Damp Squid by Jeremy Butterfield...

[fajrdrako]

The title of this book, Damp Squid, is on a list compiled by The Telegraph of the ten most mangled expressions in English. "Damp squid" for "damp squib" makes sense to me; how often does anyone talk about squibs these days?

This led me to expect the book of this title to be funny, in the style of Bill Bryson, and it's not. But it is interesting. It's about our language, and how it has changed, and how it is changing, and what a difference the Internet makes. Now we (i.e., lexicographers) have an accessible 'Corpus' of two billion words in English. And Bufferfield discusses the meaning of the word 'word', and to use (to be technical and specific) the word lemma, meaning a word and each of its derived forms and meanings.

I was fascinated by the section where he says 'half of all writing consists of

the, is, to, and, of, a in, that, have, I, it, for, be, not, on, with, he, as, you, do, at, this, but, his, by, from, we, say, they, her, she, will, an, or, my, one, all, would, there, their, what, so, up, go, out, who, about, if, get, which, when, more, make, me, can, like, people/person, time, just, know, no, take, him, year, into, see, some, good, could, them, your, think, look, other, than, come, now, then, over, its, only, also, back, after, use, us, two, work, well, our, how, first, because, want, way, even, these, very, any, give

Most of these are 'grammatical' or 'function' words - also known as 'empty words' or 'form words'. One thousand lemmas cover 75 per cent of the Corpus.

Another cool bit: common Viking words in English:

• The body: ankle, calk, fang, freckle, gill, leg, scab, skin, wing, die
  
• Eating and drinking: beaker, cake, egg, knife, steak, tang
  
• Names for people: fellow, husband, lass, sister, swain, tyke
  
• Fish and animals: bull, crake, filly, fry (fish), gelding, gosling, kid, reindeer, skate
  
• Basic words: both, get, give, same, take, they, their, them, till, though, until, want

Some good online words:

• cobswebsite - a site which hasn't been updated for a long time
  
• doppelgoogler - people with your name, which you find by googling
  
• cyberchondria - fear you have a disease you read about online
  
• linkrot - links that lead nowhere

He calls contronyms "Janus words" and lists sanction and oversight - since I collect contronyms (words with two opposite meanings), I was sorry he didn't list more. His point is that meaning becomes clear through collocatons - the words accompanying the word make the relevant meaning clear. Well, hopefully. And 'hopefully' is one of those suspect words, which many people do not accept. Personally, I like 'hopefully'. But 'personally' is another suspect word that many people dislike. And so it goes.

He says 'dove' (as the past tense of 'dive') is pretty much a Canadianism. Who knew?

There's an interesting section on the use of the word 'naked' - used most often by far with the word 'eye'. Some parts of the body are more likely to be referred to as 'bare', others as 'naked'.

He discusses the meaning and use of the word 'grammar': a set of actual or presumed prescrtiptive notions about correct use of a language. Difficult to pin down, that. An 'explosive topic' Butterfield calls it, most discussed by the British, the Australians and the New Zealanders.

The section on hyphens, use of, had me more confused than ever.

"What the dickens" is a phrase first used by Shakespeare. What would we do without Shakespeare?

Comments

[baronjanus]

Zoe: You sanguine about the kind of reception we're apt to receive on an Alliance ship, Cap'n?
Mal: Absolutely. [pauses] What's "sanguine" mean?
Zoe: "Sanguine". Hopeful. Plus, point of interest: it also means "bloody".
Mal: Well, that pretty much covers all the options, don't it?

[fajrdrako]

LOL. I love words. I love Mal, too. And Zoe.

[baronjanus]

WORDS ARE SHINY


hic

[fajrdrako]

So are Mal and Zoe.

[baronjanus]

In a different, yet still awesome, way.

I have not written words about Mal and/or Zoe for quite some time.

[ceruleancat]

Does word frequency really surprise you? There are tons of these lists. And it's fairly well-known, at least in language teaching circles, that a fairly small lexicon covers the vast majority of usage. Number differs depending on the type of corpora one examines, of course.

As for 'dove' - to my knowledge, it's considered an americanism (confirmed by OED). Also, it tends to be more common in spoken than written texts. So, if the book is based on written corpora rather than corpora of oral language, one would get a very different picture.

[fajrdrako]

No, I wasn't surprised by most of the information in the book, but I was amused by some of it. Some details were new to me, but not the overview.

According to this book, Canadians say 'dove' even more than Americans do. I haven't counted, myself. It doesn't sound strange to me, but then, neither does 'dived'.

The language base Butterfield was using was the Internet - not spoken but not actually printed, either - presumably more colloquial than the written word usually is. On the other hand, if we was counting pseudo-words like "LOL" and "pwned" and ROFLMAO, goodness knows what a skewed linguistic sampling it would be.

I was reading a piece of fanfic yesterday in which the author kept saying things like "between he and I" and "he gave it to the King and I" and I was groaning and squirming.

[baronjanus]

Ist thou familiar with this?
danglypartsiple.dreamwidth.org

[ceruleancat]

What does it mean 'the internet'?
That's like saying a scientist bases his research on the world.
If he's giving word counts and statistics, they were found somewhere. You can't calculate frequency in ether; there has to be a countable text. To determine usage according to nationality or dialect, you have to have that type of information. Based on what? Random google searches? Some other material? Some research of this type is done on specific types of websites, blogs, twitter, forums, chats, IMs...
And you can't say that the internet is between oral and written. Again, it depends what texts you look at. Chats lean way more to the oral, but you can't say Britannica or the Times or academic articles are any less written online, and all are equally accessible.