Language Trainers Blog

One language error that is often seen, not only in high school essays across the USA but in many places that should possibly know better, is the confusion of the two words imply and infer. Many think these two words mean essentially the same thing, but in fact the words are almost antonyms.

Put simply, you can imply an idea or opinion, but you infer an idea or opinion from something. Therefore, the person doing the implying is not the person doing the inferring!

Here’s an example:

Jack’s smile implied that he was having a good time.

Jack’s mother inferred from Jack’s smile that he was having a good time.

Source: voxy.com/blog

Being a bit of a Beatles fanatic, I was very happy to find this interesting infographic from voxy.com. They treated the legendary Beatles album Abbey Road as a linguistic corpus – that is, a body of words. By doing this, they can analyze things like the most often-used words, words per song, compare the songs on side A to those on side B, and so on.

However, it also reveals just why Beatles songs can be (and often are) used as teacher’s aids for those teaching English as a second language. Not only are the songs catchy and easy on the ear, but so is the vocabulary.

Here’s the full infographic (credit to the voxy.com blog):

It reveals that 91.36% of all the words on Abbey Road are found in the General Service List. The GSL is a list of the 2,000 most frequently used English words, which are considered to be useful for all learners of International English.

So if you know someone who might need a little Help! with their vocabulary, buy them a CD (sorry, that’s terrible).

You may have noticed that some people like to tap the space bar twice after finishing a sentence. Why do they do this?

The double space after a period habit comes from the days of typewriters. The problem with typewriters – besides error correcting, of course – was that due to technical limitations, the text was monospaced, also known as fixed-width or non-proportional. That is to say, unlike when you type on your computer, a character like the letter l or i takes up just as much horizontal space as a wider letter like a D or H. This made things look a little messy sometimes, due to there being a lot of white space between certain letter combinations, and not so much between others. Therefore it became a habit for typewriter users to insert two spaces after a period, to make sentence breaks a little clearer.

With the exception of certain monospaced fonts like Courier, modern day word processing has allowed for proportional fonts, which are easier to read and nicer looking. Since typewriters are never used these days, and since most people write with proportional fonts (with the exception of programmers and web designers, since computer code can be easier to parse when everything can be easily arranged in rows and columns), the double space habit has been phased out. However, there are still people who follow the old faithful – usually older than 30 – who insist that periods should be followed by two spaces, not one.

Don’t listen to them: it’s an archaic habit. Most modern word processors will automatically adjust the size of a space following a period to be slightly larger than the space between words anyway – some will even go so far as to correct a double space to a single space.

With the ubiquity of so-called “smart” phones nowadays, people have struggled with tiny touchscreen keyboards and not-so-agile thumbs. Back in the day (when cellphones had these archaic things called “keys”), people eventually learned to type incredibly fast – the current Guinness world record for sending a 160-character phrase on one of these old-school phones is 37.28 seconds, held by a 24 year old Norwegian, Sonja Kristiansen. At some point came T9, where you only needed to press each number key once and a built-in dictionary would work out the word you wanted, which sped up the process of texting further.

It’s rather harder to do this on modern, touchscreen phones, so naturally technology has arisen to assist us. Apple’s autocorrect is perhaps the simplest – start typing a word, and it predicts what you actually want to type, depending on the nearby keys that your phone thinks you ‘should’ have pressed. It then automatically replaces the word once you start typing the next one: however, this is laden with difficulties, especially when typing in a language with as rich a vocabulary as English. While it recognises most names, I can’t for the life of me get my phone to stop correcting my name (Dave) to “face”. Then there’s Apple’s insistence that they don’t want potty mouths using their devices, to the point where the words “shut”, “duck” and “he’ll” are starting to look like swear words to me. Sometimes it just plain gets it wrong: a fine example of that is the image above. “Disney”, being a proper noun, isn’t in the phone’s vocabulary; and rather than letting it slide, it corrects it to the nearest word, which, unfortunately for the context of the message, is “divorce”. There are entire sites built around these kinds of phone faux-pas (“phone-pas”?), like Damn You Autocorrect.

Google’s Android phones have a few similar tricks up their sleeves, but undoubtedly the most popular is the Swype, which is starting to be installed by default on many handsets. Swype is a simple but very effective way of speeding up your typing speed – instead of tapping each letter like you usually would, you swipe your finger from one letter to the next, lifting your finger at the end of each word. The phone reads the shape you make on the keyboard, and interprets the word you’re trying to write, giving you a choice if there are any doubts. It’s amazingly effective, especially as you don’t need to be particularly accurate as you swipe over the letters.

Phones using Google’s Android operating system also have voice recognition – for any application that uses a keyboard, you can also tap the record button and speak your text. While generally pretty impressive, it’s simply not accurate enough to be able to rely on it fully yet – especially if you’re speaking anywhere with any background noise.

The important thing is finding the happy medium between speed and accuracy – it’s simply a very difficult task to do a good job of mimicing a physical keyboard, especially on smaller screens.

In my last post I wrote about how words like “Google” and “Facebook” used as verbs had made it to Lake Superior State University’s annual “banished words” list. It’s an interesting linguistic shift and with the ubiquity of the internet we see and use these words almost every day. “I friended her on Facebook”, “I spend too much time Facebooking”, “Let me just Google that”… and right now, in fact, I’m blogging.

The use of nouns as verbs has been notable in recent years, and is especially so in the fact that, well, it is no longer considered particularly notable. People just do it, even if they are not particularly conscious of the fact that they’re doing a process grammarians refer to as denominalisation. In fact, being able to convert nouns to verbs easily is something that defines English as the language it is – this cannot be done easily in many other languages, where verbs take different forms or have a variety of different stems or endings depending on their purpose in a sentence. These changes, or inflections, are not really employed in English, besides things like adding an s to denote a plural noun, or adding -ing to a verb stem to form the present participle.

For example, in French, regular verbs have 3 different types, those with infinitives that end in -er, -re or -ir. If a French speaker wanted to convert a noun to a verb, they’d have to alter the word – in English, we can just use the same word in a different context, and most people will pick up on it.

Without any official kind of regulation, the English language is free to go where it likes, often dependent on popular usage. It’s interesting to watch new words and phrases come and go, but some words are permanently added to our collective vocabularies – whether they’re in the dictionary or not.

Source: reuters.com

Recently I blogged about how the internet was instrumental in helping to coin and spread new phrases in China. However, as with all things, there is another side to the coin.

The internet has also been responsible for particular other words and phrases gaining notoriety around the world, words that have become so overused and misused that they have made a list of ‘banished words’ for 2011, as collated by Lake Superior State University, a small college in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. They make one of these every year, the first list made back in 1976, when the “winner” was “at this point in time”.

Unsurprisingly, well-known phrases that are ubiquitous on the internet had no delay in being included on the list – the words “epic” and “fail”, often seen together, were shoe-ins for a list of banished words. The word “epic”, originally referring to the works of great Greek and Roman poets for the tales of heroes and Gods that they penned, has now come to be a word that is thrown around so much that it has lost all emphatic purpose. The word was being used (and overused) back when I was at college, all those years ago (“dude, that is so epic“), but today it seems to have reached a critical mass.

Likewise, “fail” (not “failure”), referring to something that has met disaster, has been not only seen uttered by the online masses but has pervaded offline communication, too – a few months ago I saw somebody trip over in a mall, and somebody nearby laughed and condescendingly shouted “Ha! Fail”. The term being used this way originated online, where it was used as a caption for photos depicting something going horribly wrong. For something gone completely and disastrously wrong, the term “epic fail” is often used.

However, these two strong contenders were not hackneyed enough to make the number 1 spot: that was left for the term “viral”.

“Viral,” often used to describe the rapid spreading of videos or other content over the Internet, leads the list for 2011.

“This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined,” Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles said in making a nomination.

With the ever-increasing popularity of social bookmarking and news aggregation sites, where people submit links to online content which increases in visibility on the site the more votes it receives from viewers, the word “viral” (or the phrase “going/gone viral”) is used to describe content that has reached a certain (yet undefined) huge amount of attention from online viewers. A recent example was the video of a homeless man called Ted who has a fantastic radio voice – when I first watched the video it had around 70,000 views and I felt like I was late to the party. The video was eventually pulled citing ridiculous copyright claims, but by that point had amassed well over 10 million views – using the parlance of our times, the video had most definitely “gone viral”.

Unlike “epic fail”, at least the etymology of the term “viral” makes sense – the more people view the content, the more they link it to their friends and contacts, whether by email, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other communication channel they might like. Their friends and contacts are likely to do the same, thus the content spreads like a virus.

Other words and phrases that made the list include “wow factor,” “a-ha moment,” “back story” and “BFF” (Best Friends Forever). The conversion of the words “Facebook” and “Google” from nouns to being used as verbs also gained the ire of the listmakers.

I’m a little relieved to know that I’m not the only one who gets a little irked by the overuse of these kinds of words. Obviously the ‘banning’ of such words is a light-hearted dig at how these words have come to be thrown around too much, but personally, I could do without hearing the word “epic” used in every other sentence sometimes…

“Boo!” is a short sound that all English speakers will be aware of, used to startle or surprise somebody. “Peek-a-boo” is an ever-popular game to play with babies.

Though sources place the origins of the word as from the Latin verb boare (Greek boaein), “to cry aloud, roar, or shout”, it’s a slightly strange word, only used in this way as an interjection.

Like my very first post on this blog, about onomatepoeias and how they differ around the world, it’s interesting to see how expressive sounds like “boo” differ from country to country.

Surprisingly, most European countries retain the “boo” sound, though spelling differs slightly. In Spanish and Portuguese it’s “bú”, German “buuu”, French “bouh”, Dutch “boe”, Swedish “bu”, Norwegian “bø”, and Danish “bøh”.

However, in Asian countries the sound differs. In Japan, “buu” is the sound a pig makes – our “boo” is “waa” to them. In Laos and Thailand they say “ja”, and in China they say “pēi”.

I was recently asked by a family member why the word naïve has two dots above the i, even though they can only ever remember seeing it written as naive. They thought it was an umlaut, which is added to certain vowels in German (usually ö and ü) to change their pronunciation. A German umlaut (or a “trema” when applied to Dutch) implies an “e” sound, and words can be written with or without the diacritic: e.g. the German for “spoon” can be written löffel or loeffel.

However, the ï in naïve is not an umlaut – it’s a diaeresis, also known as a hiatus. An umlaut signifies a compound letter, whereas a diaeresis signifies that a vowel should be taken as a separate sound from the preceding one – that is to say, that the second vowel is not part of a diphthong. “Naïve” is not pronounced the same as “knave”, but more like “ny-eev”; just as the name Zoë (sadly only rarely seen spelled with the diaeresis nowadays) is not pronounced “zo”, but “zo-ee”.

If you read any old books, you may come across diaereses in words that have, over time, lost them. Words like cooperate were originally spelled with the diaeresis: coöperate, reestablish would be rendered as reëstablish, and seer would be written seeër.

Interestingly, both of the terms for describing this linguistic feature (diaeresis and hiatus) have, in themselves, one of their own: diaeresis and hiatus. Perhaps they should be written diaëresis and hiätus!

The diaeresis is a dying diacritic in English – certain publications like the the New Yorker still retain them as part of their house style, but they are rarely seen or used, besides by grammarians.