It's a Queer World--or at Least English Is Queer

Eggs don't grow on an egg plant.

Shoes don't grow on a shoe tree.

Flowers don't sleep in a flower bed.

Taste buds never open up to be taste blossoms.

Roosters crow but crows don't rooster. I think the crows should organize to protest.

If you want to raise questions--say in academe or public affairs-- you need to have a question farm.

Trees have a bark but it must be a very quiet one because I've never heard it.

It can rain cats and dogs but you never see those animals pooling in the gutter. (The weather man predicted cats-and-dogs rain and said it would be "soggy." Maybe he should  have said "doggy.")

Fish occur in schools but I don't think they learn very much there--at least not how to avoid being caught.

To clock someone is pretty different from watching them.

A horsetail is not a grown-up version of a  ponytail. It's a plant.

"Peace of mind" and "a piece of my mind" are pretty different but sound pretty similar and might confuse someone learning English.

Copyright (c) 2021.

A Linguistic Generation Gap?

I am in a relationship with a guy who is much younger than I am. No, I'm not a sugar daddy to him, and perhaps our relationship is anomalous or bewildering to some people--but that's not my topic for here and now.

I wanted to write about purely linguistic matters. I am a linguist, after all, so any linguistic matter is of interest to me.

Between the two of us I think we exemplify a linguistic generation gap.

It's not news, or a new phenomenon by any means, that younger folks have a different vocabulary, particularly where slang terms are concerned, because slang changes very rapidly. (That's true not only in America; the same thing occurs in other countries.) Language and culture, generally, are closely intertwined. If there is a youth language, it's because there is a youth culture--games, music, movies, things like manga and anime. Their language may serve to deliberately shut out their parents and other adults. I am sure parents hear me here (though I have no children).

Earlier in our relationship my partner would often ask me to define many of the words I use. Now, I find myself turning to him for explanations of newer vocabulary I encounter, frequently online. I guess the online world is presumed to be inhabited by pretty young people. And yes, when it's not convenient to ask him, I may turn to urbandictionary.com.

It's kind of like Jeopardy!, the TV show. I am a big fan of Jeopardy! and like to see what I know that the contestants don't know. If it's topics like movies, pop music, or TV, they definitely beat me: they know that stuff and I don't.

However, when it's a matter of what you might call older knowledge, I know it and they don't. Here is a question I saw come up twice: "This life jacket gets its slang-term name from a 1930s movie sex symbol." Answer: Mae West. Each time, no contestant--that is, out of six contestants, between two episodes of the show--knew it. (And supposedly, people about to appear as Jeopardy! contestants study the questions asked on former episodes of the show.)

So, whether it's Jeopardy! questions or language, older and younger people may have different language and probably live in significantly different worlds.

I collected a recipe from the Internet recently.  It's a pasta dish, with mushrooms, and I found it grounds for two observations. 1) The woman sharing the recipe with us says that the mushrooms can give the dish "a stroganoff vibe." I was struck by that expression. I would never say something like that, using vibe like that. 2) Also, she referred to the mushrooms in the recipe as "'shrooms." Now, what is the reason for that? To save keystrokes? It saves precisely one keystroke! To be cute? I think that's more on target.

Maybe I'm venturing a bit beyond the original subject here, but I feel that some linguistic habits that I see around me are alarming. I feel that verbal habits--speaking and writing--have a lot to do with thinking. If we speak or write fuzzy or confused English, then our thinking is fuzzy or confused. (I don't know which is cause and which is effect but I suspect that's a chicken-and-egg enigma.) The worlds of business and commerce, and the military, encourage--maybe even demand--linguistic habits which I find little short of horrifying. Very long locutions where short ones, even a single word, would suffice. Vagueness, evasiveness, euphemism. The joke has it--and I frankly don't know if this is actually true--that the Army, rather than literally calling a spade a spade (as in the proverb), calls it an "entrenching tool."

Of course all this is not new, and I can't hold all these things up as examples of how the linguistic avant-garde are using (or misusing) the language. George Orwell wrote about all this some 80 years ago (see, for example, his Politics and the English Language).

Copyright © 2018.
Modified November 30, 2018.

Pare a Pair of Pears

I noticed a linguistic curiosity today. No, it doesn't have to do with pears or paring them; it has to do with pairs.

We speak of a pair of gloves, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, even a pair of dice; and those are all clearly sets, or pairs, of two things.

But we also speak of a pair of pants, a pair of scissors, a pair of glasses—eyeglasses, that is. In these cases it's much less clear that we're dealing with two things. I do have a pair of kitchen scissors that separates into two parts--sometimes too readily—presumably for ease of cleaning. But these pairs are normally not two separable things. So why do we treat them, linguistically, as two? Maybe it is because they are sort of bifurcated. You could say that about a pair of pants, pretty clearly. And maybe scissors. But it might be stretching things a little bit to apply this theory of mine to glasses.

Well, people who study language (and I include myself here) come to recognize that you often can't apply "logic" to language. Any language is its own system, and it has very little regard for any external system such as what we call "logic."

Copyright © 2013

Wherefore Born to the Manor?

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

We all know that line. It's Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene ii. Unfortunately, many a Juliet—aspiring, wannabe, or otherwise—has delivered it incorrectly. (The showbiz term for how a line is delivered is the "reading," and it includes intonation which in turn is bound up with the meaning: how the actor understands the line and how line will be grasped by the audience.)

The mistake has to do with the meaning of the word wherefore. Note that, as I have (correctly) reproduced the line above, there is no comma after thou. That should be a tipoff.

That is because, contrary to what many people believe, wherefore is not synonymous with where. Wherefore means 'why'. Think of the old phrase "the whys and wherefores." These are two pretty much synonymous words. (Legal usage is the model for giving two essentially synonymous words: it often was felt necessary to give both an Anglo-Saxon and an equivalent French word, in the days when in England both languages were in use, and we still find this in our legal documents.)

In the line from Romeo and Juliet, if you go on and read (or listen to) the rest of the soliloquy, it should be clear that Juliet is not wondering where Romeo is. The meaning is, Why do you have to be Romeo, and a Montague, when the Montague family are my family's enemies? (I would hope that many professional actresses and directors who have put on Romeo and Juliet realize this.)

Language changes. English has changed in the 400 years since Shakespeare, and many words, and meanings of words, have become obsolete. We continue to use words in what you might call ossified or frozen phrases: that is, a phrase may be current but it contains a word with a meaning that has become obsolete.

Some more examples: "Time and tide wait for no man." This does not mean the tide of the oceans, rising and falling. It means 'season', as in Yuletide, Whitsuntide, Easter tide.

What about the phrase, spic and span? Who knows the meanings of the component words? (As a partial gloss, at one time the phrase was more fully, spic and span new, with span being a form of the word we have in brand new.)

Yet another example, this one also from Shakespeare: The phrase is often quoted as "to the manor born"; but in fact, it's manner (Hamlet, Act I, scene iv, line 15). Hamlet is talking about the king's reveling (drinking), and says that he was born to the manner (custom) but does not do it.

So we may hear and even utter phrases that contain words with meanings that are now obsolete or otherwise obscure, and we—perhaps in a very human attempt to make sense out of the language we hear—misinterpret.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Funny Things We Do with (English) Words

There has been a tendency in English to drop the noun from a phrase consisting of a noun-plus adjective, and then the adjective becomes a noun.

Some examples: a transistor radio came to be called a transistor. (We don't hear that term anymore because any radio is going to be transistorized, or solid-state; plus, not many people carry radios in this age of the iPod.)

A microwave oven is now universally called a microwave, and we don't even think anything about it—although a microwave ought to be a kind of wave and not a kind of oven.

A pickup truck is a pickup. Laminate flooring becomes laminate—particularly if you're a flooring dealer. I've even heard Venetian blinds called venetians and I think I've seen real-estate listings in which the kitchens are described as having stainless steel and granite.

On the other hand, there's what seems to me a directly opposite trend, to add a word which is in some sense redundant. Examples: pita bread (pita is a kind of bread so you could just say pita); similarly challah bread. Garbanzo beans; bouillabaise stew; London broil steak. I have even heard salsa sauce, but that could only come from someone unaware that salsa is Spanish for 'sauce'. I have even seen, on a restaurant menu, "with au jus gravy"—never mind that au jus is French for 'with juice' (or gravy). So both with and gravy are redundant.

Not just foods: you hear panda bear and koala bear. Now, there's been argument among zoologists as to whether pandas really are or are not bears, but koalas are definitely not bears.

Here in Chicago, you often hear the word Chicagoland. Supposedly this word was coined to designate the Chicago area--the city and its suburbs. Yet I hear "the Chicagoland area," "Chicagoland and suburbs," and even "the greater Chicagoland area"!

I recently heard the US Attorney for Northern Illinois talk about a "sting" operation used to entrap suspected corrupt politicians, and he talked about "an undercover." Well, it's a strength of English that words can change their part of speech and thus an adjective becomes a noun.

Updates, May 26, 2012, June 22, 2012, June 29, 2012, July 29, 2012. More examples added.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Feminists (and PC-ers), Leave the Language Alone

It’s not that often, these days, that we hear the word feminism or feminist. We do, though, hear a lot of talk about political correctness; and I think that many feminist ideas are included nowadays in what we call political correctness.

At one time I had the misfortune to work for a woman who was a pretty strong feminist. She criticized me, one time, for referring to one of my community-college students as a "girl." "If she's over 16," this woman asserted, "she's a woman, and you shouldn't call her a girl."

Yet adult males are sometimes referred to as "boys": "the boys in the band"; "a night out with the boys."

Not only are the feminists wrong in this particular case, I think they are so bent on cultivating the idea that women are persecuted in our society that they try to make out that even the language is against them.

I can graciously accept saying "letter carrier" instead of mailman; or "fire fighter" instead of fireman. Yet I feel that an insight into our English language and its history shows that the assumption that underlies this linguistic policing is incorrect.

The feminist/PC assertion is that, every time you see –man as part of a word, there is the implicit assumption that the word denotes a male, or implies that the person to whom the word is attached is assumed to be male.

Let's look at the word woman. It descends from the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) wifman. That is, wif (meaning 'woman' and giving us the modern word wife) + man, meaning 'person'. Thus woman means 'woman-person', or, if you will, 'female person'. And man, when not qualified, just means 'person'—that is, a human of either, or of unspecified, gender. So –man, as it exists in all our compound words, does not, as the feminists insist, mean that we are sexistly asserting that the person is or is assumed to be male.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

The ABC's of Street Names and Car Names

There are a number of famous streets with names beginning with "B": Bourbon Street and Basin Street in New Orleans; Beale Street in Memphis (famous for bluegrass music, I believe); Broadway in New York City. And probably a few I can't think of at the moment.

When it comes to cars, Chevrolet has favored names beginning with "C": Corvette, Camaro, Corvair, Chevette, Cavalier, Cobalt, Caprice, Chevy II (several of those are forgotten models and probably justly so).

Ford Motor Company favors "E" for its SUVs: Explorer, Expedition, Escape, Edge. There was another one; was it Endeavor?

And many of Ford's sedan model names have begun with "F": Focus, Fiesta, Fusion. And long ago there were the Falcon and the Fairlane. Maybe Ford likes F-names because of the alliteration with "Ford." (Ford's Mercury division has built the Mercury Marquis, Mercury Mariner, Mystique, and Marauder--again, all alliterative names.)

And Ford's pickup trucks are F-150 and F-250, but maybe the "F" is just supposed to suggest "Ford." Since the initial is pronounced "eff" and therefore, when spoken, begins with a vowel, I can't say that that's alliteration.

On the other hand, there's a phenomenon recognized by scientists called "phonetic symbolism." This means that some words convey or connote something just by their sound. I can't say what words starting with "C" or "F" might connote, but it's easy to believe that the manufacturer wants names with certain sounds to be associated with the brand identity that they try so hard to build.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Linguistic Stupidity

I just read, in an online article about the space shuttle Atlantis docking with the International Space Station for its final time:

Every landmark, or rather spacemark, of this final two-week shuttle mission is being savored.

In saying "spacemark," probably the writer of that was just being cute. We don't normally open up and look inside a compound word like landmark and don't even think about the meanings of its component elements, like land and mark in this case.

In fact, to do so is incorrect and fallacious. Landmark is one "lexical unit" (as one linguist called it) or one meme (in more modern terminology), and is not (or is no longer) the sum of its parts. (In fact, spelling reflects this: once a compound word becomes a single unit rather than the sum of its parts, then it comes to be spelled "solid"--that is, with no internal space.)

But I've seen this same mistaken and misguided practice of "looking inside" (as I put it) a compound word and saying, "Hey, we can't call it this. . . ."

My examples (collected over some years):

• We used to have a term butterfat, which meant the fat component in milk. Then the federal government (probably the FDA, I'd guess) said to its collective self, "Hey, it's not just found in butter, and it ultimately comes from milk, so we're going to decree that it should be called milkfat."
• The City of Chicago (or its parks, to be more exact) had a structure we all knew as a bandshell. Fine old word. Then someone said, "Hey, we have orchestral concerts there, not bands, so we can't call it a bandshell." Thus they started calling it by the nonexistent word "music shell." I am sure anybody encountering that word says to him/her self, "Oh, they mean bandshell," and quite possibly they figure out why the new word was felt to be necessary.
• The most recent—again with dubious thanks to a governmental agency in the Chicago area—is "rush period." That, to mere mortals, is rush hour, but presumably they said to their wise and collective selves, "Well, it lasts longer than an hour these days, so we can't call it rush hour anymore."

As I said, these changes are totally wrong-headed. You just don't "open up" these words and look inside--except that we might do so in humor, to make a joke. (People will realize that they don't usually look inside and consider the meaning of the phrase's constituents.)  They are understood as single units. Get your stupid, meddling, bureaucratic hands off the language.

Updates:
Another example of the what I call, above, misguided tampering with the language: My bank's web site uses a "passcode." Once I stopped to think about that term, I realized, it's a password but they didn't want to call it that because it doesn't have to be a word--so, a perfect example, just like the three above.

On the other hand--examples of how lexical units should work: Perhaps strangely, considering how the powers-that-be in Chicago have usually handled these things, Chicago's "Grant Park Concerts" are no longer held in Grant Park and yet they're still called the Grant Park Concerts.

And, today I heard on TV mention, in the narrative script, of "cutting-edge surgical techniques." Shows that the writer of that comment had no thought at all of the original or literal meaning of "cutting edge," and only used it in its "lexical unit" meaning of 'very new' or 'up-to-date'." Otherwise it might be redundant!

An example of this I've recently thought about: No one thinks it odd to talk about "old New York." I think that shows that we are definitely not thinking about the constituent elements of "New York," so we don't see any contradiction between old and new.

I was working for a publishing company where a guy who was in a supervisory capacity very often used the expression "to be on the same page." He never thought about the literal meaning of the individual words as opposed to the meaning of the lexical unit, and clearly was not thinking of any physical page of any of the books we were working on; he was treating it as a lexical unit, which is correct.

 


Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

A Word Does Not Mean Just One Thing

Even if you've never given it much thought, you're probably aware that word can have multiple meanings. Occasionally, that's the cause of some misunderstandings, and such multiple meanings make much of our humor possible.

Here are some sentences that illustrate some of the meanings the word bar can have (and this is definitely not even the most striking example possible:

• We went into the bar.
• He walked up to the bar.
• A large number of gold bars are stored at Fort Knox.
• She might not have found a mate because she sets the bar too high.
• At one time, one's religion could have been a bar to membership in some clubs.
• She was admitted to the bar a few months ago.
• The lab experiment was conducted at a pressure of 0.8 bars.
• She spent 18 months behind bars.
  

And there are words with even more meanings than bar.

People who have learned only a certain amount of a foreign language—say, French—and then go to France, may be astonished to find that words are used differently from what they are used to. This can be a case of multiple meanings of the word, or sometimes the word being used with a slang sense.

This happened to me in France. I was riding a train, and one of the others in my compartment (all French people) asked me if I had gotten my bottle of water at the boite. Well, I knew boite only in the sense of 'box'. Turns out it also means a snack bar. (Typically, you don't learn slang terms in school.)

This phenomenon of polysemy, as it's called, gives the lie to anyone who thinks that interpretation a written text (such as the Bible or the law) is simple and straightforward. How many times do you hear, "It means what it says"? If only it were that simple.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

A Little (English) Linguistic Oddity

Why is it that the smallest unit of pants (or jeans, shorts, etc.) is called a "pair"? Maybe, you might say, it's because a pair of pants has two legs. It might be like "a pair of scissors" and "a pair of pliers"; they both have two leg-like parts.

But, we speak of a pair of men's briefs—which has no legs at all.

Having come from people who were involved in the garment trade, I think I recall that in that business they might speak of "a pant."

Otherwise, it's just one of many, many little anomalies of English; and I'm pretty sure other languages have theirs, too.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

How to Read Minds and Speak All Languages

On several occasions I was able to make people think I could read their minds. Well, probably they knew I really couldn't—they were all too smart to believe in that; but still, maybe just a teeny bit, they had to wonder. That's lots of fun.

Well, here are the episodes.

1. I know this guy who has traveled to an incredible number of countries. At one point—and this was years ago!—the count was over 100.

So, I heard him say something like, "I've been all over, I've had the cuisines of so many countries, and I can handle any and all of them. There's just one I really don't care for. . . ."

And I quickly interjected, "Ethiopian!"

And he's like, How did you know I was going to say that?

2. I used to have this friend, a doctor, who was divorced. He was telling me about finding women to date--through personal ads, I think.

He mentioned one woman, a Jewish girl who has a PhD in Philosophy.

I chimed in, "Theresa Sungeld" (not the real name).

Again, he's like, How did you possibly know that??

3. I was visiting my uncle and aunt. I was conversing with my uncle at one point, and he said, "Do you know what you ought to invest in?" And I said, "A condo on Hilton Head."

Again, amazingly, that was what he had been going to say.

Okay, want to know the secrets? I wish, dear reader, that I could tease a bit before revealing how it was all done.

In (1), it really was pretty much just a good guess. I, too, can eat almost anything, but I believe Ethiopian food looks like vomit.

In (2), it was pretty much a matter of It's a small world. I knew this woman. And there might have been other single (and dating) Jewish girls around who have PhD's in Philosophy, but I thought I'd risk that it happened to be the same one (he might also have said, ". . . from the University of ____"). Besides, both this woman and my doctor friend were quirky enough individuals that I could see them hooking up with each other.

Now, (3) is a little more devious. I'd been reading the paper at their house; it was either the Wall Street Journal or the financial section of the New York Times. And I saw an ad touting condos on Hilton Head as an investment; so I figured Unk had just seen the same thing I had.

I can also make people think I understand their language.

One time I was eating in a Chinese restaurant. I ordered a dish with tofu.

This was one of those old-fashioned places, with waiters. And they were not busy at all; I may have been the only customer. So a couple of these old waiters were sitting at a table in the back, talking among themselves in Chinese. Overhearing them, I could understand tofu . . . tofu.

When the waiter came back, I said "You're talking about what I'm eating." He goes No, no.

Later he comes back, looking very sheepish, and says, "Uh… you understand Chinese?" I guess I said something like Not really, and he said, "I was saying that tofu was Sun Yat-sen's favorite food." Yeah, right. More likely "They used pretty awful, old, spoiled tofu in the kitchen to make that guy's dinner."

Another time, at work I sat in a cubicle behind a guy from the Philippines. He was running some kind of business on the side, right from his work desk, selling perfume or something like that. His conversations were carried on in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines.

Well, as a linguistics graduate student I had done some work on a Philippine language that is similar to Tagalog, so I was able to pick up a few words of what this guy was saying. So I had him believing I could understand his whole conversation.

Just as I found when traveling abroad, people often don't realize that knowing a word or two of a language is a far cry from really being able to speak it or understand it. But if, like me, you have a bit of a mischievous streak, boy, can you make them nervous, just with your limited knowledge.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Some New Words Needed in English

The English language certainly has lots of words. No one knows exactly how many—there are reasons you can't really count, such as uncertainty over what is to be counted as a word. But one estimate is one million words.

Still, new words enter the language continually. New words are coined, supposedly in response to a felt need--although often a perfectly good word for the meaning already exists.

So, in response to some gaps in our vocabulary that I have noticed, I want to suggest some new words.

First, healthierize, meaning to make more healthy. Example: I healthierized this recipe by cutting the fat and salt.

Second, operate (in a new sense, namely to make an opera out of). Example: Mozart operated Beaumarchais' play The Marriage of Figaro.

Third: middle classify and middle classification. Example: Egg McMuffin is a middle classification of Eggs Benedict.

Fourth: cattlectomy, meaning to stop eating beef. Example: Since I underwent my cattlectomy, I have not been in McDonald's at all.

Fifth: Did you know that there is no word for a person who plays the horn (such as the French horn in a symphony orchestra)? A person who plays the violin is a violinist. Someone who plays the piano is a pianist. But there is no word hornist. I propose--again simply creating a new sense for an existing word, as I did with operate—that someone who plays the horn be called a horny.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

My Newest Pet Peeve--Acronyms

I have a new pet peeve—acronyms.

A couple of months ago I wrote the author of an online article, castigating him for using acronyms in his article and never spelling them out. Good writing practice would be to give both the spelled-out form and the acronym for the first occurrence of the term; then subsequent occurrences can use just the acronym.

But unfortunately too many writers assume we are familiar with the acronym. Just today I saw PMP and didn't know what it meant. And, still today, I saw NWS, but was able to figure that one out, largely from the context—National Weather Service. And I've had the experience of having to figure out an acronym or at least hunt pretty hard for the full form a couple other times within the last few days.

Certain fields are notorious for talking in "alphabet soup." That's fine, as long as the readers as well as the writers are clued in and speak the same language. But, rather than assuming that your reader can follow you, a writer should do as I said above, give the spelled-out form the first time.

And I won't even go into the usage of the military, where acronyms like NORAD and collapsed forms of words like noncom (non-commissioned officer) are the norm. George Orwell, in his novel 1984 (written in 1949) called such usage "newspeak." He portrayed it as one of the tools of his fictional totalitarian society. I don't think the usage of bureaucrats and technocrats has gotten any better in this respect since Orwell's day.

Anyway, what I have recourse to (and recommend to my readers) is an immensely useful website, www.acronymfinder.com.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

What Defines a Human Being?

For a long time, people have tried to define mankind, the human species, to distinguish it (him? us?) from "the animals."

We were told that Man was the tool-using animal, and then Jane Goodall, the woman who did the famous work with chimpanzees in Africa, discovered that chimps use tools—for example, they will take a twig, strip off the leaves, and poke it into a hole in a log and then withdraw it, covered with termites—and eat the termites.

We were told that Man has language. Well, chimps may not create language, but there have been a number of interesting experiments where chimps were taught to use human sign language.

Bees have a form of communication: When a bee has been out scouting for nectar and returns to the hive, it does a dance which indicates the direction and the distance to the source of nectar.

It's clear that crows are very intelligent and are able to communicate with one another. Dolphins have a system of clicks that may be a language. And we all have heard, or heard about, the songs of the humpback whale. Whales and dolphins are both aquatic mammals and have large brains as we do. Well, recent analysis of humpback whales' songs shows that they seem to have some of the properties of language.

It's also thought that humans have a mind/consciousness/self-awareness. Well, the chimp in the example above, with the twig, solved a problem--presumably because it has a mind. Also crows and squirrels can solve problems. Chimps seem to have self-awareness and even some dogs recognize themselves in a mirror--thus showing some concept of "self."

I want to ask: Why the need to find some defining characteristic of Homo sapiens so that we can state something that sets us apart from the animals (or, more properly, other animals)? We don't have any trouble recognizing our species and we don't ordinarily mistake a human for any other creature (nor do they mistake one of themselves for one of us, I'm pretty sure).

I think it's a religious motivation. Supposedly Man has a soul and animals do not. But think of the problem that presents: if you accept evolution, does an earlier species of Homo (e.g., Homo erectus) have a soul? What about still earlier hominid species like Australopithecus? Is it going to be possible to draw the line and decree that this species has (had) a soul and that one did not?

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

The British Are Invading--Again!

It's generally recognized that British English and American English have significant differences--mainly in pronunciation and vocabulary. Winston Churchill famously called the U.S. and Britain "two countries separated by a common language."

Of course we live in an age of instantaneous global communication. The British have been viewing our movies for decades, and an enormous volume of such exchange should serve to "level" (in the jargon of linguists) the differences. And I think that the British now are acquainted with many terms which had been Americanisms.

However, the influence can work both ways. Americans have come to use a few terms that had been mainly British in their use.

First, fridge for refrigerator. This is now so common in America that we hear it and don't give it a thought but (trust me, I can remember!) there was a time when this was used only in Britain.

Another is to go missing. News broadcasts in America seem to be full of stories about a person or a pet who has "gone missing." Now, here's the interesting part: What did we say before we used that expression? I don't remember. It's funny how that works, once a term becomes well-established, we don't even remember how we got along without it.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein

Americans Can't Spell Anymore

Nowadays, people's competence in English spelling is very poor, at least to judge from what I see people writing in online chat rooms and so forth. No one knows the difference between your and you're. There's also ignorance of the differences among to/too/two, there/their/they're, and even then/than. Hardly anyone, anymore, respects the distinction between it's and its. (This problem, or mistake, has become well-nigh universal.)

Some of these things are not new. I very well remember, when I was teaching college freshman English, some 40 years ago, writing (over and over and over) on student themes, "It's = it is." And it seems no one knows, anymore, how to spell a plural possessive (no, it's not the same as the singular possessive).

To my mind, the blame for this situation rests squarely with teachers. Decades ago (but after I was in school), teachers adopted a philosophy of allowing students to write with no correction or criticism of "mechanics" by the teachers—because it was thought that requiring students to pay attention to mechanics would distract them from expressing themselves and stifle their creativity.

This is part of a larger phenomenon of what is wrong with education. Teachers (and "educationists," those educators with Ed.D. degrees) want to turn all learning into a game and have enormous dread, and avoidance, of ever having to tell their pupils that something must simply be learned by applying a little effort. All out of (to my mind) an exaggerated fear of stifling the kids' fragile little psyches. Maybe this is why, according to many measures, America's kids can't keep up with those in some other countries.

However, if everybody begins to write your when they mean you are, I don't really believe that will mean the end of the world is upon us. Because of my linguistic training, I know that orthography (spelling) is arbitrary, to a degree--with English orthography being more arbitrary than that of many other languages. To spell or write homonyms the same or differently is not going to matter a great deal—unless maybe you want to worry about whether, at some future time, people won't be able to read older literature anymore. Maybe today's authors will be as hard to read, in the future, as Chaucer or even Shakespeare is for us today.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein