And a happening ear chew too

On By Ruth DaviesIn jokes and general levity4 Comments

MalLR

 

 

 

 

A bit of light-heartedness for the new year: We’ve all made the mistake at some point or other of using a word that sounds like but is not the one we mean, sometimes with hilarious results. Language learners make them often: I’ve made these errors in Dutch recently, using ‘verkopen’ instead of ‘kopen’, which resulted in me announcing to a smooth salesman that I’d like to sell a vacuum cleaner. I bet he was thinking, ‘We’ll see about that. I’ll be doing the selling around here.’ And then when returning a hotel keycard to the receptionist I tried to say, ‘We’ve forgotten your card’ but instead said ‘We’ve eaten your card’, mixing up ‘vergeten’ with ‘gegeten’. A recent example I’ve heard from a Dutch speaker learning English was when he wanted to express his appreciation to his host for the lovely dinner and time they’d had together, and he said, ‘Thank you for your hostility.’

At least language learners are likely to be corrected and not make the same mistake again; but when people make these mistakes in their first language, they usually don’t realise the error and so continue to make it. People send me examples of malapropisms they hear or say themselves, such as ‘one foul swoop’ for ‘one fell swoop’, ‘hotter than Haiti’ for ‘hotter than Hades’; ‘nip thinks in the butt’ for ‘nip things in the bud’; and even ‘erotic fish’ for ‘exotic fish’. The humour in the meow cop game relies on the butt of the joke thinking the cop is using malapropisms.

There are some great ones from the TV show Kath and Kim, including Kim’s plea, ‘I want to be effluent, Mum!’ and Kath’s judgement about what kind of kitchen table (or is it marriage?) Kim should have: ‘Oh no, Kim, monogamy’s very old fashioned. You just want a veneer of monogamy. That’s all people care about these days.’

George W Bush is famous for them, including this pearler: ‘We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.’ This example meets the criteria for a malapropism, which is that the word used by the speaker is a real word but not the one they meant to use, that it sounds like the word they meant, and that the result doesn’t make any sense. The title of this post is not strictly a malapropism in that you’re unlikely to hear anyone saying this as a genuine mistake. You can read here how the term malapropism comes from the character of Mrs Malaprop from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals; she said things like ‘promise to forget this fellow – to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory’ and ‘He is the very pine-apple of politeness!’

As word meanings change, something that may have been a malapropism is no longer: for example, the word ‘fortuitous’ means ‘occurring by chance’, but because it sounds as if it’s related to ‘fortunate’, it has, since about the middle of last century, come to be used in the sense ‘occurring by good chance’. Because any fortuitous event can happen by good, bad or value-neutral chance, these two words do legitimately overlap in meaning at least some of the time. Fowler’s Modern Usage still prescribes the ‘chance’ meaning of ‘fortuitous’, but I think that battle to halt meaning shift is already lost.

Studies of malapropisms and other language errors can be used to find out how children develop language and which language centres of the brain have been damaged when people have strokes or accidents. That’s not to say that any instance of a malapropism constitutes brain damage – in a general setting people have just learned the wrong word from their social group, or misheard a phrase and repeated their mishearing.

This leads me to ask if speakers repeat these errors, even after they’ve been corrected. This article in Language Sciences by Arnold Zwicky from 1979 suggests they don’t, because they are convinced they already have the right word. A person will be looking through their mental dictionary for a word, but find the wrong one; when they utter that word, they accept it and store it as the correct item, so they continue to make the error. The fact that they couldn’t find the right word the first time means that the correct word was either stored incorrectly or incompletely. In Zwicky’s study, people were asked if they had intended to say what they had, and they were certain that they were right. That study was not longitudinal so it didn’t follow up to see if being corrected did change what people said. (I couldn’t find anything more current than this; not even recent abstracts behind paywalls seemed to answer this question exactly.)

I’ve heard people say often enough that so-and-so person always says such-and-such malapropism, so it seems as if it is a difficult thing to correct in a speaker’s mind. I once mixed up ‘superstitious’ and ‘suspicious’ and I’ve never trusted either of them since, always pausing now before I say one to make sure it’s right. If you know someone who has this kind of speech impeachment, be sure to collect them! They’ll thank you heavily for it.

More info:

Here’s a whole website devoted to them http://www.fun-with-words.com/malapropisms.html

Aman from pafnutyblog has managed to extract the wikipedia entry revision history and put a bigger list of malapropisms in one place here: http://pafnuty.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/the-lost-malapropisms-on-wikipedia/.

Substance abuse

Image

Sometimes the meanings of two words are very close and it’s easy to confuse them. Two such words are ‘substantial’ and ‘substantive’.

According to Macquarie (Australia’s dictionary), the meanings are:

substantial: real or actual, of ample amount, of solid character, of real worth, having to do with substance, having to do with the essence of a thing.

substantive: having independent existence, belonging to the real or essential part of a thing, essential, real or actual, of considerable amount or quantity.

Obviously they’re very close in meaning. Sometimes Macquarie includes usage notes about words that might be easily confused, such as in the entry for ‘effect’, where the usage note says ‘not to be confused with affect’, but it does not for these two.

Searching a little broader (read: trawling the great google) was a little more useful. In fact, given the ease with which the internet erupts in apoplexy about infinitesimally subtle shades of meaning, it’s eerily quiet out there on this topic. (I have, however, learned from the interwebz that ‘Substantial’ is the name of a Maryland rapper. Yes, that’s him in the pic.) That tells me that either most people have a feel for it and get it right, or that most people don’t know the difference between them and so don’t know when they’ve been used incorrectly, or that the meanings are so close that to a large extent they are interchangeable. It seems from Macquarie (and from what you’ll see below) that it’s mostly this last reason.

Many lists aim to educate people about easily confused words, and these two do not appear on the most common ones:

Even Grammar Girl didn’t have an entry about this.

But the formal sources do: Fowler’s Modern English Usage and the Australian English Style Guide (Peters).

Fowler’s has a couple of paragraphs on it: both words mean ‘of substance’, but they have become differentiated to the extent that ‘-ial’ is now the word in general use for real, of real importance, sizeable, solid, well-to-do, etc, and ‘-ive’, is chiefly used in special senses: in grammar, in parliamentary proceedings, in law, in the services. This is in the 2004 edition, by the way; the difference between ‘substantial’ and ‘substantive’ was not mentioned at all in the 1926 edition.

Peters also discusses this issue, saying that the two can appear in the same context but have a different focus. ‘Substantial’ is the more common of the two, by a factor of 14:1 and has more of a physical meaning, being about size or proportion. (This difference is usage would be explained by the narrower uses for ‘substantive’ given in Fowler’s above.) ‘Substantive’ is more abstract, and is to do with there being real issues. If a document is long and important in its content then it will be substantial and substantive; but a reader will prefer to get the substantive component without having to wade through substantial pages for it!

So ‘substantial’ has more to do with the amount of a change, and ‘substantive’ to do with affecting the substance itself. You might say that reducing a document by 20% through (for example, the paramedic method) was substantial but not substantive if the content was essentially the same, but that the document had undergone a substantive change if three new chapters were introduced while keeping the length the same by reducing the size of other chapters.

As to a memory device for this? I suggest the near rhymes of “a substantial meal is plentiful;a substantive argument is illustrative” could help. Now, put that into a rap.

___________________________________________________________________________
Burchfield RW. 2000. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Revised 3rd Edition. Oxford University Press. Oxford.
Peters. P. 1995. The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Image from: http://substantialmusic.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/music-free-download-sweet-dreams-1-spot-from-fanomm-chew-fu-x-substantial-x-j-cast/
On By Ruth DaviesIn word choiceLeave a comment

Special effects affect me

On By Ruth DaviesIn common errors, word choiceLeave a comment

Many people have trouble remembering when to use ‘affect’ and when to use ‘effect’. The basic rule is that ‘affect’ is a verb, and ‘effect’ is a noun (except for some less common usage, which is described later).

Affect – verb: to influence           Cold weather affects me.

(‘Affect’ as a verb is also used sometimes to mean ‘to put airs on’ – ‘She affected a sophisticated pose with her little finger.’ – Fowler’s says that this usage is of quite different origins to the more usual meaning of ‘to influence’.)

Effect – noun: the thing that causes some change    One cold weather effect is a numb nose.

There are a number of memory devices you can use for this one – the one that seems to have stuck in my head is to use the opposite of the obvious word trick: there is an ‘e’ in verb, so that should go with ‘effect’ but it doesn’t (because they’re opposite), so the verb is affect. This is somewhat laboured and possibly not very intuitive, but it has worked for me all these years.

Another way is to remember some example sentences, like the title of this post. You would know that in basic English sentences the word order is ‘something does something to something’. This is called subject, verb, object word order and it means that basic sentences have the structure of noun/verb/noun. Don’t worry if all that grammar terminology is meaningless; have a look at the table below:

Subject (noun or noun phrase) Verb (verb or verb phrase) Object (noun or noun phrase)
The boy kicked the ball.
Mary wrote a letter.
The brilliant Mets won the game.
Special effects saved the film.
Happy people influence everyone.
Happy people affect me.
Special effects affect me.
Cold weather affects me.
One cold weather effect is a numb nose.

So the special ‘effects’ (noun) have some influence, or ‘affect’ (verb) on people. Remember also that nouns are words that take plurals, so you’re often going to see ‘effects’ (more than one effect). Verbs are words that show tense and how many people are taking the action, so you’ll see ‘affected/affecting’ and ‘affects’ (I affect them; it affects me).

This is the most common use of these words. But in formal use they can occur as the opposite part of speech – and this complicates things and confuses people.

‘Effect’ can be a verb meaning ‘to bring about’: ‘The aim of the government policy on ice-cream is to effect change in eating habits of summer-stressed Australians.’ This one is usually used with the word ‘change’, but not necessarily. For example, you could say:

‘The medicine will effect her recovery’ (i.e. bring about her recovery)

which is different from:

‘The medicine will affect her recovery’ (have some influence on, but for better or worse is not known).

And ‘affect’ can be a noun used in psychology to describe a mood or how a person presents: ‘She arrived with a happy affect.’ This is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable (AFF-ect) as opposed to the pronunciation of the verb (aff-ECT).

Effect as a noun occurs 10–15 more times than effect as a verb, so there’s a good chance that’s the one you want. And affect as a noun occurs now only in psychology.

What about idioms? Some common expressions make use of ‘effect’: my personal effects; to take good effect; the after effect; the butterfly effect; in effect; something to that effect; snowball effect … these are all nouns, and all of them are ‘effect’ with an ‘e’.

Sources:
Burchfield RW. 2000. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Revised 3rd Edition. Oxford University Press. Oxford.
Peters. P. 1995. The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/effect
Grammar Girl: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/affect-versus-effect.aspx
And last, but not least, wikimedia commons for the image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alfred_Hitchcock%27s_Vertigo_trailer_-_Vertigo%27s_Effect.png

Spot the difference

On By Ruth DaviesIn word choiceLeave a comment

 

Do you prefer your books similar to your movies, or different from them? What about different to them? Or even different than them? In Australian usage, ‘different’ is usually paired with ‘from’, at a rate of about 6 to 1 (and ‘similar’ is usually paired with ‘to’), but it’s not the case that one is considered right and the other wrong. Fowler, in 1926, said it was a superstition that ‘different’ could only be followed by ‘from’. (He was rather acerbic in this entry, actually, saying this was a mere pedantry, a hasty and ill-defined generalisation … made by mistaken critics.) The modern edition gives more detail about usage, giving ‘different to’ as occurring from 1526, ‘different from’ occurring from 1590, and ‘different than’ occurring from 1644. The trend has been for ‘different from’ to be more accepted in British usage, and ‘different than’ to be well accepted in American usage. Even though Australians may cringe to hear ‘that red car is different than the blue one’, they will be happy with ‘that result is different than we expected’ where a conjunction, rather than a preposition is required and where ‘than’ neatly replaces the repetition of the noun in ‘that result is different from the result we expected’.

The argument that we should say ‘different from’ because we are bound to say ‘differ from’ is also a furphy as it is not extended to other similarly derived pairs. For example, we must say ‘accords with’, but we accept, indeed require, ‘according to’.

Your dictionary may well say different, however. My Macquarie says that ‘different from’ is traditional but ‘different to’ is increasingly common and that ‘different than’ is widely deplored. I wish Macquarie had space or attitude enough to nod to Fowler on this, even as I find myself preferring the ‘different from’ construction.

Oh, the irony

On By Ruth DaviesIn semanticsLeave a comment

Today on a national broadcaster, I saw a presenter asking about irony vs. coincidence. The occasion was that New Zealand held the world’s first national earthquake drill, just minutes after a (small) real earthquake hit just off the coast. Was that a coincidence, or was it ironic?

While irony is a rich concept (with dramatic, situational and verbal as the main types), a key part of it is something that happens that is contrary to expectation, or there is a difference between how things appear and how they are. The broadcaster was getting at the apparent relationship between the earthquake drill and the earthquake event, thinking this was an example of cosmic irony, where it seems that the gods are toying with us mere mortals. However, given that earthquake drills are held with the expectation of earthquakes, there is nothing ironic about their coinciding; it is merely coincidence. It would have been ironic if the drill were held and no earthquake ever happened again; it would have been particularly ironic if the earthquake drill caused a flux in the universe that prevented earthquakes.

In verbal irony, what is actually said is opposite in meaning to what is meant, although the true meaning may be conveyed in tone. For example, when asked whether she enjoyed the roller coaster and the woman says in a shaking voice, ‘It was great fun,’ we have an example of verbal irony. These kinds of example cross over with sarcasm, although there must be an element of ridicule in sarcasm: ‘Yes, I’m FINE, thank you!’ says the woman, after she has had to sit down, to her inquiring friend. The difference here is that in the first example, the woman did not intend to criticise her friend, but it is clear that there is a disparity between what she says and what she is feeling; in the second example she is still clearly not fine, but she intends to punish the stupid question with sarcasm that points out the disparity.

Dramatic irony is the interesting one from a writer’s point of view, because you have a mechanism that exploits the two audiences of the message: the reader, and the characters. In the play Oedipus Rex, the audience knows that Oedipus himself is the murderer he is searching for. In The Truman Show, the audience knows that Truman is on television, but he does not.

There could be irony in news presenters needing to ask the difference between irony and coincidence; are they not people whose job is to tell, not ask? Are they not trained in the dramatic arts? However, this is possibly expecting too much of news presenters, and will almost certainly lead to me being hoist by my own petard, which IS ironic indeed.

Apostrophe atrocity

On By Ruth DaviesIn punctuationLeave a comment

Get a group of editors in a room together and you can bet that we’ll be complaining about misplaced apostrophes before you can say ‘greengrocer’. While detailed questions of apostrophe use take pages to explain, the basic rules of apostrophe use are fairly simple:

Apostrophes are used for two things:

1. to show that a single noun owns something: Ruth’s house.

If you remember that you can always turn this around into ‘house of Ruth’, it will help with plural possessives (see below).

2. to show that some letters have been left out of a contraction:

do not = don’t                   cannot = can’t

it’s = it is               or            it has

Apostrophes are not used in plurals unless there is also possession:

1. The girls are walking their dogs. (plural ‘girls’; plural ‘dogs’; no apostrophes)

2. The girls’ dogs are barking. (the girls own the dogs)

Apostrophes are also not used in the possessive ‘its’.

1. The dog wagged its tail.

(If you would like to see the basics of apostrophe use in cartoon format, have a look at Boggleton Drive http://boggletondrive.com/2011/08/17/apostrophes/)

So, to tabulate this:

  Singular Plural
Not possessive Please send this to the student. Please send this to the students.(note, no apostrophe)
Possessive Please send this to the student’s teacher.(one teacher, one student)You can change this around to say: Please send this to the teacher of the student. Please send this to the students’ teacher.(many students, one teacher)You can change this around to say: Please send this to the teacher of the students.
  Please send this to the students’ teachers.(many students, many teachers)You can change this around to say: Please send this to the teachers of the students.
IT’S/ITS – for a musical version of this, follow the link to the apostrophe song and forever remember “don’t put an apostrophe in ‘its’ unless you mean ‘it is’”.
Contractions The dog thinks it’s great to have a tail = The dog thinks it is great to have a tail.It’s been wonderful to see you = It has been wonderful to see you.
Possessive The dog wagged its tail. (no apostrophe)

Causes of misplaced apostrophes

1. Plurals: people seem to think that you need an apostrophe for a plural. You can see from the table above that you only need this if possession is involved (and the apostrophe goes before the ‘s’ for singular and after the ‘s’ for plural). In the sentence: A picture is worth a thousand word’s, there is a misplaced apostrophe because ‘words’ is plural and has no need for an apostrophe.

2. Numbers: It did used to be the fashion to put an apostrophe between a run of numbers and a plural ‘s’, for example, the 1980’s. This is now considered incorrect, as there is no risk of misreading it without the apostrophe: 1980s.

3. Shortened forms: Again, it was the fashion to form a plural shortened form with an ’s, but that’s now considered unnecessary as there is no risk of misreading: DVDs, CDs. There are some instances where it might still be used to avoid ambiguity:

A’s are difficult to get in Year 12.

You need to watch your p’s and q’s and make sure you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

With the latter example, some style guides prefer that you italicise the p and q so that it reads like this: You need to watch your ps and qs and make sure you’ve dotted the is and crossed the ts.

However, this is more ambiguous – particularly the example of is, which is easier understood if an apostrophe is used.

Some of the confusion in these forms may arise because of the combination of contraction, which does require an apostrophe to mark the omitted letters, and a plural form, which requires no apostrophe. Words such as demos and subs are both plurals from contractions, where users perhaps want the apostrophe to mark the missing letters from demonstrations or from substitutions (or subeditors or submarines). But usual contractions don’t work with plurals anyway; they all have the pattern of omitting letters from singular words, most often ‘not’ (as in could not = couldn’t and do not = don’t), and sometimes ‘us’ (as in let us = let’s) or ‘have’ (as in could have = could’ve – note, not could of!).

4. Third person singular: as if the happy coincidence of a word ending in ‘s’ meaning a possible plural (two cats) or a possible possessive (cat’s tail) weren’t confusing enough, the regular form of third person singular verbs in English also ends with ‘s’ and does not take an apostrophe. That’s the he/she/it form. So: I eat, you eat, she eats. And because people are confused about apostrophes, they are starting to throw them in here too. The image on the home page is a good example of this: the early bird gets the right size, not get’s. It’s interesting that there are some words that can be both contractions and third person singular, such as lets/let’s. The use of lets, as in ‘He lets his children play in the park’ is not the same as ‘Let’s go and play in the park’, where let’s is a contraction for let us.

In the next post about apostrophes I’ll address some of the more specific cases that give people trouble, such as the descriptive versus possessive use (species distribution); proper names ending in ‘s’; joint ownership; inanimate objects and possession; compound titles; generic phrases; expressions of time; and examples from other languages.

Other resources

OWL at Purdue: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/

Grammar Girl: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/apostrophe-1.aspx and http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/apostrophe-plural-grammar-rules.aspx

An Olympic feat … er, font

On By Ruth DaviesIn typeLeave a comment

This weekend saw the start of the 30th Olympiad, and a certain pink geometrical symbol has actually been noticed in our house, rather than being in the background. You know the one. It looks like a geometry test. It’s been lampooned in some fairly rude ways. Someone in our house said, ‘Does that say “ZOR”?’ It’s the Olympic logo.

I didn’t really pay attention to all the kerfuffle about it when it was released in 2007, and, living half a world away from London as I do, it’s been quite easy to ignore it ever since. But now it’s everywhere, and I was forced to see the font that had been used for the word ‘london’ embedded in the top ‘2’ of the logo.

SmartClinicI am interested in logos, because they’re such good examples of how instantly you can communicate something to your audience. Every time I see this one I’m impressed at how they managed to use petals to make a loveheart and a medicine capsule. It’s simple, but effective.

But I’m more interested in fonts, because my work is text, and people have to stay with a font much longer than they have to stay with a logo. A logo may annoy or delight you, but it will not make you throw down a document in despair at how the type creator impeded your access to the content you were trying to read.

Which brings me back to the Olympic font. It was created by Gareth Hague, of Alias, and it was based on their Klute font. It is ‘intended to convey energy and dynamism’, and despite being called ‘2012 Headline’ the London 2012 Education website says it is ‘used for all communications and key messages’. This seems to be bad communication to start with, as there is ample information out there about how different fonts are required for the different purposes of headlines versus blocks of text. To be fair, I haven’t yet seen any text longer than a few words in this font – but then I haven’t looked. It would be too difficult to read and I’d just turn away.

Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, had it in his list of 8 worst fonts and was horrified by it, saying in 2011 that it ‘is based on jaggedness and crudeness … the slant to the letters is suddenly interrupted by a very round and upright “o”, which may be trying to be an Olympic ring’. He admitted its advantage is how easily recognisable it is, but he was hoping they’d keep it off the medals. He’ll be pleased to see that the medal font is nothing like 2012 Headline, although he might have something to say about all that criss-crossing.

But what of the font for the next Olympics? Now there’s a beautiful thing. This one manages to be friendly without being twee, and is evocative of the fluid movements common to many sports. Created by Dalton Maag, who have offices in London and in Brazil, it has a ‘unique informality, inspired by the joyfulness of the Brazilian people.’ Paixão e transformação, indeed.