Words – Page 2 – Literary Connections

Pussyfooting, hyphenism and headlining

Time to make your mind up about hyphens

This Friday’s Phrase is pussy-foot. To hyphenate it or not? Here’s an example found in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1916 (The Daily Democrat from Woodland, California):

He pussyfooted all right. He declared in grandiloquent style for undiluted Americanism, but he had nothing to say about hyphenism.

Of course, to hesitate over this is mere pussyfooting – not something Prime Ministers and Archbishops have time for.

Which reminds me that yesterday’s tweet and blog post have become today’s Guardian headline for the turbulent priest. I’d like to say it was because this blog is so influential that it’s read throughout Westminster, but I suspect the mundane truth is that the wording was so apposite that even a journalist on a proper paper couldn’t resist.

Meanwhile, back in the OED, I’m both disappointed and intrigued to discover that hyphenism has nothing to do with lexicography but ‘the state of being a hyphenated American; the attitude or conduct involved or implied by this.’ Wikipedia offers some enlightenment that explains why this would be an issue in Woodland in the middle of the First World War:

Hyphenated American is an epithet commonly used from 1890 to 1920 to disparage Americans who were of foreign birth or origin, and who displayed an allegiance to a foreign country. It was most commonly used to disparage German Americans or Irish Americans (Catholics) who called for U.S. neutrality in World War I. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was an outspoken anti-hyphenate.

This particular issue may have faded into the mists of history (though divided loyalty still seems a hot topic to some American politicians), so how about adopting the term anti-hyphenate for those in favour of email rather than e-mail and other stylistic simplifications? That’s still stirring up debate – see Think hyphens aren’t contro-versial in The Guardian and Substuff‘s tweet yesterday:

‘Keep an eye-out for all our latest reviews.’ What is the reasoning behind that hyphen?

On this, it’s time to stop pussyfooting: I’m definitely an anti-hyphenate. I think.

Broadsides, Bono and pull quotes

Archbishop’s broadside and pullquote poetry

Thomas à Becket, Canterbury Cathedral — Beware the fate of turbulent priests! Stained glass window of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, from Wikimedia Commons

This Thursday’s Thought (and Word of the Day) is: ‘Why is a supposedly peaceable archbishop firing a broadside?’ Turbulent priest, beware the fate of your famous predecessor! (‘Downing Street hits back at archbishop’s broadside‘).

Supplementary question: Is Bono the new James Joyce? The Guardian embellishes an article in its print edition this week entitled ‘Why Bono should welcome his Glastonbury reckoning‘ with this gnomic quotation:

Pullguote over five
lines in here
here herey
herey herey
type over text

Herey, herey, indeed! Or, as letter writer John O’Dwyer comments: ‘Surely the lyrics of an unreleased U2 song, showing that Bono is a genius and the true heir of James Joyce.’

The gland tour and other offal errors

Clangers from the broadsheets

Shooting the dead dead — Dead innocent: Telegraphic tautology, or - a fatal error mars a tragic tale

St Pancreas — Station or secretion? 'Spectacular' holiday advertisement in the Guardian on 9 April

Thanks to the excellent Substuff and Peter Melville in today’s Guardian for these comic – and tragi-comic – clangers from two of our finest quality broadsheets. The Grauniad retains its (now surely undeserved) reputation for typographical infelicities – but the Telegraph, that home of grammatical rectitude and Simon Heffer? What will become of us? And with the Telegraph’s recent crime against chidren still fresh in our minds!

‘You couldn’t make it up’ update, 14 April: Today’s Guardian carries a confession about their own report on the trial that featured in the Telegraph article shown here:

In early editions, the photo caption that accompanied a report of the jailing for life of two members of an east London street gang convicted of the murder of a girl of 16, Agnes Sina-Inakoju, contained the solecism that she “died 36 hours after being killed”. As the text made clear, she died in hospital 36 hours after being shot.

Licence to repeat history?

Confusion over empire – and the right use of licence.

It’s always encouraging when others take in an interest in topics here, so I was naturally delighted when somebody on Twitter called CricketBooks signalled that my previous item had been read by retweeting it. Just shows the importance of having a catchy headline, eh, Prime Minister, even if it had very little to do with the substance of the article (something you must have had some experience of when you were at Carlton TV).

Seamus Milne in today’s Guardian considers the wider significance of David Cameron’s statement in Islamabad that prompted yesterday’s post here:

The reporters who heard David Cameron tell Pakistani students this week that Britain was responsible for “many of the world’s problems … in the first place” seemed to think he was joking. But it’s a measure of how far Britain is from facing up to its own imperial legacy that his remarks were greeted with bewildered outrage among his supporters at home.

Milne added, tartly, that the Prime Minister spoke ‘with a modesty that eluded him in the buildup to Nato’s intervention in Libya’. Hey, let’s not be churlish. After all, if we wanted to be pedantic, we could point out the Guardian originally headlined this article ‘Ignoring its imperial history licences the west to repeat it.’ Good grief, who would imagine that you’re writing in the country that, Peter Oborne declared, gave the world ‘the English language and, last but not least, the game of cricket’? So let’s leave this with a question mark in the title, and at the end. Will this now be picked up by someone promoting driving licences? (But only, of course, where British English spelling prevails: Pakistan, India and – to be balanced – the disputed territory of Kashmir still?)

Non-words or nonce-words?

Telegraph tests its readers grasp of phonics

Telegraph phonics blooper — Can you spot the irony, chidren?

“Phonics: chidren to identify ‘non-words’ in new reading test,” says the Telegraph, with a nice touch of irony. No doubt the eagle-eyed staff, fearful of the wrath of Simon Heffer, will soon correct this headline – though it has been on the site for four days already – so here’s a screenshot. The online commenters first vented their spleen about schools, teachers, modern life and everything dangerously left-wing:

One way of assisting children would be to impose heavy fines on any parents who are found not to speak English to their children at home (if they are capable of doing so).

The problem with junior and primary schools is that they have dropped their standard due to having to follow inclusion policies created by the labour party [sic].

If you want to improve state education in this country, try the following:
1. Raise the bar for those wanting to become teachers
2. Rid teacher training colleges of left wing union influence
3. Rid Local Education Authorities of left wing union influence.

Eventually, after about 30 other comments, someone noticed:

Non-words like chidren?

Thank you, Pelton Level!

Sarkozy, syncope, The Princess of Clevès and the Beano Annual

Who got to the novel first: the French or the English? Or would we rather have the curriculum at the mercy of Mr Gove or President Sarkozy?

Thursday’s Thought: Sarkozy’s syncope

Beano Annual 2011 — Only 49 more books to go...

This Thursday’s Thought from Word of the Day was stimulated by an article by Hélène Cixous in the Guardian’s series on France. Hélène Cixous is one of those French intellectuals who fill many Anglo-Saxons with a mixture of terror and mockery, ‘known,’ it says in her biography at the European Graduate School, ‘for her experimental writing style, which crosses the traditional limits of academic discourse into poetic language. Her practice crosses many discourses, and she is admired for her role as an influential theorist, as well as a novelist and playwright.’ Her target is Nicolas Sarkozy‘s philistinism, manifested in his syncope:

Pushing syncope to the limit, he swallows half the syllables and he spits the rest in his opponent’s face. He imposes his idiolect on the world. Only he ‘speaks’ this idiom; only stand-up comedians imitate it. Language gets a hammering from him. Upon its ruins he proclaims the disgrace of culture and the reign of ignorance.

His especial crime in her eyes is his contempt for The Princess of Clevès:

Just imagine an English potentate breaking the good news to the people: a ban on bloody tedious Robinson Crusoe, cluttering the mind. And Shakespeare, what a drag! Old stuff. We’ve got the telly now.

The Beano annual – and 49 other books

O blessed Anglo-Saxons! For have we not Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education and single-handed saviour of our nation’s culture? Lo, hear him proclaim that children should read fifty books a year. No matter that distinguished authors have expressed their ‘outrage at the “great big contradiction” of Mr Gove’s claim to wish to improve literacy while closing libraries across the country,’ they still tell the Independent what they’d include in their fifty. I love it that Michael Rosen’s final choice is the Beano Annual: ‘a cornucopia of nutty, bad, silly ideas, tricks, situations and plots.’ Just the place for Mr Gove to find his next wheeze for schools?

Who invented the novel?

Never mind that the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge rubbishes his ideas for that subject in the London Review of Books, what would Michael (English, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) make of Hélène Cixous’ claim that ‘The Princess of Clevès is the first novel in literature’? (‘Worse,’ she adds, ‘it’s written by a woman (Madame de La Fayette). Worse, it immortalises a woman.’) Blinkered Anglocentric that I am, I’d believed we invented the novel – I even have a volume from my own university days confidently titled Shorter Novels: Elizabethan (Deloney, Greene and Nashe: expect them in the new National Curriculum). Fortunately, Ian Watt comes to our rescue, having firmly put the French in their place back in 1957 in The Rise Of The Novel:

It is perhaps partly for this reason that French fiction from La Princesse de Clèves to Les Liaisons dangereuses stands outside the main tradition of the novel. For all its psychological penetration and literary skill, we feel it is too stylish to be authentic. In this Madame de La Fayette and Choderlos de Laclos are the polar opposites of Defoe and Richardson, whose very diffuseness tends to act as a guarantee of the authenticity of their report, whose prose aims exclusively at what Locke defined as the proper purpose of language, ‘to convey the knowledge of things’, and whose novels as a whole pretend to be no more than a transcription of real life – in Flaubert’s words, ‘le réel écrit‘.

How masterly the put-down! ‘The French? Too stylish! But of course, their President is so philistine!’ For something less stylish but more topical, we turn to Mrs Cameron’s diary in today’s Guardian on why war, especially alongside the French, is so tedious:

Obama did not man up until Dave set an example and the maddening part was he had to man up with Sarko who is such a ghastly little squit and only doing it to impress Carla, pathetic. But there are pluses because next to Sarko Dave looks so buff that tbh you feel sorry for Carla having such a weird little husband even if he is a president.

Now what was the thought?

Ah yes, who got to the novel first: the French or the English? Or was it whether we’d rather have the curriculum at the mercy of Mr Gove or President Sarkozy?

War on language? Or cooking the books?

Some minor skirmishes and broken shins on the field of language: Cicero, Wittgenstein, Kant and marketeers.

Cookery books — ...cookery books? See below....

Steve Bell in today’s Guardian comments on the confusion about whether Gaddafi is a ‘target’ in the current action over Libya. I’ll leave that to the commentariat and offer instead a few minor skirmishes on the fringes of the linguistic battlefield:

A new quango limps into life Yesterday, the recruitment site for the Standards and Testing Agency Executive had ‘Lorem Ipsum… Find out more’ on its home page; sadly, they’ve now corrected this charming touch, thereby removing what, I have been fascinated to discover, is a (kind of) quotation from Cicero: ‘Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself’. (Rhetoric again: there seem at present to be plenty of people anxious to pursue pain – oh, wait a minute, it’s the poor what get the pain.) This quango is, after all, supposed to be about standards….
Labeling and gaming Yesterday’s print edition of the Media Guardian had an advertisement from the Marketing Agencies Association headed ‘Life’s a game that marketers need to start playing’. The call-out quotation spelt labeled the American way: is that what marketers do, or this part of the war on language? Of course, the marketing people haven’t found anything new; as Ludwig Wittgenstein said many years ago, language is a game of two halves.
Brave marketeers Talking of alternative spellings, marketers are sometimes called marketeers, which makes them sound rather brave, dashing and – by association with buccaneers and privateers – also cavalier, irresponsible and untrustworthy. Thanks, as ever, to the OED, I learn that marketeer goes back to least 1665. It also helpfully tells me that ‘in many of the words so formed there is a more or less contemptuous implication, as in crotcheteer, garreteer, pamphleteer, pulpiteer, sonneteer.’
Pure Kant? In Sunday’s Observer Christopher Bray provides an upmarket example of the put-down rhetorical question:

Kant isn’t much fun either, of course, but which of us would deny the certainty-subverting genius of the “first critique”?

Come on, hands up: which of us?
Cooking the books? One from the literature front: today’s Telegraph reports Michael Gove’s latest wheeze: ‘pupils should read 50 books a year’. Splendid! But why did the paper choose to illustrate this with an image of old cookery books, one ironically titled Modern Cookery? Is Mikey cooking the books again? Does he want a generation of cooks and scullery maids? The Secretary of State himself appears on a second version of this same story on the Telegraph website, pulling that face of his (‘Yes, this is a bit of joke, but what larks!’). He’s not actually holding any books either, just a clutch of files – probably containing cunning plans to take us forward to the age of Nigel Molesworth. It seems the Telegraph marketeers are intent on gaming with their content.

That’s different!

Different from or different to?

Oxford Modern English Grammar — by Bas Aarts

I received an email this morning from a friend who has a touching faith in my ability to know the answers to such questions:

Which is correct – people having different views from you or people having different views to you?

Well, here’s a thing to provoke a domestic argument! My wife, who had just walked through the door, was emphatic it must be from. My new Oxford Modern English Grammar, acquired only yesterday, is absolutely no help – it even says ‘The account of grammar presented in this book is descriptive, not prescriptive.’ Fat lot of use that is, Professor Aarts, when people are begging to be told what to say! My fault, of course, for expecting a descriptive grammar to provide a prescriptive answer. I turned instead to Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words:

‘Different from’ is… the usual form in most sentences… But when ‘different’ introduces a clause, there can be no valid objection to following it with a ‘to’… or ‘than’…

The Guardian Style Guide is rather more assertive:

different from is traditionally the correct form, although different to is widely accepted nowadays (but note that you would always say differs from, not differs to); different than is wrong, at least in British English.

No room for choice there – but what about that magisterial tome, the complete Oxford English Dictionary?

The usual construction is now with from; that with to (after ‘unlike’, ‘dissimilar to’) is found in writers of all ages, and is frequent colloquially, but is by many considered incorrect. The construction with than (after ‘other than’), is found in Fuller, Addison, Steele, De Foe, Richardson, Goldsmith, Miss Burney, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray, Newman, Trench, and Dasent, among others….

I can’t help feeling that just three writers might have made the point – is the list of fifteen a sign of insecurity? Surely not, merely of comprehensive authority! After all this, what was my friend’s response to the advice I provided?

Are you trying to confuse me even more? Audio typing… is hard enough… without the grammatical complications that are hindering my progress!

Well, Hilary, sometimes the route to clarity lies through a thicket of confusion which we have to hack away to the very roots in order for clarity to prevail. Of course, sometimes we get lost, drop the scythe and can’t find it in the undergrowth. Now where was I…?

Contains mild language

Is mild language so rare as to be shocking?

Spotted on a poster at Buxton Community School last night, advertising a student production called Threads: ‘contains mild language’. As the OED definition of mild includes ‘not giving offence to others’, I assume this isn’t the 1984 television drama about nuclear war written by Barry Hines. I wonder if this warning is to prepare an audience hoping for something satisfyingly controversial that they might be shocked by the bandying of terms such as nesh, soft and even nice.
Alas, such thrills were not for me: instead, I enjoyed a two hour presentation on the future for the local authority, the challenge of academies, free schools and the like. Some folk didn’t seem very mild about that, though (to quote Friday’s Phrase) no sabres were rattled.

Who should wear the dunce’s hat?

Daily Telegraph gets heated about errors in an email

It’s easy to detect the Telegraph‘s disgust when reporting that a Head teacher has been forced to apologise for an error-laden report – it is, after all, the paper of Simon Heffer. The journalist duly comments that the fourteen errors ‘indicate a need for the teacher to be sent back to primary school’.

More surprising, for me, was the content of the discussion thread that followed the article, in which many of the commenters end up tearing into the Telegraph‘s journalist and editors – and even each for misplaced pedantry. Here’s a taste – you can read them if full here:

There’s also the cretinous use of a comma instead of a full stop, right after the “8’s”.

So says ‘Col Dee’ (hardly diplomatic language – oops, we’ve just learnt from Wikileaks how diplomats really talk).

‘Dunces’ hats’ has an apostrophe. Several hats belong to several dunces or possibly Telegraph reporters….
“7’s and 8’s” should not have apostrophes. There is no ownership, just a description of a group. The Telegraph should have spotted this….

This provoked ‘micha2600’ to complain:

Unfortunately the readers of the DT seem to have lost their grasp of reality and appear to prefer navel gazing and discussing minutii….

Which elicited the response:

Actually, minutii (sic) should be minutiae as it comes from a Latin rather than a Greek root.

At least ‘osaycanuck’ had the good grace to add:

Should that error detract from the meaning of what the writer was trying to say? IMHO, no.

The use of the abbreviation IMHO in the response here is hardly the norm for, say, a report to parents, though part of the lingua franca of online conversation. It’s all a matter of register (as teacher might say) isn’t it?