David Crystal's Blog, page 13

On gonna

A correspondent writes to say she had read an interview in Rolling Stone with the cast of AMC's Mad Men, where one of the actors said they had to be very careful with their pronunciation. 'There was no 'gonna' or 'shoulda' back then [in the 1960's:].' Could this be true?

It certainly couldn't. It's easy enough to check the point. These two forms actually get separate entries in the OED, and there we find gonna with a first recorded use in 1913 and shoulda with a first recorded use in 1933. (Als...

On updating and the OED

Several media correspondents have been in touch this week to discuss the report that the OED may not have a further print edition. Whether it will or not I can't say, but I do know that I've not looked at my print edition for years, and use the online edition pretty well every day. It includes an amazing amount of new lexical information. There are updates of various sections of the alphabet at regular intervals, as the OED team slogs on. And one of the unspoken messages to scholars that come...

On looking well

A correspondent writes to say that she has found such sentences as these on the internet:

Keeping these things in mind, you can look well in black dresses.
Peasant tops look well on small busted girls.

She goes on: 'I was always taught that to look good is to be attractive, while to look well is to appear healthy. According to that rule, this use of well would be incorrect. Is there any time when this use of well is acceptable? Is it a regional usage?'

The examples - and there are indeed quite a...

On insulting Brits

Radio 4's 'PM' programme get in touch today to ask for a comment about insult language. Apparently an Iranian minister has described the British as 'not human' and 'a bunch of thick people', eliciting an angry response from our ambassador out there. What did I think about it?

My first thought was that the minister wasn't trying. What an unimaginative pair of insults! The English language has an excellent insult record. He would have done better to look up some Early Scots examples of flyting (...

On the distant future

A correspondent writes to ask if the English present progressive with future meaning can be used to talk about the distant future. As an example, he cites his father getting retired ten years from now. Can he say: 'I'm setting up my own business when I get retired'?

All the standard accounts stress the imminence of the future event, when using this tense form. Quirk et al (§4.44) do give a non-imminent example:

I'm leaving the university in two years' time.

They stress the need to have the more...

On long time no see

A correspondent, having encountered the idiom long time no see, writes to ask what its origin is and if there are any more like it in English.

Nobody knows exactly where it comes from. Earliest reference in the OED is 1900, the context indicating a simplified English being used in conversation with American Indians. It probably caught on through cowboy movies. Certainly it was in US usage long before it arrived in British English. But the same pidgin expression has been noted in several other ...

On antinyms

I've been asked a couple of times what one calls a situation where a word is used to mean the opposite of what it normally means. I've usually interpreted the question to be about euphemisms, where the aim is to obscure or hide a reality. When people talk about 'passing away' instead of 'dying', or 'collateral damage' instead of 'war casualties', the reality stays the same, but the word alters. But an experience this week has made me think that my correspondents might have had in mind a diffe...

On since/ago

A correspondent writes to ask whether it is possible to use sentences like I've been studying English since four years ago and Since three years ago, I've had several accidents.

It must be possible. The question wouldn't be coming up at all if people weren't being heard to use such sentences. What has happened, of course, is that there is a clash between the usage and the rule that is widely taught in grammar books.

The rule says that since and ago are incompatible, because since refers to an e...

On needed words

A guest appearance on BBC Radio 4's 'Saturday Live' last week has initiated a flurry of correspondence, and the only place to focus it seems to be this blog. Once again it is the ludic propensity of language that has grabbed the popular imagination - in the same way that the 'foreign catch-phrases' theme (see my last post) has done.

As always, it is a passing remark that sparks the interest. The presenter asked me whether there were lost words in the language that ought to be resuscitated. Tha...

On foreign ludicity

A correspondent from the US has sent me the list of winners in a recent New York Magazine contest in which you had to take a well-known expression in a foreign language, change a single letter, and provide a definition for the new expression. A few years ago, the Washington Post did a similar thing for English words, which I reported in my Language Play. It's good to see ludic linguistic ingenuity alive and well, and engaging with foreign languages - though I wonder, in this day and age, what...