Blowin' In The Wind

Top 10 irritating phrases, according to Oxford

With all due respect, at the end of the day, I personally think it’s not rocket science to conclude at this moment in time that it’s a nightmare absolutely that we are expected to be fairly unique and think out of the box 24/7 – one shouldn’t of to put up with such nonsense!

Highlighted are the top ten most irritating phrases in the English language, according to language researchers, reports the Telegraph. I wanted to use them all in one sentence. The report says “shouldn’t of” is misused for “shouldn’t have”. That must be in spoken English: the English have a tendency to swallow their words, especially the last syllables.

The list was compiled by researchers who monitor the use of phrases in a database called the Oxford University Corpus. It comprises books, papers, magazines, broadcast, the internet and other sources, says the Telegraph. The database alerts researchers to new words and phrases and can tell them which expressions are disappearing. It also shows how words are being misused.

People are also irritated when the words "literally" and "ironically" are used out of context, says the Telegraph. It adds:

The phrases appear in a book called Damp Squid, named after the mistake of confusing a squid with a squib, a type of firework.

I especially hate the phrase “think out of the box”. I have nothing against cliches, but that one drives me nuts – maybe because I can’t think out of the box.

The top 10 most irritating phrases

1 - At the end of the day

2 - Fairly unique

3 - I personally

4 - At this moment in time

5 - With all due respect

6 - Absolutely

7 - It's a nightmare

8 - Shouldn't of

9 - 24/7

10 - It's not rocket science

Sarah Palin's "habber-dasher"

Oops, the Republicans goofed. Dan Quayle's party still has spelling problems. Read the text of Sarah Palin's speech. Someone has cleaned up the original transcript, correcting "new-clear plants" to "nuclear plants" and "new-clear weapons" to "nuclear weapons", but another howler escaped unnoticed. Could someone explain who or what a "habber-dasher" is?

"Long ago, a young farmer and habber-dasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency," says Palin. She must have had Truman in mind. But he was a "haberdasher", not a "habber-dasher".

Palin gave a pretty good speech -- punchy, warm and stirring, it's as good to read as it must have been to listen to, but someone should have vetted it with a dictionary in hand.

Outlier, according to Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell popularised the phrase,"tipping point". Now, another word may become fashionable because of him: "outlier".

He is not using it in the statistical sense in which it has begun to show up in American election news. A Newsweek poll giving Barack Obama a 15-point lead over John McCain, for example, was described as "outlier" for being out of line with the other polls, which indicated a closer contest. That is what the word means in statistics: a figure much higher or lower than the rest, or -- as the Free Dictionary says -- an extreme deviation from the mean.

Gladwell uses the word in another sense. "Outlier" means extraordinary in his new book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't.

The book, which will be out in November, in time for the US elections, is about extraordinary people.

This is how it is described on Amazon.com, which is already taking orders for the book:

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

One can understand why Gladwell calls them "outliers": they are a cut above the rest. But how many of us would have come up with that particular word to describe them? This is what sets apart good writers: their ability to come up with something fresh. 

The word itself is not new. It goes back to the 17th century and has other meanings too. According to Dictionary.com, "outlier" means:

1.    a person or thing that lies outside.
2.    a person residing outside the place of his or her business, duty, etc.
3.    Geology. a part of a formation left detached through the removal of surrounding parts by erosion.

Interestingly, the word hardly appears in British newspapers. I did a Google search and couldn't find it ever being used in the Guardian or The Times. All the links were to American and Canadian newspapers.

Now, used by a bestselling author like Gladwell, the word is bound to spread.  The New York Times had a piece on the book yesterday.

Husband, wife and spouse

What should you call someone you are dating, the USA Today asked recently. "Boyfriend" or "girlfriend" might sound silly for an adult, "significant other" too stilted, "companion" not quite right, it added.

Well, once upon a time "husband" and "wife" did not necessarily mean married. "Wife" meant just a woman and "husband" the male head of the household. That's right. "Wife" comes from "wif", Old Norse for a woman, and "husband" from the Old Norse "husbandi", formed by joining the two words,"hus" (house) and "bindi"(occupier and tiller of the soil), according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

I checked.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my wife went back to Calcutta (Kolkata) three days ago after spending more than three weeks with me in Singapore. That's why I wasn't blogging all this time. We had so much to catch up on, blogging was out of the question. Now her college is about to reopen after the summer holidays. So here I am again.

The funny thing is Bengali, my mother tongue, has lots in common with English. "Stree", the Bengali word for "wife", also means a woman. "Swami" and "pati", two Bengali words for "husband", can mean a man and lord and master respectively.

But back to "husband" and "wife". If the words did not originally mean a married couple, what were they called? After all, couples exchanged vows to stay true to one another even then. That's what "wedding" means: a pledge. I got that too from the Concise Oxford.

The Romans had a specific word to describe married couples. We use it too: Spouse. According to the Concise Oxford, it comes from the Old French "spous(e)", a variation of "espouse", which comes from the Latin "sponsus" (masculine) and"sponsa"(female), past participles of "spondere", which means "betroth".

Note the verb, "espouse", please. We espouse -- support -- beliefs and causes. But you could be espoused -- engaged -- to your sweetheart, too, though we hardly use the word in that sense today. That expression has become archaic, as the Concise Oxford says. 

I must confess I can't think of my wife as my "spouse". The word is hard to visualise unlike "husband" and "wife", which make you think of a man and a woman. And what is marriage without sex?

"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.