Well, words matter a lot to me. My native tongue is English, the progenitor of the anglic group, which has been a veritable magpie of a collector. Where anglophones have met a word for which we can't think of a clear English equivalent, our language has been gracious enough to import the word. Naturally, after a millenium or so, this has lead to an enormous vocabulary; which leaves a fair few words now redundant or seldom used, to which the anglophone naturally reaches when seeking something to which to tie some meaning for which no word sprang to mind. All very fine and natural, though I'd be happier if some more care were taken to avoid ambiguity and over-loading.
The word multiple
has come to be used in a way I find discomforting;
it's crowding the meaning of several
, or of many
, while abandoning
the distinction it used to enable. This change in usage smells of the user
trying to impress folk with their command of fancy words; as ever, this is only
attempted by those with a poor grasp of the language.
A perfect example is that someone I would describe as multilingual is now
said to speak multiple languages
. Now, it seems to me that the only
multiple language of which I've ever heard is double dutch: and that anyone who
claims to speak multiple languages is, indeed, speaking it. Ironically, there
is only one multiple language (to my knowledge), so one can speak the
multiple language
, but not multiple languages
.
Multiple
is the generaliser for double
, triple
,
quadruple
, etc. If someone eats a double or triple cheese-burger,
they're eating a multiple cheese-burger, or maybe a multi-burger (and let none
grumble at a cheese-burger
being a beef-burger with cheese; after all, a
beef-burger
is a hamburger, a preparation of beef (not ham) of a style
which comes from Hamburg). If someone eats several (single) burgers, they
haven't eaten (any) multiple burgers. A multiple fracture is where one bone is
broken in several places; when several bones are broken, the patient has several
fractures. When a killer goes down the road shooting innocent passers-by (and
what other sort have you ever heard of ?), they commit several homicides;
but, unless a single shot kills several victims, no multiple homicide is
committed. The terrorist whose bomb kills several victims does commit a
multiple homicide; but, to be guilty of multiple homicides
, the terrorist
needs another bomb in a separate incident.
Once upon a time, optimize
(and yes, that was the U.K. spelling given
by the 1973 O.E.D.) meant: make something best or most favourable
. By
the '80s, it was widely used to mean: make something better. For example, in
the world of computer scientists, compilers have several optimization
levels
; here are some snippets from the gcc compiler page:
Optimize. Optimizing compilation takes somewhat more time, and a lot more memory for a large function. ...
Optimize even more. ...
Optimize yet more. ...
Finally, the birth of the internet has seen a marvelous new variant:
where a web page is said to be optimized for
some particular web browser,
what it means is that the web page only works for visitors using that browser.
The author has deliberately chosen to produce a page which is inaccessible to
anyone not equipped with that browser, and they think this is clever.
They didn't produce a web page which worked for all browsers, then improve it:
they totally ignored all browsers but the one they took into account. Indeed,
the page is in fact pessimized (i.e. made worst or least favourable)
for all browsers but that one.
What they're doing is coding against the feature set of a particular proprietary browser, rather than coding to the publicly agreed standards of the W3C. One can enhance the latter with occasional tweaks to exploit features of (or avoid the bugs in) a particular browser, and the W3C's deliberations are careful to ensure that one can do so (in moderation) without adverse impact on a page's utility to users of other browsers (albeit major browser distributors endeavour to design seductive facilities which break this care).
The funny thing is, pages optimized for
one browser frequently look
dreadful even with the given browser – the sort of web designer
who makes this idiotic mistake is typically better at making excuses for how bad
the results are than at actually designing web pages. I know my web pages
aren't beautiful, but they're easy to compose and every browser displays them
well enough to let site visitors read them – any browser which didn't
would certainly be abrogating the W3C's specifications !
In a similar vein, many cities are optimized for
cars – i.e.,
if you want to get around in them, you'd better be in a car. Support for
pedestrians and bicyclists is added in a half-hearted manner after the fact of
design decisions which could never have been made if non-car road users had been
taken into account from the outset – as we should be.
When my mother chaired committees, she expected the title chairman and
understood it to mean whoever is chairing this meeting
: the title makes
no statement about the chairman's gender or sex, only about her rôle in
the meeting. Some folk seem to want to excise the letters m, a and n from
words, where they appear together, but it seems to me far wiser to try to lay
claim to man
as meaning any member of our species – I'd have no
more ground to object to being called a penisman (or use some anglo-saxon in
place of the latin) than a wombman has when that's shortened to its modern form.
What I really want, when refering to someone, is to only need to mention those
aspects of them that are relevant to the discourse. Since folk's genitals are
seldom the aspects of them relevant to their rôles in any of my texts, I
don't want to need to involve sex-lives, actual or potential, in how I refer to
folk.
Much of the time I dodge this by constructing sentences which evade bits of
English which call for gender resolution: and I make much use of the word
folk
. At times I'll treat fool
as though it were a singular of
folk
, ignoring (though not necessarily denying !) its proper meaning.
It's also sometimes useful to play around with pronouns: I'll use I
and
you
for two protagonists in a discourse, and English won't force me into
gender terms to discuss us; when I need more protagonists, I'll use either
he
or she
for the third, the other or possibly it
for a
fourth, leaving room for a fifth if I need it. At times, likewise, I simply
won't bother with a pronoun – it stands for a noun, and repeating the noun
once and again can surely be little worse than repeating its pronoun over and
over. I suspect most texts on God would be greatly improved by replacing
He
with God
throughout and leaving the divinity's gender out of
the discussion: when God's sex-life or genitals are relevant, use the pronoun by
all means – but only then.
It has always amused me how the word inferno has come to mean what it does
in English. Protestant preachers painted a fire-and-brimstone hell to scare
folk into subservience, thereby creating the myth that hell is hot – hence
the expression when hell freezes over
for never
. These cheap
theatrics, for all their efficacy in cowing simpletons, utterly reversed the
principal prior account of the nature of hell – as given by Dante in his
Inferno
, the first volume of his famous trilogy, whose name thus came to
be attached to the hot and scary place the protestant ranters described and, by
association, with any place of unendurable heat or grotesque suffering. Which
is marvelously absurd: Dante chose the word Inferno
, the word for winter
(cognate with French's hiver
and modern Italian inverno
(I think),
for instance) in Tuscan, the dialect of Italian he spoke. He did so because he
was describing a hell which is predominantly cold, miserable and far duller than
the torture-parlour the protestants invented. Having read Dante's Inferno, I
confess his account of hell shows a spiritual and theological sophistication
utterly lacking in the melodramatic drivel of those who ended up turning the
book's title's meaning on its head. Take note: much of hell had already frozen
over when Dante visited it.
It is perhaps worth noting that the same ranting preachers and their
pamphleteering buddies are also responsible for myths about the Spanish
Inquisition. The historical record paints a far calmer and gentler picture of
The Inquisition (a general branch of the Roman church, by no means confined to
Spain): though its opinions and policies stood in the way of progress and
silenced good folk, their methods were nothing like as infernal
as their
enemies claimed.
The Inquisition did, after all, know that it was answerable to God, staffed
by sinners and so bound to have some humility in its pursuit of truth; and it
knew that its first duty was to love the sinner, hating only the sin (ah, how
much better the world if that recipe were more widely followed), and
guide the fallen back to the path of virtue. Any inquisitor who might have felt
tempted to use improper means (in the hope of thereby attaining ends he imagined
to be just) lived with the knowledge that The Inquisition did check up
on what inquisitors did; and did insist on a full audit trail of investigation
(which is why there's a rich historical record to defend them from their
contemporaries' slanders; albeit client confidentiality
prevented them
from presenting this evidence at the time).
Contrast this with the protestant world's witch-hunters, who overtly hated
the bad people
and would sooner kill them than hear their account of the
truth. They were safe from oversight – questioning their work was all too
readily construed as evidence
of collusion with the witches. Their
legacy lives on: questioning McCarthyism in the '50s was evidence
of
communist sympathies
; questioning modern anti-terrorist
legislation (which indisuptably hampers the very freedoms the governments who
enact them claim to be defending, while only debatably hampering only some of
the methods terrorists have sometimes used) today is likewise apt to be
construed as, at the very least, condoning
the hideous human cost of some
unknown party's scarcely-noticed message of 2001, September the 11th. But I
digress.
The pamphleteers' and preachers' slander of The Inquisition was motivated by
a desire to make folk fear the church of Rome – casting the inquisitors in
the rôle of evil bogey-man – and turn to its slanderers as saviours.
The lies they invented were protestant propaganda
– wherein I can
find a further irony. The word propaganda means that which is worthy of
being spread
; the Roman church had always taken pains to control its public
utterances (as do so many political parties today), so every episode of
disembling by a church mouth-piece pushed the word propaganda a step or two
closer to its modern meaning. It took the protestant ranters, however, to fully
turn the word's meaning on its head, so that propaganda
now means: lies
that are told for political expediency.
A closely related notion is right teaching
, which is what
orthodox
started out meaning. For a somewhat contrary notion one might
call impropaganda
, see the FSF's description of some words to avoid in
any attempt at avoiding the biasses of vested interests in discussion of
copyright and kindred issues.
I have a dictionary which describes itself as Engelsk-Norsk
Norsk-Engelsk ordbok
which might superficially be supposed to claim a
certain symmetry between the two languaes addressed; but notice that its claim
is in Norwegian. Indeed, having now used it for some time, I am painfully
familiar with the subtle ramifications of its target audience being, in fact,
Norwegians. For example, while the translation for et barn
as
a child
takes the trouble to note that the plural is children
, its
reverse does not bother to tell me that the correct indefinite article for barn
is et
(rather than en
or ei
, so that its definite form (the child
) is barnet
, not barnen
or barna
) let
alone that the plural of barnet
is (irregularly) barna
(which is the word I was trying to make sense of; it seems
to mean a singular female child in definite form, but is actually the definite
form of the plural, with unspecified gender, which the dictionary neglected to
tell me). This has set me to thinking about dictionaries and how they should
actually be organised.
Note that we also have dictionaries for a single language, which explain the meanings of words. For contrast, the common form of cross-language dictionary tells one the relevant synonyms without explaining them. When a word has disparate meanings (as commonly happens with slang usages deviating from normal ones) it is necessary to go to the other half of the book and look up their several translations back again to discover which of them matches the meaning you want and avoid potentially embarrassing mistakes.
So my idea for how dictionaries should be organized is this: the dictionary
targets the speakers of one language (say Norwegian) wishing to deal with
another language; I'll describe the target audience's native language as the
target language and the other language as foreign. The dictionary's title makes
its asymmetry plain by being in the language of the target audience. One part
of the dictionary maps the words they are familiar with to, simply, lists of
words in the foreign language, with some remarks on any pertinent idiomatic
anomalies. Thus far, all is as we are used to; and we may continue the parallel
with other good features, like a section on the grammar and regular declension
of words in the foreign language. However, the other part of the book makes no
pretense of symmetry: it is, in fact, a meanings
dictionary – it
gives, for each foreign word, an entry that explains, in the target language,
its meanings and idiomatic usages, just as would normally appear in a
single-language dictionary.
This would doubtless require fatter dictionaries to cover any given fraction of a language; or a sparser coverage of the language in order to fit in a given volume of paper. However, it would serve the reader better than the illusory symmetry of each half serving to map words in one language to list of words in the other. It is also worth noting that a single-language meanings-dictionary would then simply be the special case where the foreign language and the target language are one and the same: the dictionary is the foreign-to-target portion; its target-to-foreign portion would then be a simple thesaurus.
Once upon a time in English (and still in most of Europe, though the spelling and pronunciation will be slighly different) there were a chain of names for the powers of a thousand: thousand, million, milliard, billion and billiard; to which there is enough rational structure to allow continuation with trillion (not Trillian), trilliard, quadrillion, quadrilliard, quintillion, quintilliard and so on. Crucially, the billion, trillion, quadrillion and so on are, in this scheme, the second, third, fourth, and so on, powers of the million; and each ~lliard was a thousand times the corresponding ~llion.
Meanwhile, in the U.S.A. (and, until 1948, in France), another scheme was in common use: the successive powers of a thousand were thousand, million, billion, trillion and so on. With these meanings, the billion (milliard, 1e9) isn't the second power of any whole number (let alone a nice round power of ten); the trillion (billion, 1e12) is the third power of ten thousand; but, thereafter, the quadrillion (billiard, 1e15), quintillion (trillion, 1e18), sextillion (trilliard, 1e21) and all subsequent members of the family aren't relevant powers of any whole number. Each member of this sequence has name derived from the latin for a number, n, with -llion or -illion appended: the member means 103.(1+n) in this scheme, where the same name means 106.n in the European scheme.
This didn't matter to anyone much until the nineteenth century, when some
U.S.A.ish businessmen amassed so much wealth that they owned millions of
dollars; the U.S.A.ish press took great glee in talking about these
millionaires
, at least until the novelty wore off. Before so very long
– though it might have been the twentieth century by then, and there may
have been some exaggeration involved, possibly conflating the wealth of a
corporation the man controlled with the man's own wealth – there were men
who commanded thousands of millions of dollars. To the U.S.A., these were
billionaires; but in Europe they would have been called milliardaires.
It took most of the twentieth century for the U.S.A.ish usage to infiltrate
English, and much of mainland Europe spurns this as a corruption; the net effect
is that the prudent author is obliged to avoid using any of the terms from
billion onwards, for fear of confusion. Thankfully, scientific notation
provides a replacement, albeit one with several guises – what I write as
1e21, following a form common in computer programming languages, is commonly
written as 1021, pronounced ten to the (power) twenty-one
,
meaning the result of multiplying together twenty-one instances of the number
ten. I can refer to a gigaeuro or terraeuro without danger of the ambiguity
with which a billion euros
is fraught; unfortunately, since scientific
quantifiers are jargon, this isn't much use when writing for a general
audience.
Both systems of naming were originally French. Personally, I'm in favour of junking both in favour of the SI nomenclature: I'm pretty sure that trying to introduce yet another nomenclature would totally fail to gain traction !
I treasure this strange combination found in very few persons: a fierce desire for life as well as a lucid perception of the ultimate futility of the quest.
Madeleine Gobeil
Compare and contrast with: a lucid perception of the value of life, devoid of any desire.
a Norse word, literally (that which is) for lay(ing
on bread)
, serving to unify cheese, jam, sliced meats, meat pastes, fish
pastes, pickled fish and all. An anglophone would pronounce Paul egg
or
poor leg
as near to the Norse pronunciation of påleg as can be
hoped for; I suspect the right way for anglic to spell this word would be
palleg
, though porleg
would do. I want anglic to import this
word ;^>
David Morgan-Mar unravells the twisted history of this word in the annotations to an episode of his Irregular Webcomic.
Groucho Marx
One might also say the same of intelligence. The word
military
appears to be a negatory
qualifier. Either that or words
like justice
, music
and intelligence
have become minor
collateral damage
. Then again, what is ordnance when it isn't
military ?
David Parnas
Poetic justice: 65% of freeze-dried coffee drinkers prefer
the brand which used this wording in its advertising.
My 1973 poxy tells me that terrorism
means systematic intimidation
as a method of governing or securing political or other ends
, with
terrorist
and terrorize
(not -ise
, even in
English) as derivative words. Sadly, the word terrorism
has now been
down-graded to mean violence perpetrated by anyone of whom we do not
approve
; while some who might otherwise be called terrorists
are
called freedom fighters
for no better reason than that they serve the
interests of those who so call them. [More on this.] Such mendacity
can only lead to a weakening of the moral sensibilities of those who are taken
in by it.
If you need to talk about computers in Anglo-Saxon, there's now a handy glossary for you.
Anglic contains plenty of words ending -tion which are susceptible to
mis-typing to end -iton or -tino; which sound like endings of names of particles
in the bestiary of modern physics, leading to a natural tendency to see these
typos produce fascinating candidate particles
. For example:
the irreducible constituent of which instructions are made. Then again, what would an instruciton be ?
the fundamental particle of curiosity. (First noticed in an e-mail by Christopher Petrilli on the PSA members' list.)
I guess the -iton and -tino should caricature electron and neutrino, respectively. This would make -tino hard to observe and relevant mainly to transitions involving an -iton, which would be easy to observe and do the main job hinted at by the mis-typed word. Presumably an optino would sway decisions imperceptibly.
The U.S.A. went through a phase, mostly in the 19th century, of
orthographic rationalisation
– i.e. tidying up spelling. This is a
very sensible idea, since Anglic's spelling consists almost entirely of
anomalies. The idea was to fix this by introducing a systematic approach to
spelling. It's one of those good ideas that's doomed to failure, but at least
they had a go at it. This is why U.S. English
and English are spelt
differently. Then again, I suspect quite a lot of why English is so oddly spelt
is down to Sam Johnson's personal prejudices about which of the spellings his
contemporaries were using to include in his dictionary; so you can think of the
revisions as a matter of chosing differently from him. However, the
revisionists just exacerbated the situation because, of course, much of the
anglophone world wasn't paying any attention to them.
So, if you've ever wondered why fibre, colour, sulphur, centre, aluminium,
etc., along with all those words which sound like they end in -eyes (or -ize, or
-ise), enjoy such diversity of spelling among anglophones, now you know. Well,
OK, natural anglophone slackness about spelling contributes. Ironically,
increasingly many English anglophones are now ending various words in -ise that
always used to end in -ize even in the U.K.; this is partly because
spell-checkers, when asked to check U.K. English, over-simplify the difference
from their default U.S. spelling, but equally because plenty of U.K. anglophones
back-derive the uncorrected
-ise spelling because they think
U.K. spelling used to be uniformly -ise, which it never was.
Anyhow, orthographic revisionism inspired Mark Twain [I've also seen a conflicting attribution] to a pleasantly entertaining satire:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter
cwould be dropped to be replased either bykors, and likewisexwould no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in whichcwould be retained would be thechformation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reformwspelling, so thatwhichandonewould take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolishyreplasing it withiand Iear 4 might fiks theg/janomali wonse and for all.Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez
c,yandx— bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplaisch,sh, andthrispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
I've also met (thanks to Jim Peters) an updated version of that for late twentieth century Europe:
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as
Euro-English.In the first year
swill replace the softc. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hardCwill be dropped in favour of thek. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesomephwill be replased with thef. This will make words likefotograf20% shorter.In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments enkorage the removal of double leters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent
ein the languag is disgraseful and it should go away. By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasingthwithzandwwithv.During ze fifz yer ze unesesary
okan be dropd from vords kontainingouand similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After ziz fifz yer ve vil hav a rali sensible riten styl. Zer vil be no mor truble or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.Ze drem vil finali kum tru!!
Meanwhile, in case anyone thinks English spelling and pronunciation make
sense already, here's a little riddle for you: if ghoti
were an English
word, how would it be pronounced ?
Well, consider the words tough, women and
ignition and you'll soon enough see that it's pronounced the
same as fish
. Obvious, no ? I gather this folly is also late
Victorian, though attributions have varied.
Written by Eddy.