Please excuse the fragmentary nature of this post--a hodgepodge of leftover notes and quotes, facts and figures, suggestions and complaints. Rescued from unfinished drafts, these stray observations on language point to some of the topics we'll be considering in the year ahead.
- What People Were Reading and Writing in 2009
- E-mail
The first e-mail was sent less than 40 years ago. In 2007 the world's billion PCs exchanged 35 trillion e-mails. The average corporate worker now receives upwards of 200 e-mails per day. On average, Americans spend more time reading e-mails than they do with their spouses. By 2011, there will be 3.2 billion e-mail users.
(John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. Simon & Schuster, 2009) - Text Messaging
According to a survey conducted in the summer of 2009 by CTIA-The Wireless Association, more than 740 billion text messages were sent in the U.S. during the first half of 2009--nearly double the number from the same period last year.
(CTIA Press Release, October 7, 2009) - Facebook
Every day, the 300 million active users of Facebook spend more than eight billion minutes on the social networking site. More than two billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week.
(Facebook press release, October 2009)
- E-mail
- A Royal Slip-Up (1908 version)
It was with royal disregard of English grammar that the Prince of Wales declared the Franco-British Exhibition at Shepherd's Bush open last Thursday.
"It is a great pleasure both for the Princess of Wales and I," said his Royal Highness at the beginning of his speech.
All London is now wondering who wrote the sentence for him.
("Slip by Prince of Wales; Comment on Grammatical Error in His Speech at France-British Show," The New York Times, May 17, 1908) - Golden Bull Awards for 2009
The Plain English Campaign of Great Britain recently announced the winners of the 2009 Golden Bull awards--given for the year's best examples of gobbledygook. Among those honored for extraordinary obfuscation:- Department of Health (U.K.) for information on its website about preventing disease:
Primary prevention includes health promotion and requires action on the determinants of health to prevent disease occurring. It has been described as refocusing upstream to stop people falling in the waters of disease. - American Airlines Inc. for a "Property Irregularity Receipt"--an acknowledgment that a passenger's luggage had been lost.
- Dublin Airport Authority for a 109-word clause in a contractors agreement:
(c) Neither the execution and delivery by the Consultant of this Agreement nor the consummation by it of any of the transactions contemplated hereby, requires, with respect to it, the consent or approval of the giving of notice to, the registration, with the record or filing of any document with, or the taking of any other action in respect of any government authority, except such as are not yet required (as to which it has no reason to believe that the same will not be readily obtainable n the ordinary course of business upon due application therefore) or which have been duly obtained and are in full force and effect.
Wisely, the Campaign also calls attention to instances of clear and concise communications. Plain English awards go to journalists, government officials, and web designers who have "successfully and passionately . . . fought gobbledygook." You'll find all the award winners for 2009 on the website of the Plain English Campaign.
- Department of Health (U.K.) for information on its website about preventing disease:
- A New Term
Kerry Wood, a regular visitor to Grammar & Composition, recently suggested a delightful addition to our Glossary of Grammatical & Rhetorical Terms:Perhaps you already have a term for this; if not I suggest francophonic ameliorative. It's when an English word is pronounced as if it were French in order to confer elegance. Examples:
And from one of my nephews, this rude example: a whoopee cushion with the brand name "Le Farter" (pronounced Le Far-TAY). To make sure that francophonic ameliorative makes it into our glossary, click on " comments" below and pass along your elegant examples.- I purchase many of my household furnishings at Target (pronounced Tar-ZHAY).
- The lady on the Brit-com Keeping Up Appearances whose surname is Bucket but who insists it is pronounced boo-KAY.
- Student Essay Contest: Win a Trip to Africa
From Greg Mitchell, Education Manager at The New York Times:
Are you a college or university student with a yearning to see the best and worst of the world? Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, invites students to write an essay and/or make a video to enter to win a reporting trip to Africa in the spring of 2010. Check out Nick's video about the trip and his announcement about the contest. Deadline for contest entries is January 18, 2010. - Our Failing Schools (1915 version)
The public schools of New York City are producing in large numbers boys and girls holding grammar school certificates who cannot write legibly, can not spell simple words, can not add, subtract, multiply or divide accurately, can not handle the simplest fractions correctly, can not locate cities and States, can not talk or write grammatically.
("N. Y. School Graduates Ignorant; Business Men Find Many of Them Cannot Figure, Write, or Spell When They Begin as Wage-Earners," The New York Times, May 2, 1915) - Writing Advice From E.B. White
In his new book Stylized, a delightfully eccentric (or, as the author says, "slightly obsessive") study of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, Mark Garvey quotes E.B. White's advice to an "overwrought reader":Although I'm not equipped to deal with emotional disorders, I am equipped to suggest to a writer what writing is all about. Writing is saying what you feel like saying in the way you feel like saying it. There are no rules of writing (who could possibly invent them) there are only guidelines, and the guidelines can, and should be, chucked out of the window whenever they get in your way or in your hair. I have never paid the slightest attention to "The Elements of Style" when I was busy writing something. . . .
For more advice on writing from one of America's finest essayists, see Writers on Writing: E.B. White.
I suspect that you should disentangle yourself from the so-called rules of grammar and style and get back to writing, if writing is what you like to do. A surgeon, before he cuts someone, has to know quite a bit about the intricacies of the human body; but when he gets in there, with his knife, he has to make his own way along. It is the same with a writer. There is always the temptation to use something as a diversion or a device, to delay the hard business of writing by putting up a handy obstacle. If you have subconsciously put up an obstacle for yourself, only you can knock it down. I can't knock it down for you, however much I would like to do so.
(E.B. White, from a letter reprinted by Mark Garvey in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. Touchstone, 2009) - A Linguistic In-Joke
Q: Two linguists walk into a bar. Which of them was the specialist in deictic and anaphoric discourse referent resolution strategies?
A: The other one.
(Dr. Susannah Kirby, Presidential Post-Doctoral Teaching & Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia) - The Case for Grammar (1920 version)
What, then, is the case against grammar? It is largely, in plain truth, one of ignorance. Grammar has a bad name--we need not quarrel now about where it came from--but is that reason enough for hanging it? We say we want a better system of grammar, but most of us do not know how good our system is. . . .
We need more wide-spread knowledge of what grammar actually is and how it came about--not a knowledge of how former grammarians sought to impose on a living language the inflexible categories of a dead one, but a knowledge of our speech as a living organism. Let grammar as a book of etiquette go till we learn more of the facts; biology does not concern itself with animals as they ought to be until it knows them pretty well as they are. Except for what we might have to unlearn, grammar in this aspect would be no more difficult to present to the mind than biology, physics, or chemistry; less so, indeed, for more, if possible, than these sciences is it a matter of daily experience with all of us. With intelligent knowledge of what we have, we should gain intelligent ideals of what we might wish it to be. If we had these, we should not be troubled at any diversity of opinion on the subject, however wide. Grammar would be safe in the hands of the various parties if each stood on a platform of intelligent opinion. If we knew it in all its ways, we might still have a case against grammar, but we should also have ideals, and we might with proper grace call it a poor thing if we felt it strongly our own.
(Robert P. Utter, "The Case Against Grammar." Harper's magazine, Feb. 1920) - Standards of English
We need to know Standard English, but we need to know it critically, analytically, and in the context of language history. We also need to understand the regularity of nonstandard variants. If we approach good and bad grammar in this way, the study of language will be a liberating factor--not merely freeing learners from socially stigmatized usage by replacing that usage with new linguistic manners, but educating people in what language and linguistic manners are all about.
(Edwin L. Battistella, Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others? Oxford University Press, 2005)
Finally, a toast to the new year, courtesy of essayist Charles Lamb: "And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters!" ("New Year's Eve").
Image: Logo of the Plain English Campaign
Comments
Another francophonic ameliorative: par-TAY (instead of party)
Others Kerry has collected:
• Cul-de-sac pronounced koodsock
• Charade pronounced shaROD
a subdivision for words that pretentious to Americans if pronounced as they are in French
• hors d’oeuvres not “or derves”
• Bret Favre and Le Have not “Farve” and “Harve”
• prix fixe not “pree fix”
• Notre Dame “Noter Daym”
• forte not “forTAY”
• boutique not “bowteek”
• bon appetit not “appeteet”
Par – TAY actually should have been considered Americanization of a word which to begin with sounds French, and actually happens to be from old French. As I had mentioned in a previous comment, y in French is pronounced as e and not in English; the pronunciation of the word ‘by’ rather than ‘party’ would be in accordance with the English pronunciation system, of course according to my limited knowledge.
As far as the rest of the post is concerned, I am going to mention the disagreements in numerical order where the numeral is with respect to the actual point in the post.
1.1. Email: When it comes to numbers which are spread around by authors, most of the time the only word that comes to mind is ‘unbelievable’. If one actually happens to have been, or still is, part of the system, then it does not happen to be just the first reaction but the whole truth as well. Having remained in of the system for some time, at the least well managed company, the number of emails ending up in my mailbox never really rose beyond 35, if I remember correctly; what I would like to add is that computer systems were always at the heart of what so ever was being done, and even then, not beyond 35.
1.3. In case of facebook, upon closer inspection, it actually boils down to 26.67 minutes per user. Now whether that actually happens to be an accurate figure may as well be open to question, but it sure in itself is not a big figure, let alone a gargantuan one.
3.1. As far as the medical advice is concerned, actually sounds alright to me. The rest I would blame on the company, either the publishing or my own.
4. In case of francophonic stuff, clear distinction needs to be established between English pronunciation system or phonetics and the rest, and the words which are part of the English lexical need to be converted according to those clear and readily distinguishable rules; only then would such criticism sound just. As of now, majority of words which are part of the lexical do not follow the sounds which are actually taught, as most have been borrowed from either old French or latin and have been incorporated with little or no adjustments.
6. When it comes to managers and business owners criticizing educational system, no matter how bad it happens to be, one could always tell them to find better recruiters or just accept the fact that they do not know how to differentiate between a contender and a pretender.
7. Unless the note is intended as sarcasm, for someone, overwrought in this case, who actually should start thinking about something else, I just wouldn’t agree with it. Having said that, I would like to add that once a surgeon has opened a body, the body does not go on to rearrange itself; it continues to remain a human body with a predefined external and internal structure, hence predefined routes to all the body parts.
With the hope that this year would prove to be a better one for every, especially the host and the regular visitors.
i do lie this site ,.pls.send me a message of how will you define pretentious words .,and the top 35 most commonly used pretentious words.,..,thank you,.