Rose Jacobs at Lingua Franca has an interesting idea:
And yet I accept that language changes. I like it, even. So why am I resistant to such a widely accepted if relatively novel usage? I’m reminded of a New Yorker piece by Robert Sapolsky in which the author, a neurobiologist, investigates the age at which a person’s appetite for novelty is likely to dwindle — and when our taste for the new vanishes completely. He finds that if you haven’t heard a certain style of music by the time you’re 35, you probably won’t become a fan. You’ve got a longer time window with culinary tastes, and a shorter one when it comes to body art (Sapolsky probed piercings). What about linguistic taste? He didn’t look into it, but we can.
I’ve chosen seven examples of novel language that have emerged in the past 75 years or so, tried to roughly pinpoint when each came into relatively common usage, and put them into a shared Google spreadsheet. My dates might be off, and I welcome your comments and corrections — but note that I’m not looking for Oxford English Dictionary-backed evidence of when a neologism began. Yes, impact was around as a verb in the early 1600s, and yes, there are scattered examples of its use ever since, but according to the Google N-Gram viewer at least, its boom time began in the 1970s.
Anyway, the point of the shared spreadsheet is data collection. If you’re up for taking part, fill in one row with your birthdate and a “Yes” or “No” in each subsequent column, according to whether the language at the top of that column bothers you. Once we have critical mass, we can start looking for patterns.
The examples involve reveal as a noun, Xerox and impact as verbs, the noun skillset, morph as a verb outside the context of computer animation, medal as a verb, and lowkey/low-key as an adverb; I’m mildly annoyed by the last, but not really, and I’m not taking part in the survey because my responses (as someone who has spent many years purging himself of peevery) would be so skewed. But I urge you to take part if it appeals to you, and I look forward to the results. (Sapolsky’s findings seem spot-on to me; the late 1980s, right after I turned 35, are precisely when I lost interest in new music.)
The two most recent usages I can think of that grate on me are calling a “living room”, a “living”, and referring to “main dishes” as “mains”. I’ll probably get used to these truncations eventually, but for now, they still get under my skin.
Contrary to Sapolsky’s observation, I’m still open to new music at nearly 50, but I shudder inwardly at all body art, even when the work is attractive and original.
I looked at the spreadsheet but couldn’t find the words I was supposed to react to. All I saw was a vertical left column of dates (birthdates?) and a series of yeses and noes. The top row–I assume where the words are supposed to be–was only labelled with letters of the alphabet.
I can’t agree with the premise though. I’ve been discovering new kinds of music all along–even last year, and I’m 65. Ditto new foods. My tastes in clothes have also changed (though not with the fashions much).
The only thing that hasn’t changed much for me is my politics: I still hate capitalism.
to impact
I remember when I first heard “impact” as a verb. It was while General Haig was replacing President Reagan (or VP Ford?) when Reagan was shot by a would-be assassin and had to spend time in hospital. Haig had not been very well-known, nor heard speaking to the nation, and many people were struck by his unusual vocabulary, which was attributed to his using words typical of the military. One of these was “to impact”, which generated a lot of comments but was soon adopted into current American speech.
I looked at the spreadsheet but couldn’t find the words I was supposed to react to.
I have to confess that the spreadsheet put me off — even if I had had a stronger impulse to take part, it seemed a ridiculously archaic way of constructing a survey, one level up from asking people to send in postcards.
My favorite Haigspeak – “we must definitize the President’s catalyzation”
And best quote about Haigspeak ever:
Haig, in congressional hearings before his confirmatory, paradoxed his auditioners by abnormalling his responds so that verbs were nouned, nouns verbed, and adjectives adverbised. He techniqued a new way to vocabulary his thoughts so as to informationally uncertain anybody listening about what he had actually implicationed. . . .
it bothers that the verb ‘agree’ takes a direct object now, which wasn’t the case before – i see this frequently in the financial times – i would have said ‘agree on’
i also am sad about old words i can’t use any more – when i was a child ‘negro’ was polite
I don’t mind most of her examples – ‘to medal’ is just a sports commentator thing off the telly, so I can safely ignore it – but I couldn’t figure out how to use the spreadsheet. At the age of 65 I would welcome hearing new styles of music IF THERE WERE ANY TO HEAR. All I get is the relentless singsong they play on my car radio and complaining about crappy radio stations is well within the remit of the 1960s generation. It’s good to be reminded nowadays that there once was General Haig. Not everything was better before Trump. For his insidious approach to English I’m reminded too of Donald “Known Knowns & Unknown Knowns” Rumsfeld.
Well, to answer your question outright is that, as I’ve mentioned before, and well, from “The Case Against Italians”:
“They’re rude, and prone to violence, and anyone who thinks the Mafia is dead is living in a fantasy world” . . . wait, that’s a different blog I comment on. I meant “The Case Against Italics”:
That is, it’s only natural to object to the less than euphonious “impact” when we have so many other verbs that do the job well. However, you could argue impact was actually a verb, if not quite having the same metaphorical range back, in English before it was a noun, its use beginning circa 1600 — its noun form only taking root over a century later, from the verb of course, in 1738 — and to quibble over the metaphorical range puts one on shaky ground, me thinks, although I don’t use it myself, probably having an aversion similar to Hat’s. More anti Italian rhetoric:
Shit, I just realized that it was the last item on your list that bothered you especially — “lowkey/low-key as an adverb” — and it does me, too. I can only offer my previous reasons; that and its actual novelty. Etymonline doesn’t even have an adverbial form. (I almost got that into the first comment, missed the saved button by a second!) Yeah, I hate it.
I don’t even know what a “reveal” is! So yes, it does bother me. “Medalled” I’ve never heard but it sounds ridiculous. “Lowkey” doesn’t bother me at all.
I think I’ve been living under a rock.
What does bother the hell out of me is “advocate for” instead of “advocate”. What does “advocate for the death penalty” tell you that isn’t conveyed by “advocate the death penalty”? I only noticed this one recently but it seems to have spread like wildfire.
The trouble with the 35 cut-off date is that it fails to take into account social factors. I didn’t have exposure to hiphop / rap because I didn’t move in those circles (young, Western) at the time, nor did I have access to those channels (music videos?) that would have familiarised me with it. It’s a trend that doesn’t speak to me because I never lived through it. And not having lived through it, I can’t say coming to it later that singing about gangsters seems very appealing.
On the other hand, I came across Mongolian music much later and do find some of it quite pleasant to listen to.
“Lowkey” doesn’t bother me at all.
You realize it’s the adverbial use we’re talking about? The example Jacobs gives is “I’m lowkey annoyed by her response.”
I wonder how many of the early respondents answered “yes, I’m fine with it” rather than “no, it doesn’t bother me” (or vice versa).
In my case, I’m somewhat bothered by the adverbial “low-key”, and very mildly bothered by “medaled”. The rest just feels like normal English (though I’m skewed on “morphed” by reading too many transformation stories).
I believe Fowler was already peeving about “advocate for” coming on a century ago, so bathrobe may be having a Recency-Illusion issue. Although further back in the history of peeving’s greatest hits is Ben Franklin’s 1789 letter to Noah Webster complaining about the newfangled use of “advocate” as a verb (which the OED rather cruelly uses as one of its citations for the verb!).
Separately, I’m now 53 but am not convinced there have actually been any stylistic revolutions or innovations in music since I turned 35 with the new millenium. As best as I can tell the music The Young People listen to is various variations on or combinations of 20th-century styles that were already extant before I was 35, and I like it or not depending on some combination of how I do or don’t already like the component parts and how well-executed it is. My old-dude-not-liking-new-stuff bias probably tends to be more a heard-it-done-better-before thing than a this-is-a-weird-novelty-I-can’t-grok thing. And to be fair a lot of stuff I liked when I first heard it on the radio as a teenager I might have liked less if I’d had at the time a deeper base of prior knowledge that would have predictably led to a higher incidence of heard-it-done-better-before reactions.
Probably limited to the phrase “the big reveal”, which is the moment in a story when the most important plot twist is revealed (the villain’s identity for instance).
…I didn’t even know it was possible to omit for here.
…I didn’t even know it was possible to omit for here.
Basically the same in my case. I do vaguely recall having heard of some people advocating things, but advocating for things sounds so much more natural that I wasn’t sure if I would’ve even been fine with the plain phrasing.
There’s probably a study idea in there somewhere – phrasings that had gone (mostly) out of use in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s… how old do people have to be to still not be bothered with them?
It’s probably much harder to search for such recently-obsolete phrasings than for newfangled ones, however.
With advocate, are we talking about the noun or the verb? I find “X is an advocate for the movement to abolish plastic sporks,” perfectly fine, as is “X advocates abolishing plastic sporks.” The first means X was hired by or otherwise speaks for the movement, as a lawyer or spox. The second means X is advocating a personal position.
Spox !! [ shakes cane in impotent annoyance, then reflects that it is a reasonable way to avoid the attentions of gender gripers ]
Kismet is now balking at arrow brackets. What next ?
I don’t even know what a “reveal” is!
Medieval/Tudor dress style: in those leg-of-mutton puffy shoulder pieces, an inset lozenge-shaped piece in contrasting colour.
Also a term in architecture.
Also a term used by conjurors as the ‘punch line’ of a trick.
My initial dismissive reaction to “spox” was due to taking the “o” as being pronounced as if in “spoxymoron”.
“Advocate for” the verb. “He advocated the death penalty” vs “He advocated for the death penalty”. Perhaps I am a victim of the recency illusion but I honestly can’t say I’d ever heard “He advocated for ….” It sounds like a back-formation from “an advocate for the death penalty” — which itself is obviously fine.
I did a very crude Google n-gram on “advocated the” vs “advocated for the”. The latter was minuscule compared with the former, but slowly increasing. So I’m not sure why some people feel that “advocated for the” is the only possible phrasing.
What about “advocate against” ? Do we need “abvocate” instead ?
Kismet is forgiven. Should have used the HTML escapes.
“To advocate for the death penalty” actually loses an important distinction:
He is an advocate for the poor > He is advocating for the poor.
He is an advocate for the death penalty > He is advocating the death penalty.
But since this is a classic tactic of peevers, I won’t push my luck with this one — not on LH!
@AJPC:
I’m no Rumsfeld fan in the least, but his “known unknowns” thing is not only perfectly sensible but has a sort of poetry about it. It doesn’t belong with the Haig gobbledegook.
Re music: rap. It’s the only completely original sort of pop music to have arisen in my period of musical paying-attention, and as predicted, I don’t like any of it. Recently, I’ve been wondering if I was looking for excellence in the wrong place. Sensible people whose opinions I respect seem to find genuine verbal artistry in the best sort. I may try again.
Long ago, I made my peace with the fact that in English, you can verbify pretty well anything.
you can verbify pretty well anything
I think that should be “you can verb pretty well anything”.
You can verbify pretty well any noun. Annunciation of verbs is also permitted.
I’m no Rumsfeld fan in the least, but his “known unknowns” thing is not only perfectly sensible but has a sort of poetry about it.
Indeed. What’s more, it’s a standard engineering insight. Rumsfeld himself says he heard it from a NASA administrator, who undoubtedly heard it from his own geeks. The term unknown unknowns was apparently first used by military intelligence, and later by strategic planners, including project managers.
The “advocate/advocate for” question is just one example of a more general trend.
Another example is “explain/explain about”.
I’ve had to deal with a lot of people from India, and verb forms with extra prepositions are very common in Indian English. I don’t know whether there are other varieties of English where such things are common too.
Another new style is the use of “farewell” as a transitive verb, often in reference to funerals. I associate this mostly with Australians.
As far as music goes, as I’ve grown older I’ve started to listen to older music. When I was 30 I wouldn’t listen to anything from before 1895. Now I’m back to the 1600s.
Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” thing is not only perfectly sensible but has a sort of poetry about it.’
It’s only the poetry that’s contentious. There are plenty of other ways to say it, but bureaucrats will bureaucrat.
unknown unknowns was apparently first used by military intelligence
Arf.
I wasn’t talking about rap as singsong radio music. “Music industry” is another oxymoron.
A reveal is a well-used noun in Architecture and the construction business to mean what Germans call a shadow gap (Schattenfuge), the modernist version of disguising the joining of two different materials previously accomplished by covering the whole messy area with a piece of moulding. Some say a reveal can make the bulk look as if it’s floating on thin air, but I don’t buy that (it’s quite obviously being pulled downwards by gravity – duh).
“Xerox” is not legally genericized. Xerox Corporation is still telling people not to verb it, and so is the AP.
(Meanwhile, Dumpster’s trademark has expired, and as of 2013, the AP Stylebook approves lowercase “dumpster”.)
I agree with other people that the spreadsheet is hard to deal with. In any case I don’t really disagree with any of the usages, despite being someone who can remember seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
It’s a long time since last I heard someone use “Xerox” as a verb. Don’t bogart that joint, man.
However I did misread one of them as “I’m trying to develop my skillet”. I thought it was about one of those celebrity chefs.
I never noticed the known unknowns as anything strange. Now that I think about it, it’s probably because in German die Unbekannten, literally “the unknown ones”, is one way to say “the (mathematical) variables”.
Dumpster was a trademark? The things I learn.
“To advocate for the death penalty” actually loses an important distinction:
He is an advocate for the poor > He is advocating for the poor.
He is an advocate for the death penalty > He is advocating the death penalty.
If the distinction is so important, how come it’s not made in the noun versions (before the >)?
I wasn’t talking about rap as singsong radio music.
Were you talking about it at all? In my case, rap is a perfect example of the 35-and-out rule; I fell in love with the rap I encountered when I moved to NYC just before my 30th birthday: Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, those guys (and gals — anyone remember “Roxanne’s Revenge”?), but from the late ’80s on I’ve admired newer forms of rap/hiphop from a respectful distance: great stuff, but Not My Thing.
I agree with everyone that the “known unknowns” thing is perfectly fine; I’ve been arguing with people about it ever since he said it.
I am certain that the British agree things while we Americans agree to things (or agree on things.) I’m not at all sure that the difference between advocate and advocate for has any basis in regional dialect. It doesn’t startle me to hear of someone advocating x as opposed to advocating for x. While we aren’t being invaded by Britishisms in general, they are being terribly aggressive about ‘different to’ instead of ‘different from.’ And wrongly so. A is not different to B, not even when David Mitchell says it. My general conclusion is that prepositions are the weak underbelly of language and this is where novelties most easily slither in.
If the distinction is so important, how come it’s not made in the noun versions (before the >)
Well, it is when you think of it:
He is an advocate for (not ‘of’) the poor > He is advocating for the poor.
He is an advocate of (not ‘for’) compulsory castration > He is advocating compulsory castration.
At any rate, I was only jokingly making that argument. I am well aware that these things are not decided that way.
@ Phil Jennings
This Australian thinks that it’s normal to agree to or on things. He was also brought up to sit for exams, but the preferred usage appears to be to ‘sit exams’.
It’s perfectly fine and reminds me of Groucho’s ‘Party-of-the-First-Part’ speech, another perfectly fine & useable piece of jargon that we all have a duty to mock because it jargons.
I completely agree about rap. And no, I wasn’t talking about it. I’m just not always as articulate as you and a few others here.
For people who don’t like rap, I like to suggest listening to some in a language you don’t understand. Helps to appreciate the beats and flow, while allowing you to ignore the lyrics (which too often are sexist, homophobic, … sadly 🙁 ).
Around these parts there’s probably hardly anyone who *doesn’t* understand French (I don’t), but here’s a French rap tune I like: https://youtu.be/DFWLvUia8U0
Do make it at least as far as Vicelow’s verse on MNOP, which, according to the Internet, begins…
Eh mec, tu mimes une momie
T’es lent tel une mamie
Même au M.I.C. tu blasphèmes
N.O.N. j’ai des lunettes, mais ch’uis pas
Dwayne Wayne, toi t’es C.O.N
Obligé, Vicelow te lance ce lot de mots…
Phil Stompa: I am certain that the British agree things while we Americans agree to things (or agree on things.)
No, this is wrong. As in Australia, in Britain one uses all these constructions (in different circs).
The distinction about agree is that in American English, it does not exist as a bare transitive. Agree on s.t. and agree to s.t. are fine, but agree s.t. is not.
I think I make a distinction between ‘advocate X’ and ‘advocate for X’. If you advocate for X, you go out on the streets and on Twitter in support of it. If you advocate X, you’ll say you’re for it if asked, but you won’t necessarily be moved to stir from the couch. I advocate kindness on the internet, but I don’t find much time to advocate for it.
On ‘reveal’: nowadays it’s often used in reference to reality TV programmes. The reveal is the moment when the audience and the relevant participant is shown the results of the house / garden / person makeover. It probably also covers moments like the one on Antiques Roadshow when the expert announces, after much tension-raising historical discussion, that the rusty bayonet you keep under the bed is worth £10,000 or nothing at all. What’s presented in a reveal may or may not be a revelation.
I think I make a distinction between ‘advocate X’ and ‘advocate for X’. If you advocate for X, you go out on the streets and on Twitter in support of it. If you advocate X, you’ll say you’re for it if asked, but you won’t necessarily be moved to stir from the couch.
I think that’s my usage as well.
‘to advocate policies’ vs ‘to advocate for policies’. Don’t tell me I’m suffering from the recency illusion.
Did some inadvertent linguistic fieldwork this evening due to there being five ninth-grade girls (only one of whom is my own child) chatting up a storm in my house. Heard not only in-the-wild instances of adverbial “low-key” but at least one usage of its antonym adverbial “high-key,” plus approximately a zillion instances of vocative “guys” or “you guys” w/ female addressees, if there’s anyone left who still thinks that’s a controversial innovation.
JWB: vocative “guys” or “you guys” w/ female addressees
It is interesting that “guys” is only used as a term of address – I doubt these girls use it when referring to themselves or members of their group. Even though singular “guy” is a masculine noun, “guys” as an adjunct to the pronoun in “you guys” is genderless, as is vocative “guys”. “You guys” is one of several possible solutions to the lack of an unambiguous second person plural pronoun in modern English, like “you all”, “you people” and others (“yous” does exist in some areas – rural Nova Scotia is one – but is mostly frowned upon). When I lived in an indigenous community in British Columbia, the children (all monolingual in the community’s brand of English) used three plural pronouns: you guys, us guys, them guys, all obviously plural, and genderless.
> I think that should be “you can verb pretty well anything”.
You can ehm… ergativify verbs rather easily in English, so you might even go for
Pretty well anything verbs
In this thread we prefer to ergative verbs, thanks. Our motto is zero derivation for fun and profit!
In this thread we prefer to ergative verbs
Shouldn’t it be “to ergate”? or perhaps even “to erg”?
Re: verbifying advocate
I once run into phrase “while attorneying at law”
“it bothers that the verb ‘agree’ takes a direct object now,”
As others have noted, this is standard British English usage, which is why you’ve noticed it in the FT but not in US publications.
Similarly, in British English the verb “subscribe” can take a direct object.
And contrariwise, Americans use “graduate” with a direct object whilst the British don’t.
Similarly, in British English the verb “subscribe” can take a direct object.
I don’t recall ever having come across this. It certainly can’t in my own idiolect.
Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Isn’t that a direct object? And possible in US or UK English, I would think.
I think that’s my usage as well.
I thought there must have been some difference, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The described distinction sounds about right.
(Though I suspect that there are also some cases along the lines of “to advocate for the poor” where the plain phrasing is ungrammatical, or at least means something wildly different.)
I hadn’t thought of “subscribe” in the sense “make/allow to subscribe”; I can imagine people using it with an object expressing the subscriber, though I wouldn’t myself.
This sort of zero-derived causative can be made from quite a number of intransitive verbs.
“Walk me through it.”
Maybe that’s what Bloix had in mind, though.
Shouldn’t it be “to ergate”? or perhaps even “to erg”? — those aren’t words in English as far as I know, regardless of word class. You can’t zero derive from something that doesn’t exist — but ergative is a bona fide noun.
But of course, behind closed doors we can play any games we like. Cf Stu’s annunciation earlier.
The verb graduate takes a direct object in all versions of English in its oldest sense: Trinity College graduated James Clerk Maxwell in 1854. It’s the pseudo-ergative formation that is specific to American English: I graduated high school in 1995. It is actually somewhat logical that this usage is not found in, say, British English, since the uses of (noun and verb) graduate with many different levels of education (e.g. kindergarten graduate) is particularly American.
Part of the loss of the distinction between school and university in the US.
@David Marjanović: That the difference in the structure of higher education between America and Britain has anything to do with the differences in terminology sounds like pop-Whorfian bullshit to me.
Brett A (the same or not?)
It’s the pseudo-ergative formation that is specific to American English: I graduated high school in 1995.
Pseudo-ergative? I am reasonably well acquainted with ergative elements and constructions, but not the pseudo kind.
For some reason one recent change which drives me nuts is that people now say “step foot in” where they used to say “set foot in”. When I hear “step foot in” I feel like my brain is broken.
A more robust approach is to posit that *their* brains are broken. There is reassurance to be found in My Last Duchess.
# … Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. … #
@marie-lucie: By “pseudo-ergative,” I meant a verb with inverted subject-object identities. (I have seen this terminology out there, but I am not sure how common it is.) The point is that graduate is an “either-way” verb in American English: My daughter will graduate Richland Northeast High School; and Richland Northeast High School will graduate my daughter.
The verb like is another pseudo-ergative. Originally, the syntax was, “This apple likes me.” The verb passed through an “either-way” period, but the original formation is now obsolete, and only, “I like this apple,” remains. Graduate may go the same way, with the form with the school as the subject eventually disappearing.
Brett: My daughter will graduate Richland Northeast High School; and Richland Northeast High School will graduate my daughter.
I am familiar with the first use of graduate as a transitive verb, but that is not what I originally learned: rather, this verb was intransitive and to be followed by from : She will graduate from RN High School. Its transitive use in the next clause sounds alien to me, although I would not find it strange to read RN High School graduates 200 students each year. The plural or collective noun makes a difference versus the singular noun.
Nice idea, but yes, the spreadsheet is quite clunky.
So I put Jacobs’ questions in a Google form quiz, much easier to fill
https://goo.gl/forms/hImnV9ArVuLKn63t2
the answers get recorded in this Google docs spreadsheet (viewable for anyoneO)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18UgWAkoBFNBN6CkC6DpUe87Ke-PttXjiow8w_Im35K8/edit?usp=sharing
I also mailed her/Lingua Franca about it, so maybe she’ll go for it. Otherwise, I’ll send any answers that accumulate here.
The differences in terminology are amazingly consistent: it’s not just graduate, and it’s not just Britain but all of Europe as far as applicable.
In all languages other than AmEng that have the word student in recognizable form, it means strictly “university student”; highschool student is unthinkable outside the US. Even the verb study means “be inscribed as a student of that subject at a university” outside the US, except for the metaphorical usage in, e.g., “I’ll read this thoroughly”. “Study hard” is expressed differently. Likewise, school only ever refers to a university or a part thereof (medical school, law school) in the US, outside of specialized compounds (German Hochschule “any institution of tertiary education”, Icelandic háskóli). Class appearing in a university context is an AmEng specialty, too.
For some reason one recent change which drives me nuts is that people now say “step foot in” where they used to say “set foot in”.
Same here! I can’t seem to get used to it.
So I put Jacobs’ questions in a Google form quiz, much easier to fill
What a great idea; thanks very much for that.
I don’t think it’s a Whorfian effect, I think it’s the jargon of educationists (which is a particularly horrible jargon, right up there with literary theory for awfulness) in the U.S. It’s clear that the use of student for all levels of education is a 19C thing: as late as 1935, the OED has American quotations s.v. pupil that shows it was the ordinary word for kids in primary schools, and for scholar as the word for somewhat older but not yet adult students. Someone probably made a conscious decision to use student more broadly, and it not only stuck but spread to the general public; the OED’s first record of the extended sense is an American newspaper in 1854, if we neglect an anomalous use of student at Eton (which after all is called a college) in 1764.
But as for school as part of a university, Tolkien taught in the English School at Oxford, which might also be called the English faculty (AmE English department). As long ago as 1565, people spoke of a school of fence (that is, defense), and as recently as 1994, RADA is called a drama school, both per the OED. Law school and medical school originated in AmE, but have definitely spread to BrE.
Reassurance for the Duke, perhaps, but hardly for his victims. If I were the Count’s emissary, I’d speak softly and get the hell out of Dodge, and return a highly negative report to my boss. (Americans don’t normally use master or servant, as those meant ‘slaveowner’ and ‘slave’ and the stigma clings to them.)
In all languages other than AmEng that have the word student in recognizable form, it means strictly “university student”
Sadly, not. Everyone’s a student nowadays. I’ve even seen it used for kindergartners (that might have been in Norway, I can’t remember the details). In England, ‘pupil’ is only used by me. The only alternative, ‘boys’ or ‘gels’, is used exclusively by headmasters & headmistresses.
the verb study means “be inscribed as a student of that subject at a university” outside the US
Nope.
school only ever refers to a university or a part thereof (medical school, law school) in the US
But, but… They have art schools, medical schools, summer schools and business schools in Britain.
Class appearing in a university context is an AmEng specialty, too.
Not exclusively. It’s true they don’t do that ‘Class of 2018’ thing in Britain, but Britons do take classes.
Not so; “secondary school student” is much more common than “secondary school pupil” in Ireland, according to Google, which accords with my sense of it. And on UK sites, “grammar school student” comes out about even with “grammar school pupil”.
But as for school as part of a university, Tolkien taught in the English School at Oxford, which might also be called the English faculty (AmE English department).
BrE has university departments as well – Oxford has four Divisions (medical, sciences, social science and humanities) each of which contains faculties (Faculty of English Language and Literature) and/or departments (Department of Zoology).
Tolkien did not teach “at the English School” because it does not exist as a place – the “Oxford English School” is a collective noun meaning the students reading English and the academics teaching them. As a professor of Anglo-Saxon, he was a member of the English School, and proposed reforms to it – meaning reforms to the way it was taught.
Not so; “secondary school student” is much more common than “secondary school pupil” in Ireland, according to Google, which accords with my sense of it. And on UK sites, “grammar school student” comes out about even with “grammar school pupil”.
But I would be fairly confident that “student” on its own in the UK means “university student”. If you told a BrE speaker “there are a couple of students in the room” and he opened the door to see a pair of ten-year-olds in school uniform, he would, I think, ask them where the students had gone. Similarly “school” on its own means primary or secondary school. Which school are you at? I’m not at school, I’m a student. (Even if the university in question has “School” in its name like the LSE or SOAS.)
Same here, but I think that’s the same as US usage.
“Three students were killed in a fire at Whatevertown High School” – the BrE reaction is, I think, “what were students doing there? At least all the pupils got out safely”.
When I first came to the US as a graduate student I was shocked and amused to read about kindergarten students.
@Breffni: That is not the case. In American English, student has no collegiate implications whatsoever. I was not even aware until just now that such an implication existed in other varieties of English.
Oh, OK; interesting. In Ireland it’s the same as ajay reports for the UK: “student” without further specification usually refers to university students (maybe third-level students in general, but more likely university). Student fashion, student pub, student life, the student experience… “When I was a student” means when I was at university/college… and so on.
Ajay: Note that I didn’t say “at the English School”, but “in the English School.”
Breffni: Compounds often have restricted semantics. Student pub and student union don’t make sense for younger students. In NASA-speak, mission suitability means ‘suitability (of something) for the (relevant) mission’, not ‘suitability of the mission (for some purpose)’.
When I first came to the US as a graduate student I was shocked and amused to read about kindergarten students.
Me too. I thought it was some kind of joke. In these parts, the only students we have are still those past secondary school. I’ve grown accustomed to modern English usage, though.
In all languages other than AmEng that have the word student in recognizable form, it means strictly “university student”; highschool student is unthinkable outside the US.
A little bit of poking around suggests that “students in the American sense” is used in Indian English. E.g., this article from The Times of India:
“At 315 million, India has the most students in world”
Or this from Quartz India:
“Students at India’s private English-medium schools can barely read English”
Or this Indian Government report: “Some Inputs for Draft National Education Policy 2016” [PDF], which has things like “Ensuring upward transition/mobility of students from elementary to secondary to achieve universal secondary education and from secondary to higher secondary and tertiary education continues to be a challenge.”
I think we got that one sorted.
Likewise, school only ever refers to a university or a part thereof (medical school, law school) in the US,
The second part of that — “only in the US do people refer to parts of a university as a school” seems not to be true.
Just sticking to London:
The University of London has London Business School, the London School of Economics, the UCL School of Pharmacy, the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, the School of Advanced Study, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, King’s College London GKT School of Medical Education, and the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Imperial College (apparently no longer part of the University of London) has Imperial College Business School, Imperial College School of Medicine, the Dyson School of Design Engineering, and the Royal School of Mines (founded in 1851 as the Government School of Mines and Science Applied to the Arts).
As for “medical school” in a generic sense, there appears to be a Medical Schools Council (“the representative body for UK medical schools”), which uses “medical school” throughout its web site. And even though the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, in apparent contrast to most other British law schools, doesn’t officially have “school” in its name, its About web page notes that it is “a federation of thirty law schools in the colleges of the University”, and helpfully points out that “Oxford is different from any other law school.”
So I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that “medical school” and “law school” are actually used in the UK as well as the US.
I agree with ajay’s point that “school” in a more generic/casual sense — “When I was in school” — isn’t used for university in the UK the way it is in the US.
My daughter who’s starting at the Royal College of Art can use the swimming pool of Imperial College next door and the Dyson School is some sort of joint effort (Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, went to the RCA).
Yes – thanks, everyone.
Indeed, the 1854 American quotation for student in the wide sense is immediately followed in the OED by an 1888 Indian one.
I’ve seen more than one California corner store with a sign reading “no more than three students at the store at one time”, which I found baffling—there’s no college nearby, and why?—until I realized they were talking about high school kids, and then it made perfect sense.
The tern university applies to an institution offering courses and degrees in a variety of disciplines. A university can include one or more schools specializing in separate disciplines, often with the goal of preparing students for definite professions, hence law school, medical school etc (see Peter Erwin’s list above) but such schools can also be separate institutions.
That’s how it works in the US and, as shown above, in the UK. Outside the English-speaking world, however, completely different words are used, usually cognates of faculty; the next smaller division is department or institute.
No, Russia does this too.
Moscow Higher School of Economics, for example.
Or Higher Party School in Soviet times.
Expression “vysshaya shkola” (‘higher school’) means college or university.
Same thing in countries with considerable historical Russian influence.
Mongolian National University is literally translated as Mongolian National Big School
When I was a kid reading guitar magazines it was players as endorsed products; now usage has flipped to brands endorsing players who are now obediently proud to proclaim themselves endorsed by Fumbly plectrums.
Sports commentators, always looking for new ways to say nothing of any consequence, having nothing of any consequence to say and a lot of time in which to say it, were verbing “podium” and “pee-bee” (set a personal best) as verbs in the recent past.
But I am semi-retired from the state of BrEnglish, which is after all hardly my problem any more, and I am strictly in Team Neologism in Dutch, since it annoys my betters and I was not beaten by Dutch nuns in grade school or gymnaesiums.
(I didn’t get into heavy metal, opera or for that matter Dutch until my late thirties.)
That’s a special case, which I mentioned for German above.
That looks more Chinese to me, where institutions of primary, secondary and tertiary education are literally called “little”, “middle” and “big learn” (of which at least the latter is also used in Japanese).
That looks more Chinese to me
Could be. Then “ikh surguuli” would be calque from Chinese ‘da xue’, but “deed surguuli” calque from Russian “vysshaya shkola”.
I still haven’t figured out semantic differences between these two.
France has its grandes écoles, of course, spawners of énarques and also of useful citizens.
Then (to muddy the waters) there’s “polytechnic”; in the UK a (now-defunct) name for a kind of lower-status university, whereas a French polytechnique is a very different animal.
the state of BrEnglish, which is after all hardly my problem any more
It will ALWAYS be your problem, Squiffy-Marie. You just added problems.
Deed surguul’ and ikh surguul’ are used in both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. The former is 学院 xuéyuàn (roughly ‘institute’) in Chinese, the latter 大学 dàxué (‘university’). There doesn’t appear to be a fixed way of translating the names into English, but ikh surguul’ is definitely a cut above deed surguul’. An ikh surguul’ is a full-fledged university. A deed surguul’ appears to be used for smaller, often private colleges, or vocational schools that specialise in certain areas. There may be a formal difference (e.g. in terms of government recognition or government ranking) but I’m not aware of this.
I was not beaten by Dutch nuns in grade school or gymnaesiums.
Well, there’s your problem right there. Come on, Dutch nuns, step up and do your job: squiffy-marie needs a beatin’!
(My recommended solution for a given problem is generally not to have it – I trained as a technical support specialist, after all.)
(of which at least the latter is also used in Japanese)
They’re all used in Japanese.
小学校
中学校
大学
Outside the English-speaking world, however, completely different words are used, usually cognates of faculty; the next smaller division is department or institute.
Those are hardly “completely different” words, because they’re all used within the English-speaking world as well.
“Faculty” is, I believe, pretty common in the UK; it’s rare in the US, but not unknown (the largest subdivision at Harvard is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences).
“Institute” is pretty common, too, though often specifying a scholarly/research entity that doesn’t normally offer classes for students (e.g., the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton). And there are certainly cases where the entire university is called “Institute”: MIT, Caltech, etc.
And “department”? That’s the standard name for the lowest level of subdivision within colleges/faculties/schools. (E.g., UCLA has several dozen departments within the College of Letters and Science, and three departments within the School of Engineering.)
I just overheard two university students discussing tutoring relationships between undergraduate students in different years, using the word “grade,” as in, “She was two grades ahead.” This usage genuinely seems out of place to me, but it is probably fairly common and not necessarily even recent.
The tern university applies to an institution offering courses and degrees in a variety of disciplines.
In the US, there’s a tendency to use “university” for a place which specifically includes graduate[1] programs, even if the majority of students are undergraduate. A “college” by itself[2] only has undergraduate programs.
It’s definitely an American thing to refer to one’s undergraduate experience as “college”, even if you went to a large university. (When I’m talking with British people, I have to consciously remember to say, “when I was at university” instead of “when I was in college” to avoid confusing them…)
[1] Or “postgraduate” if you’re British.
[2] As opposed to the use of “college” for a subset of a university, or residential/housing units within a university.
Moscow Higher School of Economics, for example.
In which I had the fortune to study for several years before I was forced to admit that I’m far too lazy for regular studying.
Incidentally, the recent discussion made me wonder – are the Hogwarts students also referred to as Hogwarts students in the original Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (as opposed to, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and the numerous fanfics based on the latter), or are they, for example, Hogwarts pupils instead?
(I don’t have a copy, so I can’t check – though I might be able to find an online version…)
@ January First-of-May:
A quick search inside HP and the Philosopher’s Stone (on Amazon UK, to avoid any possible Americanizations) turns up 2 hits for “pupil” and 27 for “student”… (In one case, the text had a teacher using both words within the same speech, as if they were interchangeable synonyms.)
I worded that badly, I just meant “school” vs. “faculty” – and of course the word faculty is used a lot in the US, but to refer to the teaching personnel, except evidently at Harvard.
I absolutely concur with Breffni as to usage here in Ireland and in Northern Ireland; as an American expat I find no difference between the way I use the words and the way they use them here, except that “college” doesn’t mean “university” and “student” seems to be the wrong word to use for young ones in nursery. (Interestingly I actually live in what was, anciently, Bréifne.) My English co-worker, who is quick to pounce on my Americanisms, has little to say about this as well.
A “college” by itself[2] only has undergraduate programs.
Except Dartmouth College which also has a med school, business school and other graduate schools. I’ve never known why, but Dartmouth University – University of Dartmouth? – it ain’t. It seems to weasel around the convention by referring to itself as “Dartmouth” in connection to the grad schools.
I’ve mentioned this a million times already and see no reason not to do so now since it hasn’t been stopped: schools, and their former pupils, that add an unnecessary The to the name just for the sake of free pretentiousness. As in The Dalton School, The Chapin School and worst of all: The Riverdale Country Day [ugh] School. There’s also a The Manhattan Country School on, like, 90th Street in Manhattan.
Dartmouth College is called that because it always has been; unlike Harvard College, it neither changed its name nor (like Radcliffe College) became incorporated into a larger institution. It was founded in 1769, in the words of the royal charter, “for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing & all parts of Learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing & christianizing Children of Pagans as well as in all liberal Arts and Sciences and also of English Youth and any others.” In practice no Indians attended until modern times.
> In all languages other than AmEng that have the word student in recognizable form, it means strictly “university student”;
In at least my Danish idiolect, “student” almost exclusively means “high school graduate”, even if you never go on to university. When you graduate high school (sic) you become a “student”. For university students, I would use “studerende”, the nounified present participle.
> unknown unknowns
Using adjectives as noun phrases is possibly a case where derivation (if we call it that) is more complicated in English than in at least other Germanic languages, where we just decline the adjective as if the noun were there, then leave the noun out. In English there’s a couple of strategies:
1. Use “ones” (The green ones)
2. Zero derivation, but no plural -s (The Japanese)
3. Zero derivation, plural -s (The unknowns)
By the way, I occasionally run into “a Japanese” from native speakers, which sounds strange to me, and which I learnt was wrong. Does this depend on the speaker?
Unknown unknowns remind me of a riddle I heard when I was a kid: Out of a bag of balls you randomly draw 10, of which 5 turn out to be white and 5 black. If you draw another, what’s the probability it’s black? I said “0.5”, feeling smart. White? “0.5”. Blue? Now I felt stupid.
Unknown unknowns remind me of a riddle I heard when I was a kid: Out of a bag of balls you randomly draw 10, of which 5 turn out to be white and 5 black. If you draw another, what’s the probability it’s black? I said “0.5”, feeling smart. White? “0.5”. Blue? Now I felt stupid.
IIRC, several similar puzzles are discussed at length in Dodgson’s (or Carroll’s, don’t recall) Pillow Problems.
I think the first two probabilities are supposed to be 5/11, but I don’t recall if that’s the right answer either.
The third probability is indeed 0 as stated, as the last case divides into the ball being blue or green or yellow or gray… up to theoretically infinite possibilities.
In Australia, you are a student from pre-kindy until you finish university. The word pupil is rarely used.
At primary school and secondary school (known in Australia as high school), you go to class. “Class” can also refer to the time that you spend inside a classroom, eg. “my brother is in Maths (not Math as in the US) class”. Schools are divided into different grades, from grade 1 to grade 12. But when you are talking about which grade you are in, you use the word “year” eg. “I am a year 5” or “I am in year 5”, meaning “I am in fifth grade”. You can also say “year fives” when talking to, or about, all the students in year 5.
Teachers and principals (or headmasters) are called Mr Smith, Miss Smith, Mrs Smith, and not “Sir” like in the UK. You don’t have to stand when speaking to the teacher, but you do have to raise your hand (not two fingers as in Europe) before you are allowed to speak.
In tertiary education, students go to universities or unis for short, and not school. The American system of naming grades is not used, instead you say eg. “I am a second year commerce student” or “I’m studying master in arts”. The only exception is for first year students who are also called freshers, but that’s more uni slang, and not used widely outside unis.
My university was divided into faculties, but the Faculty of Law was housed in a building with a sign that said “Law School” on it. However, it’s much more common to say “I’m studying law / medicine” rather than “I go to Law / Med School.”
The word College is used in three senses. One is a residential college at university. These colleges provide residential accommodation for students who live on campus. The second sense is as a synonym for high school, but only in a specialised way. A number of private as well as public high schools are called colleges in their name: eg. “I go to high school. My school is called St Mark’s College”. The third sense is in certain private institutions who offer specialised courses. For example, private educational organisations that offer English courses for foreign students are usually called XYZ College. These are very small organisations, often run as for-profit companies.
> I think the first two probabilities are supposed to be 5/11,
I think the whole point was that it’s hard to say anything about the probabilities at all unless you make some a priori assumptions. Hence unknown unknowns.
IIRC from my studies of compression algorithms using Markov models, the modeling of unprecedented events was mostly up to convention or experimentation. One way to model it would be to say you’ve drawn unprecedented balls 2 out of 10 times, so you model the probability of the unprecedented as 1/5. If you have finite possibilities (in this case a finite number of color terms) a more advanced model would reduce the probability of unprecedented events as you get closer to seeing all possibilities.
@ Dainichi
I’m a bit puzzled about the context, but for me “a Japanese” is fine.
If you line three people up, a Japanese, an American, and a Dane, which one stands out from the other two? (Don’t bother attempting an answer. This is just an exercise.)
Or perhaps you had something else in mind?
@zyxt
I think a change has come about in my lifetime. “High-school student” might have been fine but I suspect “primary-school student” wouldn’t have sounded so familiar 50 years ago. “Pupil” was still in use, if I remember rightly.
The use of “class” and “grade” seems to depend on the State. In NSW I went from 1st class to 6th class at primary school, and then went to 1st year high school before leaving the State. In Queensland it used to be numbered through from Grade 1 (primary school) to Grade 12 (high school). But terminology in Queensland has since changed and the grades have been renamed “years”.
Universities used to be universities and colleges (generally specialised or vocational institutions at a tertiary level) were colleges. Everything has since changed. For example, the old Queensland Agricultural College has been merged into the University of Queensland. What used to be the Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College is now part of the Queensland University of Technology (formerly the Queensland Institute of Technology). Many of the old colleges have been renamed TAFEs (institutions of “technical and further education”). In Queensland, at least, all of the old TAFEs have since been merged into one huge “TAFE Queensland” with campuses all over the State.
It is now common to name combined primary-high school institutions “colleges”. Kelvin Grove State College is a school for students from “Prep” (start of primary school) to “Year 12” (end of high school) and has nothing to do with the old Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College (which, as I said is now part of QUT).
Sorry for the excruciating detail, but the continued changes in both organisation and terminology over the past 40 years have been dizzying.
Thanks Bathrobe.
It sounds like there are differences between states worth exploring. I wonder whether the differences are more of an administrative or legal nature, or are they of a linguistic nature?
eg. for “college”: Though there might be institutions calling themselves “college”, in my experience, people don’t say “I go to college”. Instead, they say “I go to school” or “I go to high school”, as the case may be.
Oh – as of 8 years ago, the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now merged back into the Sorbonne) had an école doctorale as a bureaucratic construct. I immediately thought the whole thing was copied from an American graduate school.
Unrelatedly, I should perhaps mention the French use of fac from faculté for a whole university: je vais à la fac “I’m physically on my way to an unspecified university building”.
Fascinating. Over here, Studierende is used as a cover term for, y’know, Studenten and Studentinnen.
I’ve seen two fingers, but I’m pretty sure I was taught one finger, and usually it’s the whole hand anyway.
Teachers and principals (or headmasters) are called Mr Smith, Miss Smith, Mrs Smith, and not “Sir” like in the UK
Actually, in England (I won’t vouch for the rest) teachers nowadays are mostly called by their first name. And I don’t know where you heard this two-fingers business, but it probably happened at one particular school fifty or more years ago. I went to a lot of schools in England from 1956-1970 and I’ve never heard of it. Perhaps it was an overzealous regulation to avoid hand raising being confused with a Nazi salute, like it was here.
Danish studenter: It used to be that university students, at least in the first stages of their education, were known as just that, and there was even a special cap (studenterhue) that was worn as a sign of their status.
Also back then, almost everyone who went through gymnasium (year 10 to 12) went on to enrol in university (or the engineering and agricultural colleges (højskoler) which were not so called). If you didn’t have such plans, you went on after year 9 to take a special one year finishing class (realeksamen) that was preparatory to starting a white-collar career.
Because of that, the final exam of the gymnasium was known as studentereksamen — and in modern times, where that exam is required for many other kinds of job, traditions have changed so that everybody gets their studenterhue when they take the exam, or rather at the “translocation” ceremony (properly dimmission), instead of at the immatriculation ceremony of the university, and are called studenter from that point.
So as @dainichi said: to distinguish those who actually do start a tertiary education, they are now known as studerende.
On a tangent, I have several times tried and failed to get a firm idea of what “high school” means in the Anglosphere. Most of the times is seems to be what you do for 2-3 years just before university, but I think I’ve seen references to high schools starting at year 7 already…
I have several times tried and failed to get a firm idea of what “high school” means in the Anglosphere
Depends on the jurisdiction. For a rundown, check out the Wikipedia articles on “middle school” and “secondary school”.
Whatever the jurisdiction, there is generally a split between lower secondary education (generally up to the end of compulsory education) and upper secondary education (prior to tertiary education). Lower secondary education is the work of “middle schools” or “junior high schools”. Upper secondary education is the work of “high schools”.
In Australia the two are almost always combined into “high schools”, but there is still a split between what is known in Queensland as “junior” (equivalent to middle school) running up to the end of compulsory education, and “senior”, after which students proceed to tertiary education. But each country has its own systems and naming, which makes it all very complicated.
@Lars (the original one): In American English, high school means, unambiguously, four years (so grades 9 to 12). In almost all cases, a physical high school building contains exactly these grades.
The third probability is indeed 0 as stated
No, that can’t be. If the probability of drawing a blue ball were really zero, it would be impossible to do so. And then when you actually did draw a blue ball, wouldn’t you be surprised.
from grade 1 to grade 12
That is also Canadian usage, as opposed to the ordinal number used in the U.S.
If you line three people up, a Japanese, an American, and a Dane, which one stands out from the other two?
I shall answer anyway: there is not enough information to say, for all nations are represented in the U.S., and therefore an American could look like anyone at all. Except, usually, taller.
On a tangent, I have several times tried and failed to get a firm idea of what “high school” means in the Anglosphere.
Well, I’ll tackle it for the U.S., but it’s complex and not entirely known. Education is mostly a matter for the states, and it is highly devolved; there are over 13,500 school districts overall (NYC’s being the largest with almost a million students) with responsibility for primary and secondary education, and many of them are highly autonomous, though that depends on the state. In its infinite wisdom, the federal government does not collect statistics on the subject, so making definite assertions about American education is a mug’s game, and we have little more than rumor and stereotype to go on.
In the 19C the traditional pattern was eight years of elementary (primary) school, starting at age six, followed (for some) by four years of high (secondary) school. (I am neglecting kindergartens entirely here.) These four years corresponded to the normal American four-year college, and were often seen as a prefiguration of them. The same quartet of terms (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) were applied to students in the 9th-12th grades, for example, and when college football teams became de rigueur, so did high school football teams.
About a century ago, the pattern shifted when it was realized that the span between six-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds was too big for a single institution to bridge. High schools were cut back to 10th-12th grades only, and a new institution, the junior high school, covered the 7th-9th grades. As the high school prefigured the college, so the junior high school prefigured the high school, adopting the same names (omitting freshman), the same athletic teams, and so on.
More recently, the pattern shifted again: the junior high school was renamed the middle school, typically covering 5th-8th grades, in order to clearly differentiate it from the high school. This was the pattern in use where I grew up, but the older pattern is by no means dead. In NYC today, all elementary schools cover 1st-5th grades, but what happens after that varies with the school.
In short: high school is prototypically four years but sometimes three: two years is improbable, though it may exist somewhere for all I (or anyone) know.
“High school” isn’t really a thing in EnglandandWales (Scotland has a different education system of which I know nothing). Secondary school covers ages 11 to at least 16 (by law) and when attempting to speak American some people may call that “high school”, I guess.
(I also don’t know what US grades correspond to, largely for lack of inclination to find out.)
I am in the process of having my passive-aggressive ignorance of Dutch secondary schooling dismantled it is a whole new world of fun. (Everyone wants to explain it, but they all want to first explain how it was when they where young and then give a chronological outline of the changes since, every one of which has weakened the spinal fortitude and dissipated the precious bodily fluids, they will insist, of the nation’s youth.)
in my experience, people don’t say “I go to college”
Then it’s changed since my day.
an American could look like anyone at all. Except, usually, taller.
I’d just been about to say that the Dane would probably be the tallest.
the junior high school prefigured the high school, adopting the same names (omitting freshman)
Not in mine (WV, 1958-61).
I still can’t get used to “middle school”; when I were a lad we said “junior high.”
“High school” isn’t really a thing in EnglandandWales (Scotland has a different education system of which I know nothing)
There are plenty of schools in Scotland called “something or other High School”. Craigmount High School and the Royal High School in Edinburgh come to mind. It’s just another word for “secondary school”. You go there after primary school, at about 11, and stay until 16-18.
Indeed yes: I am myself an alumnus of the High School of Glasgow.
I still can’t get used to “middle school”
For me it only became familiar from the Japanese education system. It’s kind of exotic.
So, to sum up what John said: From 1st to 4th grade, you’re in Little (primary) School. In 5th-6th grade, you are either in Little or Middle School. In 7th and 8th grade you are either in Middle or Junior High School. In 9th grade you could be in Junior High or High School. And from 10th to 12th life is simple again, you’re in High School.
In the US.
@Lars (the original one): I have never heard of “little school” in American English. The normal adjective is “elementary,” with “primary” as an alternative synonym. Moreover, since kindergarten is now essentially universal (and generally runs the full school day, unlike the half day that was standard when I was a kid), K also counts as “elementary.”
Heh. The closest thing I had to an immatriculation ceremony was standing in line…
No way Americans are taller than Danes on average.
Especially those of the female persuasion.
The Dutch are the tallest. Longer than Danes. Americans are tiny ants by comparison. On request Dutch hotels will supply extensions for their beds.
> that can’t be. If the probability of drawing a blue ball were really zero, it would be impossible to do so
0 probability is not the same as impossible, in fact, in any continuous probability distribution, all possible individual outcomes have probability 0. Of course, if you consider blue an interval, the probability might be non-zero.
> a Japanese, an American, and a Dane
The way I learnt it and feel it (to the extent I’m allowed to feel anything about a language I’m not native in), American and Dane are nouns, whereas Japanese is not, so it has to be “a Japanese noun”. Does your grammar allow “a Danish”? (When talking about a person, since your answer might be different when talking about pastry =D)
> In American English, high school means, unambiguously, four years (so grades 9 to 12).
I realize this probably differs by state, but does this mean compulsory education is 8 years, 12 years, or some other number which doesn’t align with graduations?
Compulsory education is generally to age 16, so no, it doesn’t align. And no, I can’t call people Danishes (or Dutches) except in the mode of irony or whimsy. As for height, I only said “usually”.
Elementary, primary, or grade school isn’t called little school, no. But then again, the name of the least comprehensive dictionary of Ancient Greek is A Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon, but that does not prevent irreverent people from calling it the Little Liddell. The larger lexica are of course the Middle Liddell and the Great Scott.
I note that L & S has now been translated into Modern Greek.
Here’s a link that breaks down compulsory education in the US by state: http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/07/03/10703.pdf
I note that L & S has now been translated into Modern Greek.
It must have cost an enormous amount of money. Could that have contributed to the economic difficulties ? In a similar vein, I wonder how the pomp of the Grammarian’s Funeral was financed.
Austrian compulsory education is 9 years, which doesn’t align with anything except the rare choice of Volksschule (4 years) + Hauptschule* (4 years) + polytechnischer Lehrgang (1 year).
* Recently renamed Neue Mittelschule in a typical Austrian compromise.
I note that L & S has now been translated into Modern Greek.
“It is the most pointless book since ‘How to Speak French’ was translated into French.” – E. Blackadder
The way I learnt it and feel it (to the extent I’m allowed to feel anything about a language I’m not native in), American and Dane are nouns, whereas Japanese is not, so it has to be “a Japanese noun”.
Well, “American” is an adjective, too. Danes have a noun to their name, so “Danish” is mainly used for pastry.
I don’t know what people are taught, but “a Japanese” (and “several Japanese”) are fine by me.
“Several Japanese were sitting in the restaurant drinking beer.”
Both Wiktionary and Dictionary.com list this usage.
There is a question on “Why is ‘Japanese’ offensive?” at English Language Learners, but the answers were all over the place (grammar, implication that it treats a person as a thing, terms in ‘-ese’ are racist against Asians, it’s offensive in Japanese) and the writers don’t appear to have much idea what they are talking about.
It does, appear, however, that there are people who regard “a Japanese” as ungrammatical. Sorry, I don’t.
I have never heard of “little school” — I have, albeit rarely, and probably facetiously. I used it for the parallel with “Middle”, cf the Greek lexicon. I missed the opportunity to use Tallest and Tall for High and Junior High, though.
Immatriculation ceremony is still a thing at the University of Copenhagen, and maybe half the new year attends, I believe. A speech, handshakes from the Rector and the Prorector, and the Dean of your faculty feeds you cake. What’s not to like?
Irish contribution to the comparative schoolology thread:
Primary school (=”National school” for public ones): 4-12 years. The first two years (=US kindergarten?) are called Junior Infants and Senior Infants (sometimes colloquially “First/Low Babies and Second/High Babies”, though I haven’t heard those for a long time). Then it’s First Class through to Sixth Class (called First Standard etc. in my old school; no idea why).
Secondary school is usually called just that, and it covers ages 12 to 18, with no formal subdivisions (though there’s a state exam after three years), and the “grades” are called First Year to Sixth Year.
On “a Japanese”: I’ve occasionally heard that, but it sounds old-fashioned and a bit derogatory to me; I can’t explain why, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it actually proscribed. Same for “a Chinese”. “An Italian” is fine, and “a Candian”, but not “a French”, “an Irish”, “an English”, “a Welsh”.
I have never heard of “little school” — I have, albeit rarely, and probably facetiously.
Have you heard it from native English speakers? It doesn’t sound to me like “something people across the water probably say,” it just sounds wrong. To me, a little school can only be a small building, parallel to “little library” or “little gas station,” and even there, “small” would be more likely.
I believe that -anus traces its noun/adjective duality all the way back to Latin. “Properly” things, places and events from/in Italy would be Italic, and only individual denizens Italians. (Don’t tell your local peever).
The Danish primary school system at present is not very interesting, just mandatory K-9 with an optional 10th, followed by optional high school or vocational schooling. But the old system (from 1903 up to 1958 (law) or 75 (reality)) was a mandatory 7 year basic school, where pupils after year 5 could change to a 4-year “middle” school (første mellem following femte klasse) to prepare for gymnasium, or an alternative year ten ending in realeksamen if your grades or inclination for book learning were low.
What Breffni mentioned turns out to be an interesting property of the suffix, ie the head morpheme, of gentilics:
-ian, -an, -er, and -i allow plurals/singulatives across the board (Martians/a Martian, Italians, Romanians, Nigerians, Norwegians, Syrians, Germans, Icelanders, New Yorkers, Pakistanis…) but never collectives: *The Martian/German/Pakistani are very friendly…
-ese never allows plurals/singulatives (*Cantoneses/*a Cantonese, *Chineses, *Burmeses, *Portugueses, *Lebaneses, *Senegaleses…) but readily allows collectives: “The Burmese are very friendly and hospitable.”
-ish, -sh, and -ch on their own, behave like -ese: they never allow plurals/singulatives (*Englishes/*an English, *Spanishes/*a Spanish, *Swedishes/*a Swede, *Turkishes/*a Turkish, *Irishes/*an Irish, *Welshes/*a Welsh, *Frenches/*a French, except in the irrelevant meaning of multiple languages), and readily allows collectives: “The English are very friendly and hospitable.” Unlike -ese, though, words that take these often allow you to form plurals/singulatives by other strategies:
– further affixation of -man (in one case with irregular reduction of -ish to -s-): Englishmen/an Englishman, Scotsmen/a Scotsman, Irishmen/an Irishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchman, Welshmen…
– substitution of -ard for -ish: Spaniards/a Spaniard
– eliminating the affix: Swedes/a Swede, Turks/a Turk..
Can’t think of any other gentilic suffixes offhand; can you?
On “a Japanese”: I’ve occasionally heard that, but it sounds old-fashioned and a bit derogatory to me; I can’t explain why, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it actually proscribed. Same for “a Chinese”. “An Italian” is fine, and “a Candian”, but not “a French”, “an Irish”, “an English”, “a Welsh”.
Yes, it’s odd. For some countries the adjectival form of the name is fine as a noun describing an inhabitant: Bolivian, Italian, Canadian, American, Mexican etc.
For a few others it’s adjective + “man” (or “woman”): Englishman, Frenchman, Irishman, Dutchman.
Not so much “Scotsman” now; “Scot” is more commonly used, and I can’t think of many other examples where the word for a person of a certain nationality isn’t [adjective] or [adjective+man]. “Turk”, I suppose.
But Japan and China don’t seem to have anything; “Japanese” is old-fashioned and, you’re right, sounds derogatory, as does “Chinese”. We don’t say “Japaneseman”. There isn’t any single word that means “person from Japan”. I think the same is true for Portugal. “There’s a Portuguese waiting outside my office” sounds wrong in the way that “there’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office” doesn’t.
Edited: Lameen has covered this all much better.
Like in German – though Austrian practice resets the count after the 4 years of elementary school, while German practice does not, and the bureaucracy (at least in Austria) prefers Schulstufe, lit. “school stage”, over Klasse and does not reset the count, forcing Austrians to calculate (achte Schulstufe = vierte Klasse Hauptschule/Gymnasium…)
This is never extended to university, where years don’t even exist. The unit of time is the semester, and a term for students comparable to “freshmen” exists only for first-semester students (the unimaginative Erstsemestrige, nickname Erstis).
“Japanese” for “Japanese person/people” is quite common on the Internet. It might sound rude to say “There’s a Japanese waiting outside my office”, but “There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office” doesn’t sound too polite, either.
I admit that “Japanese” used in this way seems relatively common in Australian sources, but “Japanese” for “Japanese person/people” is found in sources around the world. And most examples do not sound derogatory at all.
“Three Japanese were killed and another three were injured in a terrorist attack on Tunisia’s national museum”
“Two out of three Japanese are against accepting more foreign workers, let alone manual workers.”
“One in three Japanese are aged 60 or older which is why it is considered a “hyper-aging” country.”
“The three Japanese are about to be flown to remote areas of Burma where they will be parachuted in to Japanese forces who have not yet surrendered in order..”
“Twenty-three Japanese are still unaccounted for including ten college-age students from the Toyama College of Foreign Languages”
“When two Japanese are talking, the listener not only listens but also nods along ”
“It will be the first time two Japanese are in space at the same time.”
“The two Japanese are in the country on their 149th Hiraiwa Africa Tour. They are Michio Hiraiwa and daughter Masayo”
“The two Japanese are only playing their third tournament together with their best result being a quarterfinal finish at the Korea Open.”
“I tend to think a lot of relationships between two Japanese are often extraordinarily shallow too”
“Two Australians and two Japanese are also believed to have perished, as well as Belgian and Turkish travelers.”
“Is true that many Japanese are converting to Islam?”
“Many Japanese are convinced that their nation is “unique for being unique””
“Thus, it’s a concept that many Japanese are quite familiar with.”
“Many Japanese are reluctant to die at home because they feel hospitals are safer and they don’t want to burden family members with caring for…”
“Yet many Japanese are concerned that social harm will come with casinos.”
“So in one sense, a Japanese is a person who is brought up speaking Japanese.”
“However, when a Japanese is asked a question posed by a non-Japanese, it is not rare in many instances for a Japanese to cock his or her head and say,”
“it has long been frowned on in Japan, where the question of who is a Japanese is not usually a topic for idle discussion.”
“A Japanese is said never to be angry, and I must say that although we were often in most trying positions I never once saw Ishida out of temper”
“Just as a Japanese is opening his mouth to say something, someone else jumps in and starts speaking.”
” I wouldn’t say that Japanese are good at time management AT ALL.”
“However, most Japanese are about as polite or impolite…”
“Americans and Japanese are pessimistic about ending North Korea’s nuclear program and oppose military options.”
“Now more Japanese are remaining single, while couples are having fewer, if any, children.”
“Japanese are increasingly leaving corporate jobs”
“Few Japanese are positive toward Putin or Russia.”
“Why do so few young Japanese want to work overseas?”
“There is delay because Japanese want to learn as much as possible about an issue. Japanese are more holistic than US Americans and believe more facts are…”
I note that only five of your about 30 examples are “a Japanese”. It seems to work much better in the (semantic) plural. That said, it’s not ungrammatical for me either, though it gives me the same funny feeling as “a Jew” (at the end of that thread, the two expressions are explicitly compared).
“There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office” doesn’t sound too polite, either.
Interesting. It sounds completely neutral to me; can I ask if other nationalities of this form sound impolite to you? “The gold medal, however, went to an American”. “Marc Garneau was the first Canadian in space.”
It sounds completely neutral to me too.
I think pretty much all speakers of English agree on the collective use: “The Japanese/Portuguese/Assamese are good at time management”. (Likewise, all speakers of English reject the collective use for -an: no one says “The American are good at time management.”) But for the singulative there seems to be variation. For those who find “a Japanese is a person who is brought up speaking Japanese” normal, what’s your reaction to sentences like these? Normal, or weird?
– A Portuguese is a person who is brought up speaking Portuguese.
– A Lebanese is said never to be angry.
To me (L2) “A Portuguese” works and “A Lebanese” doesn’t, entirely because in these contexts the former is definite and the latter isn’t.
(“The Lebanese” works as a collective noun if I imagine I’m reading some cheesy 19th century colonialist travel guide.)
The word which once worked in place of ‘Japanese’ was ‘Jap.’ This became such a hate word, even more vile for being a single snarled syllable, that we Americans became ashamed of using it after WW2. There’s no redemption for ‘Jap.’ It is strangely parallel that we scrupulously use ‘Chinese’ as the good word, similarly to ‘Japanese,’ in place of ‘Chinaman,’ which is avoided because it brings up an image completely out of date. The innocent British have been slow to eschew ‘Chinaman’ but it must happen, the Brits becoming even more contrite because for once we Americans have shown ourselves earlier to be politically correct.
“The Lebanese” works as a collective noun if I imagine I’m reading some cheesy 19th century colonialist travel guide”
Really? “In the quarter finals, the Lebanese played well but were brought down 3-1 by Morocco” – that sounds out of date?
Lameen: Can’t think of any other gentilic suffixes offhand; can you?
There is -ite, which is most strongly associated with a legendary City of the Plain. However, it is also used for inhabitants of real cities. A person from the capital of Oregon is unambiguously a Salemite.
For an individual of Chinese extraction, there is, beside the Chinese and Chinaman already mentioned, the term Chinee (variously spelled), equally obsolete. As old-fashioned, somewhat offensive terms, they all have a certain Old West feel (the West being where in America most Chinese immigrants were to be found in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Both Chinamen and Chinee were used in Back to the Future Part III, the latter memorably by Pat Buttram:
“Looks like he got that shirt off’n a dead Chinee.” (Buttram, as well as Dub Taylor and Harry Carey, Jr., played saloon patrons in the film, as an homage to their many western roles.)
Unrelated: Google is also getting terrifyingly smart. I did a quick search to verify that I remembered the Back to the Future line correctly, using “back to the future 3 script” as the search string. The first result was a script of the correct film, which was no surprise. What was striking was that the sample text displayed on the Google search results page included the very same “Chinee” quote that I was searching for! Apparently, Google had figured out, based just on what I was typing in this Chrome window, that I probably was interested in that precise line!
Lots of suffixes in the Wikipedia “Demonyms” article.
I should have said that although “an English” and the like are straightforwardly ungrammatical, “a Japanese” just make me uncomfortable. Likewise Lameen’s Portuguese and Lebanese sentences.
“There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office”
I would be surprised to discover that said Nigerian is a woman. It seems to me that all the examples quoted above assume that the person identified by their nationality is an adult male, unless man as a suffix (as in Frenchman) could be replaced by woman. But if I was the person waiting outside the speaker’s office, I think they would be more likely to refer to me as a French lady. Similarly for the hypothetical Nigerian above. In French of course (as in other Romance languages), the gender of the person in question is indicated by the word referring to the nationality, as in une Française, una inglesa, una italiana etc.
The existence of the neighbouring African countries le Niger and le Nigéria caused a problem with how to refer unambiguously to the citizens of both. Un Nigérien already existed for the former French colony of Niger, so the solution was just to add just n, hence the English-looking un Nigérian, une Nigériane. Similarly for the other countries with names ending in -a, for instance un Kényan, une Kényane.
other suffixes
There is also -i as in Israeli, Somali and a few others, where the suffix is not exactly borrowed, instead the whole word is, from the language spoken by the people referred to. in French this suffix is not used, instead a word (noun or adjective) is formed using the existing suffix -ien as in israélien (which contrasts with Israélite which refers to a person practicing the religion known as le judaïsme).
All the examples I quote show “Japanese” in the meaning “Japanese person” or “Japanese people”. I scrupulously avoided examples referring to the Japanese as a collective group (which everyone keeps assuring me is fine) because it is part of a universal phenomenon: the British, the Americans, the Lebanese, the Brazilians, the Californians…
I also scrupulously avoided the many examples that seemed attributable to Japanese speakers:
“In giving a gift, a Japanese will stand up and hold the gift out with his two hands. Then the other Japanese is expected to stand up and extend his two hands in.. ” (A Kumayama)
“A Japanese will rarely commit his or herself totally to either side of a subject. ” (Y Kumagai)
“Note with what patience and skill a Japanese will wrap something in such a trivial object as a furoshiki, which is nothing more than a simple square of cloth ” (Hideyuki Oka)
I also avoided the large number of examples from non-Japanese who appear to live in-country.
“But a Japanese will really be “abroad” everywhere. Few people will have lived in Japan, counterparts in government and business are unlikely…” (Japan Times)
“First impressions are important and how you act and talk when you first meet a Japanese will determine this. ”
“If you are about to leave somewhere, mainly home or the office, a Japanese will say “ittekimasu” to the remaining people.”
“However, a Japanese will answer, “Yes,” meaning, “Yes, I do not want this.”” (Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council).
“Your chances of running into identical twins in America are many times greater than the chances that a Japanese will run into a born again Christian” (Japanese Ministries)
What Dainichi pointed out was the ungrammaticality of “a Japanese”, not its offensiveness. None of the examples I gave are offensive in the way that “a Jap” is.
As for “There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office”, the offensiveness lies in feeling the need to raise the person’s nationality at all. “There’s a man/woman waiting outside my office” should be fine. Mentioning the person’s nationality is flagging it as important, as though there’s something specially significant about it being a Nigerian as opposed to a Congolese. Or an Englishman. Or a Japanese.
A Portuguese is a person who is brought up speaking Portuguese.
That sounds strange because it doesn’t make sense. That’s not how people think about Portugueseness. Portugal had many colonies, the largest of which is Brazil. You can’t define Portugueseness in that way. It works for “Japanese” because Japan is pretty much “one country one language”.
“A Spaniard in a heated discussion about Spain will defend his country’s honour to the death. A Portuguese will sit quietly thinking how to change the topic.”
That works for me, even if it’s not an accurate depiction of reality.
A Lebanese is said never to be angry.
Does this work for “An Egyptian is said never to be angry”? If it sounds strange for an Egyptian, there is no way it should work for a Lebanese.
I’ve given plenty of examples where “Japanese” is used to refer to Japanese people. I would be happy to say something like “I want to marry a Japanese”. I find it difficult to see why it should be construed as either offensive or ungrammatical.
I would be surprised to discover that said Nigerian is a woman.
Thanks, m-l, my feelings exactly. There is an inherent sexual bias in all these terms.
“There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office”, whatever its grammaticality, sounds pointed to me.
Bathrobe: As for “There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office”, the offensiveness lies in feeling the need to raise the person’s nationality at all. “There’s a man/woman waiting outside my office” should be fine. Mentioning the person’s nationality is flagging it as important, as though there’s something specially significant about it being a Nigerian as opposed to a Congolese. Or an Englishman. Or a Japanese.
Without a context, this sentence could be offensive, but in a suitable context it could be very significant, for instance if some administrator is expecting representatives from West African countries and the receptionist has been told to prioritize citizens from those countries and make other people wait or send them to someone else. So the administrator getting a phone call could use this sentence to cut short the caller if the latter was aware of the importance of the African visitor.
“In the quarter finals, the Lebanese played well but were brought down 3-1 by Morocco”
Not as bad to my ears, because it refers to a specific group of Lebanese, rather than speaking of a supposed ethnic characteristic. “The Lebanese have increased their consumption of beef by 20% in the last ten years” sounds fine, too.
As for “There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office”, the offensiveness lies in feeling the need to raise the person’s nationality at all. “There’s a man/woman waiting outside my office” should be fine. Mentioning the person’s nationality is flagging it as important, as though there’s something specially significant about it being a Nigerian as opposed to a Congolese. Or an Englishman. Or a Japanese.
This is very odd. You seem to be saying we should never refer to any aspect of a person not directly relevant to the situation; if gender isn’t relevant, you shouldn’t use gendered pronouns, etc. etc. That may be admirable, but it is completely against human nature and an unattainable and faintly absurd goal. It may be that we shouldn’t describe people’s nationality, but in fact we do and will keep on doing so, and within that context of actual behavior surely “There’s a Nigerian waiting outside my office” is no more “offensive” than similar sentences with “Congolese” or “Englishman,” which I thought was the point at issue.
Or “Japanese”.
When I lived in Ghana (things may have changed since) no Ghanaian seemed to have any problem with using ethnic group names in pretty much any context, including direct address; “Whiteman!”, to me, for example, was plainly not meant offensively (unless the person knew my name, and was not using it, which would be very rude indeed.)
Having said that, it was also the case that nobody seemed to find it particularly problematic to stereotype people on the basis of ethnicity either; this is basically the default human attitude, as Hat more-or-less implies.
m-l is right re context, of course; “there’s a Nigerian waiting outside your office” is a perfectly reasonable statement if Nigerians rarely wait outside your office. I may say that the statement would give me great pleasure, as I would then anticipate being able to reminisce sentimentally about West Africa with somebody who wouldn’t switch off after the first thirty seconds of listening to me (as Whitemen who’ve never been to Africa do, having no way to relate what I’m talking about to their own experience.)
The discussion of whether, “There’s a Nigerian waiting outside your office,” is offensive or derogatory cannot help but remind me of an exchange from Howard’s End:
The dialogue is quote from the 1992 Merchant Ivory film, but given how closely the screenplay hews to the original novel, the same thing probably happens in the book as well.
We have got to this point:
A. “Talking about ‘a Japanese’ is ungrammatical.”
B. “But there are lots of examples of ‘a Japanese’.”
A. “Yeah, maybe. But ‘a Japanese’ is offensive.”
B. “But lots of people use ‘a Japanese’ and it’s neutral.”
A. “Sorry, it’s offensive. But talking about ‘a Nigerian’ is neutral.”
B. “But ‘a Nigerian’ could also sound offensive.”
A. “No, it’s neutral. It’s human nature to categorise and describe. ‘A Congolese’ is also ok. But ‘a Japanese’ is not. So take your examples elsewhere.”
End of story.
Personally, I suspect the actual situation is this:
As Dainichi noted, in older style English, “a …..-ese” was frowned upon. As a result, this was avoided and “….-ese person” used instead. But by analogy to “an American” etc., “a Japanese”, “a Senegalese”, “a Lebanese”, “a Chinese” are used (or have come to be used). However, there is still residual resistance to this usage because it sounds somewhat dehumanising. Thus some people think it’s offensive, especially given past attitudes to the Japanese and Chinese.
But I don’t think that sentences like “You can’t say that to a Congolese and get away with it” or “You can’t say that to a Senegalese and get away with it”, “You can’t say that to a Vietnamese and get away with it” are any more objectionable than “You can’t say that to an American/Nigerian and get away with it”. All are equally categorising.
(Time ran out)
Since there is a tradition of adding “person” to “…-ese” words, if you want to be polite/understanding/neutral you might say: “You can’t say that to a Congolese person and get away with it”, “You can’t say that to a Senegalese person and get away with it”, “You can’t say that to a Vietnamese person and get away with it”, ““You can’t say that to a Japanese person and get away with it”. Perhaps.
On the other hand, “You can’t say that to an American person and get away with it” is probably less common (in fact, it sounds funny) because “American person” was rare to begin with. But talking about “an American” is just as categorising as “a Japanese”, “a Congolese”, “a Lebanese”, etc., and could sound equally offensive (or equally belligerent), depending on the context.
So my point stands. “A Japanese” is quite commonly used without offensive intent, even if the polite commentators at LH feel that it’s nicer to tack on “person”.
And in news reports, it will probably be normal practice to say “A Japanese woman was found floating off Brighton Pier early this morning”, just as it is normal practice to say “An American woman (not an American) was found floating off Brighton Pier early this morning”.
Similarly, in Dorothy Sayers’s detective novel The Unpleasantness of the Bellona Club, a maidservant at a rich woman’s house refers to Inspector Parker as “quite the gentleman”, causing the cook to snap, “No Nellie; gentlemanlike I will not deny; but a policeman is a person and I will trouble you to remember it.”
In a conversation with my wife the other day she was making a list of people: “A South African, a Norwegian and an English,” she said and I pointed out that it didn’t work that way. We decided that to stand alone as a citizen-noun, the adjective that’s formed from a place name had to consist of the place name (roughly) plus -an: a Russian, a Brazilian, a Cuban, an Australian, Indian etc. -Ish adjectives like English, Irish and British won’t work (and hence the recent “Brit”, “Briton” is too Boadicealike for most purposes). But what about a Swede? He’s Swed-ish. The same with other -ishes: Pole, Scot, Dane and Fleming. So now I’m very muddled. Is there a rule? And how do we automatically know there’s something funny about “a Swiss” “a Welsh” “an English” or “a Japanese” as if they’re missing “-person” (ie they sound like they’re only adjectives)?
I thought the timeline was the other way around, with increasing reluctance to zero-derive nouns from adjectives and decreasing reluctance to use “person”.
That would fit the use of adjectives alone to refer to people, which is an English peculiarity by European standards and seems to have been rare before the mid-20th century: “I’m Jewish”, “I’m American”, “I’m Portuguese”, “We are British”.
And how do we automatically know there’s something funny about “a Swiss” “a Welsh” “an English”
“An English” or “a Welsh” would sound strange because we already have very well-established generic singulars for those nationalities: Englishman, Welshman. (Likewise, Frenchman, Irishman, Manxman).
“A Swiss” is certainly uncommon, but I’d find the sentence “I went hiking in the Alps with two Austrians, three Slovenians, and a Swiss” acceptable.
I thought the timeline was the other way around, with increasing reluctance to zero-derive nouns from adjectives and decreasing reluctance to use “person”.
I think you’re right about this, and that the usage of “a Japanese / a Chinese / etc.” as a singular noun is probably declining, not getting more prevalent.
Two Austrians, three Slovenians and three Swisses….
“An English” or “a Welsh” would sound strange because we already have very well-established generic singulars for those nationalities: Englishman, Welshman.
That’s not the reason it sounds strange. Look at “a Swiss”: you can’t write “a Swissman” (as opposed to “a Swiss man”) but “a Swiss” is still kind of odd.
I’d find the sentence “I went hiking in the Alps with two Austrians, three Slovenians, and a Swiss” acceptable.
I know it’s acceptable. Or accepted, because there’s no alternative. It’s still odd.
But ‘a Japanese’ is not.
Note that I didn’t say that; I don’t have a clear intuition about it.
That’s not the reason it sounds strange.
No, I couldn’t disagree more. If there’s a widely used demonym it necessarily follows that any other form sounds strange. If Englishman were not a word with a millennium-old pedigree, then “an English” might be possible (though likely it’d be “an Englander” or some other formulation).
The rules for forming demonyms in English are complex and rife with exceptions. The WP article on demonyms helpfully breaks down the topic by suffix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym). It’s easy to see patterns, but few, if any, hard and fast rules.
I think you’re right about this, and that the usage of “a Japanese / a Chinese / etc.” as a singular noun is probably declining, not getting more prevalent.
Possibly….
In which case we have two competing situations:
1. Dainichi’s observation that ‘I occasionally run into “a Japanese” from native speakers, which sounds strange to me, and which I learnt was wrong [on grammatical grounds]’.
2. The observation that “a Japanese” and “a Chinese” are increasingly regarded as offensive.
Is there some kind of connection between the two?
That’s not the reason it sounds strange.
No, I couldn’t disagree more. If there’s a very widely used demonym, it necessarily follows that any other form sounds strange. If Englishman were not a word with a millennium-old pedigree, then “an English” might be possible (though more likely it’d be “an Englander” or some other formulation).
The rules for forming demonyms in English are complex and rife with exceptions. The WP article on demonyms helpfully breaks down the topic by suffix. It’s easy to see patterns, but few, if any, hard and fast rules.
FWIW: a) I find the issue of the grammaticality or idiomaticity of “a Japanese” entirely separate from the question of its potential offensiveness; b) I accept from some of the quotes upthread that there are apparently existing varieties of English in which “a Japanese” is in some degree of active use; but c) my variety of English just ain’t one of those and it remains to my ear so unidiomatic as to be ungrammatical, same as “a Welsh” or “a Portuguese” would be, no more no less. NB that the same morphological process that once gave us “Chinee” as a singulative also gave us “Portugee/Portagee” as a singulative from “Portuguese,” also now archaic and claimed by at least one online source to be or have been derogatory. I will try in future to be mindful that instances I may see of “a Japanese” reflect dialect variation within global English rather than being Just Plain Wrong.
my variety of English
An amusing thought just occurred to me.
How much would we understand each other if discussions like this were conducted in real life?
I know educated British people have a tendency to switch to standard UK speech in such contexts, but Australians, for example, don’t.
I won’t even mention foreign accents many contributors here must have.
It’s just somehow strange that people can communicate in written English better than in speaking.
Like it’s Chinese or something
Laowai, thanks for responding. You clearly know much more than I about this. Thanks for “demonym” too. I guessed there was a name, but I didn’t know how to find it. Patterns is a more suitable word than rules, as you say.
If Englishman were not a word with a millennium-old pedigree, then “an English” might be possible
Possible, but still a last resort and weird-sounding like “a Swiss”. And using your logic, there’s no pedigree for “Britishman” (“a Briton” has never had an equivalently wide usage of say “an American” or “a Yorkshireman”) and “a British” sounds most peculiar to my ear (though not of course “the British”).
For a Swiss person, I’ve seen “a Switzer,” but i I think it’s obsolete.
There’s a restaurant in Bloomington, IN called Japonee. I tried to post a site link, but it didn’t appear.
And then there’s Milton’s vulture, who
lights on the barren Plaines
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light.
The reason for a Swiss is probably that we lost our original demonym, Switzer, Switzerland being of course the land of the Switzers, as Finland is the land of the Finns.
Adjectives vs. nouns: David Gerrold puts it eloquently in his book The Trouble with Tribbles (a making-of, not a novelization of the famous Star Trek Classic episode; the book was written in 1973, which I mention once and for all rather than scorning Gerrold’s diction in detail):
A person from here in Sligo is apparently a “Sligonian”. Even my friend who works for the main Sligo events blog was not sure where that “n” came from, but I think it is from “Sligensis”. (I am seeing a parallel with Cork, which is “Corkonian”, from “Corcensis”… why not “Corconian”? Dunno.) It certainly isn’t from the Irish name of the place at any point in its history. Nearby Ballysadare, or Ballisodare, or Baile Easa Dara, or whatever it calls itself, needs to decide what its name actually is before deciding what its demonym is. I kid because I love.
My husband says he is a “Tyrone man” and is perfectly sure there is not any collective noun for Tyrone people. I think he’s right; the young man who taught me the small amount of Irish I possess thinks it corresponds to an Irish expression that is literally “man of Tír Eoghain”. And I think this is likely to be true of most of Ireland. (“Galwegian” is just strange.)
I would have said Tyronian, not to be confused with Tironian, the adjective for Cicero’s secretary Tiro, purported inventor of the Tironian et, or ⁊, an abbreviation for ‘and’ now mostly used, ironically enough, in writing Irish. It’s a lot easier to write than &, which is a stylized et. But if they don’t say Tyronian in Tyrone, then so much for that.
All agree that people from the western part of Kent in England are Kentish Men (f. Maids), whereas easterners are Men (Maids) of Kent. But there is no agreement on the exact line of demarcation: some say the River Medway, some the boundary between the dioceses of Rochester and Canterbury, and for others it’s marked by the Kentish Scour. In any case, the Men of Kent resisted the Conqueror (according to legend, armed with tree branches) whereas the Kentish Men submitted (or possibly ran away), and this has caused the two groups to look down on each other ever since.
In any case, the Conqueror made a settlement with Kent, promising to preserve its ancient rights and customs (including gafolcynn, modernized as gavelkind, the traditional inheritance of real property by the youngest rather than eldest son, still in effect in the 20C), hence the motto of the county, Invicta ‘Unconquered’. The division is older than that, though: the Men and Maids of Kent were Jutes, the only area of Jutish concentration in England, whereas their counterparts across the line were of Saxon origin like most people in southeast England.
Some aspects of written English are indeed like written Chinese: consider the relation of spelling and pronunciation of though and through.
From interpreting – as a joke – Sligo as a Latin n-stem, like Cicero, which has -n- in all case forms except the nominative/vocative singular.
Strange yet straightforward: take Galloway; interpret way as the English word; reverse-engineer that to weg, and then tack the Latinate ending on.
Really strange is to model Glaswegian after Norwegian.
Other than the Isle of Wight.
Just realized there are non-demonymic parallels to what’s going on here. “The young are often cruel”, “The poor live in slums”, “The gifted advance rapidly” are generally acceptable, if maybe a little old-fashioned sounding; *”I saw a young at the bus stop”, “*A poor came up the road”, “*There’s a gifted in that class” are just plain wrong. Yet for other adjectives, the distribution is almost the opposite: “*The white are often red-headed”, “*The black are the majority in South Africa”, “*The blond are stereotyped as dumb” are clearly ungrammatical, while “I saw a white at the bus stop” is not nearly as bad, and “There’s a blonde in that class” is fine (though both are kind of cringey for the reasons David Gerrold, via John Cowan, outlines above).
For many English speakers, including me, “Japanese” (like other -ese gentilics) falls into the first set, along with “young” or “poor”: “The Japanese are…” is possible, “I saw a Japanese” sounds wrong. “Korean” (like other -an gentilics) falls into the second, along with “black” or “blond”: “*The Korean are…” is wrong, “I saw a Korean” is fine. Nothing to do with ideology, just morphology. For other English speakers, such as Bathrobe, the distribution is evidently rather different; I wonder if that’s true for adjectives like “young” as well?
It must be relevant that there was a time not long ago when English derived singulars by adding one > un: young-un, li’l-un, hard-un. Those singulars could be re-pluralized to contrast with the collective sense of the zero derivation: the young-uns vs. the young.
“A gay” is generally a shibboleth for people who are utterly unfamiliar with gay people, and likely unsympathetic to them.
Really strange is to model Glaswegian after Norwegian.
I think Mr or Ms Speedwell was talking about Galway, in Connaught, with “Galwegian”. But Galwegian is also the name for, as you say, someone from Galloway and that’s in Scotland pretty close to Glasgow. So it’s possible the -weg in Glaswegian is taken from the example of Galloway close by. There’s also a similarity in pronouncing norge & Glasgæ, but that seems (to me) irrelevant.
JC, that’s so interesting about Kent. I wonder if it was mostly Men & Maids of Kent who took part in the Peasants’ Revolt. That was later, 1382ish, but I think the revolting members were in the eastern part of the county including Canterbury. There is by the way a 19C Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect that may or may not be very accurate but it does have an entry on p.5 – undated but looking pretty old – ax for ask, as in “Where of the seyde acomptantis ax alowance as hereafter foloyth” (Accounts of the Churchwardens at St Dunstan’s Canterbury.)
Lameen, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
I think the “Jutes” of Anglo-Saxon England may have been closer kin with the Frisians on the continent than with the Scandinavians. The settlement pattern of the Jutes along the southern coast resembles that of the Frisians along the North Sea coast of continental Germania. The Frisians were a seafaring people trading on the edge of the Roman Empire, and organizing themselves through leagues of polities ruled by assemblies rather than under kings. The earliest bonds between Scandinavia and England — in legend as well as in the archaeology of Sutton Hoo — were with the Anglian parts — which would also become the core of the Danelaw.
This might be my now-obsolete 90s political correctness talking, from back when we naively thought diversity was good, politeness was not a sign of weakness, and fascism was bad (/sarcasm)… but I was taught that it’s always possibly offensive to refer to a human being by just an adjective.
So, instead of “Polack”, or “Pole”, wouldn’t any style guide from the past few decades encourage the use of “Polish person” or “Polish citizen” or “Polish man” or whatever? Same with any other kind of adjective, particularly ones which might be seen as disabilities or reasons for prejudice – “Mute”, etc.
Tiro is a character in the series of ancient Roman mystery novels written by Steven Saylor. In the first book, Tiro is one of the most important characters, but his appearances wane over the course of the series.
I have tried reading at least three different series of ancient Roman mystery novels, but none of them seemed entirely satisfactory. There are a couple common problems. One is that giving the protagonist(s) typical ancient Roman values tends to make them extremely unsympathetic; the result is that the detectives tend to be extremely anachronistic characters. There is also the issue that we do not really know how lower-class Romans addressed one another in day-to-day interactions, so any author writing in this setting is forced to invent a consistent system of address and nomenclature, which is hard to do without, again, making it unrealistically modern.
@ Lameen
Yes, that is the collective use, which is uncontroversial. Talking about “the Japanese” (as a collective group) is different from talking about “three Japanese” (individual people) or “a Japanese” (an individual person).
But in the following short passage, “the Japanese” (three individuals) must also be distinguished from the collective use:
“Seven people were injured in the crash, three Japanese and four Albanians. The Japanese suffered light injuries, but the Albanians, who were sitting at the front of the bus, were hospitalised for several days.”
@ AG
but I was taught that it’s always possibly offensive to refer to a human being by just an adjective.
That is where my feeling about “a Nigerian” came from. My feeling was that calling anyone “a Nigerian” was just as bad as calling them “a Japanese” because it’s not nice to refer to people that way. From the examples given, though, that will obviously depend on the circumstances.
Unfortunately grammaticality and offensiveness became hopelessly entangled in the discussion and are only now being sorted out.
Ungrammatical inoffensiveness seems to upset no one except for peevers. This may be a clue to eternal happiness for all.
it’s always possibly offensive to refer to a human being by just an adjective
From a purely linguistic point of view, this is simply a silly made-up pretend rule, like the “rule” about split infinitives, or the one about stranding prepositions, or the American obsession with “which.”
Unfortunately it is self-fulfilling, in the sense that if members of a group who can tell the difference between an English noun and adjective (unlike most L1 speakers of English) actually are thereby offended, the term is offensive, and it’s arsehole behaviour to go on using it just because the rationale of the objections is fundamentally mistaken. It’s parallel to the myths that “Eskimo” means “eater of raw flesh” and “squaw” means “vagina”; it’s deeply annoying to any right-minded lover of Language that people ever bought into the myths in the first place, but if people genuinely find the terms offensive because they have, offensive is what they are, and there’s no help for it.
The “-(i)an” terms don’t actually seem to upset anybody: I’ve never met a Ghanaian or Nigerian who had any problem with being called a Ghanaian or a Nigerian; nor an American, for that matter. It seems to be the “-ese” ones that cause un-ese.
This may have something to do with the tendency for “-ese” forms to cluster predominantly around “exotic, from a European (or at least British) perspective.” (I seem to remember a Language Log thread about this some time ago.) This might have led to a feeling that the “-ese” forms have a penumbra of prejudice about them, which is neutralised to the level of acceptability in polite circles only if they are not used as in-yer-face noun phrase heads but as mere deniable dependents.
Francophone Hatters: is “un congolais” or “un sénégalais” more objectionable than e.g. “un nigérien”? Or is this just an English thing?
I think you’re right about this, and that the usage of “a Japanese / a Chinese / etc.” as a singular noun is probably declining, not getting more prevalent.
Actually I wonder if they might be on the rise in recent years (particularly in an online context), as Western contact with East Asian people and media has increased. A matter-of-fact usage like “there were two Chinese there” strikes me as something that I might read from a Western expat or a fluent Chinese speaker of English. (Although I’m basing this on very little, so who knows.)
David E – I get your points, I think you are definitely onto something with the “-ese” unease, and I’m glad you (begrudgingly) agree that calling people things they perceive as insults is probably not good.
Where do we stand on “Jew”, “Chinaman”, “Black”, “Gypsy”, “Mongoloid”, “Pygmy”, etc.? Grammatically speaking I guess we could call anyone anything, but we don’t, do we?
On the other hand, I myself am not as “politically correct” as my earlier post and my current high-horsedness might seem; I always say “Bombay”, “Burma”, “Rangoon”, and “LaoS”, for example (Did you all know that expats in SE Asia only ever say “Lao”, with no hint of an “S”, and that it’s a weird smug thing that drives me nuts?) Not sure why I stick with some of these old names but not others, just a random stew of personal preferences and atavistic colonial sympathies, I guess.
An ethnic adjective, an ethnic adjective, and an ethnic adjective walk into a bar…
(Nigerian/Chinese/German work here. English/French/Jewish don’t: for those there are nouns.)
AG: The official name of the country is given in transcription as “Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao”. The language is called “phasa lao”. Since I know zero about the country or the language, I have no idea what to make of your complaint about a missing “s”.
I have a feeling that weird smug Anglo expats in Germany refer to the country as Deutschland when they talk to each other…
Hmm, I know only one Anglo ex-pat here. We speak in English. We rarely talk about this country, so I have no idea what he would call it. I suspect that what’s being referred to as “smug” is what I know as pretentiousness.
I first encountered this at UT Austin. There was a twerp who did a “junior year abroad” in France, and came back quite unable to speak English fluently. He indulged in much troubled swooning at his new-found inability to remember simple English words, due to the profundity of his recent immersion in furrin.
Les Laos is a French plural. That’s the only source for the -s. The stamps used to have POSTES LAO on them (maybe they still do).
The Pathet Lao (Frenchly pronounced ‘th’) was often mentioned in the English language media during the Vietnam war. The adjective of Laos was (and perhaps still is?) pronounced ‘Lay-ocean’.
Not sure why I stick with some of these old names but not others
It might have to do with communication. If I talk about Siam and Persia, younger people won’t have a clue that I mean Thailand and Iran. I still use Peking since everyone seems to still understand. I’m not planning to give up Bombay, Rangoon or Calcutta. I occasionally use Oslo instead of Christiania but only to appease the natives. When there’s an obvious political objective that I agree with, I’ll renounce a name I grew up with. I gave up Rhodesia & Nyasaland over ten years ago now.
I still use Peking since everyone seems to still understand
Good heavens. Really? I’m wondering whom you consider “younger people.” There are people well into their middle years who will never have known any spelling other than Beijing. Why cling to an outdated pronunciation / orthography based on 18th French missionaries’ interpretations of Nanjing dialect, and one which, moreover, was entirely abandoned by English news media sometime during the 80s? I’d be completely gobsmacked to hear an English speaker use the word “Peking” unless it were to modify the word “duck.”
In general, I’m in favor of calling people and places what they wish to be called, so would never boast of clinging to some old exonym decades past its sell-by date.
In the USSR, they tried for a while to follow the Mandarin usage and call Hong Kong Xianggang.
Didn’t stick, fortunately.
Let’s all switch to München instead of Munich. It’s pronounced like Munchkin without the k, but be sure to say the u as “ee” with lips pursed. Make Munchkins Great Again.
I can still find Munich on a map. But I can’t seem to find Leghorn, Tiflis or Danzig. O tempore, o mores!!
Only last week I learned about “Leghorn” for Livorno. Todally weird. I couldn’t keep cartoon roosters out of my head, but the Germans can’t be blamed for that. Because it was the British, you see.
Every time I am stuck in Incheon International Airport, I wish it was still called Chemulpo
Ha ha. There is a culinary delight in Livorno called stoccafisso, which the German WiPe tells me is Stockfisch.
The official name of the country
…is (in English), last time I checked, “Lao People’s Democratic Republic”. I personally didn’t really care much about where the S came from (and/or why it disappeared), and just thought that the country is called Laos and the people are called Lao (when they aren’t called Laotian*), but the “French plural” explanation does make at least some sense.
The Russian is also Лаос, with an S; fortunately, Лаосская (Народно-Демократическая Республика) is ambiguous in Russian in that it would have been the same (at least in spelling; possibly not in pronunciation) whether formed from Лаос or *Лао (though it heavily suggests the former).
*) obligatory: “which ocean?”
Good heavens. Really?
Why the ostentatious fake-surprise? Obviously “really”; he said so.
Why cling to an outdated pronunciation / orthography based on [bla bla bla]
Obviously because it’s what he learned and grew up with. By “cling to” you mean “use.” And your whole comment is a fine example of what I call “performative progressivism”: fake shock at a usage one has “outgrown,” combined with tut-tutting and hopes for moral improvement.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using “Peking”; it is a perfectly fine English name for a foreign city, of which we have scads (almost all of which are based on outdated bla bla bla). Unless you say “Moskvá” for Moscow and “Krung Thep” for Bangkok (or “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon,” if you’re really obedient) I’m calling you out for inconsistency. And when you talk about “calling people and places what they wish to be called,” what you really mean is “…what the (usually repressive) government wishes you to call them”; I guarantee you the average Chinese doesn’t give a flying fuck whether you talk about “Peking” or “Beijing” when you’re talking your own damn language. (I have even seen people insist on “Myanmar” on the basis of “what they wish to be called,” which is really rich.) And of course we must say Mumbai and Kolkata even though scads of Indian natives of those cities insist on “clinging to” Bombay and Calcutta, despite the undoubted fact that their benevolent regional governments have beneficently changed the names.
I really don’t get New Delhi.
What’s wrong with plain Delhi? It’s not like it’s on the different continent or something.
Why the ostentatious fake-surprise? Obviously “really”; he said so.
No need for high dudgeon. “Really?” as in the sense of “Are you being facetious? Is this a statement of fact or am I misreading an attempt at deep sarcasm?” I genuinely wasn’t certain if he was being serious.
Unless you say “Moskvá” for Moscow and “Krung Thep” for Bangkok (or “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon,” if you’re really obedient) I’m calling you out for inconsistency.
Utter nonsense. I wouldn’t, willy-nilly, propose that English adopt the endonyms of every major city around the globe. But the Peking / Beijing debate was definitively settled very early in the Reagan administration more than 35 years ago. Any English speaker still using Peking is either being deliberately anachronistic or is living entirely in the past.
this seems like a discussion for another time and place, but… Almost all expats in SE Asia say “Lao”. I (also an expat, but a rebel) say “Laos”. I can’t explain this choice. It’s indefensible but there we are.
But the Peking / Beijing debate was definitively settled very early in the Reagan administration more than 35 years ago.
You say “definitively settled” meaning, presumably, either that some combination of government agencies and news media decided to use the new version or that you yourself did so. It clearly wasn’t definitively settled in the normal sense of the phrase, since plenty of people haven’t switched. And I still don’t understand the moral urgency implicit in your upbraiding; there is nothing admirable in choosing to obey the diktats of a government.
Almost all expats in SE Asia say “Lao”. I (also an expat, but a rebel) say “Laos”. I can’t explain this choice. It’s indefensible but there we are.
This is apparently a very in-group thing, since I have never heard anyone say “Lao.” It seems to me absurd on the face of it for English-speakers (how the French say it is irrelevant), and I support you in your rebellion.
But the Peking / Beijing debate was definitively settled very early in the Reagan administration more than 35 years ago.
Talk to my lawyer, I guarantee you the average Chinese doesn’t give a flying fuck whether you talk about “Peking” or “Beijing” when you’re talking your own damn language says it better than I ever could. Living in Europe I never relied on the Reagan administration for much, certainly not for definitively settling my pronunciation. But 35 years… well, I’m 65 (sixtyfive) years old, so that means I’d spent nearly half my current lifespan before Ron Reagan decided I should say Beijing and I’ll bet I’m not the only one still doing it.
Any English speaker still using Peking is either being deliberately anachronistic or is living entirely in the past.
No, not really. Obviously if I were writing the name in a letter to, say, Donald Trump and I wanted him to focus on the contents, I’d use ‘Beijing’ but most of the time I’m just rattling on to my family about nothing much. I’m pretty sure if I suddenly blurted ‘Beijing duck’ they’d give me a funny look (esp. since we’re vegetarian).
The names I avoid are ones like nigger and Jew, because African-Americans & Jewish people find them offensive (and for good historical reason, but that’s beside the point). I don’t believe I can contribute to making them harmless by bringing them back into everyday use, unlike cunt or other swear words with a colorful history that I like using. Just as you’re clearly annoyed by Peking, I’m cross when some nitwit decides that I can’t say X because someone might get offended. They don’t seem to understand that they’re the people causing a problem.
Hear, hear!
Jew is offensive word now?
Damn, but what politically correct term should we use then?
{thinking} let’s call them confessionally challenged or something
since plenty of people haven’t switched
Plenty of people? Again, if you’re under the age of, say, 45, you’ve never, ever, been exposed to any other term than “Beijing” to refer to the capital of China in any English-language media that you’d remember.
Therefore, your hypothetical demographic of stubborn language-deadenders is entirely of retirement age, or nearly so. They also, doubtless, missed out on the Beijing Olympics and have entirely avoided traveling to the region, so for them it seems an arbitrary, unnecessary change from what they were taught in elementary school, rather than a simple reflection of the fact that “Peking” was always a bizarre artifact of an ancient foreigner’s clumsy mispronunciation. “How dare they change the name??!! It’s a diktat! Or, at least, a ukase!” Shallow peevery to the nth degree.
There’s no “moral urgency” whatsoever in my observations, only bemusement at graybeards* forever wishing the world would stop changing. The decision of the national government of China, two generations ago, cannot seriously be compared to the whim of a local government within the past few years. (*FWIW, I’m a graybeard myself.)
David E: is “un congolais” or “un sénégalais” more objectionable than e.g. “un nigérien”?
None of them are objectionable in any way, any more than anglais or italien. Both suffixes are totally established en français, and both have a perfectly regular feminine form, in -aise and -ienne respectively. The first one has an alternate form in -ois(e) which seems to be unproductive (unlike the other two) but is otherwise totally acceptable, as in chinois, suédois, danois and a few others. These suffixes are also plentifully used for names of inhabitants of cities, as in orléanais or parisien.
The old form of -ais was -ois, long pronounced [wE]. In most such words, [wE] became [wa] in Standard French, as in dieppois(e) ‘inhabitant of Dieppe, except for some of the imparfait verb forms and most demonyms, which lost the [w]. The case of the derivatives of France is interesting: the demonym is français but the personal name is François, the French version of the name of the current pope (the official, Latin name being Franciscus).
Laos from a French plural
I didn’t know that. With most French plurals the -s suffix is silent except in cases of liaison (as in leS enfants, but I have never heard any pronunciation than laoS for the name of the country. I think this is due to the fact this name is perceived as exotic, a word for which one expects an irregular pronunciation (as opposed to chaos, a Greek word). The citizens are called Laotiens : for the t one might again compare with chaotique, even though the t in Laotien is [s].
A quick wikipedia skim suggests that Peking remains reasonably standard in German, Pekin in French and Spanish, Pechino in Italian, etc. Are the speakers of those languages just less sensitive to the suppposed call-them-what-they-want-to-be-called (whoever you think “they” may be) norm, or have the lobbying efforts of the brutal regime occupying mainland China been focused on English orthography because of English’s default global-lingua-franca status, or what?
It’s Peking in Russian too.
Strangely enough, in Mongolian it’s Beijing (and was so for the last couple of centuries at least) – I guess being neighbors to Mandarin speakers helps
confessionally challenged
– Haha
Jew is offensive word now?
It is to some. A very old (English) friend of mine nearly exploded when I used it. That was when I decided to back off. Jewish people is acceptable. That Mel Brooks still can use it only shows its potential for causing offense, I think.
From a couple of under 45s – I know Peking as an old spelling of Beijing; my wife knew that Peking was a city in China, but not that it was the same place as Beijing – everyone knows Peking duck.
Peking is a romanization of Beijing in Nanjing dialect, not a bizarre artifact of clumsy foreigners. Of course we don’t pronounce it as intended.
“Jew” is not offensive. In fact, I bridle a bit at the notion of gentiles acting like the word is taboo; because historically the only reason not to say “Jew” was if it was felt that there was something wrong with being Jewish.
JWB: have the lobbying efforts of the brutal regime occupying mainland China been focused on English orthography because of English’s default global-lingua-franca status, or what?
I would think so. Also, “Beijing” pronounced according to the conventions of other languages would often result in less recognizable versions of the city’s name.
The name in French is written Pékin not Pekin which would suggest that the first vowel is schwa rather than a mid-high front vowel. This is not just a question of spelling: according to the rules of schwa-deletion, we would say à P-kin (two syllables) instead of à-Pé-kin ‘to/at Beijing.
my wife knew that Peking was a city in China, but not that it was the same place as Beijing
Appalling. #SoCalledAmericanEducation
Also, if you pronounce Beijing exactly as written (that is, with a traditional ‘j’ sound, not a Frenchified ‘zh’ for ‘j’) you pronounce it very nearly as intended, allowing for the fact that English isn’t a tonal language.
“A gay” is generally a shibboleth for people who are utterly unfamiliar with gay people, and likely unsympathetic to them.
I seem to remember that it started as a PC-ism, then died of awkwardness except among the people you mention.
It’s a boon when one’s detractors are tongue-tied. Squeamishness is one of the most desirable social graces in the hateful.
Again, if you’re under the age of, say, 45, you’ve never, ever, been exposed to any other term than “Beijing” to refer to the capital of China in any English-language media that you’d remember.
This is an obvious overstatement (“never, ever” — seriously?). Yes, “Beijing” is far more common now. That doesn’t make using it a moral imperative, and I’m curious what you have to say about the point J.W. Brewer brought up, the lamentably old-fashioned forms still (still! in this enlightened age!) in use in German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
I am exposed in the talking media to a lot of competitive preciousness about words and pronunciation. I’m as willing as the next guy to be guided, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let myself be dragged around by the nose.
I remember 1986 as the first time I became fully aware of these verbal distinction antics here in Germany. In the weeks after “Chernobyl”, the big newscasters initially stressed (I think it was) the second syllable. Then some German professor of Things Russian was interviewed who stressed the first syllable. Over the next few days the newscasters gradually switched to that stress.
Then another professor with a thick Russian accent piped up, and the stress moved to the last syllable. Not everyone followed, many talking heads just doubled down on what they’d been saying, merely adding a hint of thick Russian accent.
Call me crazy, but I consider the word in use in other Indo-European languages (universally derived from the original French boo-boo) wholly irrelevant to any discussion of what is, or is not, normative English in c. 2018.
Or perhaps you believe that because Russian calls China “Китай” we should revert to calling it “Cathay” in English? So much more traditional!
“Peking duck” is a fossilized collocation at this point, a cooking term, and entirely irrelevant (as I thought I’d all but spelled out). I’d be absolutely astonished to hear any native speaker of English say “My wife and I are flying to Peking to next week.”
LH: the lamentably old-fashioned forms still (still! in this enlightened age!) in use in German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
How would a monolingual Spanish speaker interpret the j in Beijing? A French or Portuguese speaker? A German or Italian?
Even the switch from initial P ro B does not more accurately represent the sound, which is somewhat intermediate between the aspirated [ph] of English or German and the fully voiced [b] of the Romance languages.
Then there is the word for an inhabitant of the city: in French this is un pékinois (also the name of a little dog), how would this be pronounced if written beijingais? etc.
In Spanish it’s Pekín. Beijing would be pronounced “bei hing”. I don’t think the Spanish do “j” as in English “judge”. No more than Anglophones do “ü”. Let it pass.
Lao
I’m struck by the short form “Saudi” as a country name.
FWIW, no one ever put Beijing Duck on a menu.
Stu, I was using “rhetorical questions”. My point was that the name would sound quite different in different languages, and quite different too from what speakers are used to (as with the woman who did not realize “Peking” and “Beijing” were the same city).
Y: “Saudi” as a country name.
I think that Saudi is used as an adjective, as in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi regime, and such, and as a demonym, as in The Saudis for the inhabitants of the country. I don’t recall reading Saudi as the name of the country.
Call me crazy, but I consider the word in use in other Indo-European languages (universally derived from the original French boo-boo) wholly irrelevant to any discussion of what is, or is not, normative English in c. 2018.
You’re making my point for me. Of course the word in use in other Indo-European languages is wholly irrelevant to any discussion of what is, or is not, normative English in c. 2018, and so is the preference of the Chinese government. The only relevant fact is what actual English-speakers say. Since a lot of English-speakers have allowed themselves to be bullied by the Chinese government and the Westerners who have held their coat and cheered them on, “Beijing” is now majority usage, but that still doesn’t make it “right” and all other forms “wrong.” Those who say “Peking” have every bit as much right on their side as those who, er, kowtow to the Forbidden Palace. And I still want to know whether you think the Europeans are all lamentably retrograde and should update to the currently approved usage, or whether they get a pass since they’re Europeans.
I don’t recall reading Saudi as the name of the country.
Yes, it’s common usage these days among people who have occasion to say things like “I’m flying to Saudi next week.”
I wonder why they spell Taipei, not Taibei.
Kowtowing to Kuomingtang* regime, no doubt
*well, it’s DPP regime now, but Kuomingtang sounds scarier
And I still want to know whether you think the Europeans are all lamentably retrograde and should update to the currently approved usage, or whether they get a pass since they’re Europeans.
This assumes, of course, that the Chinese have taken any interest in what their capital is called in French and other non-English languages. Since French is no longer the lingua franca (Zut alors!) I doubt that the Chinese give half a hoot. A cursory Internet search (OK, just Googling the French Embassy in Beijing) suggests that this is the case. The French WP page also only notes very demurely “également appelée Beijing.”
And “currently approved usage”? “Kowtowing” to the Chinese? We’re discussing a usage that came into being in the Disco Era and is as entirely natural to most currently-living English speakers as Peking once was to the Geritol set. If there’s any “pressure” at all to use Beijing, it happened roughly when Walter Mondale was running for president, not in the intervening decades.
I’m not interested in questions of “right” vs. “wrong”; only in questions of “contemporary” vs. “quaint / antiquated.” I just tried searching for a flight to “Peking,” and, impressively enough Google actually understood what I wanted even though every single one of the returned results directed me to a site using the word “Beijing.”
And Forbidden City in English, not palace. A Sinologist clearly you are not.
I don’t recall reading Saudi as the name of the country.
Saudi expats always refer to the country as “Saudi” (or KSA…or the Sandbox). I speak from personal experience. Multisyllabic country names are always shortened by those who have to deal with them very frequently.
people who have occasion to say things like “I’m flying to Saudi next week.”
I am not one of them and don’t know any!
Multisyllabic country names are always shortened by those who have to deal with them very frequently.
Fate has rewarded said shmuck with a generation of English speakers, saying that they went on holidays to Czech.
I’m not interested in questions of “right” vs. “wrong”
And yet you sound every bit as heated on the subject as if the fate of the world hung on the choice of Peking or Beijing.
A Sinologist clearly you are not.
Nor was meant to be! I am interested in many things, and lamentably ignorant about most of them. You are, of course, correct about the Forbidden City.
“Czecho” in Le Carré novels.
In a twofer for controversial toponymic out-of-dateness, I give you footage of a 2009 performance by the band Mission of Burma of the song Peking Spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJgUqlga5cA
Yup.
And German isn’t particularly conservative with exonyms. Sure, we keep Mailand* for Milano, but Preßburg for Bratislava was simply forgotten behind the Iron Curtain. The few instances of Pressburg showing up after 1995 only go to show that the term wasn’t treated as a proper name with a fixed spelling anymore; we say Bratislava, except that the locals probably wonder what that *Pratyslava place is.
* Literally “May country” – after all they have spring instead of winter there!
Apparently.
Ouch, that’s not the version you mean.
It’s a voiceless lenis. That makes it identical to Spanish /p/, to the /b/ of most of southern and central German, and to the most common pronunciation of word-initial /b/ in most Englishes and most of northern German.
French /p/, a fortis, is a bit different.
You’ve overdone it, though – it’s Kuomintang (or Guomindang of course).
What’s wrong with plain Delhi? It’s not like it’s on the different continent or something.
Delhi is a large city dating to the -6C, the capital of India in Moghul times. New Delhi is a small city constituting about 2% of the area of Delhi, built in 1911-1931 by the British Reich as a replacement capital for Calcutta. So it is not new in the sense of New York, but in the sense of the New City of Jerusalem.
I don’t believe I can contribute to making them harmless by bringing them back into everyday use, unlike cunt or other swear words with a colorful history that I like using.
To American women, the c-word is as offensive as the n-word to African Americans or any other such word, whether it refers to a body part or a person. Particularly in the latter use it is utterly irretrievable.
Since a lot of English-speakers have allowed themselves to be bullied by the Chinese government and the Westerners who have held their coat and cheered them on
I think the nature of the Chinese government is irrelevant to this. Everyone wants to get their native spelling into English (okay, not Western Europeans with long histories of rubbing up against anglophones), because English (in the last few centuries, at any rate) always borrows words in their native spellings and then mangles them phonologically.
Bathrobe, in NSW the “first form” of high school became “seventh grade” some time in the 70s. As far as I know, the main difference in school year terminology between Australian states now is what you call the first year of primary school which comes before year one, where it exists (kindergarten/prep/transition). When it comes to university, the School of Mathematics and Statistics, School of Physics, etc., were part of the Faculty of Science.
As someone whose parents lived through the change from first form to seventh grade, I agree with laowai’s surprise that people still use Peking. This is not to support or oppose the change, or tell anyone that they shouldn’t use it – just that as far as I’m concerned it has successfully happened. For me, the fact that Chinese government preferences influenced the standard English name for the city is simply a matter of history.
I’d also like to suggest that events with zero probability really are impossible. Formal mathematical probability works on measure theory, which ignores zero probability events like single points in a continuous line. This is perfectly consistent with the fact that it’s pretty hard to make physical sense of those sort of events. The idea that there are possibilities with probability zero is a bit of a red herring that comes about an unnecessary emphasis on those sort of points.
Just because it’s now the capital city they’re forcing us to stop calling the place Peiping!! Anyway, as everyone knows, its real name is Khanbaliq.
David M: [Chinese p] It’s a voiceless lenis. That makes it identical to Spanish /p/, to the /b/ of most of southern and central German, and to the most common pronunciation of word-initial /b/ in most Englishes and most of northern German.
That is what I was trying to say without using too many technical terms.
French /p/, a fortis, is a bit different.
??? I have had conversations in Spanish with a number of native speakers (mostly but not all from Latin America) and never noticed a difference between my native p and theirs, as in French papier : Spanish papel in which the p’s are both unlike those of German papier : English paper. Where there could be a difference is in final position where French voiceless stops are fully released in deliberate speech, as in la cape ‘cape (garment)’ or la nappe ‘tablecloth’.
I now realize that I don’t know if the KMT regime in exile on Taiwan continued to refer to the city as Peiping and if so when that usage drifted away.
laowai: [Pékin and similar words] in use in other Indo-European languages (universally derived from the original French boo-boo)
capra: Peking is a romanization of Beijing in Nanjing dialect, not a bizarre artifact of clumsy foreigners.
Thanks capra, but why are the French considered the “clumsy foreigners” guilty of a “boo-boo”? They were not the first Europeans to be allowed to enter China, the Portuguese were there first, and among the Jesuits who came later were both Italians and Frenchmen, all highly educated.
French and other Romance /p/ don’t differ in voicing or aspiration (both are lacking), but in the degree of pressure from the lungs. This is a distinction that Southern Germans and Austrians alone among Europeans make at the phonemic level, so the rest of us are not attuned to hearing it.
@DM: What, northern German /b/ is voiceless word-initially? Have I been mis-hearing people all my life?
but why are the French considered the “clumsy foreigners” guilty of a “boo-boo”?
m-l,
I was going by WP’s note that the French were the first to use Peking in print. To wit:
You’re right, of course, that calling it a “boo-boo” is glib since it reflected the pronunciation of at least some Chinese speakers at the time.
As for my “heated” remarks, the adjective I’d choose would be “astonished.” I simply wasn’t aware that 40 years after the change went into effect there were still Anglophone holdouts referring to the city as Peking. Do such also refer to Travancore-Cochin, Upper Volta, and Ceylon? Frunze, Gorky and Kuybyshev? This would seem to be an impediment to effective communication.
Google Peking University, for example.
They are not in a hurry to change their name, to put it mildly
Do such also refer to Travancore-Cochin, Upper Volta, and Ceylon? Frunze, Gorky and Kuybyshev? This would seem to be an impediment to effective communication.
In my mind there’s a clear difference between a change of name and a change of preferred realisation of a single name.
Again, if you’re under the age of, say, 45, you’ve never, ever, been exposed to any other term than “Beijing” to refer to the capital of China in any English-language media that you’d remember.
You are giving the American education system far too much credit. I am sure many school districts continued to use older “World Studies” textbooks and maps with “Peking” well into the late 1990s, and I would not be surprised to find some 1980s vintage textbooks still in use in some poorer school districts today.
I think the battle for “Peking” has been lost. I don’t know anyone who says “Peking” in English. Yes, Peking University and Peking Union Medical College still use “Peking” but virtually no one else. There is no particular reason for dropping “Peking” except the desire of the Chinese to sweep out the vestiges of colonialism (it’s amazing they still put with Hong Kong) and standardise the pronunciation of place names in China in Mandarin as part of the modern new China (so Amoy had to go; it was dialect). But all these names are pretty well established now and the old ones have largely disappeared except in the minds of people who remember that far back.
I have seen “Beijing Duck” plenty of times, too (Google it). I prefer “Peking Duck” but I suspect that “Beijing Duck” will win out in the end.
I saw restaurants of 北平 (Peiping) food in Taipei about two decades ago. According to the Internet, that usage is still current in Taiwan.
But then, they’d only made you say Běipíng/Pei³-p’ing² last time they moved the capital to Nánjīng, which was in 1911 IIRC.
Much earlier, Cháng’ān (“long/eternal peace”) was renamed Xī’ān (“west peace”, “peace somewhere out west”) when it ceased to be the capital.
It’s often voiceless word-initially in those regions where the fortes are seriously aspirated; I can try to find a few published sources for this if you like. Here in Berlin, which is at least traditionally part of the aspiration-free zone south of the aspiration zone, word-initial /b d g/ are more commonly voiced, and pretty reliably so before /r/ and /l/.
The trick is the variation within German that I’ve alluded to. I don’t aspirate natively, you’ll be hard-pressed to find aspiration in Austrian TV newscasts, and in one of my first English lessons I was taught how to aspirate, complete with holding a sheet of paper in front of my mouth to see what happened. And then, nobody told me to drop the aspiration behind s, so it took another 10 years or so till I read (!) that I’m supposed to do that, because it doesn’t come naturally to me either – aspiration as a whole doesn’t, so I lack intuitions for what comes with it. (Lack of aspiration behind s does seem to come naturally to aspirating northern Germans, but I have a very small sample size for that.)
And yet, to pronounce La Plata right, I always have to imagine “lablada”. And yet, I don’t have this issue in French (or Russian), whose /p/ and /t/ are identical to my native ones; and I hear when a Chinese accent turns French /t/ into a lenis.
Conversely, I’m not good at hearing whether voice is present in lenis plosives if they’re short enough. (See here for a snippet of Sanskrit chanting driving me mad.) I’m also not good at hearing whether short voiceless fricatives are fortis or lenis – natively I only have a length distinction for fricatives, and the short ones are free to be fortes, lenes or anything in between; they’re just never voiced, so that [z] is a completely exotic sound for me that I had to learn to articulate when I started learning French and English.
(…/v/ is a complicated story that I’ll tell later if anyone’s interested. /k/ is another one.)
Preßburg for Bratislava was simply forgotten behind the Iron Curtain
True, although for reason my car’s GPS call its “Preßburg” when I switch it to German. It also recognizes even more archaic Habsburg era names such as “Saybusch, Polen” (Zywiec) and “Iglau” (Jihlava, CR). “Neusohl” (Banska Bystrica, SK) might be too much.
Incidentally, I was seriously disappointed when I found out (recently, on LLog) how it’s actually pronounced in Cantonese. Instead of Hongkong, we could’ve been calling it Hönggong in German this whole time! Argh!
Place and personal names.
To American women, the c-word is as offensive as the n-word to African Americans or any other such word, whether it refers to a body part or a person
That is an overgeneralization. I have some good American female friends who throw the word cunt around fairly generously. Granted they are comedy writers and anglophiles. There are also of course feminists who are consciously trying to “reclaim” the word, but may not appreciate men using it. I walk by a bookstore in Vienna that has been displaying the “Cunt Coloring Book” prominently in the window for the past seven years. The book looks like it was a product of second wave 1980s American feminism.
But even for most “ordinary” American women I don’t think you can really compare cunt to nigger in terms of offensiveness.
There ought to be a list of taboo words which potentially could end a marriage when uttered just once by a husband to his wife.
C-word would be near the top of the list, I expect.
C-word would be near the top of the list
Except when applied to the object itself. Sometimes it’s the kind of “dirty language” that couples engage in, behind closed doors, of course.
Google Peking University, for example.
No need to Google it; I lived within walking distance of it for several years. (I was living there when I discovered LH, in fact, which is why my nom-de-LH is what it is.) A few vestigial uses of Peking in a city of 20 million really count for nothing. Ditto for the fact that St. Petersburg is still located in Leningrad Oblast, or that several colleges in Chennai still incorporate the word Madras.
“last time they moved the capital to Nánjīng, which was in 1911 IIRC.”
Confusingly, Nanjing (ie. Southern Capital) was one of the names used for Beijing during the Liao dynasty. The place has gone through so many name changes that there is a wikipedia article on “Names of Beijing”. Apparently the first recorded name is Ji.
“Jew” is not offensive.
You can say this until you’re blue in the face but you don’t get to decide for others. The fact is that some Jewish people DO find it offensive.
I bridle a bit at the notion of gentiles acting like the word is taboo
Who said anything about gentiles? I said ‘English’. The two conditions Jewish & English are not incompatible.
Mel Brooks – Ouch, that’s not the version you mean.
Right. Huh. I guess I should watch my own link before I post it.
To American women, the c-word is as offensive as the n-word to African Americans or any other such word, whether it refers to a body part or a person. Particularly in the latter use it is utterly irretrievable.
I’ll make a note that you speak for all American women, John. But you’re just illustrating my point. What’s offensive to me is someone writing ‘c-word’, ‘n-word’, ‘G-d’ etc. as if it’s an accepted convention that these words are SO POWERFUL they must not be spelled out. That’s exactly the opposite of what ought to be intended.
In China, nothing is ever quite what it seems.
‘Nanjing’ (Liao and Jin cities) was a small city located in the southwest corner of modern Beijing, west of the present South Railway Station. Its growth was always hampered by lack of water. The city was built in a new location and greatly expanded by the Mongols (Khublai Khan) after water supplies were found that could support a large city.
The Ming hated the Mongols so much that they razed the Yuan capital and rebuilt it slightly south of the original location (the remains of the old Yuan wall are still there, known as 土城 tǔchéng ‘earth wall’). The Qing kept the Ming city but the inner portion (often identified by modern Chinese as 老北京 lǎoběijīng ‘old Beijing’) was actually reserved for Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese bannermen.
I said “yes” (that is “yes sir I don’t like it, hmmf”) to “impact,” not because I find the word offensive but because whenever I hear that phrasing I’m listening to a management dweeb bloviating. For “skillset” I said “no” (“no problemo!”) because it would be OK to hear out loud, but if someone were to write it, I think they’d be making a StyleError™ omitting the space between the two separate words.
Everyone wants to get their native spelling into English
But it is not “their native spelling”! That would be 北京. They are trying to change our spelling based on their preferences. How far do you think we’d get if we announced we had decided on a new preferred Chinese-character rendering of American cities and expected them to switch over?
To American women, the c-word is as offensive as the n-word to African Americans or any other such word, whether it refers to a body part or a person. Particularly in the latter use it is utterly irretrievable.
Nonsense. I am surprised that you of all people would indulge in such an absurd generalization. My wife is as American as they come, and she refers to people she dislikes as “cunts” frequently and with great enjoyment.
I knew I liked Ms Hat.
I have a feeling that if I ever called my wife by this word, I would be served divorce papers next morning.
{thinking} the strongest phrase I ever used to her was “you are a little stupid today” and afterwards she wouldn’t talk to me for three days
But the point isn’t whether women enjoy being called by insulting names (who does?), it’s whether they are shocked and appalled by the word itself. Which some are and some aren’t.
All these C-, F-, J- and N-words. Soon all the letters will be used up. Will we have to switch to Unicode ? Another possibility is that people by then will be plumb tired of playing Rev Chasuble and Miss Prism.
How far do you think we’d get if we announced we had decided on a new preferred Chinese-character rendering of American cities and expected them to switch over?
Well, it worked for the Koreans…
it’s whether they are shocked and appalled by the word
I’m fine with shocked and appalled. I’m shocked & appalled that a prissy attitude to language leads people to browbeat others into self-censorship. Next thing, I’ll have to stop leaning out of my car window and calling someone a codfish in Norwegian cos it, you know, freaks out the herring and other drivers.
My favorite professor in college used to say: “Are you under the impression that we [writers, linguists, language scholars etc.] are making the language? Language is made at the farmer’s market!”
If the Norwegian expression for “piece of cod” is the same as for “codpiece”, that might be an amusing variant. One tires of having to use the same old disobliging phrases all the time.”You Bronzini codpiece!”
Torsk for a fool is also in dialect tosk. I’m unsure if the latter originally also meant ‘cod’. Trond would kno. Torskedum is ‘silly as a goose’ but my dic says nothing about the Norwegian for ‘codpiece’, a word I use infrequently even in English.
I’ll make a note that you speak for all American women, John.
I did not say “all American women”. Cats have four legs, not because all cats have four legs, but because that’s the way to bet (as SFReader does with his wife).
shocked and appalled
My wife, at least, is not shocked or appalled. She is disgusted.
All these C-, F-, J- and N-words. Soon all the letters will be used up.
I remember reading that collisions already exist, though I don’t remember the specifics. I use these forms out of habit.
codpiece
Wiktionary only gives a few words for ‘codpiece’, notably French braguette, which to an anglophone ear sounds like just the thing (a diminutive of brag). Irrelevantly, I once spent a summer wearing leather shorts with a button-up codpiece, though I confess to wearing underpants as well.
JC: Wiktionary only gives a few words for ‘codpiece’, notably French braguette,
A codpiece is no longer indispensable to proper male attire as it was a few centuries ago, when it was a piece added to the top portion of the breeches , the garment parts that (like modern trousers) cover the lower halves of the body from waist to ankle. Such a piece was eventually also added to the top (sweater-like) portion of a full body armour, with holes which allowed the wearer to pee without going to the considerable trouble of removing the armour, or risking damage if there was no such piece.
The word includes the diminutive suffix -et(te), added to the descendant of the Latinized Celtic (I think) word braca which evolved into French braie (and English ‘breech’), normally used in the plural. The use of the diminutive reflects the fact that the original braguette was a kind of miniature “pant leg” added to the front of the breeches, as is obvious in pictures of the period (approx. 15C) which demonstrate the then-fasionable emphasis on male anatomy. The word still exists, but only refers to the area of a pair of pants that allows them to be opened (by means of buttons or a zipper), so it corresponds to English fly rather than the medieval codpiece. Although the design of modern pants is similar for men and women, I think that only men customarily use the word braguette.
I did not say “all American women” = “I’d rather not bother to respond to your point so Ooh look! A squirrel!” John, you very often use this “I didn’t say X, I said almost-X and that’s totally different”. It’s pretty feeble, and its haughtiness is quite irritating, but most of all it doesn’t usually get the conversation any further.
Hey hey! Everyone speaks from their own experience, even the widely-read who have a lot of experience.
JC’s problem is that he’s so chock-full of incredible information on such a range of esoteric topics that it’s a bit of a surprise (and perhaps a little embarrassing) when he stumbles.
I don’t know American women but I do know that Australian women don’t (or, perhaps more accurately, don’t all) have the same allergy to “cunt”. But then again, “cunt” has never been used in Australia as a term of opprobrium for women. It’s a just a strong but general swearword that can be used for men (“He’s real cunt”), things (e.g., tools = “cunt of a thing”), and situations (“What a cunt for you!”).
So if you’re in a relationship with a woman who doesn’t mind you saying you want to fuck her, “cunt” isn’t necessarily far behind. But in a dirty way, not in a violent, aggro, hostile way. Which is exactly the same as “fuck”, when you think of it.
(Mind you, since I’m a long-term expat things might have changed in my absence. Plus I don’t hang around the sort of people who habitually say “cunt” any more. Maybe it’s not used as much as before.)
Another factor is that we are now in the Morgenbesser of our lives, where a silly joke counts more than street cred.
So it seems native speakers fall within 3 groups, “a Japanese” is 1. ungrammatical, 2. grammatical but offensive, and 3. grammatical and unremarkable. I suspect that 2 is mainly an American thing, and even 1 might partially be a result of younger speakers internalizing 2, I guess.
But one thing I didn’t feel I got the answer to: Does “a Japanese” being ungrammatical (or offensive) necessarily mean that “two Japanese” is ungrammatical (or offensive)? As John Cowan remarked, most of Bathrobe’s examples were in the plural. And even if the collective “the Japanese” is considered grammatical by all, do some still consider it offensive?
Oh, and FWIW, it’s /pekiN/ in Japanese as well. In Danish, I’d definitely say “Peking” and find “Beijing” odd, but Googling it turns out the latter is quite common, so something must have happened since I left.
> In Spanish it’s Pekín. Beijing would be pronounced “bei hing”. I don’t think the Spanish do “j” as in English “judge”.
Spanish phonology doesn’t allow final [ŋ], as far as I know. As for “j”, I’ve heard speakers pronounce “ll” and/or “y” in a way that comes close.
As for “j”, I’ve heard speakers pronounce “ll” and/or “y” in a way that comes close.
Forgot about that, as in “allá” spoken as if “a(d)já”. Is this sometimes a dialectal or one-off idiosyncratic production ? That is, on some occasions hearing it I have wondered whether it is a kind of whimsy-of-the-moment condoned by tradition, or a brief dip into dialect. As in the English pronunciation of “guitár” as “gíht-ar” to be nonce-funny, not because the speaker always says “gíht-ar”.
At any rate there is no homegrown “dj” sound in Castilian. Though I’m sure speakers can manage “Django” without breaking a tooth.
@dainichi, nowadays Danish public discourse largely (and blindly) follows American journalism in what to call places and peoples. I don’t think I’d catch any flak for saying Peking, but I’m not sure a teenager would know it’s the same as Beijing [b̥aɪˈd̥͡ʃ̟iŋ] (ObPhonology: (almost)-unvoiced alveolar affricate, not post-).
Silliest example: The Gaza Strip called Gazastriben. Stribe means ‘stripe’, something that by default is painted on the middle of its background. Strimmel is the thing you tear off the edge of something else.
I’ve seen several heated Internet discussions of cunt up close. The consensus seems to be that, literal meaning aside, in the US it’s unambiguously a misogynistic slur: it’s never used towards men, it’s used to accuse women of being women. (I should perhaps emphasize that all these discussions happened in cyber-places where nobody is uncomfortable with swearing itself.) Britons and Australians wandering into such discussions tend to be quite perplexed, because for them it’s a mild swearword used only towards men, much like more traditional uses of bastard – for some of them, the homonymy with the literal meaning seems to feel accidental, so of course the fact that it’s etymologically a misogynistic slur – accusing men of being women – hasn’t occurred to them.
(By “more traditional uses of bastard” I mean those that are meant to be mildly insulting, as opposed to friends calling each other “officially a bastard” to mean “I’m envious of you”. The original meaning and usage, BTW, still existed in fundamentalist circles in the US a few decades ago.)
The pronunciation of /j/ as [dj], [ɟ], [ɟj] or [dʑ] is very widespread, but not generally considered standard, so individual speakers fluctuate a lot. I’m not sure if I’ve heard [ʑ] or [ʒ], but [ʒ] is attested, and most of Argentina has famously gone all the way to [ʃ].
Some of the same people, BTW, turn /tʃ/ into [ts].
Guess what: it’s been Gazastreifen since ever. Streifen does mean “stripe”, but in this case the implication is a stripe on a map, a narrow rectangular piece of land, which is pretty much correct.
Amazingly, Gaza does not get a spelling-pronunciation with /ts/.
Spanish phonology doesn’t allow final [ŋ], as far as I know.
In some places, at least, it can be heard as an emphatic pronunciation of [n].
The G, however, does get a spelling pronunciation: it is /ɣ/ in Arabic and /ʕ/ (typically realized as zero) in Hebrew.
In some places, at least, it can be heard as an emphatic pronunciation of [n].
Some varieties have word-final /n/ as [ŋ] pretty regularly.
The consensus seems to be that, literal meaning aside, in the US it’s unambiguously a misogynistic slur: it’s never used towards men, it’s used to accuse women of being women.
That’s the conventional wisdom, but it’s not true. In practice I encounter male-directed cunt pretty often from other Americans – either as a British-influenced “edgy youth” usage, or as a more established (possibly Irish-influenced) Northeastern city usage.
That’s the conventional wisdom, but it’s not true.
Exactly.
I meant /n/, of course.
I would have supposed that Greco-Latin “Gaza” was derived from an Ancient Hebrew pronunciation with /ɣ/.
Very likely. The evidence of the LXX is that /ɣ/ was still distinct from /ħ/ (which had not yet merged to /x/ < fricativized /k/) and likewise /ʁ/ from /ʕ/, but there were no separate letters in the Phoenician-derived abjad to write them with, so various rough-and-ready written mergers were used.
danichi says: But one thing I didn’t feel I got the answer to: Does “a Japanese” being ungrammatical (or offensive) necessarily mean that “two Japanese” is ungrammatical (or offensive)?
To me “two Japanese” sounds ungrammatical, because it sounds like the sentence is not finished. Without additional context, my response to a statement like “I saw two Japanese”, would be “Two Japanese what?”.
The sentence “I saw two Japanese” contains an adjective without a noun. It needs to be completed by a noun eg. “I saw two Japanese people”, “I saw two Japanese shows” etc.
It could be apparent from context that the speaker who says “I saw two Japanese” is talking about people, game shows, cats, or whatever else. But to facilitate clear communication, it would be more “grammatical” to include the noun. The same holds for “I saw a Japanese”.
This can be contrasted to “I saw two Americans” where the plural ending -s clearly shows that “American” is used as a noun, rather than an adjective.
As I’ve noted before, to me “two Japanese” sounds fine.
There is a restaurant called “Three Japanese” in Hobart.
Speaking of cats, would you say “I saw two Burmeses” or “I saw two Burmese” or “I saw two Burmese cats”?
Two Swisses and three Burmeses met in a bar…
What Wikipedia says about coda nasals in its article on Spanish Phonology is:
> if a nasal is followed by a pause rather than a consonant, it is realized for most speakers as alveolar [n] (though in Caribbean varieties this may instead be [ŋ] or an omitted nasal with nasalization of the preceding vowel).
so you’re right, it exists as an allophone, although it’s not a phoneme.
@David Marjanović: The pronunciation of /j/ as [dj], [ɟ], [ɟj] or [dʑ] is very widespread,
I assume you use /j/ for a yeísmo-merged /ʝ/ and /ʎ/. Salamanca, where I studied Spanish, is supposed to still make the distinction, but there seemed to be a lot of personal (and situational?) variation, so it was really hard to pin down.
Jumping to Danish:
@Lars (the original one): Beijing [b̥aɪˈd̥͡ʃ̟iŋ]
[iŋ], not [e̝ŋ]? I’m not even sure my phonotactics allow that.
The sentence “I saw two Japanese” contains an adjective without a noun. It needs to be completed by a noun eg. “I saw two Japanese people”, “I saw two Japanese shows” etc.
That’s circular reasoning; for those speakers who use/accept such sentences, it is of course a noun.
That’s circular reasoning; for those speakers who use/accept such sentences, it is of course a noun.
I’m not sure that’s quite right. Unequivocal adjectives can be noun phrase heads, for example in constructions like “the young in one anothers’ arms.” In fact, thinking about it, for me personally, though evidently not for some other commenters, “Japanese” is straightforwardly an adjective, and I can only use it as an NP head where I could also use (say) “deaf.”
“The deaf frequently suffer from thoughtless prejudice.”
“The Japanese have the most awkward writing system still in current use.”
“Most of the children escaped from the bus, but the deaf did not.”
“The Americans were taken prisoner, but the Japanese were released.”
but not
“I saw a deaf” or “I saw a Japanese.”
nor “Two deafs arrived” nor (for me or zyxt) “Two Japanese arrived.”
It differs in this from “Nigerian”, for example, which I can freely use as a noun; in fact, given that nouns can be used as they stand as premodifiers in English (“library book”) I’m not sure that it’s even necessary to suppose that “Nigerian” and words of that type are (as it were) amphibious; you could maybe just regard them as nouns tout court.
Even those who find “two Japanese” grammatical don’t say *”two Japaneses”, I notice. Unlike (for example) “two pekingeses” (i.e. dogs.) You could capture this by saying that all these words have irregular “sheep” plurals, I guess; but it actually seems more parsimonious, given that we’re talking about the entire series of “-ese” words, to do as zyxt implies and invoke ellipsis of a head noun, licenced for some speakers (like Bathrobe) by the preceding quantifier, but not for others (like me and zyxt.)
“Japanese” is a noun for me as the name of the language, of course … same as “French” or “Irish.”
Rather belatedly it occurred to me that questions like these would surely be treated somewhere in the myriad pages of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, a work I hold in reverential awe. Nor was I disappointed: on p1589, in a section on nouns with the same form in singular and plural, it has a subsection on the “-ese” nationality words along with “Swiss”, where they say:
In some varieties of English these behave as singular nouns with base [i.e. invariant] plurals: a Chinese/Swiss ~ two Chinese/Swiss. However, this usage is lessening in frequency, and count noun usages like a Chinese sound old-fashioned and even slightly offensive to some speakers, for whom plurals like the Chinese and the Swiss are acceptable but have the structure of generic plural constructions with nationality adjectives [sic] like the French or the English, cf. *a French, *two English.
two Japanese
I am not sure what I would say, on the spur of the moment, but to me these words can only refer to Japanese persons. For non-humans from Japan (as opposed to other origins), I think I would say two Japanese ones. Same thing for a single referent: a Japanese one. For instance, I had a choice between a German car and a Japanese one.
Actually this is not quite right: one,two (or however many) Japanese refers to people whose relevant characteristic in the context of situation is to be Japanese, and the word used is a noun. But with the demonymous adjective,… Japanese one(s) can refer to people already iidentified by some other relevant word. Suppose we are talking about concert violinists applying for a position in an orchestra, I think we could say : The top applicants were Austrian and Japanese respectively, and the hiring committee chose the Japanese one.
What do native speakers say?
Yes.
Wow, I thought it had died out everywhere in peninsular Spanish something like a hundred years ago!
It’s reportedly retained in places like Peru, where Quechua supports it; I haven’t encountered any people from there, so I have no idea if their unmerged /ʝ/ participates in the drift.
My eldest lives in Salamanca. I must ask him. I think he himself speaks like an Andalusian though. No consonants to speak of at all.
You be careful, out among them English.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/213dcd53-30c7-4136-b7b9-e82e12fb4795
m-l:
That’s a good point, and it also pretty much invalidates the idea I had that the constructions just involve ellipsis of a head noun: I actually might say (for example)
“I sold the four Chinese scrolls but I kept all the Japanese.”
It would nevertheless strike me as elliptical, and if asked to repeat it I might well say “Japanese ones.”
Human-reference constructions like “The Japanese are all too familiar with earthquakes” are evidently not of the same kind, so if you were going to call them elliptical it would have to be in a different somewhat idiosyncratic abstract sense.
It’s evidently rather a question of under what circumstances you can use adjectives as NP heads in English. Bestirring myself to consult the Cambridge Grammar again, I see that they call this sort of thing “fusion of internal modifier and head”, under which they list (pp 415ff) a number of other things that hadn’t occurred to me in this context, like “the utterly impossible”, but also cases like “the very poor”, “the pure in spirit” and “the Dutch.” They rather hand-wavingly call this type, all of which involve adjectives, “modifier-heads with special interpretations.” Evidently further research is needed …
Short summary/response paper in German about the geography of aspiration and voice all over extant Germanic.
@David Eddyshaw: I don’t think that it is ever clarified in Witness, but among the Amish, English is not really an ethnonym (although it obviously originated out of one). Nowadays, it really means anyone who does not reject modern technology, regardless of their racial, ethnic, or national identity.
David Eddyshaw: Thanks for the improved analysis of the adjective/noun question and for checking the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
Yes, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language helped clarify things to some extent. I’m glad to have been identified as a speaker of “one variety of English”.
In written English I would be happy to use “a Japanese” to refer to a person.
“I saw a Japanese walking down the street.”
But in very colloquial English, where “a” can be replaced by “this”, I don’t it’s quite as happy:
“I saw this Japanese walking down the street.”
I think the more natural version would be:
“I saw this Japanese guy (man, girl, woman, etc.) walking down the street.”
@Brett, maybe “ethnonym” isn’t the right category, but there are various languages that have words for the lumped-together “ethnicity” of everyone-who-isn’t-us, e.g. gadjo in Romany, goyim in Hebrew/Yiddish etc. (Sometimes it may be narrower in scope, meaning something like everyone-who-isn’t-us-that-lives-close-enough-to-us-to-be-salient.) The Amish sense of “English” seems comparable to that. If we don’t want to call that sort of word an ethnonym or demonym, what ought we to call it?
Good question. Xenonym and allonym both seem to have been claimed for other uses already.
Edit: How about, um… othnonym, from ὀθνεῖος (“stranger”)? Nobody seems to have ever used it for anything, and the similarity to ethnonym is amusing.
Or nymnym, since those to whom it refers are nimnims.
[iŋ], not [e̝ŋ]? IANAP — it’s more close than [e] so I picked [i], but you’re probably right.
Quirk et al.’s Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, the other tome-length English grammar, discusses this in §7.23–7.27, especially §7.25. Quirk et al. distinguish three syntactically distinct types of adjectives used as nouns, which they call (a) “the innocent”, (b) “the industrious Dutch”, and (c) “the mystical”. The “Dutch” type “is virtually restricted to words ending in -(i)sh and -ch.” They don’t give examples other than nationalities. They add, “Easily confused with adjectives denoting nationalities of type (b), but distinct from them, are ethnic names, e.g. Eskimo, Navaho, Bantu. These, however, show their nominal character by the possibility of being modified by determiners and numerals (two Eskimo, several Navaho) and, optionally, taking plural -s: two Eskimo(s).”
Lars (the original one) : it’s more close than [e] so I picked [i]
Ah ok. Yeah, the high front vowel space is pretty packed in Danish. I meant it’s the vowel in “spille” (often denoted [e], but more accurately [e̝]), not the one in “spilde” ([i]), and I don’t think the latter occurs before [ŋ] in Standard Danish.
On the “Japanese” issue, there must be syntax tests we can apply to determine whether it’s a noun (with the same form in the plural) or an adjective heading an NP. Would you say “an ethnic Japanese” or “an ethnically Japanese”?
Easy.
“She’s an ethnic Japanese” (noun).
“She’s ethnically Japanese” (adjective).
“She’s an ethnically Japanese person” (adjective).
The squeamish need not read further would be an example of Quirk’s B (not to be confused with B’s quirk) that is not a nationality.
You can always tell a Frenchman,
You can always tell a Dutch,
You can always tell a Yankee,
But you cannot tell him much.
(Sometimes clipped to just the second and fourth lines.)
For me, “the Dutch” is fine, but “a Dutch” is not, always excepting the moods of irony and jocularity, as here.
Speaking of Japanese, a new English word has made an appearance:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/omakase
Yeah, I think I’ve seen that in restaurant reviews (though I couldn’t have told you what it meant before clicking through). But I don’t like the etymology: “Japanese, literally ‘respectfully leaving another to decide what is best’.” Come on, at least give us the base verb!
From 任せる (makaseru) – entrust
o is the weird Japanese respect particle, I assume
My thoughts exactly. Why the cute exoticising? It just means ‘I’ll leave it to you / up to you’. The verb, is, of course makaseru (makasu), in this context ‘leave a decision to another person’. (As SFReader points out, the broader meaning is ‘entrust to’. Here it is the decision that is entrusted to the other).
Thanks to both of you!
Just opened up the latest New Yorker and the first thing I saw was a restaurant review that started: “On a recent evening at Mayanoki, an eight-seat sushi bar in Alphabet City, the chef, Jeff Miller, introduced a course of his omakase as ‘Newburgh shrimp.’”
They could have gone for just “Japanese, ‘up to you’”, but once they’ve decided to use the “literally”, I don’t think it’s wrong to incude the “respectfully”, since that is what the “o” is.
お任せします o-makase shimasu means that the customer is leaving it to the chef to decide (‘I leave it to you’). The お o represents a respectful action directed at the other person, that is, respectfully leaving it to the chef, not an honorific, which elevates the action of the other person. お任せします o-makase shimasu is probably fairly normal for this situation, although the more informal 任せます makasemasu is also possible.
It’s interesting that お任せ o-makase has been lexicalised to mean that the customer (respectfully) leaves it to the chef to decide, speaking from the point of view of the customer. In the unlikely event that the chef came out and spoke to the customer, he might say 任せてください makasete kudasai ‘leave it to me’.
Of course, he could also say お任せください o-makase kudasai ‘leave it to me’, which is not interpreted as respectful towards himself. So my musings in the previous comment are premature.
An appropriate translation of the title Leave It To Beaver would be like what the chef says ?
If translated literally, it could indeed be ビーバーにお任せ Bībā ni o-makase.
I have no idea if it has ever actually been translated into Japanese.
Seems odd to use Keigo with a child. Mightn’t be something like “Bībā-chan ni makaseyō!”
There’s a subtlety in the English: “leave it to X” in certain uses means “you can rely on X to mess things up”. That’s the case with Leave It To Beaver.
> Seems odd to use Keigo with a child.
Full-on keigo, maybe, but “omakase” is so established as a word that kids might use it without understanding keigo grammar at all. And there are lots of titles based on the template “xxx ni omakase!”. Other expressions where the keigo grammar is even more hidden are “Go-men” (sorry!) and “O-ide” (come!).
According to one site the Japanese title is ビーバーちゃん Bībā-chan.
I am one of the 2500-odd (that hyphen is important) Jews in Ireland. I call myself “a Jew” for two reasons. First, I think calling myself “Jewish” or “a Jewish woman” implies that I am religious (and I’m exactly as religious as the nearest rock); I am racially and culturally a Jew, not of the Jewish faith. I am not sure whether it is common to use the two words in that exact way. Second, I tastelessly enjoy the slight shock value, but more importantly I think it helps cement the idea in my hearers’ minds that it is a word I can “reclaim”.
I have become inured to “cunt” and have once or twice used it innocently in front of American friends, and blushed frightfully. It’s used locally for men AND women, although some of my friends use the older “wagon” preferentially for women to mean the same thing as how other people use “cunt” for women. (Oh, and “the c-word?” You are protecting a bunch of professional and amateur linguists from words now?).
Thank you, AJP, for your great sensitivity in not assuming my gender from the fact that I said “husband”. I am in fact a woman by anyone’s definition, but we are all a bit more conscious of that sort of thing in Ireland these days.
David Marjanović, your explanation of “Sligonian” makes absolute sense, but unless Cork is “Corco” it’s clearly not a parallel (and doesn’t need to be; I was just pointing it out). I did mean Galway, which is “Gaillimh”, pronounced “goll-iv”, and I haven’t seen a satisfactory explanation for how it turned into “way” in the first place. Doubtless someone here knows, though.
“leave it to X” in certain uses means “you can rely on X to mess things up”. That’s the case with Leave It To Beaver.
But not with “Leave It To Psmith”.
LEAVE It TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
I think calling myself “Jewish” or “a Jewish woman” implies that I am religious (and I’m exactly as religious as the nearest rock); I am racially and culturally a Jew, not of the Jewish faith.
This is an aspect I hadn’t even thought of. I’m not Jewish (in either sense) but I would not make this distinction – if someone said they were Jewish (or a Jew) I would make no assumption about their religiosity either way. I’d be interested to hear how others would react.
(Ditto, I suppose, “Sikh”. Other religions don’t have the same ambiguity between “group member” and “believer”. I was struck to see a piece in the Guardian last year by a woman who explained that she wore a headscarf because she was “a secular Shia Muslim”. It sounds like the joke about Northern Ireland with the punchline “ah, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist”?)
When people are intentionally being offensive, they usually use “Jew” instead of any of the longer synonyms; for instance, the white racists at Charlottesville were not chanting “Persons of the Jewish faith will not replace us.” Could this be part of the reason why “Jew” is sometimes heard as more offensive, even in innocuous senses like “Jews celebrate Hanukkah in December”?
True enough. But that’s also because the Jewish religion is not what they are complaining about: they are equallly opposed to fully secular Jews.
On beavers in Japanese: https://unrealisticdialogue.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/japanese/.
I, by the way, am both an atheist and an observant Jew.
“Omakase” is new to me.
It reminds me of an old story about a young English couple who go into a pub in the rough part of Glasgow. The woman says, “I’ll have half a pint of mild, please,” to which the landlord replies, “No you won’t, you’ll have a pint of fuckin’ heavy like everyone else.”
It sounds like the joke about Northern Ireland with the punchline “ah, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist”?
My husband is, in all seriousness, a “Protestant” Northern Irish atheist. His nonreligious sister is married to a “Catholic” Northern Irish atheist. The marriage caused more consternation in the community than their atheism. You would not believe (OK, you might actually believe) the horrid things people said at the time.
I, by the way, am both an atheist and an observant Jew.
So’s my grandmother. She did go to the synagogue while she had the mobility. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was for bingo. I asked her about her religious observance once when I was a teenager. She said, “That’s the way I grew up. Your mother [her daughter] is a Christian. You do what she says.” I was a good girl and I did so, for a while.
@David: “Jew”, while not a slur, tends for whatever reason to be used as a snarl word more often than most other ethnonyms, which can cause well-meaning people to mistake it for one.
When someone like Brett or author Stephen Brust announces himself as a Jew all unsuspected, I think, in my ungenerous reptile mind, oh God, another one. They’re all over! I have to fluff down a bit to think they didn’t do it as a plot. They can’t help being born. And I like them. Maybe I should like them being born. Maybe if I like every single Jew I’ve ever known (being a Midwesterner and not acquainted with the coasts) I should cheer them on. I also like every American Indian I’ve ever known. There are a few Afro-American people I’ve been worried about, but that seems reasonable. They’ve had it hard. They see me as not incandescent with goodness. I am not incandescent with goodness. But just now my previous barber having retired, I’ve gone to a black barber from my church and he’s done a good job.
…?
@Phil Jennings:
Thank you for bravely sharing your psychopathology with us. I’m afraid I must freak you out further by owning up to a taint in my own ancestry. It is fairly dilute, so you do not need to attempt to like me. I will understand. Others have also failed.
“I’ll have half a pint of mild, please”
In one of William McIlvanney’s truly excellent “Tartan Noir” Laidlaw novels, the eponymous cop has to apologise for a subordinate who has had the sheer bad manners to turn down a “proper” drink offered to him by the old-school Glasgow gangster John Rhodes. Certain standards must be maintained …
I will join in your plug for William McIlvanney; anyone who has any fondness for cop/crime novels should give him a try. I bought a map of Glasgow just for him.
‘Hullo, you,’ he said to Laidlaw and sat down across the table from them. ‘Ye’ll hiv a drink.’
‘A whisky for me,’ Laidlaw said. ‘With water.’
‘I won’t bother, thank you,’ Harkness said.
The blue eyes turned on him like a blowtorch lit but not yet shooting flame.
‘He’ll have a pint,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He’s such a fierce drinker. When he says he won’t bother, he means he’ll just stick to the beer.’
When I was in 9th grade, my best friend had a coming out.
He said he is actually a Jew. I never suspected such a thing.
Half of my class were Jews and I thought I always could tell a Jew.
Not anymore. Sneaky fellows.
In the distant past I read of an idea attributed to Aristotle: “to specify the genus is to give the reason”. I remembered this because I had no idea what it meant. Now I do have an idea, although apparently Aristotle didn’t write such words and anyway who cares about him ? What it means is: to assign something to a category is to explain its nature. No further explanation is needed, and a lot follows from our intuitive knowledge of the category. Details on request.
This accounts for the appeal of “discovering” that someone is a Jew (or as Crown learned to say more cautiously: “is Jewish”), or a fag, a Republican or a German. You suddenly acquire a bunch of knowledge about that person without having to rise from the armchair. No need to read books and do experiments.
The “a” is the giveaway: one of a kind.
I’m having trouble believing my eyes. What am I reading here, on LH, no less…
I agree. It may be a phenomenon I associate with pubs and other therapeutic venues. In a protective environment, some people feel emboldened to give tongue to their worst thoughts, and one is, like, WTF?
to specify the genus is to give the reason
Aristotle (of all people) would never have said anything so stupid.
It reminds me of the occasion when I wondered what the original of primum non nocere was, given that Hippocrates didn’t speak Latin. There isn’t one. The great man never said it. At least in the contexts where it’s usually invoked, the principle is exceptionally foolish, being used as shorthand for “this medicine/operation/intervention can have damaging side effects, so it is unethical and no further discussion is needed.”
Hippocrates is a familiar false-attribution magnet, like Darwin, and of course Einstein. False attribution to Aristotle at least shows some intellectual ambition.
Whaddaya know, fifty years on I find that it is Aristotle-like after all. Whoever formulated that tag must have been using “reason” in the sense of “reason of being” = “essence”, and leaving out the differentia bit (or I didn’t notice, or did but forgot it). Of course “reason” is a weasel word, along with “essence” and the rest of them, including “and” and “the”.
# Since a definition defines an essence, only what has an essence can be defined. What has an essence, then? That is one of the central questions of Aristotle’s metaphysics; once again, we must leave the details to another article. In general, however, it is not individuals but rather species (eidos: the word is one of those Plato uses for “Form”) that have essences. A species is defined by giving its genus (genos) and its differentia (diaphora): the genus is the kind under which the species falls, and the differentia tells what characterizes the species within that genus. As an example, human might be defined as animal (the genus) having the capacity to reason (the differentia). # [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Aristotle’s Logic”]
My own contribution to modern Aristotelian logic is the modest one of conflating “species” and “individual”.
People aren’t to be held responsible for their thoughts (or dreams), only for what they do with them. I myself, primarily because of bad experiences in the past, tend to think of people in wheelchairs as arrogant assholes and dogs as aggressive biters: in short, I am prejudiced against both.
I don’t try to defend these prejudices by reason (which is a tool that serves bad motives or even outright madness just as well as enlightenment), and I do my damnedest never to show them when around members of either group. (Though I can’t answer for how well I do from a dog’s viewpoint; still, no dog has bitten me since.) This is part of that particular kind of hypocrisy which lubricates civilization. I think Phil’s reference to his “reptile brain” is exactly correct psychologically, whatever the idea is worth physiologically. Reptiles are far more scary predators than any mammal, precisely because they can’t be scared off.
As for shocks, I knew perfectly well through the accumulation of small bits of evidence that Brett was an M.O.T., but I was completely surprised (and this too is prejudice, though of the unconscious rather than the conscious variety) to discover that Speedwell is female. (For what it’s worth, I have tentatively concluded that D.O. is also female.)
The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was sitting in one of those oligosedic British railway compartments when a fellow passenger approached him: “Sir, I understand you are an atheist!” Rossetti replied politely: “Not at all, Sir. It is my daughter who is the atheist. I myself am an anarchist.” As these were the days when anarchist commonly meant ‘bomber’, the compartment was speedily emptied of everyone but Rossetti (which may have been his intention all along).
People used to assume I was female when I started the blog; I took it as a compliment.
I will remain gender-anonymous for now. English language is very forgiving in this respect. I once (should say “once upon a time” really) participated in a Russian internet forum. It was much harder there. I assumed as an alias my computer’s network name. And stuck to appropriate gender-endings.
Personally, I believe that everyone has an inalienable human right to hate anyone else on the basis of race, ethnicity, age, gender or sexual orientation.
However, norms of politeness should be observed in public and it is always a great loss of face to insult someone’s racial, ethnic or whatever identity unintentionally.
Be assured, if I am ever going to make an anti-semitic insult, I will make it privately, intentionally, for a very good personal reasons and to someone who really deserves it.
Looking at Wikipedia, I see that the German title was “Erwachsen müßte man sein” and the Italian “Il carissimo Billy”.
Somewhat similar is entia non sunt multiplicanda super necessitatem, attributed to William of Ockham: sure, he pretty much said it, in Latin even, but never in these words.
{nonsense} because {nonsense}
No, what he’s alluding to is the old idea* that the human brain comes in metaphorical layers (often illustrated as real layers which are then taken literally); in this model, the “reptilian complex” is responsible for instincts, fight-and-flight, aggression, dominance, that “kind” of “thing”.
(In reality, even amphioxus have a limbic system, supposedly part of the “paleomammalian complex”.)
* And now I learn Sagan is largely responsible for spreading it. So that was the one big mistake in his life. I was wondering.
Ah, so German isn’t the only language that refuses to translate film/TV titles and creates completely new ones.
David: Ah, so German isn’t the only language that refuses to translate film/TV titles and creates completely new ones.
Many titles of books, films, etc consist of words or phrases which cannot be translated literally without losing the flavour, the connotation or even the total meaning of the original, so it is much better to create a new title which will have at least some of the resonance if not the meaning of the original.
I recently encountered the French title of a work by Kurt Vonnegut: Le berceau du chat, obviously a literal translation of “Cat’s Cradle” understood literally as “The cradle of the cat”. But that is not at all what “cat’s cradle” means, and it has a French equivalent un jeu de ficelle, referring to playing with a string held between the hands and manipulated in various ways by the fingers.
As for “Leave it to Beaver”, I have never seen the series but judging from what I know about it, and changing the protagonist’s nickname to a more suitable French one, I would suggest;
Ce Dédé, quel phénomène! (Dédé being the diminutive form of André).
Be assured, if I am ever going to make an anti-semitic insult, I will make it privately, intentionally, for a very good personal reasons and to someone who really deserves it.
Yes, but what’s the point? I truly don’t understand this It’s one thing to insult someone because of their bad behavior, but then the insult should consist in pointing to those bad behaviors, not in a group membership that has nothing to do with the case and that they can’t help. (There may be a partial exception to this in the case of openly antisemitic Jews and similar individuals of other groups.)
You do remind me of Quentin Crisp, who said “Unless it was by accident that I had offended someone, I never apologized.”
David: I know what Phil is alluding to. But I have seen (on video) both a crocodile and a Komodo dragon stalking (but not killing, I hope) a human being, and it was absolutely chilling to watch. Scary predators indeed.
# The origins of what has come to be known as Occam’s razor are traceable to the works of earlier philosophers such as John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253), Maimonides (Moses ben-Maimon, 1138–1204), and even Aristotle (384–322 BC).[9][10] Aristotle writes in his Posterior Analytics, “We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [other things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.”[11] Ptolemy (c. AD 90 – c. AD 168) stated, “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.”[12]
Phrases such as “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer” and “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity” were commonplace in 13th-century scholastic writing.[12] Robert Grosseteste, in Commentary on [Aristotle’s] the Posterior Analytics Books (Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros) (c. 1217–1220), declares: “That is better and more valuable which requires fewer, other circumstances being equal… #
It is, if not instructive, at least amusing to compare the German and English articles. Everbody got his own quotes and priority claims. It occurs to me that even the Nouvelle Cuisine that was, relied on ingrediential parsimony.
It’s surprising that no one has addressed the question of how the razor was kept sharp.
Perhaps by stroppy philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
“Cat’s Cradle” is (apropos of nothing much) pretty much perfect.
Moreover, Bokononism explains a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism
more on cat’s cradle
It occurred to me to look at the Wikipedia articles on Vonnegut’s work in both English and French. The English one is a lengthy review of all possible aspects of the work, where the string fame does occur. (I had read the work years ago but had forgotten the episode). The French one is very short, and quotes the translator who explained that le berceau du chat is the name of one jeu de ficelle, apparently among others. They I checked the TLFI for berceau ‘cradle’, a word which has many specialized meanings and is found is many collocations, but none relating to the string game. I conclude that the translator did a poor job.
The translator may have felt that le berceau du chat was a more striking title than jeu de ficelle and more likely to interest the potential reader. Plus it has the attraction of exoticism. It might not have been a good choice but it was at least a motivated choice.
It’s one thing to insult someone because of their bad behavior, but then the insult should consist in pointing to those bad behaviors, not in a group membership that has nothing to do with the case and that they can’t help.
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!
Insults are supposed to hurt, offend and make someone mad at you. They are certainly not supposed to be fair.
What you are describing is constructive criticism, not insult. No sane person will get offended by it.
Effective insult must be unfair, hurtful and often exaggerated.
For example, when you are insulting a woman, never forget to make disparaging comments about her appearance, weight and age. This always works.
SFReader: I agree wholeheartedly. It’s no good pussyfooting around everyday practice. Of course that’s not going to deter those who don’t like this practice, and attempt to define it out of existence.
Oh, and thanks for the tips about how to insult a woman. That had never occurred to me. It’s always individuals whom I insult (when I do), but at a higher level. The worst I say to women is “you’re acting just like a goddamn woman” (approximation to what I actually say in German). This at least perplexes them long enough for me to stroll off in haughty indignation.
Towards men I am constrained by gender logic from using the same ploy. I usually content myself with “fuck off!”, thus acting just like a goddamn man. You can’t win them all.
@SFReader:
There’s more to it than that.
First of all, for it to be an insult (as opposed to simple sadistic taunting) the victim, at least, must believe that what you are saying is untrue, or at least significantly unfair.
Secondly, this ignores the issue of stereotyping: there is a difference between calling somebody a hysterical woman and implying that qua woman, she is inevitably hysterical. Like the difference between calling somebody a Russian antisemite, and saying “Bloody antisemite! Typical Russian!”
To stereotype your insults on the basis of supposed inherent characteristics of your victim’s supposed group is not vigorous free language; it’s being an arsehole. It would still be being an arsehole even if women actually were prone to hysteria and Russians really were characteristically antisemitic. It belongs in the sadistic taunting category, not the flyting.
@SFReader:
Reading your post more carefully (perhaps a habit I should practice) I see that you do say something along these lines yourself; accordingly, I’d rephrase things a bit to stress the difference between “Insult” properly so called, and “speech intended to cause pain”, of which “insult” is only a subset (and not always even that: insults can signal affection, for example.)
Stu would probably deny a meaningful distinction; I would concede that the boundaries are not always clear cut.
It might be said that what I’m foolishly trying to do is to distinguish “ethical” from “unethical” insults: but why not? Unless you believe that all insults are unethical, or that ethics itself is just flimflam, it seems a reasonable (if difficult) endeavour to me.
It also occurs to me that the pragmatics of insult are actually quite complex. I expect PhD theses have been written on this …
When I walked about in less sophisticated neighbourhoods in Ghana, I would frequently be followed by bands of children chanting “White man! White man!” in whatever the local language might be (I passed a linguistic frontier in the course of a twenty-minute walk into town, where I metamorphosed from a Nasaara into a Batuuree.)
It would be absurd to describe this as an insult; it is both true, and not regarded locally as anything to my discredit. However, it was certainly intended to annoy (“cause pain” would be somewhat over the top.)
It did mightily annoy a Sri Lankan colleague, who didn’t take kindly to being lumped in with pale Western Europeans in an undifferentiated odd-looking-foreigner category. He probably did interpret it as an insult, because he thought it was untrue; as far as the cheeky children went, the motivation for the catcalling was identical (and the ethnic distinction insignificant, if perceptible at all.)
It’s not how insults based on group membership work.
You won’t get offended by being called a white person.
Similarly no woman will be offended to be called a woman. No, you’ll have to accuse her of having some offending trait and imply that she has it, because she is a woman. *
Of course, in many cases you don’t have to do that, because there is a proper slur available already. Just use the C-word or N-word or J-word.
Kidding about the latter, English doesn’t really have it, but Russian has a word which is thrown around a lot at the time when pogrom is about to start.
* This doesn’t work in opposite direction however. Somehow men never take it as an insult when women accuse them of typical male behavior.
@SFReader:
Well, yes: that’s pretty much what I was saying. I should have made it clearer that my Ghanaian experiences were supposed to illustrate non-insults, at least in my case; as far as my Sri Lankan friend was concerned, I remember trying to convince him that he’d misinterpreted what he’d heard as an insult. It’s interesting that for something to actually be an insult there seem to be conditions on what all the participants actually believe about any statements made, quite apart from the intentions of the supposed insulter.
Adopting your definitions, I would then say that what you are calling “insults based on group membership” are what I would describe as arsehole behaviour. Or unethical insults, to be more po-faced about it.
Incidentally, “fuck off!” doesn’t seem to be an insult in the same sense of “you running-dog imperialist lackey!”, given that it has, let’s say, no propositional content. Perhaps it should be characterised as a ‘performative’ insult. Or something. These are deep waters. Where are the expert academic insultologists when you need them?
Come to think of it, the intrinsically pejorative words for groups (like your Zh-word) align with “fuck off!” in this. They don’t convey any sort of false proposition as such; their use to members of the group in question is intended to cause offence directly. Like spitting in someone’s face. Performative.
I suppose you could argue that such words have come, for those who use them, to be convenient summaries of whole networks of false and damaging propositions, so the distinction is not absolute. As such, they can be used to reinforce group solidarity, always easier if questionable preconceptions are kept carefully tidied away. I don’t suppose the literal sense of “running-dog imperialist lackey” remained particularly salient to those using the term after the first few hundred repetitions, either: it’s just another rude word for “those Others, who are not entitled to the respect due to regular human beings like Us.”
As a counterexample (or close to a counterexample), four or five years ago a nurse working in occupational health who was about to vaccinate me asked me if I had an infection; I said yes, I thought I had a flu, at which she threw her eyes up to heaven and sighed “man-flu.” This really irritated me, in that the core of the idea of man-flu is of a man harping on the idea more than is reasonable, and I can’t think of a more reasonable context to say that one has an infection than that one; and I was at work, there was very little to suggest I was being over-dramatic for the sake of sympathy.
their use to members of the group in question is intended to cause offence directly. Like spitting in someone’s face. Performative.
Yes, use of such words is a direct expression of hostile intent leaving absolutely no doubts what you think of your adversary.
I recall first using Zh-word after our resident class bully* Misha Kogan punched me twice in the belly.
It earned me a third punch, but that’s OK. The word needed to be said in that context.
* yes, by some impressive feat of social engineering, our Moscow school managed to get so many Jews that even this role typically reserved for Russian boys was taken by a Jew (a big, tall, heavily built boy wearing thick glasses – somehow he was both the smartest and the strongest boy in the class. Oh, and a self-declared Zionist, to boot)
Sure, but 90% of the time that job is horribly botched – and it’s done even when a literal translation would be just fine.
Hence the concept of splash damage.
Hence the concept of splash damage.
Well put. I was groping my way to saying something like that, but less neatly.
Insults are unethical if they harm innocent bystanders.
I mean, yes, but the whole concept of “ethical insults” seems deeply strange to me. The contexts in which one would want to seriously insult someone (as opposed to snarking in their general direction) and those in which one is intent on behaving ethically would seem to have little overlap.
It’s sort of like discussing ethical ways to use a broken beer bottle in a bar fight.
I picked the wrong terms in using “ethical/unethical.” They seemed snappier than “regrettable but understandable in context” and “beyond the pale”, but they muddied the water, and implied greater moral seriousness than I can really lay claim to. Pretentious.
I think David M has nailed the difference, though.
FWIW (not much) I can actually imagine ways in which it might, in exceptional circumstances, be ethically justifiable to use a broken bottle in a bar fight, and others where it most emphatically would not, regardless of the circumstances. I’m glad to say my engagement with this particular topic is entirely theoretical, however.
I believe the most effective insult in history was made by Marco Materazzi at the 2006 World Cup Final.
Unfortunately, we still don’t know what exactly he said to Zidane, but apparently it was a racial slur and not an insult to his mother or sister as was rumored at the time.
Anyways, that’s the guy who really knows the right time and place for a well-calculated intentional insult….
I can actually imagine ways in which it might, in exceptional circumstances, be ethically justifiable to use a broken bottle in a bar fight, and others where it most emphatically would not
I’m not denying that, just pointing out that the discussion is purely theoretical, in that nobody who is actually engaged in a bar fight is meditating the ethics of the situation.
the most effective insult in history
In this sad sublunar sphere it is indeed true that dishonorable behaviour may be effective. Plato addresses this problem in the Republic… unsuccessfully.
@Hat:
Yes, you’re right.
Though it’s still worth drawing a moral distinction between bad and worse. (I really, really shouldn’t have used “ethical” for “bad.”)
As I say, David M has hit it on the head as to why group-membership insults belong in “worse.” Collateral damage. (Including moral damage to the insulter, incidentally.)
As I say, David M has hit it on the head as to why group-membership insults belong in “worse.” Collateral damage. (Including moral damage to the insulter, incidentally.)
All very true.
Well, some people don’t. Others try to keep some sense of proportion. A broken bottle is a war crime – justifiable perhaps in immediate self-defense against comparable or greater danger, but otherwise kick people in the guts, dammit.
Insults are supposed to hurt, offend and make someone mad at you.
Certainly. But to call someone a bully is definitely an insult even if true and fair, because no bully thinks of himself as a bully. And the bully will certainly resent it just as much as if you called him a dirty Jew, at least in the U.S.
The victim, at least, must believe that what you are saying is untrue, or at least significantly unfair
Just so.
it was certainly intended to annoy
Surely it would be just as annoying to be followed by a group of children (or moles) chanting “Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!”, wouldn’t it?
Performative
It has been pointed out, I forget where, that “I insult you!” is not an insult, therefore not performative.
the whole concept of “ethical insults” seems deeply strange to me
Another unciteable memory is a woman recalling when she got rid of persistent unwanted male attention by threatening to slander the man in question. Nowadays (and this is an advance in civilization), telling the truth would probably suffice.
absolutely no doubts what you think of your adversary
Your adversary and their whole group, which is David Eddyshaw’s point and mine: what’s the purpose of that? To call someone Polish is not an insult: to call them a Polack (despite its etymology < Polak ‘Polish’) is.
otherwise kick people in the guts, dammit
“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” is a known expression for futility, or at least underachievement; “bringing a gun to a knife fight” is not, but is ethically and indeed legally worse. Someone who adds a new deadly weapon to a consensual fight (apart from whether the fight is itself criminalized) is a murderer or attempted murderer at common law.
“bringing a gun to a knife fight”
Canonical.
Polack, Russky and Yid have made me wonder if endonym-as-slur has a special association with Eastern and Central Europeans.
Well, there’s also Chinaman, a calque of the endonym.
Fenian for an Irish Catholic (in the mouths of Protestants).
Gringo < griego.
Hadji, a recent American slur.
Jock ‘Scot’ is not exactly an endonym, but it’s the Scots form of a very common name.
Australian English Kanaka direct from the Hawaiian endonym; in Canada it remains an endonym, but possibly gave rise to Canuck ‘Canadian’.
Kushi, a Hebrew slur against Africans, though it was not always so: Othello is Ithiel the Cushite (though we don’t know if Kush is an Ancient Egyptian exonym or a loan from some forgotten Nubian language).
Majus, an Arabic slur against Persians, cognate with magus, implying that they are secretly still Zoroastrians.
Mau Mau ‘aggressive black person’.
Nip < Nipponese.
Nusayri ‘Alawite’ by other kinds of Muslims, from the founder of the Alawite school.
Portagee.
Scandihoovian (now often jocular).
Shiptar, Serbian slur against Albanians.
Xiao Riben ‘Japanese’.
For the non-western Europeans, there is also hunky ‘Hungarian’ > honky ‘white American’, and bohunk ‘Bohemian, Hungarian, or whatever, indiscriminately’.
Mongolian has Hujaa for Chinese, derived from Chinese 华侨 (Huaqiao) – Overseas Chinese.
For the non-western Europeans
Bulgarians fared the worst, I am afraid – bugger
Except in Florida.
Oh yes. I’ve read a long, stupid duel with sword and whip was in the script, but Harrison Ford had diarrhea that day…
False praise as mockery, like Chief in earlier times.
My husband said he grew up with “Prods” and “Taigs”, though “Fenians” eventually took over for the latter.
When I was in high school, “nerds” was then a newish word and a common insult. My group of friends analysed this, because we were nerds, and came up with something that I think is now how “nerd” is regarded: a nerd is anyone who isn’t insulted, or is even pleased, when they are called a nerd. The word (not in very common use in English) that really means what “nerd” used to mean is “otaku”.
@speedwell.
Ah! Recursive (non)insults!
Now I’ll have to revise my monograph on the Pragmatics of Insult. It’ll complicate the mathematical model no end.
“Nerd” was not used as a frequent insult at my high school. However, my teenage daughter (who is shy and intellectual) uses it all the time. I have not pressed her to explain the pragmatics behind that.
The word (not in very common use in English) that really means what “nerd” used to mean is “otaku”.
But, I would argue, the word “otaku” is commonly used by American nerds, at least under – 30s.
Oh, I keep forgetting…
Sure, but whether a predator can be scared off depends on other things than just its phylogenetic position. If a bear attacks you and you’re unarmed, the advice is as follows: if it’s a black bear, fight to the death; if it’s a brown bear, play dead and hope it gets bored and walks away after eating only half of your face. If you’re attacked by a polar bear and you are armed, the advice is “shoot to kill” – not much else will stop a polar bear.
Or a honeybadger for that matter. I’ll just say that there are no reports of people claiming to have been attacked by honeybadgers…
I read something once about a woman in Alaska being surprised by a grizzly at a close distance: she shoved her hand in its throat, pulled it out, and left it to choke on her mitten.
If you try this yourself, make sure you get it right on the first try.
When Bears are seen
Approaching in the distance,
Make up your mind at once between
Retreat and Armed Resistance.
A Gentleman remained to fight—
With what result for him?
The Bear, with ill-concealed delight,
Devoured him, Limb by Limb.
Another Person turned and ran;
He ran extremely hard:
The Bear was faster than the Man,
And beat him by a yard.
MORAL
Decisive action in the hour of need
Denotes the Hero, but does not succeed.
David E: When I walked about in less sophisticated neighbourhoods in Ghana, I would frequently be followed by bands of children chanting “White man! White man!” in whatever the local language might be
[Having the same experience] did mightily annoy a Sri Lankan colleague, who didn’t take kindly to being lumped in with pale Western Europeans in an undifferentiated odd-looking-foreigner category. He probably did interpret it as an insult, because he thought it was untrue; as far as the cheeky children went, the motivation for the catcalling was identical (and the ethnic distinction insignificant, if perceptible at all.)
I had a similar, though perhaps opposite experience working in a First Nations community some years ago, not right away but after I had been there for several years and had some very good friends there. Once I witnessed a scene between two boys about 10 years old. One, who was fairly dark-skinned (though not more so than most of the local population), was insulting another one, who was definitely fair-skinned, repeating Nigger! You look like a nigger!, to which the second boy, whose family I knew well, appeared confused and embarrassed but did not react. Much later I realized that the locals used the word to refer (derogatorily) to both blacks and whites, and that they seemed to have the following hierarchy : top, Indians; second, Chinese and Japanese; bottom: “niggers”, a category including blacks, Southeast Asians and whites. So I was not completely surprised one day when some cheeky children (whose parents I did not know) called to me on the street Hi, nigger!. I replied with Hi, kids!. But a black family (probably West Indian) who had moved to the village when the father had been hired for some administrative position decided to move again when they found that their children were being addressed that way.
That is truly bizarre!
top, Indians; second, Chinese and Japanese
In Central Alaskan Yup’ik, “Asian” is Yugngalnguq “one resembling a Yup’ik.”
The indigenous people of the North Pacific can be quite similar on both coasts. On the Canadian West Coast many of them are taken for Chinese by those who are not familiar with them. Japanese are esteemed because they have similar food tastes: they eat a lot of seafood and seaweed, “just like us”.
That [Hi nigger ! Hi hids] is truly bizarre!
Only on a Romantic view of the origin of language. “nigger” here is not taken from nature – although it is taken from adults, who are part of the natural environment. The sign “nigger” is soulless and arbitrary – although it is soulful after all, as marie-lucie explains, the kids know to be cheeky with it. “Uppity” I would call them.
Only on a Romantic view of the origin of language.
Oh, come on. Are you seriously suggesting that anyone without “a Romantic view of the origin of language” would find it perfectly normal?
Sorry, I said Hi kids
My comment was not about the Romantic view, etc, but as a counterpart to David E’s Siri Lankan colleague (presumably fairly dark) being pursued with White man!.
I don’t know about “normal”. M-l’s explanation makes perfect sense to me. Without that, I might have found it bizarre until accepting it as the way things were there. This is what normal means to me.
I once thought that the familiar theories of language origin were bizarre. I still do, but I also see they’re normal, that is, that people espouse them is just the way things are.
M-L, I didn’t assume that that was what you meant. It’s just something that struck me in connection with the other recent thread on Romantic.
In re David Eddyshaw:
Is there a term for a poem with a final “MORAL” stanza like that? I thought that I had heard such a term, but it is not coming to me.
The most notably example of that kind of “MORAL” that I can think of is John Godfrey Saxe’s “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” although the poem is frequently reprinted without the final stanza in which the metaphor is made explicit. That part was missing from the poem when it appeared in my ninth-grade English textbook, and a couple of years ago, the senior rabbi at our temple based a sermon around the poem without being aware of the the last lines. After services that night, I quoted him the “MORAL” from memory, and it fortunately agreed with the point he had been making.
MORAL
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
Envoi is the word you want. Apparently its pronunciation is assimilated: I had always pronounced it (in my head) as straight French, but it’s the same as envoy. Though it can point a moral, as here, the metaphor is that of sending a message to someone (as also in French), and often the poet directly addresses the reader or someone else.
And all rhymed fables used to end with one (a pointed moral, not necessarily a named “envoi”).
JC: I thought of French un envoi but did not quite remember the definition, and I did not know the word was used in English. I agree that it does not have to be a “moral” as in the case of fables, which are meant to carry a moral message which is emphasized in the extra lines at the end, in case the reader did not get it.
Actually, I didn’t quite answer Brett’s question: envoi is the last bit, not a name for poems-with-last-bits; I don’t know any word for that. Someone with more French than me could doubtless coin a word meaning ‘having an envoi’.
A coinage based on Latin inviatus would be more impressive and probably better formed.
I think I must have been thinking either of envoy or tornada (from Provencal), which is an envoy of specifically three lines. The tornada is shorter than the previous stanzas, as envoys often are (although Saxe’s is not), and I associate the three-line concluding stanza with the sestina form. In a sestina, the last words of the six-line stanzas are permuted from one stanza to the next for six stanzas, after which the regular permutation would bring each word back to its original position. The seventh stanza is a tornada with two of the concluding words per line.
I don’t see ‘Fenian’ much in Northern Ireland and on the relevant bits of the internet. (I hear it even less, thankfully, ‘one of themmuns’ is the most derogatory term that has been used towards me, as someone with a name that is clearly of that community and a clearly southern accent who has been working a day a week in a people-facing job in NI for the last three years.)
‘Huns’ vs. ‘Taigs’ is probably the commonest colloquial opposition at the moment. I’ve no definite explanation for the former, my working hypothesis is that it was a satirical adoption of the first world war slang for German, used to denote the more detail-oriented, economically successful and blunt yin to the more haphazard, economically strained and socially skilled yang of the other side.
(Taig, to be clear, is just a striking male first name specific to one community, usual spelling as a proper name “Tadhg.” I don’t take it as intrinsically offensive itself, nor would I ‘Fenian’, but of course context matters, as for all communication.)
Joder, this is a can of worms: https://www.irishpost.com/news/what-does-the-word-hun-mean-and-what-is-its-place-in-todays-society-91001. I haven’t called anyone a Hun ever, and have no plans to start!
Are there plastic Taigs to go with plastic Paddys then? 🙂
My impression is that it was the English who started with Taig ~ Teague, and the OED seems to confirm that: their first quotation is from 1661, only a few decades after the Plantation of Ulster. The OED says the word is “obsolete or archaic” as a nickname for any Irishman, their last live use being 1865, but as a derogatory term in NI it’s surprisingly recent; their first quotation is from 1971. Wiktionary, however, says that the derogatory sense is current in Scotland as well. A 1899 quotation says Tadhg is not now in use as a name, but perhaps it was revived after 1919 or so?
I’ve certainly known the odd (person named) Tadhg, and it’s probably familiar to most Irish schoolkids as the Gaelicisation of Tim(othy). (It used to be a common practice to provide kids with the Irish version of their name, and sometimes for teachers to use them when taking attendance. Maybe it still is, but it doesn’t seem to happen in my child’s school.) In my secondary school we used to occasionally address our friend Tim, who had, and has, an unmistakably English accent, as Tadhg. The incongruity amused us.
The only Tadhg I’ve met pronounced it Todd.
After Paddy Mayne (to be fair, there’s no evidence of significant sectarianism from him in NI), maybe all the plastic Paddys should become plastic Taigs!
In a novel I once read of a family of Tigues (in North America) whose relatives across the U.S. border were Teagues. I suspect the author meant both names to be pronounced [tig(e)].
Googling turns up the following instances of “plastic taig”:
1) “Being half-Irish”… get tae fück you wannabe plastic taig idiot!
2) “plastic taig who thinks the Marxist IRA is based” (fragmentary).
But the results are dominated by references to Taig Tools, a U.S. company that makes desktop lathes and milling machines, which can mill, among other things, plastic.
My impression is that it was the English who started with Taig ~ Teague, and the OED seems to confirm that: their first quotation is from 1661, only a few decades after the Plantation of Ulster
“Ho, brother Teague, dost hear the decree?” is the opening line of a jaunty sectarian ditty from around that time which serves as the signature tune of the BBC’s world service.
I first learned it from Tristram Shandy (or, to be more specific, from Captain Toby). I learn from the Wikipedia article that there’s an American version from the time of the Civil War:
“‘Jaro, ‘Jaro, ‘Jaro, ‘Jaro, Kilimanjaro’s melting away”.
Note that the variation Lillibullero ~ Lilliburlero indicates that non-rhoticism was starting to take over.
a word meaning ‘having an envoi’
L’envoi-en-soi s’envoie en l’air. [Sartre]
I believe the comment about rhotacism is incorrect. The lilibullero lyrics make sense in Irish, I. e., an lily ba léir ó, ba linn’ an lá. So liliburlero with second ‘r’ is just a mangling of a phrase the singer does not understand.
So liliburlero with second ‘r’ is just a mangling of a phrase the singer does not understand.
I agree.
So liliburlero with second ‘r’ is just a mangling of a phrase the singer does not understand.
Sure, but listening to various modern recordings, even those labeled with a written r are sung with plain schwa. If you’re non-rhotic, lillibulero and lilliburlero will be pronounced the same, so when it comes to writing the word down it’s almost a matter of chance which spelling gets used. A modern parallel is the respelling “Shar-day” for Sade, which caused hundreds of millions of rhotics to mispronounce the singer’s name horribly.
Your general point is of course correct, but a nonsense (in English) word full of l’s and r’s is not a useful piece of evidence, especially when it’s so early.
A modern parallel is the respelling “Shar-day” for Sade, which caused hundreds of millions of rhotics to mispronounce the singer’s name horribly.
Yeah, I’ll never forgive the International Herald-Tribune’s “Shar-day” for misleading me for decades.
In Australia, I’ve seen the name spelled “Natarsha” in the wild. Boggles this American’s mind.
Yeah, I’ll never forgive the International Herald-Tribune’s “Shar-day” for misleading me for decades.
Never mind the International Herald Tribune, it was right on the goddam cover of the album. Still pisses me off.
> the respelling “Shar-day” for Sade, which caused hundreds of millions of rhotics to mispronounce the singer’s name horribly.
It’s interesting how names are an area where primacy-of-writing rules supreme. It wouldn’t be a horrible mispronunciation if a Brit named Hardy was called “Hardy” instead of “Hoddy” by a rhotic American, would it?
A New Zealander called Mark told me some Americans misheard his name as “Mac” (because of his non-rhotic, fronted START-vowel). And objectively, that might actually be closer than the rhotic AmE pronunciation of “Mark”.
A recent discussion here on rhotacism (and non-ditto) gone wrong.
It wouldn’t be a horrible mispronunciation if a Brit named Hardy was called “Hardy” instead of “Hoddy” by a rhotic American, would it?
Of course not, but what does that have to do with Sade?
It wouldn’t be a horrible mispronunciation if a Brit named Hardy was called “Hardy” instead of “Hoddy” by a rhotic American, would it?
No, but the cases aren’t parallel. Hardy/hardy is a known name/word, not a foreign name that needs a phonetic respelling to prevent people from rhyming it with blade. And since Shah is pronounced the same way in both accents, “Shah-day” would have served the purpose perfectly. But noooooooooo.
Never mind the International Herald Tribune, it was right on the goddam cover of the album. Still pisses me off.
Oh, it’s definitely on them then.
Mondegreen Dept., Lillibulero Section: When I first heard the song sung, I heard the refrain as “Lillibulero, bullin[g] along”, as in pushing through all obstacles like a bull (or a wombat).
“Shah-day” would have served the purpose perfectly. But noooooooooo.
Or shower. British people know that Americans roll their Rs, as it’s called, but they’ve no idea that it has ramifications for other pronunciation. That’s your first hurdle, right there.
I’m sure there are non-rhotics who say “show-ah” even in the U.K. (show rhyming with how, not foe, of course).
Oh yes. The video illustrates the accent that goes with the lorst par of the British Empar; I don’t think there’s much left of that.
Torsk for a fool is also in dialect tosk. I’m unsure if the latter originally also meant ‘cod’.
I’m glad I happened on this while skimming the thread; it helps explain a scene in the new movie Godland featuring a horse called Torsk.
“Cod” in German: Dorsch. (Or Kabeljau.)
(Trond: I moved your comment to the new thread.)
Thanks! I was very confused for a moment.
A brief confusion, like a brief nap, is good for you.
“Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.”
– The Gospel according to Thomas, logion 2