Link love: language (13)

Latin tattoos.

Poem: To A Thesaurus.

“Badgergasm” (analysed).

Ireland, the emerald desert.

Ultrasonic songs of male mice.

Language as a secret weapon.

Taking abstract thoughts literally.

Proverbs and sayings of the Isle of Man.

The secret history of typography in the OED.

How “dord” accidentally entered a dictionary.

When exclamation marks disappeared from Marvel comics!

The evolution of speech: a comparative review (PDF, 632 KB).

The Linguistic Niche Hypothesis: summary, full report, discussion.

“Sarah Palin and her elk“, and eggcorns of this ilk (via Fritinancy.)

[more links]

Flipping the sky into smithereens

The Macmillan Dictionary Blog has been posting an interesting series of articles on English as it is spoken and used in various parts of the world. For their Irish-English week in January, I contributed a piece on the word smithereens. It focuses on the term’s etymology and usage, from its somewhat hazy beginnings in the early 19th century to its appearance in modern poetry and Disney musicals.

Though the origin of smithereens is slightly obscure, the term is widely thought to have come from smiodar (Irish for “fragment”) + ín (Irish diminutive suffix). This seems a likely route, but the full story is not so straightforward. Language development is anything but linear! To find out more, you can read the article here. You might also enjoy Macmillan’s growing list of resources on Irish English.

Forums, forum, fora

Forum has three main meanings. There is the everyday sense — a place or medium for public discussion and the open exchange of ideas; the legal sense — a court of law, tribunal, or other legal assembly; and the historical sense — a marketplace or other public arena in ancient Roman cities, where civic, commercial and judicial activities were conducted.

The first sense includes online discussion forums. Several of these have featured discussions about the correct plural of forum itself — is it forums or fora? — as have some language blogs and other sites. Latin plurals are evidently a popular topic. Some of the commentary is sensible and even-handed, but some comprises simple repudiation of one plural form or the other (e.g. ‘The plural of “forum” is… FORA since it’s a Latin word. [...] Sorry to be pedantic, but that’s the English language for you’), so a little clarification seems to be in order.

Forums reflects the word’s naturalisation into English, while fora stays true to its Latin origin. Forums is much more common, outnumbering fora by a considerable margin. This is especially so in the word’s everyday sense; in its legal and historical senses, fora is less unusual. (I’ve based these assessments on personal reading and editing experience, and on searches in various corpora and search engines; I would welcome a more rigorous contextual breakdown.)

Fora in the everyday sense of forum is not incorrect, but some readers might find it fussy or pretentious, and usage commentators disagree over its suitability. Don Watson considers it “archaic”. All three editions of Fowler’s report that the plural occurs only as forums. (This, however, is demonstrably wrong.) Kenneth G. Wilson, in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, lists both forms as standard. Bryan Garner takes an intermediate position, describing forums as “preferred” and fora as “pedantic”. So it’s fair to conclude that this is a grey area.

The English language is inconsistent in its pluralisation of Latin words. Of those ending in -um, some retain the Latin endings (bacterium → bacteria; quantum → quanta; stratum → strata; ovum → ova; desideratum → desiderata); others, being more Anglicised, generally take the English -s (albums, asylums, museums, gymnasiums, crematoriums, premiums); while some commonly take either, depending on context or personal preference (atriums or atria; aquariums or aquaria; compendiums or compendia; podiums or podia).

In summary: fora is not wrong, but unless you’re writing about law or Roman history, you’re better off using forums. Foras is wrong.

See also: Data is data, or are they?

[image source]

A pun to hand in Wonderland

On this day (27 January) 178 years ago, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in Cheshire, England. Better known as Lewis Carroll, he became a mathematician and author, among other things. Today he is remembered chiefly for the playful and protean prose he penned, especially his Alice books, and for his enduring nonsense verse, such as The Hunting of the Snark.

In honour of his birthday I offer a clutch of Carrollian clippings, beginning with an excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which inspired the title of this blog.

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I wo’n’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

Commenting on this much-beloved book, Carroll wrote:

I think a child’s first attitude to the world is a simple love for all living things. And he will have learned that the best work a man can do is when he works for love’s sake only, with no thought of fame or gain or earthly reward.

Speaking of rewards, Carroll knew well the satisfaction of a good pun, incorporating many of them into his books and puzzles. Here is one of the latter:

John gave his brother James a box:
About it there were many locks.

James woke and said it gave him pain;
So gave it back to John again.

The box was not with lid supplied,
Yet caused two lids to open wide:

And all these locks had never a key—
What kind of box, then, could it be?

*

And last, some links,
for laughs and thinks:

Solution to the puzzle above.
A useful and instructive poem.
Eight or nine wise words about letter writing.
Centenary exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center.
Jabberwocky translations, parodies, and explanations.
Lewis Carroll at the Victorian Web, including: Through Bergson’s Looking-Glass and “Lewis Carroll”: A Myth in the Making.
John Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books.
Other artists’ illustrations of Wonderland.
The Lewis Carroll Society.
Wikipedia page.

Hoover, the “talking” harbour seal

“Imitation is as crucial to the acquisition of speech as it is to learning gesture,” writes Christine Kenneally in The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. As infants we mimic our parents’ (or guardians’) language as part of a natural process of learning our unique version of it, going from babbling to building novel sentences in a remarkably short period of time. (Birds, bats and dolphins are also said to go through a babbling phase.)

As we get older we remain impressed by skilled mimicry, be it impressions of other accents or the more peculiar ability of certain non-humans to make sounds like we do. We are amused and intrigued by any creature that can mimic human speech despite considerable anatomical differences. Videos of “talking” cats and dogs abound on YouTube, to say nothing of birds and elephants. A more surprising example is the seal. Kenneally’s book includes a charming account of Hoover, a harbour seal who became famous for his human impersonations:

Hoover didn’t “talk” until he reached sexual maturity, but once he started, he improved over the years. He spoke only at certain times of the year (not as much in the mating season) and would reputedly adopt a strange position in order to do so. He didn’t move his mouth. Terrence Deacon [Anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley] recounts stumbling across Hoover while walking near the aquarium one evening. He thought a guard was yelling at him (“Hey! Hey! Get outta there!”).

Harbour seals may seem unlikely mimics, but they have a wide range of vocalisations — especially among sexually mature males. You can read a short account of Hoover’s life story at the New England Aquarium website, which also has a short audio clip of Hoover “talking”. It’s a very funny, slurring sound, like the gruff scolding of an ill-tempered janitor.

Evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch hosts a few more files of Hoover’s “speech” on his page at the University of St Andrews. Fitch says that Hoover’s ability is all the more interesting because “vocal learning of complex sounds” has not been found in any non-human primate, and the animals skilled in such learning — such as song birds and cetaceans — do not use the same organs that we do.

Hoover died in 1985 but his legacy continues in his grandson Chacoda, AKA Chuck, who seems to have inherited this remarkable ability.

Irish winterlude

We had an unusually cold winter in the west of Ireland. Layers were worn, walks were taken, fires were lit.

It felt like this, and it looked like this:

Ghostly faces in a frozen puddle. How many do you see?

Blue tit enjoying provisions from the bird feeder.

The view across Lough Corrib on New Year’s Day.

First impressions

Today’s Galway Independent has a short article publicising a local copywriting company. Under the title “Copywriting a must for business”, the article begins as follows:

First impression in business are very important

It certainly are [sic]. The piece has additional typos, in both the online and print editions of the newspaper, but I see no reason to labour the matter. I would just like to point out that if words are your business, copy-editing is important too.