Lavengro

Foreigner or immigrant?

I was watching an episode of the BBC detective series Wallander the other day. It set in Sweden and is based on Henning Mankell’s series of books. In the first episode of the second series, Faceless Killers – and I am giving nothing away by writing this – Wallander thinks that a woman’s dying words might have been farmer or foreigner or something similar. This fact is leaked to the press who mount a racist campaign against a supposed foreign killer.

Somehow, this public outcry that the killer might be a foreigner seemed a little strange to me. Then I realised that surely in English, or at least in the UK, the word used by the media would be immigrant rather than foreigner. I assume, and I don’t know and I have no Swedish, that the original book reflects the use of the Swedish word for foreigner in this context, but I am surprised that this translation made its way into the excellent BBC production.

(Image, Wikipedia)

Horses for courses

In a recent post I wrote, with special reference to split infinitives, that like the Economist I played safe with controversial aspects of grammar:

My job is to teach and advise people who need to use English for their business and professional purposes. I also translate texts, sometimes for publication, for people who are demanding in their requirements. I simply cannot afford to have a student come back to me with a complaint that something that I have taught or tolerated has been criticised in no uncertain manner as a grammatical solecism by a native speaker; nor can I afford to have an argument with a translation client on the same matter. As a result, I play it safe just as the Economist does.

I thought that that point of view would be fairly uncontroversial but it was not. Indeed, I was called to order by Geoff Pullum for it. So why have I just written these words in a translation:

We can’t do that ’cos there’s only four of us.

The answer is, of course, to be found in the context. Here I am transcribing a video of children playing. The register is entirely different from that of professional correspondence or formal business negotiation. In other words, I write what my client expects and needs while keeping, obviously, within the accepted norms of English usage.

Pedantry rides again

It seems to be an iron law that when pedants make their pronouncements on the English language they succeed in parading their own ignorance before the world. The Guardian today offers us these joys:

I am appalled that your Guardian style guide author David Marsh advocates dispensing with elements of grammar that have been sacrosanct among the educated classes for centuries. His disregard for rules on split infinitives, the subjunctive tense (1) or the ending a sentence (2) with a preposition made my blood boil. Is the grammar of today’s schoolchildren, already so influenced by the need to keep their missives (3) down to a paltry 140 characters (4), not bad enough, (5, 6) that Mr Marsh should wish to encourage such sloppiness (7) by recommending a general dumbing-down of our beautiful language? Whatever next? Would he be so bold as to suggest we no longer use (8) words such as referenda or formulae (9)? Why not go the whole hog and say that there is no difference between less and fewer? (10)

May I propose that the Guardian, which has an unfortunate history of committing a number of famous typos and clangers (11) over the years, to the extent that it has often been lampooned by the likes of Private Eye among others (12), be (13) not the most authoritative organ to bid that we rewrite our grammar books? (14) Please stick to things at which you excel, such as current affairs and great news articles, rather than dabble in things about which you have shown yourselves to be defective (15).
Tristán (sic) White
External examiner, University of London (16)

1) The subjunctive is a mood, not a tense. Moods are indicative, subjunctive and imperative; tenses are present, past etc.

2) Wrong. This must be either ending a sentence with a preposition (ending is a participle) or the ending of a sentence with a preposition (ending is a gerund).

3) Missive: formal or humorous a letter (COED).

4) It is not clear that all schoolchildren use Twitter, certainly not in all their written communication. David Crystal says: “On Twitter, you don't get the range of texting abbreviations you get in text messaging. It's a more sophisticated kind of communicative medium. You get semantic threads running through it. When you start counting thousands and thousands of messages, you suddenly realise that on the whole it's a new art form in the making.”

Of text messaging itself he says: “Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol and brb (“be right back”), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.”

5) I am not sure about the phrase [adjective] enough that. I have not investigated the matter but to me it seems American; I first met it as a tic of Tom Clancy’s style. I would prefer so [adjective] that but I do not insist.

6) This comma is certainly incorrect. Removing the subordinate clause we have: Is the grammar of today's schoolchildren … not bad enough, that Mr Marsh should wish to encourage such sloppiness. Either the writer has got hopelessly mixed up or he has used a comma rhetorically to mark a pause in speech.

7) The writer has certainly got his negative concepts confused here. He is implying that the level is not yet sufficiently low for Mr March to wish to encourage it.

8) This is surely intended as a subjunctive use of use but it is ambiguous. I would recommend should use for clarity’s sake.

9) The writer assumes that referendum is a Latin second declension noun like bellum. It isn’t; it is a gerundive form meaning something to be discussed. It is more like the referendum question itself or an agenda item. Anyway, it is firmly established as an English word with its plural referendums. Here we have not only the etymological fallacy but also fallacious etymology. The COED has mathematical and chemical formulae but formulas as methods or ways of doing something.

10) Quite enough has been said about this.

11) I do not think that commit is really the right collocation for a typo or clanger-

12) The likes of and among others are synonymous. This is an example of tautology, regarded as poor style.

13) Clearly intended as a subjunctive but it is referring to a present state, not to a hypothetical future. If you propose that something be … you are saying how you think that it should be in the future. Here the writer is making a proposition that starts from what he regards as a present situation. It should be is.

14) The two subordinate clauses, one nested inside the other, are correct but make for a pompous style that is not immediately easy to follow.

15) Turning this sentence round we have You have shown yourselves to be defective about these things, which is not the best style.

16) Mr White does not say which subject he examines but I can only hope that it is not the English language.

I did consider the possibility that this letter was written ironically. On balance I fear that it was intended seriously.

The second letter is this:

I must defend the imperfect subjunctive where meaning is at stake. I have regularly been alarmed by such statements as “England may have lost the match without Rooney” when what was meant was “England might have lost the match without Rooney”. I'm sure Wayne would agree.
Janet Sturgis
Tunbridge Wells, Kent

I sympathise with the writer’s sentiments. I have made the same point myself here. However, this is nothing to do with the subjunctive; it is the use of the present and past tense of a modal auxiliary verb with the perfect infinitive. True, may is sometimes used to express a subjunctive idea, as in:

I fear that we may have been deceived.

But that is not what we have here.

Language prohibitions and taboos

On the Language Log Geoff Pullum refers to this article describing how a cartoon of a prostitute holding a sign saying ‘GLUTEN FREE’ is acceptable but a similar one showing a down-and-out vampire with a sign saying ‘WILL SUCK FOR BLOOD’ could not be published. What is happening? As Geoff says:

The prostitute cartoon would doubtless also have been banned if it had incorporated the word eat, instead of just implying it

Piraro (the cartoonist) says:

Americans (and maybe all humans, I'm not sure) are more obsessed with words than with their meanings. I will never understand this as long as I live. Under FCC rules, in broadcast TV you can talk about any kind of depraved sex act you wish, as long as you do not use the word "fuck." And the word itself is so mysteriously magical that it cannot be used in any way whether the topic is sex or not. "What the fuck?" is a crime that carries a stiff fine — "I'm going to rape your 8-year-old daughter with a trained monkey," is completely legal. In my opinion, today's "gluten-free" cartoon is far more suggestive in an unsavory way than the vampire cartoon, but it doesn't have a "naughty" word so it’s okay.

Are we a nation permanently locked in preschool? The answer, in the case of language, is yes.

It’s a good point but I don’t see it quite that way. All societies have taboos, and these can apply to precise words as well as general concepts and behaviour. It seems that the concept of sex can be referred to indirectly but that the actual colloquial words that describe it are taboo. This is not surprising. The point about taboos is that breaking them is an act of rebellion. Rebellion is a way of changing society, so a dynamic society must have taboos. And not only must it have them but they will change over time and even differ within the same society. It is notorious that at one time English novels printed d— because damn was a religious taboo. That is no longer the case in Britain but in Spain some people say hostia quite casually while for others it is a serious taboo because it is the host in the religious sense (there is a minced form ostras, which means oysters). Sex has become much less of a taboo, with some people deliberately setting out to break it and normalise words such as fuck and cunt. And it might be interesting to mention that Spanish coño (cunt) is about on the bloody hell or oh shit level of surprise or anger and is not a personal insult. I have heard teenagers using the word quite casually in the presence of their perfectly respectable parents. In fact, the whole question of why in English-speaking culture the slang names of the sex organs are used as personal insults is an interesting matter; as is the use of the slang names for testicles to mean rubbish.

But to return to taboos, an interesting example of how the nature of taboo words can change was mentioned in this letter to the Guardian on 24 September 2013:

The Guardian allows fuck and cunt but still delicately refers to "the N word". Orally it is offensive but is seeing it in print going to turn us all into racists?

Roland White

Bognor Regis, West Sussex

Biannual and biennial

The other day I had to translate ‘Desde 2006 y de forma bianual’; I put ‘Twice a year since 2006’. The Spanish Royal Academy's Dictionary defines bianual as ‘Que ocurre dos veces al año’ (Which occurs two times a year).

The client came back querying this, saying that they were referring to something that happens ever two years. This should be bienal, which the Dictionary defines as ‘Que sucede o se repite cada bienio’ (Which happens or is repeated every two-year period).

As for the English equivalents, Fowler says:

Biannual, probably invented to stand to biennial as half-yearly to two-yearly, is sometimes confused with and sometimes distinguished from it. Half-yearly is the right word.

Gowers’s revision agrees and illustrates the point with a curious example:

If it were not for bicentenary, which lacks a vernacular equivalent, there would be no reason why all the bi- hybrids should not be allowed to perish … They cause confusion in the most surprising places. An annual bulletin is our first aim; but biennial issues may become possible if the Association enlarges as we hope. (From a bulletin issued by the International Association of University Professors of English.)

Burchfield’s Fowler says:

The distinction is far from watertight.

In A Guide to English Language Usage I say:

Strictly speaking, biannual means half‑yearly and biennial means taking place once every two years. However, the similarity of form, together with the similarity of pronunciation, of these rather uncommon words has led to considerable ambiguity and confusion. Half‑yearly and two‑yearly are perfectly good and avoid ambiguity.

Why we don’t like ‘impactful’

On Lingua Franca Anne Curzan asks ‘What To Do About Impactful’? What indeed? She says, and I agree:

If I were asked to rate new words on a scale from 1-10 based on their aesthetic appeal (note: words’ aesthetic appeal in my opinion—this scale cannot possibly be objective), with 10 being the most appealing and 1 being the least, I would give impactful about a 3. In other words, I notice the word, and I don’t especially like it.

Fair enough, but when she goes on to say:

There is no particularly good reason for my displeasure with this word.

I am not so sure; it has an unusual stress pattern. Other words that take the suffix -ful (the COED lists 115 of them) are monosyllables (playful, useful) or have the stress on the syllable before the suffix (eventful, delightful). As a result, the u is pronounced as a schwa or indeed not at all. Impactful, on the other hand, does not fall into this category because it has the stress on the first syllable, requiring a strong vowel in the last syllable. Further, the consonant cluster is not easy. Frightful and fateful have a t before the f, and tactful has the same ct combination, but they are monosyllabic roots that allow a weak pronunciation of the vowel in the suffix.

So, I think that the word’s perceived unpopularity has an objective basis in pronunciation and is not, at least not entirely, because it is a neologism popular in business jargon.

The Scotsman leads us down the garden path

The Scotsman presents this unfortunate sentence:

If there was a kind of doomed glamour to Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age excesses, there was little in the drinking career of Berryman, whose self-destructive boozing would end in his suicide, to make one feel good about drink.

The problem is that we know from the introductory ‘if’ that the author is making a stylistic contrast between Fitzgerald and Berryman, so we assume that the ‘little’ refers to there being little doomed glamour in Berryman’s career, and if the sentence had ended with the word ‘suicide’ there would have been nothing remarkable about it. In fact the author intends us to understand

there was little in the drinking career of Berryman … to make one feel good about drink

But the mind doesn’t work that way and we hit the comma after ‘suicide’, see that the sentence has not in fact finished, and wonder what on earth is coming next – or even whether his suicide is supposed to make us feel good about drink.

Note: To lead someone down the garden path means to give confusing information or signals. A garden path sentence is one that seems to be heading in one direction but changes course without warning. I have mentioned another garden path sentence here.

Language gender marking and biological sex

This picture (click to enlarge) says in German:

Eine Mutter ist der einzige Mensch auf der Welt, der dich schon liebt, bevor er dich kennt.

It is a quotation from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, in English:

A mother is the only person in the world who already loves you before she knows you.

English nouns do not have inherent gender, so pronouns (which do have gender) can be used as appropriate to the sex of the person concerned; a person is she if it is a mother or he for a father. In German, however, nouns do have gender, determined by the form of the article that is used with them. Mensch (person) is masculine and the gender follows through in the rest of the sentence so the masculine relative pronoun der and personal pronoun er are used even though the person this is all about, Mutter (mother), is feminine.

In German the nouns used for people, and also for animals that are regarded as having sex distinctions, have appropriate gender. The common word for child is Kind, which is neuter. It is true that the words for girl and young woman, Mädchen and Fräulein, are neuter but this is because they are diminutive forms of the feminine nouns Magd and Frau, obeying the rule that all diminutives in German are neuter whatever the gender of the root noun.

There is a similar situation in Spanish although it has only two genders. Some Spanish nouns are marked for gender – cook is cocinero or cocinera – for example while others, such as doctor and doctora, change by convention; a list of Spanish medical people might show Dr. Fulano and Dra. Mengano. There is pressure in Spain to extend this usage, for example by using jueza for a female judge (juez) but there is the counterargument that if a word is not marked for gender there is no point in doing so unnecessarily. When Angela Merkel became the German Chancellor there was the suggestion that canciller should be adapted to its feminine form until it was pointed out that in parts of Latin America cancillera means a drain!

Spanish persona and víctima are feminine regardless of the sex of the person concerned. If a newspaper report of an accident says La víctima fue trasladada al hospital (The victim was taken to hospital) we have no notion of whether the victim is male or female. I have never seen any suggestion that persono and víctimo should be used for male persons and victims and on the occasions when I have suggested this I have been met with blank incomprehension.

Know what you're talking about and practise what you preach

There is more to good usage than grammar. Style and clarity are important; the style should be appropriate to the recipient of the communication, whether spoken or oral, and the content should be clearly arranged and expressed.

I once received a phone call from a university student who was having trouble with Shakespeare and was heading for a resit exam. Could I help her? I am strictly a language teacher and I was very reluctant to take her on, but she insisted that her problem was with language and so, with the very clear understanding that I was not a literature specialist and had no more than an averagely well educated Englishman’s knowledge of the Bard, she came to me.

It was immediately clear that she hadn’t the slightest idea of how to construct an essay. She understood the need for an introduction and conclusion but couldn’t write them properly, while the body of her work was hopelessly confused. I sat with her reorganising the content, which was good enough, into a coherent structure: one topic or point of view per paragraph and using appropriate linking and contrasting words to express and compare different points of view. She was bright and could see what I was doing, and after just a few hours with me she was able to do it herself and easily pass an exam that had been a source of great worry to her.

Leaving aside the question of how such a situation could have arisen in the first place, I was reminded of it when I read this on the Language Log. Mark Liberman writes about Michael Gove, who is the British education minister. Gove chooses to give advice about written English style but does so in a way that shows an ignorance of the passive voice, which he condemns but uses correctly, and he actually contradicts his own stylistic advice on clear paragraph construction. It is well worth following the links to the Spectator and Telegraph contained in the first paragraph of Mark’s piece.

 

Keep it simple

My friend Alan Booth has dawn my attention to this sentence in the Independent.

Ms Williams, whose father, Stephen, works as a detective constable for West Mercia Police, which is leading the investigation into her disappearance, was reported missing after failing to attend a driving lesson or meet her boyfriend, Matthew Bird, 18, on Monday morning to travel to a music festival.

Alan asks whether prizes are awarded for such sentences. Maybe they are, but if so they are not called Pulitzer.

First, it must be said that the sentence is grammatically correct and is systematically punctuated, but … it is the grammar and the punctuation that are the problem.

Complex sentences are to be welcomed in their place. The last thing we want is sentences that just have one clause each, but here we have the opposite extreme. Basically, we are told that Ms Williams was reported missing in certain circumstances, but this sentence contains within itself two linked relative clauses: whose father … and which is …. It also contains two cases of apposition, Stephen and Matthew Bird, and a parenthesis telling us Matthew’s age, 18. The relative clauses and appositions are set off in commas; non-restrictive relative clauses should be but the need is not so great for apposition. I see nothing wrong with

whose father Stephen works as a detective constable

or

her boyfriend Matthew Bird.

As it is written, the reader is navigating a rigmarole of clauses that have to be kept in mind while constantly tripping over commas that hinder a clear assimilation of the meaning. A ratio of eight commas to 48 words in one sentence is too much. Why should it be one sentence anyway? Why indeed should we be told Matthew’s age? I see no reason. How about this?

Ms Williams was reported missing after failing to attend a driving lesson or meet her boyfriend Matthew Bird on Monday morning when they were to travel to a music festival. Her father Stephen works as a detective constable for West Mercia Police, which is leading the investigation into her disappearance.

That won’t win a Pulitzer prize either but at least it’s easy to read.