Upstarting

We were in Brussels just before Christmas for a little holiday, and we visited a couple of lambic breweries while we were there. One of the brewers at Verzet was great and took the time to show us all round it and tell us loads about the process and their beers.

Some of the barrels at the Verzet brewery
(named after their music heroes)

He was talking about the background of the guys who work there, and he said at one point that one of them helped upstarting a brewery, meaning 'helped to start up' a brewery.

In Flemish, there are what's called 'separable verbs'. These correspond to English verbs that have a preposition-like particle as part of it, so in this case start up. The Dutch version is opstarten. You can see that the 'up' part is a prefix, so it's literally 'upstart'. Flemish does have the option of separating that prefix from the main bit of the verb, more like the English equivalent, but it doesn't always separate (based on some rules of what kind of sentence it is). You can see that he basically just anglicised the word (it's called a 'calque' when this happens).

An interesting aside: I say Dutch in the paragraph above because that's what Google Translate has, and I think that the Dutch of Flanders is not different in this respect. Where there is a difference, according to this site,* is exactly when you separate the verb. The verb remains joined together when it's the only verb in the clause, it seems. When there's another verb, as in our sentence (He helped to start up a brewery), it's more likely to be separated in the Netherlands (he helped to start a brewery up) and more likely to remain intact in Flanders (he helped to upstart a brewery).

*If you, like me, like reading about grammar, this seems to be a really comprehensive grammar of Dutch that you can download as a PDF. 

Omni rage

Image of a facebook post describing
a satirical rant as 'omni Greggs rage'

You may have watched The Thick of It, in which Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, characterises someone as an 'omnishambles'. It caught on because it is an excellent word. So I don't know, but I think that this use of omni in this facebook post might be an example of it going wild (the post it refers to isn't for real, but it is a convincing pastiche of a certain type of person).

Omni is a prefix most of the time. It means 'every', like in omnivorous. Prefixes can cut loose from their roots if they're typically used in one specific word, or if the free version has just one meaning. So, for instance, cis means cisgender because we don't really use cis for much else (though we could - cisalpine is a word, though not a common one, meaning 'on this side of the Alps', where 'this side' means with respect to Rome - it's a Latin thing). So cis has specialised into this one meaning. Other gender- or sexuality-related prefixes have similarly gained independence, so you can describe yourself as bi, meaning bisexual, even though we have the bi- prefix in loads of words (bicycle, biped, biennial). It's just with that one meaning that it can be used solo.

I checked Urban Dictionary for omni and quite frankly didn't understand most of the definitions, so I'm not totally sure what's going on here. I didn't find anything that suggested it's used alone in the omnishambles sense but that really does look like what it might be. Omni rage as a term for that pure, hysterical rage as displayed by Malcolm Tucker in full flow?

(If you're not in the UK you'll have no idea what anything in the facebook post is about but don't worry about it; it's just the latest nonsense. Basically, professional moron Piers Morgan threw a hissy fit about 'snowflakes' when Greggs started doing vegan sausage rolls and people were quick to point out the irony of his rage about something so harmless.)

This adverb is super interesting

The Oxford Times published a whinge about the prefix super- recently (don't click the link; you'll get the idea from this post and like all local papers, the page is full of really annoying adverts that play audio). They're unhappy about the increase in adjectives preceded by super, such as super-strong, super-expensive and super-fit.

The claims about its increased frequency are discussed for American English in this post by Neal Whitman from February this year, and are true. It is getting more common (this is super-unusual, by the way, because normally it's the frequency illusion). Whether the claim that its use over here comes from American English is true or not I don't know; I can't be bothered to check because I don't really care.

What I do care about is whether it really is a prefix in all the examples they mention. Neal has it as an adverb and I instinctively classed it as that as well before I was pointed to his post. Why, though? The Oxford Times' examples are all written with a hyphen, and they explicitly call it a prefix. I also have an intuitive hyphen when it's an attributive adjective rather than predicative (a super-compelling argument vs this argument is super compelling). Whyyyyy??

[Aside: the fact that it can be unambiguously an adjective in examples like This pudding is simply super is irrelevant. Words don't usually have a category* when considered in isolation, and only have categories when considered in context.]

With a noun, as in superyacht, I'd not hesitate to call it a prefix, regardless of whether it's written like that or as super yacht or super-yacht. And when rich is a noun, I'd class it as a prefix (the super-rich ought to pay more taxes), but when it's an adjective it's a more ambiguous (The owner of this company is super rich). This is easily explained: adverbs can't modify nouns, so super (adverb) can't modify a noun like yacht; it must be a prefix meaning something like mega- or über-.

So let's focus on the ambiguous cases where it modifies an adjective, so could be a prefix (like über-strong) or an adverb (like incredibly strong). How do we tell which it is? Intuition is notoriously unreliable.

It would be useful to know if anything else can occur between the putative adverb and the adjective. You couldn't split a prefix from its base (apart from with expletives, like un-bloody-fortunately) but you might be able to put another word between an adverb and an adjective (really very pleasant). I don't think you can with super, but it's not a super-compelling argument; you also can't put anything between very, an undisputed adverb, and an adjective (very really pleasant is awful). But you can stack it up, which is more adverbial-like (super super happy).

One argument for it being a prefix would be that it can modify just adjectives. Adverbs can modify verbs and prepositional phrases (not nouns, as noted above). But it looks like super can actually modify these too: Neal Whitman gives these examples of prepositional phrases:

Three is super off tee, but not off turf.
I was super into rollerblading which I'm not any more.

Other adverbs:

Lift super slowly, taking 10 seconds to raise and 5 to lower.
My job was to 'appear', super suddenly.

And verbs:

Their media strategy... is to kind of exalt and super serve the conservative media.
I super hate to lose.
I super want a desert tortoise!
We super like this song.

The fact that these are less common is slightly an issue, though - perhaps this is a prefix in the process of breaking free and making a bid for adverbialhood? It's times like these I wish I was more of a morphologist and knew how to find out. Advice welcome - anyone want to do a study?

*That's a super-controversial way of putting that. I don't mean to imply any stance on whether the category of a word is part of its inherent content, or whether the same word in more than one category is a single word that changes category rather than being two homophonous words, or anything really. I have opinions about these things but they aren't the point of this post. 

Mispronunciation humiliation

[Sorry - this is a short and rushed post. It's Week 0.]

I was reminded the other day (because I mentioned it) that I only recently discovered how to pronounce the word archipelago. As I said in that conversation, discovering how to pronounce words as an adult tends to be an embarrassing realisation that you've misinterpreted something your whole life, usually in front of more people than you would like.

In this case I suppose it's not so embarrassing, but the reason for my mispronunciation (with stress on the -la- syllable rather than the -pel- syllable) was because I was simply looking at the word as an undecomposable whole. Had I known that the word came from a Greek prefix arkhi and root pelagos (which I ought to have recognised, really, given how much I like the word pelagic), I might have had a better chance (though perhaps not, as I also pronounce pelagic with stress on the penultimate syllable).