, that’s Morse code!

CK: What’s Morse code?

P: ‘Didit, didit, dah dah dah dah didit’!

CK: Chap’s off his rocker. I mean, DM’s command of languages solved the problem!

DM: No, Colonel. We just settled for sign language.

CK: Ah.

What exactly DM means by sign language is unclear: perhaps gesture, or more likely some mythical universal sign language that one or some of the Laplanders happened to command. DM himself speaks dozens of languages fluently, but the route of translation he follows is fanciful – at least, I don’t see any system behind it.

I especially like how the tag question Did it? is transformed through reduplication into Morse code, and the fact that dialects are cited rather than languages – a distinction seldom observed in children’s cartoons, as are references to Urdu and early Germanic tongues.

Apparently in certain translations the show’s name had to be changed to retain the ‘DM’ emblazoned prominently on the protagonist’s outfit: Donnie Murdo in Scots Gaelic, Dzielna Mysz ‘Brave mouse’ in Polish, Dundermusen ‘Thundermouse’ in Swedish. It was recently rebooted, but I have no plans to see the new episodes.

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* On the use of Eskimo as opposed to Inuit or other terms, see this discussion by linguist Linda Lanz, and this usage and etymological note at the American Heritage Dictionary.

A great many people are unsure what the passive voice is, and what (if anything) is wrong with it. That wouldn’t be such a problem, except that a lot of those people misidentify and misrepresent the passive voice from positions of authority – whether they’re authors of writing manuals or journalists in need of a rhetorical scapegoat.

This is why you’ll often find writers deploring the passive while using it naturally in their own prose, blithely unaware of the double standard. For example, The Elements of Style says, ‘Use the active voice.’ But the first paragraph of E.B. White’s introduction to the book has five transitive verbs, four of which are (perfectly unobjectionable) passives.

‘Fear and Loathing of the English Passive’ is the name of a recent paper (PDF; HTML) by linguist Geoffrey Pullum on the passive voice. He has followed it with a series of six short videos on the topic (whence the image above). I’ve embedded them all below, for convenience.

So if you’ve ever wanted clarity on the passive voice, set an hour aside. This instructive and entertaining series systematically explains the different types of passive and the rules of their use, then catalogues writers in eminent positions leading their readers astray. With the right information you can avoid the same fate.

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Thanks to Gretchen McCulloch at the ever-excellent All Things Linguistic for alerting me to the videos. If you fancy wandering deeper into the grammatical rabbit hole, see further discussion and links here.

Languages often borrow from one another: it’s a common source of linguistic growth and change. Normally what gets borrowed is words, called ‘loans’, ‘loanwords’, or ‘borrowings’ (though the terms suggest eventual return, which isn’t how it works). Any word that isn’t a loanword is a native word.

English is a frequent borrower, being full of loanwords from many other languages. This ability to integrate foreign forms is one reason for its success. And it goes both ways: because of English’s status and reach, it’s a common ‘donor language’ for others. The World Loanword Database is a useful resource on the phenomenon.

Less often, other linguistic elements are borrowed, like grammatical structures or pronunciations. An example of the former is because X, a popular construction in informal English.* I first wrote about because X in 2013, elsewhere picking it as my word of the year (the American Dialect Society later did likewise). Such was its impact that the phrase was discussed not just by linguists but by more mainstream outlets.

From my original post:

Because X is fashionably slangy at the moment, diffusing rapidly across communities. . . . However it arose, it seems to be spreading. Language loves economy, and the sheer efficiency of this use of because is likely boosting its popularity.

Or, more succinctly:

So it should not surprise us to find that the usage has been borrowed by other languages. I got provisional confirmation of one, Norwegian, in a tweet from @Joakimpb in January 2014:

Then recently I got an email from Ian Mac Eochagáin, an Irishman living in Helsinki, who shared this photo of an ad for Volkswagen in the Finnish magazine Suomen Kuvalehti.

Ian writes:

‘Täysin uusi’ means ‘completely new’. ‘Koska perhe’ means ‘because family’ in Finnish. The ‘because noun’ construction has become something of a thing in Finnish, I’ve noticed. It’s not normal for Finnish grammar and seems to have been borrowed from English. I remember seeing a sign in a Helsinki bar saying the terrace was closed at 22:00 ‘because Helsinki’, referring to the city by-law. […] It’s become entrenched.

Because X in Finnish, koska perhe, is rendered in the marketing campaign as a hashtag (#koskaperhe), underscoring its informality and trendiness. Though the hashtag has a company website named after it, the fact that only two tweets appear to have used it (one of them critically) doesn’t flatter the corporation’s use of Twitter.

In any case, it made me wonder if because X has become a calque or loan translation in any other languages as a result of its emergence and increasing mainstream use in English. It certainly has a history in a few, in some cases presumably independent of English influence. Here are some tweets on its occurrence in various dialects and languages:

It’s also older than I thought:

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* Also called because NOUN or prepositional because, but I tend to stick with because X because the construction also licenses verbs, adjectives and interjections, and because the ‘prepositional’ description is disputed.