Lavengro

Lavengro books in the Kindle Store

At last I am publishing my books in Kindle format, starting with Pearls of the English Language. It is available worldwide in the Kindle Store.

I am able to do this easily through Kindle Direct Publishing. Because of the phonetic symbols, which do not display in Kindle’s converted ‘reflowable text’, I have used Kindle Textbook Creator. This is an application that takes a pdf file and converts it to a format that is an image of the original. In this way, any image, chart, graph etc. can be preserved in the display on the Kindle. This display is only available on tablet devices like Kindle Fire, iPad, Kindle for PC etc. It is not available on Kindle e-ink devices and the book cannot be downloaded to them.

It is a useful idea and one that has solved a big problem: the impossibility of making my books available on Kindle because the phonetic symbols could not be displayed.

Amazon describes this as a ‘print replica’ but it is not a simple replica of the pages of the printed book. It is a completely new presentation which has been carefully designed and laid out to make it easy and pleasant to read.

 

Print version	iPad display

The BBC and the garden path

The BBC’s UK news page says:

Memorial for stab death teacher

Tributes are paid to a teacher who was stabbed to death at a school in Leeds by her family, friends and civic dignitaries at a memorial service attended by hundreds.

AP crash blossom

The word ‘crash’ is unnecessary. Another way of solving the problem would be to say ‘crash site’, which is what it really means.

Tu and vous

One of the biggest problems facing English-speakers learning a feign language has nothing to do with the grammar or vocabulary of the language. It is the social problem of using the familiar or polite form of the personal pronoun. Spanish has the familiar tú and the formal Usted, from Vuestra merced (Your Worship) and takes a third person verb. It’s not always an easy choice. It seems that tú is gaining ground, at least in Spain. Latin America is a different matter; the builder who did some work on my home a few years ago was a perfectly friendly man but he was Argentinian and insisted on Usted. I deal with publishing and distribution companies where Usted seems to be the norm for email but tú is used on the phone. I have heard it said, though I have no evidence, that the Civil War led to a breakdown of formality on both sides and an increasing use of tú. Something similar happened I think, too, after the English Civil War, which led to the disappearance (almost) of thou. The King of Spain, however, has it easy. Everyone calls him Usted and he calls everyone tú.

To make life harder, it’s different in different languages. German for example is much more formal than Spanish. To celebrate Bastille Day the LA Times published an interesting infographic about the use of tu and vous in French. The image cannot be extracted but I attach a screenshot of a part (click to enlarge). The full thing is very well  worth looking at here.

Independent crash blossom

(Click to enlarge.)

It's good to know that fewer nurses are endangering patients' lives, whether or not they have university degrees.

The question of why the Independent chooses to illustrate this with a photo of a nurse’s bosom is, fortunately, not one for this blog.

Passively counting whales

On the Language Log Mark Liberman reports on a BBC crash blossom:

An English friend asked me how this might have been avoided. Retaining all the information given in the headline it is impossible in the available space but I suggested this to him:

Whales counted from space.

The scientists are relegated to the body text, but does that matter? They are the subject of the first sentence and anyway, saying in the headline that the counting is done by unidentified scientists hardly adds to our stock of knowledge.

Then later, as I thought about this, a curious idea occurred to me. In my passive alternative the scientists are removed from the headline because, being anonymous, they are not important at that stage of the information flow. One common reason for preferring the passive voice is precisely to focus on what would be the object of the equivalent active sentence, the identification of the agent being optional. The BBC has chosen an active sentence that leads to a crash blossom rather than a passive sentence that is clear and appropriate, and that tells us immediately that we are concerned with whales rather than scientists. Why should it make that choice? Could it be that this was a deliberate editorial decision to avoid the passive voice as a matter of policy and style?

* * * *

I can’t leave this topic of whales from space without mentioning the great Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.

For the whale’s thoughts as it fell, see YouTube.

‘Number’ and group nouns

In my article on group nouns in A Guide to English Language Usage I say:

The word number behaves similarly to group nouns. In sentences such as A large number of bicycles were in the road the verb is plural because the effective subject is bicycles. The sentence could be rewritten as Many bicycles were in the road. However, in the sentences The number of bicycles in the road was very high and The number of students was divided by two the verb is singular because the subject really is the singular word number.

The Stroppy Editor (Tom Freeman) has an insight that had escaped me: that the number of… has a singular verb because it is the number that is of interest, while a number of… has a plural verb as it is the plural things that we are considering. He quotes Gowers’s second edition of Fowler

When the word number is itself the subject it is a safe rule to treat it as singular when it has a definite article and as plural when it has an indefinite. The number of people present was large, but A large number of people were present. In Before the conclave begins in a fortnight’s time a number of details has to be settled the singular is clearly wrong; it is the details that have to be settled not the number; a number of details is a composite subject equivalent to numerous details.

and Pam Peters’s The Cambridge Guide to English Usage:

In grammatical terms the difference is that number is the head of the subject phrase in the first sentence [The number of applications is small], but a premodifying element in the second [A number of applications are still to come].

A search of A Guide to English Language Usage shows that I followed this rule myself without being aware of it:

…a large number of French words were incorporated [into English after the Norman conquest]

The number of stars [in the EU flag] does not change.

However, I happen to have Word’s grammar checker on as I type this (I usually have it turned off because it’s more trouble than it’s worth) and I see that it flags

A large number of bicycles were in the road

and offers

A large number of bicycles was in the road

as a correction, offering this irrelevant explanation:

The verb of a sentence must agree with the subject in number and in person.

• Instead of: What was Stephen and Laura like as schoolchildren?
• Consider: What were Stephen and Laura like as schoolchildren?

• Instead of: Tom watch the snowy egret stab at the fish.
• Consider: Tom watches the snowy egret stab at the fish.

Further evidence, if ever it were needed that Word’s grammar checker is utterly hopeless. It has just flagged that were needed as “Passive voice (consider revising)” and even flags its own Consider: in the above examples for colon use. Aaargh!

More about the ambiguity of ‘if not’

I have discussed the ambiguity of if not here – does it mean perhaps or does it mean but not?. Grammarphobia has a post about it in which it points out that the ambiguity is more evident in writing than in speech.and quotes Theodore M. Bernstein:

“The solution to the present problem should have become evident in its very discussion: if you mean perhaps, say so; if you mean but not, say so.”

We think that makes sense. As we’ve said many times—if not many, many times—the whole point of writing is communicating. And nothing should interfere with that.

Literally Spanish

The non-literal use of literally to strengthen an expression is a recurrent theme of English language comment. The usage is also found in Spanish as we see in El País (my emphasis):

Pero la situación había llegado a un punto en el que Obama se veía, literalmente, con las manos atadas, no ya para sacar adelante las reformas prometidas, sino para garantizar el funcionamiento básico de las instituciones judiciales fundamentales.

But the situation had reached the point where Obama literally found his hands tied, not just to go ahead with the promised reforms but to ensure the basic working of the fundamental legal institutions.

The Spanish Royal Academy’s Dictionary does accept this meaning:

Que debe entenderse en la plenitud de su sentido la palabra a la cual acompaña. Estoy literalmente extenuado.

The word that it accompanies to be understood in its full meaning. I am literally exhausted.

Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall over

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

So Humpty Dumpty had a fall. Was he an old egg? Several times recently people in Britain have mentioned to me the curious fact that young people fall over but older people have a fall. I am not aware of this myself but it seems to be a popular understanding in Britain.

Google Ngram viewer (click to enlarge) shows that had a fall is less common than fell over, as one would expect, but also that its use is decreasing, which might mean that the expression is more used by older people. The dip in fell over between about 1950 and 1990 has no explanation that I am aware of.

Humpty Dumpty makes an appearance in Through the Looking Glass when he discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”

”But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

”The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

”The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

Humpty Dumpty also appears in Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames*

Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.

*A homophonic translation of English nursery rhymes into French. The title itself is such a translation of Mother Goose Rhymes.

(Images of Humpty Dumpty, Wikipedia)