Ask the English Teacher

The Rise of 'New English'

The Tyee has published my article The Rise of 'New English'. Excerpt:

Linguists estimate that about 2,500 of the world's 6,000 languages are "endangered." One of them is mine: 20th century North American Standard English. 

An endangered language is one whose speakers' children are unlikely to be using it 100 years from now. North American Standard is already vanishing before our eyes (and ears). 

I have an understandable reason to regret its passing: I taught it from 1967 to 2010. Long before I left the classroom, though, I knew I was whipped. Better said, Standard was whipped -- by more politically powerful dialects. 

A dialect is a version of a language that's more or less understandable to speakers of other dialects. If a dialect's speakers wield political and economic power, they establish the de facto standard for the whole language. So when my beloved Standard is no longer the standard, I know power has moved away from me and mine. Those who speak and write New English are in the saddle.

Click through to the article for more, including ten ways to tell if you speak New English.

A lost American accent

Via The Atlantic, James Fallows raises a question I've wondered about too: Language Mystery: When Did Americans Stop Sounding This Way? Excerpt:

The Atlantic's wonderful new Video Channel has a lot of great material, and it is invidious to point to any one offering rather than another. But this clip, "Wings Over the Golden Gate," which I started watching because of the irresistible aviation + California combo (I have flown over exactly the scenes shown here) got my attention for another reason. Watch for about 60 seconds and you'll see what I mean. 

The language that the narrator, one Gayne Whitman, uses is florid enough. But his accent! It's instantly familiar to anyone who's seen old movies and newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s. 

But you cannot imagine a present-day American using it with a straight face. It's not faux-British, but it's a particular kind of lah-dee-dah American diction that at one time was very familiar and now has vanished. Margaret Dumont, in the Marx Brothers movies, was maybe the most familiar and caricatured female equivalent. 

Even Katharine Hepburn's very arch accent (eg in Philadelphia Story) seemed a step closer to "modern" American usage. 

I wonder who the last person was who sounded this way. I wish someone still did. Maybe I'll try.

Click through to the Fallows post to watch the clip and learn (from a Fallows reader) what the accent was all about. (The clip is worth watching for its own sake: 1930s San Francisco in colour!)

You can certainly hear the accent in many movies and radio recordings from the 1930s and 40s, and it began to fade out in the 1950s. As the clip shows, it's notable for its "swallowed" r's ("empiah," "Mahket Street," "wuhk," "Fishamen's Woff").

I speak a kind of 1950s California English with a fairly hard r, but I often hear younger Canadian and American English speakers who don't just sound their r's—they practically choke on them: "PURR-fect!" "CoRRneRR." It's not wrong, just yet another sound shift in an ever-changing language. 

How to pronounce "the"?

Marta asked me an interesting question: 

I wondered whether you could explain to me the difference in pronouncing the article 'the'. In some words like: the luggage, the monkey or the lion 'the' sounds as it is written 'thuh'. However, in other words like the economy, the elephant, the owl 'the' sounds like 'thee'. How would I know which pronounciation to use. Is there any pattern?

Her question contained the answer: Most native English speakers are more comfortable saying "thuh" before a word beginning with a consonant, and saying "thee" before a word beginning with a vowel. If we try to say "thuh economy," it sounds like a hiccup.

Sometimes I do hear people say "thee" before a consonant, but they're usually politicians trying to sound Very Serious: "We must protect thee principle of free trade."

By the way, the unstressed vowel sound is written phonetically as ǝ --technically known as a "schwa."

Original English

I've just run across an entertaining essay in The New Yorker: The Book Bench: Original English. Here's an excerpt:

As an English person living in New York, I find myself in the odd position of frequently receiving compliments for the simple feat of having a voice. 

Because of my exotic accent, with its lingering vowels and well-behaved consonants, I tend to be mistaken for someone far more witty, widely read, intelligent, and authoritative than I really am. 

This state of affairs suits me fine—I’m all for it. “Don’t lose that accent, honey,” I am often counseled by hyper-friendly barmaids and call center operatives, and I assure them I won’t. 

The American accent has had less success in England, and judging by a recent and much-read piece in the BBC Magazine—Matthew Engel’s “Why do some Americanisms irritate people?”—the same could be said for American idiom. 

Engel’s article lists several Americanisms the author finds “lazy and pointless”—”faze,” “wrench,” and “rookies” among them—and concludes with a puzzling plea to maintain “the integrity of our own gloriously nuanced, subtle and supple version—the original version—of the English language,” by which he presumably does not mean the West Germanic dialect spoken by the settlers who came to England in the fifth and sixth centuries. 

The idea that there is such a thing as “the original version” of English is wrongheaded, as is the failure to recognize that the nuance and suppleness that Engels so treasures is the direct result of the language’s multifarious appropriations. English is sedimentary: on top of the Anglo-Saxon base was laid the French dialect of Norman conquerors, to which was then added the Latin coinages of Renaissance humanists.

And much as I like this essay, I must point out the subject-verb agreement problem in the last clause. It should be: "...to which WERE then added the Latin coinages of Renaissance humanists." Proofreading at The New Yorker is not what it once was.

The author might have escaped this problem if he'd stuck to the active voice: "English is sedimentary: the Norman conquerors laid their French dialect on top of the Anglo-Saxon base, and the Renaissance humanists then added their Latin coinages."

Can u write gd Eng in txt?

My friend and colleague Azza Sedky runs a blog dedicated mostly to Egyptian politics. But she's also a teacher of communications and ESL, and recently she blogged about The tidal wave battering our language shores. Excerpt:

A few years back, before bbs’s (blackberry messages) existed, an indisposed student sent her university instructors a collective e-mail. The wording was along the lines of, “I will b hospitalized 2day. I won’t return to university b4 next week.  Thank u 4 understanding.” Bear in mind that that was an e-mail sent in a university environment not a text message to one’s buddy. 

Her instructors were stymied and horrified, so they quickly congregated to discuss the e-mail and how to react. They decided to first call in the student and let her know that this kind of writing was unacceptable, and two, to ask the communication instructor of that program, me, to emphasize e-mail netiquette as part of the required business writing course of that program.   

When the student was called in, she was surprised that this kind of writing wasn’t the norm, and defensively explained, “But this is how I always write.” Again she was told that there is a vast difference between standard, professional English and text messaging your friends. 

However, it is really crucial to realize that this student personifies a generation’s way of thinking and writing. This is the writing she sees and is accustomed to. If a generation considers this normal writing, how will it affect our language and its evolvement in the long run? 

Since then my opening spiel in my business writing courses every semester has had an add-on. Not only does it focus on the norm—avoid jargon, clichés, slang, gobbledygook, etc.—but steer clear from text messaging in professional or academic writing.

Capitalizing proper nouns...or not?

Josh wrote to me today:

I work for Redbox, a new dvd company.  Everywhere you see Redbox written from the company itself, it is written with a lower case “r.”  Examples are plentiful on our website, redbox.com.  I guess it’s sort of a creative, modern way of writing it.

However, I was under the impression that, when writing a name of a company, it is always capitalized when used in documents, emails, essays, or other official forms.  (I guess my question would be specifically in reference to company-wide emails that need to be professional and grammatically sound.)  Even while I was writing this email to you, I was auto-corrected when I wrote the lower case “r” in Redbox. 

I have asked around and no one seems to know.  Should the “r” be capitalized in Redbox or not?

Good question! Normally, we do capitalize proper nouns, including Josh and Crawford and Microsoft. However, we call ourselves anything we like, and capitalize it as we prefer. Auto-corrections assume we want capitalization, but that's not always the case.

Consider the iPad and the iMac, or e.e. cummings; Canada also has a famous poet who goes by bill bissett. I see dozens of websites with lowercase titles. If redbox wants to be lowercase, long may it prosper ... even if it is, um, undercapitalized.

Man up and refudiate the viral use of banned words!

Via The Star: Banned words list for 2011 includes ‘viral,’ ‘epic,’ a dozen others. It's pointless to try to forbid usage, but the banned-words list at least makes us think about terms we might use just because they seem fresh and clever. Excerpt:

It’s official: Viral went viral, and now it’s been virtually vaporized. 

Michigan’s Lake Superior State University features the term linked to popular online video clips in its annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. The 2011 list, compiled by the university from nominations submitted from across North America throughout the year, was released Friday. 

Nominators did more than vanquish “viral.” They also repudiated Sarah Palin’s “refudiate,” flunked “fail” and weren’t at all wowed by “wow factor.” In all, 14 words or phrases made the cut to be, well, cut from conversation. 

The call to banish viral was vociferous, garnering more nominations than any other. 

“This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined,” Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles wrote in his submission. “If one more thing goes viral, I’m buying a Hazmat suit and moving into a clean-room.” 

Other entries showed people’s apparent aversion to simple language, hence the call to “live life to the fullest” when they could just live, promoting every foible or stumble to “fail,” or super-sizing every reasonably good time to an “epic” event. 

“Standards for using ‘epic’ are so low, even ‘awesome’ is embarrassed.” said Mike of Kettering, Ohio, whose submission came with no last name. 

Appropriately, Lake Superior State spokesman Tom Pink stopped short of describing this year’s batch of submissions as “epic.” Rather, he viewed it as solid and typical — based on more than 1,000 nominations, once he and his colleagues sorted out phrases previously banned in the list’s 36-year history.

Best wishes for the holidays and 2011

I wish you a very happy Christmas and a prosperous new year. Since this is the season when we reflect on past and future, perhaps you'll enjoy this essay that The Tyee has republished (it first appeared a year ago): Vanitas and Caritas.

Is or are?

A reader wrote this morning:

I have a doubt about a translation I’m doing regarding the use of is or are. The more I think about it, the more unsure I feel about the right word to use. Perhaps you can help me. The sentence is as follows:

 If the iron, cord or plug is damaged...

And that's the correct usage. When we use "or," we're saying only one of those nouns is the real subject. But it raises a lot of related questions.

When we have a compound subject, two or more nouns linked with "and," we use a plural verb:

Tom and Jerry are going to the conference.

But when we use the conjunction "or" between the nouns, and the nouns are singular, we use a singular verb:

Tom or Jerry is going to conference.

That is, only one of them is going and therefore only one of them is the subject of the sentence.

If the nouns are plural, then the verb will be plural too:

The Thompsons or the Wongs are going to the conference.

But what if one noun is plural and the other is singular? Then the verb agrees with the noun that is closer to the verb:

Bob Thompson or the Wongs are going to the conference.

The Wongs or Bob Thompson is going to the conference.

I know—the second version may be correct, but it sounds odd. And it's likely to make readers stop and say: "Huh? Is that right?" When the way we write distracts readers from what we're actually saying, we need to rewrite. So if I had to tell my readers about who's going to Europe, I'd try something like this:

Either Bob Thompson or the Wongs will go to the conference.

God save the Queen's English

You don't have to be a monarchist to like this article from the UK paper The Independent: God save the Queen's English: Our language is under threat from ignorance, inverted snobbery and deliberate 'dumbing down'. Excerpt;

The Queen's English, with correct grammar and vocabulary, can be spoken in many accents, say Indian or Australian, and in regional British accents such as those used in Birmingham, Newcastle or Glasgow. There are extremely good users of the Queen's English in Sweden, Sri Lanka and Singapore, and very bad users of it in London, Oxford and Cambridge. 

There is much ignorance, carelessness, inverted snobbery and deliberate "dumbing down", as if bad English is more socially acceptable than good English. 

Standard English should be used when writing business letters, essays, reports, job applications and on all formal occasions. Most people here use it automatically nearly all the time, without consciously thinking: "I am using the Queen's English." 

Other forms of English are completely acceptable in appropriate situations. For example, in plays or films involving characters with strong regional or ethnic dialects, the author would not write standard English for them. 

A problem with non-standard English is that it can cause confusions. For example, in Malaysia, to have an "off day" means to have a day off, not a bad day, and to "chop" a document means to rubber-stamp it, not to cut it. In Britain, one finds people using "sick" or "wicked" to mean good, with great scope for misunderstandings. 

Deviations from the Queen's English include errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation and word choice. I heard a man on a train say: "Me and him gets on great". The two pronouns should be in the subject case, not the object case; the verb should be plural as there are two subjects, and "great" is an adjective, when an adverb is required. One should put oneself last, so the correct version would be: "He and I get on well." 

One can have a sentence that is grammatically correct, but ambiguous, such as: "This room needs cleaning badly" or "Mary told Jane that she was pregnant." The former would be clearer as, "This room badly needs cleaning," because word order affects meaning. In the latter, the pronoun "she" could apply to either woman. 

The world of advertising often uses corrupted English, as in the slogans "Beanz Meanz Heinz" and "Drinka pinta milka day". Odd spellings are used, such as "lite" and "nite", perhaps to catch the eye by being unconventional. These should be avoided. 

It is repeatedly said that English is a living, changing language. We do need new terms for technology or new phenomena, and English has such a large vocabulary because it has absorbed words from many languages. The Queen's English is not fossilised and takes in new words, phrases and usages, but it should not embrace usages which blur meanings. 

For example, we have clear distinctions in meaning between to effect/to affect, disinterested/uninterested, imply/infer, their/there/they're, defuse/diffuse, complimentary/complementary, fewer/less. 

We lose precision and clarity if we lose those distinctions, and confusions of such words are extremely widespread.

To which I reply, "Hear, hear!" (And not "Here, here," which I see too often in online debates.)