You can't have too many vowels

Yesterday I received an email (as a C.C.) where the sender couldn't remember if the person he was writing to spelled his name "Neil" or "Neal", so he compromised with Neail.

That's very ... something.

Pedagogy

I think this anecdote is amusing. Sad, but also amusing.

As director of communications I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo one of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office and told that the executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for "perverts" working in her company. Finally he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired, and the word "pedagogical" circled in red.

The HR manager was fairly reasonable and once he looked the word up in his dictionary, and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry. He would take care of it.

Two days later a memo to the entire staff came out, directing us that no words which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.

You can look up the word here.

Noir versus gonzo

Mrs Impala and I were discussing the differences between noir and gonzo:

Mrs Impala: "Noir is a mysteriously-buttoned trenchcoat. Gonzo is sleeping in clothes that got torn somewhere you don't even remember."

Me: "... in a bathtub."

Mrs Impala: "Well, naturally. The bathtub goes without saying."

Anarchy

Bad writing and poor grammar

One of the most pernicious myths about English grammar is that you should never split an infinitive. Linguists point out time and time again that the prohibition against splitting infinitives makes no sense in English, and that it was originally derived from Latin and French where it is impossible to split an infinitive.

An infinitive is a verb with the word "to". For example:

• We plan TO GO immediately home.


• At the time I intended TO INVADE only half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO KICK the guy viciously.

And here they are again split:

• We plan TO immediately GO home.


• At the time I intended TO only INVADE half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO viciously KICK the guy.

There's no doubt that sometimes splitting infinitives can weaken a sentence, but very often it makes it clearer and stronger. In case you still believe that infinitives should never be split, please read this and this and this.

But then there are still those who continue to spread the superstition that splitting infinitives is bad grammar, like the aptly-named "Lousy Writer". When I first came across his site, I had just spent a delightful half hour or so browsing the World Wide Words site. Compared to Michael Quinion's delightful prose, which has flow and rhythm, going to the Lousy Writer site is like having your eyeballs sand-blasted. I can't imagine taking the Lousy Writer's advice on style matters, or common English idioms.

There's at least one common construction where even the most rabid "Thou
Shalt Not Split Infinitives" mavens end up splitting their infinitives:

• An effective way TO more than DOUBLE your income is by mugging little old ladies.

On a related note, are you shamed by you English?



Click thumbnail for full-sized image.

The dilemna of spelling dilemma

My brain just broke. Apparently, there are millions of people across the English-speaking world who have been taught by school teachers and text books to spell dilemma with a silent N.

See the comments such as:

I grew up in Los Angeles, started kindergarten in 1962. I, too, was taught to spell it dilemna. My understanding was that the spelling was later changed. It’s hard to believe that we all were merely being taught to spell a word incorrectly. It had to have been in textbooks all over the country.

and

I know that I learned the MN spelling at some point in school, because I have always used the mnemonic (please don’t tell me I’ve been spelling THAT incorrectly, too) trick of pronouncing it silently as “dil-em-na” whenever I write it, so that I am (was) sure to remember the important silent-N.

And this was before the coming of the amazing misinformation delivery system known as Teh Interwebs.

Googlefight shows there is a small but significant minority who have been taught to insert a silent-N into dilemma: 346,000 hits compared to 32,300,000 hits.

I before E

There's a mnemonic to help you remember the correct spelling of ie/ei words:

I before E except after C,
and when sounding like Ay as in neighbour and weigh,
and on weekends and holidays, and all throughout May.

I like this version better than the more commonly heard British and American ones, because in my opinion in demonstrates the absurdity of any rules where there are so many exceptions -- perhaps more exceptions than words that actually follow the rule.

Here are just a handful of the exceptions:

beige, caffeine, eight, either, feisty, foreign, freight, heifer, heist, leisure, neither, seize, sheik, species, veil, weird

Many people have tried to extend the I before E rule with various caveats and qualifications, eventually reaching the height of absurdity above. There's a spirited defence of the English-style I before E rule here, but I think it is informative that although the author gives no fewer than twenty exceptions to the extended rule, he only gives six words that follow the rule:

relieve, belief, irretrievable; receive, deceit, inconceivable

Despite all the caveats, there are exceptions to all the extended rules, which leads me to the conclusion that the rule simply is no good as a general purpose mnemonic.

Unique leopard

The WWF is reporting the discovery of a new species of clouded leopard from Borneo. Genetic tests have shown that it is a different species to the clouded leopard from the mainland of Southeast Asia, with almost as many differences as between lions and tigers. There are about 40 genetic differences between the two species of clouded leopard, and 56 between lions and tigers.

But what's especially interesting is that apparently there's only one of them, and it's at least 100 years old:

"For over a hundred years we have been looking at this animal and never realized it was unique," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo program

*raises eyebrow*

McJobs

According to page five of today's MX, McDonalds is upset about the dictionary definition of "McJob", and have asked the Oxford English Dictionary to remove the definition.

The OED defines "McJob" as:

an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector

MX reports that McDonalds' executives say that the definition demeans its workers.

Well, here's a thought. Maybe if McDonalds is concerned about its workers being demeaned, maybe they should stop putting them in jobs that demean them?

This is one instance where shooting the messenger simply won't work. Even if the OED caves and removes the word, it isn't going to make a lick of difference. The word was created by the public, and was used for years long before the OED even considered putting it in the dictionary. The OED doesn't invent words, it reports on words that are in use. The words will remain in use even if the OED doesn't include it.

Doyen

I subscribe to Dictionary.com's Word of the Day newsletter. Saturday's word was "doyen". From the newsletter:

doyen \DOY-en; DWAH-yan\, noun:

1. The senior member of a body or group.
2. One who is knowledgeable or uniquely skilled as a result of long
experience in some field of endeavor.
3. A woman who is a doyen.

A woman who is a doyen? How come they don't include "a man who is a doyen"?

I think definition number three is actually from "doyenne", although that begs the question for why there needs to be a separate word for a male doyen and a female doyenne.

Invincible

One of the best science fiction TV programs around these days is Heroes. Despite the derivative premise (sort of a three-way mutant hybrid of the X-Men, the X Files and 24) Heroes is quality television: well-written, well-acted, well-made, with excellent production values and characters you can really care about.

Alas, one thing really grates on my nerves: an egregious mistake in plain English by the voice-over at the start of many episodes. One of the heroes is schoolgirl Claire Bennet, who has the power to regenerate from virtually any physical injury. That makes her invulnerable to permanent injury.

Not according to the voice-over, which describes her as "invincible". As in, can't be beaten or defeated.

I'm not the only one who gets annoyed at this mistake. Wandering teh Interweb more or less at random, I stumbled across this post on LiveJournal:

every time the voiceover at the start of an episode refers to Claire as "invincible", we shout "GET A DICTIONARY, DUDES!" Sure, she's effectively "invulnerable" and apparently, well, ultimately ~coughs~ unkillable. But invincible? No bloody way. All it takes to conquer her, as it were, is Daddy Bennet saying, "Claire, you're grounded!" :P

Plural of virus

There are many schools of thought on the question of what is the plural of virus. Or to be precise, seven schools of thought.

The first is that virus is an irregular noun, derived from the Latin word for "poison", and therefore we need to make it a plural in the same way we would with syllabus/syllabi, fungus/fungi or cactus/cacti: "viri".

The second school of thought is that "viri" is bogus, because that in fact is the Latin word for men, not poisons, and therefore we need to make virus plural by dropping the -us ending and adding two i's, just like the Romans did with filius/filii (son/sons): "virii".

The third school of thought is that the word is virus and not virius, and anyone who would hallucinate an extra i in the word is obviously a nutter. There is no recorded use in Latin of virus being used in the plural: it is an uncountable word, like air[1] or bravery, and so didn't take a plural.

Therefore, like chassis, corps, deer, moose, sheep (and sometimes fish) the plural is the same as the singular: "one virus, two virus".

The fourth school of thought is that saying two virus is just wrong, no matter what the rules for bloody 4th declension uncountable nouns are, and that perhaps virus in the original Latin was like corpus/corpora, opus/opera and genus/genera: "virora".

The fifth school of thought is that the plural of virus, like certain other Greek words, should be "vire".

(This is the point where the first four schools of thought batter the fifth school with a Clue Stick, because virus was not a Greek word.)

The sixth school of thought is that "virorum" sounds about right, if virus was a second declension neuter noun, which it wasn't, and if we thought to correct the Romans' own spelling, which we don't.

The seventh school of thought is that we aren't ancient Romans, and the English word virus is not the Latin word meaning poison, and we aren't obliged to follow the Latin rules of making words plural any more than we are obliged to follow Latin grammar.

Therefore virus is a regular noun, and we make it a plural using the same rule used for words like bus/buses and campus/campuses.

So there you have it: seven possibilities, all of which (with the exception of virii, which is just dumb) have respectable rationalisations, although the one for "vire" is really stretching it.

Viri, virii, virus, virora, vire, virorum and viruses. Which is correct?

When faced with a difficult question like this, there is only one way to decide:

GOOGLE FIGHT!!!

http://www.googlefight.com/

Obviously we can't include "virus", because any search we do will find the singular as well as the plural. Besides, while virus to the Romans was an uncountable noun, like "fun" or "information", in the modern English sense it is countable. So virus is out on a technical disqualification.

On with the Googlefight! Last word standing is the winner!

Round One:
VIRI defeats VIRII 2,380,000 to 711,000

Round Two:
VIRI thrashes VIRORA 2,380,000 to 582

Round Three:
VIRE defeats VIRI 4,400,000 to 2,380,000

Round Four:
VIRE soundly defeats VIRORUM 4,400,000 to 267,000

Round Five:
VIRUSES tramples VIRE into the ground, stomping it flat and doing a little victory dance over its bloody corpse with a comprehensive 50,900,000 to 4,400,000 massacre.

But wait... fight officials are investigating the participants for the illegal use of acronyms, place-names and words in Foreign to bulk up their scores. So let's repeat the Googlefights with more focused terms:

COMPUTER VIRII defeats COMPUTER VIRI 313,000 to 144,000
COMPUTER VIRII defeats COMPUTER VIRORA 313,000 to 135
COMPUTER VIRII defeats COMPUTER VIRE 313,000 to 187,000
(Vire isn't so tough without all those place-names, hey?)
COMPUTER VIRII defeats COMPUTER VIRORUM 313,000 to 14,800
COMPUTER VIRUSES defeats COMPUTER VIRII 18,700,000 to 313,000

The results speak for themselves: despite apparently 313,000 over-educated but not-quite-as-educated-as-they-thought Latin-philes and/or L33t5, VIRUSES is the overwhelming winner. And all is well with the world.

---

Aside: this exercise is an interesting example of the growth of the 'Net. I had originally done these Googlefights back on 23 November 2004, with considerably different results:

Word	2004	2006
viri	389,000	2,380,000
virii	426,000	711,000
virora	309	582
vire	397,000	4,400,000
virorum	35,000	267,000
viruses	11,700,000	50,900,000

[1] Air in the sense of what we breathe. "Airs and graces" seems to be the only exception, and that is merely a figurative sense. Back

Stories in just six words

Wired has a collection of short stories written by science fiction, fantasy and horror writers. These are seriously short stories: just six words each.

Some of them are actually quite good. But they aren't stories. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end; a story has a plot, and one or more protagonists. These don't have any of those elements, not really. But they do communicate something, perhaps not a plot, perhaps an event or a feeling or an image. In just six words, they paint a picture in words.

Or, to put it another way:

Six words. Not story. Word picture.

I need a word

I need another word for minimise, but I'm not sure whether lessenate or smallify best captures the connotations of minimise.

Yahoo gets it, Google doesn't

Earlier, I discussed Google Inc.'s nastygrams to various media people ordering them to stop using the verb "google". It seems that Yahoo knows the value of the English language: they've put out the word that they want people to re-mix their brand.

Google says no more googling

I like Google™. I am critical of their actions sometimes, but in general they are one of the less evil of the big corporations. But sometimes they need to learn the lesson of King Canute: you can't keep the tide from coming in.

Google Inc. has been sending nastygrams to media organisations, warning them to stop using google as a verb.

Sorry guys, but the tide has come in. Google is now listed in at least three dictionaries, two in English and one in Japanese. In two of those, "google" is listed as a verb. Google Inc., like so many before them (elevator, escalator, zipper...) is a victim of their own success: google has become a generic term for "search the Internet". Of course, Google Inc. has to try to defend their trademark, and no doubt there is a difference between Google™ the noun and google the verb. But for a company whose corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil", Google Inc. need to actually, um, stop being evil. If Hormel Foods Corporation can distinguish between Spam™ the tasty food-like product and spam the evil unsolicited email, Google Inc. can stop trying to stop the tide from coming in too.

Oh, and guys... your website is full of dozens of references to "Google" with nary an trademark ™ or registered trademark ® symbol to be seen. There's a ™ on the Google logo, and that's about it. Sloppy, real sloppy. That's the sort of thing that will convince a judge that you aren't really serious about your trademarks.

At least Google Inc. can take cold comfort in the fact that though competitors will (soon) be able to talk about "googling the Web for something using Acme.Search.Com" the owner of google.com will have a huge advantage over their competitors.

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. But google as a verb is generic, sorry guys. Get over it.

Physics Envy

The Tensor writes about physics envy in linguistics:

Let me be clear. I find language and linguistics fascinating, and I do not regret my choice of field. But an underground lab with "the lowest level of radiation of any point in the Solar System"? Goddamn, that's cool. We mere social social scientists never get to announce anything that so totally reeks of Big Science. Think about it. We'll never get to say something like:

• When fully pressurized, gentlemen, this hyperverbal chamber will contain the highest density of lexical items ever observed.


• After parsing this quintuply-nested onion sentence, Broca's area in the subject's brain will achieve a temperature nine times hotter than the surface of the sun.


• The submicrosecond collapse of this precise mixture of passive and antipassive verb forms produces mutual annihilation and a burst of hard gamma rays.

Politics and the English language

A classic, timeless piece by George Orwell that everybody interested in politics or writing should read.

Word of the Day: Dysphemism

Dysphemism

n : an offensive or disparaging expression that is substituted for an inoffensive one; "his favorite dysphemism was to ask for axle grease when he wanted butter"

That leads me to ask, what would be a euphemism for "dysphemism"? Perhaps "crudity".

How about a dysphemism for "euphemism"? "Bowdlerism" comes to mind.