a budget of grammatical peeves

A discussion I had recently online about what peevologist meant (see this Wishydig blog entry for a discussion of its origin) revealed to me a great truth about soi disant snoots: they are as lacking in their quivering aggregate of absolutist rules of “grammar” as they are in their erudition and scholarship. (Well, perhaps I’d already had an inkling of that.) Their Weltanschauung causes them to hound anybody who uses a word with a slightly different meaning to the one which their grammar teacher beat into them, e.g., decimate to mean destroy. Any whiff of semantic drift causes the customary ejaculation “And look at how gay was co-opted! It used to mean merry or joyful!” Some say it still does in some contexts. I usually try to explain to them that gay has had a long and varied semantic drift since emigrating from Normandy to England about a millennium ago.

From Partridge A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (in two volumes), Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961:

Gay. (Of women) leading an immoral, or a harlot’s, life: 1825, Westmacott (OED), In C. 20, coll., on verge of SE.—2. Slightly intoxicated; ob. C.19–20; Perhaps orig. a euphemism.—3. Impudent, impertinent, presumptious: US (—1899), anglicized in 1915 by PG Wodehouse, OED (Sup.).

Also, gay house ‘brothel’, gay in the arse ‘(Of women) loose’, to lead a gay life ‘to live immorally’, the gay instrument ‘the male member’, gaying it ‘sexual intercourse’.

The grammar mavens’ll have nothing of the sort, thankee. They’ll blink myopically and tell you that though they have nothing against homosexuals personally, but they do want their word back. Yeah, right. Why are similarly polysemous words like symbology not being ranted about? I count at least three meanings of the word: (1) The study of symbols; (2) the use of symbols; and (3) a collection or system of symbols. And don’t even ask them about mole or put.

txting the fall of the rome

One of the fun things to do in museums is to try to read and decipher ancient inscriptions. Just knowing Latin or Greek is not enough, because of the extensive use of abbreviations in monumental inscriptions. Marble being an expensive material on which to write, the messages needed to be brief. Take for example, a milestone from the Via Trajana in Italy from the early second century CE. First is the original message, second is the unabbreviated version in Latin, and third is an English translation:

LXXIX
IMP CAESAR
DIVI NERVAE F
NERVA TRAIANVS
AVG GERM DACIC
PONT MAX TR POT
XIII IMP VI COS V
P P
VIAM A BENEVENTO
BRVNDISIVM PECVN
SVA FECIT

LXXIX
Imperator Caesar
divi Nervae filius
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus Germanicus Dacicus
pontifex maximus tribunitia potestate
XIII imperator VI consul V
pater patriae
viam a Benevento
Brundisium pecunia
sua fecit.

79
The emperor Caesar,
son of the deified Nerva,
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus, victor over the Germans and the Dacians,
chief priest,
holder of the tribunician power 13 times, saluted emperor 6 times, consul 5 times,
father of his country,
made the road from Beneventum
to Brindisium
at his own expense.

[From Lawrence Keppie (1991) Understanding Roman Inscriptions, pp.65-6.]

So, it occurred to me, that the Roman Empire fell, not because of lead poisoning, moral turpitude, or invading Goths and Vandals, but as a result of their language being diluted and degraded by a plague not unlike text messaging abbreviations. This also explains how the noble tongue Latin devolved into the barbarous jargons that are Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romantsh, and Romanian. (Published on the InterWeb earlier. And a tip of an iceberg to Professor Pullum over in the UK for posting this and jogging my memory.)

flutter by wings

A while back, miladus edenensis posted on his delightful blog, Ad Usum Delphinorum, a link to an exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Honoré Daumier and his heirs (link), one of which, Wiaz, drew the cartoon below (link). The insouciant pear is French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, and the trenchant knife is Édouard Balladur, the Minister of Economy, Finance, and Privatization.

Not being familiar with Wiaz, I looked him up in the French Wikipedia, and, lo, his real name, Pierre Wiazemsky, made me think of Eve Democracy in Godard’s Le Vent d’est (1970, link) and Odetta in Pasolini’s Teorema (link). His sister Anne Wiazemsky was also the middle of Godard’s three wives, all of whose names begin with Ann. As if all that was not enough, the siblings Wiazemsky were the grandchildren of the daughter of Francois Mauriac (Claire) and the Prince of Wiazemsky and Count of Levachov (Yvan).

lexica supina

More and more dictionaries have been showing up on my browser. Here’s a list:

1. John Florio. 1611. Queen Anna’s / New World / of Words, / or / Dictionarie / of Italian and English / Tongues, / Collected, and newly much augmented by / Iohn Florio, / Reader of Italian vnto the Soueraigne / Maiestie of Anna / Crowned Queene of England, Scotland, France, / and Ireland, &c. / And one of the Gentlemen of hir Royal Priuie / Chamber.
2. Edward Robert Tregear. 1891. Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary.
3. Ralph Lilley Turner. 1962–1966. A comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages.
4. Woxikon, the Online Dictionary. German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish.

bleedin pony, innit?

We all know that English is going to wrack and ruin, and that the road to its destruction was paved by descriptivist linguists and skulking lexicographers. And the media are doing their part preaching to choir:

It had four wheels and cost a lot of money but, sadly for one impatient teenager, the similarity ended there.

A teenager was greeted by a display cabinet instead of a taxi because her Ali G-style slang confused a series of phone operators.

The girl hurriedly dialled directory inquiries to book a taxi from her home in London to Bristol airport, using the cockney rhyming slang Joe Baxi.

Yesterday when the “story” broke, there were along a score or so of ghits. Today, we’re up to 2,670 ghits. More blogging and bloviating. But there is some debunking is going on, too, at Five Chinese Crackers (link), Obsolete (link), and Chimp Media Monitor (link) blogs. A likely origin seems to be a press release (link).

certitudo indoctorum

It’s the sort of grammatical rule that’s easy to remember: use between with two conjoined noun phrases, but among with three or more. It also has nothing to do with English grammar or usage, but that does not stop the learnèd ignorant from foisting it upon you. It is an example of the etymological fallacy. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (link) quotes J A H Murray (the first editor of the OED):

[Between] is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely.

The editors go on to say The OED shows citations for between used of more than two from 971 to 1885. 971 is the date the Bickling Homilies were composed (link). I took a look at the index. The entries for betweonum show that it is used four times as a postposition (probably more of a verbal particle), and a couple of times split with its complement coming between the two parts. For example:

þa cwædon þa apostolas to þæm folce, ‘Heo bið swiþor gestrangod be us tweonum þurh Drihtnes gehát’. p.143.ll.11f.

then said the Apostles to the people, ‘She shall be much more strengthened among us by God’s promise’.

In other words, pretty much since English has been written down, between has been used with more than three items.

mercutio florio

Years ago, while book-grazing at the local regional library facility, I came across a curious typescript called William Shakespeare, alias Mercutio Florio. Its title page indicated the author was Friderico Georgi, but in the card catalog this was said to be a pseudonym of Franz Maximilian Saalbach. It was published in Heidelberg in 1954. Googling Franz Saalbach dredges up a Heidelberger Geschichtsverein e.V. HGV history page (link) where 17. September 1952: Gründung der HIAG-Kreisgemeinschaft Heidelberg im Bergbräu, Hauptstraße 27. Zum ersten Sprecher wird Franz Saalbach gewählt.. The German Amazon lists the book, but there the author is Erich Gerwien (link). What triggered all of this was running across a theory that Shakespeare was Italian which a couple of Sicilian professors came up with (link). And, as with anything Shakespearean, can the Oxfordists be far off? This final bit is thanks to Languagehat (link).