What are your pet peeves re English usage?

How you do love to pontificate.

In that category, Set, I'm a piker compared to you.


Those from west Africa who speak French do so because French is the official European language of their homeland--their native languages are their respective tribal languages. Additionally, the teaching of French in their homelands adheres to the standards of Tourainese French as promoted by the Academy.

I haven't the least doubt, however, that you will continue to contend that you know best--it seems to be the only thought you bring to this thread.

I didn't state anywhere that I knew best. You've jumped to conclusions that just weren't there, Setanta.

Virtually all languages of the colonizing powers were European, or thereabouts. That doesn't mean that the European languages have remained "pure".

Languages are massaged to fit local circumstances. Vocabulary expands and changes, describes new things that weren't in the mother country. Pronunciation too, changes. These changes do not represent moving away from an ideal.

Many people believe this but we only have to look around us to see that this is a falsehood. If their pronunciation was pretty good, how would yours stack up against Clary's?

Yer a fit, Bubba, but you do entertain . . .

I'm quite sure you now understand. I know you're a bright guy.

Okay can we get on with peeving and pontificating now.
I can't think of a peeve today, my world is wellnigh perfect.

Anyone?

(Clary, do you ever read Dot Wordsworth in The Spectator? Very good, I think, always good value and entertaining. I wish she would publish a collection of her pieces. JTT, do you see that out there in the East?)

McTag wrote:

Okay can we get on with peeving and pontificating now.
I can't think of a peeve today, my world is wellnigh perfect.

Anyone?

(Clary, do you ever read Dot Wordsworth in The Spectator? Very good, I think, always good value and entertaining. I wish she would publish a collection of her pieces. JTT, do you see that out there in the East?)

No, I've never even heard of her, McTag. Why don't you post something of hers?

No, I've never even heard of her, McTag. Why don't you post something of hers?

[
Well, easier said than done, because the online Spectator (q.v.) has recently gone on to subscription-only, for some things including apparently her column. I looked at it last night, and you only get the first couple of paragraphs of the article, unfortunately.

Mind your language
Spectator, The, Mar 26, 2005 by Wordsworth, Dot


What is the difference between a cad and a bounder! It depends on your dictionary. 'A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards women,' says the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) of cad, and of bounder, 'a dishonourable man.' Both words are marked 'dated'.

The origin given for cad is: 'Late 18th century, denoting a passenger picked up by a horse-drawn coach for personal profit.' This demonstrates the difference between etymology and explanation. Certainly that was the meaning of the word in the late 18th century, but the appeal that the former denotation makes to the imagination does not explain the current meaning of the word. This passenger was not regarded as caddish, to women or anyone else. If anyone was a cad, it was the driver for pocketing the fare he should have paid his employers. A bounder was once a four-wheeled carriage too, but that doesn't help either.

Cad in the 19th century meant a workmate, or confederate. It was related to the golfer's caddie, derived from cadet. But there was also a meaning of an Omnibus conductor'. Dickens uses it in Pickwick. This still doesn't enlighten.

Caddie meant 'a lad or man who waits about on the lookout for chance employment' in 19th-century Scotland. But in 1831 William Hone, that rather unpleasant radical sceptical antiquarian of his time, who turned Christian at last, explained in a footnote in his Table Book that cads were 'low fellows, who hang about the college to provide the Etonians with anything necessary to assist their sports'. The big Oxford English Dictionary added, 'So at Oxford, applied by collegians to town-lads of the same description, and contemptuously to townsmen generally.'

The volume of the OED with cad in it was published in 1893, and the dictionary did not change the entry for the second edition of 1989. The Oxford career of the word accounted for its connotation of nongentlemanly behaviour.

I had read in Belloc's The Cruise of the Nona (1915): 'Of the cads and gentlemen I have met, I would give the cads a shade of odds in the matter of salvation.' He defined cad as 'a male deficient in one particular small set of those many moral qualities which, when combined with the national tradition of wealth, build up what is called in England a "gentleman"'. The 'gentleman' was Belloc's real target. 'I wonder what posterity will make of it?' he asks of gentleman and cad. 'Probably . . . what we all do in dealing with the past, shrug its shoulders and pass on.'

Dot Wordsworth

Copyright Spectator Mar 26, 2005

Mind your language
Spectator, The, Oct 11, 2003 by Wordsworth, Dot


'What's he mean "After Theory"? Doesn't make sense,' said my husband looking up from the paper with no further clues.

Luckily, I'd already noticed that the funny old Marxist Terry Eagleton was bringing out a book called After Theory. Not a moment too soon, I thought, since theory was such a dull commie take on literature. But isn't After ridiculously overused as a title word? Indeed someone called Thomas Docherty wrote a book called After Theory as long ago as 1990. There is also Life After Theory, and Prof Eagleton surely must know that his colleague Valentine Cunningham has written one called Reading After Theory. And we've had the unreadable After Writing from Catherine Pickstock and, in the publishers' catalogues, Shakespeare After Theory, quite apart from Shakespeare After Mass Media and Tempests After Shakespeare.

I don't know who started it. Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer merely used a familiar prepositional phrase. But then Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote After Julius, and there are After Henry and After Haggerty and After Hannibal. Among theoretical books, Leo Stoller wrote After 'Walden' in 1957 and George Steiner After Babel in 1970.
Pity the bookshop assistant asked for a book with After in the title. He must not confuse Heikki Patomaki (After International Relations) with Haruki Murakami (After the Quake). He must separate After All, poems by William Matthews, from another book called After All that is not poems but by Mary Tyler Moore. Imagine seeking After Thoughts by Max Bygraves and getting After Thought, a study of computing in the future; or, worse, vice versa.

There's After Freedom and After Authoritarianism, After Authority and After Libertarianism, After Hegemony and After the Empire (American); After Modernity What? and After Truth; Life After God and After God (by Don Cupitt); After Aquinas (by Fergus Kerr) and After Virtue (by Alasdair MacIntyre). A lot seems tendentious before you've got past the cover.

There are place-names that stand for events: After Three Mile Island; After Rwanda; After Vietnam. There are the apparently contradictory: Byzantium After Byzantium; Religion After Religion. There is the futuristic after. After Modernity; After Postmodernism; After Poststructuralism.

Apart from After September 11, another book on the same subject is simply called After. But another book called After is on the Shoa. There are plenty more in the pipeline. Merlin Holland's After Oscar is due out next year, and a book by Jenny Diski is to be called After These Things.

I think after is a bit passe.

Dot Wordsworth

Copyright Spectator Oct 11, 2003

Mind your language
Spectator, The, Jun 21, 2003 by Wordsworth, Dot


A kind-hearted reader wondered whether Chinaman might not be a derogatory term. I used it the other week.

If you believe the Encarta dictionary, it is not just derogatory - it is offensive. But then, the (mainly Zulu) Encarta (as I like to think of it, in memory of the BBC World Service's invariable phrase each time it mentions the homophonic South African party Inkatha) opines that Montezuma's revenge is offensive, to the shade of Montezuma for all I know. The thing itself can certainly offend.

It is hard to know why Chinaman should be offensive. There seems to be a general reluctance to call foreigners by anything too concrete. Thus Spaniard sounds a bit rude, and so does Jew. 'A Spanish person' or 'a Jewish person' is much more refined. But a Jew wouldn't mind being called 'a Jew', surely, and a Spaniard probably wouldn't notice. Tartars like to be 'Tatars', as if that made it any better. Turks are still, I think, proper Turks.

Chinaman, as the wise Dr Robert Burchfield points out in the New Fowler's, was perfectly polite in 1926, when H.W. Fowler merely pointed out that you would not speak of the generality of Chinamen, but of Chinese. Contrariwise you wouldn't speak of just one Chinese. And it still does not sound right to me. You don't say 'a French'.


If you want a bit of value-added historical perspective, China in Chinaman was originally an adjective, as in China-orange, which does not mean an orange made of china, but a sweet orange from the China trade routes, a mandarin orange we might say now, unless the Encarta finds it offensive.

We are still allowed to say Chinaman with reference to the cricket ball. There is an interesting quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 1989) from the Times for 11 May 1963: 'I understand the "Chinaman" to be simply an off break bowled out of the back or the side of the hand by a left-handed bowler - that is, the ball comes in to a right-handed batsman from the off, and the left-handed bowler's action in bowling is equivalent to that of the right-hander in bowling a leg break. I believe the term was first used in referring to this style of bowling practised before the last War by Ellis Achong, who, although he played for the West Indies, was in fact a Chinese.'

My husband might well know who wrote that, and if it is true, but he is asleep in a deckchair.

Copyright Spectator Jun 21, 2003

Manage what?

Walter is a mage, into whose methods it is best not to inquire.