Sorry?

I was due a broadband upgrade before Christmas, but at the eleventh hour the upgrade was postponed owing to some technical glitch or other.

The email informing me of the delay was very polite, until it came to the final sentence.

"Sorry for any incontinence," they wrote.

PS

Received an email from an old colleague this morning in which he'd added a PS.

It started me thinking about what an anachronism this is now. Post-script. In the days before WYSIWYG editors when text was always serial and if you remembered something after the fact you had to add it to the end. Why would you do that now? Why not just stick it inline, where it would have been if you'd thought of it at the time?

Two possibilities sprang to mind. Maybe adding it in at the right place would disturb the sense of the sentence, and you don't have time (or you're too lazy) to frig around with it. Far simpler to just jot the thought down whole, at the end, in a PS.

Or maybe you already sent the email, and you want to make it clear that what you send after it should have been part of it in the first place. Maybe we need another standard subject prefix of "PS:" to go along with "Re:" and "Fw:"

So from a point where I thought PS belonged in the age of Basildon Bond and sealing wax, I've now convinced myself that it'll be around for a fair few years yet.

The fun gets funner

More work-time language fun, this time from one of our... no... I'll stick to my Principles of Anonymity. This arrived in an email yesterday:

... as far as I am a ware...

What? As far as you are an illegally-obtained piece of software? As far as you are a piece of pottery? As far as you are an ethnic native of Tanzania? As far as you are a small town in Hertfordshire? No, dear boy. You are aware. Or rather, you ain't.

And then I noticed...

...people who can't tell the difference between 'then' and 'than'.

My latest example: I just read a blog post by a famous author; some idiot flamed him in the comments; and a later commenter wrote (and I quote): "There are better places to be a troll then here."

I don't know whether this kindergarten grammatical error is becoming more common or if it's just that I'm *seeing* it more often, but I've caught it dozens of times in the last few weeks and it's becoming about as irritating as people who write "I should of been there" or "I would of come if I'd known."

What's more, I suspect it has the same root. That is, people writing how they speak. Should of, could of, would of, all come from hearing should've, could've, would've in their daily lives without ever seeing them written down properly or being taught the grammatical explanation for the contraction. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover "better places then here" has a similar explanation. It probably started in the U.S. where "than" is often pronounced closer to "then" and pretty soon with a lame school system (both there and here, sadly), no-one knows the difference.

The real sad thing is that it's not confined to kids and illiterate forum dwellers. Even those who should know better - professional writers among them - have fallen into the trap.

We recently watched the final series of The Wire - a marathon viewing session lasting most of Sunday - and I was struck by the way not only the kids manning "the corners" but also senators, lawyers and the police expressed themselves with minimal vocabulary. A single word like "shit" - uttered with variable expression and dependent on context becomes something like a universal noun.

An expression of surprise: Shit!
An expression of disgust or disbelief: Sheeeeeeeeyit.
A generic description of one or more objects: Don't mess wit' my shit.
A reference to a horrific event or something that must not be spoken of: Shit like that.
A misdemeanour: What's with that shit?

etc, etc.

After a few hundred years of increasing literacy - pretty much since the invention of the printing press - anarchy is returning to language. At this rate it won't be long before we're all communicating in a series of grunts again. Sheeeeeeeeyit.

Say what?

A lifetime love of language occasionally manifests itself in mild amusement at the verbal knots tied in the sentences of others, malapropisms and general mis-speaking. Mild internal amusement, I should add. It's not my style to wag fingers and snort with derision or anything like that. I don't get pleasure from others' embarrassment(*).

So there'll be no names or other identifying material in my relating a comment from a colleague on a recent voice conference, when describing how his current project was going:

It's got a status of 'quo'

I wonder where they get it from sometimes.

(*) Note: I don't count forum dwellers. I'll wag fingers, snort, pick apart, ridicule, correct, bang on about apostrophes and generally not give any quarter when I'm on a forum. It's all part of the fun. Besides, they deserve it.

English as she is spoked

As you might expect, with being a writer, I love the English language. Not just the wealth of vocabulary or the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, but its fluidity. It's ability to change and grow, adopting new words from other cultures and adapting existing ones to meet new needs.

Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.

And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.

Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."

But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.

Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.

Not to mention the fell ratio

While I'm on a linguistic roll, I caught the tail end of summat on Radio 4 yesterday (Word of Mouth, to be precise) on the subject of arcane English spellings and what a barrier they are to learning the language. I found it interesting as spelling has always been a strength of mine (to the extent that some of my colleagues refer to me as "the human spellchecker"), something I feel is important, and as such what I thought was the "modern" trend against teaching spelling in schools, or at least not correcting it when wrong, sat very uncomfortably with me when my children started school.

Well it seems the tide is turning, and received wisdom is coming full circle. After years of schools not concentrating on spelling, universities are rebelling against a tide of students whose use of language is so poor they can barely make themselves understood, and industry is suffering from a generation of semi-literate youngsters incapable of generating a professional-looking document or presentation. Despite 30-40 years of laissez-faire in the classroom on the subject of spelling, good English is still seen as a marker of educational attainment.

This is causing something of a backlash from those teachers concerned for their students in the lower ability ranges, for whom the unruly spelling of many English words is a hurdle they find hard to leap. It was this aspect (among others) that Word of Mouth spent some time discussing, and which I found so interesting - mainly because the difficulties that it poses had never affected me, so it was something I'd never really thought about.

To spice up what is essentially a dry subject, the programme had invited someone who campaigns for spelling reform - a woman deeply passionate about the scars of humiliation inflicted on the hapless learner - to explain the problem. Some of the facts and statistics she presented were quite illuminating, leaving aside the hyperbole with which she described the "injustice" of forcing children to learn English spelling - comparing it to the Victorians sending them down mines and up chimneys and implying that it is something which in these more enlightened times should be dispensed with.

The problem is, English uses far more discrete spellings of language sounds - graphemes - than other languages. Graphemes are the written representation of phonemes - standard vowel and consonant sounds plus combinations like ea; ou; sh; ch; etc.

Most European languages have around 50 graphemes. English has 114.

It's quite common for phonemes to have more than one grapheme - i.e. there's more than one way to represent the same sound - but what makes English so much more complicated is that the reverse also happens frequently. In 49 cases the same grapheme is used to represent more than one sound - for example 'ea' in treat, threat and great.

These are referred to by language teachers as "tricky" words - words which can't be learnt by following simple rules. Bright children start learning these tricky words right from the beginning but for those on the slower side, they're too hard and pose real problems. The speaker reckoned there are 3,695 common English words that cannot be spelled by rule. Things like

very - merry
arrive - arise
ballad - salad

1,000 of the tricky words involve doubling or not doubling a consonant, and their correct spelling has no connection with the "rule" about a double consonant keeping a vowel short (as in dinner/diner). The presenter argued that this is a relatively simple problem to overcome, whereupon the teacher suggested that while it may not be so bad for words pairs such as latter/later, what happens when you encounter lateral?

It was clear the presenter, Clive Rosen, wasn't convinced. Italian is well recognised as a "regular" language, he argued, but the same literacy problems exist in Italy, where a sizeable percentage of the population still struggle with reading.

Sadly while the programme expressed the problem eloquently enough, little time was devoted to any potential solution. The lady's campaign to reform English spelling would, for instance, see all the different ways of spelling the 'ee' sound in the language (leave; sleeve; receive; evil; magazine; siege; aesthete; ...) replaced with just one. But this is just one change. Does anyone really beleeve that this is a change that could actually bee introduced among the 600+ million English speekers in the world with any degree of success? We're talking peeple of all age ranges, not to mention ree-writing all the spell checkers, signposts, reeprinting all the books, and editing the overwhelming majority of the billions of Internet pages.

And that's even before considering the opposing view - that existing spellings reflect the origins of the language and make English what it is. It can't be *that* hard, surely, if it still enjoys such widespread usage?

A more realistic solution to my mind would involve the development of more effective teaching techniques targeted at lower ability levels. Avoid the kind of embarrassment the guest speaker was alluding to; devote more time, and earlier, to tricky words (as the more able students do naturally already); introduce more fun elements to the traditionally tedious subject. At least such changes would be restricted to the 4-11 age range, rather than forcing the entire population to relearn something we each already have such a heavy personal investment in.

(and of course, we're all familiar with these, aren't we? ;o))

I'd rather be a cunning linguist

Taro 9 (made by BBC Wales to be broadcast tonight on S4C) asks the question: Is bilingualism the way forward?

"For decades the status of the Welsh language has sharply divided opinion in Wales but in Belgium it looks like a row over language is set to tear a nation in two," says the press release, going on to describe the controversy caused by Milford Haven politician Eric Harries who dared to suggest that limited resources are being wasted by the legal requirement to publish all council documents in Welsh as well as English (you can read the rest of it here).

In Belgium, differences between the Dutch speakers in Flanders to the north of the country, and the French speakers, primarily from Wallonia in the south, are threatening to literally split the country in two, wiping Belgium clean off the map.

I'm reminded of the conversations I've had in the past with Canadian friends regarding the resentment they feel as a result of their own legal requirement, historically imposed on the entire country by the relatively small province of Quebec, to have both English and French descriptions on all packaged goods and many public signs, and to be forced to learn French in "immersion" classes. And also of recent debates in the UK about the relative merits of publishing, for instance, medical leaflets in a variety of ethnic languages (Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, etc) as opposed to insisting that settlers in this country learn to speak and read English.

We often joke about America and England being divided by a common language, but there is more uniting us (especially in our use of English) than separates us, and certainly within a single country, it seems that one of the attributes that defines a country as a country is its common tongue.

If a country like Belgium, which to once again quote from the BBC press release is referred to as being "...regarded the world over as a symbol of co-operation and European unity", can be divided by language then surely the message is clear. One country: one language.

Office euphemisms

I don't know how many of you work in an office, but those that do must be familiar with that ubiquitous character common the world over: the Holder of Loud Telephone Conversations.

They come in two varieties. Those that sit at their desk and hold forth safe in the knowledge that they're not disturbing anyone, because their conversations are so interesting that the whole of the rest of the office will want to stop what they're doing and listen in. This is a good job, because those other workers don't get a lot of choice in the matter. They're gonna hear what the guy (or gal) is saying whether they want to or not.

The other variety has a neurological condition that physically prevents them from sitting still when a phone approaches their ear. They are impelled to pace up and down the office, and in really bad cases even through the entire building, while conducting their telephone business. In the same way as a pigeon can't walk without bobbing its head, the Ambulatory Holder of Loud Telephone Conversations can't talk without walking.

Inasmuch as any of this has an advantage, it is this: it allows students of human nature access to a wide variety of office euphemisms, which I thought might make an interesting subject for an occasional series, starting today. I have no idea how long this will run (or even if it will), or how many different phrases I can extract, but for today, here's #1.

"I'll leave you in peace."

This is an attempt to stop the conversation that actually means "I've got what I wanted from you and I'm not interested in hearing about your problems, so shut the fuck up and let me get off the phone."

Its effect is limited, as witnessed by the fact that our resident HoLTeC had to say it three times before his callee got the message.

The double is

I don't know if this was a regional phenomenon years ago, but for the first eighteen years of my life I never heard the double is. When I went up to UMIST I became friends with a guy from Windsor who used it all the time. I used to take the piss out of him mercilessly and he could never understand it. As far as he was concerned it was perfectly normal to say "The difference is is that I come from the South," or "What I think is is he should not of (sic) done it," or "reaching out for human faith is is like a journey I just don't have a map for."

Brief Net research suggests this abomination began in the United States (source of most English grammar mangling, unfortunately) around 1971 - which explains why I didn't hear it until 1975 - and jumped the Atlantic relatively quickly, worse luck.

In the last 10-15 years, like most appalling grammatical errors, the incorrect double is usage has gained wider currency. Whether this is due to the diaspora of "estuary English" or the dire state of grammar teaching in schools (by which I mean the almost total lack of...) or a combination of those I don't know, but it can now be heard regularly all over the country, even on what used to be considered the last bastion of grammatical correctness: Radio 4 (although the presenters on there now can't even manage their verb-subject agreement properly most of the time).

It's almost as if the speaker believes the first 'is' has become part of the preceding word. That's often how it's spoken: all run together. In the examples above it's "difference-is" or "think-is" etc.

There is, of course, a correct usage of the double is, but it is far rarer than current usage would have you believe. Used mainly for emphasis, your response to the question "what is that?" for instance, might be: "What that is, is a way of explaining how to use the double is."

The difference is that (not "is is that") in the correct usage the first "is" is always followed by a comma and is not run into the preceding word as if they were one. Try it - strike a blow for good English and a return to how things should be. And if you hear it used on Radio 4? Get on to the complaints show.

If is is is bad enough, then more recent developments are even worse. Some kind of bastardised past tense has been introduced, so we get constructs like "The only thing was is..." and only last week on The X Factor I heard Simon Cowell say "The difference being is that..." Aargh!