Having yourself painted and cutting men's heads off

On last week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, they said that women at *some point in history that I've forgotten - Tudor England?* enjoyed "having themselves painted as a biblical character in the middle of cutting a man's head off".

Ah, ambiguities. Have a think and see if you're as much of an idiot as me.

First, I recognised and chuckled at the obvious one: [in the middle of cutting a man's head off] can describe the time of the action of the painting - they were in the middle of this action when they stopped and had themselves painted. Clearly this is silly. It describes what the biblical character (Judith, obviously) was doing. She was [a biblical character in the middle of cutting a man's head off], and that's what they had themselves painted as. I'm an intelligent person, see, and I spotted this potential pitfall and navigated it proficiently.

Which makes my next misunderstanding all the more ridiculous. Now, as I'm sure you realised, these women were having their portraits painted, in the guise of Judith cutting off Holofernes' head. But as well as having their portrait painted, 'having themselves painted' could mean that someone was applying paint to them: compare 'having themselves painted blue'. And yes, dear reader, that is the meaning I leapt to, and retained until about halfway through the item when I realised the more sensible interpretation. Honestly, I despair of myself sometimes.

Eggcorn morphemes

Twice this week I've heard a phrase that sounded like the speaker had misheard it. On the QI podcast 'No such thing as a fish' Andy said that meteors/meteorites came from out of space rather than outer space, and a television continuity announcer said that a garden in an Alan Titchmarsh programme needed some tender love and care rather than tender loving care.

These, I think, count as eggcorns. I'm not certain, because 'eggcorn' has a very specific definition: it's misinterpreting a word or phrase as something else that makes sense. It's named after an example of itself: an acorn looks like an egg in an eggcup, so eggcorn makes sense.

In this case, it's a function word (or part of a word) that's been misheard as something else that makes sense. In outer space, the -er is just a schwa if you have a non-rhotic accent (you don't pronounce the 'r' at the end). As it happens, so is of in connected speech, at least a lot of the time. We even have a way of writing it: o' (although this looks affected or like you're mimicking an Irish accent or something). Another way of writing it is when we merge it into another word: a lotta fun, a lorra lorra laughs. And it's reasonable to say that a meteorite has come from out of space. The Eggcorn Database has an example of outer body experience, which is the same thing in the opposite direction.

In tender loving care, it's the -ing morpheme (part of a word) that's misanalysed. Again, the pronunciation in normal speech may be reduced to 'n', and so might and. And again, it's just as reasonable that you would give a garden tender love and care as that you would give it tender loving care (maybe more so, actually).

Machines can hear it

More from the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast. The Elves have an incredible breadth of knowledge, but by necessity cannot have an in-depth understanding of all the facts they present. This becomes obvious when they talk about something that one happens to know something about. This morning, I was listening to them discussing accents, and they said a number of things that reminded me that there's a curious mismatch in terms of how much people like to talk about language and how poorly equipped they are to do so. (Linguistics is not the only subject to suffer from this, of course. Psychology springs to mind.)

The most striking thing was their discussion of (by now fairly old) research analysing the Queen's Christmas speeches over the years, which concluded that the Queen does not speak the way she spoke when she was younger. The reason that this is interesting is that it shows that older people's language shifts, not just young people's. But the shifts documented in that study are slight, and affect vowels, which are notoriously hard to pin down.

Because we need to be able to tell the difference between bet and bat, we hear vowels as categorically different sounds, but they are actually points in a continuous potential noise-range (you can easily slide from e to a with no break in between, and the intervening sounds are halfway between the two vowels). What distinguishes vowels from each other is their relative 'distance' from each other (scare quotes to indicate metaphorical usage and also technical terminology - the distance is literal as well).

This means that when sounds change very slightly, you might not be able to hear it, or you might not hear it reliably because you're expecting to hear a particular sound (the McGurk effect is a famous demonstration of just how useless you are at hearing a sound if you're expecting to hear another). If you can't trust your own ears, you aren't going to do a very convincing scientific experiment, are you? So people use specialist equipment to measure sounds, and then they can analyse these measurements to determine exactly what sounds were produced and how (for instance) the Queen's vowels have changed over time. So, one change they noticed was that her vowel in words like had was produced lower in the mouth in the 1980s than in the 1950s, causing it to sound a bit more like had and a bit less like hed.

The Elves reported the study and in the course of the conversation, said 'You can't hear it though. Machines can hear it'. This was met with astonishment from the audience and the other Elves, but it's no stranger than measuring anything else with a machine (blood pressure, brain activity, blood sugar levels, gravity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, radioactivity...). It's a peculiar quirk of language that because we all do it with a reasonable degree of consciousness, we think we must know all about it, even though we don't know how our lungs or digestion work without explicit teaching.

So I think the moral of this is that everyone should come to my department's forthcoming event, consisting of an exhibition, two film screenings and a public lecture, and learn more about how amazing language is!

Geek English

This is an open question, or an idle wondering, depending how you view it.

I've noticed a particular variety of English which I'm calling 'Geek English'. I'm calling it that because I notice that it's particularly used by people who I would broadly identify as geeks, nerds, whatever you like, in a basically positive sense. You know, the kind of people who spend time playing online games, a lot of time in the internet in general, and are happy to be thought intelligent. It might also be people who would otherwise sound quite posh. For instance, some of the QI elves on their podcast 'No Such Thing as a Fish' have this accent (particularly Anna).

My question is, what characterises it and where does it come from? I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but my immediate impression is that it has a vaguely transatlantic sound. There's a bit of what sounds like 'flapping' of the t's, and also the intonation is quite distinctive, and I think perhaps the vowels are a bit non-UK-like. But then, all this could be an incorrect assumption based simply on its unfamiliarity to me. A proper phonetician needs to study it.