bombast
Originally, bombast was a soft material used for padding. By metaphorical
extension it was applied to extravagant, insincere language.
bon mot
A bon mot (plural bons mots)
is a French phrase meaning a witty or clever saying (literally ‘good word’).
Oscar Wilde’s utterances were famous for such bons mots as:
I can resist everything but temptation.
I have nothing to declare but my genius.
The English have really everything in common with the Americans except
of course language.
A bon mot is sometimes confused with le mot juste. The latter implies the
perfect word or phrase in the perfect position.
See: diction,
style.
borrow, lend, loan
Borrow means receive something from someone on the understanding
that it or its equivalent will be returned:
May I borrow your pen?
Could we borrow some sugar?
Lend is the converse verb to borrow
and means give something to someone on the understanding that it or its
equivalent will be returned:
Could you lend me some money until next week?
I won’t lend it to you because you never pay
anything back.
Loan is frequently used as a noun:
They got their
loan in record time.
As
a verb, it is similar in meaning to lend:
Can you loan me some money?
is more
widespread in the USA than in other parts of the English-speaking world. Many
linguistic commentators object to the verbal use of loan although such objections have not stopped the spread of verbal
loan internationally.
See: antonym.
borrowing
The term borrowing is a misleading metaphor, in that borrow implies temporary use of something that is eventually
returned to its owner. Linguistic ‘borrowings’ are different. Items are taken
into one language from another without permission and with no prospect of
return. Additionally, the ‘borrowing’ of, say, restaurant from French does not leave the French language without
the borrowed word. ‘Adoption’ and ‘adaptation’ would be more accurate
descriptions of the processes by which words and phrases from outside sources
are taken into English and modified to conform to English patterns of phonology and morphology.
Strictly, borrowing suggests
a simpler division between native and non-native vocabulary items than actually
exists. Scholars use terms such as ‘native English’ to refer to words of
Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) origin
although these are a product of at least three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the
Saxons and the Jutes, together with any borrowings
these groups may have made before and during their settlement in Britain.
The notion of the ‘purity’ of native English is thus based on a false
interpretation of the ways in which a language develops and changes.
The chief impetus to borrowing is contact between speakers of different
languages, and speakers of English have been extensively involved in such
contacts. A large part of the vocabulary of contemporary English consists of
borrowed rather than native elements. (An examination of the previous sentence
shows that seven words [of occurs
three times] are English in origin and seven have been borrowed from French.) Core vocabulary items such as man, woman, tree, together with function
words such as auxiliaries, determiners, pronouns and prepositions, tend to be
English in origin although, even here, inroads have been made by speakers of
other languages (they and till were ‘loans’ from the Vikings and
the Irish reinforced the use of she).
English has borrowed words
from every group of people with whom English speakers have been in contact. The
earliest borrowings were from the Celtic, French, Greek, Latin and the
Scandinavian languages, but these have been augmented by other borrowings from
Europe (e.g. commando, pretzel),
Africa (e.g. safari, yam), Australia
(e.g. boomerang, kangaroo), the
Middle East (e.g. ayatollah, sheikh),
the Far East (e.g. shanghai, tycoon),
India (e.g. bungalow, jodhpur), the
Americas (e.g. jigger, moccasin, pampas)
and the South Pacific (e.g. taboo, tattoo).
See: foreign words
in English, word formation.
bowdlerise/ize
This verb
derives from the name of Thomas Bowdler (1745–1825), who published an
expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818. Since the classics were often read
aloud to family groups, Bowdler removed anything that he felt might cause
embarrassment. He cut out large sections and modified others, causing Lady
Macbeth, for example, to proclaim ‘Out, crimson spot’ instead of ‘Out, damned spot.’
The term bowdlerise consequently
means delete or modify written passages that are regarded as rude or offensive.
The puritanical urge to ‘clean up’ literature is not limited to fiction. The
lexicographer Noah Webster spent sixty years producing a version of the Bible
from which all the rude and suggestive words and passages had been deleted.
Sometimes bowdlerise is
mistakenly associated with bringing older texts up to date. In 1984 Arrow Books
produced a series called Shakespeare Made
Easy which has been severely criticised by people who forget how difficult
some of Shakespeare’s language is for people today. Admittedly, some of the
poetry is lost, as when in The Merchant
of Venice Portia’s:
The quality of mercy is not
strained…
becomes:
By nature,
mercy is never subject to compulsion…
Such changes cannot be equated
with bowdlerisation because they were
introduced not for the sake of propriety but for comprehensibility.
bring, take
Bring and take are prime verbs that
express not only location but also
the relevance of place in relation to the speaker or the writer. Bring usually expresses movement towards
and emphasis on the place where the speaker/writer is:
Bring your book over
here and I’ll stamp it.
Take expresses remoteness from or movement away from the
speaker/writer:
He took the cargo from Shanghai to
Chicago.
Take your book over there to the
Librarian’s desk.
Bring often refers to the immediate
location, whereas take may imply the
remoteness of a specified location:
I’ll bring it home (back to where one of us is
now). I’ll bring you home (back to where we are now). I’ll take it home (away
from where we are now). I’ll take you home (away from where we
are now).
The emphasis on
place extends to the past and future, so that bring may be used of a place where the speaker was or will be:
I brought that book in last week.
I’ll bring my book to the next class.
However, the relationship between bring
and take is not a simple
dichotomy in that there can be considerable overlap in usage:
I took that book in last week.
I’ll take my book to the next class.
The choice of take rather
than bring emphasises that the speaker
is not at the specified place at the time of speaking, either physically or
emotionally.
All words in English depend for their meaning on the interlocking web
of patterns in which they can occur. Take
has a duality in that it contrasts with both give and bring:
She gave him $10 and he took it.
She brought the books over and he took them home.
but whenever take is used it tends to imply movement,
physical or emotional, away from the speaker.
The best rule for using bring and
take according to the canons of Standard English is to concentrate on
the speaker. When the action involves proximity to the speaker, use bring; when it is remote from the
speaker use take.
See: alienable, prime verbs, speaker orientation.
British
British is a very ambiguous term,
particularly when problems of nationality and citizenship are involved. It can
refer to residents of the British Isles (that is of the
Republic of
Eire as well as England, the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales)
and to citizens of ex-British colonies who are entitled to a British passport
but not necessarily to residence in Great Britain (that is, England, Scotland,
Wales).
English people tend to use English
when British would be more
accurate, often referring to ‘an English passport’ (there is no such thing),
‘English place-names’ (many of which are Celtic) and to ‘English’ when they
mean British English.
Americans
often use ‘British English’ to refer to varieties of English which are non-
American, concentrating on such differences as spell-ings: US center, check, as opposed to centre, cheque; grammar: US different than, gotten, as opposed to different from, got; and different words
for essentially the same thing: US call
collect, elevator as opposed to reverse
the charges, lift. Since these differences are found in Australia, Eire,
India, parts of Africa and New Zealand as well as in Britain, a more
appropriate term should be selected.
See: Anglo-English, Anglicism, Irish
English, Scottish English, spelling, UK and US words, Welsh English.
burst, bust
Burst is unchanged in the past tense and
past participle:
She burst the balloon
yesterday. She has burst another
balloon.
In the UK, bust is
nonstandard as a past tense or past participle but acceptable, especially in
casual speech, in such fixed expressions as:
There’s been a
bust-up.
‘June is busting out all over.’
In the USA, bust derived from
burst and is standard. The past tense
and past participle may be either busted or
bust.
See: -ed, -t forms, problem pairs.
business and finance
Although a
great deal of international trade takes place through the medium of English,
there are some differences between UK and US terminology that can cause
problems for the unwary. The commonest of these are:
UK US
bank
guaranteed cheque certified check Bank of England Federal Reserve bill, account account
bill (restaurant) check
building
society thrift bank current account (bank)
checking account deposit account (bank) savings account drapery dry goods
Foreign Office State Department Gilt-edged stocks Government stocks Hire purchase installment plan
nought, zero zero
phone
someone call someone up reverse (telephone) charges call collect
shares stocks
shop assistant sales clerk
solicitor lawyer, attorney
stocks bonds
ten pound note ten dollar bill
See: Americanism, Anglicism, UK and US words.
but
But is a co-ordinating conjunction
joining contrasting units of equal grammatical rank. It can link
adjectives, adverbs, phrases and sentences:
(She was) very quiet but remarkably efficient. (adjectives)
(He worked) quietly but efficiently. (adverbs)
(He didn’t lecture) on the given topic but on another equally interesting one. (phrases)
Harold defeated Tostig but William defeated Harold. (sentences)
But has a number of other uses:
1 It can
introduce a clause after such fixed negative expressions as ‘nothing would
do/please/satisy him/them’:
Nothing would
satisfy them but we should stay
overnight.
2 It can
function as a preposition, usually capable of being replaced by except:
He eats nothing but bananas.
She loves everyone but me.
3
It can occur as an adverb in formal, somewhat
archaic styles:
She had but one child and now he too was ill.
Modern stylists would prefer only to but.
4
It occurs as a sentence modifier in
Australian and Northern British English:
You have to
admire him but.
In the past,
sentences beginning with but were
condemned as stylistically unacceptable. Initial but is now acceptable in informal styles. As a stylistic device,
however, it should be used sparingly.
See: although, and, co-ordination, conjunction, word order.
calque
A calque is a loan translation where the word or phrase is
translated morpheme by morpheme from
one language into the other. Calques from German include:
Battenberg>Mountbatten
from French:
cordon bleu>blue ribbon
and from
Latin:
paganus (person from heath)>heathen
Calquing is a
marked feature of the English-related pidgins
and creoles of West Africa and the New World where such calques as the
following are found:
day clean—dawn
dry eye—brave (of a man),
brazen (of a woman)
suck teeth—disparage,
insult See: creole, pidgins and creoles.
Cameroon English
Cameroon has often been described as
‘Africa in miniature’. Like Africa, it is multilingual (with over 200
indigenous languages for a population of under 9 million); it has known three
colonial masters (Germany, France and England) as well as trading links with
Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands; it has two official languages (French and
English); and it has learnt the value of lingua
francas (pidgin English, Ewondo Populaire, vehicular Hausa).
The following types of English are found in Cameroon:
1 Standard Cameroon English
(SCE) 2 SCE with francophone influences
3
pidgin English (a much-used lingua franca,
spoken by perhaps 50% of the population and becoming a mother tongue in some
urban communities)
4
broken English
Since SCE is the variety favoured by radio announcers, it will be
described here. Cameroon Pidgin will also be discussed because it is the most
widely used language in the country and a language of considerable literary potential.
Phonology
1 SCE is non-rhotic.
2 There are
fewer vowel contrasts in SCE than in Received
Pronunciation (RP).
Additional homophones are created by the merging
of:
/i/ and 
to /i/, seat and sit are both /sit/
/ε/ and 
to /e/, get and gate are both /get/
/æ/
and 
to /a/, cats and carts are both /kats/ 
and 
to 
, nought
and not are both 
/u/ and 
to /u/, fool and full are both
/ful/ 3 There are no central vowels or centring diphthongs:
>/a/, better>/beta/
/з/>/e/, bird>/bed/ 
>/e/, but>/bet/ 
/ia/, here>/hia/ 
>/ea/, dare>/dea/ 
>/aia/, fire>/faia/
>/aua/, power>/paua/
4 /θ, ð/
are frequently replaced by /t, d/:
that thing>dat ting
5 There
is a strong tendency to devoice /z/ and /bz, dz, gz/ in word-final position,
thus causing the following pairs to become homophones:
nips and
nibs>/nips/ carts and cards>/kats/
lacks and lags>/laks/
6
Consonant
clusters tend
to be split up, especially in word-initial position:
stop> 
trouble> 
7
There is a tendency to nasalise vowels in
words which occur in both English and French and which are nasalised in French:
baton>
mason> 
patron> 
8
Under the influence of the vernacular languages and French,
English tends to be spoken as if it were a syllable-timed language. Thus, all
four syllables in decolonise receive
equal stress.
Vocabulary
The main
influences on the vocabulary of SCE are: 1 the vernacular languages, giving
items such as:
achu (type of food)
fon (chief)
yaa (chief’s wife, female with
power) 2 French, giving loans such as:
bon de caisse (cash voucher)
polycopy (photocopy, handout)
vignette (road-tax disc)
3 Pidgin,
contributing words such as:
ashia (empathy
formula) cry-die (a wake) pikin (child)
4
Calques from the local languages and French:
corn-stick<kichi mbwasong=cob red-man<kim bang=European
certificate of individuality<certificat d’individualité=affidavit
court of first instance<cour de première instance=magistrate’s
court 5 US English is becoming
increasingly popular and has provided such items as:
elevator—lift guy—man kickback—bribe movies—films
Grammar
The grammar of SCE is essentially
the same as other international standards but the following local usages are
common:
1 the
substitution of all for both:
Dynamo and
Union, all Littoral teams, are to
meet in the semi-finals.
2
the tendency to use certain adjectives as
verbs:
She has been pregnanted.
They have easied it.
3 transforming
mass into count nouns:
equipments (pieces of equipment)
woods (pieces of wood, blocks)
4
the hypercorrect use of -ed in the past tense of words such as:
broadcasted
shedded
5 names
are usually written as surname+given name:
Mr Ngowah
William
Cameroon Pidgin
English has been widely used as a lingua franca throughout the country at least
as far back as the German annexation (1884), and is the lingua franca of the
police force, of prisons, and of urban schoolchildren at play. Although widely
used and greatly loved, it has not been officially sanctioned by the government
or given any status in the education system. The following extract from a story
illustrates some of the features of the language:
dei bin de nau, disaid sei i go bigin mek bif. I wan
go i hamahama elefan di bush.
Once upon a time, Tortoise decided that he would
play a trick on an animal. As he went about he met a huge elephant eating in
the forest.
See: African English, pidgins and creoles, West African English.
Canadian English
Canada has a
population of 24.4 million, mostly of European origin, but with sizeable
communities of Amerindians (250,000) and Inuit (17,000). Officially, the
country is bilingual in English and French, but there is little functional
bilingualism in Canada, largely because with the exception of the Province of
Quebec the country is overwhelmingly anglophone. (In 1976, 81.5% of the
population of Quebec claimed French as their mother tongue whereas the
percentages for the other provinces were: British Columbia
1.6%, Alberta 2.5%,
Saskatchewan 2.5%, Manitoba
5.5%, Ontario
5.7%, New Brunswick 33.6%, Prince
Edward
Island
5.6%,
Nova
Scotia
4.5%
and
Newfoundland 0.5%.)
Canadian English is becoming
increasingly assimilated to US norms.
There is free access along the 4,700 miles of shared border; many US radio and
television programmes can be received in Canada; and over 75% of Canadians live
within one hundred miles of the border.
As in most communities where English is spoken, we find regional, class
and ethnic differences. The folk speech of Herring Neck, Newfoundland, is very
different from that of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan; the English of Quebec shows
markedly more influence from French than does the English of British Columbia;
immigrants from the Caribbean continue to use creole features; and working-class speakers are usually
distinguishable from their middle-class contemporaries. The Canadian English of
the media is, however, both influential and relatively homogeneous and it is
this variety which is described.
Phonology
1 The entire country is rhotic; post-vocalic ‘r’ as in war
and ward is prestigious.
2
When the diphthongs and occur before voiceless
consonants, there is a strong tendency to replace them with 
and producing
such contrastive pairs as:
pie pipe house(v) house(n) prize price
loud lout
side site mouth(v) mouth(n)
3 Canadian English follows the US
model in:
(a) the use
of /u/ rather than /ju/ after /t, d, n/ as in:
 |
/du/—due
/nuz/—news
(b) the
voicing of /t/ between vowels and between /r/ and /t/:
 |
(c) the
deletion of medial /t/ after /n/:
(d) 
the use of syllablic or
where UK speakers use 
(e) the use
of /e/ rather than 
in the stressed vowel of tomato. 4 Canadian English follows the
UK model in preferring:
(a)
/i/ rather than /ε/ in the first vowel of:
 |
(b) 
rather than in the second vowel of the prefixes:
(c) /u/
rather than 
in:
/rut/—route
Vocabulary
1 Among the words borrowed from
Amerindian and Inuit languages through Canadian English into world English are:
caribou
pemmican toboggan (Amerindian)
igloo kayak parka (Inuit)
Most Canadians now use Inuit rather than Eskimo. (The word Eskimo is
believed to derive from an Amerindian form meaning ‘eaters of raw flesh’.)
2 Canadians use riding to mean ‘parliamentary
constituency’.
3 Canadians
tend to follow US English usage in vo cabulary, preferring:
US to UK
bathroom lavatory
clerk shop assistant
gas petrol
kerosene paraffin pantyhose tights pavement road sidewalk pavement truck lorry
4
In a few instances, Canadian English follows
UK usage, preferring:
UK to US
railway railroad
tap faucet
tin (of beans) can (of
beans)
5
In spelling, Canadian English tends to follow
UK norms, preferring:
UK to US
labour labor
programme program theatre theater
Grammar
Speakers of Canadian English
increasingly use the grammar of the standard language. The following features
are apparent:
1 the use of what has been
called ‘narrative eh’ as a tag in
speech:
Are you listening, eh? Well
those shoes I bought, eh, are the
most uncomfortable I’ve ever worn, eh.
They hurt everywhere, eh, at my
toes, eh, and my heels.
Among younger Canadians, eh is often replaced by right:
He came in, right, walked
straight up to me, right, and stuck
out his tongue.
2
the nominative form of pronouns (especially I) is often used in structures involving
you+and+pronoun:
Between you and I/he…
He came in to
see you and I.
The cost has
to be borne by you and I.
3 Have you got is preferred to Do you have:
Have you got any fresh
fruit?
4
French word
order of noun+adjective is seen in the names of the Great Lakes:
Lake Ontario Lake Superior
and in a number of government
agencies:
Agriculture Canada External Affairs Canada
See: UK and
US English.
cant
Like argot, cant is often used as a synonym for jargon. However, cant has
a more specific meaning in that it is the term applied to speech or writing
associated with a doctrine that is suspect. It may thus imply hypocritical
piety, unacceptable political dogma, the secret language of the underworld or
the stereotyped language of religious, political or scientific writers with
whom we do not agree. When cant is
used, it implies not only disagreement with what has been said or written but
disapproval of the author.
See: argot, etymology, patois.
Caribbean English
In this
account, the Caribbean comprehends a
number of countries stretching from Bermuda, the Bahamas, through the Cayman
Islands, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Leeward Islands (including
Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Monserrat, the Virgin Islands), the
Windward Islands (including Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent),
Trinidad and Tobago, the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao) and the mainland
coastal areas of Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guyana and parts of Suriname.
English is the official language of Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Caymans, Jamaica,
the Leewards, the Windwards, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize and Guyana and in
these countries it is spoken in a range of forms from standard to creole by approximately 5 million
people. In coastal areas of Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Suriname English-related
creoles are spoken, and in the other countries English is acquired by many as a
second language. Throughout the region, therefore, we find a continuum of
interlocking variants, ranging from creoles (which are the mother tongues of
the majority of the population) to Standard English. (Such a spectrum of
Englishes is often called ‘a post-creole continuum’.) In the Virgin Islands, US English is the model. In all the
territories historically linked to Britain, UK norms prevail but, because of the physical proximity of the USA and
its penetration of the media, US English is becoming increasingly influential.
This description concentrates on the standard end of the spectrum.
Phonology
1 The accents of Barbados and the Virgin
Islands are rhotic; Jamaican and
Guyanese speakers occasionally pronounce post-vocalic ‘r’; the remaining speech
communities are non-rhotic.
2
All syllables are more equally stressed in
the Caribbean than in the UK or the US and there is more variation in the
intonation of sentences.
3 The diphthongs
and 
as in gate and goat are monophthongised to /e/ and
/o/.
4 Schwa
rarely occurs in relaxed speech. In words ending in -er, the vowel is often
/a/, thus:
batter is often /bata/
fitter is often 
In other unstressed syllables,
either the full, unstressed vowel occurs:
instrument is 
panted is /pantεd/
or 
is used:
flannel is 
5
The centring diphthongs 
and 
(or their rhotic
equivalents and /εr/) are often merged so that beer and bare are homophones and realised as /bea/ or /bεr/.
6 /θ, ð/
are frequently replaced by /t, d/, producing extra homophones in tin and thin, with and wit, den and
then, breed and breathe.
7 
The -ing form of the verb is
frequently realised as 
with:
becoming
8
Consonant
clusters in
word-final position which end in /t, d/ are often simplified. Thus:
act occurs as
/ak/ best as /bεs/ build as 
sand as /san/ talked as 
9
There is a tendency to substitute /kj, gj/
for /k, g/ when they are followed by back vowels:
cash>/kja∫/
gas>/gjas/
Vocabulary
1 Speakers
from the Caribbean use the full range of the standard vocabulary. The region
has, however, been settled or visited by many different people, all of whom
have left linguistic traces on English. From African languages come calalu (vegetable), and duppy (ghost), from Arawakan comes matapee (basket), from Carib cayman (alligator), from Dutch koker (sluice), from French bateau (boat), from Hindi dhal/dhol (yellow pulse), from
Portuguese brigah (cocksure,
disdainful of others) and from Spanish mantilla
(head covering for a woman).
2 Many English words have been extended
in meaning:
mash up can mean ‘destroy, ruin’
passage can mean ‘money to pay the fare with’
3
Occasionally, tone is used to distinguish meanings, thus station pronounced with a mid tone followed by a high means ‘the
railway station’, whereas when pronounced with a high tone followed by a mid
tone it means ‘police station’.
4 Rastafarian terminology changes regularly but items such as Babylon (oppression), deaders (meat) and dreadlocks (type of ringlets) are found throughout the Caribbean,
as well as in the UK and the USA.
Grammar
1
Structures involving active voice predominate. Where passives occur, they usually
involve GET:
He got killed.
The car got mash up.
2 Will is often replaced by would, especially when there is doubt about the proposition:
Would you buy me
some new dothes?
3 Serial verb constructions are common:
Child, run come go bring those hats.
4
Because of the reduction of consonant
clusters and because of the influence from the creoles, the past tense, past
participle and plural markers are occasionally
deleted:
The march has
been ban. They ban it yesterday.
He went round
all the place but there were no job.
5 Up is added to a verb to indicate intensity or frequency:
He beat up the boy.
He ate up his food every day.
6
Questions are often in the form of statements
but with rising intonation:
That is your
ball?
Often right is used as a question tag:
You lost it, right?
7
Collective nouns such as government and jury always
function as singulars:
The government is tackling the problem of
unemployment.
8 My own and your
own are often preferred to mine and
yours.
