Blowin' In The Wind

Beijing wild at "vile behaviour"

Only Beijing can come up with English with so colourful as this. Outraged by the London demonstrators disrupting the Olympic torch relay, an official said:

"We strongly condemn this vile behaviour."

Vile? I can't recall when I last heard any official use the word, "vile".

But Beijing has always been colourful in its condemnations.

I recall the old days of Chairman Mao when Radio Beijing used to thunder against "paper tigers" and "running dogs".

Relations with the outside world have clearly improved since then.

The protesters were not berated with animal metaphors but dispatched with an adjective, "vile".

The word immediately reminded me of Shakespeare, though of course it has its modern users too. Randall Terry is quoted as saying: "I believe that Clinton is the most wicked and vile president this nation has ever had." (See here.)

But the most memorable quote involves two of Britain's most famous prime ministers.

Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease". Disraeli replied, "That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress." (See here.)

By the way this is how the Chinese Communist Party newspaper China Daily is reporting the demonstrations.

Pimp your English, Harvard

“We love the people we admitted, but we also love a very large number of the people who we were not able to admit,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College.

Heh-heh, English is not one of the strong points of the dean of admissions at Harvard.

The quote is from this New York Times story, Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission:

Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied — or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.

Columbia College admitted 8.7 percent of its applicants, Brown University and Dartmouth College 13 percent, and Bowdoin College and Georgetown University 18 percent — also records.

Technorati Tags: english,harvard

"Not factually accurate"

I missed the Democrats' debate yesterday, but it looks like Obama was guilty of a pleonasm. He said:

"There was a set of assertions made by Senator Clinton as well as her husband that are not factually accurate."

Pray, sir, is there any other kind of "accurate"?

Or does my question reveal my own ignorance? We have read and heard about something called the "higher truth". So is it possible that Obama was disputing only the factual accuracy of the Clintons' comments and not denying they might be accurate on some other level? After all, he is a lawyer and lawyers choose their words carefully.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I looked up Wikipedia -- and, by Jove, Oscar Wilde was right, truth is anything but simple. Truth can be subjective, relative, objective, absolute. That begs the question, if there are so many notions of truth, is it possible at all to tell a lie? Not that I am going to lose any sleep over that question. As a Hindu, I am only too familiar with the idea that the world is an illusion -- maya -- but I am not ready to kick the bucket; let me live my lie.

Remember the words of Shakespeare:

... We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

I was reminded of my college days when we had to tackle Plato and Aristotle and the theory of mimesis.

According to Plato, apparently this computer I am writing on is the computer manufacturer's idea of a computer, and therefore only an imitation of the real thing, which exists only in nature, and that is God's idea of a computer. And when I try to describe my computer, I am presenting only an imitation of an imitation.

Truth is the concern of philosophers only, according to Plato, and not of poets, actors or orators.

Maybe that's why Obama complained only of "factual" inaccuracy. He doesn't expect the Clintons to be philosophers.

 

Technorati Tags: obama,clinton,truth

The future of English

Gordon Brown hopes there will be more people speaking English in China than in America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand by 2025. I wonder what that will do to the language.

Language evolves with culture and society and the English-speaking countries are radically different from China.

Fundamental to the English-speaking countries is democracy and human rights, freedom of expression and individualism. EM Forster said he would betray his country rather than his friends. Noam Chomsky can freely criticise US policies. It's very different in China where society matters more than the individual. 

It is possible, of course, for a country where English is the common language to practise a limited form of censorship for the sake of racial harmony and political sensitivity: look at Singapore. But it is the exception to the rule. And it is too small to have any major influence on the English language. Not so China. That schoolchildren in China will now have to learn English from the age of six will affect popular culture, the publishing industry and the teaching of English as a foreign language for starters. The vast Chinese population is bound to make a difference.

India

It is true there are other large, populous countries where English is widely used such as India, which have had only a peripheral influence on the English language. But one reason why India has not contributed more to the English language than a smattering of words and phrases and several gifted writers is that the Indians tried to emulate the English -- and later the Americans -- and shared the same values, cherishing freedom and democracy.

And though English is widely used in India, by no means is it the common language, which it will be in China if every Chinese has to learn the language from the age of six. That is bound to have a profound influence on the language.

Gordon Brown has ambitious plans to teach English to the Chinese using the internet and all the latest doodads. He believes English language teaching will become one of Britain's biggest exports, earning 50 billion pounds a year by 2010, and bringing countries closer together.

Separated by a common language

I am not sure about the latter, though. From America to India,freedom struggles against British rule were led by people who knew English. And there is no denying the aphorism about America and Britain being "separated by a common language".

Gordon Brown is offering English language teaching as Britain's "new gift to the world", ignoring the fact that it's not new, nor his to give, says the Financial Times. It is British English, of course, he wants to promote, "not Hollywood's and certainly not the bastard version used wherever non-native English speakers gather to do deals," it adds.

Well, I wish we Indians were taught American, not British, English. Hollywood and American popular culture have contributed more to the spread of the English language than anything else. Even British English has been leavened by American words and expressions. So why not learn the English of the day?

Technorati Tags: english,chinese,indian

Man, have we changed!

Man is sexless, says William Safire. So why am I not shocked or insulted? Because he is absolutely right, etymologically speaking. Let’s put the words in context. In How Not To Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar, a slim little paperback, he writes:

Etymologists know that the word man, going back to the Sanskrit manus, means “human being” and is sexless. Although man and woman are differentiated in English, the universal meaning of man to encompass both sexes remains. Why accept a fiat from anti-sexism headquarters to change it now?

Safire is deriding the tendency to replace a word like “chairman” with “chairperson”. The “man” in this case can be a woman too, he argues, going back to the root of the word.

Personally, I would rather not call a woman a chairman. But he is right. Manus -- or manush (pronounced mah-noosh) as we say in Bengali -- means a human being.

I was amazed. I am a Bengali myself and yet it had never occurred to me that the English “man” and the Bengali manush were, in any way, related.

Later, I looked up the Concise Oxford Dictonary, which said “man” comes from the Sanskrit manu.I didn’t know that word, but Safire’s manus immediately made me think of the Bengali manush.

And I was struck by how people mutate, too, like any other species.

No one will mistake a Bengali or any other Indian with an Englishman or a German, and yet many of the words we use come from the same stock. We speak what scholars call the Indo-European languages, which also include Greek, Latin, Persian, Gaelic and Slavic among others. I don’t understand any of those languages; yet they all have the same roots.

I can imagine how we changed. There were intermarriages; foreigners went native. The Aryans in India became different from those in Persia, as did the Greeks from the Latins.

We are still changing. We Bengalis in India speak the same language as the Bangladeshis; yet our accents are different, and so are some of the words we use. Pakistan was once part of India. Now, on the Arts and Letters website, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper is grouped with Al Jazeera, Tehran Times and other publications from the Middle East.

Changes are taking place elsewhere too. Think of the growing Hispanic and Asian populations in America -- and the former British Conservative leader, Michael Howard. His father was a Romanian shopkeeper who changed his name from Hecht to Howard. And he himself, an immigrant’s son, is British to the core.

Jejune

Much of the early Beach Boys' songs are about high school and teenagers. Some of them are quite funny, but they aren't as naughty and knowing as Chuck Berry's celebrations of teenage life. The Beach Boys' Fun, Fun, Fun, for example, is as infectious and more filled with harmony than anything composed by Chuck Berry, but the lyrics aren't in the same league as a Chuck Berry classic like Nadine. In fact, I was about to describe the early Beach Boys' lyrics as "jejune". Not "childish" or "juvenile" but something "adolescent".

Adolescent they are but they can't be called "jejune". Though "jejune" is lumped together with "juvenile" and "puerile" in the thesaurus, there is a difference according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. According to it, "jejune" means "naive and simplistic" and can also mean "dull". The Beach Boys are by no means dull. But that's what "jejune" means according to the COED. It says the word comes from the Latin "jejunus", which means "fasting, barren".

I am surprised that a word derived from the Latin for "barren" became a synonym for "juvenile". The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary categorically says "jejune" means "juvenile" and "puerile". "Juvenile", "puerile", "infantile" all come from Latin words for children. But "jejune" originally had nothing to do with children. How did it come to be associated with "juvenile"?

Meanwhile, here's Chuck Berry performing Roll over Beethoven. I did find a clip of him performing Nadine with Keith Richard. But this is an all-time classic.   

Google isn't always right

Google's success is built upon its Page Rank system of searching, but it may not always deliver the right answer. The first few search results may be misleading. So I found yesterday. I was writing something where I used the phrase, "The devil's in the detail". And then I wondered whether it should be "The devil's in the details". Being online, I checked the Free Dictionary. Curiously, the words weren't there. So I checked Google. It immediately linked to pages containing the words, "The devil's in the details." No cigar. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, it should be "the devil's in the detail".

Maybe, I would have found the right phrase on Google too if I had continued my search. I looked only at the first search results page. But isn't that what a good search engine supposed to deliver: The right answer immediately? 

Google, of course, relies on collective wisdom, the wisdom of the masses. But that's not always very useful. We need other ways of searching too.

Is this her?

Just because I don't read The Straits Times every day doesn't mean I have a poor opinion of it. Though it can be boring, it has certain standards. So I was taken aback by this frontpage headline on The Sunday Times -- its sister paper -- today: "Is this her?"

Er, shouldn't it be "she"? I wondered looking at the pretty woman -- a Mongolian model killed in Kuala Lumpur.

But my English is not up to The Straits Times' standards. So I went online and checked a couple of dictionaries at home.

After all, it's more natural to say, "It's me" or "It's him" instead of "It's I" or "It's he". So why was it jarring to read, "Is this her?"

It's perfectly okay, according to Dr Grammar, who quoted:

"Patricia O'Conner, author of Woe Is I, says, 'It's OK to use It is me, It's her, and similar constructions, instead of the technically correct but stuffier It is I, That's he, and It's she.' "

But the expression sounded strange to me because it was so ambiguous.

The headline, "Is this her?", made me wonder: "Is this her what?"

There's a difference between "him" and "her". "Him" and "me" are both pronouns.  "Her" is not only a pronoun but a determiner too. So if anyone asks, "Is this her?", one may be excused for wondering if the question is about a woman or something pertaining to her.

No such misunderstanding is possible in the case of "him" and "me", which can never be used as possessives.

The misunderstanding could be avoided in the case of the woman, too, by using the grammatically correct "Is this she?"

But, no, The Sunday Times didn't want to be correct; it wanted to be noticed. That it was.

The general's funky phrasal

Thai coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin has said a new prime minister will be named in two weeks and the military won't hang on to power.

"We have two weeks. After two weeks, we will step out," he said. Spoken like a general: "Step out", not "step down" or "step aside". Troops go in and pull out; they are not expected to surrender.

"Funky phrasals". That's how a BBC World Service Learning English programme describes words and expressions formed by pairing a verb with an adverb or a preposition.

"Funky phrasals", that sounds so much better than "phrasal verbs", which is what grammarians call idiomatic phrases like "step out" or "step down".

I was reading the other day English more than most languages uses phrasal verbs to come up with new words and expressions.

My dirty mind thought it was rather sexy -- coupling verbs with adverbs or prepositions to make new words.

Not that I would recognise an adverb or a preposition without a dictionary in front of me. My grammar's shot to hell as my writing no doubt shows. But this practice of putting two words together to make new words sure does sound good to me: that's just like sex.

The BBC, which can't encourage sex on the airwaves, could only call it "funky". That's the next best thing to sex, I guess, funky music.

Now that I think of it, troops going in and pulling out also ... ah, never mind!

Incomer, income, and similar Indian words

I discovered a new word yesterday: incomer. The meaning was perfectly clear when I came across it either in The Times or the Guardian, in an article about foreigners in Britain. The search engine on The Times site started spinning endlessly when I typed the word into the box, but I must have seen it in The Times yesterday, because the Guardian search engine after spinning for a while threw up 58 "results", most recently on May 11, May 10, May 6, before that on March 18, which was the first time it was used this year, as it last appeared on Nov 18 last year. My point: It's not all that commonly used.

Google found 126,000 references but since it was searching the entire web, that's not an awful lot. In fact, above the search results came the query: Did you mean income? No such query appeared when I searched for income, for which Google found 527 million results.

Yet the word "incomer" exists in the Concise Oxford Dictonary, which says it's chiefly Brit. and defines it as "a person who has come to live in an area in which they have not grown up".

How come such a simple word so easy to understand is not more commonly used? Could it be for the same reason that Google asked "Did you mean income?"

The two words must have the same roots: in, come. But while one means earnings and passed into common use, the other, meaning an outsider, is chiefly used in Britain, according to the COD, and that too not all that often.

"Income", according to the Concise Oxford, has a Middle English origin in the sense of "entrance" or "arrival". Payment was not always made in cash in those days, it could be in kind as well. So it was an appropriate word for "earnings".  The word "salary" started off with a more precise meaning: buying power. It comes from the Latin "salarium", "orig. denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt, from sal", says the dictionary.

We Bengalis have a word similar to income: Ay. It means earnings and could mean "Come" or "come in" too. One might say "Ay" to a friend, a younger person or a social inferior, asking him or her to come or come in, but never to someone older or when one wants to show respect. The polite form is "ashoon" or "ashben". I myself seldom use "ay", the politer, informal version is "esho". Yes, the Bengali language has various nuances and inflections. Other Indian languages are even harder in their grammar.  But I am digressing.

My point is English and Bengali are two different languages, yet some of the concepts and word origins are the same. Neither Bengali nor Hindi has a word with a similar origin as "salary" but there is a common saying: One should be faithful to the person whose salt one eats. In other words, one should be faithful to one's employer. I wonder how that expression arose, because there again the word "salt" is being used to mean one's livelihood.

Party political film (no, this isn't a typo)

Here's a strange phrase. The Straits Times reported today a Singapore film maker who made a documentary on the opposition politician Chee Soon Juan was let off with a stern warning for making a "party political film".

Eh, I did a double take: Could that be a typo or a literal for a "partly political film" ? Or did the words get juxtaposed and what the writer meant was a "political party film" ?

But no, the phrase appeared again. "Party political films" are banned in Singapore, said the report.

I wondered just what kind of a party animal is that. I have heard of political films and political party films, but "party political films" must be a different breed or why should they have a different name? I did a Google search and concluded they must be native to Singapore because the search engine referred me mostly to Singapore sites. 

Google also pointed to Monty Python's Flying Circus and Party Political Broadcast made in 1974 and a British National Party broadcast. That was dumb, I was only searching for the phrase "party political film".

The Wikipedia offered a wiki -- quick -- explanation. It said Singapore's Films Act defines a "party political film" as a film which

(a) is an advertisement made by or on behalf of any political party in Singapore or any body whose objects relate wholly or mainly to politics in Singapore, or any branch of such party or body; or

(b) is made by any person and directed towards any political end in Singapore

Exceptions are, however, made for films "made solely for the purpose of reporting of current events", or informing or educating persons on the procedures and polling times of elections or referendums.

So a "party political film" has a specific meaning. It is not the same thing as a political party film. The latter would be party propaganda. But a "party political film" need not necessarily reflect the views of any political party though it has a political message.

So why not call it a political film? That would be casting the net too wide. Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown in Singapore though it was unabashedly political. But it was about American, not Singapore, politics.

Singapore's Films Act banning "party political films" specifically defines them as films related "wholly or mainly to politics in Singapore". That's why it had to come up with a special phrase. But it's hardly English. English phrases normally put the adjective before the noun. "Party political" sounds French. But it was coined for a good reason, I guess. Vive la difference.