this is NOT English

Here's a sign in Heidelberg. The terrible prose doesn't fill the reader with confidence that the development will be of a high quality.

If you're going to spend money on a fancy sign, why not pay someone to edit your prose?

organic or pretend organic?

Have a look at these bags of planting mix. Organic or just pretending to be organic?

My understanding of quotation marks around a noun means to be wary of the genuineness of the thing named. It implies irony in the use of the marked word.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online says:

 We also use single quotation marks to draw attention to a word. We can use quotation marks in this way when we want to question the exact meaning of the word:
I am very disappointed by his 'apology'. I don't think he means it.  

NEW 'WAR' OVER NORTH SEA FISHING PLANS

This Washington State University site on American usage discusses the same sort of thing I've noticed on the bag of planting mix:

There are many ways to go wrong with quotation marks. They are often used ironically: 

She ran around with a bunch of "intellectuals." 

The quotation marks around "intellectuals" indicate that the writer believes that these are in fact so-called intellectuals, not really intellectuals at all. The ironic use of quotation marks is very much overdone, and is usually a sign of laziness indicating that the writer has not bothered to find the precise word or expression necessary.  

Advertisers unfortunately tend to use quotation marks merely for emphasis: 

"FRESH" TOMATOES

59 CENTS A POUND 

The influence of the more common ironic usage tends to make the reader question whether these tomatoes are really fresh. Underlining, bold lettering, all caps - there are several less ambiguous ways to emphasise words than placing them between quotation marks. 

I managed to overcome my initial reaction to this strange punctuation, and bought the product to plant my nice new Jonathan apple in enriched soil.

gorgeous plates with strange grammar

I recently bought some lovely plates. They are just the right size to serve a salad and their bright decoration makes me feel cheerful. Each one has a message written on it about the uses of olives in cooking.

I wonder if the designer has English as her second language? The messages use language in an off-key way. For instance, here's what it says on the box:

'Olive oil's uses in gastronomy are immense...' 

And one of the plates has this:

'The olives can be green or black and is traditionally served...'

What a pity no one edited the language before the plates were printed. I notice that they were made in China, but they were designed in the USA. Here's the  mark on the reverse of one plate:

I enjoy oddities of language, so I'm expecting to find food served on my lovely new plates has an extra piquancy.

I've found a link to the manufacturer. I think their products are lovely, by the way.

attaboy!

Today's email from A Word A Day was attaboy! (The focus this week is on interjections, those useful little words or phrases that act as a 'filler' and have no grammatical relationship to the rest of the sentence.)

I can't recall the last time I heard anyone use this interjection, but I know it was used in my family when I was growing up. Of couse, I preferred attagirl! seeing I'm female. I suppose the current household equivalent would be the frequent use of good girl! when my dog Penny earns some praise.

I'd have thought it was a typically Australian usage, but Word A Day is an American institution, so I guess it might be a more universal phrase than I realised.

The online Macquarie thesaurus (Australian) includes attaboy in a selection of interjections synonymous with well done!

good for you, good on you; Informal: (you) (little) beauty, attaboy, attagirl, beaut, bewdy, bully, bully for …, curl the (or a) mo, good egg, good iron, good show, great, man, nice one, onya, that's the shot, your blood's worth bottling;

I've never used onya as an interjection, but I have used good onya (meaning good on you).

A Word A Day emails include a quote or two to show the usage of the daily offering, and here are the quotes for attaboy:

"The employees are not asking for a whole lot -- just an Attaboy! or an Attagirl! And news of this small gesture moves like wildfire through the ranks."
Labonita Ghosh; Five Ways to Reward the B-player in Your Team; The Economic Times (New Delhi, India); Feb 1, 2011.

"Dr. Burton refutes the notion that present-day parents have coddled and attaboyed their children."
Michael Tortorello; Mom, You're One Tough Art Critic; The New York Times; Jan 27, 2011.

So...
the first quote shows the word is used in India and the second one shows it has morphed into a verb. Verbing is one of my favorite linguistic processes. As Mark Liberman on Language Log says, '... you can pretty much verb any noun you want to verb.' There are myriad examples of nouns used as verbs, from Shakespeare's day to today, but I don't know many examples of interjections as verbs. (I'm sure linguists know lots of them, lol.)

my BeBook Neo eReader

I was browsing the site of a writer, The Raven's Eye, and noticed she has self-published one of her short stories. It was only about $2 to buy a copy, so I thought I'd be part of The Long Tail and buy it.

Of course, this led to a discussion in our household about how many copies the writer would have to sell in order to 'make a living'. In my opinion, if an author self-publishes online, as long as it's not too expensive a process, any sales are a bonus, because they not only bring in a trickle - or hopefully, a flood - of money, but they act as publicity for the writer's other work.

In this case, the story was a great read. I'd categorise it as urban fantasy, which I like, and it had a protagonist who I'd like to know more about. (Yes, I do know I could have written 'whom' in that last sentence, but I'm over that word and don't intend to write it any more.)

I bought it at Smashwords, which I hadn't previously heard about.

The other benefit of buying the story was that it made me get my BeBook Neo eReader out again. Since the initial excitement of buying it, I haven't used it much. Now that I've discovered buying short stories, I think it could get as much use as my iPod. Hmmm... and that doesn't come out of the drawer much, either. Must get on over to the iTunes store and buy some music.

I have mixed feelings about my BeBook. It's a great screen, easy on the eyes, but I don't find it easy to navigate.

Kate Burridge in Daylesford

Language change is interesting, so I considered myself lucky to be in Daylesford recently for the Words in Winter festival and able to attend a talk on this topic by Professor Kate Burridge, linguist and radio commentator.

She started by showing us the rate of change is not constant.

For centuries the norm was rapid change in spoken English. For instance, between the times of Chaucer (fourteenth century) and of Jonathan Swift (early eighteenth century) there was such a massive change that Swift's readers would have had difficulty reading Chaucer.

She read the first lines of the Prologue from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales - in the accent of the time, I might add!

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
When Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye -
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages -
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

In contrast, when she read the opening to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, we had no trouble understanding the text.

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, and eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years.

Out of interest, after typing this quote, I spell-checked it, and Word thinks it is acceptable modern grammar.

The rise of written English as the pre-eminent form is the reason behind this slowing of the rate of change. When most business and study and social interaction occurred through spoken English, people didn't mind language changing, as long as they could understand each other. But we, with almost universal literacy, are strongly influenced by the way a word is written, visualising it as we say it, and this makes us resist change.

It was a great talk and has given me lots to think about.

verbs, nouns and transition to the future in Banyule

The headline in our local paper, the Heidelberg Leader, says Community produce plan flowers. "What in the world does that mean?' was the first reaction of each family member to read it.

I think it's clever headline, because it makes you think. At first it appears to be two nouns, an adjective and a verb: Community (noun) produce(verb) plan(adjective) flowers(noun).

When it doesn't make sense, you read it again, and there it is: Community(adjective) produce(adjective) plan(noun) flowers(verb), ie a community plan to plant produce along the footpaths is about to flower.

Transition Banyule is part of a world-wide movement to engage the community in planning the future.

I'm intending to plant a fruit tree on the edge of our property so neighbors and passers-by can help themselves to the 'produce' as they pass by. On Saturday 31st July we'll get together to organise it.

an unnecessary comma?

Reading about the Duchess of York today in The Age newspaper, I had to pause to think about the meaning of one sentence:

The man who inveigled the duchess into a long, boozy dinner, the sight of $US40,000 ($A48,000) in fresh notes beside an ashtray, and a bottle of wine afterwards is Mahzer Mahmood, whose elaborate stings have trapped celebrities, royals and crooks.

It's a sentence that sets the scene clearly, and I could imagine the duchess sitting there looking longingly at the money, but I had trouble with comprehending its meaning. At first I thought perhaps a comma, following the word afterwards, would make it clearer.

But then I remembered the rule that we should not use a comma between the subject and the verb. At its simplest, the above sentence is The man is Mahzer Mahmood. So we wouldn't want a comma before is.

So I guess it's just one of those long sentences that are correct but take a moment or two to process. If I'd written it, I would have put that comma in but I think I would have been wrong.

weeding the garden and pit verbs

Recently I was thinking about the verb to weed, so I was interested to read a post today on Language Log about verbs that mean removing the thing that is named, for instance to bone a piece of meat, to gut a fish or to string a bean.

The post also refers to pitting a cherry and says this is why this type of verb is called a pit verb. I would not use the word pit to refer to the seed in a cherry. I'd use the noun pip instead, and I think this is probably standard in Australia. But if I needed a verb for the action I'd say I was going to pit the cherries.

I definitely wouldn't say I was pipping cherries.

omitting apostrophes

The Australian Government Style manual, the official arbiter of grammar and punctuation in Australian publications, says of apostrophes:

It is increasingly common for the apostrophe to be dropped from the names of other institutions where the plural reference is a human reference - for example, Geologists Conference, Plumbers and Gasfitters Union. In all such cases, the plural word is not strictly possessive; its relationship with the following word or phrase is associative or descriptive, rather like an adjective.

Now, a toilet block is not usually considered an institution. But, maybe I shouldn't always smile when I'm walking in Darebin Parklands and I see these two signs:


















I always have an image in my mind of little 'mens' and 'womens' making their way into the toilet block. I don't know why they have to be little, but that's the way my imagination processes it.

If I visualise the toilets as a meeting place, a kind of informal conference centre, and think of the words as having the understood extra word, toilet - mens toilet, womens toilet - then it sort of fits the rule I quoted at the start of this post, ie it's not a place owned by men or women, but a place where they are gathered.

But, deep down, I want to add an apostrophe.

comma splices gain credibility

I've just noticed some comma splices in such a prestigious text that I'm now doubting my own ability to spot them. It's in a book called Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her life and Work.

As the blurb says, 'Elizabeth Jolley is one of Australia's most significant and best-loved writers'. So, if she's using comma splices they must have a role to play. I noticed them most in a short story called Paper Children. Here are a couple of examples:

Even their letters were strange, they wrote in English because Lisa had never learned to speak anything else.

Lisa tried to look forward to the visit, she knew so little about her mother, an old lady now after a life of hard work as a doctor.

The use of these constructions seems to me to give a sense of intimacy, closeness to the point of view of the two characters in the story.

And, from another story, Pear Street Dance:

No one needed to read anything, the Newspper of Claremont Street told them all the news.

I guess, now that I'm looking out for comma splices, I'm going to find them all over the place...

comma splices and a frightening and thrilling Pastworld

I've just read a novel I thoroughly enjoyed. It's called Pastworld. After a while, mainly because of the age of the main characters - 17 - I realised the book was written for young people. It's published by Bloomsbury Children's Books.

The idea underlying the plot is gripping - London, in the middle of the twenty-first century, has been bought by a mega-Corporation and turned into a huge theme park where residents and visitors live according to Victorian-era laws, morality and culture. The darker side of Victorian life (and of mega-corporations!) creates a sense of evil that provides the tension.

The book's a great read and I wonder if it might one day be made into a film.

One odd thing that struck me about the writing was that the author, Ian Beck, sometimes uses comma splices.

At first I thought it was occurring only in dialogue, which seems fine to me, as it gives a sense of the individuality of a character. Here's an example from page 84. 'At least we shall travel on a steam train, you might enjoy that.'

But there are comma splices in other places too, for instance on page 88: Lucius turned to Caleb and stopped him, he held on to his arm and said almost in a whisper...

There are many more examples of this construction.

I've heard it said that the comma splice will eventually be acceptable in English. I know that I see it often in the writing of teenagers, which makes me wonder if their writing is a sign of the times to come. I like changes in English, in language generally, because to me that's a sign of life, of change and growth. But I must say that comma splices 'twang' for me when I'm reading and take me momentarily out of the world of the writer's imagination.

Anyway, here's a great gift idea for all those writers who've already moved into the brave new world of comma splicing.

When I checked out the home page of the writer, Ian Beck, I was pleasantly surprised to realise he's the author of some of the lovely picture books I've shard with young children in the past.

a good nother idea

I'm still on the trail of the new word nother. Recently my sister said, 'That'll weigh a good nother kilo, I reckon'.

Okay... now I've heard a different word than whole inserted between an and other.

So now I think maybe our brains are processing the expression as one word rather than as a phrase. Maybe it's the word another with an infix in it.

When I looked up infix in the Merriam Webster online, I was surprised to discover it can be a transitive verb or an adjective as well as a noun. However, it seems as if we don't use infixes much in English compared to other languages.

when a gerund does the job better than another noun form

I noticed a sign on the back of a van today. It said, 'Pipe and cable locating'.



My first reaction was that it should have said, 'Pipe and cable location', as I think location is the noun that best describes what I presume this company does - scan for pipes before the client excavates.

But they used a gerund, a verb form that operates as a noun.

On reflection, I think the sign is clever, in that the gerund form creates a subtle advertisement for them as an active business that will do things for you.

funny quotation marks

I've just been laughing out loud at the photos on the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks.

It's hilarious.

What a money saver it would be if someone told the sign-writers not to waste paint on those unnecessary punctuation marks.

I found this great site by following a link from Language Log.

prefixes, suffixes and infixes - and arpy darpy

When I posted about the use of bloody as a highly informal insertion into Australian English words, I didn't know this form of expression is called an infix, until Anonymous commented on the post.

Since then I've discovered that this particular infix is a FREE morpheme (smallest unit of meaning) because it can also operate as a stand-alone word - that is, it can move freely within a sentence without being part of another word.

I've been told about blooming, which can operate in the same way, but has more of a British English tone.

And, just now, I was browsing HyperTextBooks and saw a mention of damn used in the same way - fan-damn-tastic - though I must say the particular example doesn't roll off my tongue as smoothly as our Aussie expression does.

But, best of all , I suddenly remembered arp-language! When I was young I could speak it quickly and fluently, but now I have trouble even remembering how it worked. But I think it involved inserting arp - an infix! surely an infix! - before any vowel that was sounded. For instance, bottle would be barpottle and camera would be carpamarperarpa. Or maybe it would have been carpamarpra, because we pronounced it camra.

A Wikipedia entry calls this language game Arpy-Darpy and says it is spoken in New Zealand. Well, I can attest that it has been spoken in Australia, though I don't know if anyone plays with it now. We called it Arp-language.

a mysterious advertisement without a gerund

We received a strange brochure in our letterbox today. It's from Australia Post and shows pictures of various computing devices for sale.

At the top it says: Part of me staying up to date.

Uhhh?

There's a picture of a man typing at a computer. I thought maybe his hands are the part of his body staying up to date. Or maybe his brain...

And then I wondered if the word 'staying' is a gerund, and not a present participle. Perhaps it means that having items of modern technology is part of his staying up to date.

To be quite honest, I hardly ever use a possessive pronoun before a gerund these days. Grammartips, at Homestead, gives these examples of incorrect use of the gerund:

He resents you being more popular than he is.
~Most of the members paid their dues without me asking them.
~They objected to the youngest girl being given the command position.
~What do you think about him buying such an expensive car.
~We were all grateful for Jane taking on the responsibility for the party.

I'd be likely in everyday speech to say these incorrect forms, rather than the correct forms:

~He resents your being more popular than he is.
~Most of the members paid their dues without my asking them.
~They objected to the youngest girl's being given the command position.
~What do you think about his buying such an expensive car?
~We were all sorry about Jane's losing her parents like that.

Sometimes, however, using the incorrect form of a gerund makes the meaning unclear. I think the brochure should say: Part of my staying up to date.

use of the word 'sided'

As I reached for a small square of cotton to wipe my face this morning, I was struck by the words on the box: '100 sided sealed cotton squares'.

Sided? I'd never heard the word used in this sense, but when I looked at the cotton in my hand, I saw that it had been sealed down two sides, presumably to stop the cotton falling apart as I used it.



I had a look at the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary®, which gives the the definition:

side vb sid*ed; sid*ing vt (1591) to furnish with sides or siding <~ a house> ~

The dictionary on my computer says:

[ trans. ] provide with a side or sides; form the side of : the hills that side a long valley.

I think it's a great use of this word, precise and succinct.

By the way, they're not squares, as I use the word, because they're 5cm by 4cm.

chiasmus and chocolate cheese cake

My sister prepared a chocolate cheese cake last night and we just ate some of it, in a celebration of all that is unhealthy in delicious food, a symphony of fat and sugar that will sing through the veins and into the organs and probably settle on the hips forever. (I said 'prepared' rather than 'baked', because it's a frozen, uncooked one, and not such a good choice for a barbecue on a summer's day - but that's another story.)

We felt a teensy bit guilty eating it, but comforted ourselves with the knowledge that although it would have been unhealthy to eat a large portion, we each took a piece that was quite small compared to a huge serve. And then had to admit it was undeniably huge, compared to a small serve.

An example of chiasmus! The very first day after I learned this new word, it slid quietly into the lunchtime conversation.

About.com defines chiasmus:

A verbal pattern (a type of antithesis) in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first with the parts reversed. Essentially the same as antimetabole.

Of the examples quoted after the definition, my favorite would have to be Samuel Johnson's "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

the elegance of long sentences

I've been listening to a series of lectures by Brooks Landon on how to compose long sentences rich in meaning and yet easy to understand, and I'm loving the lectures, with their analysis of language and the great examples included in each session.

I've always loved grammar, but tended to see it as the analysis of written words rather than a means of constructing beautiful sentences. Now I'm seeing it in a different light, as a tool for the writer. Which makes me think of a comment about Hegel's Science of Logic in a novel I'm reading (Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull. One of the characters writes about Hegel,

And, still in the introduction, he talks about how dry and empty are the forms of grammar when studied by themselves, but how full of meaning they are to one who has studied languages.

I'm also reading a book by Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences; Syntax as Style. To quote the blurb,

In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte presents-and comments on-more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language.

The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept-short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.

As an aspiring writer, I'm loving the book!

Here are a few of my attempts at long sentences. The first two are based on actual sentences quoted in Tufte's book and the third is my attempt to write a 500-word sentence. (As you will see, I couldn't do it!)

She tried to call the dog, at ease before the fire, his great serrated jaws looming like a cavern, his rough fur lying tufted and spiky along his spine, his enormous tongue and teeth in a gaping, panting yawn, and his sharp curved claws extended and stabbing into the rug.

By night-time, the dogs’ main exercise was undertaken restfully in the lounge-room, lying about on rugs or covering the distance to the couch, all vying with masterful Fido to drag themselves up by paws, claws and teeth like wolves conquering a mountain cliff, while the human woman, a grubby thickly-waisted little person, told them how to behave and yelled angry commands in a beer- soaked growl punctuated by occasional abrupt sneezing, as a result of which she was eventually taken to a hospital in the City.

Dreaming of the past, longing for a chance to make things right, to show Ronald, the man who now despised her, that she wasn’t as evil as he thought, Susan walked along the path in the sunshine, ignoring the songs of birds, the rustle of leaves and the chirping of sparrows; nevertheless, she noticed the mud underfoot, the dirty, stinking mud that coated her shoes and clung to the hems of her jeans, the very jeans she had worn when she betrayed Ronald, giving way to her temper (that temper having caused her enough trouble in the past that you'd think she'd have learned her lesson long ago) and set herself on the path to loss and suffering, not a path that she had taken consciously - she had lost the opportunity to choose when she drove her vehicle into the car park, saw Ronald with the woman, and jumped to such a hasty conclusion, one that she now regretted, and knew she might regret to her dying day.


These awful sentences make it rather obvious I've still got a lot to learn, but I'm having fun.