More BBC nonsense

Last week the BBC published an article by one Megan Lane entitled “Disgust: How did the word change so completely?” which described how the word has changed very little at all.

The article begins:
Originally “disgust” was used to express distaste for rotten food or filth. Today it’s deployed against looters, phone hackers and others whose actions many find morally murky. So how did the meaning change so much?

The author, who appears to have been to university, doesn’t seem to know the meaning of “meaning”. Not a good start. She continues, self-contradictorily:
[Disgust] was not a word at [Shakespeare's] disposal – it only entered the English language towards the end of his life.

Hmm. Not going well. Not wanting to be outdone in this festival of bollocks, up steps Gerry Breslin, who works for a dictionary:
Nowadays people and attitudes can disgust us rather than tastes and smells. The verb has lost its currency, but we do use the adjective disgusting to cover all of these usages.

At which point, with impeccable comic timing, Ms Lane asks “But what disgusts us most?”

It turns out that this isn’t a proper article about language at all, it’s just an advert for a survey the BBC is conducting about morality.

p.s. Notice that Ms Lane’s attempt to be scientific by resorting to the Google n-gram viewer is doomed to failure. As Michael Grant writes in a comment:

 

Actually the word’s spike in popularity started in 1750. Your graph is faulty, due to Google Books’ inability to parse a long S, ſ, as “s”. The spike at 1800 you show is actually when ſ drops out of use. Search for both “disgust” and “difguft” and you’ll see the real result: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=difguft%2Cdisgust&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

 

1996

Back in 1996 the BBC Reith Lectures were entitled The Language Web. The author was Professor Jean Aitchison. Well worth a listen.

The riots: non-threats, minorities and deterrence

A couple of language matters thrown up by the unfortunate events in England in August…

1. On Tuesday the 9th, Haroon Jahan and two other men were senselessly killed in Birmingham. The next day Haroon’s father, Tariq Jahan, said the memorable and affecting line:

“I lost my son – step forward if you want to lose your sons, otherwise calm down and go home.”

Apart from the extraordinary eloquence of Mr Jahan’s speech, grief-stricken as he clearly was, the other thing I noticed, not immediately, but the second time I heard it, was that it wasn’t meant as a threat, and didn’t come across as a threat, but it was certainly open to interpretation as a threat. Perhaps that was what was so remarkable: to turn words that in other circumstances would’ve been seen as a threat, into an earnest and heartfelt plea for peace. Rhetorically, it was quite a feat.

2. One afternoon, listening to Radio WM, I was struck by a caller’s use of the word “minority”. She said something along the lines that she understood that it was only the small minorities that were involved in the riots/looting. It occurred to me that since there is an important difference in meaning between “minority” and “minorities” it’s rather unfortunate that the two expressions are virtually the same and prone to confusion. I wonder of she was the only person who, hearing that only a “small minority” were involved, thought that meant that the ethnic minorities were responsible?

3. Finally, an interesting sentence from the report into the disturbances published today by the chief constable of West Midlands Police:

Neighbours

There was something a bit silly in an Economist article this week:

“Otto von Habsburg, once heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, died this week at the age of 98, days after Hungary handed the rotating European Union presidency to its neighbour, Poland.”

Slovaks will be less than impressed with this, since Slovakia, once part of the Hungarian Empire, is inbetween Poland and Hungary.
But wait, in the comments section, here comes the author of the article to attempt to justify his word choice:

Countdown

22nd March 1995, Series 29, programme 51. I lost the first letters round (I got 7 (“ingrate”), Sue got 8 ) and I never recovered. I remember Carol Vorderman being a very nice person, the dictionary guy being a bit stuck-up, and David Jacobs being very old.

May and Should

Revisiting some old holiday photos, I found this neat sign from a funfair:

Espy’s Eggcorns

What we generally know of today as eggcorns, William Espy called “hobson-jobsons“, and here’s the relevant section from his 1971 book “The Game of Words“:

Excuse me?

I’ve been playing more Scrabble lately, having rediscovered ISC. It’s possible to play games as short as 8 minutes, making it quicker than the new Facebook Scrabble. Anyway, I’m used to a lot of the weird and wonderful words that are allowed, but tonight a new one on me was “BOEP“. I couldn’t find it at all the first time I searched on Google, and thought that maybe it’s a trap street, but then I discovered it’s an Afrikaans word for belly, and adding .za to my search I was able to verify that English-speakers in South Africa do indeed use this word, a word that I assume sounds like “burp”! How do I get rid of my beer boep, indeed…

The Meaning of Louth

Have you heard of Paul Jennings? He was a British humorist*, mainly active in the 50s and 60s. I have one of his books, “Oddly Ad Lib”, which was published in 1965.

This book is mainly of interest for the piece called “Ware, Wye, Watford (1)”. As you can see, it’s a spoof dictionary of English placenames, an idea that was taken up with much success by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in their bestselling “The Meaning of Liff” (1983).

Although I can find no suggestion that they copied the idea from Jennings, the Wikipedia page about the Liff book says that Adams apologised to him.

It appears that there may be more than one version of this piece. A commenter on a BBC page mentions Jennings’ definition for Dunstable: possible. “If ’tis dunstable he’ll do’t, my lord.” (Shakespeare)

*I prefer the American spelling of this word…

Consult Me (1866)

Consult Me is a wonderful book, a kind of Victorian Wikipedia, with entries of varying usefulness for everything from Abdominal Ruptures to Yorkshire Pudding. The entry for Errors in Speech gives a short introduction to the language peeves of that era, some mystifying, some still very familiar today…