Do Profanity Filters Dream of Philip K. Dick?

Searching for a book review recently, I visited a web page with a pirated copy of the book, alongside a reviewer’s name that seemed to have been automatically censored:

Compare the censored name with its original form on the back of my paperback copy of the same book:

Googling “Philip K. censored” brings up a rash of hits: mostly forums and file-sharing pages. In this age of robots on Mars, nanobees on tumours, and Samuel Johnson on Twitter, the name of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted science fiction writers is not reproduced on certain web pages because it is also a slang term for male genitalia. Dick himself might well have been amused and even inspired by these prudish artificial-unintelligence bots — “notbots”, if you like — and he was not averse to playing around with his own name, but that is beside the point.

How awesome is awesome?

The answer, of course, depends on whether you interpret the question to be enquiring or rhetorical. More to the point, it depends on what you mean by awesome, and here we run into a spot of semantic sludge. Speaking to a friend on the phone last night, I used the word and found myself appending a parenthetical clarification: that I meant awe-inspiring. Because to many people in many contexts — especially young people in any context — the word awesome means pretty good, great, cool, excellent, fine, exciting, quite interesting, not terrible, etc. It is often preceded by totally, or followed by dude, or both; and new variations arise constantly.

My hiccups have stopped. That is so awesome!!1!
Is that a new pencil? It’s awesome, dude.
There’s, like, a free David Hasselhoff toaster with every new kitchen. That’s, like, totally awesome. It is teh awesomest.

This sense of awesome dates to 1961 and became popular a couple of decades later (more on that below). The original meaning of awesome, dating to around 1600, is “filled with awe, profoundly reverential”; by the end of that century it had come to mean “awe-inspiring”. The root word awe, meaning terror, dread, or wonder, is much older. There are situations where awesome is still implicitly and normally understood in this earlier sense, such as when used in religious commentary, or deployed by, say, a physicist when describing the power of the sun. But the weakened sense of the word has crowded the field.

The first time I remember using awesome was on a day in the bog in my early teens. We (assorted family members) were loading a truck with bags full of sods that were finally dry and ready to store. Helping us were two men I didn’t know, brothers in their late thirties or so. I was hefting bags from one pile to another nearer the truck, and from this vantage the men seemed immensely strong, even when I allowed for the physical disparity between the average adult and my non-Hulk-like teenaged self. One brother stood in the back of the truck while the other tossed bags of turf up to him with one hand — almost flicking them, as if they were no heavier than juggling bags. I turned to my father and said, “That’s awesome.” He laughed and agreed.

Occasionally I use awesome in its weakened, broad sense, and I see and hear this usage everywhere. Some people use it with irresistible enthusiasm. I would guess that its ubiquity has almost attained a level of colloquial penetration that cool did before it; at the risk of sounding facetious, its current popularity is awesome. Our generation is either in a state of near-perpetual awe, or in a state of a complete lack of awe. What’s more probable, and less tongue-in-cheek, is that the word’s meaning has simply devalued. And I mean no value judgement. It is arguably as pointless to bemoan a shift in lexical meaning as it is to gripe at the rising tide for turning your sandcastle into an amorphous lump.

[Image of Synchiropus splendidus by Luc Viatour. Because it is awesome, like this cat.]

A few examples, selected more or less at random from the British National Corpus, shows a wide range of usage, with landscapes, battles, sporting feats, and natural forces and sights appearing often:

Understanding of the atomic nucleus was progressing rapidly and awareness was dawning of the awesome energies latent within.
You’re an awesome dancer.
The SNES version of Star Wars looks being one of the most awesome treats of ‘93.
Certainly, multimedia systems can perform spectacular, even awesome feats.
[T]he famous charge of the Frankish knights with levelled lances was still an awesome and terrible thing to the lightly-armed Saracens
His batting could be awesome in its power.
High Elf mages are mighty spell casters whose fiery blasts and awesome energies have won many a battle.

The Urban Dictionary has, at the time of writing, 73 user-written definitions of awesome, the vast majority of which attribute to it the same generically positive meaning as cool, with an optional added oomph of awesomeness. Roughly seven entries include the sense of awe or allude to the traditional definition. The Urban Dictionary is a contemporary slang dictionary, so this ratio is unsurprising. Some of the entries are quite imaginative; others seem decidedly weary.

Film critic Roger Ebert tells us that the American teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) features Sean Penn immortalising the word awesome. I have not seen this film; for me it was Bill and Ted who popularised the slang usage. I don’t know when this happened relative to my awesome day in the bog, so I can’t say how established the word’s different connotations were at the time, but I have always been aware of using it in two distinct ways. These spheres of meaning overlap but are usefully distinguished — at least if we want to preserve the traditional meaning. (The Oxford English Dictionary includes a third meaning of awesome, from the late-sixteenth century: “filled with awe”, which discovery almost prompted me to title the post “I am awesome”, until I thought better of it.)

In the Columbia Guide to Standard American Usage, Kenneth G. Wilson writes that in the 1980s the word was “suddenly taken up as a hyperbolic adjective to describe anything better than average”. This seems a fair assessment. Wilson adds that awesome and awesomely “will no doubt one day be perfectly useful words again, but just now [1993] they are shopworn and weary”. A few years later, Bryan Garner wrote of awesome that “[f]or the time being, the word has been spoiled by overuse”. But these judgements should not dissuade you from using it as you see fit. Robert Burchfield, in his third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, reports that “[t]he traditional reverential use is far from extinct […] in the US, though it is more at risk there than in Britain.”

Awful is a related term, and its history is equally interesting and even more changeable, but this blog post is already long enough. I wrote a little about it here, if you’re curious. And if you’d like to share your thoughts below, that would be awesome.

Hear ye this here: Hear! Hear!

The phrase hear! hear! originated as the imperative hear him! (hear him!) in the late seventeenth century, or possibly earlier. It became popular as a British parliamentary exclamation used to draw attention to something a speaker had just said. By the late eighteenth century an abridged version had developed: hear! or hear! hear! In its written form it is punctuated in various ways, e.g. hear, hear and hear hear!

Over time, the expression spread to other domains, such as meetings and local debates. These days it is often used online to signify agreement, in much the same way that “Seconded”, “What [x] said” and “+1” do. It can, however, be used to convey anything from enthusiastic approval to withering derision, depending on the tone and context of delivery. Deployed ironically, it would be similar to “Would you listen to that!” or “Get him/her!”, which in text form might require a sarcastic font to prevent literal interpretation.

Hear! Hear! is frequently written here! here! (or here, here!, etc.). In A Dictionary of True Etymologies, Adrian Room suggests that this may be as if to indicate “the person or place where there is approval (while also suggesting the almost synonymous ’same here!’)”. Another factor in the confusion may be the historical predominance of the phrase as a spoken expression rather than a written one. If Google hits are any indication, the erroneous rendering now seems more popular, and may ultimately become the normal or even standard form, through contagion and imitation.

Turning in the other temporal direction, the same expression – more or less – appears in the Bible, albeit in the slightly different sense of “Listen” or “Hear me”:

Then cried a wise woman out of the city, Hear, hear; say, I pray you, unto Jo’ab, Come near hither, that I may speak with thee.

A hear, hear or hear-hear is the noun describing the act of saying “hear! hear!”, while to hear-hear is the verb. A person who says “hear, hear!” can be described as a hear-hearer. If you have difficulty remembering whether it’s hear, hear! or here, here!, it might help to recall the origin of the phrase.

A violent ambiguity

In a local newspaper yesterday I saw what appeared at first to be an alarming story. After a moment’s stunned disbelief – this was before my morning tea – the subhead provided an innocent explanation: Ireland’s flagship children’s festival, Baboró, is celebrating its thirteenth year.

Owing to time constraints I will not address the typographic shortcomings in the digital version of this article, except to mention in passing that – in the reproduced subhead – the words children’s and festival are unnecessarily capitalised, the accent (síneadh fada) in Baboró is missing, and there is a good case for inserting a comma immediately after it.

What struck me, if you’ll pardon the pun, is the queasy ambiguity of the headline. In a newspaper context it is, of course, understandable: headlinese is a language unto itself, one that prizes punchy monosyllabicity above all. Agreements become pacts, disagreements become clashes; increases become hikes; decreases become cuts; an investigation is a probe; to punish is to rap; to support is to back; to criticise is to blast or slam; and everywhere are bans, rows, bids, leaks, shifts, shocks, pleas, moves, calls, vows and threats of all sorts. Whatever you are doing, you can be said to act. And so on.

But this tendency to use the shortest and sharpest possible word sometimes comes at the cost of intelligibility, and sometimes at the cost of good judgement. The word Baboró might not mean much to some readers, especially if you are not Irish or based in Ireland, but to me it connotes “children’s arts festival” and immediately conjures up images of the kind of child- and family-oriented cultural events for which the festival is renowned.

This information underlines the unfortunate ambiguity of the headline. Maybe recent events have sensitised me to certain interpretations of the juxtaposed words “hit” and “teens”, but when my eyes scanned the page, my first (pre-caffeine) reaction was not to assume that something or someone had reached its thirteenth year.

To conclude: full credit to the newspaper for spreading the word about the festival, and continued good wishes to everyone involved in Baboró, but please, to whom it concerns: try to parse your headlines with fresh eyes before committing them to print, if only for the sake of your more literal-minded readers.

No one, no-one, nobody, no noone

The indefinite pronouns no one and nobody are largely interchangeable. Garner (1998) notes that no one is more formal and literary, a judgement supported by this corpus analysis. Both terms, however, are apt to appear without controversy in almost any kind of writing.

No one, meaning no person, is spelt with two words. The hyphenated no-one is a common variant, especially in informal contexts, though it is less to my taste than the traditional two-worded form. The diaeretic noöne is unlikely to enter common usage. The practice of writing no one as noone may have resulted from its virtual synonymity with the one-worded nobody; from its connection to the similarly unified everyone, anyone and someone; or from the tendency for the morphology of many compound words to go from A B to A-B to AB.

Noone is a decidedly strange spelling of no one. To my eyes, today, it is wrong, but no one can say for sure what usage will be accepted in 50 years’ time. Noone implies the monosyllabic pronunciation /nuːn/, especially to non-native speakers of English. (Mind you, I have yet to hear anyone mispronounce cooperate.) Searches for “noone” on Bartleby.com turned up a small number of results, all of them the archaic spelling of noon.

Moreover, noone immediately suggests some specific person called Noone, e.g. the actor Nora-Jane Noone or the musician Peter Noone. Thus it may lead to momentary ambiguity or to additional meanings that are both unintended and comic:

Noone loves me, but I have my eye on Sullivan.
Noone saw Noone leave the room.
Noone was behind the tree, so I discreetly relieved myself before rejoining the others.

You see the problem.

Now, a few notes on usage.

Indefinite pronouns (no one, everyone, anybody, etc.) usually take singular verbs but can be referred to by singular or plural pronouns (they, them, their). If you follow an indefinite pronoun with a plural pronoun, you scupper notional agreement (AKA “concord”), but you avoid awkward constructions such as s/he and his or her, as well as the accusations of sexism habitually slung at the notoriously gender-specific he, his and him.

Sometimes the singular form will be called for, and it is preferred by some writers, but there is nothing grammatically wrong with the plural.

“Nobody remembers a journalist for their writing” – Richard F Shepard
“[N]o one can ever be in love more than once in their life” – Jane Austen, in Sense and Sensibility
“Nobody here seems to look into an Author, ancient or modern, if they can avoid it” – Lord Byron, in a letter

This last quote is cited in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which adds that Byron’s “Nobody here” could only have meant males. Yet he opted for genderless they, and it seems altogether natural and sensible. Elsewhere, MWDEU states that “the plural they, their, them with an indefinite pronoun as referent is in common standard use”. Writing about any, anyone and anybody, Robert Burchfield points out that “popular usage and historical precedent favour the use of a plural pronoun”. In adopting the singular use of “plural” they, Byron is in good company.

So, would you write “No one in their right mind”, “No one in his right mind”, “No one in her right mind”, “No one in his or her right mind”, “No one in zer right mind”, or what? My advice is to approach these options with an open mind; to be aware of, but not cowed by, those who decry singular-they constructions; and to let context, meaning and good sense guide your decision.

[image source]

“Attacks” on the language are greatly misunderstood

Last Thursday’s edition of the Irish Times included an opinion piece about the English Language. When I saw the title (“Attacks on the language are rising, basically”) I wondered what the author, David Adams, might be referring to. Was his article a damning assessment of funding for education? A protest at misplaced apostrophes, those errant marks whose ubiquity some would have you believe portends an imminent apostrophopocalypse? A penetrating analysis of contemporary Newspeak, Doublethink, and political framing, such as the redefinition of “war”?

No: Mr Adams spends almost half the article complaining about people using the word “basically” too much, while the rest is a scattershot rant about the nouning of verbs, Australian intonation, and assorted fads and verbal ticks that annoy him. He makes a reasonable point or two near the end, but along the way he takes tiresome potshots at the “blogosphere” (his scare quotes) in “cyberspace” (mine), where “words are regularly invented, mangled or forced against their will from nouns into verbs, or vice versa” (about which more below). He concludes by having another go at “basically”. His barely suppressed rage at the utterance of this word is more than a little alarming:

Only good manners and not wanting to be thought a complete lunatic stop some of us from screaming: “There is no ‘basically’ about it. . . .”

Unwilling to suppress my own more temperate feelings about the matter, I emailed a response to the Irish Times, reprinted below. My letter (which is rather long, but a lot shorter than it was originally) does not appear in today’s Times, though there is one short letter congratulating Mr Adams “for highlighting the abuse of ‘basically’”. At this point I would like to refer all interested parties to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage,* whose entry on “basically” includes the level-headed point that “the rigorous pursuit of excising ‘basically’ does not look like an important path to better prose”.

* Freely available in the dreaded “cyberspace” or from any good bookshop.

Plurals of acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms and single letters

Plurals of acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms and single letters do not usually take apostrophes. Guidance on this issue is not unanimous, but some general advice can be consistently applied, and may help resolve some of the widespread confusion that seems to be generating even more widespread confusion.

Pictured is a screenshot from Twitter, taken a few months ago, showing popular subjects or “Trending Topics”. The vast numbers of people using Twitter means that for a subject to become a “Trending Topic”, it needs to be mentioned a great deal. Because the software distinguishes between two words that are identical apart from the presence or absence of an apostrophe, both “SATs” and “SAT’s” have the potential to appear concurrently in the list, as indeed they did. Evidently, both forms are widely used. My preference is for “SATs”, and I would consider “SAT’s” ill-advised, because such apostrophes are largely unnecessary and potentially confusing.

A recent report from TechCrunch illustrates the potential for miscues from apostrophised plurals: