David Crystal's Blog, page 9

On the rising demand for elocution

Another week in which the phone hasn't stopped ringing. Accents again, this time. During the week a private tuition company (www.thetutorpages.com) issued a report headed 'Elocution in the new Britain', in which they told us that they were receiving more requests for elocution lessons than for any other subject, and that demand had doubled. Inevitably, this was translated into media headlines about 'soaring demand' and 'death of accents'. I did a handful of radio interviews. The general attitude of the presenters was that they were appalled - reflecting the current BBC ethos that regional accents are a very good thing. They were certainly surprised - as indeed was I.

And saddened, for two reasons. The report highlights quotations from some of the enquirers which showed that there is still a great deal of national antagonism towards some regional accents, especially in the West Midlands and Birmingham. And it showed a woeful misunderstanding of what elocution is all about.

Elocution is not about replacing regional accents. As the report concluded:

'Today's elocution teachers are responding to these trends not by seeking to take their students back to the days of The King's Speech. Most people who come to them for help no longer wish to acquire a cut-glass accent or learn to speak like the Queen. On the whole they wish to retain their accents but to develop a clearer, softer, or more authoritative voice.'

That's the point. There are all sorts of reasons why people feel they need voice help. In some cases it's speed of speech that is the problem: they need to slow down. In others it's a desire for a different voice quality - a softer voice, for example, or one that is less breathy or creaky. (Some quite famous politicians have gone down that road.) In others it's anxiety over speaking in public, which is far more than a purely linguistic matter. In others it's a need to sound more confident, which again is not solely a linguistic matter. In others it's the need for better breath control. And in some cases, yes, it's a worry - real or imagined - that their accent is holding them back in their career.

The point has to be made, loudly and clearly, that all these problems affect all accents - Received Pronunciation included. Even RP can be a handicap in some circumstances, being perceived as too posh, distant, or customer unfriendly. And it's perfectly possible for an RP speaker to lack confidence, speak too fast, or be phonetically unclear. If you want examples, turn on Radio 3, where the infamous 'dropped intonation' at the end of a sentence is often heard obscuring a critical part of the information focus:

'That was piano concerto in D by .......'
'The programme will be repeated next Thursday at .......'

Or listen to some of the RP voices on PA systems in airports, ferries, and railway stations. I spent some weeks once training the people who made the announcements on Stena ferries. Almost without exception, they spoke too quickly - regardless of the accent they had.

Voice training can be enormously helpful in these respects. However, despite the hype, it's worth noting that in all of this, we're not talking about thousands of people. The report refers to 'over 500' enquiries only. That's a tiny tiny fraction of the population. But, from the comments quoted in the report, it's clear that there is still a cause for concern. For whatever reason, far too many people are still being made to worry about their accent.

On Waterstone(')s

Another day when the phone doesn't stop ringing, and (once again) all because of the apostrophe. Waterstone's has decided to become Waterstones. In the end I did a short piece on 'Front Row'. I also wrote the following piece for the Mirror, but as they only used 200 words of it, here's the full version, with a couple of extra points added following the chat with Mark Lawson. If you recognize some of the examples, you're right: they appeared in my By Hook or by Crook, making the point that there's nothing new about this story at all.

The apostrophe was one of the last punctuation features to come into English orthography, and it has never settled down. In writing from around Shakespeare's time we see people beginning to experiment with it. It's used to show a missing letter and to mark posssession, but it's also used for plurals and third person singulars in verbs. In the first printing of his plays we find such spellings as fellow's, how fare's my lord, and dilemma's.

Even as late as Dr Johnson, in the 18th century, the system was still developing. There are no longer any plural apostrophes after a consonant, but there are several after nouns ending in -o or -a. In his dictionary we find him allowing such spellings as grotto's, innuendo's, and echo's as well as comma's, opera's, and toga's.

In the 19th century, printers attempted to standardize the system, but they didn't do it very well. They applied the rule about possession rigorously to nouns, but forgot about pronouns, so that his, hers, its, ours, yours, and theirs don't have an apostrophe, even though they do express possession. They banned the apostrophe from plurals, but allowed a number of exceptions, such as after numerals (the 1860's), abbreviations (the VIP's), and individual letters (P's and Q's).

People found it difficult to apply the rules consistently, right from the start. And proper names posed one of the greatest problems. There was a great deal of inconsistency around the end of the 19th century as to whether it should be St Pauls or St Paul's, or Harrods or Harrod's. The fuss over Waterstone's has its parallel a century ago.

To begin with, Charles Henry Harrod was perfectly satisfied with his grocer's apostrophe, when he opened his shop in Knightsbridge in 1849. An advertisement in 1895 for a sewing-machine tells readers that it can be bought from the first floor of 'Harrod's Stores, Brompton'. But as the century progressed, variation crept in. Manufacturer marks on metalware products made for the firm show a mixture of Harrod's and Harrods. By the early 1900s, the apostrophe had largely disappeared. An advertisement in The Times for 9th December 1907 says: '15 acres of Christmas gifts at Harrods'.

The trend affected other firms. Around the same time, Lloyd's Bank became Lloyds Bank. And in 1890 the US Board on Geographic Names made a far-reaching decision, which is still in force: 'Apostrophes suggesting possession or association are not to be used within the body of a proper geographic name.' Why? 'The word or words that form a geographic name ... change from words having specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.'

You might have thought that would settle the matter. But no. There are hundreds of names with apostrophes in the official US repository, the Geographic Names Information System. These exceptions are administrative names, such as schools, churches, cemeteries, hospitals, airports, and shopping centres. Such names, the Board concluded, 'are best left to the organization that administers them'. That's the crucial point, which we need to bear in mind when talking about the Waterstones case.

The English writing system in Britain today is full of apostrophe anomalies. Lord's Cricket Ground but Earls Court. McDonald's but Starbucks. A website in London has a big heading: King's Cross Online. Immediately underneath is the heading Welcome to Kings Cross Online. You can see it here.

But even the firms which insist on apostrophes have to bow before technology. The website of McDonald's restaurants is www.mcdonalds.com. The search engines like their URLs to be as simple as possible. Type mcdonald's into Google with an apostrophe, and you'll probably get 'page not found'. A percentage symbol (%) replaces an apostrophe if it's absolutely necessary.

The Board on Geographic Names identified a crucial point: the rules governing everyday usage no longer apply. Such things 'are best left to the organization that administers them'. That feels right. You can spell your own name or your house name or your shop name however you want, and that's your democratic right. Is it Humphrys or Humphreys? McDonald or Macdonald. It's up to you. If someone came up to me and says my name should be spelled Crystall rather than Crystal I would tell them to mind their own business. And if the name happens to contain an apostrophe, that's a matter of personal choice too. Mr D'Amico can call himself Damico if he wants to.

So if Waterstone's wants to become Waterstones, that's up to the firm. It's nothing to do with expressing possession or plurality or anything to do with meaning. It's simply an identity marker. I hear that the CEO of Waterstones has tried to defend the change on two grounds. He says that dropping the apostrophe suggests plurality - there are lots of the stores. That's definitely not a good defence, for there are not lots of Harrods. He's on much stronger ground when he cites motivation from the constraints of the Internet. Or refers to the trend to make public print less cluttered in appearance - a trend which goes back many decades, and began with the dropping of periods in Mr, BBC, and the like.

It's important to realize that whatever Waterstones does has no immediate bearing on the way we use the rest of the language. An apostrophe is still required in standard written English - whether we like it or not - to make such distinctions as it's vs its, and boy's vs boys', and enough people consider that to be critical to mean that there's still a lot of life in this punctuation symbol. On the other hand, when a prominent firm makes a decision like this, it does reinforce a climate of change, so those whose life depends on the use of the apostrophe are right to feel threatened.

It's impossible to say how long the apostrophe will last. For almost a thousand years of its history, English writing did very well without it. During the 19th century it came to be seen as obligatory, and the rules governing its use were formed. But during the 20th, its role became questioned. Was it really needed? It was sometimes useful in distinguishing meanings, but it seems it could be left out without causing ambiguity most of the time. The electronic revolution provided the evidence, as people voted with their fingers in emails, blogs, instant messages, texts, and tweets, and omitted the apostrophe all over the place without causing any breakdown in communication. The context was generally sufficient to make it clear what the writers meant - and if it wasn't, then an apostrophe was always available to make the point clear.

It's been an awkward time for teachers, who have the task of pointing out to their inernet-savvy students that this is a transitional moment. The old order still rules, and has to be respected. Omitting an apostrophe may not cause a problem in a text message, but it can cause a huge problem in essays, job applications, and other kinds of formal writing. Not because it makes meaning unclear, but simply because it goes against what society considers to be acceptable English. Students have to be taught how to manage this situation, so that they know what's expected of them.

It's the same with spelling. There's never a problem of meaning if we write accommodation with only one c or one m. But it's not acceptable to do so. Standard written English evolved to aid national and international intelligibility. And the rules that guarantee this intelligibility are essentially rules of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Society judges people in terms of the language they use, and if they break these rules, they must be prepared for a reaction.

But over time, attitudes change. Most of the issues of English usage that caused a furore a hundred years ago have died away now, and the language has changed. It's likely that as the amount of written language on the Internet increases, and becomes more central to our everyday lives, so its norms will become increasingly adopted elsewhere. Punctuation and spelling are likely to simplify, and this may happen to the apostrophe too. This sort of change doesn't happen overnight. Or even over-decade. But over-century, yes.

On being thick

A correspondent writes to ask about the utterance 'She was very thick with the gardener', encountered in the Hercule Poirot episode, The Halloween Party. 'I looked it up in a dictionary and it seems it's an old-fashioned way of saying "she was very friendly with him". Then I saw another expression, thick as thieves (is it still used?) .What I can't really understand is how/why the word thick (usu. 'not thin'; 'stupid') came to be used in the sense of 'friendly'.

The original sense, in Anglo-Saxon times, is of material extension, where it's regularly opposed to thin, as in a thick wall. Then it came to be applied to density and abundance (thick hedge, thick hair, thick mist...) and size (thickset) and extended to thickness in general (where it's not opposed to thin), as in 'the cover is an inch thick'.

It then generated several figurative senses meaning 'excessive in some disagreeable way', especially in the phrase a bit thick ('indecent' or 'indelicate'). It's the sense of 'density of contact' that led to the figurative sense of being 'close in association' - in other words, being 'intimate' or 'familiar'. It seems to have been a late 18th-century development. And quite a few similes have since emerged, such as as thick as glue, as thick as peas in a shell, and as thick as thieves, some of which have become proverbial.

The idioms are still used a lot, but the use of the single word to mean 'intimate' is certainly old-fashioned now, redolent of P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.

On being ignorant

A correspondent from the UK writes to say he has encountered a use of ignorant in an active sense. In this use, to say that X 'is ignorant' is to mean 'X goes around ignoring people'. He has the impression that this is a working-class usage, and wonders what I think about it.

Well, this is a new one on me, for any class level. I know that there was an overlap of meaning between the adjective/noun (14th century) and the verb, when this finally arrived (early 17th century). The present-day active sense of ignore ('intentionally disregard') is much later (18th century) and, interestingly, was dismissed as erroneous by Johnson and others. The OED has a lovely quotation from 1854 when the Earl of Carlyle apologises for using the word in this way: 'Mr. Finlay says that the modern Greeks wholly ignore (I beg pardon for the use of the word) the whole period from Alexander the Great to Lord Palmerston.'

I've not come across a correspondingly active sense for 'ignorant'. The OED makes no mention of it, nor does the Urban Dictionary. I've never heard anyone say such things as 'X is a very ignorant man' meaning 'X ignores people'. But my correspondent has friends who use it in this way. It would be good to get a sense of whether this is at all common anywhere and to find examples in writing. Are there any out there? If you've come across it, remember to give details of where and when.

On reading me loud and clear

A correspondent, having encountered such usages as 'Do you read me?' and 'I'm reading you loud and clear' in radio interaction, wonders what is meant by 'read' instead of 'hear'. It's an interesting example, as these are well-used expressions used in films and television where radiotelephony is a part of the plot, but they must seem odd to learners of English. For a start, the collocation of read and loud is unusual. And if it's radio, what is being read?

The interpretation is clear enough. The question asks about the quality of the signal being received. The response affirms that the signal is of good quality. The expressions are part of the jargon of two-way radio communication: read has been used along with copy ('Do you copy?'), receive, and other conventions, such as Roger (acknowledging receipt of the message). As radio is the medium, we might have expected a different form of words: 'Do you hear me?' and 'I'm hearing you loud and clear', where the collocations are normal. So what motivated read?

I've not been able to find a source which explicates the point. The usage has been around since 1930, according to the OED. (Receive in this sense is a little older; copy in this sense is not recorded in the OED.) My suspicion is that it was the ambiguity in hear which led to the search for alternatives. 'Do you hear me?' can actually have a negative interpretation, expressing attitudes ranging from mild insistence to aggressive rudeness - 'Are you listening to me?', 'I'm not going to say this again'... - the effect being reinforced by the absence of any facial expressions which might soften the force of the language.

But why read? Presumably it was motivated by the visual display on the receiving equipment, which would show a point of origin or frequency of the signal. This would often be the name of a place or a set of letters and numerals. But even if it were simply a waveform, then there was ample precedent for applying the verb in this way. Read had already been widely used in a range of senses other than that of interpreting conventional written language, as in to study, observe, or interpret something ('reading thoughts/my mind/ my heart/ the road...'). It seems to have been a natural development. As I say, I haven't found a source in the 1920s or 1930s which explicitly discusses this use of the verb, so if any reader is aware of one, do let me know.

Loud and clear was a collocation long before radio telephony. The first recorded use of it is in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass: 'I said it very loud and clear; I went and shouted in his ear.' That's how it stayed, resisting prescriptive criticism (that it should be loudly and clearly). And it remains the number one choice, beating the phonetic alphabet alternative (Lima and Charlie) and the fascinating 'I read you five by five'.

This was a response (also not in the OED) where the first number indicated the strength of a signal and the second indicated its readability. Each was rated on a scale from 1 to 5: signal strength went from 'loud' through 'good', 'weak', and 'very weak' to 'fading'; readability went from 'clear' through 'readable', 'unreadable', and 'distorted' to 'having interference'. So, if you read something '5 by 5' you could hear the signal well and also understand what was being said.

The origins of the expression are unclear, though it seems likely that it's another of those expressions based on parts of the body. One commentator suggests that it began with early pilots having to communicate with a controller, before taking off, by signalling with their hands, and showing with their fingers the quality of their radio reception. Plausible - but again, it would be nice to find a written source.

On 'I asks' in Sherlock Holmes

 A correspondent writes to ask about a construction he came across in a Sherlock Holmes story, 'The Red-Headed League'. He noticed 'that on one occasion Watson adds suffix -s to the first person singular verb in the present simple tense'. Why, he asks, would an educated man use such a construction? Is he referring to himself in the third person?

This is the quotation: 'Spaulding, he came down into the office just this day eight weeks, with this very paper in his hand, and he says: "I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a red-headed man." "Why that?" I asks.'

The story is being narrated by Dr Watson, but it's actually not Watson talking at this point. It's Wilson who's narrating. So the question is whether Wilson would be likely to use such a construction.

We are given the following description of him by Watson: 'Our visitor bore every mark of being an average comonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow.' We also learn that he began as a ship's carpenter and now works as a pawnbroker. So it seems quite in character that he should use such a form.

This isn't the third person, though. It's the first person with an -s ending - a widely used regional dialect feature in English, both in Victorian times and today, and common in local London speech, especially in narrative discourse. We also hear such forms as 'I goes', 'I sees', and so on. It's a dramatic use of the present tense in narrative. The rest of the time people say 'I asked', 'I observed', and suchlike.

Conan Doyle does use nonstandard speech in his writing - for example, John Rance's speech in 'A Study in Scarlet': 'I was a-strollin' down ... them two houses... won't have the drains seed to...' - though it's not his stylistic forte. I find the usages rather stilted and tokenistic. But there are only hints of demotic speech in 'The Red-Headed League'. Mr Wilson has a few colloquial turns of phrase typical of the businessman trying to rise in society, such as 'never was such a fellow for photography', 'as true as gospel', 'a pawnbroker's business is mostly done of an evening', '[he] took to coming in only once of a morning', 'he... would come cheap'. 'I asks' is a clear instance of a nonstandard usage, in this story, but it's the only example, and it does stick out like a linguistic sore thumb. Which, I suppose, is why my correspondent noticed it in the first place.

On skyfall

A correspondent from BBC Radio 4's Front Row calls to ask whether I have any views about the name of the new James Bond movie, Starfall. Had I ever heard the word before?

I certainly had. Thanks to various children, I am aware of characters in Transformers universes with this name, and I recall an adventure fantasy from the 1980s which had a planet called Skyfall. And there was a striking use by W H Auden, in the charade (his first dramatic work) he wrote in 1928 and dedicated to Cecil Day Lewis, 'Paid on Both Sides', which has the vivid lines:

Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat
Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder's bite.

But apart from this, the coinage seems a somewhat predictable compound. Other words ending in fall in English are unremarkable - rainfall, snowfall, waterfall, and suchlike, alongside figurative extensions such as pitfall, landfall, and shortfall. It does lend itself to cosmic invention, though: a quick search on Google produces starfall, moonfall, planetfall, sunfall, and others. So skyfall is in good company. But we'll have to wait and see what motivates the title in this case.

I'm wondering if it's 'James Bond meets Chicken Licken'. You remember him? An acorn falls on his head, and he thinks the sky is falling down so he rushes off to tell the king? Maybe the new Bond baddy is Foxy Loxy in disguise.

On snowtober

A correspondent writes from the USA about the news media's collective decision to settle on Snowtober as their name on Twitter and in headlines for this weekend's storm. Why, he asks, did this coinage beat the others which had been suggested, such as Snoctober and Octsnowber? Are there any linguistic reasons?

There are always linguistic reasons. We can rule out Octsnowber straight away, on two grounds. First, it is an infixing coinage - something English doesn't do very much. Most blends are combinations of the first part of word A plus the second part of word B, such as brunch, helipad, smog, motel, and so on. Inserting one word inside another is rare - absobloodylutely. Second, the result of the infixation is to produce an unpalatable 4-element consonant cluster /ktsn/.

Snoctober satisfies the blending preference, but loses out on phonological grounds. The long vowel (diphthong, actually) of snow, rhyming with low, has become a short vowel: snoc rhymes with lock, and as a result the immediacy of the semantic connection with snow is lost.

Snowtober does everything right. It blends in the usual way. It keeps the phonological connection with snow in front of our ears and eyes, and it avoids an awkward phonetic sequence of sounds. This had to be the media choice.

On being fairly much aware

A correspondent writes to ask if he can say fairly much and still be grammatically correct? If we can have pretty much and very much, he says, can we have fairly much?

A quick trawl of the Internet brings to light quite a few instances, such as:

I'm fairly much aware of that...
I'm fairly much a novice when it comes to marketing...
You can locate virtually anything online now, fairly much...
It's fairly much the same from class to class...
Australia is fairly much in the middle...
This fairly much mirrors my own experience...

What we seem to have here is a lexical issue rather than a grammatical one: we're dealing with a collocational change. Fairly traditionally collocates with well but not much. Words like pretty and very collocate with both. What's probably happening is that the collocates of pretty and very are transferring to fairly.

It's not a usage that's part of my idiolect, but I've heard it occasionally, especially in the north of England. Fairly is one of those words which has quite a wide range of usage in regional dialects in Britain, e.g. She's fairly looking (meaning 'good-looking'). I seem to recall hearing it abroad too, for example in Australia. Can readers of this post add their impressions?

On LARSP latest

Long before I began this blog, correspondents were already writing asking how they could get hold of the three texts on clinical language profiling that were developed when I worked at the University of Reading in the 1970s. They had gone out of print, and it was proving difficult for new generations of students in speech therapy and language pathology to get hold of them. Those wanting to improve their proficiency in using the grammatical analysis known as LARSP (the 'Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure') were particularly affected.

Old books have new leases of life today, thanks to Internet technology. So, my thanks goes to Tom Klee and his colleagues at the University of Canterbury at Christchurch, New Zealand, for hosting electronic versions of each of the books. Keyword searches can be made through the search facility of
 the PDF reader and the table of contents is linked to each chapter. The various profile forms in these works can be reproduced without charge.

The Grammatical Analysis of Language Disability can be downloaded from 
here

Working with LARSP can be downloaded from 
here

Profiling Language Disability can be downloaded from 
here

As it's a busy university server, there may be the occasional delay in accessing the material. A download takes about a minute per text.

It's great to see these books readily available once more. And this is especially timely, as a new book illustrating the way LARSP has been used in thirteen languages is about to appear: Assessing Grammar: the Languages of LARSP, edited by Martin Ball, David Crystal and Paul Fletcher, published by Multilingual Matters.