language

In which I learn some new words and discover that you’re never too old to enhance your vocabulary

Anyone for a long word? Pic credit: Arvind Balaraman, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1058

I learned three new words or phrases this week, simply from lurking about in a discussion on LinkedIn. One member (British) laughingly suggested that an Americanism employed by another member (American) was peculiar to the “13 Colonies”. The American took exception to this, saying the phrase was “fracked”; and the Brit responded he hadn’t meant to offend, it had merely been a “lulzy” comment.

I had to ask for clarification, since I didn’t have the first idea what they were going on about. It seems that “fracked” means bad, not acceptable. “Lulzy” is a contemporary term meaning amusing, jokey. The 13 Colonies reference is to the colonisation of what is now the US by the Brits.

You’d think three new words or phrases in a day was enough to add to one’s vocabulary, but then I had an email from my friend Kim, the one who jacked in her job to go to university, at the age of what we’ve agreed to call 42.

I’m fairly accustomed to Kim’s vocabulary and in my presence it’s been primarily employed in negotiating the purchase of a couple of pints of Gem bitter from publicans, or casting aspersions on left-leaning politics. So it was a cause of astonishment and amusement to her friends when K started her English degree this term and started sprinkling her conversation with words like “ameliorated” and “ethereal”.

Anyhow, Kim’s email said would I mind casting an eye over her latest essay, devoted to an analysis of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. She’s under the impression I know what I’m talking about, having done a degree myself as a mature student. I begged to remind her that I graduated 10 years ago and have forgotten most of what I learned, but it seems a vague analysis from a forgetful OU grad is better than a poke in the eye from a blunt stick, so I agreed to give her Keats the once over.

I was impressed to see that K’s thoughts were now focused on enjambment, synecdoche, caesura and spondees.

A spondee, as everyone will be aware, is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters. As we all know, it’s unique in English verse as all other feet (excepting molossus, which has three stressed syllables, and dispondee, which has four stressed syllables) contain at least one unstressed syllable.

Synecdoche, as none of us need to be told, from Greek synekdoche (συνεκδοχή), meaning “simultaneous understanding”) is a figure of speech closely related to metonymy (the figure of speech in which a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing). It is more distantly related to other figures of speech, such as metaphor.

Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line.

But you don’t need me to tell you all that. (Thanks to http://www.wikipedia.org/ for the translations.)

Anyhow, I was at a client’s Christmas lunch yesterday and was telling some of the other party-goers about my friend’s impressive new vocab, and it was suggested that we should phone her up and tell her some other long words that she might like to include in an essay. There were some quite intelligent suggestions and I carefully wrote them down on a piece of paper, only for one of my client’s other suppliers to decide there would be more comic value if he were to eat the list – thus enabling him to say that he’d “eaten his words”. Sometimes, respectable media industry types do this kind of thing after an afternoon on the juice of the grape.

He consumed the paper with every appearance of relish and enjoyment, and we promptly forgot the words written on it. We still phoned Kim – it would be rude not to phone a friend after several hours’ reckless drinking – but we found ourselves at rather a loss when it came to thinking of high-brow words at a moment’s notice. Our second list eventually comprised:

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”

“Felching”

“Machu Picchu”

and

“Um diddle diddle diddle, um diddle ay!”

No-one was entirely sure whether “rimming” was a real word, but it sounded good so we threw that in as well.

Scarcely adequate in terms of the composition of an academic paper, but Kim received our suggestions politely enough and we all had a good time, which is the main thing. It’s all testament to the entertaining complexity and potential of the English language.

.

Embarrassed by mispronunciations – and why I avoid buying French cheese

A friend of mine, who is something high-powered in financial services, made a bit of an arse of herself the other day when making a presentation to a bunch of financial advisers. Her typed briefing notes used the word “geographical” to refer to some new financial product – but her handwritten notes used the word “geographic”. Glancing from the typed version to her notes and back, she embarrassingly found herself unable to say either word and instead announced the launch of the new “geogoraphicorical” investment fund, to cruel sniggers from the assembled suits.

I was only partially sympathetic, since this was the same woman who once scoffed mercilessly at the pub quizmaster who mispronounced two popular French cheeses as “Bry” and “Cambert”. (Looking back, I see I’ve mentioned this in a previous post – shows how much of an impact it had on me.)

How we laughed, and K louder than anyone. This Bry and Cambert, were they tragic Shakespearean lovers, we wondered? Were they Victorian comic opera composers? Maybe they were a comedy duo like Morecambe and Wise, or Mitchell and Webb.

It must be a quizmaster thing; I was at a pub quiz the other week where the participants were stumped by the question “what would AOTP stand for if something was Orey and Assqueue?”

We puzzled over this for a while then I gave up and asked him to spell the words and he obliged with AWRY and ASKEW – the answer being All Over the Place. “Oh!” I said, light dawning, “awry!”.He gave me a funny look and said: “Yeah. Orey.”

Anyway, to return to Bry and Cambert, French pronunciation can be difficult. I once had to interview a French trade association leader (in English) about agricultural issues and he kept going on about the “Kutars”. Whatever these Kutars were he obviously didn’t like them – he got quite heated about them – but I was baffled as to what they might be, and of course the longer the conversation went on the harder it became to admit that I didn’t have the first idea what he was talking about. Kutars? Maybe some kind of boll weevil? An anti-farming protest organisation? His annoying next-door neighbours? The only thing I could do was nod knowledgeably and write down “kutars” every time he said it, in the hope that context would eventually reveal all.

When I got back to the office my editor asked if Jean-Philippe had said anything interesting about the agricultural quotas – I breathed a sigh of relief and managed to write a passably intelligent article.

Mispronunciations can rub off on the listener. I once worked with a French woman whose English was fluent other than her persistence in pronouncing “biscuits” in the French way, as “bis-kwee”. Since at the time we ate a lot of bis-kwee in the office, this method of pronouncing the word became pretty much ingrained in me and I still use it to this day. A similar thing has happened with cheese as a result of the quiz incident – if I’m not meticulous about buying Edam or Stinky Bishop or Parmesan instead, I know I’m going to end up offering dinner guests “Bry” and “Cambert” with their “bis-kwee”.

Pic credit: Rob Wiltshire, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1395

Mangling Keats through online translation to get a cheap laugh

Had a lot of fun today putting the first verse of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” through an online translation facility. Translating into Swahili and back wasn’t amusing enough for me, so I then ran subsequent English versions through Icelandic, Filipino, Welsh, Arabic, Afrikaans and traditional Chinese.

Here’s the original…

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

And here’s the end result, having been translated consecutively into seven languages and back again. Actually, I’m pretty impressed – it captures the gist to a certain extent, though I daresay Keats would have wanted to tweak it a tad. Anyway, well done, http://translation.imtranslator.net/translate/default.asp, for a sterling attempt.

“Pain in my heart, pain and numbness sleeping

my heart, I drank hemlock,

or reduce the number of poor color hypnosis

one-minute things – ward immersion:

This is not a lot of fun does not envy,

but happy for your happiness,

you, fairy wings and light the trees in some sweet plot

Beecher shades of green, less

[# singer summer], to reduce the diver completed.”

I wonder if the “This is not a lot of fun” line is the website’s plea to me to stop making it translate ludicrously old-fashioned English multiple times in order to get a cheap laugh; and go and do some work.

Pic credit: Tom Curtis, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=178

(Yes, I know it’s not a nightingale, but I couldn’t find one. I’ll link to anyone who can correctly identify the chap in the picture. )