The virtual linguist

Flabbergasting

I needed to look up a French word in the dictionary earlier (the word was ahurissant) and the English translation given was 'flabbergasting'. I think that flabbergasting is a rare form of the verb to flabbergast - although the infinitive flabbergast isn't used much either. Having said that, I've just put flabbergasting into Google News page and there are several instances of it, mostly in US papers.

The verb is usually seen in the form flabbergasted, and even then it is used as an adjective eg I was flabbergasted. Its origin is unknown, although the OED suggests it may have come from a regional dialect, possibly Suffolk or from Perthshire in Scotland. Another suggestion of the OED is that it is a made-up word from flab or flap and aghast.

The OED also has the rather nice word flabbergastation, the act of flabbergasting or the state of being flabbergasted. It also has a lovely variant of flabbergast, sadly only a nonce-word -- flabberdegasky.

Road signs to be written in Cornish

Local government councillors in Cornwall have voted to replace road signs in Cornwall with bilingual versions (article and video report here). There is no-one in Cornwall who can't understand the English so needs the Cornish - the Cornish language died out as a first language in the 18th century, although as I said in this recent post, it is being successfully revived. The council has taken the decision for cultural and economic reasons - the language is part of 'brand Cornwall'.

Language is inextricably linked with culture, so it makes sense to try and keep languages alive or even regenerate them by offering adult education classes, printing books and dictionaries etc. Welsh has been revived as a result of human effort, and we can all benefit from that, not just Welsh speakers.

The British government's position regarding Cornish is that it recognises it as a minority language and does contribute a modest amount of money to promoting the language. I cover that issue in this post.

Not only is there a fully-fledged Cornish language, but there are also Cornish dialect words in English. One common one is emmet, which means a tourist (standard English meaning is an ant, although it's now found only in old literature and crosswords). One of the commentators uses it in response to this local newspaper article. 

Apostrophe vandal and St Johns Close

The most viewed article on the Daily Telegraph's website is this one about a 62-year-old former soldier who painted in an apostrophe on his road sign, St Johns Close. I added a comment to the story (although it's not as amusing as other comments) and have covered apostrophes before in my blog.

There is a tendency for apostrophes to be dropped from many names these days. I think it may be something to do with computers and the internet, as apostrophes cannot form part of URLs or internet addresses. I suspect that companies are leaving them out to avoid confusing people. As some of the Daily Telegraph commentators mention, there is not a lot of logic to apostrophes in names of towns beginning St. St Helens, St Andrews and St Albans don't have apostrophes although St Mary's (largest of the Scilly Isles) and St John's in Newfoundland do.

One company bucking the trend for omitting apostrophes is Chop'd, a takeaway salad bar I walked past recently in St Pancras Station (no apostrophe, I've just checked their website). I doubt they need to worry what people will type as an internet address as most of their business must come from passing footfall; people don't google when looking for a lunchtime sandwich. 

Dunce

When researching an article on eponyms (also mentioned here) I discovered that the word dunce is an eponym.

It derives from the Scottish-born theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus, who died in 1308 (more about him on Wikipedia). At first his works were widely studied but by the 16th century he was regarded less kindly. Duns or Dunce was associated with the qualities of pointlessness and nit-picking. By the late 16th century dunce had acquired the meaning "a blockhead, one incapable of learning".  

Misspelling

Poor spelling has been in the news today. First Gordon Brown misspelt the name of a soldier killed in action in Afghanistan, in a letter to his parents (and apparently made twenty other spelling mistakes, although Brown claimed these were not spelling mistakes, but his execrable handwriting). More on that story here.

Also, the president of the Queen's English Society has claimed that British graduates are losing out in the job market because of their inability to spell. Even worse, doctors misspell drug names and patients die as a result. That story is here. 

In case anyone thinks I have misspelt 'misspelled', this word has two variants. Misspelt is the British variant (although the -ed ending is perfectly okay here) whilst misspelled is the preferred form in American English.

Good and goodly

Reporter Brian Hanrahan referred to a goodly crowd at the site of the old Berlin wall on BBC Radio 4's PM programme this evening. At one time goodly meant attractive or excellent, but now it means sizeable or quite large. It's a literary word, and when used in speech can carry ironic undertones (I don't think Hanrahan was being ironic - it was pouring with rain in Berlin so perhaps people had stayed away from the celebrations and he felt he couldn't use the word large).

Goodly is linguistically related to the word good, of course, which is an old Germanic word and is similar in other Germanic languages cf German gut. The OED suggests that the original sense of the word was 'fitting, suitable', making it a cognate of the Russian adjective godny, suitable.

Maladroit

Home Secretary Alan Johnson recently described the government's handling of immigration as 'maladroit'. This morning on Radio 4's Today programme (here for a few more days; scroll down to 08:10) Justin Webb began his report with the OED definition of maladroit (awkward, bungling, clumsy or inept), the on-the-spot reporter also gave a definition in her report "... that it had been maladroit, or inept", and in almost all newspaper reports the word maladroit is in quotation marks, suggesting that the media clearly think no-one understands the word.

You will of course recognise the etymology of the word if you know French. Mal means badly and à droit means rightly, or properly (literally 'to right'). Its first written usage, according to the OED, was in 1685. Interestingly, the adverb maladroitly came first, according to the OED - in 1673 in Dryden's Marriage à la Mode, although Dryden wrote it as three words.

Bob's your uncle

I watched the first episode of Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain (available on iplayer for another month) which looked at the period between 1901 and 1906. Marr said that the expression 'Bob's your uncle' was coined at this time.

The Bob in question was Lord Salisbury, three-time British prime minister between 1885 and 1902, whose real name was Robert (hence Bob) Cecil. He was succeeded in 1902 by Arthur Balfour, who just happened to be his nephew. The expression Bob's your uncle refers to the fact that Balfour got his position thanks to nepotism. He lost his (Tory) seat and position in the 1906 Liberal landslide.

It must be said that this explanation of the origin of the phrase is disputed and is not mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bob's your uncle is a British and Australian expression which means "that's all there is to it" or "if you do such-and-such a thing, everything will turn out all right". It appears in this recent article from The Scotsman about fertility problems where a woman being interviewed says "I just thought it would be a simple case of coming off the pill and Bob's your uncle".

Babies cry in a French or German accent

Some German biologists are claiming that babies cry in different 'accents' depending on the native language of their mother. This has led the researchers to hypothesise that babies begin to pick up language before they are born. Here is an informative and erudite article from today's Times, and here is a rather less erudite one from the Daily Mail entitled Ee wah gum! Babies cry with regional accents. The German study compared the crying of French and German infants. The Daily Mail has its own hypothesis, namely that British babies born in different regions of the country to parents speaking different dialects and with different accents, will also have their own distinctive crying patterns.

Not all linguists are convinced by the study, which showed that French babies' cries built up from a low to a higher pitch, while German infants' cries were the other way around, matching the intonation rhythm of the French and German languages.

Ee wah gum, by the way, is meant to be a pun on the northern dialect phrase ee bah gum, which means 'golly!' or 'well I never!'. It's supposed to be a Yorkshire phrase but I went to university in Leeds in Yorkshire and can't remember ever hearing anyone say it. The phrase by gum is in the OED. Gum is a corruption of God, as is the interjection golly.

Tawdry

I was commissioned to write an article on eponyms (words which derive from the names of people), and my brief was to ignore the eponyms that everyone knows, such as bloomers, hoover and boycott but to find others to write about. I delved into my dictionaries and came upon tawdry.

Tawdry, meaning cheap and nasty, or tacky, is an eponym, because the word derives from St Audrey, a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princess of East Anglia and patron saint of Ely. Audrey was also known by the name Etheldreda. Tawdry is short for the now obsolete expression tawdry lace. Legend has it that Audrey, a religious woman, died of a tumour in her throat. She believed the tumour grew because she was being divinely punished for her love of fine silk and lace neck ornaments. In the 16th century the women of East Anglia would buy tawdry lace adornments and jewellery at annual fairs held in honour of their patron saint. In time cheap and tacky versions of the necklaces were produced and sold at a lower price, hence today's meaning of the word tawdry.

This story reminds me a bit of the derivation of sleazy.