female, male; feminine, masculine

A study of the way these terms are used reveals a lot about popular attitudes to the roles played by men and women.

The words female and male are often used descriptively and objectively to refer to the sex of people, animals, insects and plants:

The people of Papua New Guinea often refer to a female child as ‘pikinini meri’.

The male swan is called a cob.

Female spiders have been known to eat the male after mating. The stamen is the male reproductive organ of a flower.

There is, however, a tendency to regard male as basic and female as derived or parasitic, so that if female (or one of its synonyms) does not precede a profession we are likely to assume that the person is male:

a female pilot a lady judge

a woman doctor

In similar vein, a number of linguists working on feature analysis where, for example, a bull could be described as being:

+noun

+animate

+male

+adult…

have chosen to describe a cow as:

+noun

+animate

−male

+adult…

The terms feminine and masculine are used objectively in descriptions of gender. In many languages, all words are either feminine or masculine and the pronoun used to refer to a word is the equivalent of either he or she:

La table est petite. Elle est…(The table is small. It is…)

Le jardin est petit. Il est…(The garden is small. It is…)

The fact that there is nothing intrinsically female about a table, for example, is illustrated by the fact that the word for ‘table’ is masculine in Irish. Similarly, salt is masculine in French, Italian and Portuguese but feminine in Spanish and neuter in German.

See: gender, sexist language.

fewer, less, lesser

Fewer and less are both comparatives but they are used differently. Fewer modifies

countable nouns and less modifies uncountable quantities:

There are fewer people here because we’ve had less sun this year.

We are eating less sugar and fewer potatoes than before. They have learned even less than we imagined.

The distinction between fewer and less is easily taught and remembered but is a distinction that is probably being lost, with less being increasingly used to modify both countable and uncountable nouns. Even the BBC in a news broadcast reported:

There were less policemen on duty today.

using a form which would have been stigmatised a few years earlier; and The Times used the headline:

Connors to play in less events.

Lesser occurs only as an attributive adjective in relatively formal styles:

He is the lesser man.

Choose the lesser of the two evils.

See: problem pairs.

figurative language

The term figurative language has two related meanings.

1 The first involves metaphor and focuses on what happens when X is expressed in terms normally associated with Y. For example, a soft cushion is an ordinary literal description with the adjective deriving from sensory perception. However, when soft is used to describe something that is not literally soft (a soft job, a soft option, a soft smile) then we are using figurative language. Such non-literal use of language may be observed in all social activities and at all levels of formality. If we limit ourselves simply to body parts, we can see how widely they have been extended from their literal bodily applications:

to nose out the truth the mouth of a river

to shoulder responsibility to foot the bill

It is virtually impossible to speak without using metaphor because metaphor is, in the words of I.A.Richards, ‘the omnipresent principle of language’.

2 Figurative language can also refer to language embodying figures of speech. The commonest figures of speech (apart from metaphor) are:

analogy (birds of a feather)

antithesis (Hair today, bald tomorrow) apostrophe (Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou?) bathos (A man, a master, a marvel…a mouse) climax (the high point of the action)

hyperbole (an Olympus to a molehill)

irony (Marie Antoinette: Now don’t lose your head over these revolutions!)

metonymy (He was called to the bar.) oxymoron (a noiseless noise) personification (the laughing brook) simile (as fat in the forehead as a hen)

synecdoche (Two heads are better than one.)

See: litotes, meiosis, metaphor, paradox, syllepsis.

Fijian English

The Republic of Fiji is made up of a conglomeration of 300+small islands, just over 100 of which are inhabited. The islands were explored by Captain Bligh (after the mutiny on the Bounty), annexed by Britain in 1874 and granted independence in 1970. Today’s population of under one million is multiracial (46% indigenous Fijians, 50% immigrant Indians and 4% made up of Chinese, Europeans, South Sea Islanders) and multilingual,

with English, Fijian, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Gujerati and Chinese being spoken, with radio programmes in English, Fijian and Hindi, and with two daily and one monthly newspaper in English and weeklies in both Fijian and Hindi.

English is the official language of the Republic. It is the main language of commerce, education and government, the one language capable of bridging racial, cultural and linguistic barriers, and Fijians often claim with pride that the new day dawns first in Fiji, making the local English daily (founded in 1869) ‘the first newspaper published in the world today’. The standard norm in Fiji approximates to Standard New Zealand English largely because of three facts: many teachers in Fiji are from New Zealand; the two most important school examinations are the New Zealand School Certificate and the New Zealand University Entrance Examination; and many Fijian students go to New Zealand for tertiary education. There are a number of differences, however, most of them attributable to the influence of the mother tongues.

Phonology

1 All accents are non-rhotic and all speakers tend to speak English as if it were a syllable-timed language.

2 Speakers of Fijian tend to have a smaller vowel inventory than New Zealanders, often eliminating centring diphthongs (as in dear, hair, liar, shore and sure), using /a/ rather than schwa in words such as ago and father, and monophthongising the vowels in goat and gate.

3 Speakers of Indian origin tend to preserve the retroflexion of their mother tongues and to carry over some of the speech habits found in Indian English.

Vocabulary

Local borrowings into English are limited. Fijians tend to use Fijian among themselves and the same is true of other linguistic groups, with the result that the vocabulary is very similar to New Zealand English. Among the commonly-used local words are:

roti—type of bread

taro—edible plant

Grammar

1 Yes/no questions are often distinguished from statements by intonation and/or the use of a tag:

He’s coming today? He’s coming, yes? He’s coming, isn’t it?

Wh-questions, too, frequently have the word order of statements:

When she is coming? Why she said that?

2 Mass nouns such as information are often treated as count nouns:

I have received these informations.

See: English in the Indian Sub-Continent, New Zealand English.

fillers

Unrehearsed speech is often marked by fillers, that is, words and phrases which are unnecessary semantically but useful in preserving a rhythm, avoiding uncomfortable silences and associating the listener with the conversation. Among the most frequently used fillers are:

as everybody knows/says as it were

at this moment in time by and large

from where I stand in (actual) fact

in my opinion/view just let me say/add kind of/sort of right and proper you know/you see

Many stylists condemn fillers as being unnecessary, clumsy or imprecise but there is good reason to believe that fillers contribute to the fluency of speech. Originally, the Français Fondamental course had no fillers but teachers found that conversations were stilted and unnatural until they introduced such fillers as alors, eh bien, and mais vous voyez.

See: catch phrase, phatic communion.

finite

The term finite is applied to a verb (phrase) which takes a subject ([you] sang), can show contrasts in tense ([you] sing/sang) and in agreement ([you] sing/[he] sings) and which can occur alone in an independent sentence or main clause:

[they] sing

[they] have sung [they] are singing [they] are sung

[they] have been singing [they] have been sung

The non-finite parts of the verb are the infinitive (to sing), the present participle (singing)

and the past participle (sung).

Clauses containing finite verbs are called ‘finite clauses’:

when he arrived

whereas clauses containing non-finite verbs are called ‘non-finite clauses’:

on arriving having arrived

See: verb.

first, firstly

Many stylists and publishing houses insist that firstly should not be used. This attitude is illustrated by Eric Partridge’s claim:

firstly is inferior to first, even when secondly, thirdly follow it. (Usage and Abusage 1982:120)

The advocated system is thus: ‘First…secondly…thirdly…finally/ last.’ Since first means ‘preceding all others in time, order or significance’ it is unnecessary to use the -ly form.

Nevertheless, firstly has been used since the sixteenth century, is increasingly widely used today and is acceptable in all but the most formal of styles.

See: ‘chestnuts’.

flammable

Many users of English have trouble distinguishing flammable, inflammable and non- flammable. Flammable and inflammable both mean ‘easily set on fire’ with inflammable being more likely to be used of emotions and flammable of volatile substances. Difficulties arose because the in- prefix in English is often used to negate words:

edible inedible

hospitable inhospitable

and so inflammable became ambiguous.

The normal warning now used to mark chemicals and substances which can be easily ignited is flammable with non-flammable being the negative.

flaunt

Flaunt has several meanings in contemporary English:

1 display oneself in public

2 wave something ostentatiously

3 display something or someone ostentatiously or impudently 4 treat rules contemptuously

The fourth usage probably arose from confusion with flout: He flouted the rules.

and consequently some stylists argue that flaunt the rules is incorrect. Many contemporary writers use flaunt to mean ‘treat contemptuously’ and flout is rapidly becoming archaic.

See: ‘chestnuts’.