Språk

Apart from astroturfing, other words and phrases of the day for today are:

1) Holding pattern. The hype is over. The Ashes cricket series between Australia and England has finally started. In Cardiff of all places (which should remind us that actually England players represent England and Wales). In the build up to the first day’s play, the Aussies were struck with the bad news that super-fast bowler Brett Lee had suffered a side strain and was ruled out of the first Test match. But when the injury was still an unknown quantity, before the results of a scan had come back, the team spokesman described the feeling of limbo like this: “We’re in a holding pattern until [the results of the scan]“. And you thought that was just something planes do over Biggin Hill while they wait for the chance to land at Heathrow?

2) Dinkum. As (almost always) in ‘fair dinkum’. The BBC Test Match Special radio commentary team pondered over the etymology of Aussie slang word ‘dinkum’ today. Listeners wrote in with various explanations: brought over by Captain Cook and originally ‘fair drinking’, brought over by immigrant Chinese goldpanners and originally ‘din gum’ (meaning ‘good gold’), and so on. But, beautifully, it’s going to be one of those word puzzles we’ll never be able to solve

3) Sherpa calls. No this is not some form of Himalayan yodelling. It’s, as The Guardian explains, “conference calls among senior officials” before a major political event – such as the forthcoming G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy. In other words, the officials are like the sherpas – the ones doing all the hard work. The politicians are the Western mountaineers, taking all the glory. But we knew that already. The more interesting point is that the G8 are considering ejecting Italy for its shoddy organisation of the sherpa calls (and many other things, probably, but it’s more fun to think they’ll be kicked out because they couldn’t even organise a conference call at a conference). But guess who stepped in to set up the sherpa calls? Uncle Sam, that’s who. Where would we be without them?

And now for 3 recent words of the day from the Urban Dictionary – which is cheating, sort of, but they deserve wider publication…

4) Hand me up. An amusing new antonym to the much maligned ‘hand me down’: “Where the young generation in a family adopts and purchases new technology product at a fast rate, and old versions (that are in working order but are not up to current standards) of that technology product are given to the parents or older generations of family. Commonly occurs multiple times on commodity technology gadgets, leaving your parents with many gadgets to play with”. It’s time to get your own back for all those years of jumpers, shoes and sportskit your older brother/sister got bored of, that you’d never choose for yourself in a million years, with a bit of free will, but that you still had to accept. Hand me ups are here to stay!

5) Facebrag. A verb. Could be a noun too, in time. The Facebook fightback has begun: “To use Facebook as a platform to brag. Normally about a job, internship, trip, purchase or anything else that nobody really needs to know but you’d like to tell everyone because you’re awesome”. There’s lots of it about

And finally…

6) Sarah Palin Effect. “The principal that expertise on a certain subject can be gained through geographical proximity to it”. As in, ‘I have experience of foreign policy, because Alaska is right next to Russia’. A timely reminder of the SP problem as her resignation from the Alaska Governor’s post is interpreted in some quarters as preparation for a run in the next Presidential election. And to think that the US only just managed to get rid of the last Republican Bossman they were ashamed of. Here comes another one

A hoard of new words for you this fine July Friday. First we have survivability – which relates to, as it suggests, one’s ability to have survived something. This one cropped up in a report of a tragic event in which two swimmers were swept out to sea off Weston-super-Mare. Commenting on the chances of finding the men alive, a coastguard said: “In terms of their survivability, obviously now a long time has elapsed. I think we are more looking at a recovery operation, rather than a rescue now”. And sure enough, both bodies have now been found

Sorry for the morbid start, but you have to know the context if you’re going to get to grips with these new words. And there’s more: there’s an extra layer of context to the survivability story. This is its obvious similarity to bouncebackability – a rare success story of the post-football-match interview. Iain Dowie, manager of Crystal Palace at the time, coined the word and it has since cropped up in other sports, in business and politics, and all over the world. So now we have two words formed the same way – survivability and bouncebackability (and of course the two are linked in more ways than morphology)

Next up we’re back at Wimbledon. Where players no longer simply change how they play in terms of tactics: they change it up! So said Greg Rusedski commentating on the Haas-Federer semi final today. Haas was complimented for taking a different approach to his serve when facing a break point. So, he changed it up. Change is not enough, take note

Meanwhile, in the women’s draw, Venus Williams engaged us in some US fly talkin’ when explaining sisterly antics with Serena: “No, we’re not so competitive off the court. She tricks me a lot, but I get hip to her tricks. Like we could be in the store trying something on, and she’ll be like, No, that doesn’t look good. As soon as I put it down she tries it on, but I got hip to that. So soon there will be another trick that I have to get hip to…” Get hip to, ‘to work out, realise, get wise to’ – remember where you heard it first. Why not try and use it? You may even like it

In case we were getting carried away with all this yellow ball, Centre Court, love-forty action, the cricket journalists have been chirping away to remind us about that small matter of The Ashes. Any story’s a good story so it seems. And so we have Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff in the naughty corner again. This time for missing the scheduled 8:10am team bus leaving for the site of the Battle of Passchendaele. That’s early by anyone’s standards. And most of us would need to set an alarm to be sure of making it (the real story is that only one player missed the bus). Whereas the rest of us have to concede the times we oversleep when we arrive late for work, school, etc, the professional sportsman cannot be seen to have the same frailties as mere mortals. Instead, he was said to have had an “alarm-clock issue”. As in, he forgot to set it, he forgot to bring it, or he threw it across the room and broke it when it went off? The details were not disclosed

Finally, in the fourth sport referenced today, here in town we were made aware of the possibility of thunderstorms at the outdoor swimming pool today. Of course, thunder comes with lightning as sure as smoke comes with fire. And that’s not a good time to be swimming. But the warning that the pool would have to close if a storm broke was jargonised somewhat: “Please be aware if we experience thunder conditions we will have to close the pool”. Thunder conditions? It’s not the thunder conditions we’re worried about. It’s the lightning conditions which can seriously affect one’s survivability

The end of week one at Wimbledon, and already we have had dutiful overuse of the commentators’ hardy perennials great, epic and rollercoaster to describe the action. We now know what Hawkeye is, what it’s used for and that it doesn’t work after 8.30 at night. We’ve had a liberal sprinkling of players bossing rallies. We’ve even had a few squeaky bum times borrowed from football (no box seats borrowed from cricket yet though). Regular Språk readers will have seen all that stuff coming

Sadly, there’s only one roof in SW19 that anyone’s talking about and so it’s referred to plainly as The Roof and everyone understands we’re talking about the Centre Court covering – thus there has been no opportunity to further the minority-interest debate: is it retractable or protractible? (and the natural secondary question: why is retractable -able and protractible -ible?) Perhaps we’ll have to die wondering

Anyway, the most pleasing aspect of the BBC’s online text commentary so far? Linguistically speaking of course. Well, a straw poll (orig. US straw vote, says OED) has come up with this from day 5:

“1750: So what happened to all this rain, eh? Those in the know said we were dead certs to get a downpour today but…. nothing. Roof shmoof”

And what is the shm in ‘roof shmoof’? Why it’s Yiddish shm-reduplication of course! So versatile that you can use it in many many imaginative ways: bagel shmagel, strawberries shmawberries, McEnroe shMcEnroe, blog shmog, Språk shmåk, etc etc. See? Hours of fun

Oh please send me a text Björn

Wimbledon. Tennis players grunting. Ballboys running frenetically. Fans queueing overnight for tickets. A topsy turvy world. And the BBC covers it in multimedia ways. Including radio. Which medium affords much opportunity for studio anchors to go to roving correspondents on location. A situation which gave rise to a very understandable misunderstanding today

Roving correspondent: “Got a text from Björn Borg in Paris did Robin Söderling”

Studio anchor: “I thought you were going to say you got a text from Björn Borg in Paris – I would’ve been mighty impressed”

Studio anchor wasn’t the only one to be led up the garden path. I also thought that it was going that way

So what did our roving correspondent do? Went against the normal word order of English, that’s what. Instead of SVO (subject, verb, object) – as in, Robin got a text from Björn in Paris – Mr Correspondent went all VOS on us: [V: got] [O: a text from Björn Borg] in Paris did [S: Robin Söderling]

Which is the word order you’d expect if the correspondent were speaking, say, Fijian or Malagasay. But in English it seems a bit unusual and old-fashioned – old-fashioned in the sense that it can come across to the listener as a little rural rather than old-fashioned in the sense that it sounds lovely and literary. That’s in particular because going VOS in English forces us to put a form of do, a.k.a. the dummy auxiliary in there (did Robin Söderling ooh-aar)

The problem was that nowadays when you hear got at the start of an utterance then you think the speaker’s going to say something about himself, with I as the understood but absent subject. As in -

A (pretending to be nonchalant): Got a text from Björn Borg in Paris

B (pretending to be nonchalant): Oh did you?

A null subject construction that one. And that’s funny because it happens a lot in speech, with lots of verbs not just got, whereas it’s not supposed to happen in English at all. Null subjects are something languages like Italian and Spanish can do, but English supposedly not. But then, why not? If we understand it (with certain exceptions like when the speaker wants to go all VOS on us) then there’s no harm done. We drop a surprising amount out of speech. Especially subject pronouns. Especially in the first person singular, when you’re talking about you. And when you’re telling a story. Listen out for it. Is everywhere

We’re in the thick of the English cricket season and already it’s clear which are to be the vogue phrases of the summer. Box seat – as in, “The Netherlands are in the box seat here” and used at least three times per match of the Twenty20 World Cup, seemingly under contractual obligation. And ask. Almost always collocated with big. It’s usually a ‘big ask’ we speak of. Not a ‘quite big ask’. Never a ’small ask’. As in, “the West Indies need 3 to win from their final over and that’s not a big ask”. Or (an actual example here), “South Africa need 86 from 54 balls and that’s a big ask” (exclaimed Dermot Reeve on BBC Radio Five Live)

Etymologically, ‘box seat’ presumably comes from the metaphorical idea of being in the driving seat – the box seat being the driver’s seat in an old fashioned horse-drawn carriage. ‘Ask’ being used as a noun is new to British English, and has already been scorned by TW. Its meaning is more like ‘requirement’ or, more figuratively, ‘test of character’ than the ‘question’ or ‘enquiry’ meaning carried by the verb. And guess where we got it from? Our friends in Australia of course, who first used it in writing in the late 1980s according to the OED. They mess with our word classes as well as our cricketing self esteem, those Antipodeans

The good news for any who may dislike these turns of phrase is that both belong very much to the shorter forms of the game, when the number of overs bowled is limited and the setting and reaching of targets is requisite and not just optional (as it can be in a Test match if a draw will do). So this means the phrases will be less in evidence by the time the main event of the summer – The Ashes series against Australia – comes round. Instead, we’ll have ample opportunity to trot out those other well worn English cricketing cliches: ‘batting collapse’, ‘weary bowlers’, ‘captain sitting dejected on the balcony’. Look forward to it

So who’s the fastest linguist in the world? If there were a linguists-only track race tomorrow, who’d win it?

We can forgive Noam Chomsky if he’s a little slower out of the blocks, now he’s halfway through his 81st year on the planet. Steven Pinker’s hair would be his parachute. And David Crystal has more the David Bedford look of a long distance runner rather than a Usain Bolt paceman

In fact, everyone else may as well prepare to race for second place: for none other than Christine Ohuruogu, current Commonwealth, World and Olympic 400m champion, has a linguistics degree. From UCL no less. It just goes to show that studying linguistics need not be a hurdle to future success

A new event for the next Linguistics Olympiad?

The Grauniad may seem an unreliable indicator of language trends, given their liability to add ands (above left) and omit apostrophes (above right). Not that there should be one for “(goal)keeper”, mind, the need to signal the abbreviation there having long since settled down to stating the obvious. No. It’s the its that’s the slip up

But the way they form the past tense of leap as leaped rather than leapt is symptomatic of the general trend to regularise the irregular –

“Once James was ruled out, one statistic leaped out from last weekend’s Premier League fare”

And it’s an assault on our Old English vocabulary – that which used to do funny things like change the vowel in verbs to signal the past tense. The regularising force is the later introduced -ed ending – a Continental idea imported with Normans, castles and cheese. This has already happened with, for example, climb and help (you climbed the tree and helped someone yesterday – you did not clomb the tree and holpe, holp or holpen them. And it wouldn’t have sounded weird to you at the time)

It’s a work in progress with leap-leaped-leapt, creep-creeped-crept, dive-dived-dove (the Americans playing the conservative keep-the-irregular role in this last case – Americanisms-are-bad-for-us believers take note)

What these examples so far have in common, apart from being regularised to some degree, is that they’re relatively infrequently used. Lying forgotten in a dusty corner of our personal word banks, our lexicons, these verbs are prone to regularisation essentially because we forget that there is an irregular form. It’s only through use, re-use and use again that we reinforce the odd ones out

That’s why regularisation is unlikely to happen with, say, sleep-sleeped-slept because it’s probably frequently used enough to survive as an irregular. The most frequently used verbs in English are be, have, do, say, go, get, make, know, take, see, think, come and give. It’s no coincidence that every verb on this list has an irregularly formed past tense – and thanks to their frequency it’ll stay that way for a long long time. Unless someone enforces their regularisation on us. But then who‘d want to do a thing like that?

Watson (L): not chuffed, never has been, never will be

What does an Aussie cricketer say if he’s happy to be picked in the Ashes squad? That he’s stoked, in the words of Shane Watson (if you listen to the extract from his press conference, admire the way he transforms Australia into ‘uh-stray-ya’, talking Strine, see?)

What does an English rugby player say about being called up to the squad for the summer fixtures? That he’s chuffed, in the words of Sam Vesty

It’s hard to say why either of these was originally transferred to mean ‘very happy’, but both have in common a connection with engines. The two verb meanings of ‘chuff’ in the OED are [a] an onomatopoeic way to describe the puffing workings of an engine, [b] to swell out (the cheeks usually). So the image behind the metaphor is perhaps a kind of strutting boy-cockerel, sticking out its chest, and sounding off loudly in its pride

‘Stoking’ a fire or furnace is that thing you do to stir it up and keep it thriving. It’s a universal instinct men at barbecues will surrender to for no apparent reason or benefit except that it feels powerful. Feel that heat and watch that steam rise! And therein lies the link between these two terms for being happy – it can’t be a coincidence that they’re both associated with giving off heat, noise, steam, looking impressive, sounding impressive, and that the consequences are actually substantial

‘Chuff’ has also picked up a couple of unsavoury slang meanings. But the happy one is characteristically British, apparently first used by military types in the mid 20th century, and now kept alive by rugby players – a bit posh then really. As for ’stoked’, it’s characteristically New World, was probably first used by surfer types in the late 20th century, and is now common currency among Aussie cricketers, snowboarders and stoners everywhere… Why are the Brits so uncool at everything? We even had Cool Britannia and couldn’t do that right

Well done Ledley King for being the latest in the proud tradition of public figures to have euphemistically been described as tired and emotional in the media. The Tottenham footballer, who spent the night in the clink after allegedly racially abusing and punching a nightclub doorman, follows Wayne Rooney, Nicklas Bendtner, George Best, [insert footballer's name here] in earning the tag with a grand tradition

The ‘tired and emotional’ adjectives have been used to stand in for ‘drunk’ ever ever since Private Eye used the expression to refer in a non-libellous way to an MP’s drinking problem. It was an open secret in political circles that George Brown, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, 1960-1970, came to work under the influence. But to put the fact in print so boldly was to risk a court case. So the euphemism was composed, and ever since has been a tabloid column inch waiting to happen

Alas we'll never see these days again

While Henman, Agassi, Graf and Clijsters rolled back the years and entertained a capacity Centre Court crowd sat (sitting) – for the first time – under the new, translucent, roll-on roll-off roof, a more pressing linguistic question was at hand. Jon Henderson opened the debate in the Guardian:

“Finally, a thought about the description of Centre Court’s new accessory as a retractable roof. Does retractable have an opposite in the sense that it is used here? It seems its sliding forth when rain arrives – rather than its retraction when it passes – is its most salient feature. Should we not call it a protrusible or protractile or even a protrusive roof? The matter needs careful consideration”

Henderson is right. Careful consideration is what we shall give it

If the function of the roof is to withdraw itself when necessary than it would be retractable. Like Blofeld’s faux-volcanic lair with retractable crater (You Only Live Twice). Or Tower Bridge’s rising arms. Rising rather than falling because the special circumstance is the former. Its standard function is a bridge. Unlike the barriers at level crossings whose function is to come down when the trains are near. Hence they are barriers – even though that’s not what they’re usually doing – because that’s their function

So it depends really on what you see as the default setting for the Wimbledon roof. If you believe what they say about the British weather then you might say ‘retractable’ based on an image of the default roof position being closed. But anyone else might disagree, the groundsman in particular

So there you have it: the roof over Centre Court will not usually be closed. Jon Henderson is correct: its function will be to roll out and ensure the tennis never stops, and then roll back when conditions improve. The roof is still retractable in terms of the literal – given that it can do it – but it’s not a retractable roof in terms of the functional. It was commissioned primarily so that it could protrude. Its retraction is a necessary by product of its intended purpose

So what is it? Henderson’s choice is ‘protrusible’, ‘protractile’ or ‘protrusive’. Which would all be fine. But for the direct opposite of retractable, in rhyme and etymology, how about ‘protractible’? Yes, a protractible roof. Sounds very fine. Plus it introduces that mystifying -ible/-able alternation cherished by spelling bee setters the world over