Reflecting on the reflexive pronoun ‘themself’

Singular they has featured a few times in the lingua-blog world of late, with Motivated Grammar noting its antiquity and Language Hat linking to Language Hippie’s sensible defence of it. On a tangent to this issue, I want to look at the lesser known themself, the status of which I’ve been musing and tweeting about recently:

Just used 'themself' as a reflexive pronoun. It was normal centuries ago; it can be normal again!—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) May 29, 2012

Gill Francis at Macmillan Dictionary Blog posed the question: Is there a case for the pronoun themself? The example she leads with, from a Bristol City Council leaflet, is a good illustration of the gap in standard English which themself would naturally fill. But because the word isn’t standard, people often avoid it. Or it doesn’t occur to them, or it’s strange and they’re unsure if it’s permitted. Et cetera.

Real estate lingo, and the sorriest apologies

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, excerpted below.

The unreality of real estate language was prompted by the amusing hyperbole of property ads, where ordinary lawns are “magnificent”, rooms are “filled with natural light”, and dreams lie forever on your doorstep. It is a world where

medium is ‘large’, average is ‘first rate’, and unusual is ‘extraordinary’. Any site that isn’t a ruined shack sinking into a swamp may be described as ‘superb’. A well-maintained building is ‘stunning’ and ‘fabulous’, a better-than-average view ‘must be seen to be believed’, and everywhere but the most dilapidated neighbourhoods are in a ‘most sought after location’. (Hyphens, unlike typos, are often scarce in these ads.)

The comments offer such phrases as “deceptively spacious” and “compact and bijou” as further examples of this less-than-reliable repackaging of reality. You can read the rest here.

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Apologies are being expressed – or are they? examines the possible differences between saying “I’m sorry” and “Apologies” (and variations thereon):

Authentic remorse tends to be effectively communicated so long as sincere effort is made through tone, gesture, penitent behaviour and so on. But the words, as an explicit admission of wrongdoing or shortcoming, can be an important part of reconciliation. . . .

Because it omits the subject, ‘Apologies’ is somewhat disembodied and abstract, a bit like saying ‘Mistakes were made’ instead of ‘I/We made a mistake.’ It can be personalised, for example as ‘My (sincere) apologies’, but this feels formal – at least to me – whereas ‘I’m sorry’ does not. Omission of the subject is why the passive voice is not best suited to apologising . . .

It’s a very subjective area, of course, and “I’m sorry” can be as sarcastic as “Apologies” can be sincere – which is partly why it’s so interesting. The comments from other people helped to develop the discussion beyond my hunches and experiences. I didn’t use corpus data in arriving at my cautious conclusions – for which, my apologies.

Explaining ‘fell’ in one fell swoop

For years I’ve been reading the phrase at/in one fell swoop, and even using it occasionally, without ever examining it closely. I knew what it meant (“all at once”), and that it came from Shakespeare, but only recently did I stop and wonder: What’s that fell doing there?

It begins, as far as we know, with Macbeth. In Act 4, Scene 3, Macduff finds out (spoiler warning) that his family has been murdered, and he says:

He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

The image of a kite from hell swooping to kill defenceless chooks gives the sense of a sudden, fierce, merciless assault: this much is self-evident; the use of fell is more obscure.

Fell as an adjective has had several meanings over the centuries, most of them now obsolete or restricted to poetic, rhetorical, dialectal and idiomatic contexts. The oldest adjectival sense dates from the late 13th century: “fierce, cruel, ruthless; terrible, destructive”, according to the OED. Thus did Shakespeare use it.

This fell came from Old French fel, from Middle Latin fello “villain, traitor”. Its history overlaps with that of felon – once “wicked person” – and of felo de se “suicide”. Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary connects it to Celtic tongues, for example Irish feall “betray, deceive” and Breton falloni “treachery”.

Over time, at one fell swoop softened and came to mean simply “all at once” or “in a single go” – that is, the connotations of viciousness and calamity faded. MWDEU says the idiom is now “neutral in application”. We can do the housework, empty the dessert bowl, X all the Y at one fell swoop.

Variations have multiplied. Fell swoop becomes foul swoop, fowl swoop, fell stoop, fell stroke, full swoop, fail swoop, and so on. The meaning remains the same, more or less, but you might want to be careful of the variant adjectives unless your intent is to play or pun on the original. The preposition at is often in and sometimes with; indeed, a definite switch from at to in appears to be under way:

The trend is supported by data from the Corpus of Historical American English. You can click on the following graphs to see how the respective phrases have been used.

at one fell swoop:

in one fell swoop:

Some critics consider at one fell swoop a cliché. Like any set expression, though, it can be deployed to good effect when its particular sound and style suit your needs.

Graeme Donald, in The Dictionary of Modern Phrase, says it “properly applies to the sudden, savage attack of a bird of prey when it goes into its stoop”. But not even Shakespeare used it that way: it has been metaphorical since birth.

Note: This post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus. Subscription required until three months have elapsed.

Two poems, two polls

You might remember the Monster A Day drawing blog that prompted my short verse about a whispering shell. Here are two more whimsical rhymes, best read in tandem with the lovely illustrations.

‘The monster that waits in the cupboard of an abandoned house’:

In a comfy cupboard on the quietest floor
Of an empty house with the creakiest door
Sits a great big thing with its furry face stuck
In the cosy excitement of a paperback book.

‘The monster that steals your socks… for sock races!’

You’re probably wondering what happens your sock
When it darts with a blur past the grandfather clock.
I’ll tell you: your foot’s not the favourite place
Of a sock that just wants to be sock-monster-raced!

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On an unrelated note, I’m honoured to be included in Lexiophiles’ top language professional blogs and top language Twitter accounts 2012. Many thanks to the kind reader(s) who nominated me.

You can browse the lists for languagey goodness, and you can vote for me at Sentence first and @StanCarey, or for whatever takes your fancy.

The interstellar etymology of ‘mazel tov’

Mazal tov or mazel tov /’maz(ə)l toːv, tɒf/ is a Hebrew and Yiddish expression analogous to ‘congratulations’ or ‘good wishes’, though its literal meaning is closer to ‘good luck’.

Grammatically it functions mainly as an interjection (‘Mazel tov!’), and sometimes as a noun (‘a chorus of mazel tovs’). I see it in both forms online, and occasionally in films and books, but it’s not part of my idiolect or culture, so corrections or clarifications are welcome.

Popular on celebratory occasions such as weddings and Bat and Bar Mitzvahs, the phrase derives from modern Hebrew mazzāl ṭôb. Mazal (Hebrew) or mazel (Yiddish) refers to a star, constellation, luck or fortune; ṭôb means ‘good’, from ṭyb ‘to be(come) good’.

Mazel tov hats at a Bat Mitzvah

The American Heritage Dictionary says mazel tov comes from Mishnaic Hebrew and ultimately from Akkadian, one of the earliest written languages: manzaltu, mazzaztum meant ‘position of a star’, from izuzzu ‘to stand’. The related words Mazzaroth and mazalot have to do with astronomical constellations or the zodiac in Kabbalistic astrology.

Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass, touches briefly on these connections in The Unfolding of Language, his 2005 book on how language evolves. The following passage is from its short introduction to Semitic languages and their cultural history:

Their political star may have waxed and waned, but for a good part of 2,000 years, Mesopotamian emperors, from Sargon in the third millennium BC to Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar in the first, would lay claim to the title ‘King of the Universe’, ruling over ‘the four corners (of the earth)’. More stable than the power of the sword, however, was the cultural hegemony of Mesopotamia over the whole region. The Akkadian language shaped the dominant canon for much of the Near East in religion, the arts, science and law, and was used as a lingua franca, the means of diplomatic correspondence. Petty governors of provincial Canaanite outposts, mighty Anatolian kinds, and even Egyptian Pharaohs wrote to one another in Akkadian. Language across the Near East also borrowed many scientific and cultural terms from Akkadian, a few of which may even be recognized by English speakers today. The Jewish expression mazel tov ‘good luck’, for example, is based on the Hebrew word mazal ‘luck’, which was borrowed from the Akkadian astrological term mazzaltu ‘position (of a star)’.

Although I have little interest in horoscopes, I like how mazel tov preserves a reminder of celestial bodies’ significance in traditional conceptions of human fate and fortune. English retains a similar link in written in the stars, thank your lucky stars, and star-crossed (‘ill-fated’).

The last of which brings us nicely to schlimazel, from Yiddish shlimazl ‘someone prone to bad luck’ – hence Schlimazeltov!, a short documentary about the concept of luck in London’s Jewish community.

Schlimazel may have somehow developed into shemozzle/schemozzle ‘muddle, melee, brawl’, but the etymology is uncertain. WordReference says shemozzle is “suggested by late Hebrew šel-lō’-mazzāl ‘of no luck’.”

[image adapted from Wikimedia Commons]

Annals of non-restrictive ‘that’

You’ll seldom see that used with a comma to set off a non-restrictive clause. Normally which does this job. (Which is also fine in restrictive clauses, by the way, despite the pseudo-rule that forbids it. The first link explains the terminology.)

My earlier post on non-restrictive that gives an idea of how rare it is, and provides an ambiguous example from Penelope Fitzgerald; I later updated with more clearcut literary examples. This post notes a few more instances of non-restrictive that used in books I recently read and re-read, respectively.

In Everest: Impossible Victory, Peter Habeler writes:

The men struck their Camp VI at 8200 metres, that is well below the place at which Mallory and Irvine were last seen.

And Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media:

The rapid increase of traffic brought in the railway, that accommodated a more specialized form of wheel than the road.

The wheel, that began as extended feet, took a great evolutionary step into the movie theatre.

Habeler’s line is ambiguous: that could either be a relative pronoun (or perhaps a subordinator), used where we would expect to see which; or it could be a demonstrative, which means there’s a comma splice where we would expect a dash or full stop.

You could argue the same for the first McLuhan line, but you’d be on even shakier grounds, I think. My feeling is that these thats are non-restrictive relativizers. I’d be curious to know how you read them.

Mar dhea, moryah — a sceptical Irish interjection

The Irish phrase mar dhea /mɑr’jæ/, /mɑrə’jæ/ “mor ya” is characteristic of Irish English speech. It’s a sceptical interjection used to cast doubt, dissent or derision (or all three) on whatever phrase or clause precedes it. Mar dhea literally means as were it, i.e., as if it were so.*

Sometimes mar dhea is translated as forsooth, but I’m not sure this is helpful. Better to consider it an ironic insertion similar to As if!, Yeah right!, or a sarcastic indeed or supposedly. Bernard Share, in Slanguage, describes it as an “expression of sardonic disbelief or dissent”, while P. W. Joyce says it’s:

a derisive expression of dissent to drive home the untruthfulness of some assertion or supposition or pretence, something like the English ‘forsooth’, but infinitely stronger [English As We Speak It In Ireland]

Mar dhea has been anglicised in many ways, for example moryah, mor-yah, maryah, mara-ya, maryeah, mauryah, maureeyah, muryaa, moy-ah, and moya. It’s a testament to its popularity in Hiberno-English, the diversity of Irish pronunciation, and the difficulty of finding precise orthographic correspondence between the two tongues.