Let's lead led away

All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb lead, which is standardly spelt led, dead. Or ded. I'd noticed it being misspelt as lead so many times, including on the BBC news website, that I thought it was probably simply prolonging its agony to try to preserve led. Of course it's still around, because inexplicably I'm not in charge, and written language doesn't change that fast. But I was reminded about it the other day and was frustrated all over again by the fact that this one is actually one that has sensible spelling and pronunciation, unlike most of our irregular past tenses. 

Lead is pronounced with an 'ee' sound, like read, and led is pronounced like red, so it really ought to be totally transparent and memorable and unproblematic. The problem with lead/led is, though, that we also have read/read, which is not spelt red, though we have another word that is. Oh and we also have the word lead, for the metal, which is pronounced like led. All of which obscures the fact that lead and led are pronounced more or less as they're spelt, unlike read (past tense) and lead (the metal). 

I feel bad for it, I really do, but I also think it would just be simpler to let it slip quietly away. 

(Moderate) Spelling reform

Advice about keeping a blog always says not to apologise for not writing for a while, because no one will really notice, so just write whatever it is without mentioning it. But I'm not apologising; I'm noting the fact that this term was so bloody ridiculous that I didn't have one single bit of head space to knock out a blog post now and again, a task that I know from experience only takes me about half an hour while I'm watching telly (yes, sorry, I don't give you, my adoring public, my best time, or in fact much time... you deserve more, but I'm not paid for this). 

So hey, welcome back. It's been a few months. I have a few things I saved for later, so I'll go through them and see if any of them at all are still relevant. For now, let's talk about this spelling reform that got voted in by the English Spelling Society last week. It's actually surprisingly sensible, though of course totally unnecessary. It doesn't change much, and they suggest that the minimal changes are just sort of floated in as legitimate alternatives and that they'll hopefully catch on as standard. Seems fair enough. There's a screenshot of the Times article about it below, which I'm not linking to as it's paywalled but you can find if you want. 

It's just things like having double consonants mean something consistent, I think syllable stress, and removing Es that don't change pronunciation. So you get surender but edducate. I can't tell what the logic is behind changing fields to feelds but not beaches to beeches; they say that it's ok to have one sound be spelt in different ways but each spelling should make one sound, so maybe it's because <ie> is taken for the /ai/ ('eye') sound. 

It overlooks that there are some things that won't make any more sense to people who don't speak Standard Southern British English, of course, as they always do. So they say good will be guud, and foot will be fuut, and blue will be bloo. Totally fine for me, as good and foot do have the same vowel, while blue has a different one. But there are some speakers who have more or less the same vowel in all three of those words and others who have a different vowel in the first two. So I'm not sure it will achieve its aim of making spelling more logical for everyone. 

I wonder whether people who are planning to adopt it will need to write a little note to say so until it catches on. So if someone wants to submit their essay with this spelling, will they put a note at the top to say that's what they've done? 

This is reminiscent of the howling of the papers recently, including the Times I might add, about universities being advised not to deduct marks for bad spelling. When I mark essays I already don't take marks off for incorrect spelling or non-standard English. We haven't 'taken marks off' for anything for years, in fact, as we award marks for what is done well against a set of marking criteria, which include 'clarity of expression' and 'accuracy'. This is likely to include a lack of spelling errors, but doesn't absolutely require it as you can be clear and still spell things differently. The Times article itself says:

[Hull] university said that it would instead “encourage students to develop a more authentic academic voice, a voice that can communicate complex ideas with rigour and integrity — that celebrates, rather than obscures their particular background or characteristics”.

But they then quote Frank Furedi (lamentably from my own institution) saying that inclusive assessment 'violates the norms of academic education', so I'll have to check with them whether it would be OK to use these new spellings or not. I don't know why they went to Furedi, a retired sociology professor, rather than one of the many linguists or pedagogy experts, no, I can't imagine the reason. 

Anyway, spelling reform, sure, whatever, it's not really needed but go ahead, but encouraging students to find an authentic academic voice seems a good thing to me, and I secretly hope that one day someone will submit an essay written entirely in their own non-standard variety as a conscious act of linguistic politics. 

The everyday every day

Moose Allain, the cartoonist, tweeted about the word everyday and the phrase every day, noting that the distinction between them is probably being lost:

As you know I’m against pedantry (because it’s usually wrong) and welcome the way our language changes. I don’t suppose it matters, so long as both meanings exist, if the spellings are interchangeable. However, I do think the local authority should get it right.

— Moose Allain Ꙭ (@MooseAllain) January 27, 2020

Maybe so, and if it is, we'll all get used to it and it'll be fine. In case you already don't have this distinction, everyday means 'ordinary', as in Just your everyday clothes will be fine for the event, while every day means more or less the same as each day: Parking charges apply every day. Just another bit of the internet sad about an ongoing language change, then.

I was intrigued by his follow-up tweet, which noted that pedantry is usually wrong, and this minor spelling change doesn't matter because we'll still have both possible meanings. Which is true. But he also thinks that the local authority should get it right.

On the face of it, it's totally logical. It may well be a change in progress, but while there is still a 'correct' option, official bodies should get it right, because official writing should follow formal conventions. I would tend to agree, in fact. But there is clearly a contradiction here. If it doesn't matter, then the local authority shouldn't have to get it right, no matter who they are. And if it is a change that's happening anyway, then at some point it won't be a mistake, and that line isn't a date when something is incorrect the day before but correct the day after. It's just the time when people can look back on 'the past' and note that we did things differently then.

Practice is nicer than practise

This exchange appeared in my facebook the other day. I don't know any of the people involved, and as always, I'm just commenting interestedly, not making fun or criticising them.

The image shows a conversation in response to someone mentioning 'practicing', with that spelling. Assuming that things haven't changed since I learnt this, that's a valid spelling in American English. British English would traditionally prefer 'practice' for the noun (as in We went to practice tonight) and 'practise' for the verb (as in Are we practising tonight?). In practice (ha!) this is very variable and it's probably one of those things that's on the way out really, and both spellings can do both jobs.

What interested me about the above, though, is that even though 2 out of the 3 people having this discussion obviously care about this spelling rule (otherwise they wouldn't be discussing it), they don't seem to be very clear on which it should be.

Person 1 says 'practicing with a c, though' indicating that they know it's spelt incorrectly, and sharing a link to that effect. Person 2 doesn't really notice the spelling comment (unless I'm missing some more subtle joke?) and comments on the content of the original post, spelling it with an 's' for both the noun and the verb (Some sides don't practise [verb] wilst half drunk, so it could well be 'intoxicated dance practise [noun]' for a newbie...). Then Person 3 brings it back to spelling and quotes the rule, presumably in response to Person 2 as much as the OP, to which Person 1 replies, agreeing, and saying I think it's nicer to think of it as morris 'practice' rather than 'practise'. I realise it's incorrect :). 

But it's not incorrect! Both spellings are right depending on which 'morris practi{c/s}e' is intended (noun or verb).  And here, the commenter is probably actually correct, because with the pre-modifying 'morris', it is far more likely to be the noun, so 'practice' is the right spelling to use.

And – most baffling – why is it 'nicer to think' of it with a 'c'??

IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR

Hooray! Another article about how 'textspeak' is bad for kids is out! (Daily Mail link, so don't click it – you can get the idea from just reading this post.)

It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.

Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.

In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:

OMG ikr
Yo dude r u still coming to party Friday

I'm just going to take the second one. It contains, among other things, the following grammar:

• a vocative (Yo dude)
• subject-verb agreement (r for 2nd person singular)
• question inversion (r u rather than u r)
• a verb phrase with a prepositional complement (to party) and adverbial (Friday)
• present tense (r rather than were)
• progressive aspect (coming)
• pre-verbal adverbial (still)
• knowledge of which words can be omitted in this context (the, on)

It also has 100% correct spelling, if one allows that r u is an abbreviation rather than an error.

Ombudsmun

This is a screenshot from a tweet that passed through my timeline:

tweet including the word 'ombudsmun'

It includes the word 'ombudsman', but spelt 'ombudsmun'. I'm a big fan of this spelling. The word  contains the word 'man', but as in many words, the syllable is not stressed and the vowel is reduced to a schwa (the sound at the end of my name). The writer has reflected that in the spelling (probably not deliberately, maybe not consciously) by spelling it 'mun'.

For a while, I was spearheading a single-woman campaign to get 'man' to be truly gender-neutral by using terms like 'postman' for female postal workers. In the end I gave up but it remains true that if it's to be reinterpreted either as a suffix (as in postman, policeman, etc) or as just an inseparable part of the word, with no independent meaning, as looks to be the case here, then it has to be the schwa pronunciation rather than the full 'man' vowel. That loss of vowel content hastens its loss of semantic content.

There are other instances of this spelling, even on quite official ombudsman sites (enough that I had to quickly check it isn't actually a variant spelling - seems not). And I ought to also note here that 'man' is used as a pronoun in some varieties of English, such as Multicultural London English, but that it is more or less gendered when it's used in a non-generic 'one' sense (you get some instances of it being used of women, but it's rare). It's also a pronoun in German, in an obviously historically-related turn of events.

Trump and sensitive editing

Trump (who I don't blog about much because I don't think it's helpful to criticise his poor command of language when he is so unbelievably awful in so many other more important ways) has been mocked on twitter again. He used the phrase [they] pour over my tweets rather than pore over. This is a very common mistake; lots of perfectly intelligent people also make it; it's not transparent enough for it to be a thing you could work out. You just either know it or you don't. In most uses, pore is a little hole for your skin to breathe through, so it's not obvious why it should mean 'gaze intently', and in fact we don't know where that meaning comes from - we just have it recorded in early English writing and without a known origin. So I'm not going to beat Trump up for not knowing that, but the internet did. The problem was that he used it in a tweet where he explicitly said how good his written English was, and a version of Muphry's Law states that if you write anything praising your accurate writing, there'll be an error in it.

So let's look at this positively. Lot's of people just corrected the spelling of pore, others pointed out other less-than-brilliant aspects of the writing in the original tweet, but this person, a writer himself, edited the tweet to read much better:

“Having written many best-selling books and somewhat priding myself on my writing ability, it should be noted that the fake news likes to constantly pore over my tweets looking for mistakes. I capitalize certain words for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized.”

There
FIFY pic.twitter.com/M9wi9u1CkJ

— michaelharriot (@michaelharriot) July 3, 2018

There's a commonly-criticised error in the original tweet, which Michael hasn't fixed: the dangling participle(s) at the beginning. Normally, people are keen to point out the comedy of such constructions (Plunging hundreds of feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls). But in this case, it's fine: the potential confound is it, which is what we call an expletive, which means that it doesn't mean anything so you can't accidentally interpret the modifier as modifying it. And it sets up the context for the rest of the tweet nicely, so it's a perfectly acceptable construction.

Secondly, Michael has actually introduced a split infinitive (to constantly pore). I'm a big fan of these, especially if they make a sentence read better, which they often do, and which it definitely does in this case. It's not the liking that's constant, it's the poring, and the rhythm is also nicer in my opinion.

I like this sensitive editing with attention paid to how the tweet sounds and no rigid adherence to the rules given that it is a tweet. If you're an editor for a newspaper whose style guide says no split infinitives, then you must remove all split infinitives and that's it. But if you do have a choice, then it's good to be able to use them where it improves a thing.

Seen as this is the 1930s

I watched ITV's Harry Price: Ghost Hunter over the Christmas break, which starred Rafe Spall as the eponymous psychic investigator/faker/unmasker.

One linguistic fact of note is the spelling of his first name, which I assume is a respelling reflecting the pronunciation of the name Ralph, which is now usually pronounced as it looks.

But what caught my ear was the very modern-sounding language. One character used vowels which I would have said were characteristic of Estuary English or MLE: monophthongs where RP would have had a diphthong, for instance. And Rafe Spall himself said, at one point, seen as rather than the normatively correct seeing as (meaning more or less because or since). I'm hesitant to say that this is anachronistic, as it's almost invariably a 'recency illusion' when anyone makes an argument like that. Rather, it's probably just that we expect posh and middle class people in period dramas to speak in RP, and when they don't we find it jarring. But I can't find out how old this variant is, because it's virtually ungoogleable and I'm not sure where else to go to look for it. Seen as has indeed increased massively since 1960, but I can't filter out the false hits like we were seen as inferior, where it's not the same thing. Anyone happen to know about this? (Sorry if the chart is not the right size - html skillz are failing me today. Follow the link above to the original.)

Bumpf

Yesterday, quite coincidentally, two of my colleagues sent me electronic communications and used the word bumf. (This is not a reflection of their opinion of my work, of course.) But what was interesting was that both of them mis-spelt it bumpf.

Bumf is a 'clipping' or shortening of the word bumfodder, and both used to mean 'toilet paper'. I always thought it was Dutch and have just this very moment discovered that it is not. It's dated back to 1889 and is given as 'British schoolboy slang'. This mis-spelling as bumpf might come from mixing up the two spellings: it can also be bumph.

Bum-fodder is three syllables, with the first two divided between the /m/ and the /f/. This is unremarkable: if you have an /m/ and an /f/ together in English, they're normally either side of a syllable boundary. Ham-fisted, chamfer and bumface are all other examples of this. But when it's shortened, it's just one syllable, so that single syllable ends in the consonant cluster /mf/. This is a bit unusual in English. Try and think of other words that end in this combination. There's a few, but they're rare. The OED has nymph, galumph, wumph, triumph and harrumph, among others. And they're all spelt with a 'ph'. I don't have an explanation of this spelling quirk (some come from Greek, which is where most of our 'ph' spellings come from, but not all). I can tell you why that rogue 'p' gets into bumpf though.

Basically, /m/ and /f/ are very nearly as different as two sounds can be. This means that when we say them next to each other, we add in another sound that's halfway between them to make the transition a bit easier. /p/ is made with the same lip-shape as /m/, and the airflow is the same, but the vocal folds are like they are when we say /f/. This insertion of a sound is called 'epenthesis' and we do it all the time: adding a 'p' in 'hamster' is a famous one, showing that this isn't because the cluster comes at the end of the syllable. It only occasionally shows up in spelling mistakes (like bumpf or hampster), and this is a really cool insight into what we say and what we are aware of when we say it.

Ribenary

I saw this advert last week:

It's an advert for Ribena. It's got some wordplay around the suffixes -y (which makes nouns into adjectives) and -est (superlative) and the combination of both of these. So in the slogan at the top, we have tastiest and fruitiest, both of which are common enough words, but also blackcurrantiest. That's the kind of word that people might ask 'is that a real word?' and of course it is, because it's made with perfectly legal word-creation processes, but it sticks out because it's new. Blackcurranty isn't normally an adjective, but of course we can make it easily (I just did) by sticking the -y suffix, which turns nouns (like blackcurrant) into adjectives. And then once you've got an adjective that ends in -y, you can make the comparative blackcurrantier and the superlative blackcurrantiest. With a word this long, we'd normally use more and most instead, though, so this word is eye-catching because it sounds unusual.

At the bottom, we have one the fact of it the exact same thing: it says 'You can't get any more Ribenary'. Again, just stick a -y onto a noun (Ribena) to get the adjective. Unfortunately here there is a spelling issue. Ribena, unusually for English words, ends in an 'a'. You can't stick -y onto the end of that, because Ribenay doesn't look at all like the word it's meant to be. So they've spelt it the same way we say it: with an 'r' that wasn't there to start with. This is called 'intrusive r' and all it does is make it easier for us to say two consecutive vowels.

Intrusive 'r' is closely related to 'linking r', which is the one that is there in the spelling but that people who speak dialects like mine wouldn't normally pronounce - like at the end of computer. When that word is followed by a vowel, like in the phrase my computer is switched on, the 'r' comes back again. For me, these two types of 'r' are so similar that I usually have to look them up to check I've got the names right.

Now, I believe that rhotic speakers don't have this intrusive 'r'. Rhotic speakers are the ones who would normally pronounce the 'r' at the end of computer. For those people, linking 'r' isn't really a thing because the 'r' is always there anyway, and the problems we might solve with intrusive 'r' are solved another way. So for those people (and that's most of Scotland, Ireland and North America, for instance), is this advert just weird? Does the word Ribenary work?

Daily Fail fails to ask a linguist (again)

It's no surprise when a newspaper publishes an article about language and fails to ask a linguist. They rarely do. It's even less of a surprise when the newspaper is the Daily Mail and the 'article' is actually just a summary of a website (note to newspapers: this is not journalism. It's lazy. Especially when you get to it two weeks after the rest of the internet has already seen it).

This 'article' summarises a reddit thread for us, which is actually quite handy because reddit threads are horrible things to read. The questioner wanted to know what the hardest English words to pronounce are. Here's the top ten, as reported by the Mail:

1. Worcestershire
2. Specific
3. Squirrel
4. Brewery 
5. Phenomenon
6. Derby
7. Regularly
8. February
9. Edited
10. Heir

The Mail then helpfully made some very condescending comments about how specific and squirrel are 'apparently easy' and brewery and edited 'seem rather straightforward to the average Brit', while February and phenomenon are 'notorious tongue twisters even for native speakers'.

So far, so utterly, utterly dull and vacuous.

Among the linguistically interesting things to note here is the fact that there are two types of difficulty: hard to articulate, and hard to predict. Derby is very easy to say for most people, but it's hard to predict its pronunciation from its spelling. Similarly heir and, of course, Worcestershire, which has the further problem of being long and daunting.

On the other hand, specific, squirrel, brewery, February and edited are all pronounced more or less like they're spelt, but it's actually saying them without stumbling that can prove tricky. They have consonant clusters like [skw], and lots of [r] sounds and 'glides' [w] that occur between vowels, making them hard to keep control of. February causes native speakers less trouble than the Mail would have you believe, because we don't try to pronounce both those [r] sounds.

[r] in general crops up a lot here, probably because a lot of the contributors to the list speak a first language like Chinese where [r] and [l] are not two different sounds, but rather two 'versions' of a sound ('allophones'). English contrasts these sounds (so read and lead are different words), but doesn't contrast the two 'k' sounds in car and key, for instance (so you can't the difference unless you're trained to do so). If your language treats [r] and [l] as being as similar as those English considers those two 'k' sounds, you can imagine the difficulty regularly or squirrel is going to cause you.

Likewise, edited contains a string of short, similar vowels separated by [d] or [t]. Those two sounds are very similar to each other, differing only in terms of whether they're 'voiced' or not ([d] is, [t] isn't) and again, many languages don't contrast these sounds. In many English dialects (e.g. US English), they are actually pronounced more or less the same in this word. You end up with some sequence of rapid tapping of the tongue against the back of the teeth which is over almost before you realise you've begun it.

(Incidentally, no one in real life pronounces the name of the sauce as Worcestershire - everyone calls it 'Worcester sauce'. Apparently this is frowned upon by the company that makes it, but it's true.)

Spelling reformers get wrong end of stick shocker

Crikey. This Guardian article seems designed to elicit spluttering apoplexy. I think the author must be trolling. Nevertheless, I shall content myself here with pointing out a few minor quibbles. Throughout, letters within <pointy brackets> refer to orthography (spelling) and letters within /slash brackets/ refer to sounds and are in the IPA. My statements apply to English only unless otherwise specified. 

Postik notes

I was recently at the excellent Petrie museum in London. It's got loads of ancient Egyptian stuff, including a lot of beads. They also had this board:

It says 'Please write any comments on postik notes'.

Someone has rather snarkily corrected the error by putting a squiggly line under the word and writing the correct word and putting 'sp' next to it. This is overkill, but no matter.

I thought the mistake was quite charming. Post-It notes are sticky, after all, so 'postik' is kind of an eggcorn, almost (it doesn't quite fit the definition). And 'post' is used in a not-very-British way - I think you post things on walls more in American English than UK English, and Lynne Murphy confirms this at her blog Separated by a Common Language. So that makes it more likely that the person didn't realise the meaning of the name Post-It (i.e. display it on the wall).

Apostrophe is a letter and a sound, sometimes

I've just discovered a note to myself to blog about something that bugged me on Only Connect a while back. Only Connect is a BBC4 quiz programme (now moving to BBC2, which seems a shame for BBC4, but I'm not in charge of the schedules) which asks a variety of questions which all have something to do with making connections. The final round is the 'missing vowels' round, in which the answer is a word or phrase with all the vowels removed and the consonants respaced. To make it possible to answer, the contestants are told what connects the answers.

In the episode I'm thinking of, the connections was 'words that end in ii'. There was a Latin plural in there somewhere, I expect, and also 'Hawaii'. Now, the thing is, there is some controversy over this. When the islands became a state, they were the State of Hawaii in official documentation, and some people still do it this way. Others, however, now spell it with the extra symbol, and this seems (as far as I can tell) to be the way we ought to do it.

The symbol, which looks like a single inverted comma, stands for the glottal stop. We use it in English sometimes, when we write in 'eye-dialect': the word water with a glottal stop rather than /t/ is written as wa'er in lots of texts. In English, we usually don't count the glottal stop as a letter. In phonology it is a sound, so it's given much the same status as the other consonants, but replacing another consonant with it doesn't change the meaning. Wa'er and water mean the same thing. This is not to say that we only have letters for sounds that change the meaning, of course, but it means that it's kind of gone unnoticed for a long time and I suppose we just never got round to representing it, or felt the need to.

In the Hawai'ian language, on the other hand, the glottal stop is really considered to be a consonant in the language, and the letter is part of the alphabet. I realise that it's quite hard to find four words that end in ii, and Hawaii at least used to, but it seems like a programme that prides itself on being intelligent and pedantic ought to get things right.

Gwynne's at it again

The odious Neville Gwynne is at it again, publishing books. This time, he's written a Latin book. He's so pompous, my immediate instinct is to disagree with anything he says, so when I saw an advert for it in the paper that said learning Latin would improve your English, I refuted it loudly and firmly to anyone who would listen.

I love Latin, and I think everyone should learn it. A friend who was subjected to the refutation pointed out to me several ways in which learning Latin can improve a person, and he actually mentioned things that most people never think of, such as scientific analysis (I think he said this, anyway - he said biology, so I suppose he may have meant that you'd understand binomial classifications better, which is true, but it would also help you with doing anything that requires careful, logical, rigorous analysis). This friend also agreed with Gwynne that Latin would improve your English, however, and until today I thought that I heartily disagreed with this point of view.

Latin grammar is sometimes held up to be 'better' than English, or alternatively the basis of English grammar. Although Latin grammar is a beautiful thing, it is not better and nor is it the root of our language. Gwynne says that Latin is the source of 'well over half' of English. This is sheer nonsense. I think he must be counting words, because I can accept that half of English vocabulary comes from Latin - we did borrow a lot when we were conquered by the Romans and then the French (I say 'we' - I've no idea whether I'm one of the conquerors or the conquered, or even if there's any way to tell at this distance). But even then, if you count tokens rather than types, it's nowhere near half. What that means is, rather than count the number of Latin-based words in the dictionary, you count a word each time it appears in use rather than only once. More common words tend to be Germanic rather than Latin, so the number of Latin-based words in any text is not likely to be half. Take my first paragraph: based on my instincts regarding the words' origins, only 10 of the 61 words are Latin-based. Hardly half. And then, words are so far from being the whole of language it's simply preposterous to say such a thing when our grammar is basically not Latin in any way whatsoever. So this is why I disagreed with the notion that knowing Latin improves one's English: a) There aren't really any similarities and b) it assumes that some people speak 'bad' English, and as a linguist I have to be a little bit forceful about making sure people know that there is no such thing (only inappropriate styles).

So, anyway, today I went on good old Amazon's 'look inside' thingy. And whaddaya know, I agreed with a lot of it (except that part about the influence of Latin on English). Let's look at what he says are the benefits of learning Latin:

1. 'To know the source of any word is to understand it better'. Well, in some ways this is not true. Take a word like 'foliage'. Does it help you to know that it comes from the French for 'leaf'? I'm not sure it adds much. What about a word that's changed a lot over time, like 'nice'? It doesn't really help you use it any more accurately if you know that it comes from the Latin word for 'ignorant, unaware', although is is interesting and telling people this kind of this in detail has the nice side effect of getting rid of unwanted company at parties. And what about 'enormity', which is so misused, if you believe the pedants? Well, it has the meaning of a terrible crime, but is supposedly used wrongly by people who don't know any better to mean 'hugeness'. Do you know where it comes from? The Latin word for 'hugeness'. Clearly, we cannot base modern usage on etymology. But on the other hand, it might make your vocabulary more nuanced if you know the origin of some words. Gwynne gives the example 'radically', which comes from the Latin radix, 'root'. 'Radically' therefore means 'from the roots', which doesn't help me use it any better but might help me to think of it when I need a work that means that. 
2. Translation from English to Latin requires you to reorganise the sentence, for which you need to understand how the sentence was put together. This is absolutely true and I have no quibble with it - it is good to understand how the mechanics of grammar works, and it does help you to write better sentences. 
3. You must revise your translations thoroughly so they read well. Also true. This might make your writing more elegant, as you will be practising writing elegant translations and editing prose. However, the Latin is merely a means of doing this, and is not essential to the process. You might just as well translate any language, or even simply rewrite English passages. 
4. The meaning of the Latin words and phrases we use in English will be 'very much clearer than if you were to rely solely on what a dictionary says as to their meaning'. Possibly. We don't use them all literally, so it won't always help, but I imagine it helps to remember what they mean if you recognise them, rather than simply having to memorise them. For instance, there's a mnemonic to get 'eg' and 'ie' the right way round, but I can never remember the mnemonic. I do know, however, that 'eg' stands for exempli gratia 'for example' and 'ie' stands for id est 'that is', so I get them right. (Side note: never follow 'eg' examples with 'etc' if you're writing an essay for me.) 

One benefit I'd add which Gwynne doesn't mention is spelling. I think if you know the root, you are more likely to spell certain words right. For instance, 'separate' is commonly misspelt 'seperate', but it comes from the Latin parare. Since I learnt that, I've never spelt it wrong.

So, unexpectedly, I'm broadly in agreement with Gwynne for once. Everyone should learn Latin right away.

We can't finish on such a positive note though. People will think I'm going soft. Here, have some criticism: Gwynne makes a number of mistakes regarding linguistic facts. Even without looking for them, I spotted two glaring inaccuracies, both, I think, a result of paraphrasing Wikipedia without understanding it properly and therefore introducing error. Here's the first:

Latin is the direct ancestor of, between them, the five so-called Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) of the largest European language group, and of both of the official South American languages (Spanish and Portuguese).

Even ignoring the fact that it's odd to list Spanish and Portuguese twice (we could give him the benefit of the doubt as there are many differences between the European and South American varieties), this is a strange sentence. Those five are the Romance languages with the most speakers, but he implies that they comprise an exhaustive list of the Romance languages, which is not true. There are lots more. He also implies a contrast between 'the largest European language group' and the South American languages, but the language group he refers to is presumably Indo-European, and this is a classification based on relatedness, not geography, so Spanish and Portuguese are part of it regardless of where they are spoken. And perhaps the biggest inaccuracy of all here is his use of the phrase 'both of the official South American languages', which can only mean that there are two official South American languages, and those two are Spanish and Portuguese. This is wildly wrong: English, Dutch and French are all official languages in South American countries, and oh yes, there are lots and lots of indigenous languages, which Gwynne, in the grand tradition of the superior white man, overlooks. A brief glance at Wikipedia lists Quechua, Aymara and Tupi Guarani in Bolivia, Guarani in Paraguay, more than 60 indigenous languages with official status in Colombia, and so on. None of this is relevant to Gwynne's point, but getting the facts so wrong doesn't fill the reader with confidence about his linguistic expertise.

Here's the second, in a footnote:

The language that Latin replaced [in Britain] was the Celtic language.

No. It wasn't. There is no such thing, and there wasn't when Latin was around either. There are several Celtic languages, and although they all derive from a common ancestor, that was a heck of a long time before Roman Britain. I mean, really, the fact that I'm only giving Wikipedia references here tells you how easy it would have been to check a few of these claims.

[Update: I noticed that later in the book, he says that 'no modern language comes close to approaching Latin in difficulty'. I can't even be bothered to explain why this is idiotic, so I'll just invite readers to share their contenders for 'a language more difficult than Latin' (for an English speaker, presumably, as difficulty of learning varies depending on your native language).]

This 'public service announcement' exists:

Why on earth would it be Patty rather than Paddy, I hear you ask? Well, it's a simple case of homophony. Two identical-sounding words, one pronunciation, confusion abounds.

What's that? They're not homophonous? Not to you, maybe. Yer average British English speaker will pronounce these with a /t/ and a /d/ respectively, or possibly a glottal stop instead of the /t/. Yer average American, on the other hand, will have what's called a 'flap' or 'tap' instead of the /t/, and this sounds so much like a /d/ it's pretty much indistinguishable and they're pronounced exactly the same.

I'm ashamed to say I don't know how yer average Irish person would say them - my instinct is telling me there's variation between the flap and the /t/ and /d/ distinction, but I don't know. But then any Irish person is likely to know how to spell the name of their patron saint in any case, one would hope.

Excellent correcting effort

I spotted this sign in Canterbury, which someone has neatly lettered but made a mistake by leaving out the p in 'imported'. Not to worry, they've corrected it so that no one will know... 

Replace all

I've just finished reading the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It was all right, not great literature but a fun enough read. Odd typos in the last book though.

One thing was that there very often lacked a space between sentences. I have no explanation for that. Another thing was three misspellings, all related. The first was evapourate. The second was elabourate. The third was labouratory. In each case, the error is an extra u where there shouldn't be one. Can you see why?

Twitter makes girls more aggressive!

Or not. As usual it's a Daily Mail article ranting about something that has no substance and which it knows nothing about in any case. It's published an article saying that using Twitter and Facebook make girls, especially, speak in a 'curt' manner with 'terser sentences'. Actually, it doesn't even say that. It says that this phenomenon applies to young people's languge generally, but that it's more evident in girls because they 'communicate more'. Oh, and it's not a linguist who's said that, it's Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign (no, no idea what it's got to do with them - they campaign for removing jargon and legalese from public communication).

We should be clear: before I point out that this claim has no basis, the Mail basically does that itself by using the phrases 'it is claimed' and 'research shows', but never actually saying who claims it or what research it was. The Telegraph is even worse, repeating the story by quoting the Daily Mail, and saying 'experts believe'. All of this is clear indication that the journalist or some news/publicist person has made it up.

Let's begin. Citing Twitter and Facebook as being the culprits of degrading young people's language is dubious to start with. Young people use other types of online communication far more than these largely adult media. What you mean is 'whatever online communication young people use these days'.

Using 'terser sentences' or being 'curt' may well make a person appear 'aggressive'. But what are the measures by which these girls' speech is being judged as 'terser' or 'curt'? Shorter, maybe? Than what?

Marie Clair says this:

To any outsider, there aren’t those pleasantries that there were when you wrote a letter to someone.

No - because we've all worked out that it's a bit daft writing 'yours sincerely' in a facebook comment. It's all about register. If these girls don't know how to write a letter properly, well, that's another problem and one that should be addressed, but it's not Twitter's fault.

Apparently girls 'communicate more than males'. Well, I've no idea if that's true. Seems like one of those claims that doesn't really stand up, but maybe it's true. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say it is. (Still doesn't excuse the use of 'males' when she means 'boys'. They're not animals.) But I think 'Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford' (gasp! they asked an expert!) is more likely to be right when she says, in a different part of the article,

The teenage years are a period of life where you find linguistic innovations of all kinds, and girls are generally ahead of the curve. People often put down as ‘girls’ language’ something that’s actually going to spread through the whole speech community.

The article also says this:

Professor Cameron said it could be right that teenagers’ language styles in general are getting more aggressive, however there is no ‘hard evidence’ of this at present. Hard-core swearing is still most associated with adolescent and young adult, working class males.

So what she basically said was 'no, there is no evidence for this claim'. Which actually entirely contradicts the whole message of the article, but what the hell, let's include it anyway - no one will notice (and actually the commenters don't notice).

Anyway, let's all calm down with this article which says that there is no evidence that texting harms spelling, and might even be good for it, and this one in which Carol Ann Duffy says texting is good for poetry.

Cummerbund. Not cumberband.

There was a thing, for a little while, when some people thought a journalist had made a hilarious typo and referred to Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch as Bandersnatch Cummerbund:

Language Log notes the 'typo' and clears it up for us that it is, very obviously, a joke. Benedict Cumberbatch is a funny name, you see, and sometimes hard to remember, so she humorously misremembered it on purpose. (Bandersnatch is the frumious creature from the Jabberwocky, and a cummerbund is an item of men's dress wear.)

But look! She spelt cummerbund right! That's more than most people on the internet can manage. Before long, one or both of those variants is going to become accepted as an alternative spelling. And of course that's fine with me.