fun facts about english

Fun Facts About English #84 – Grammatical Ambiguity

11/05/2020 by admin

Often presented to students as a linguistic puzzle, the sentence demonstrates grammatical ambiguity. Where written language lacks the critical element of a human expressing it, punctuation serves as a necessary substitute for intonation, stress, and pauses used in speech.

Disambiguated, the sentence reads, “It is true for all that, that that “that” which that “that” refers to is not the same “that” that that “that” refers to.”

If still unclear, this may help to unravel its meaning: “It is true, despite everything you say, that this word to which this word refers, is not the same word to which this word refers.”

Ambiguity

Ambiguity in language appears in a variety of ways, intentional or not, with some cases more celebrated than others. Consider the difference between the ‘suggestive’ language of poetry and a ‘misleading’ advertisement. Ambiguity can be the result of an absurd juxtaposition or the sudden and hilarious turn in a comedian’s routine. In a world where transparency and clarity seem to be the goal, we are often on guard against social uncertainty, while at the same time give ourselves wholly to the lyrics in a favorite song – whether we completely understand them or not.

To understand how language works, linguists differentiate lingual ambiguity into a variety of categories, including lexical (words and their definitions), syntactic (words in context), phonological (the sounds of words), and semantic (meaning in language and logic). The research goes further into the field of neurolinguistics; the playground of cognitive scientists who study the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.

For case studies, there’s no better place to begin than with toddlers, whose rapid acquisition of language brings about valiant but flawed attempts at language construction. Pity the poor parents who, upon pain of an emotional meltdown, must mentally sort compound mashes that only an emphatic toddler can construct.

“A father of a little boy goes upstairs after supper to read to his son, but he brings the wrong book. The boy says, ‘What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?'”

Or consider a casual conversation where one might ask for clarification to fully understand.

A: Alice told her mother she won the lottery.
B: Who won the lottery?

Humor

At the crossroads of lingual uncertainty and clarity sits humor. A good comedian is a master manipulator of such language. Combined with comical timing, a standup artist uses the sometimes ambiguous nature of language to trip confusion and, in turn, make you laugh. It’s a linguist’s pleasure to understand the mechanics of humor and how ambiguity, from set-up to punch line, fuels a comedic routine.

Lexical ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word, is the anchor of many children’s riddles and wordplay. One of the first jokes I remember telling was, “Why is the corn angry at the farmer? Because he keeps pulling their ears.” I might have found this especially funny at the time because my own father was an ear puller.

Syntactical ambiguity, the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words, is part of many comedians’ strategies for surprising their audience.

Phonological ambiguity occurs when words sound identical but have different meanings. The standup talents, Abbot and Costello, rely on this confusion in their legendary “Who’s on First?” comedy routine. Likewise, the puzzling aspect of the sentence, “Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses,” rests on a series of homophonous words. When rewritten for clarity, the sentence is far less lyrical or interesting: “A woman named Rose got up to put red fish eggs on the bands of flowers after which she was named.”

Headlines

There are occasions when syntactical ambiguity enters more sober spheres. Cognitive confusion occurs when it’s difficult to determine if a newspaper headline is purposefully being humorous or not. Headline-ese relies on loaded words and expressions to attract a reader’s attention. This and a stringent need for lexical brevity can result in unintended smirking and chortling.

The Last Word

The brain has a particular response to semantic incongruities as well. Sometimes known as senseless or absurd sentences, they result in what some call an absurdist’s humor. The Flaming Lips used this brand of ambiguity in their song, “She Don’t Use Jelly” from the album, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, to drive a light-hearted song about friends with peculiar habits:

I know a girl who thinks of ghosts
She’ll make ya breakfast
She’ll make ya toast
But she don’t use butter
And she don’t use cheese
She don’t use jelly
Or any of these
She uses Vaseline
Vaseline
Vaseline

If you enjoyed reading about the wonderful ambiguity of our language, you might be interested in proverbs that are often misconstrued, or the conundrums of capitonyms and contronyms!

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Fun Facts About English #87 – Capitonyms

11/05/2020 by admin

A capitonym is a word that changes its nuance, meaning, and sometimes pronunciation when it’s capitalized; capitalization being applied due to one form being a proper noun, such as Bill/bill, or an eponym, such as Augustus/august. Some capitonyms are homonyms (Rose/rose), and others can be heteronyms (Polish/polish, Tangier/tangier) where pronunciation changes accordingly. The word capitonym is a portmanteau of the word capital with the suffix -onym.

Besides the list of first names above, last names that are capitonyms often fall in the realms of labor, colors, and animals, like baker, cook, farmer, brown, white, green, wolf, fox, and parrot. When first meeting people with such surnames, best to spare them your witticism.

Capitonyms may or may not be etymologically related in their capitalized and un-capitalized forms. The month of May and the verb may don’t share an etymology, whereas Catholic and catholic both derive from a Greek adjective meaning “universal.”

Capital letters can be used to differentiate a set of objects or people and an example of that set, like a moon and the Moon, a dad and Dad, or a bible and the Bible.

Religious contexts have very specific rules for capital spelling. The general word god is capitalized to God when referring to the deity of monotheistic religions. When referencing said deities, common pronouns like me, mine, you, and yours are usually capitalized as well. Within the liturgy, there is Mass as opposed to physical mass, and church denoting a building compared to Church when referring to members of a religious group. In the same lofty vein, words carrying a meaning of transcendence, religious or secular, are often capitalized, such as Truth, Beauty, and Justice.

Because political parties are often named after political philosophies, capital letters differentiate one who supports a philosophy, such as a conservative believing in a philosophy of conservatism and one who claims herself a Conservative in support of the Conservative Party.

Finally, there’s one pesky little glitch in the English scheme to differentiate capitonyms: the beginning of a sentence. Consider the mental sort and the necessity of context and punctuation when reading these examples:

Bill the patient, please.
Turkey requires a visa.
Rusty waters plants.
Crystal is clearly delicate.
Nice winters are mild compared to Paris.
Cook wages war in court.
Iris blossoms on the piano.
Pat the dog.
Will Will?
March!
Randy?

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading about palindromes, the conundrum with contronyms, or why the word widow is unique among gender-specific nouns!

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Stories for Young Readers is a graded textbook series for students studying English as a second language (ESL/EFL). The series presents English in clear, grammatically simple, and direct language. Most importantly, the textbooks have been designed to extend students’ skills and interest in developing their ability to communicate in English. Visit Donald’s English Classroom for pdf downloads, or purchase through the Kinney Brothers Publishing website!

Fun Facts About English #85 – The Big Bad Wolf

11/01/2020 by admin

ablaut reduplication Kinney Brothers Publishing

To understand this anomaly, we’ll need to review a few grammar points. Bear with me and you’ll come to a sparkling revelation by the end of the post.

Adjectives

An adjective is a word or phrase that describes a noun, e.g., small, red, or awesome. When using multiple adjectives in a sentence, there are two orders: coordinate and cumulative adjectives.

Coordinate adjectives are in the same category and require a comma between each one:

My dog is brown, black, and white. (color)
This is a Spanish, English, and French dictionary. (purpose)
He’s intelligent, handsome, funny, and a great dancer! (opinion)

Cumulative adjectives come from various categories and don’t require commas, but must be ‘stacked’ in a specific order:

Opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Origin
Material
Purpose

This is a cute little blue bag.
We rode two gorgeous big black Arabian horses.
I have a tiny 10-week-old brown beagle puppy.

Reduplicates

Reduplication is when a word or part of a word is repeated and sometimes modified to make a longer term, like hush-hush or boogie-woogie. There are two types of reduplicates: exact and rhyming.

Exact: goody-goody, choo-choo, bye-bye, wee-wee, yum-yum, aye-aye, boo-boo, so-so, tut-tut, no-no, night-night, poo-poo, yada-yada, ta-ta
Rhyming: okey-dokey, itsy-bitsy, arty-farty, razzle-dazzle, fancy-schmancy, walkie-talkie, raggle-taggle, super-duper, boo-hoo

Interestingly, there are a large number of ‘h’ words in the rhyming group: hocus-pocus, hanky-panky, hokey-pokey, hoity-toity, higglety-pigglety, harem-scarem, helter-skelter, holy-moly, honey-bunny, hum-drum, Handy Andy, Humpty Dumpty, and Henny Penny.

Ablaut Reduplication

Ablaut is a term introduced by the 19th-century German linguist, Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm duo. Ablaut refers to a vowel change which, in reduplicates, often follows a particular vowel pattern, such as zigzag or sing-song. If there are two words, the first vowel is I and the second is usually either A or O. If there are three words then the order is often I, A, O.

Two-Word: flim-flam, knick-knack, mingle-mangle, dilly-dally, pitter-patter, chit-chat, Tic Tac, wishy-washy, criss-cross, flip-flop, tick-tock, ping pong, clippity-cloppity, bibbity-bobbity, King Kong
Three-Word: bing-bang-bong, ding-dang-dong, bish-bash-bosh, splish-splash-splosh, clink-clank-clunk

We have our Germanic/Old English heritage to thank for this familiar vowel pattern. A similar vowel shift occurs with verb conjugations like drink, drank, drunk (trinken, tranken, getrunken) or sing, sang, sung (singen, sang, gesungen).

The Anomaly of The Big Bad Wolf

If we understand that cumulative adjectives are stacked in a specific order, a sentence with the words bad (opinion), big (size), and wolf (noun) should read, “bad big wolf.” This logic holds true for “cute little kittens,” “scary old house,” or “nice long drive.” So, why are the two adjectives in “big bad wolf” flipped? The writer, Mark Forsyth, explains this phenomenon in his title, The Elements of Eloquence:

“The reason “big bad wolf” is reversed is that the phrase skips the stacked-order rule to follow the ablaut reduplicative I-A scheme where big-bad acts like zig-zag!”

It would be easy to assume this anomalous ordering is the way it’s always been said, until you look at early versions of The Three Little Pigs. In Jacob’s English Fairy Tales (1890), the story includes “not by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin” and lots of huffing and puffing, but not the phrase “big bad wolf.” In the much older Grimm’s Fairy Tales version, you’ll find the piggy threesomes’ “Tra-la-la!” refrain, as well as the agreeably-ordered “wicked black wolf,” but no “big bad wolf.” So, when did this happen?

In 1933, the song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” was featured in Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony rendition of The Three Little Pigs. The theme song was a Depression-era hit and continues to be one of Disney’s most well-known songs. So successful was the animation, the studio spun several sequels. The theme song was repeated in The Big Bad Wolf with Little Red Riding Hood, and Li’l Bad Wolf, the son of Big Bad Wolf. Unsurprisingly, the wolf pup inherited his father’s ablaut reduplication, further cementing the adjectival reversal in our collective memories.

So, now you know! (I was going to say “That’s all folks!” but remembered that’s a different pig altogether.)

You might also be interested to learn about the most common adjectives, test your own knowledge of stacked adjectives, or how to begin teaching stacked adjectives to your youngest ESL students! Read more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

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Fun Facts About English #77 – The History of Headlines

10/30/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English Headlines

“The headline screamed at him as soon as he saw the paper. He almost screamed back.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

The familiar large-type, front-page headline didn’t come into use until the later 19th century as increased competition among newspapers led to the need for attention-grabbing headlines. This practice has successfully carried over from print news to online news with “screaming” headlines urging you to click through and read more.

Click on the image to see larger.

Some of the most famous, creative, and notorious headlines take us back in history, provide a window into the state of the culture, and can even shape our collective response. Though the idea of a creative guy with his feet on a desk being paid to brainstorm snappy headlines works well in the movies, the reality of the business is staider with a hierarchy of accountability.

The headline is often the duty of copy editors. Writers may suggest a headline, but beyond word count, they may know little about the space in the paper and how the story will appear. A section editor or editor-in-chief may overrule the copy editor before the layout becomes final. Collectively, their efforts don’t go unrecognized – or ridiculed if bold errors are made. In the United States, headline contests are sponsored by the American Copy Editors Society and the National Federation of Press Women.

Because a physical newspaper’s above-the-fold, front-page real estate is the most valuable, newspapers developed a set of grammatical rules for an abbreviated or compressed telegraphic style known as headlinese. The syntactic conventions include:

“Be” verbs and articles (a, an, the) are usually omitted.
Most verbs are in the simple present tense.
The conjunction and is often replaced by a comma.
Surnames are used with no honorifics.
Organizations and institutions are indicated by metonymy: Wall Street, White House, California, etc.
Abbreviations, contractions, and acronyms are used wherever possible.
No periods are used even if the headline forms a complete sentence.

Word choice and word alternatives are also of paramount importance for saving space. This forces editors to be painfully blunt or wildly idiosyncratic in their creative effort to relay as much information in the shortest space possible.

Alternative word choices include:

axe (eliminate)
bid (attempt)
blast (heavily criticize)
hike (increase)
ink (sign a contract)
mull (contemplate)
nab (grab)
nix (reject)
pen (write)
slam (heavily criticize)
tout (promote)

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Famous Headlines

With this abbreviated writing style, the media has been criticized for their overuse of words such as slam, blast, rip, and bash, drawing comparisons to professional wrestling matches rather than sober journalism. This over-reliance on the promise of a titillating or conflict-laden narrative gave rise to the 21st-century internet term clickbait.

FYI: The term clickbait was invented by Jay Geiger in a blog post written in December of 2006.

Headlinese can also go awry. When a headline delivers a message that is unintended or is so ambiguous as to have multiple interpretations, it’s known as Crash Blossoms. The term comes from a 2009 Japan Times news article with the headline, “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms.” The article was later re-titled, “Violinist shirks off her tragic image.”

Kinney Brothers Publishing Famous Headlines 2

Another example of Crash Blossoms is The Times 2019 headline “Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five.” Normally, readers have come to expect the word named to mean “blamed” or “held accountable.” In this case, the headline can be humorously interpreted to mean “Hospitals named after sandwiches, kill five.”

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a few knee-slapping headlines from companies that scrape the bottom of the yellow journalists’ barrel. When doing research for this post, the internet offered no end of historical tabloid headlines so outrageous, you’d have to be an idiot or member of some online cult to actually believe them. Unfortunately, there are numerous faux “news” companies more than willing to take advantage of gullible people.

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Outrageous Headlines

You might also be interested in learning why acronyms are so popular, what the X in LAX actually means, or the reason Pikes Peak is spelled without an apostrophe by law!

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Stories For Young Readers Lesson Packs, from Kinney Brothers Publishing, are complete downloadable lessons with stories, dialogues, grammar exercises, puzzles, answer keys, and audio files! Click here to learn more!

Fun Facts About English #81 – Old English Words

10/29/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Flitterwochen

English Timeline Kinney Brothers Publishing

Old English is the language of the early Germanic inhabitants of England known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Their settlements began in the 5th century and lasted until the end of the 11th century. Only about a sixth of Anglo-Saxon words have survived and make up about 1% of the current English language. On the other hand, 80% of the thousand most common words in modern English come from Old English! They include the words water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she, you, no, and not. Interestingly, many common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin, including tits, fart, shit, turd, arse, and probably, piss.

Here are ten Old English words you can start using to bring some medieval color to your daily vocabulary. You’ll also be doing your part to save endangered words!

anon – shortly; “The concert will begin anon! Make haste!”
bedward – to head to bed; “It’s late and I’m moving bedward!”
crapulous – feeling ill after too much eating or drinking; “I’m feeling totally crapulous today, dude.”
elflock – tangled hair; “After frolicking in the woods, her hair was full of elflocks.”
gardyloo – what you shout before emptying your bedpan out the window; “The drunk yelled, “Gardyloo!” and pissed out the window.”
groke – to stare intensely at someone who is eating hoping you will receive some, especially a cat or dog; “The dog sat groking at me while I ate my sandwich.”
grubble – to feel or grope around for something you can’t see; “She grubbled in the bottom of her purse for her house key.”
overmorrow – the day after tomorrow; “We’ll have to travel all day tomorrow and overmorrow to arrive by Sunday.”
trumpery – things that look good but are basically worthless; “The crowd was taken in by his Madison Avenue trumpery.”
twattling – gossip, nonsense; “The woman is nothing but a twattling old gossip!”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in French words that you should know when dining at French restaurants, the influence of Native American languages in American English, or common words you didn’t know were Spanish!

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Fun Facts About English #80 – Scientist

10/29/2020 by admin

The word science came into the English language via Old French from the Latin word scientia, meaning “knowledge, learning, application, and a corpus of human knowledge.” From ancient times, the pursuit of knowledge included things like grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Previous to the term scientist, a practitioner investigating nature and the physical universe was known as a natural philosopher.

Rev. Dr. William Whewell, who coined the word scientist in 1834, was a British polymath; scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science.

William Whewell Kinney Brothers Publishing

From ancient times, an insular focus on social and religious systems often made little distinction between knowledge of astronomy and math, for example, or other types of knowledge, like mythologies and legal systems. The fundamental break with religion and the onset of the first industrial revolution changed this in the 18th century, giving rise to empirical science and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By the end of the 19th century, with the changes brought about by science, war, and a second industrial revolution, we found ourselves in vastly different, faster-paced lifestyles unlike anything previously known.

Thomas Arnold Kinney Brothers Publishing

Labor, transportation, and communication saw an upheaval in social orders and means that had been in place for centuries. Landscapes and seascapes changed with the introduction of the locomotive, the telegraph, iron-clad ships, and electric lights. Factories tooled and expanded their production lines, becoming faster, and more efficient. The business of business became a science in itself with economies of manufacturing and the cost-effectiveness of human labor as its focus. By the early 20th century, in a period of just ten years, the horse, that stalwart of transport and labor for millennia, was completely replaced by combustion engines.

While the big machines get the most attention, the 19th century also gave us myriad small inventions that were quickly adopted as household and work conveniences. Factories brought us cheaper textiles and ready-made clothing, safety pins, canned food, staplers, raincoats, ice boxes, matches, barbed wire, typewriters, sewing machines, toy balloons, toilet paper, wrenches, cylinder locks, and the zipper.

World Industrial Exhibition Ticket Kinney Brothers Publishing

With the specificity of scientific inquiry came new language and terminologies. Appendicitis, conjunctivitis, bronchitis, and colitis were all 19th-century coinages. Specialized areas of study gave us new fields such as biology, climatology, and ethnology.

Along with 19th-century engineering feats that included the Brooklyn Bridge and the Thames Tunnel, the first trans-Atlantic cable was laid in 1858, and pleasantries were telegraphically exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. The cable was celebrated with souvenir watch fobs, earrings, pendants, letter openers, candlesticks, and walking-stick toppers. By 1880, the simple word hello, previously nothing more than a coarse expression for calling hounds to a chase, became a salutation for “calling” someone on the newly invented telephone.

Brooklyn Bridge Kinney Brothers Publishing

With its break from religious ties, scientists and inventors advanced civilization at such a pace, it truly must have seemed like “three hundred years in the span of thirty.” The next century literally took us to the moon and now a robotic vehicle is sending us data from Mars. Telescopic satellites photograph distant galaxies and star factories, relaying images that are nothing short of breathtaking. Today, 750,000 miles of submarine cables and satellites allow us to communicate, collaborate, and trade on the internet globally. Robots and AI are redefining manufacturing, the efficacy of human labor, and our “relationship” to work. Moore’s Law tells us our world is going to change at a pace and scale even twentieth-century industrialists could hardly have imagined. Buckle up!

To glimpse what’s in store for humanity in the next few decades, take a look at Tony Seba’s RethinkX, a technology think tank that is making data-based predictions for transportation, food industries, and the race toward renewable energies.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like reading about words that are understood all over the world, how the use of acronyms exploded in the past two centuries, or how rebracketing changes the pronunciation of common words!

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Kinney Brothers Publishing’s Communication Series is a graded textbook series for students studying ESL/EFL. Stories for Young Readers and Dialogues for Young Speakers offer readings, exercises, puzzles, and easy dialogues that will get students up and talking. This series is available as printed textbooks, downloadable pdf files, and as digital content on Google Slides – perfect for your online classes!