‘Scary quotes’

You’ve probably heard of scare quotes, well here’s scary quotes.

This is an image from the BBC news website today. Note the scary phrases in quotation marks, aka inverted commas:

Scary quotes commonly appear in headlines and subheadings. Some indicate reported speech or text, a common function of quotation marks; others paraphrase. They are a subset of claim quotes, an unofficial journalistic term for what Martyn Cornell describes as

a shorthand way of saying “someone is making this claim and we neither give it authority nor dismiss it, we’re just reporting it”. Frequently what is inside these sorts of claim quotes is a paraphrase of what was actually said, to make it fit inside the headline space

Bombers, memory holes, vomiting and screaming: the defining feature of scary quotes is that their contents are scary. Visit BBC news any day, at any hour, and you might take fright. [Edit: On a visit an hour later, I saw 'rape', 'recession', and 'rhino gang' in scary quotes – and that's just the Rs, on the front page.]

Yes, I’m plagiarising my Twitter self again. It’s a busy week.

.

Previously in novel punctuation: apostrophantoms.

Language play in ‘Jude in London’

Some people’s accents are so settled that it’s hard to imagine them changing much, if at all, through outside influence. Other people’s accents change readily and strikingly, a point exaggerated for comedic effect in Julian Gough’s recent novel Jude in London:

Her accent, in so brief a time, had gone completely London. I had seen the phenomenon before: some of the Lads, after a weekend in Limerick, would return to the Orphanage with accents so foreign they made the younger Orphans cry.

Elements of language and identity feature prominently in Jude. Its eponymous hero, an irrepressible young Irishman, initially finds his speech emerging in the form of parodically British English as a result of a “Mental Catastrophe” (explained in this extract).

His appearance has already been radically and rudely refashioned by plastic surgery. In this guise, in a valley in England (“or perhaps Wales”), he meets a group of construction workers:

I concentrated hard on distilling the pure drop of my Irishness. I structured my sentence in the glorious grammatical forms of the original language of all these islands. I would be authentically Irish.

I’d be Jude. And what name would you be after having yourself? I thought.

“The name is Jude. May I enquire as to your identity, sirs?” I said.

The more Irish I tried to be, the more English I sounded.

Holy shite.

“God’s dung!”

“What?” said the Lads.

“My speech,” I explained, “has been corrupted by English novelists.”

Jude’s plot is episodic, its elaborate set pieces tied together by the narrator’s continuing journey to learn his origins and find true love. Sincerity mixes with silliness, sometimes in the same serendipitous sentence. Throughout, opportunities for wordplay and mischief are inventively grasped.

As he wends his wandering way through the adventure, Jude meets many colourful characters borrowed from reality and warped with authorial abandon. Some serve chiefly to fuel an extravagant pun, for example the artists formerly known as Eminem and Tracey Emin, who together have founded a movement to fight for women’s rights:

“It is modelled on the Be-ism of John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon. Except they used pacifism, and we use violence.”

“Fair play to you both,” I said.

“We call it Feminemineminemism,” he said.

“It rolls off the tongue,” I said. “Eventually.”

Eminem is subsequently referred to as Eminem Emin-Eminem. This sort of revelry in daftness gets me giggly, so as you might imagine, I had a lot of fun with the book. It’s constantly playful — almost exhaustingly so — with jokes operating on multiple levels, some immediate and obvious, some allusive and engineered with patient intricacy.

In this regard Jude is reminiscent of the work of Flann O’Brien and even Buster Keaton, and it shares their plasticity of form and robust disregard for plausibility. The world is distorted this way and that, for all sorts of structural and opportunistic reasons. (Gough has described the book as being about “the bizarre love triangle between consciousness, language, and reality”.)

The style will not appeal to everyone. There is relentless use of Comedy Capitals and Emphatic Capitals, and the story and language alike are frequently and deeply scatological. Readers of Gough’s earlier novels, Juno and Juliet and Jude in Ireland (formerly Jude: Level 1), will have an idea of the tone, and may double it.

But the underlying voice is warm, wry, and consistent even as it embraces paradox and multiplicity. For all its puns, perversions, and prods at literary luminaries, Jude is no mere cheeky comic novel. It’s an original, idiosyncratic and well-written tale that resists tidy categorisation: it’s a lark within a love story and a quest full of questions; whimsy and lunacy belie heartfelt points about life, art, literature and criticism, Irish culture and politics, and Tipperary sandwiches.

John Self’s insightful review says Gough “pursues flights of fancy with ruthless logic” and that he has “not so much killed his darlings, as filled the book with them” — which is fair, I think, but then darlings have their own appeal. Kevin Barry in the Irish Times said he was interested in stories “where the writer has managed to get all of his or her darlings onto the page.”

Jude in London is part 2 of a trilogy. For a flavour, I recommend the aforelinked extract; and The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, a surreal satire of economic madness first published in the Financial Times as a standalone piece and later incorporated into Jude. Both showcase Gough’s freewheeling style and flair for farce.

Jude is available from Old Street Publishing and in bookshops.

A grisly crash blossom

What would you do to escape prosecution?

Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking.

Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

The Glottal Stop Hotel

I am tempted to hoist a /ʔ/ into the gap:

The glottal stop, which you hear between the vowels in uh-oh and in some pronunciations of water, is a sound familiar to most people but seldom referred to outside of linguistic contexts.

David Brett has a helpful introductory page about it, including audio files, while Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium has a lovely example of a glottal stop tattoo.

The glottal stop is not bad for you, and its IPA symbol is attractive, but all things considered the hotel owners would probably prefer a true or flap /t/.

[Photo is from Salthill, Galway, Ireland.]

LOLcat linguistics: I can has language play?

Oh hai. Few internet memes have enjoyed the cultural penetration and staying power of LOLcats (examples; home; Wikipedia). Whether they annoy you, amuse you, or please you to the point of purring, there’s no avoiding them online, and they’ve even infiltrated the physical world.

LOLspeak (the language of LOLcats) is too new to have attracted much scholarly research to date. But there is some, and it features in “I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak”, a presentation by Jill Vaughan and Lauren Gawne at the Australian Linguistic Society’s annual conference in 2011.

Vaughan and Gawne identify LOLspeak as a form of language play that serves in-group cohesion: if you’re in on the joke, you’re part of the community. They show how a LOLcat simultaneously builds two identities: the ubiquitous cat and the internet-savvy human that gives it its idiosyncratic voice.

This slide, for example, quoting the LOLcat Bible, demonstrates LOLspeak’s eccentric form:

The presentation is at once funny and informative. After briefly explaining the origins and context of LOLspeak, it briskly addresses its phonetics, orthography, lexicon, syntax, and morphology. We see how the surreal and deliberately mangled “cat-world discourses” reveal a playful sophistication and a “high level of metalinguistic awareness”.

See enough LOLcats and you’ll notice themes and sub-memes recur and become recursive. It’s creative but far from anarchic: linguistic norms have emerged but further subversion is always possible, even relished. Apparently some people have argued that LOLspeak is a creole, but “that’s just cos they want to use the phrase kitty pidgin”…

Here’s the video:

[via Superlinguo]

English As She Is Broke

Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naïveté, as are supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare’s sublimities. Whatsoever is perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable: nobody can imitate it successfully . . .

So wrote Mark Twain in his introduction to Pedro Carolino’s English As She Is Spoke (1883), a Portuguese-English conversational guide infamous for its incoherent translations and memorable incongruities.

Every page of this short book is rich in non sequiturs and grammatical mishaps that border on the poetic, the cumulative effect of which is a rare and unpredictable entertainment.

Will you this?
Let us amuse rather to the fishing.
The coffee is good in all time.
You hear the bird’s gurgling? Which pleasure! which charm!
Comb-me quickly; don’t put me so much pomatum.
He burns one’s self the brains.
You come too rare.
I row upon the belly on the back and between two waters.

Carolino’s book offers vocabularies, phrases, dialogues, letters and anecdotes, all of them delightfully mangled. There is a pronunciation guide that renders washerwoman as uox’-eur-ummeune, and a list of proverbs that turns “A rolling stone gathers no moss” into “The stone as roll not heap up not foam”.

If it were twice as accurate, it would not be half as beguiling.

The book’s history is also muddled. Collins Library published a new edition in 2002 that followed an early edition in crediting Carolino and José da Fonseca as authors. But Fonseca appears to have had no involvement except that his own work inspired Carolino’s awful effort. (I use the word inspired loosely: Carolino spoke no English, and borrowed wholesale from one of Fonseca’s phrasebooks.)

After linguist Alexander MacBride got a copy of the Collins Library edition, he contacted the publishers to question the dual authorship. He felt that a grave injustice had been done to Fonseca:

Not only was his little phrasebook ripped off, and transformed into an eternal monument of linguistic incompetence — he, the victim of the outrage, is remembered by posterity as its author!

Further digging by MacBride threw more light on how the confusion came about. It’s a nice bit of historical research. He found that Fonseca was “a serious and competent scholar” who had an excellent command of English and was “contemptuous of shoddy and amateurish conversation guides and phrasebooks”.

So English As She Is Spoke — Carolino’s “Jest in Sober Earnest” — would presumably have earned Fonseca’s contempt, but we can enjoy it on its own inimitable terms. After all,

A little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their fancies on the literature.

You can download English As She Is Spoke in various formats at Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

Put your confidence at my. How do you can it to deny?

Five-Line Rhyme Time: A Limerick Contest

[Note: This limerick contest is now over. See foot of post for updates.]

It’s competition time at Sentence first! All you have to do is write a limerick about language and add it in a comment to this post, and you’ll be in the running for a Kindle or some fine books on language. First, a word about our sponsors.

Sponsors:

Sponsoring the contest and supplying the prizes are the good people at Stack Exchange, a community-based Q&A website. At SE, people ask questions, answers are discussed, edited, and voted on, and so the most helpful rise to the top. There are sections on cooking, maths, photography, programming – all sorts of special interests, including:

(Click pic to visit.) The English Language and Usage page has a lively turnover of questions on usage, etymology, semantics, pronunciation, dialects, phrases, and other such topics; the FAQ offers a useful introduction. It’s a friendly, informative kind of place. Some example discussions:

Why is q followed by a u?
Why are there inconsistencies in the pronunciation of the alphabet?
What is the origin of ZOMG?
Can doubt sometimes mean question?
Did English ever have a formal version of you?
Origins of the word bug in Software.
Proverb or expression for a situation with two choices, both leading to a different kind of trouble.

Here’s one relevant to our competition:

What is it about English that makes it favourable for writing limericks?

And one that caught my eye from the Science Fiction & Fantasy page:

How does Superman shave?

I think it’s an addictive place to browse partly because whatever one person is curious about, others will be curious about. Try it and see.

*

Guidelines:

And so to business. Lauren, who manages the English Language & Usage page, recently got in touch to propose a contest; I suggested limericks, and now it’s your turn.

Limericks should be of normal length, rhythm, and rhyming scheme, more or less. You probably know the structure well. Wikipedia has the basics, and I’m glad to see it cites Gershon Legman, whose thorough and spectacularly rude two-volume collection I read this year. But do please resist this tradition – keep your compositions family friendly, and ignore Morris Bishop’s characterisation:

The limerick is furtive and mean;
You must keep her in close quarantine,
Or she sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.

Should your muse linger, you can submit 2–3 limericks – but no more! They should be original, and in English. The theme is language: writing, grammar, usage, style, and so on. Anything language-y or linguistic, so long as it entertains. Rhymes should be close but need not be precise. Inventiveness is encouraged; repeating a rhyme (à la Lear) is not.

*

Prizes:

First prize is a Kindle, Amazon’s popular e-book reader. I hear they’re all the rage.

Second prize (A) is two new books I haven’t yet read but look forward to reading: Robert Lane Greene’s You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity (praised by Language Hat here); and Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl’s 101 Misused Words You’ll Never Confuse Again (commended by John E. McIntyre here).

Second prize (B) is two older books I have read, and to which I often refer: T. P. Dolan’s wonderful A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, described by Tom Paulin as “a pioneering work of scholarship”; and the great Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which Geoffrey K. Pullum calls “the finest work of scholarship on English grammar and usage I have ever seen.”

Prizes can only be sent to western Europe, continental U.S., and Canada. I’m sorry if that’s a problem for some readers. You can’t enter if you’re related to me or work for Stack Exchange; otherwise, go for it. It’s impossible to be objective about poetry, so if I can’t choose clear winners I’ll narrow it down a bit and pick three at random.

You don’t have to spread the word through social media – or traditional speech or gesture – but I’d love if you did: the more entries, the more fun for all.

Today is Monday 12 September; the deadline is Friday 23 September. Winners to be announced the week after, in an update to this post. In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter, if you’re the tweeting type.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

*

Update 1: The contest is now closed. Thank you all very much for submitting poems and spreading the word. I’ve had great fun reading the limericks (over 130 of them!), marvelling at their wit and ingenuity.

I’ll make a shortlist of the ones I’m most impressed by and will draw lots for the prizes. Winners will be announced next week. Comments are closed until then.

Some of you will be interested to know that Stack Exchange now has a Linguistics page.

*

Update 2: So many good limericks were entered, I wish I had more prizes to give. Ten times more. But I’m happy to announce the following three winners:

Second prize (B) goes to Mike Page:

If engaged in a contest with Inuit
in snow-naming, please, discontinue it!
We can hardly compete
Using “slush”, “powder”, “sleet”…
You’ve got to be Inuit to win you it!

for imaginative rhyming and inspired silliness. (Alongside his limerick I must recommend this essay (PDF) on Eskimo words for snow.)

Second prize (A) goes to Lisa Liel:

Grammarians like to explain
That the verbing of nouns is inane
But friending is fine
It’s no different in kind
Than contacting me to complain

More sense in 25 words than you can shake a derivational suffix at. (Note: after the verb contact (in the sense get in touch with) arose in the early 20th century, it was “greeted with open hostility by purists for several decades”, according to Robert Burchfield.)

First prize goes to Paraic O’Donnell:

There was once a pig’s ear of a language,
Romance scraps in a Jerry-built sandwich.
Mostly used for rude jokes,
It became for some folks
Something nothing was seriouser than which.

for fine philological punning and wonderful syntactical funning that made me laugh much longer than I ought to admit.

Congratulations to Mike, Lisa, and Paraic, thanks to Stack Exchange for their generosity, and thank you all again for taking part!