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Fun Facts About English #82

10/30/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Nothing made me feel more inculcated into my own language than the idea of stacked adjectives. In an English speaker’s subconscious mind, multiple adjectives have a specific order if accumulative. When they fall out of that order, the brain glitches, and the meaning can be lost, confused, or even misconstrued.

Adjectives

We learn in school that adjectives fall into categories, such as color, size, shape, age, etc. When multiple adjectives are used in a sentence, they appear in one of two types of groups: coordinate or cumulative adjectives.

An example of coordinate adjectives is, “It’s a black, brown, and white cat.” The adjectives are all in the same category of color, can be understood in any order, and must be separated with commas.

“I have two cute little pink pigs,” is a sentence with cumulative adjectives. With each successive adjective, categorical information is accumulated about the noun they modify and don’t require commas between them. The crux of stacked adjectives is the order that they are expected to appear.

Stacked Adjectives

Though there’s nothing semantically different between “a white big house” and “a big white house,” the second aligns itself to an English speaker’s internal ordering of adjectives – the result of a linguistic potty training we don’t even remember. An invisible code snaps into place and an adjectival conga line forms with all the modifiers in a proper queue:

Quantity or number
Quality or opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Proper adjective (nationality, place of origin, or material)
Purpose or qualifier

There are linguists and laymen alike who oppose this strict order, such as size after opinion, arguing that a person is no less correct or clear in saying “a mean little dog” or “a little mean dog.” Nonetheless, patterns are imprinted from an early age and set with children’s stories like My Naughty Little Sister or Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse. (There is the curious case of “the big bad wolf” that doesn’t follow the size after opinion rule. That will be the subject of another Fun Facts About English.)

Adjective order is still flexible enough for changing the character or meaning of an object being described. For example, a “fake Japanese watch” is a knock-off of a Japanese-made watch, but a “Japanese fake watch,” is a thing (dummy, toy, or phony) from Japan masquerading as a watch.

It would be impossible for most of us to elucidate this adjectival order, though we employ it in our language every day. Take the following sentence for example:

“This is a yellow new French cotton handsome jacket.”

It’s difficult to discern what the sentence is trying to convey and comes off like an adjective salad. In their proper order, the descriptors should be aligned thusly:

“This is a handsome new yellow French cotton jacket.”

Of course, one can stack adjectives so high that it becomes a categorical nightmare to mentally sort — whether you’re listening or speaking. This is why it is often recommended that we limit the number of adjectives in a sentence to keep the lingual conveyor moving smoothly.

“This is a handsome new yellow jacket. It’s from France and made of cotton.”

The Test

Imagine that you’re a foreign speaker of English. You’ve spent weeks memorizing adjectival order to answer test questions like the five below. Marvel at the sorting function that activates in your native English brain! The answers are below. Good luck and let me know your score in the comments!

Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
A. We took a ride on a green old Korean bus.
B. We took a ride on a Korean old green bus.
C. We took a ride on an old green Korean bus.
Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
A. My brother rode a beautiful big black Arabian horse in the parade.
B. My brother rode a beautiful Arabian big black horse in the parade.
C. My brother rode a big black beautiful Arabian horse in the parade.

For the next three questions, insert the adjectives that are in the correct order.
I bought a pair of _________________boots.
A. new nice yellow rain
B. nice new yellow rain
C. yellow nice new rain
Put the money into that __________________box.
A. little old round red
B. round little old red
C. little old red round
She was surprised to get a ________________ puppy for her birthday!
A. little beagle cute ten-week-old
B. cute ten-week-old little beagle
C. cute little ten-week-old beagle

Answers: 1-C, 2-A, 3-B, 4-A, 5-C

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Fun Facts About English #81

10/29/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

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!”

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Fun Facts About English #80

10/29/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

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.

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Fun Facts About English #78

10/24/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) is a Federal body established to maintain uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government. The BGN comprises representatives of Federal agencies concerned with geographic information, population, ecology, and management of public lands.

The BGN focuses on the names of natural features, as well as canals, channels, and reservoirs. The BGN does not rule on the names of cultural or man-made features such as roads, streets, shopping centers, churches, schools, hospitals, or airports — unless specifically asked.

The U.S. is the only country with a policy of eradicating apostrophes thanks to President Benjamin Harrison who set up the BGN in 1890. The BGN’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.

The board’s current “Principles, Policies and Procedures” manual states, “The word or words that form a geographic name change their connotative function and together become a single denotative unit. They change from words having a specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.”

In their 113-year history of promulgating names, they have eradicated approximately 250,000 apostrophes. So, Henry’s Fork became Henrys Fork, Pike’s Peak became Pikes Peak, and King’s Mills became Kings Mills.

The government agency has granted only five exceptions, mostly under public pressure. Those allowed use of an apostrophe are:

Martha’s Vineyard, MA
Ike’s Point, NJ
John E’s Pond, RI
Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View, AZ
Clark’s Mountain, OR

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Fun Facts About English #79

10/24/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the name of the letter Z is zed, pronounced /zɛd/. Zed takes its name via French and Latin from the Greek equivalent, zeta. In American English, its name is zee /ziː/. Zee is thought to have originated from a late 17th-century British dialect and influenced by the bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the alphabet.

This British dialectical form was likely what the English Puritan minister and author, Thomas Lye [Leigh, Lee], was drawing from when he published his New Spelling Book in England in 1677; the full title of which is:

A New Spelling Book, Or, Reading and Spelling English Made Easie: Wherein All the Words of Our English Bible are Set Down in an Alphabetical Order and Divided Into Their Distinct Syllabls

At the time of its publishing, Britain was home to a variety of dialectical pronunciations of the letter Z that included zed, zod, zad, zard, ezod, izzard, and uzzard. Samuel Johnson, in his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language published in London in 1755, referenced izzard as the name of the letter. In King Lear, 150 years earlier, Shakespeare had used zed.

Beginning in the 1600s, zee and other British pronunciations made the voyage across the Atlantic to colonial America. By 1883, British historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, noted that zee was mainly found in (formerly Puritan) New England, while zed was the accepted form in the American South. Areas such as Philadelphia vacillated between the two. He also noted that not a few Americans still used izzard, a fact that tickled his British funny bone.

Nonetheless, by the 19th century, zee became firmly established in the U.S. with several important developments. New England born, Noah Webster, published his own American Spelling Book in 1794 with the letter “ze.” In 1828, Webster also published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language asserting the pronunciation of the letter Z as “zee.” Finally, “The Alphabet Song,” copyrighted in 1835 and published by Boston-based music publisher, Charles Bradlee, rhymed Z with “me.”

FYI: The tune of “The Alphabet Song” is based on the 18th-century French song “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman.” It was popularized by Mozart in his “Twelve Variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, maman.” The melody is also used in other children’s songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

It’s worth noting that, like zee, Webster also defined the standards of American spelling for words like theater for theatre and honor for honour,” spellings that were not invented by Webster himself. These were spelling variants in use in the English language, including in Britain. Webster simply chose to institute one variation as a standard.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was undergoing a similar change, namely a push-back against izzard and its variants. Sticking with the etymological legacy of its French origins (zéde), zed became enshrined as the proper name of the letter in British English.

Finally, it’s important to remember, unlike most major languages in the world, English has never had a regulatory body that governed its use – anywhere nor at any time. As for slinging tired arrows at the U.S. for its “unilateral” divergence from British English, let’s reflect on the idea that even today, in a country the size of Louisiana, England has over 40 dialects (compared to 24 in the whole U.S.) and a long legacy of myriad spelling and pronunciation variations. Over several centuries and 4000 miles apart, the notion of a culturally freeze-dried, correct language and orthography simply didn’t exist, on either side of the pond.

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Fun Facts About English #76

10/23/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Kinney Brothers Publishing uncopyrightable

OK, word nerds, this post is for you!

An isogram, also known as a nonpattern word, is a word with no repeating letters or, more broadly, a word in which the letters occur an equal number of times. This category of words can be further subdivided into first, second and third orders, words with repeating pairs, words that can be transposed, words equally divided between the first and second half of the alphabet and… well, you get the picture.

In addition to being an isogram, the meaning of uncopyrightable is ambiguous. It could mean “able of being un-copyrighted” or “unable of being copyrighted.”

Because of the paucity of 15-letter non-pattern words, attempts have been made to add to their numbers by “coining” more of them. They include misconjugatedly, hydroneumatics, and prediscountably. Possible 16-letter words are uncopyrightables and subendolymphatic.

twelve-letter isograms Kinney Brothers Publishing

Isogrammatic Orders

First-order isograms, like uncopyrightable, are words where each letter appears only once. 14-letter isograms include ambidextrously, troublemaking, and demographics.

Second-order isograms, where each letter appears twice, are Vivienne, Caucasus, couscous, intestines, and deed.

Third-order isograms, where every letter appears three times, are deeded, sestettes (a spelling variant of sextets), and geggee (a victim of a hoax).

The longest first-order isogrammatic place name, at 14 letters, is Bricklehampton, a small village in Worcestershire, England.

eleven-letter isograms Kinney Brothers Publishing

If you’re interested in more word oddities and trivia, get your favorite beverage and check out this site by Jeff Miller (who also has a pretty mean collection of dictionaries!) Peruse this compendium of online resources for wordplay, puzzlers, making word clouds, and saving endangered words.

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