When we say "it's raining", what is the "it" that we're referring to? In fact, "it" doesn't exist - it's what's called a dummy or non-referential "it". Its function is grammatical rather than lexical. "Grammatical" refers to meaning signalled by such things as word order and other devices like "s" to denote a plural. "Dog bites man" has the same words as "man bites dog", but the meaning of each sentence is different thanks to the different word order. That's grammar in action. Every language has its own grammar. "Dog bites man" is a classic English subject-verb-object construction. Japanese, on the other hand, uses the subject-object-verb order - "man dog bites". In this respect, English is outvoted. In the 1980s, linguist Russell S. Tomlin reported that 45% of languages prefer the Japanese order, while "only" 42% prefer the English way. Hebrew, Irish and Zapotec opt for verb-subject-object - "bites man dog". Persian, Romanian and Finnish don't have a strict word order except in specific circumstances. You might notice that every sentence above, regardless of word order, is in agreement about what each individual word means. "Man" means "man", no matter where you put it. This is what is meant by "lexical meaning", also called denotation, also called the dictionary meaning of words. "Bites man dog" is full of lexical meaning, even though the sentence itself is jibberish to an English speaker. Which brings us back to the dummy or non-referential "it". It lacks lexical meaning - that is, it doesn't refer to anything "out there" in the world. But that doesn't make it empty. "It's raining" tells you something. The dummy "it" behaves differently in different variations of English. In some creole languages such as Gullah, rather than say "there's a spider in the shower", a speaker would say "it's a spider in the shower", replacing the dummy "there" with a dummy "it". Having defended the dummy words, now let me get out my shotgun for a moment. Because it requires so little thought, the dummy "there" is a common feature of weak writing. If your writing is stuffed with sentences like “there are five roads leading into the city”, you're placing a lot of empty words in your prose. One way to become more concise and energetic at the same time is to revise them to read “five roads lead into the city”.
1 Comment
Today's word is in honour of the remarkable 17-year-old Lydia Ko (left), who has just capped off her first season on the LPGA Tour by winning the CME Group Tour Championship and, with it, just under $2m in prize money. Oh yeah, she's also been named rookie of the year. Phenomenal! I'd always assumed that links derived from the fact that the 18 holes on a golf course are linked, chain-like, in a predetermined sequence. But no. It turns out that links is a Scottish/Northumbrian term for undulating sandy ground, often near the sea. It comes from the Old English hlinc, "rising ground, ridge". It was on this type of ground that the first games of golf in Scotland, home of this venerable game, were first played. I'll bet Lydia already knew that. The star. Apostrophe abuse ranks somewhere between whale hunting and the Government hocking off state-owned assets as a reliable topic for engendering outbursts of indignity. My own heart did a little leap for joy when I spotted this misuse at our local Mitre 10. Note the (admittedly difficult to see) apostrophe in "wok's", after which the author seemingly lost heart, interest or confidence, or ran out of apostrophes, and thus failed to continue the misuse in the following items. Apostrophes get misused in so many ways that if they were human, they'd surely have their own lobby group to defend their downtrodden selves. The most popular misuse - affectionately known as the grocer's apostrophe - is as shown here, where it's slapped, often randomly, onto a plural. For some mysterious reason, it almost seems like a law that grocers must write potato's, bean's, cucumber's and so on. Or potatos', beans', cucumbers'. But before coming down too hard on your local vege stall, note that apostrophes have their detractors. George Bernard Shaw called them "uncouth bacilli" and British phonetician Dr John Wells said they're "a waste of time". He speaks 10 languages, so he probably has some idea of what he's talking about. Apostrophes are a fairly recent addition to English, having been borrowed from the French in the 16th century. They've been put to all kinds of tasks ever since (who writes "look'd" a la Shakespeare these days?), and one of the challenges for anyone more interested in selling broccoli than mastering the fine points of English is keeping track of all those uses. My heart goes out to the greengrocer's (sic). Then there are those who take the opposite view. The Apostrophe Protection Society (Motto: The whales can go hang) deserves grudging respect for its efforts "to protect, promote and defend the differences between plural and possessive". So far, though, it's not looking too good for them. A 2008 survey found that nearly half of the UK adults polled were unable to use the apostrophe correctly. Here's an experiment for any reader not sure of this word's meaning. From its sound alone, would you guess it to be a positive or a derogatory term? Did you plump for derogatory? It does sound kind of down-and-dirty, doesn't it? (When I asked my wife to guess the meaning, she said "something that gathers on the wheels of paddle steamers". Nice try - and slightly worrying at the same time, honey.) Its actual meaning is "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole". Its origin is uncertain, but the commonly accepted story is that it was coined in 1962 by one Jackson W. Granholm (not a paddle steamer captain) in an article for computer magazine Datamation. Synonyms include jury rigging, Heath Robinson and makeshift. Work-around, another computer-related term, isn't quite a synonym, as it refers to a solution that gets around a problem without actually fixing it. A kludge, on the other hand is a fix - of sorts. One theory says the word's derived from the German adjective klug, meaning "smart" or "witty". In which case, someone's being ironic. Personally, I hear resonances of words like fudge, clubbed (together), smudge and glugged (up). If my theory's correct, that makes kludge a cousin to words like smoosh (a combination of squash, mash and mush). That would also put kludge in a class of words called phonesthemes, where a particular sound or sound sequence suggests a certain meaning. You can hear it in words like glisten, glimmer and glare, where the "gl" sound suggests vision. Think also of the abundance of words with "sn" at the start (snicker, snort, sniff, snore, etc) that refer to nasal functions and noises. From the "there's a name for that too" file comes the phrase "contrastive reduplication". Let's start with bog standard, garden variety reduplication, which you charmed your parents with as a child, you little monkey. Examples include choo-choo, yum-yum, and moo-moo. Pretty self explanatory, yes? Contrastive reduplication is the adult version of this game. It's when you're inviting friends over for lunch and you say, "We'll make a tuna salad and you bring a salad salad." In the words of a Boston University academic, contrastive reduplication is "a kind of clarifying construction that usually means something like 'the prototypical thing, not one of the slightly non-prototypical things one might otherwise have called by this name.' " No? Then try this two-minute clip of comedian Micky Flanagan. It'll clear things up. You've read this adjective many times (sometimes preceded by words like "deadly" and almost always followed by nouns like "warfare", "struggle" or "conflict"). But what does it actually mean? Most commonly it's used to mean "deadly and internal". Some people, however, insist that its true meaning is simply "internal" (the "inter" prefix is surely the giveaway here). However, history is not on their side. In its first recorded use in English, in 1663, "internecine" meant "fought to the death". About a hundred years later, when he was writing his famous dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined the word as "endeavoring mutual destruction". He took as his cue the prefix, meaning "between, among". But according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, he misunderstood: "inter" was actually being used in its less common guise as an intensifier. Johnson was such a compelling authority, that his new meaning was widely accepted, and gradually shifted over the years to become "relating to internal struggle". That's the restricted meaning some people still insist on. But meanings are given by accepted usage, not by personal preference. Today, "internecine" is most widely used to mean internal and destructive, and the Oxford English Dictionary, for one, offers that definition. On that basis, the US Civil War was an internecine struggle, but WWII wasn't - it was merely destructive. We'll stick our necks out, in that case, and assert that to talk about deadly or savage internecine warfare is to flirt with redundancy. When someone says "I'm sorry you should feel that way", they're using should in a different way than someone who says "you should ditch that no-good, lazy boyfriend of yours". The latter use is called the mandative should, expressing as it does a command or recommendation. The first also has a name; it's called the putative should. Putative means supposed or presumed, and the putative mood, used when the speaker doesn't have direct evidence of something but is inferring it, is common to a number of languages. The putative mood is, relatively speaking, a bit player in the English language. The two heavy hitters are the indicative mood, used to make factual statements or pose questions ("You are upset", "Are you upset?"); and the imperative mood, which expresses a request or command ("Get your butt over here.") A little further back comes the subjunctive mood, which shows a wish, or doubt, or something that is not established fact ("If I were you, I'd be upset too"). The subjunctive may be disappearing from English, and many writers - and even more speakers - no longer feel bound by it. "If I was you" is perfectly acceptable in many quarters these days. By comparison with all these moods, the putative feels quaint and antiquated - like something you might hear in Downton Abbey. It's disappearing by, literally, disappearing. Whereas "if I were you" is being replaced by "if I was you", "I'm sorry you should feel that way" is being replaced by "I'm sorry you [no word here] feel that way". One reason, perhaps, why grammar pedants often rail against failure to observe the subjunctive, but rarely against failure to observe the putative. It's harder to notice something that's no longer there than it is to notice something that's been replaced by an alternative. Don't ever argue with anyone in possession of a trenchant wit. You'll come away bloodied and bruised every time. Especially bloodied. Trenchant is a synonym for cutting or sharp, and readers with a sense for these things will have already guessed at its French origins. It's directly related to trench, as in the terrible things that soldiers in WWI suffered and died in. In fact, WWI is when the term trench warfare arose, though oddly enough not until 1918, the last year of the war. Trench coat, also from that war, is named after apparel worn by British officers in the trenches. The Australian term digger also has a place in this story, even though it originated during the 1800s. At that time, it was a popular word on both sides of the Tasman, and referred to someone who worked in a mine or spent their time digging for Kauri gum. It gained an especially strong foothold in Australia thanks to the Victoria Eureka Rebellion of 1854, in which 27 people died during an uprising against gold mining bosses. During WWI, digger earned even greater currency thanks to the fact that Australian soldiers (along with British, New Zealand, etc) did, literally, spend a good part of the war digging. If you ever find yourself wondering what war is good for, one answer is that it seems to throw up new words and phrases, or expand existing ones, thereby enriching the language. WWII gave us blitzkrieg, Vietnam gave us grunt (for soldier), and the second US-Iraq war gave us axis of evil. Some benefit. Other variants of trench are trencher, a board for cutting food, and the little known trencherman, someone with a hearty appetite. Trench is also thought to be related to truncate, or cut short. Those who work in finance may also be familiar with tranche, which literally means portion (usually of money) and is simply a variant of trench. Funny how French sounding words somehow seem more important than the English. I mean, which would you rather be handed: a portion of money or a tranche of funds? Thought so. Last issue's Word of the Week, feculent, put me in mind of a similar word that a girlfriend's mother once archly used to describe me - feckless. Despite their obvious similarities, however, feculent and feckless have entirely different roots. Scottish in origin, feckless is a variant of feck, from effeck or effect. A feckless person is one so spineless and jelly-like as to be incapable of causing anything. How rude! Does feck in the Scottish sense have any connection with feck, the expletive so popular among the Irish? Indeed it does. While you may be excused for thinking that feck the swear word is simply a more palatable version of you-know-what, it also conveys a sense of uselessness (as in feckless). Two other meanings of feck are steal and throw contemptuously, as in "he fecked $10 from his mum's purse" and "he fecked me the remote, the pig". That makes it a hard working word indeed, unlike those feckless layabouts it is sometimes used to describe. As for my girlfriend's mother, I hope for her sake that she eventually changed her opinion of me. Today, that girlfriend is my wife. When my wife recently asked me if I knew what this word meant, all I could think of was the foul-mouthed Father Jack from the late, lamented comedy series Father Ted. His favourite word, which he voiced loudly, drunkenly and at any opportunity, was "feck". But while that may have made him a feckulent character, whether he was feculent is another matter entirely. Feculent entered the English language in the mid 1400s, and must have been a useful word indeed at that time. It means turbid, filthy, fetid, abounding in dregs - the last of which is likely a euphemism for covered in s*** (and when you think about it, s*** is also a euphemism for the word which no spam filter will allow us to spell out in full). As you might have gathered by now, feculent comes from the same word - faex - that gives us faeces. One notable characteristic of this word is that it only exists in the plural. Another characteristic is the number of colloquial terms it's engendered, some of them taboo or at least considered offensive, and some so nauseatingly cute (poo poo anyone?) as to deserve way more opprobrium than their blunter cousins. Then there is the weird term stool, used exclusively by the medical profession. It owes its existence to an obsolete piece of furniture called a stool of ease, which held a chamber pot and was kept in bedrooms for nighttime use. Yek! One last story before we end this somewhat distasteful discourse. When I was about seven I developed an allergic rash to something on our farm which led to an outbreak of hives, a day of diarrhoea and, a couple of days in, sudden difficulty in breathing. The doctor was immediately summoned (this was a long time ago, remember) and on his arrival he asked me a number of questions, including "have you done any big jobs today?" In my innocence, I replied, "I helped my Mum put the groceries away." That was the day I learned yet another stupid colloquial term for - well, let's not say it again. |