English Language

ENGLISH LANGUAGE OF TOMORROW

March 15, 2017

The telecopying of document (i.e. creation, transmission, and recovery of facsimiles) was with us for almost a century, from the dawn of telephony — but not very popular until the name of the process was shortened to the catchy word, “fax.” That is a sharp illustration of the power of a succinct word or phrase. For the same reason, the word for photographs (“pictures”) is now routinely replaced with “pix”; and nobody talks about taking a self-portrait (with a cell phone) anymore, but just a “selfie.”

Where does it end? And is it really creative? Does it not lead to obfuscation, making an otherwise clear message quite murky? Not long ago the media used to refer to police dogs as a “Canine Unit” (from canis, the Latin word for dog). Then someone realized that “canine” sounded like “K-9” and now even our print media have abandoned the accurate forms and begun to write routinely about “K-9s” in police units.

One wonders why “K-9” is now preferred in US English. K-9 is not easier or shorter to write or say than “dog” or “canine.” It is not even a clarification: indeed it is the opposite of clarification. Soon students will no longer know or remember the provenance of the term “K-9.” The degradation of our language is going beyond words to embrace the emerging fusion of words and pictures. In cell phone text messaging “U” stands for you, “ur” for your, “2” for “to,” and “4” for “for.” Thus, “I heart u” means I love you (the heart becoming a proxy for love). Now, try and translate “A K-9 is gud 4 u”; that’s the standard English of cell-phone texting, no doubt the English language of tomorrow.

And then there’s the fastest-growing sector of obfuscation: the perceived need to “supersize” every existing word, especially adjectives. It used to be a thing was small, medium, or large (big); then, with time, along came “enormous” from Latin e-normis (literally out of the normal); later we discovered “gigantic” (for “big as a giant”) and “tremendous” (causing a quake by its sheer size!). Then the “baby-boomer” generation created “humongous” (perhaps a cut-and-nail amalgam of “huge” and “monstrous”). Nowadays, teenagers combine “gigantic” and “enormous” to fashion “ginormous.” Inundated as we are with frenetic commercial advertising, we have all become self-boosters now, leap-frogging one-another with escalating comparisons.

Where will it all end?

March 15, 2017 0 comment

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AN INTRODUCTION

written by Lyn Thomas-Ogbuji

Life’s Lessons Learned

The dynamics of English language can be very baffling to the non-native speaker trained in the tradition of formal/written (as opposed to colloquial/vernacular) usage. US English is especially quirky. In the book Mother Tongue & How it Got That Way an oriental businessman is quoted as telling his countrymen not to be daunted because they might make mistakes when expressing themselves to Americans in English: “They cannot speak their own language, anyway!” he said. And right he is too. There is a lot of babbling in the USA! While Americanism may be charming and catchy in colloquial usage, some of it is downright incongruous in written communication. The distinction between colloquial and written English is often ignored in the USA these days. The rot is spreading furiously now that everyone feels emancipated from restraint and entitled to write as they please without oversight.

English language is, so to speak, the final frontier of an all-too-familiar steam-rolling American dominance in world affairs. British imperialism planted English language in all corners of the globe and US military, economic, and social dominance consolidates that trend, making English a second language for nearly everyone on the globe. But whereas the British required all users of the language to conform to a rigid structure in grammar and syntax, American English is free-wheeling, in keeping with the irrepressible individuality of Americans. As the bold initiators of change in our world, with boundless drive and a pronounced disregard for they way things are done anywhere else, Americans are changing English rapidly ― for better and for worse. US English is, ultimately, an expression of the hegemony of a peerless and pushy people.

At first the US immigrant from a former British colony is intimidated by the honey-smooth flow of the American accent. He starts to copy the style, warts and all, just to be “with it” and to get along. He begins to pronounce the second month of the year as “Ferb-you-wary” (which seems to be OK because even British commentators now use that pronunciation). Then he gets a note from his college-educated boss saying “We may loose money do to your error,” and he begins to wonder: Does anyone care anymore? Do Americans use the dictionary? Do they really learn English in high school? Does the use of correct English matter at all?

Declension of pronouns is muddled ― so that presidential candidate Bill Clinton once kicked off his cross-country bus tour with the folksy message to rally attendees: “If you have any questions send them to Al Gore and I.…” (Did anyone understand that Mr. Clinton was saying: “Send your questions to Al Gore and/or send them to I”?) Verb conjugation is going too. “If I was you” is much more common than the correct formulation, “If I were you.” We may overlook oddities of colloquial expression; otherwise we alienate too many people, for instance by observing that the “dee-poh” in Home Depot (or the “deb-you” for debut) is really neither French nor English but a higgledy-piggledy amalgam of both languages. But what of errors in written communication? Should we ignore them too? Must I guess the meaning behind your sentence? If so, at what point shall we become mutually unintelligible?

Ask Johnny how he’s doing and he will reply: “I’m doing good.” Not long ago that would have meant that he is performing charitable deeds! Perhaps because of its ending in “ly,” the word “likely” has morphed entirely from adjective to adverb. Casting a sentence in the subjunctive mood was always challenging at best with its troublesome requirement of a verb in the infinitive tense; now it is altogether a lost art. Actually, it has been said that whereas the British have only recently began to fudge the subjunctive mood, Americans never bought into it in the first place.
Among the most noticeable changes in written English (one hesitates to call modern American popular writing “literature”) is, that the hyphen is following the semi-colon and the serial comma into oblivion. Those changes in punctuation style are accelerated by the proliferation of text editing features embedded in nearly all software and textual apps we use. If you are reading this text on an electronic screen you will notice several words or phrases underlined in blue or red. Many instances of such machine editing turn out to be wrong, and if you click on the underlined passage you are apt to receive a wild and horrible suggestion for an alternative! All it shows is that those hidden text editors are no better-informed than the persons who wrote them in the first place. I almost always ignore all the editing prompts in MS Word. (Most useless and ubiquitous is the prompt that says, “Fragmentary; consider revising.”)

FUNDRAISING, SHOPLIFTING and THANKSGIVING are similar constructions: in each case a noun is formed by plugging a gerund onto another noun, in the lego style that is quite common in the German language. One can imagine that not long ago the preferred style was to connect the noun and gerund with a hyphen; however, the hyphen is becoming extinct. If you change the gerund to its verb of origin the similarity between the three words vanishes. “They shoplifted” is OK but not “They fundraised” or “They thanksgave.” If you wonder why that is so then you are getting to the heart of the matter, the very spirit of this blog. What is right or wrong in English language is often not a matter of logic, of rhyme or reason. Good English is to a large extent idiomatic, and idioms are a matter of conformity, acquired by learning (aka imitation) rather than by I-too-can-improvise derring-do.

But while tinkering with English grammar and syntax is not for the dilettante, expanding the vocabulary with home-minted words is a different matter. Now and then we find new words injected into the language by some intrepid souls. Recently a blogger dismissed the contrary views of an opponent as “mere hopium” (thus fusing the two words ‘hope’ and ‘opium’ to create a neat, derogatory tag that means essentially addiction to unreasonable hope). Note that blog, and tweet and their derivatives blogger and tweeter, etc. are themselves brave recent coinages spawned by new technology (just like ‘broadcast’ and ‘broadcaster,’ which passed into Queen’s English with the onset of radio communication right after World War II).

May 23, 2015 0 comment

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KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

written by Lyn Thomas-Ogbuji

The dynamics of English language can be baffling to non-native speakers trained in the tradition of formal/written usage (as opposed to the colloquial/vernacular). US English is especially quirky. An ad for Rosetta Stone (the language learning tutorial) states that the average American does not speak a second language. That may not matter these days when the whole world is gravitating to English language under the spell of America. What may be troubling is the question of whether the average American has sufficient mastery of English, especially for written communication. In the book MOTHER TONGUE AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY, an oriental businessman is quoted as telling his countrymen not to be daunted because they might make mistakes when expressing themselves to Americans in English: “They cannot speak their own language, anyway!” he said. He is right: US English can seem like a lot of babbling! While we may find Americanisms charming and catchy in colloquial usage, some of it is incongruous in written communication. The distinction between colloquial and written English is often ignored in the USA these days. The rot is spreading furiously now that everyone feels emancipated from restraint and entitled to write as they please without oversight.

English language is, so to speak, the final frontier of an all-too-familiar steam-rolling American dominance in world affairs. British imperialism planted English language in all corners of the globe and US military, economic, and social dominance consolidates that trend, making English a second language for nearly everyone on the globe. But whereas the British required all users of the language to conform to a rigid structure in grammar and syntax, US English is free-wheeling, in keeping with the irrepressible individuality of Americans. As bold initiators of change in our world, with boundless drive and a cultivated disregard for how things are done anywhere else, Americans are changing English rapidly ― for better and for worse. US English is, ultimately, an expression of the hegemony of a peerless and pushy people.

At first the US immigrant from a former British colony is intimidated by the honey-smooth flow of the American accent. He starts to copy the style, warts and all, just to be “with it” and to get along. He begins to pronounce the second month of the year as “Ferb-you-wary” (which seems to be OK because even British commentators now use that pronunciation). Then he gets a note from his college-educated boss saying “We may loose [sic] work days do [sic] to bad weather,” and he begins to wonder: Does anyone care anymore? Do Americans use the dictionary? Do they really learn English in high school? Does the use of correct English matter at all?

Ask Johnny how he’s doing and he will reply: “I’m doing good.” Not long ago that would have meant that he was performing charitable deeds! Perhaps because of its ending in “ly,” the word “likely” has morphed entirely from adjective to adverb. Casting a sentence in the subjunctive mood was always challenging at best with its troublesome requirement of a verb in the infinitive tense; now it is altogether a lost art. Actually, it has been said that whereas the British have only recently begun to fudge the subjunctive mood, Americans never bought into it in the first place.

Among the most noticeable changes in written English (one hesitates to call modern American popular writing “literature”) is, that the hyphen is following the semi-colon and the serial comma into oblivion. Those changes in punctuation style are accelerated by the proliferation of text editing features embedded in nearly all software and textual apps we use. If you are reading this text on an electronic screen you will notice several words or phrases underlined in blue or red. Many instances of such machine editing turn out to be wrong, and if you click on the underlined passage you are apt to receive a wild and horrible suggestion for an alternative! All it shows is that those hidden text editors are no better-informed than the persons who wrote them in the first place. I almost always ignore all the editing prompts in MS Word. (Most useless and ubiquitous is the prompt that says, “Fragmentary; consider revising.”)

January 5, 2015 0 comment

English Language slider

Mind Your Language!

written by Lyn Thomas-Ogbuji

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE!

This is a new site, full of hope and trepidation! What you can expect to see at this site are the issues and snafus that attend communication between people in the USA.

This blog is a commentary on those peculiarities of the American usage of the English language, reflecting a highly popular tendency to blaze one’s own trail, right or wrong. Americans call their most popular game “football,” when it is almost never played with the foot (and with utter disregard for the billions of people the world over who play their football with the foot). They ride to the moon and beyond in spacecraft that still measure quantities in “bushels,” “inches,” and “pounds,” with implicit disdain for the rest of humanity who have coalesced completely around metric mensuration for generations now. But most notable Americanisms occur in communication: such as the blustery assertion, “I don’t want no nothin’ from nobody.”

During my third year in the USA, a colleague in grad school said something that gave me pause. He had asked what time of year I first arrived in the USA. To show off my two-year acculturation into US English I replied, “Fer-byu-wary.” The colleague smiled ruefully and said: “Most of you Africans come here speaking proper English, but then slide into the casual American way of saying things.” I smiled, and corrected myself, “Fe-bru-ary.”

He was right, of course. But the urge to conform to Americanisms is very strong among immigrants. As the saying goes, “You have to go along in order to get along.” So, before long some of us from Anglophone West Africa begin to babble in the American way. We learn to make popular mistakes like the following (the underlined words are redundant or incorrect):

“Thanks, ya-all.”

“We drug the couch across the room.”

“Get off of me.”

“She brung lunch.”

“He’s not that tall of a man.”

“Where’s he at?” (“Where” means “at what place”; thus, repeating “at” amounts to tautology.)

Does all this matter? Well, it depends. It may not be “that big of a deal” when we are engaged in vocal conversation. But in written communication one is likely to be misunderstood by wrong words or phrases. Conversation, after all, is often clarified by being augmented with other, non-verbal cues—body language gestures like nods and smiles—especially when one is addressing peers who share his vernacular. A mother who admonishes her son, “Don’t tell no lies to nobody!” is unlikely to be misunderstood. But when you communicate in writing, your audience has nothing but your exact words to tell them what you mean. That is why the rules of grammar and syntax are in place for “formal” (i.e. written) English. That is the area that concerns us in this blog.

The American gusto for improvisation fosters innovation, yes; but also quite often it leaves you scratching your head. Please come in! You can scratch my head and I will scratch yours, OK?

December 30, 2014 4 comments