Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 17

Flaunting or flouting the law (2). If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Or flout it?

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[5-6 of 20 words good writers shouldn’t confuse]

(Six-minute read.)

What’s the story (morning glory)?

In the earlier blog about these changeling verbs, we looked at what flaunt and flout are supposed to mean, and at how often they get swapped.

Writing about that made me wonder why they get confused in the first place.

Why the confusion?

There must be a reason. Nothing in language is, I am quite convinced, arbitrary; nor must this be.

Clearly, sound plays its part: the words cross the starting and finishing line together. However, rhyme they do not (i.e. are not homophones), and one has four phonemes while the other has five: /flaʊt/ and /flɔːnt/.

Sound helps, but doesn’t explain everything. Something else must be going on. And that something else is what I think I can explain below (prompted by a wise observation in the Merriam-Webster Concise Usage Dictionary).

If flaunt were a packing case, it would have ‘I DISAPPROVE!’ stamped all over it.

In fact, the Cobuild dictionary, which is hot on this kind of thing, known technically as ‘pragmatics’, makes that quite clear.

If you say that someone flaunts their possessions, abilities, or qualities, you mean that they display them in a very obvious way, especially in order to try to obtain other people’s admiration. [disapproval]

They drove around in Rolls-Royces, openly flaunting their wealth.

[If you need an avatar for ‘flaunt’, think footballers’ sports cars, or Kim Kardashian (assuming, gentle reader, that you are not one of her besotted followers).]

If you say that someone is flaunting themselves, you disapprove of them because they are behaving in a very confident way, or in a way that is intended to attract sexual attention.

[disapproval]

‘She’s asking for trouble, flaunting herself like that. Did you see the way Major Winston was looking at her?’

What links these two meaning of flaunt? Hypervisibility. Or, in Cobuild’s more measured, words ‘…display them in a very obvious way.’

If you’re enjoying this blog, and finding it useful, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up  and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips. Enjoy!

A Kardashian among verbs

Anyone who flaunts themself [sic] might as well have donned a hi-vis jacket with ‘LOOK AT ME, ME, ME, MEEEEE! AREN’T I SEXY!’ emblazoned all across the back.

Now, the Cobuild definition I mentioned earlier says that if someone flaunts whatever it may be they choose to flaunt, they do so ‘in a very obvious way’.

‘In a very obvious way’ is technically an ‘adverbial adjunct’. OK, ok already: it is more than one word, and it doesn’t end in –ly, but it is doing exactly what a common or garden adverb does, which is to comment on the verb.

Which raises the question: which common or garden –ly adverbs lend their seal of disapproval to  flaunt? We have already had openly in the example above (…openly flaunting their wealth…).

But isn’t that practically tautological? After all, to flaunt means ‘to display to public view’. You can’t secretly flaunt anything, can you?

That would be to miss the point of openly, and another adverb often used, publicly. Rather than being tautological, or redundant, they both intensify the tut-tutting, finger-wagging tone inherent in flaunt. If  you describe someone as ‘openly flaunting’ something, you’re suggesting their action is morally on a par with, shall we say, kicking a baby or having public sex.

Even more common are adverbs with a positively Whitehouseian moralistic tinge: blatantly, brazenly, flagrantly.

Those adverbs form the bridge to flout.

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Why this Greek flute player? Read on.

Shameless!

Dictionary definitions say nothing about visibility in relation to flout (e.g., Cobuild’s ‘If you flout something such as a law, an order, or an accepted way of behaving, you deliberately do not obey it or follow it’).

But language corpora (which are vast, computerized collections of natural language) show those same ‘visibility’ adverbs that criticise flaunt clustering round flout like bees round a honeypot: openly, flagrantly, brazenly, blatantly:

For too long these rickshaw drivers have been ignored while blatantly flouting the law.

Not only are court orders brazenly flouted, there is substantial evidence that the cleared land are [sic] not used for any development purposes, but rather, reallocated to political cronies.

Another blush-making adverb is shamelessly.

This video shows how two drivers shamelessly flouted driving rules on one of Chelmsford’s busiest roads.

The ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashian’ star shamelessly flaunted her fabulous bikini body in the vintage snap.

So, these twin features of hypervisibility and brass-necked shamelessness make the two words almost perfectly overlap in a sort of Venn of moral revulsion.

In the previous blog on this, I was wrong to say it is only flaunt that ousts flout. M-W Usage Dict. has a couple of examples of the reverse direction, as does the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), and even Google, e.g. Put simply, no amount of drug education in schools will succeed if the law enforcement agencies allow drug dealing with impunity on our streets and drug dealers are allowed to accumulate and flout their wealth (GloWbe).

Who started the swapping?

According to The Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage (2002), the first green-ink letter about this of which they have ken was penned (and received) in 1932. Their earliest evidence of the swap is from 1918, from the Yale Review, while the OED’s is from 1923. Google Ngrams does not seem to throw up any earlier evidence.

But even such a brilliant lyricist and wit as Noel Coward could fall into the trap, according to the OED:

Although we sometimes flaunt our family conventions, Our good intentions Mustn’t be misconstrued.

N. Coward Stately Homes of Eng.in Operette(libretto) I. vii. 55, 1938

And no less august a figure than the PM at the time could be caught out too:

The Prime Minister in a broadcast on Wednesday (January 17) … referred to ‘flaunting’ the regulations.

Times 25 Jan, 1973

(Whether ‘Sailor Ted’ and ‘august’ collocate, I’ll let the reader decide.)

What about the words themselves. Where do they come from?

Flaunt

Nobody knows for sure. For flaunt (first cited in the OED from 1566) a connection with certain Scandinavian dialect words has been posited; alternatively, it might be a blend of e.g. fly, flounce with vaunt.

In its original intransitive use, one meaning was, as the OED (1896 entry) majestically puts it (underlining mine; the second underlined clause seems like a perfect definition of most social media activity): ‘Of persons: To walk or move about so as to display one’s finery; to display oneself in unbecomingly splendid or gaudy attire; to obtrude oneself boastfully, impudently, or defiantly on the public view. Often quasi-trans. to flaunt it (away, out, forth).’

This use is exemplified in Pope’s (1734) Essay on Man: Epist. IV 186:

One  flaunts  in Rags, one flutters in Brocade.

And in Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) VI. xxxiii. 122:   To flaunt it away in a chariot and six.

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Mrs Piozzi (Hester Thrale), in 1810, aged 69, J. Jackson. Chalk & pencil portrait (detail.) Dr Johnson’s House museum, London.

 

But this use, though recorded first (1566) must surely be an extension of the literal meaning, first recorded in 1576: ‘Of plumes, banners, etc.: To wave gaily or proudly. Of plants: To wave so as to display their beauty.’

You might not think of plants being attention-seeking, but Dr Johnson’s friend and muse, Mrs Thrale/Piozzi,1 did:

Orange and lemon trees flaunt over the walls.

H.L. Piozzi, Observ. Journey France I. 59, 1789

 

The transitive use, though latent earlier in ‘to flaunt it away’ did not materialise until 1822:

The Summer air That flaunts their dewy robes.

T. Hood, Two Peacocks of Bedfont ii, in London Mag. Oct. 1822

The haberdashers flaunt long strips of gaudy calicoes.

Thackeray, Paris Sketch Bk. I. 19, 1840

Flouting and fluting

In its transitive meaning (‘To mock, jeer, insult; to express contempt for, either in word or action’) to flout appears in a 1551 translation of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia:

In moste spiteful maner mockynge…and flowtynge them.

Robinsontr. T. More Vtopia sig. Aiii

and Shakespeare used it in the Scottish play2.

The unrevised OED (1897) suggests a link with a Middle English spelling of flute (verb).

‘What has a flute got to do with it?’, you may well ask.

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Pan by Picasso. Lithograph.

Well, the connection seems to run like this, according to authoritative sources. It might come from Dutch fluiten ‘whistle, play the flute, hiss (in derision)’ [remember that Dutch has gifted an extraordinary number of words to English]. In support of this origin, the Oxford Online Dictionary notes, ‘German dialect pfeifen auf, literally ‘pipe at’, has a similar extended meaning’. And the OED points to hiss having evolved similarly from simple ‘noise’ word to derision.

As far as I have been able to establish, flout started to be used with ‘rules, law, etc.’-style words in the mid-nineteenth century (Corpus of Historical American) but didn’t really take off in that use until the twentieth.

1 The Grauniad review of Beryl Bainbridge’s masterly last completed novel, According to Queeney, recounting Dr Johnson’s relationship with Mrs Thrale, has an interesting use of flaunt:  ‘Bainbridge respects her reader enough not to flaunt her research, though this is a novel stitched together from original material.’

2 DUNCAN: Whence cam’st thou, worthy Thane?

ROSS: From Fife, great King,

Where the Norwegian banners flout the sky

And fan our people cold.

Norway himself, with terrible numbers,

Assisted by that most disloyal traitor,

The Thane of Cawdor, began a dismal conflict

Till that Bellona’s bridegroom [sc. Macbeth], lapped in proof,

Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Point against point, rebellious arm ‘gainst arm,

Curbing his lavish spirit; and to conclude,

The victory fell on us—

 

 

Flaunting or flouting the law? (1)

If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up  and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips. Enjoy!

[5-6 of 20 words good writers shouldn’t confuse]

(Four-minute read.)

I’ve been prompted by a comment on this site (h/t Rick), and by seeing flaunt for flout recently, to revise and republish this post from the early days of this blog.

What’s the issue?

Put simply, it is this: Are people who write sentences such as “motorists who blatantly flaunt the regulations for their safety and well-being” (instead of flout) woefully ignorant dunderheads who need remedial English and should not be allowed into print, or are they just following a long-standing and perfectly legitimate linguistic trend?

How you answer that question defines your place on the descriptive-prescriptive spectrum (if you answered “yes”, you are probably an out-and-out prescriptivist). Your answer could also depend on where you live, and which dictionary or usage guide you take as your bible.

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What do these words mean?

Though sounding similar, they have—at least in origin—rather different meanings. If you flaunt something, you show it off in a way which is brash and overdone. The very use of the word suggests that [image error]you don’t approve of whoever is doing the flaunting. Typical things that people flaunt are their wealth, their sexuality, and themselves, or bits of their anatomy (ahem!).

He flaunts his riches like everyone in the business.

Women should have it both ways—they should be able to flaunt their sexuality and be taken seriously.

Katie seemed to be flaunting herself a little too much for Elizabeth’s liking.

If you flout a law, rules, regulations, convention, and semantically related nouns, you do not obey them, and you treat them with blatant disregard.

Around 10 smokers were openly flouting the ban when the Health Board’s environmental health inspectors arrived.

Spain ‘s Duchess of Alba, known as the “rebel noble,” has died at age 88. The wealthiest woman in Spain, she was also a bohemian, famous for her eccentric style and for flouting convention in numerous ways.

In another case, it rejected the appeal of a New Mexico photographer accused of flouting anti-discrimination laws by refusing to photograph a same-sex wedding.

A quote from Chinua Achebe (1987) illustrates the confusion between the two. “Your Excellency, let us not flaunt the wishes of the people.” “Flout, you mean,” I said. “The people?” asked His Excellency, ignoring my piece of pedantry.

Unlike some other pairs of confusable words, such as lord/laud, the confusion here seems to work only in one direction. IOW, people do not use flout instead of flaunt.

What do dictionaries and usage guides say?

Merriam-Webster gives that transitive use of flaunt two definitions.

1 to display ostentatiously or impudently:

2 to treat contemptuously

while adding a note, which states that the use of flaunt in this way “undoubtedly arose from confusion with flout”, but that the contexts in which it appears cannot be considered “substandard”.

On the other side of the pond, Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO) states categorically that the two words “may sound similar but they have different meanings”. [image error]The 1993 draft addition to the OED entry for flaunt notes that the usage “clearly arose by confusion, and is widely considered erroneous”.

Various British usage guides maintain the distinction rigidly, and the Economist style guide’s witty note runs “Flaunt means display; flout means disdain. If you flout this distinction, you will flaunt your ignorance”. The Australian Macquarie dictionary notes “Flaunt is commonly confused with flout”.

Nevertheless, ODO admits that in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) “the second and third commonest objects of flaunt, after wealth, are law and rules”.

What does the evidence say?

Other corpora (Corpus of Contemporary American, the NOW corpus, and the Global Corpus of web-based English (GloWbE) present a similar picture of the most frequent collocates of flaunt. For instance, in GloWbE, the most common noun object of flaunt is wealth, followed in equal second place by body and law. The other corpora show a similar pattern.

However, if you look at relative frequency, that is, at how often each verb has as its object a noun in the semantic field of “law, regulation, etc.”, things start to look rather different. For instance, in GloWbE again, you have the following (flout/flaunt) ratio:

law 287:37

laws 100:18

rules 212:25

convention 31:3

That shows a percentage of between 10 and 15 percent for flaunt with those collocates. Figures from the NOW corpus show a rather lower percentage, which may be due to its being journalistic, and therefore more ‘edited’:

law 1614:77

rules 2116:96

convention 82:4

So, while Merriam-Webster is less prescriptive than Oxford, Macquarie, and British style guides, in that it accepts the contested use, these figures suggest that many, many more writers across the twenty varieties of English represented in the corpora mentioned actually maintain the distinction than those that ignore it.

Conclusion

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Given the current state of things, any reply to my original question has to be nuanced. So, if you read something that contains collocations such as flaunt…rules, regulations, convention, you could try to suppress a sigh for the total collapse and degradation of the English language and just give the writer the benefit of the doubt: it is presumably part of her or his idiolect.

Flaunt has been used to mean “flout” since the 1920s, according to that draft addition to the OED entry, and appears regularly, particularly in journalistic writing. At least one dictionary recognizes it as having that meaning; in the long run, others may accept it too.

On the other hand, if you are writing or editing something, there is an argument that it would be wise to maintain the distinction, and, possibly, tactfully, raise the issue with the author. In that way, you or they might avoid the involuntary sighs of some of your (probably older) readers as they are distracted from the content of your message by what they see as a flaw in its form.

Worst enemy or worse enemy? Eggcorns (6)

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I’m my own worse enemy, I really am

In the previous blog, I mentioned the eggcorn ‘own worse enemy’, and raised various questions about the original version ‘to be one’s own worst enemy’:

What is its origin?
Are there similar idioms in other European languages? and…
My example has plural concord (Scotland are their own worse enemy) but enemy is singular. So, how often do people say ‘enemies’ in such cases

For reasons which I hope will become clear, I’ll start with 2.

Is there a similarly worded idiom in other European languages?

Yes, in several.

(Handily, Oxford bilingual dictionaries online seem to cover the same source language (English) items, which makes comparison delightfully easy.)

For French/Italian/Portuguese and Spanish there is a word-for-word equivalent:

être son pire ennemi;

essere il peggiore nemico di se stesso;

ela é o seu pior inimigo;

su peor enemigo es ella misma (Last two are equivalent to she’s her own worst enemy.)

German doesn’t mirror the Romance languages, and instead has niemandem schaden als sich selbst ‘to harm nobody other than oneself‘.

But, perhaps curiously, Russian mirrors the Romance languages: он сам себе злейший враг,

‘He himself to himself is his worst/most ferocious enemy’.

Now, has this same image/metaphor occurred to different people at different times in different languages, both Romance and Slavic?

Naw!

It goes without saying that languages borrow whole phrases from each other (‘It goes without saying’ is a loan-translation from French ça va sans se dire). But if a phrase spreads over several languages, it inevitably raises the suspicion that there must be a common source.

‘To be one’s own worst enemy’ sounds like a time-honoured cliché. And where would one look for a common source for t-h clichés? To our linguistic alma mater, Latin, of course.

Where does the phrase come from?

Searches in several sources were initially fruitless because they did not even give the phrase pageroom.  However, Garner’s Modern American Usage puts it in a list of must-avoid clichés, the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms has it, and, finally, the Penguin Dictionary of Clichés (also known as The Cat’s Pyjamas) suggests that it goes back to ‘Greek and Roman times’, an ancestry which is frustratingly vague.

However, a concatenation of googles eventually led me to none other than Cicero. In a letter to Atticus he describes Julius Caesar as

sed tamen nihil inimicius quam sibi ipse; Cicero, ad Atticum X. 12a.

Word for word, that is ‘but still, nothing is more harmful than he himself to himself’, which sounds a bit like a poor back-translation from Klingon, or Yoda’s version of ‘He’s his own worst enemy.’

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Yet, lo and behold (a phrase that never actually appears in the Bible, despite its pseudo-biblical patina), a translation of Cicero’s letter renders the Latin as ‘he has no worse enemy than himself’, which seems remarkably close to the modern, clichéd version.

Beyond Cicero, I can venture no further, though Google, that propagator of wrongly attributed quotes, suggests an Aristotelian origin.

They’re their own worst enemy

In the original eggcorn that led me down the primrose path of this particular phrase, we had ‘Scotland are their own worse enemy’. For American readers I suspect the plural verb reads oddly in any case, since collectives regularly take a singular verb in U.S. usage. But here what intrigued me was the singular enemy; the sentence seems to be totally AC/DC as regards singular/plural: collective + plural verb + plural possessive + singular complement.

On a strict interpretation of concord, could it be argued that their should be followed by enemies? Probably. But then the thought occurs that enemy itself has a collective meaning (1.1) that allows both singular and plural verb concord, e.g. the enemy are/is already upon us.

In one small corpus, a search for ‘their own worst enem.*’ had the two variants neatly and exactly balanced. In a larger one, enemies was preponderant in a ratio of 132:73. Below is an example of each kind.

Do France’s squabbling Socialists have a future? Lately, the Socialists have looked like their own worst enemies.

A whole generation of people has been lost. Ultimately, the terrorists are their own worst enemy. The utopian goals most terrorist organizations set leave their foes few options.

I can discern no difference between them.

All I can see is PLURAL SUBJ + PLURAL VERB + their + own.

So, is this in the end a classic case of linguistic free variation?

Own worst enemy or own worse enemy? Eggcorns (5)

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No punctuation in contractions? Well never accept it, will we?

I’m my own worse enemy, I really am

Oh, what a fount of inspiration is that little bird. Watching the Scotland vs. Ireland Six Nations Match on Saturday (10 March) and tweeting at the same time added to the thrills and spills, even if it meant missing a few crucial moments. (Even J.K. Rowling was tweeting. Gosh! Scotland lost abysmally, btw.) And it can throw up the odd language curiosity. One such was ‘Scotland are their own worse enemy’.

Yay! Another eggcorn spotted in the wild. This one is not in the ‘famed’ (how I loathe, detest and revile that word, which I only put in so that I could say quite how much…) eggcorn database, so there was no illumination to be found there as I wondered how frequent it might be.

It also piqued my curiosity in other ways.

Is the eggcorn on the increase?
How old is the eggcorn?
How did the eggcorn come about?
Where does the original phrase come from?
Is there a similar idiom in other European languages? and…
My example has plural concord (Scotland are their own worse enemy) but enemy is singular. So, how often do people say ‘enemies’ in such cases?

How frequent is the eggcorn?

That, I thought, is going to depend on where you look, surely?

As it turns out, it does, but the differences are not huge. Three different corpora I consulted give figures ranging from just under 2 per cent to 3.63 per cent of all occurrences of both forms.

A Google for “own worse enemy” in quotation marks scores 32,700 against “own worst enemy” at 2,590,000, but I suspect that doesn’t prove anything very much.

Is it on the increase?

I couldn’t tell you. When I entered the search string ‘own worse enemy_INF’ in Google Ngrams, it plotted a seemingly vertiginous rise from the 1980s onwards. But the numbers are so small they don’t tell you very much. If you enter both strings], i.e. …worse… and …worst…, you can see a much gentler rise for …worst…, going back to the nineteenth century.

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How old is the eggcorn?

Coming across any eggcorn, one might be tempted to tut-tut, shake one’s head, and condemn modern illiteracy. If you are so tempted, refrain. Like many other eggcorns and ‘mistakes’, …own worse enemy has a venerable history—at least as far as Ngrams goes—1881 being its premiere there.

‘It is not too much to say that the man who has any interest in fruit production or selling in this State, and yet places obstructions in the way of the execution of laws intended to foster that industry, is his own worse enemy, and a blind leader of the blind.’ This seems to have to do with a crisis in the horticultural industry of aphis on pear and apple trees, i.e. probably greenfly and blackfly.

How did/does it come about?

From a meaning point of view, it baffles me. But I’m probably too close to it to see the wood for the trees. I mean, everyone can use the superlative—man’s best friend, I am the greatest, etc. If you use the comparative, as here, what’s the comparison? I’m probably overthinking, though, because there’s another explanation, which is  phonetic, and it seems quite simple. It’s yet another case of final t-/d-deletion, the same linguistic brand that is proud to bring you it’s a doggy-dog world, midrift, coal-hearted and cold slaw. Knock off the final -t of own worst enemy, and you have…

And I’m own worst enemy because I put off blogging, and then weeks go by I don’t post anything.

lactose intolerant, lack toast (and) intolerant, lack toast and tolerant: eggcorns (4)

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Continuing my intrepid expedition into the fabled Kingdom of Eggcornia (“Here bee dragoons”), in this blog I’ll look at one more from the first ten of the list I mentioned originally. (The full list is at the bottom of this blog.) It is lack toast intolerant, and variants.

I’ll use the notation that I used and explained in an earlier blog.

lack toast intolerant, lack toast and tolerant and even lack toast and tall or rent, lack toast and toddler ant, etc. (lactose intolerant)

9.1.1 (In eggcorn database?)  Y;

9.1.2 (If in, date of first citation) 2004;

9.1.3 Typology possible t-insertion, at least for lack toast intolerant; in other words, the reverse of final d/t deletion, the phenomenon that explains explains e.g. dog-eat-dog becoming doggy-dog

9.2 (GloWbE figs.) n/a;

9.3 (Earliest Ngrams citation) n/a;

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9.4.1 (History and explanation) I think this one is on the Barbary shores of the fabled land of Eggcornia. Or rather, it is more spoken about than spoken. Many of the Google hits for it are metalinguistic: people are slagging it off as a mistake.

However, it’s been around for quite a while: this site refers to its being mentioned in 1997, and Susie Dent mentioned it in her Language Report for 2006. And this Youtube link is an example, as is one of my images.

Being lactose intolerant has to do with milk products. Someone who had never heard the phrase before might assume there was a t missing, insert it, and come up with lack toast intolerant. But it doesn’t at first sight make a great deal of sense.

But then there is the “reshaping” lack toast and tolerant, which, actually makes more sense and might shed some light on lack toast intolerant. It makes more sense because, if I don’t know what the lactose in lactose intolerant is about, my thought processes might go something like this:

From context, it’s about food allergies;
Oh, yeah, some people are allergic to wheat products;
Toast’s got wheat in it, right?
So, what they’re saying is, they’re intolerant because they can’t eat toast;
Sure, I dig. Who wouldn’t be a bit grumpy if you can’t even eat toast?
And then, with the reformulation to lack toast and tolerant, the meaning is that the person so described, being wrongly supposed to be allergic to wheat, is now tolerant because they have not got toast, which contains it.

Far-fetched? Possibly. I’ll let you decide. I came up with this explanation, before discovering that someone else humorously suggested something along the same lines (see below).

The alternative, of course, and equally, or more likely, is that whoever uses the eggcorn understands exactly what the referent is, but has just never thought about analysing the individual parts of the phrase.

9.4.2 (Other observations) FWIW, Google searches using quotation marks produce these figures:

“lack toast intolerant” 39,600

“lack toast and tolerant” 8,240

“lack toast and intolerant” 327

In The Ants are My Friends (2007), Martin Toseland jokes about the last one: “If you wake up in a bad mood, don’t get breakfast soon enough and are generally a complete pain, you can be described as ‘lack toast and intolerant’;…”

To be pacific (instead of to be specific)
An escape goat (instead of a scapegoat)
Damp squid (instead of damp squib)
Nipped it in the butt (instead of nipped in the bud)
On tender hooks (instead of on tenterhooks)
Cold slaw (instead of coleslaw)
A doggie-dog world (instead of dog-eat-dog world)
Circus-sized (instead of circumcised)
Lack toast and tolerant (instead of lactose intolerant)
Got off scotch free (instead of got off scot-free)
To all intensive purposes (instead of to all intents and purposes)
Boo to a ghost (instead of boo to a goose)
Card shark (instead of card sharp)
Butt naked (instead of buck naked)
Hunger pains (instead of hunger pangs)
Tongue and cheek (instead of tongue-in-cheek)
It’s a mute point (instead of moot point)
Pass mustard (instead of pass muster)
Just deserves (instead of just deserts)
Foe par (instead of faux pas)
Social leopard (instead of social leper)
Biting my time (instead of biding my time)
Curled up in the feeble position (instead of curled up in the foetal position)
Curve your enthusiasm (instead of curb your enthusiasm)
Heimlich remover (instead of Heimlich manoeuvre)
Ex-patriot (instead of expatriate)
Extract revenge (instead of exact revenge)
Self -depreciating (instead of self-deprecating)
As dust fell (instead of as dusk fell)
Last stitch effort (instead of last ditch effort)

 

 

 

 

Blog-gate: what happens when your WordPress site is suspended?

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I was totally flabbergasted and bemused.

Apologies

Gentle reader, I’m sorry if you were notified about a new blog post but then couldn’t read the post because this blog was temporarily down. So, I thought I’d explain in my usual OTT style, in case you were wondering what was going on and whether I’d been arrested and locked up. Or, at the very least, I’d been bad-mouthing someone, or gone off on a rant about something and been censored.

On Wednesday my blog was suspended for no apparent reason.

What I learned

It’s not fatal.
If you query such a suspension as a mistake, WordPress responds very rapidly and appropriately. (And considering my site is free, that’s pretty impressive on their part.)
Back up you your blog after every single new blog post (with WordPress it’s so easy it’s like ‘stealing candy from a baby’).
Finalise the content, and save it somewhere else, for the record, before posting. (Till now, I drafted all blogs in Word first, and then edited them online. Time-consuming, and other people probably don’t, but it’s the way I liked to work. From now on, I’ll make sure the Word version is the final one, and then just copy and paste.)

What happened?

On Wednesday 25 Jan. I posted a new (revamped) blog about ‘on tender/tenterhooks’. As I always do, I publicised it on Twitter, with a link to the blog. I’m glad I did, because a tweep alerted me to this notice that now appeared when he tried to follow the link:

This blog has been archived or suspended in accordance with our Terms of Service. For more information and to contact us please read this support document.

How did I react?

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That sounded pretty drastic to me; a visit to my site did nothing to reassure me.

All I was able to see was a kind of disembowelled, disembodied ghost of a dashboard with only a couple of options. No blog post of any kind. Things just seemed to be getting worse and worse. Glug!

Where had all those tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of words posted over the last six or seven years gone?

How dare they snaffle and then annihilate my intellectual property!

How am I going to start again from scratch?

What about those thousands of visits I get very month? How can I build those up again on a new site?

Fortunately, however, and despite my mounting irritation and anxiety, that wraith-like d’board still allowed me to export my content, which I promptly did.

If you’re enjoying this blog, and finding it useful or informative, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Sign up and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and whatever language point floats my boat on any given day according to my mood swings. Enjoy!

Reasons for which I surmised it was suspended

Once I got over the initial puzzlement and shock, I asked myself what Terms of Service I could possibly have infringed. The User Guidelines page mentions all the things you’d expect: basically, no hate speech/porn/nicking other people’s stuff/advertising/infringement of copyright.

My brain went into a paroxysm of mini-paranoia.

Someone’s got it in for me, and has maliciously reported me.
My blog’s been hacked.
Oh dear, I’ve used an image that is copyright, and the copyright lawyers have got it in for me.
The OED have complained, because I quote profusely from it, and have got it in for me.
I’ve used ‘naughty’ words (such as ‘toilet’), and somehow this has been picked up by a naughty-word-cleansing algorithm, which also has it in for me. (Better half was adamant it was my title ‘toilet talk’ that had caused it.)
I included a sarcastic mention of the SNP in a blog, and they’ve got it in for me.

And so on and so forth.

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My head is going to explode.

At the back of my mind I thought: ‘Shurely, this is shome ridiculoush mishtake?’ At the same time, I was incensed because the notification did not mention a specific fault or infringement.

I felt myself plummeting into a literally (?) Kafkaesque nightmare world of being tried by an invisible judge for a nameless crime. (The ToS page said something along the lines of ‘The final decision is ours’.)

Why had it been suspended?

Fortunately, the ghost dashboard also allows you to send a message if you think your blog has been suspended in error.

I sent such a message, explaining that my blog is purely about ‘language’, and wondered how many days or weeks it would take to hear back (if I ever did).

Well, ‘my relief was palpable’ (what a strong collocation that is, isn’t it?) when, within the space of a couple of hours a Community Guardian got back to say:

Your site was mistakenly flagged by our automated anti-spam controls. We have reviewed your site and have removed the suspension notice.

They also apologised for the error and any inconvenience.

I’m impressed, actually, by the speed of response.

So there you have it. The culprit was an automated routine, not a person.

So, all’s well that ends well, but the answer raised another question: what in my site fell foul of the automated routine? And, might it happen again? Well, at least I know what to do now.

I asked if any specific words might have caused it, and they told me that doesn’t happen.

In any case, I’m thankful to WordPress for such a quick response. And I’m thankful that I don’t have to start from scratch. Phew, and double-phew! Everything is luxe, calme et volupté once again.

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‘Luxe, calme et volupté’, Matisse, 1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Title taken from Baudelaire’s poem L’invitation au voyage, from Les fleurs du mal.

On tenterhooks or on tenderhooks? Eggcorns (3)

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The chap on the left is attaching the cloth to a tenterhook, to keep the cloth nice and taut on its ‘tenter’ (frame).

If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful or interesting, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Sign up and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and whatever language point floats my boat on any given day according to my mood swings. Enjoy!

I’m on a role [;-)] with this eggcorn thang, so here’s a revamp of one I made earlier, to tied you over until the next in-death one I have time to pen.1

To be on tenterhooks: What does it mean?

You’ll probably have your own image. [You can add it mentally here…]

For me, it is to have that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling, being totally wrought up because you don’t know how something important is going to turn out, whether some news will be as bad as you feared, be it exam results, a job application, a medical test:

“Britain’s farmers have been on tenterhooks since a vet found lesions–possible signs of foot and mouth disease–in the mouths of two sheep at the farm on Tuesday.”

Where does it come from?

Why tenterhooks? Most people absorb the phrase as a whole (or Gestalt, if we want to be pretentious): they grasp the meaning without analysing its constituent parts. Others grasp the meaning but change the form to tenDerhooks. That change is understandable, because who on earth knows what a tenterhook is? And if something is tender, it’s delicate and susceptible to harm or damage, and so, if I’m on tenderhooks–you get my drift when it comes to explaining the logic of this eggcorn.

Not to mention that, soundwise, it’s possibly another example of the t-flapping which/that accounts for several other eggcorns, such as trite and true, financial heartship and cuddlefish.

Well, it’s all to do with tenters—who are not hippy-dippy people who have anything to do with tents or camping. In fact, tenters are not people at all. (There is a word tenter meaning someone who lives in a tent, but that’s a different word.)

The kind of tenter we’re interested in is, according to the OED, “a wooden framework on which cloth is stretched after being milled, so that it may set or dry evenly and without shrinking”.

The OED also points out that tenters once stood in the open air in tenter-fields or grounds, and were a prominent feature in cloth-manufacturing districts. In other words, the original image is one of being very “tense”, in the sense of being stretched very tight, as can be clearly seen in the early quotation, from Cranmer, mentioned later on.

And in some antique panoramas of cities before or during industrialization the surrounding fields are filled with white waves of cloth suspended on tenters.

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In the image here of Leeds in the 18th century (undated, but first quarter to first half, I guess, though I’m no costume expert) rows of tenters in some of the fields can just about be made out.

The origin of the word tenter, again according to the OED, is not certain, but may have to do with the Latin for stretching (tendĕre) or with the French for dye (teint).

And tenterhooks are?

As the OED puts it: “one of the hooks or bent nails set in a close row along the upper and lower bar of a tenter, by which the edges of the cloth are firmly held; a hooked or right-angled nail or spike; dial. a metal hook upon which anything is hung”.

How old is the word?

Tenters is first recorded in its literal sense from the 1300s (“Whon þe Iewes hedden þus nayled Criston þe cros as men doþ cloþ on a tey[n]tur”, Modern English: “When the Jews had thus nailed Christ on the cross as men doth cloth on a tenter“), while the last OED citation of the literal meaning is from a dialect dictionary of 1889. Note the meaning drift.

Tenter-hooks, strong iron hooks put in ceilings and..joists.., on which bacon and other such things are hung. Glossary of Words from Manley & Corringham, Lincs. (ed. 2), E. Peacock.

Tenterhooks makes its first OED appearance in the form tentourhokes in a citation from the 1480 wardrobe accounts of King Edward IV’s daughter and Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York. She apparently needed 200.

Another sartorial context (1579) is provided by the Office of the revels of Queen Elizabeth I. You could buy a lot of them very cheap (by today’s standards): “Tainter Hookes at viiid the c.” (i.e. at eight pence the 100).

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How old is the metaphor?

Very. Tenters was used in several phrases such as to put or stretch on the tenters in the 16th century. The next two quotations suggest by their visual immediacy how much tenters must have been part of everyday life. From the author of that jewel of our language The Book of Common Prayer, and Protestant martyr, Thomas Cranmer (1551): “But the Papistes haue set Christes wordes vppon the tenters and stretched them owt so farre, that they make his wordes to signyfy as pleaseth them, not as he ment”, (not a sentiment calculated to endear him to Queen Mary).

And in this simile by the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker (1602): “O Night, that…like a cloth of cloudes dost stretch thy limbes; Vpon the windy Tenters of the Ayre“.

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Disraeli père, looking very intellectual and thoughtful.

Tenterhooks was used throughout the 16th and 17th centuries and beyond in various metaphors suggesting something causing suffering, and also the idea of stretching something beyond its proper bounds, as in this Isaac Disraeli (the Prime Minister’s dad) quote: “Honest men…sometimes strain truth on the tenter-hooks of fiction” (or, as we’d say nowadays, “are economical with the truth” or even use “alternative facts”).

However, according to the OED, the phrase to be on (the) tenterhooks meaning “to be in suspense” that has since become fossilized is first recorded only as late as 1748 in Smollett, and in its canonical form not until 1812, in the diary of soldier and diplomat Sir Robert Thomas Wilson: “Until I reach the imperial headquarters I shall be on tenter-hooks“.

Byron used the spelling “tender” – or did he?
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Aren’t I just fabulous? You can dress me up in this ridiculous, semi-oriental drag that no Englishman (or half-Scot, which I am) would be seen dead in and I still look like a lord. That’s breeding for you.

The line from Don Juan runs as follows:

[It] keeps the atrocious reader in suspense; The surest way for ladies and for books To bait their tender or their tenter-hooks.

Does tender here go with hooks? Or is it used in the meaning of “offering”?

How frequent is the eggcorn version?

To be on tenderhooks is relatively well known among eggcornisti, and seems to me to be part of the “eggcorn canon”. But, actually, how frequent is it? I’ve looked at various sources, such as the Oxford English Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American, of Historical American, and Google books (US), which all suggest that it isn’t at all frequent, at least in written sources. For instance, in the GloWbE (the Corpus of Global Web-Based English) it occurs 3 times against 241 for the correct version. Similarly in Google US books (155 billion words) the figures are 57 to 8,238.

Dictionaries don’t accept the eggcorn, and judging by relative frequency are unlikely to for a long time. I don’t think I’ll be on tenterhooks waiting to see if they do.

1 In case you think I’m being more than usually silly, tie over, indeath research and to be on a role are all genuine eggcorns. I didn’t stumble across them; I asked myself if they would exist in the wild, googled them, and, sure enough, they do. Almost any idiomatic phrase you care to think of will probably have an eggcorn version. Try it for yourself.

Eggcorns (2). Let’s nip this in the butt!

 

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It’s a dog-meet-dog world…

In the previous blog on this topic, I attempted to differentiate eggcorns from other verbal “slips”, and suggested that they illustrate how people try to make sense of idioms they hear that are both unfamiliar and seemingly nonsensical.

I also suggested that the difference between eggcorns and the originals that inspired them could often be reduced to a single sound. In other words, I want to hone in [sic] on the fact that not only are eggcorns semantically motivated and “logical”; they also often make sense from a sound point of view. They are not, as nothing in language is, random in the sense of being arbitrary, and are susceptible of rational explanation.

For instance, not only does damp squid make sense meaningwise; it replaces the voiced plosive /d/ with another one, /b/, rather than, say, replacing it with squit. which ends with a voiceless plosive, but could equally convey the meaning of dampness and unpleasantness.

The section on “typology” in the list that follows, hopefully, illustrates ways in which such modifications are phonetically non-random.

Of course, eggcorns can be highly amusing if they generate a surreal image. But the amusement they provide should be disinterested and kind-hearted; it should not be of the rebarbative “I despise you when you use poor grammar” school.

I also suggested that the survey I talked about in the earlier blog could not seriously be considered “research”. Which raises the question: where is evidence for eggcorns to be found?

Language corpora of different kinds are the obvious answer. There is also the mother of all eggcorn collections here, the eggcorn database set up by asphyxianados years ago. (I made that one up, in case you’re wondering, but a google does get some hits.)

That said, eggcorns are largely oral phenomena, and therefore looking in written sources for them might be akin to looking for God in a brewery. Nevertheless, written collections of one kind or another do shed some light. What follows is a detaiedl analysis of the first four in the original list (there’ll be further blogs on others). Each one is analysed according to the following criteria:

1.1 In eggcorn database? Y/N

1.2 If Yes, year of first citation mentioned in that database?

1.3 Typology

1.2 Frequency of original in the vast database GloWbE1 vs the eggcorn version

1.3 If in Google Ngrams, earliest relevant example

1.4.1 History & explanation (if applicable)

1.4.2 Other observations

(Numbering starts with the number of the entry in the list, and then continues with the numbers of the four categories and subcategories mentioned above.

to be pacific ( to be specific )

1.1-1.1.2 (Eggcorn database & Year) N;

1.1.3 (Typology) initial consonant phoneme drop;

1.2 (In GloWbE?) N;

1.3 (Google) no Googles, other than metalinguistic

1.4.2 This one puzzles me. The use of “pacifically” for “specifically” is well attested; so much so, in fact, that is practically a meme. I suspect that whoever put the list together found this somewhere and regurgitated it.

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escape goat ( scapegoat )

2.1.1 (In eggcorn database?) Y;

2.1.2 (If in, date of first citation) undated;

2.1.3 (Typology) initial vowel phoneme addition;

2.2 (GloWbE figs.) 3,094/63 escape goat; escapegoat 5;

2.3. (Earliest Ngrams citation) As can be seen on this link, 1853, it seems. That entry is from a French-English dictionary. Earlier quotations seem to be not germane to this discussion.

2.4.1 (History & explanation) The “scape” in scapegoat is escape with its first vowel chopped off. In Google Ngrams, some of its occurrences are metalinguistic, i.e. in discussion of how it came to be.

As Ben Zimmer pointed out in the eggcorn database: Note by Ben Zimmer, Nov. 15, 2010: “As explained by Merrill Perlman in ‘Passing the Blame’ (CJR Language Corner, 11/15/10), the change of scapegoat to escape goat simply brings it into line with its etymological origins:

‘The concept of the “scapegoat” is in the Bible, in Leviticus, as part of the ritual of atonement. The word “scape-goat” itself, though, did not appear until 1530, according to The Oxford English Dictionary: “In the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev. xvi), that one of two goats that was chosen by lot to be sent alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having been symbolically laid upon it, while the other was appointed to be sacrificed.” That first goat escaped death, though it was loaded with sin. Since “scape” was merely a spelling variation of “escape,” it was, literally, an “escape goat.” Maybe “escaped goat” would be more grammatically correct, but no matter.”’

It is also worth mentioning the further eggcorn scrapegoat.

 

damp squid ( damp squib )

3.1.1 (In eggcorn database?) Y;

3.1.2 (If in, date of first citation) 2005;

3.1.3 (Typology) Final consonant phoneme swap (voiced plosives);

3.2 (GloWbE figs.) 352/20;

3.3 (Earliest Ngrams citation) 1898 “By the time she returns to her ‘muttons’ all interest in the entertainment has evaporated, and the denouement fizzles out like a damp squid.” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, Volume 68;

3.4.1 A squib is a type of firework, and a damp one doesn’t go off, and is therefore disappointing. The OED first records the idiom from as “recently” as 1846.

3.4.2 What can I say? This was the title my editor chose for my parvum opus. The idiom, in either form, seems to be far less known in the US than in the UK. In the earlier blog, I mentioned Jeanette Winterson’s remark that she grew up believing it was damp squid. Here it is again, for interest:

“I laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a ‘damp squid’, which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?”

 

4. nipped it in the butt (nipped in the bud)

4.1.1 (In eggcorn database?) Y;

4.1.2 (If in, date of first citation) 2002;

4.1.3 (Typology) t/d-deletion2;

4.2 (GloWbE figs.) 462/2;

4.3 (Earliest Ngrams citation) n/a;

4.4.1 The original, nip in the bud, is a horticultural metaphor. First recorded in its current form in 1607, but known in a variant from 1590: F. Beaumont Woman Hater iii. i. sig. D4v   Yet I can frowne and nip a passion Euen in the bud.

4.4.2 I couldn’t track this down in Ngrams, which is perhaps not surprising, given its mere two occurrences in GloWbE. If you google “nip in the butt” millions of ostensible hits show up. I scanned the first two screens of hits, and all, bar one, were discussions of the misuse of one for t’other, or knowing puns.

The single exception, from a blogger who had grown up believing “in the butt” to be the correct version, shows how adept people are at rationalizing their own usage: “I thought the saying was more of a scare tactic. Basically if you don’t cut out the behavior that you are doing you will get nipped (bit, pinched, etc) in the butt. This was pretty powerful for me growing up.”

The confusion with butt is not only “logical”, as illustrated by the blogger’s comment above; it is also motivated by conflicting meanings of nip. For the in the butt version, people assign the meaning “bite, peck” etc. to the verb, as in the cartoon below.  However, the idiom derives from a different, and nowadays rarer meaning, which the OED classifies as sense 13 a: “Originally: to check or destroy the growth of (a plant), as by the physical removal of a bud or the like, or through the action of cold or frost. Later: to arrest or prevent the growth or development of (anything).”

Additionally, I would have thought that the existence of other frequent idioms with butt (pain in the butt, kick in the butt, etc.) must play a part.

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1 GloWbE stands for “The Global Corpus of Web-based English, a corpus containing over 1.9 billion words of text from 20 countries where English is used.

2 t/d-deletion, discussed here, explains why e.g. skimmed milk might become skim milk, and why some estate agents wax lyrical if a house for sale “boasts” stain glass windows. Try saying end game very quickly. Now, is there a /d/ there? Be honest.

Eggcorns. Grit to my mill! (1)

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On 8 December 2017, some British newspapers picked up a story about “eggcorns”. The Independent headed it “The 30 most misused phrases in the English language”.

According to the Indy, a British opticians and hearing care company “surveyed 2,000 British adults and found that 35 per cent of them used eggcorns without even realising they were saying something incorrectly”.

As its introduction, the article (drawn, I suspect from experience, more or less verbatim from the company’s press release) stated, “New research has revealed the 30 most commonly misused phrases in the UK. Known as eggcorns, the bizarre phrases often carry entirely different – and often hilariously nonsensical – meanings.” (The full list is at the end of this blog.)

Clearly, this is not serious “research”. For starters, what particular “English language” was being sampled? For example, were people recorded over a period of days, weeks, or months, and were the recordings then transcribed and analysed? Somehow, I think not. And a score of other questions could be asked.

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Let’s leave methodology aside, though, and hone in [sic] on the purported “definition” of eggcorns: “bizarre phrases [that] often carry entirely different – and often hilariously nonsensical – meanings”.

No, sirree. eggcorns are quite the opposite of “nonsensical”: they are the hearers’ attempt to make sense of phrases that strike them as nonsensical by making them meaningful – at least for those hearers.

I’ve pontificated previously about eggcorns in general here, and about specific ones here and here. But, at the risk of repetition, here’s the OED definition again:

“An alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word.”

Incidentally, I’d highlight “reinterpretation” here, rather then “mishearing”: the sound stream reaching my ear may be the real McCoy, but my brain has to interpret it somehow by turning an “unknown unknown” into a sort of “known unknown”, if you catch my drift, and the result is an eggcorn.

The term was coined in 2003 by the eminent linguist Professor Geoff Pullum1, and derives from a “reinterpretation” of the “word” acorn2.

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Oh, so it’s just a fancypants, linguists’ term for malapropism, right?

No. That’s why it was needed.

Malapropism involves “The mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with an amusing effect.” President Bush was famous for them, e.g. “We’ll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers.”—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000.

OK. So, it’s like folk etymology, then?

(You mean “folk etymology” in the meaning of “the transformation of one word or lexeme into another which then becomes institutionalized”, such as crayfish from Middle English, crevice, crevisse, with the –ice, –isse element reinterpreted as “fish”; or chaise lounge [recognised in some dictionaries] from chaise longue?)

No, because, in theory at any rate, eggcorns are the productions of one speaker, rather than of a speech community.

So, what defines an eggcorn?

Well, apart from being the production of one speaker – and such are going to be very hard to find written evidence for, aren’t they? – they often tend to differ from the original by a single sound, occasionally two. An example of that is damp squid for damp squib3. Alternatively, actually, they sound exactly the same as the original, but their existence only emerges when someone writes them down, as in ex-patriot for expatriate.

What’s more, many idioms that are eggcornized contain a word that rarely, or even never, occurs outside the idiom. What exactly is “grist“, anyway, and what is it doing in my mill? And what is a “squib“?

What evidence is there for the claim made?

I believe that any “research” mentioned in the article would be along these lines: the market research company surveying people created a list of thirty phrases with their original and eggcorn versions, and then asked their sample to say which was correct. If that is the case (and I’ll try to find out), the statement “35% of them used eggcorns” needs to be deconstructed. It could, after all, merely mean that 35 per cent of the sample got 1 phrase wrong, out of 30. More probably, however, there will have been a range: i.e. some answered 1, some 2, some 3, etc. (though none will have answered 30).

It would be interesting to know which were the most commonly misused, but that is too much to hope for.

More importantly, though, if the company created the list, it must have drawn on existing sources. That, as a bit of an eggcorn groupie and having myself done PR campaigns based on eggcorns, is what I suspect from the list, and from the dubious status of at least a couple of entries on it (“to be pacific”? “circus-sized”?)

For the moment, I’m going to analyse and comment on the first 12  in the list. But that’s material for another blog. Otherwise, this one will be too long.

To be pacific (instead of to be specific)
An escape goat (instead of a scapegoat)
Damp squid (instead of damp squib)
Nipped it in the butt (instead of nipped in the bud)
On tender hooks (instead of on tenterhooks)
Cold slaw (instead of coleslaw)
A doggie-dog world (instead of dog-eat-dog world)
Circus-sized (instead of circumcised)
Lack toast and tolerant (instead of lactose intolerant)
Got off scotch free (instead of got off scot-free)
To all intensive purposes (instead of to all intents and purposes)
Boo to a ghost (instead of boo to a goose)
Card shark (instead of card sharp)
Butt naked (instead of buck naked)
Hunger pains (instead of hunger pangs)
Tongue and cheek (instead of tongue-in-cheek)
It’s a mute point (instead of moot point)
Pass mustard (instead of pass muster)
Just deserves (instead of just deserts)
Foe par (instead of faux pas)
Social leopard (instead of social leper)
Biting my time (instead of biding my time)
Curled up in the feeble position (instead of curled up in the foetal position)
Curve your enthusiasm (instead of curb your enthusiasm)
Heimlich remover (instead of Heimlich manoeuvre)
Ex-patriot (instead of expatriate)
Extract revenge (instead of exact revenge)
Self -depreciating (instead of self-deprecating)
As dust fell (instead of as dusk fell)
Last stitch effort (instead of last ditch effort)

1 The link to the Language Log post discussing the issue is here.

2 As the OED shows, the person who pronounced acorn as “eggcorn” and thus inspired the linguistic term was not alone, and not the first.

1844   S. G. McMahan Let. 16 June in A. L. Hurtado John Sutter (2006) 130   I hope you are as harty as you ust to be and that you have plenty of egg corn [acorn] bread which I cann not get her[e] and I hope to help you eat some of it soon.

1983   Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa) 24 Apr. 23 (caption)    Paper sacks held a variety of ‘recyclable’ goods including ladies’ shoes, pine cones, walnuts, used toys and, according to their sign, eggcorns (acorns).

If you say the word acorn in a sort of Texan drawl, you might hear how it could become eggcorn. Or, as Mark Liebermann puts it: “Note, by the way, that the author of this mis-hearing may be a speaker of the dialect in which ‘beg’ has the same vowel as the first syllable of ‘bagel’. For these folks, ‘egg corn’ and ‘acorn’ are really homonyms, if the first is not spoken so as to artificially separate the words.”

3 Jeanette Winterson is quoted as follows. [image error]Her explanation shows how very much eggcorns do make sense: “I laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a ‘damp squid’, which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?”

 

U and non-U language – napkins and serviettes

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Fountain 1917, replica 1964 Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968 Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1999

In response to my toilet talk number one (geddit!?!) post, one of my most assiduousest followers (Here’s to you, M******t!) asked when it became de rigueur in British polite society not to refer to the kasi as a toilet.  In other words, when toilet became what is/was known as non-U. It’s a long story, so please bear with…

For the benefit of my transatlantic reader(s) and the young … toilet falls– or fell – into the category of words that the English/British upper classes would supposedly never use, a group of words classified as ‘non-U’ [i.e. non-upper-class].

Such distinctions must seem entirely baffling to those drinking nectar and ambrosia in the land of the free. Let’s explain. At one time, not that long ago, in England/Britain, which synonym you chose of a pair immediately identified the rung you occupied on the social ladder.

Referring to ‘a square piece of cloth or paper used at a meal to wipe the fingers or lips’ as a serviette meant you were a lower-ordersy sort of cove, and to be confined instantly to social outer darkness, while calling the same item a napkin meant either you really were posh or else had skilfully trained yourself to sound it.

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Napkins looking like an unlikely ancient observatory.

Similarly, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all’ is not a sentiment a well-born British Evil Queen would have expressed, since looking glass, scansion notwithstanding, was the snob-approved synonym.1

Where did the U/non-U distinction come from?

While the distinctions themselves  must clearly predate any description of them, it was a linguist who coined the terms and then an aristo who brought them to somewhat clamorous public attention—the first in 1954, the second, the following year.

That linguist was Professor Alan S. C. Ross, then Professor of Linguistics at Birmingham (UK) University, and the aristo was Nancy Mitford, one of the almost legendary Mitford sisters.

An obscure Finnish academic journal, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen2 (‘The Bulletin of the Neo-Philological Society of Helsinki, Vol. 55. No. 1, 1954, pp. 20-56, available at JSTOR and also here) published an article by Ross entitled Linguistic Class Indicators in Present-Day English. Not a title, or indeed a source, you might think, to set the Thames on fire. But in 1954, in a British (specifically English) context, ‘class’, and in particular class-defined language, was a seriously hot-button topic.

Ross included in his article a list of word/phrase pairs, such as writing paper (U) and notepaper (non-U), How do you do? (U in reply to How do you do?, while Pleased to meet you would be utterly non-U), and so forth.

While toilet is not listed in its own right, toilet paper is listed as non-U compared to lavatory paper (U), implying therefore that lavatory was the ‘polaite’ word for the bog.

One of Ross’s sources was Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love. The professor consulted la Mitford about her language in that book, but she decided to have a jolly jape about the whole thing, which resulted in her rejoinder-as-essay titled The English Aristocracy for the left-leaning-intello-snob magazine Encounter.

Here’s a telling contrast. The Prof started his article thus:

‘Today, in 1956, the English class system is essentially tripartite—there exist an upper, a middle, and a lower class. It is solely by its language that the upper class is marked off from the others.’

If one manages to pass over the wording ‘a lower class’ without choking on a pheasant bone, and then not stumble on the Anglocentric ‘English’, the Prof’s thesis was that members of the upper class had only language to distinguish them from—and, let’s admit it, elevate them above—(the) hoi polloi3. For, as Ross pontificated, they were ‘not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class’.

At this distance, it seems impossible to say how in earnest the Prof was; to me, some of his article reads like someone gloriously extracting the Michael at the expense of the Finns and everyone else. That impression is only reinforced by the knowledge that Nancy Mitford considered him U. However, a Wikipedia list of his publications shows a learned philologist, so one has to take what he wrote at face value.

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Nancy in a rather fabulous wedding dress

Which is what la Mitford did, when she began her riposte with…

‘The English aristocracy may seem to be on the verge of decadence, but it is the only real aristocracy left in the world today’.

The touchpaper of linguistic insecurity had been lit, and it blazed [What is ‘it’? The touchpaper or linguistic insecurity? Please review this rather far-fetched phrase. Ed.] fiercely for at least a couple of years, leading to the publication in 1956 of the Prof’s (simplified and condensed) paper, la Mitford’s rejoinder, and contributions from that ur-snob Evelyn Waugh, among others, in a slender volume called Noblesse Oblige. To cash in on the furore that had been sparked off, the title was changed to ‘U and non-U’ with the subtitle ‘An essay in sociological linguistics’. The embers of the issue burned on for years.

Nowadays, as British English arguably4 morphs into a Calibanish second cousin of American (when visiting Buck House as a member of the public a few years back, a young whippersnapper asked us ‘to form a line’ – I ask you! I remonstrated, and reminded him that in this country we speak of queues, but that laddie was not for learning. And now it is obligatory if you are under 120, to talk of ‘shtructures’ and ‘orcheshstras’ and ‘shtreets’ – need I go on?) it takes an effort of the imagination to think how different things were in the constipated Britain – well, England, actually – of the mid-1950s.

The Second World War had supposedly effaced the rigid pre-war class distinctions and Labour had swept to power (excuse the cliché) in 1945. The NHS had been created, fair enough, but underneath nothing much had changed, and a Conservative government had been returned to power in 1951.

Toffs were still toffs, the working classes generally knew their place and were definitely not upwardly mobile; to wear a hat of some kind outside the house was a virtual obligation for men as well as women; Britain still clung to an Empire on which the sun was rapidly setting; and possibly a third of the British population believed that the Queen had been appointed by God. [image error]

At home my mother drank a vile coffee-substitute confection called Camp, a hangover I suspect from her time as a Frontier Corps wife in the dying days of the Raj; olive oil came in tiny phials bought at great expense from the chemist to loosen childish ear wax; on winter outings my brother and I were cocooned like mini-me Jack Hawkinses in military-style dufflecoats whose toggles constantly frustrated childish hands, and, when the cold really bit, we were topped off with balaclava helmets; our father schooled us laboriously and aspirationally in how to say ‘How do you do!’ and shake hands with adults we were introduced to; and everyone leapt to attention when the national anthem was played in cinemas at the start of the programme.

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In such a world, to get on in most walks of like, you had to enounce your thoughts in an RP (Received Pronunciation) accent (but not a refained and therefore put-on one). Social climbers who had a gift for mimicry could train themselves to talk like the clipped-most BBC announcer or the orotund-most Shakespearean actor. But such social tightrope-walking was perilous. Like the German spies in Holland who, anecdotally, were unmasked [Can you be ‘anecdotally unmasked’? Ed.] by not being able to pronounce Scheveningen5 like a true Netherlander, one lexical slip could send your social ambitions straight down the toilet. Which is where we came in.

You might sound like a toff, but was your vocabulary U?

The next sheet of this blog will be about the phrase toilet talk and loo.

Incidentally, the first uses of lavatory to mean either room or receptacle are quite close to those for toilet (1874/1886, i.e. earlier for the room, but later for the receptacle 1894 for toilet vs 1903 for lavatory), which raises the question of when it became U in the first place, and why.

I’ve been editing far too many academic articles and monographs of late…that’s my excuse for the endnotes, anyway.

i In the Grimms’ original, the mirror is a diminutive Spieglein, which is hard to match: mirrorlet? I don’t think so. »Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand,

Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?«

so antwortete der Spiegel:

»Frau Königin, Ihr seid die Schönste im Land.«

ii It is easy to forget that German was well placed to become the universal lingua franca in the nineteenth century, above all because of its scientific and scholarly credentials. This seems to have been the case in Finland, as witnessed by the aforementioned journal, whose title is in German, as is, naturally enough, the information about it. However, Ross’s article is in English, and the one, also in English, preceding it in the journal, mentions how English was taking over in Finland in scholarly circles.

iii Pray don’t tell me that hoi means ‘the’ in Greek, and therefore ‘the’ in English is redundant. I know already  what it means. But English is not Greek, just as Hungarian is not Mandarin, nor Slovene, Punjabi, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

iv Arguably is such a wonderfully, conveniently weasel word. It would like to sound as if it means ‘there are objective arguments to support what I am about to claim’; what it really means, as here, is ‘because I say so’.

v Scheveningen is a suburb of the Hague, where, as a mid-teenager, I spent my first solo European holiday, when my father was working there. It’s a word that does not trip easily of an untutored British tongue, and my dad’s Dutch friends had hours of harmless fun trying to get me to say it properly.