David Crystal's Blog, page 8

On tomorrow and to-morrow and to morrow

A correspondent has been reading Dickens, and writes to ask why to-day, to-night, and to-morrow were used with hyphens, and when did the practice cease. The origins of the practice lie in etymology: the three words were originally (in Old and Middle English) a preposition (to) followed by a separate word (dæg, niht, morwen). As a sense of their use as single notions developed, so the two elements were brought together in writing, but with considerable variation in usage, seen from the earliest records (tonight, to night, to-night). The view that they should be written as separate words was reinforced when Johnson listed them under to as to day, to morrow, and to night (with no hyphen). Nineteenth-century dictionaries (Worcester, Ogilvie, Webster...) opted for the hyphen in all three words, and this was further reinforced when dialectologists included other forms. Joseph Wright, in his English Dialect Dictionary, hyphenates them all, and adds to-year (= ‘this year’, in general dialect use in Britain and Ireland) and to-morn (= ‘tomorrow’, especially in N England - he has examples from Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, and Lancashire). In passing, he also has some nice examples of to-night meaning ‘the night just past’, as in I had slept well to-night, recorded in the English south-west. The OED shows hyphenated examples throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th. Latest examples are of to-day (1912), to-night (1908), and to-morrow (1927, with a possible further example as late as 1959). I have personal experience of all three words continuing to be hyphenated as late as the 1970s, as for some years now I’ve been editing the poetry of John Bradburne, who died in 1979, and in all his writing he consistently hyphenates. But he is a poet very much aware of the past, and regularly uses archaisms. The current online OED says simply ‘also as two words and with hyphen’, though this is likely to be revised, given that hyphens were dropped from the eigtth edition of the Concise Oxford in 1990. The steady disappearance of the usage in the 20th century was influenced by Fowler, who in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage comes out against it: ‘The lingering of the hyphen, which is still usual after the to of these words, is a very singular piece of conservatism’. He blames printers for its retention, in a typical piece of Fowlerish irony: ‘it is probably true that few people in writing ever dream of inserting the hyphen, its omission being corrected every time by whose who profess the mystery of printing.’ Today, it’s rare to see it even mentioned as an issue. It doesn’t even merit an entry in Pam Peters’ Cambridge Guide to English Usage.

On rofling

A correspondent writes to tell me about a usage that he’s heard among young people college-aged and in their early twenties in America. It’s rofl, the texting acronym for ‘rolling on the floor laughing’. I’ll quote the bulk of Ariel’s message: “To rofl now means sort of, to waste time in a pleasant way either alone or in a group. So someone sitting around looking at YouTube videos is rofling. So is someone throwing a football around with their 3-year-old. It's like ‘hanging out’ but with more positive and silly connotations, as if wasting time were a desirable thing. You can also use to rofl to mean to fudge, or to make it up as you go. As in, ‘What's the plan on Friday?’ ‘We'll rofl it.’ On top of that, a few people also seem to be using it to mean ‘beaten badly in a competition or fight.’ As in, ‘We tried fighting the orcs in our game of Dungeons and Dragons this weekend, but we got rofled.’ From that the term ‘rofl-stomp’ has developed, meaning (as far as I can tell from hearing people use it), ‘to destroy decisively and in an impressive but comically excessive way’.” I hadn't come across this before. It's a really interesting development, as few Internet acronyms have migrated into general usage in this way. People are always asking me whether texting abbreviations have had much of an impact on general usage, and my answer has always been ‘no’. Hardly any have achieved a usage outside of local slang – though LOL is a famous exception. Maybe rofl will be another. Why this one? There always was a figurative sense to rofl: no one ever actually rolled on the floor. So it's not surprising to see it extending in meaning in various directions. It’s a nice opportunity to see semantic change in rapid action, as – with no standard dictionary usage to follow – people are evidently trying it out in different ways. I suspect one or two of these meanings will emerge as the winners in due course. In the meantime, it would be interesting to know from readers of this post whether the usage has turned up in other parts of the world – and I don't just mean the English-speaking world, for rofl has become a loan-acronym in several other languages. ‘Roflez vous’ perhaps?

On capitalizing/Capitalizing

Two correspondents write in the same week worrying about capital letters. The first, working in ELT, has noted that many people write Past Perfect rather than past perfect (and likewise for other names of tenses). Which is it, he wonders? The second, working in the building industry, wants to know how to deal with such sentences as Wet rot has been noted in the door frame (photograph 2). Should it be (Photograph 2), given that a caption to the photograph, typically placed at the end of a report, would be either PHOTOGRAPH 2 or Photograph 2? This issue has come up before on this blog: see On studying history/History. I made the point there that capitalization is a highly variable matter, influenced by personal taste, graphic aesthetics, and social trends, so there is never a hard-and-fast rule for examples like these. Devising a capitalization policy was one of the trickiest things I had to do when editing the Cambridge Encyclopedia family in the 1990s. You can read the relevant remarks in a paper in English Today I did in 1990, which I paraphrase now: 'The problem is one of gradience, from the clear-cut case where we are talking about a unique person, place or thing, to cases where we are talking about the class of entities. Thus, we have President Kennedy, at one extreme, and The country is governed by a president, at the other. But there are many intermediate cases.' And I give a list of some of them, all taken from the Encyclopedia. Which would you choose and why? ...charity, founded in 1919, and having as its president/President the Princess Royal......Indian philosopher, statesman, and president/President......the country's first president/President......US Republican statesman and 40th president/President......the domestic policies of US president/President Roosevelt......a department responsible to the president/President for the conduct of......and his successor as president/President (1989)......led to his being elected president/President of the colony......the constitution of 1987 provided for a president/President......chairman of the Hawker Siddeley Group from 1935, and president/President from 1963......as president/President of the provisional government......the first president/President of the Royal Academy (1768)......and became the only president/President to be re-elected three times......he became president/President of the National Union of Mineworkers... There are subtle constraints at work here. Context seems important. Thus, Indian President is more acceptable than Indian philosopher and President, and I doubt whether anyone would go for Indian Philosopher and President. The implied importance conveyed by a capital letter makes President of the United States more likely in a general reference work than President of the National Union of Mineworkers. The 'general' is important, as in publications emanating from the NUM the opposite priority would probably be encountered. And a provisional government presidency, being only provisional, might not merit capitals at all. What is clear is that no simple principle will work for all cases. 'All official titles should be capitalized' says one house-style manual on my shelves. But does this work? He became Emperor of Rome.He became Emperor of all lands west of...He was crowned Emperor.He acted as Emperor. Or take academic titles. Dennis Gabor, for example, was a professor of physics, but one could not write this as Professor of Physics, for this was not his title: he was in actual fact Professor of Applied Electron Physics. To refer to his official role briefly, as general reference books often do, one would have to avoid capitals altogether (unless one accepted Professor of physics). So, to return to my correspondents... The typical semantic function of a capital letter is to draw attention to an item of special significance, such as a proper name or personification, or to Make an Important Comment. The usage variation raised by my first correspondent arises because people will have different views about what is 'specially significant'. In an ELT context, I can easily imagine some teachers seeing tense forms as being so important that they feel the need to give them special graphic prominence, as she mentions. But not everyone will see them in this way. Personally, I wouldn't capitalize. Tense forms are so frequently mentioned in a grammar book that the capital letters would turn up all over the place, reducing their attention-drawing function, as well as adding to the visual clutter of the page. It is a slippery slope. Present Progressive... Third Person Singular Present Progressive... The problem facing my second correspondent is different, for it introduces the discourse function of capitalization, to mark identity throughout a text so that readers are left in no doubt that the same item is being referenced - that is, the repeated use of a particular word needs to be consistently capitalized. This is especially important with cross references, such as that illustrated by the photograph example, and seen also in The point is dealt with in chapter/Chapter 3 and suchlike. The reason for my correspondent's doubt is that there is a clash between the two types of function in her example. A cross reference is not, by its nature, of special semantic significance, so there is no real reason for using an initial capital. On the other hand, the caption to the photograph does use an initial capital, so this motivates the parallel use of a capital in the parenthesis. When semantic significance (no need for a capital) clashes with discourse significance (need for a capital), semantics usually wins. If there's no special reason for drawing attention, the general view would be not to use a capital letter. But style books vary, especially over time. Fashion is a critical factor: in the late 17th and early 18th century, for example, virtually any noun would be capitalized. And there are regional differences: American English uses capitals far less than British English - a preference that may well have originated in dictionary practice (the original OED having all headwords beginning with a capital, unlike the typical American convention). On the whole, the advice in style guides is 'If in doubt, don't capitalize'. But above all: 'Be consistent, whatever you decide to do'.

On interrobanging on

A correspondent writes to ask if I would settle an argument about the use of an exclamation mark after a question mark in order to add emphasis to a question, as in 'What?!'  The writer finds it unacceptable, and feels that if one wishes to add emphasis to a question, one should write it in italics. The other party has no problem with it. Nor do I - though I have to say straight away that it's not possible ever to 'settle' arguments about punctuation, as attitudes are very much bound up with personal taste and trends in fashion. There's been antagonism towards the use of the exclamation mark for a long time, and especially since the 19th century, when writers used it a great deal. Fowler, for example, comments: 'Excessive use of exclamation marks is ‥. one of the things that betray the uneducated or unpractised writer.' So the use of it along with the question mark has attracted extra ire from stylists, and 20th century house styles generally recommended the removal of exclamation marks unless absolutely necessary. Copy editors would never allow a multiple mark (!!, !!!), except in such genres as novels and poetry where the author insisted - and even then, they would do their best to persuade the author to remove them. I've had many of my exclamation marks removed, over the years, and have had to shout vociferously in order to get them back. But the attitude has influenced me, and I always look carefully at a piece of formal writing before deciding to use one, knowing that any use still antagonizes some readers. But this prescriptive trend hasn't stopped their use, and in settings where copy editors are absent, we see multiple forms frequently, especially in blogs and other online genres where emotional expression is not being artificially constrained. Indeed, on the Internet there has been a remarkable proliferation of uses, including emails in which exclamation and question marks are combined in long sequences (?!?!?!) and used idiosyncratically along with other forms (such as ?!**!?, received in an email recently, which I interpreted as an emphatic questioning explosion of some sort). There has even been an institutionalization in print of the basic combination, in the form of the interrobang. The style is informal, of course, so the argument my correspondent reports really resolves into a stylistic question of the level of language the two parties have in mind. It isn't just the Internet, however. The combined form makes available a further semantic distinction which is of general availability: Why on earth would John ever want to do such a thing? - a genuine questionWhy on earth would John ever want to do such a thing! - an emphatic commentWhy on earth would John ever want to do such a thing?! - a genuine question with added emphasis - the question function is primary in the speaker's mind There is also a fourth possibility (much less often encountered): Why on earth would John ever want to do such a thing!? - an emphatic comment with a questioning tone. The question is an afterthought, a bit like: Why on earth would John ever want to do such a thing! - huh? I have no problem making this contrast in my own writing, but I've no idea how far the distinction is shared by others. I can't imagine that the use of italics would work. Maybe it would, for single-word utterances. But it would seem like overkill to italicize a long sentential question. Why on earth would John ever want to do such a thing?And it would disallow the use of italics in that question if the author wanted to highlight a single word, as in: Why on earth would John ever want to do such a thing?! So my view is that there's nothing wrong at all with a combined form, in informal contexts where the emotion is clearly warranted. But I'd be interested to see other examples of the usage, as readers of this blog encounter them.

On should better

A correspondent writes to ask about should better, which he has encountered from time to time, and wonders whether it is idiomatic English. He gives two examples, both taken from published books: 'The means by which one can solve the definitional equations are some very simple properties, which one should better specify in advance, and these are the properties of and and of yields.''One should better pay attention to what Darwin and Wallace had to say about the same problem. When faced with the monumental task of classifying natural life, both biologists came to the conclusion that all divisions were arbitrary.' He asks: are they synonymous with had better do X or with specify/pay attention in a better way? I think the context suggests the latter, in both cases. The first quote is from an Italian logician, Giovanni Sambin, in his One Hundred Years of Intuitionism, p.305, and he makes it very clear in the surrounding paragraphs what the 'better specification' is. Better is an adverbial modifier here. The string means 'which it would be better to specify in advance'. The second quote is evern clearer, when we examine the context. It's from a book called A Scientific Model of History, by Juan J Gomez-Ibarra, p. 28, and in the previous paragraph we read: 'Should we reduce the figure of twenty-one civilizations down to twenty because of... Or, should we better rename the two societies as...' The inverted order suggests that better is modifying rename - 'we should rename in a better way'. In which case, the 'we should better' usage follows on naturally. He is using better to modify pay attention. He doesn't mean 'ought to'. So why was my correspondent uncertain? It's because there is interference from the had better ('ought to') construction, which has led to the use of a modal should better as a blend (of should X and had better X). I've heard this usage in several regional dialects, but it hasn't (yet) established itself as idiomatic standard English. I've also heard it quite a lot from learners of English as a foreign language. It's a usage which usually poses no problem of interpretation in speech, and is probably already a feature of English as a lingua franca. But, as we see from these examples, it is waiting in the wings to upset any adverbial use of better following should. For this reason, I'd avoid it myself, and go for an alternative syntactic solution, such as replacing better by rather or rephrasing (as above) with a more explicit adverbial phrase.

On for example, for instance

A correspondent writes to ask whether there is any difference between for example and for instance.

I think most people use these as stylistic alternatives, to avoid repetition, without any difference in meaning. The OED glosses for example as 'a typical instance' and for instance as 'for example'.

Differences...? For example is older - first recorded usage in 1447. For instance, 1657. And for example is much more frequent - about five times more so, in some corpora. Also, their distribution isn't identical. The expressions have developed further usages where the words don't easily substitute, such as I'll give you a for instance and by way of example.

But am I right to feel that related senses of the two words could influence the selection? The original use of instance (as in 'at the instance of', and related time-related words such as instant) conveys a sense of urgency or earnestness. Perhaps it's the phonaesthetics of the two words (the contrast in stress position and vowel height) which makes me think I would use for instance when I want to be a bit more emphatic and for example in a more leisurely exposition. I'd be interested to get some other opinions on the point.

On quotatives (he goes)

A correspondent writes about the use of goes for says in conversation, as in And so she goes 'Wow...'. 'Nobody seems to say anything any more', he comments sadly, and asks 'Why is it happening and when did it start?'. This is his explanation: 'It's as if people are trying to describe the emotions of the other person behind the words or to imbue them with some intent instead of simply and accurately reporting on what the person plainly said.'

That's exactly right, though it's not the whole story. First, the historical point. This use of go has been around for quite a while. The online OED has a draft addition which reflects its recent increase in frequency, but the earliest recorded instances are over 150 years old. It defines it thus: 'to utter (the noise indicated) with direct speech... now often in the historic present', and cites Dickens 1836:

'Yo-yo-yo-yo-yoe,' went the first boy. 'Yo-yo-yo-yoe!' went the second.

Past tense and present tense uses are found throughout the 20th century, with the present tense usage increasing.

This use of go is technically called a quotative - a form that acts as an introduction to direct speech, functioning in a similar way to the use of quotation marks. Not having punctuation marks available when we speak, we've devised various ways of alerting listeners to the fact that we're about to say something which would need quotation marks in writing, such as making a gesture in the air with the first two fingers of each hand, or - more conveniently - using an introductory word such as like, says, or goes.

Say is the traditional form, of course, as my correspondent notes. So why has an alternative usage developed? An analysis of actual usage provides the clue. Here are some examples:

Two minutes in, he goes, 'Wow, this is strenuous' and stopped.
And he goes, 'Gosh, I've never seen you in one of those'...
And I go 'Hello, this is odd...'
And John goes '[whistles]'...

Note how the direct speech begins with an interjection or similar vocal effect. In one study, it was found that 76 percent of uses of quotative go occurred with a following vocal effect, often with accompanying gestures or facial expressions. The function is sometimes described as 'mimetic' - the speaker is trying to recreate exactly the audio-visual character of the discourse being reported.

A longer extract from the corpus used in that study shows something different (I omit the addressee's reactions). The speaker is telling a story about how he was mistaken for a woman because of his long hair:

the other day I went into a bar and this guy asked me to dance, and all he saw was my hair, and he goes 'do you wanna dance' ? I turn around and go 'what' ? and he goes 'do you wanna dance' ? I go 'no no'. he goes 'oh oh I'm sorry'. I go 'yeah you better be'...

Here we see some other features that motivate a go usage. It's a dramatic narrative, which the speaker is trying to make as vivid as possible. The speaker is critically involved in what went on. The interaction involves a high level of emotion. And this, I think, explains why the usage has developed: it offers a dramatic alternative to say. Say is used when the language is more factual; go when the speaker in the narrative is more involved in the action.

(1) So John says, 'It's time we were leaving'
(2) So John goes, 'It's time we were leaving'

In (1), the speaker is reporting what happened. In (2) there's a greater dynamic force: something has just happened to make John say this.

I see the quotative use of go as the language developing a fresh expressive option in informal speech. It becomes noticeable because, when people are telling a conversation they find dramatic, they tend to use go repeatedly - just as they would with say in less dramatic circumstances. I'm not sure if the usage is sociolinguistically restricted - it certainly isn't only heard among young people - but I don't find in it any reason to be sad. It's an increase - a tiny one, but an increase nonetheless - in the expressive richness of the language.

On watching

A correspondent writes to say he has been hearing watch used with reference to new movies in the cinema, as in Have you watched The Artist? and I watched The Artist last week. He would use see in such a context and wonders what I think. For him, Have you watched The Artist could only mean 'Have you seen it on TV or on a DVD?'

The verb watch has always had a note of alertness in it, from its earliest uses in Old English meaning 'keep awake' or 'keep vigil': it is 'seeing + attention'. In its transitive uses, there's typically some notion of surveillance or vigilance, either physical or mental. A passive sense of 'seeing' isn't mentioned in the OED, but it's certainly there with such collocations as watch television and watch a DVD, where 'alertness' has broadened into some notion of 'closeness'. My correspondent uses as another example the contrast between I watched the birds at my bird feeder (where he observed them closely) and I saw the birds at my bird feeder (which suggests that he has stopped watching or that they are no longer there).

But the collocation watch + movies is a powerful one, hugely reinforced by sites which ask us to watch movies online (32 million hits for this phrase in Google). And it's a very short step from I'm going to watch something on TV to I'm going to watch something at the cinema. So I'm not surprised to see this usage gaining ground. There are hundreds of online examples like these:

Last night my wife and I watched The Artist....
I watched The Artist about a month ago...
I'm going to watch The Artist tonight...

It's not my usage - yet. I still say see, like my correspondent. But I think it's only a matter of time...

On reciting

A correspondent writes to ask 'Why is it that we 'play' at a recital, and 'recite' in a play?' This is one of those nice juxtapositions which makes me love English so much. It seems perverse until you look carefully at the history of the two words, and then you find it isn't as crazy as it seems.

Play is one of the oldest verbs in the language. It turns up in Old English in several senses, including the musical sense of playing an instrument and the dramatic sense of a theatrical performance, and these usages have developed in parallel ever since. Nothing special to note here.

Recite is the interesting one. It's found in English from the 1430s, and originally was restricted to written or spoken language activity. Someone was said to recite poems, words, speeches, and suchlike. And the result of this action was a recital - though people have never felt entirely comfortable with this noun. Several other nouns have been used for the action of reciting, such as a recite, a reciting, a recitation, and a recitement. Nouns for the person doing the reciting have varied too: the OED has examples of recitant, reciter, recitationist, and recitator. And even the verb produced a variant: to recitate, with examples of usage still occasionally found today.

But towards the end of the 15th century we see a natural development in the direction of music, when the verb is used to describe the chanting or intoning of a religious text, such as a psalm. The first recorded usage, in Caxton's Mirror of the World (1481), illustrates a new contrast between 'saying' and 'reciting': 'The Orysons that ben sayd and recyted euery day in the chirches.' This is the link to the modern musical sense of recital, though it took some time to emerge - not until the mid 18th century, in fact, when we encounter the word referring to a performance of a single piece of music, or a selection from a single composer, by a soloist or small group of musicians. Other terms developed too, notably recitative (first recorded usage, 1654) for a style of musical declamation intermediate between singing and speech, as heard in the narrative sections of an opera or oratorio.

As a result of this, recital is now ambiguous. 'I'm going to a recital' could be either poetry or music. At the end of the 19th century, there was an apparent attempt to keep the two senses apart. We encounter 'recitalist' for someone who gives a recital of music or dance, with reciter continuing to be used for speech. The distinction never caught on, though such usages as 'concert recitalist' are attested into the present century. However, what makes this development especially interesting is that the musical sense developed only in the noun. The verb sense stayed with speech. Musicians don't recite; only poets (etc) do.

On falling in love (with a language)

A correspondent - in this case, the author of several well-known books on bilingualism, François Grosjean, has sent me a link to his latest blog post. (Incidentally, his blog, 'Life as a Bilingual: the reality of living with two (or more) languages', is a splendid resource on this subject.)

The film Julie and Julia made him think of other people who had fallen in love with a culture and a language. I'm intrigued by the reasons for doing so. Sometimes it's the culture that provides the initial attraction; sometimes it's the language. In my case, I've experienced both.

I can still remember my first French lessons in secondary school, and falling in love with nasalized vowels. It was only much later, on my first visit to France, where I worked with a youth group (called Concordia) building a bridge in the mountains in Haute Savoie, that I realized there was a culture behind the language. Or rather, cultures. At the camp were several Algerians, and they lost no time putting me right about French, much to the disgust of the Parisians who were also there. It took some time for me to realize that I needed to supplement my Algerian colloquialisms with a different variety if I wasn't going to attract funny looks along the Left Bank.

Soon after, I saw an English-language film documentary about France, voiced by Orson Welles. I remember just one line from it. He said: 'Everyone has two homes; his own, and France'. I felt that way too.

The opposite situation took place when I first visited Brazil, for the British Council, in the 1960s, to teach on a summer school. It was February (think about it) and just before Carnival in Rio. I've talked about it in my Just a Phrase I'm Going Through, so I won't go into it here, except to say that in this case I arrived in Brazil with no knowledge of Portuguese at all. However, after a period of immersion in samba schools and the hit songs of the day, and meeting some wonderful people, I became virtually a native-speaker of musical Portuguese in three weeks. I still have a fine collection of vinyl records from that decade, and some of the songs have stayed with me. It was my primary motivation to get to grips with Brazilian Portuguese. I find the intonation patterns of the language, and especially of the Carioca dialect, hugely appealing. And the nasalization. (What is it about nasalization?)

So now I was in love with two languages. At the same time. The metaphor doesn't quite work in such cases. This was a new love-affair - but that metaphor doesn't seem right either, for I hadn't fallen out of love with my previous amour. I was equally in love with both.

And actually, now I think about it, both would in any case have been jealous of an even earlier love-affair - with Welsh, a language I had left behind when moving to Liverpool in the 1950s, but with which I was becoming intimate again after getting a job at Bangor in Wales.

It has been like that ever since. I guess being a linguist means one falls in love with every new language one has the opportunity to explore. They're all beautiful. I can't conceive of an unattractive language. I fell in love with Shona, on my first visit to Zimbabwe. And here the encounter with language and culture was pretty simultaneous. I suppose, if anything, the culture had come first, as I was there as a result of editing John Bradburne's poetry. (I tell that story here.) But that was an introduction to the culture through someone else's eyes. It's a very different experience when you visit yourself.

One's mother-tongue (or tongues) is an interesting case in point. I spend most of my life working on English. Am I in love with English? Yes, but it's different, in some indefinable way, from the feelings I have towards other languages. Maybe that's natural. Can one retain the same level of passion for the language(s) one lives with longest?

It's a commonplace to say that linguists love languages. But what kind of love is it? The analogy is not so much with married or unmarried love, it seems to me, for the associated terminology of flirtations and love-affairs doesn't fit very well. Rather, it's more like the love of a parent towards a child. Somehow, new additions to the linguistic family don't diminish the affection already felt towards the other members.

Then there's the other side of the coin. No wonder people can get so upset when a language dies.