Mom vs mam, and Americanisms in Irish English

I was recently approached by the Irish Independent newspaper for comment on the influence of American English and pop culture on Irish English speech.

The resulting article, by journalist Tanya Sweeney, focuses on the words people use to address their mother: mam, mum, mom, ma, and so on. It says the rise of mom in Ireland joins ‘other Americanisms that have now slipped into the lexicographical stream’.

Do you take pains saying ‘painstaking’?

I don’t know when I first realised that painstaking – which means very careful, diligent and meticulous – is about taking pains. It’s obvious when you see it, but I didn’t make the connection when I first saw the word, and duly used and encountered it for a while before the etymology occurred to me or I read it somewhere.

Consider for a moment how you say the word, specifically the s in the middle. Do you voice it like a z, as in pains-taking, or is it an unvoiced, ‘soft’ s, as in pain-staking? Maybe you say it both ways? Or it could be borderline – it often seems so. I know the pronunciation of a sound can depend a lot on its neighbours, but I don’t have the phonetic savvy to establish precisely what’s going on here.

In any case it seems I’m not the only one to whom the word’s structure wasn’t initially glaringly obvious. When I asked on Twitter how people spoke it, most said they didn’t voice the s, and some were surprised (to put it mildly) to analyse it anew as taking pains. I’ve just put the full Twitter discussion up on Storify Wakelet, if you’d like to take a look.

Tibetan Buddhist monks taking pains over a sand mandala.*

Curiously, there may be a UK/US difference here. British dictionaries tend to include the voiced-s pronunciation (or ‘z-form’) in their entries for painstaking, but some omit the unvoiced-s variant despite its popularity. Macmillan and Collins offer only the z-form, as does Oxford Dictionaries’ UK page – its US page has both.

Cambridge’s UK audio sample is clearly pains-taking, IPA /ˈpeɪnzˌteɪ.kɪŋ/, but its US audio is closer to pain-staking. Merriam-Webster has \ˈpān-ˌstā-kiŋ\ but its audio is (I think) ambiguous. The American Heritage Dictionary 4th ed. has the z-form only, but the 5th has both and notes that despite its etymology the word “often sounds as if it were made from pain and staking”.

So here’s a quick poll, to increase the sample size of this informal survey. Comments on how you say it and what your dialect is would also be welcome, as would phonetic analysis from anyone who has taken pains to learn those ropes.

* Photographer unknown. Please tell me if you can identify the source.

Whilst, amongst, amidst — old-fashioned or normal?

Language peeves can develop when a word or phrase becomes, or seems to become, rapidly popular – ongoing, for example. You begin to notice it everywhere, and you say Enough! And then there are usages people dislike for the opposite reason: they’re no longer popular enough. They have become … old-fashioned.

Anti-anti-Americanismism

A recent article on the BBC America website features ’10 Things Americans Say… and What They Really Mean’. It begins with an unpromising generalisation and a gratuitous sideswipe:

When it comes to the spoken word, Americans are a truly baffling bunch. So we’ve decoded their most irritating idioms.

Here’s an example of said ‘decoding’ which, though it may have been intended as humour, seems to me sour and condescending:

That which is restrictive

This is quite a long post about a distinction some people make between that and which as relative pronouns — an oft-disputed point of English usage. Feel free to skip ahead if you’re familiar with the territory.

Restrictive clauses (aka defining or integrated relative clauses) provide information that’s essential to a sentence. Take this one:

The bike that I keep in the garage is ideal for short trips.

The underlined clause is integral to the sentence, for reasons context would normally make clear. For example, there may be an implication that I have access to other bikes, so the restrictive clause defines or restricts what bike I’m talking about.

Non-restrictive clauses (also non-defining or supplementary relative clauses) are bound less tightly to the sentence: they can be removed without changing its essential point. Thus:

The bike, which I keep in the garage, is ideal for short trips.

Here, there’s only one bike I could be referring to, and the information about where I keep it is supplementary, non-defining, dispensable.

In speech, non-restrictive clauses are intoned separately; in writing, this separation is marked by punctuation: normally commas, as above, sometimes dashes or parentheses.

There’s a good case for calling non-restrictive clauses supplementary relative clauses, and restrictive ones integrated relative clauses. But these terms are quite new, and in this post I use the more familiar names.

So far so uncontroversial. Then there are sentences like this:

United by uncommon lexicography

A few centuries ago, English spelling was a far looser and more inconsistent affair than it is today. Dictionaries were few, their contents patchy. Shakespeare’s name, even by his own hand, serves to illustrate the degree of variation. Gradually, a good deal of standardisation came about, particularly in the written language, but different standards apply in different places, and usage remains much colo(u)red by variety.

A lot of the discussion over this variety concerns the differences between AmE and BrE spellings (many of which owe to the influence of Noah Webster). Ireland uses BrE spelling, for the most part, as do Australia and New Zealand (Burchfield’s home country), while Canada mixes American and British conventions. Wikipedia has a long, heavily footnoted page on transatlantic spelling differences; for analysis of these and more general differences, I recommend Lynne Murphy’s separated by a common language blog, named after G. B. Shaw’s famous quip.

Are AmE and BrE spelling differences reversible? More qualified minds than mine have entertained the idea of bringing the spelling systems closer together. It’s a very human urge to want to tidy the messy edges of a language. We want to fix, if only in part, an imperfect system. Efficiency is one of the forces behind linguistic change, whether it is consciously directed at a text before us or emerges spontaneously and gradually over time.

Lexicographer Robert Burchfield was no stranger to linguistic change: his revised third edition of Fowler’s iconic usage dictionary was criticised for its largely descriptive approach; and as editor of the Supplement to the OED, he received death threats over some of his decisions. So he was more aware than most people of the passions, for better and worse, that words can inspire.

Tucked away at the back of his book The English Language (1985) is a curious endnote about spelling reform that’s worth reproducing in full:

It would not be a difficult exercise for British people to become accustomed to final -or in all the relevant words (honour/honor, labour/labor, etc.), or for Americans to become used to –our. Similarly it should be possible to come to an agreement about the spelling of such words as marvellous/marvelous, travelling/traveling, and kidnapped/kidnaped (the British forms given first in each case). More difficult (it seems to me) would be the resolution of oe/e in oesophagus/esophagus, etc., ae/e in aesthetic/esthetic, etc., and ph/f in sulphur/sulfur, etc. But a ‘trade-off’, if it could be achieved, in such relatively minor areas of spelling would help to bring the written forms of British and American English much closer together. In 1968 Dr Philip Gove (editor of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary)* and I lightheartedly discussed the possibility of making an approach along these lines to our respective governments but it came to nothing in the end.

Much as I admire Burchfield’s optimism, I think it’s very unlikely that even the more modest shifts could ever be engineered. If changes along the lines Burchfield describes were to be introduced systematically, there might be uproar – or, at any rate, furious brow-furrowing, ferocious levels of grumbling, and further inconsistencies.

Not only do people become accustomed and attached to words and particular spellings and usages, but they positively fetishize (and fetishise) them – often to the extent of finding legitimate variants objectionable.

But it’s tantalising to imagine the discussions Burchfield and Gove had about this. How light-hearted were they? What sort of approach to their governments was envisaged? Were any records kept of possible “trade-offs” – lists made on café napkins, degrees of difficulty calculated, that sort of thing? My curiosity about this is unlikely to be satisfied.

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* A fiercely contentious reference book which I wrote about here.

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