enquire, inquire
The spellings enquire/inquire and enquiry/inquiry are interchangeable. Both forms are correct
throughout the English-speaking world. There is a slight tendency to prefer the
en- form for the verb:
We enquired about the times of the
services.
and in- for the noun:
The inquiry opens tomorrow.
but this is a
tendency and not a fixed rule.
In the UK enquiry/inquiry is
pronounced 
as if it were in+choir+ee
whereas the US pronunciation is usually 
See:
pronunciation.
epenthesis
This term
refers to a process which is almost the reverse of syncope. Epenthesis involves
the inclusion of a vowel or consonant medially in a word, often making the word
easier to pronounce:
film>filum chimney>chimminey/chimbley
It most
frequently involves the insertion of a short neutral vowel into a consonant cluster:
and is
frequently found in the English of people whose mother tongues do not have the
consonant clusters found in English or whose mother tongues have a CVCV
structure (i.e. consonant vowel consonant vowel, e.g. nama, pita). English permits a maximum of three consonants in
initial position and four in word final position:
CCCVCCCC strengths
/strεŋkθs/
and in
non-mother-tongue English these clusters are often broken up by epenthetic
vowels so that screw driver, for
example, is realised as ‘sukuru daraiva’.
A form of written epenthesis occurs in words like debt and doubt, which
used to be written dette and dout but had the b inserted by scholars
who felt that the English words should reflect their Latin origins in debitum and dubitare. Many other words had their spellings changed so that
their classical origins might be more easily seen. These include:
adventure (previously aventure) baptism (previously
bapteme) catholic (previously
cat(t)olic) language (previously
langage) perfect (previously parfit)
It seems
probable that until the early seventeenth century these words continued to be
pronounced in the old way but gradually, under the influence of the written
medium, the pronunciation too changed.
See: consonant cluster, intrusive
vowels and consonants, spelling pronunciation, syncope.
epigram, epigraph, epitaph, epithet
The morpheme epi derives from a Greek form meaning
‘upon’. These four words are sometimes confused because of their similar
appearance and because of a certain overlap of meaning.
An epigram originally meant
an inscription (often on a tomb). The word is now used to describe a short,
pithy saying, often in a balanced, antithetical structure:
If the hill
will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.
Francis Bacon, ‘Of Boldness’
As a literary
term, an epigram refers to a short
poem in two parts, the first setting the scene and the second making a concise
and often unexpected point. An example of such verse is:
Go, smiling
souls, your new-built cages break, In heaven you’ll learn to sing, ere here to
speak, Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst
Be your delay;
The place that
calls you hence is, at the worst, Milk all the way.
Richard Crashaw, ‘To the Infant Martyrs’ An epigraph is an inscription in stone, on a coin or on a statue:
E pluribus unum (From many one)
Look on my work, ye Mighty, and despair.
P.B.Shelley, ‘Ozimandias’
The word epigraph is also applied to a motto or quotation at the beginning
of a written work or at the beginning of a section of the work:
Guns don’t
kill people, people kill people.
D.Bolinger, Language
the Loaded Weapon.
An epitaph is
an inscription on a tomb:
Here lieth the mortal remains of X The Lord hath given
The Lord hath taken away.
Epitaph is used in a broader sense to
refer to a commemorative verse such as the one written by Ben Jonson on the
death of his daughter in 1616:
Here lies, to
each her parents’ ruth Mary, the daughter of their youth…
The term epithet has three related meanings, only
the first of which is fully acceptable: 1 an adjective or adjective phrase:
deceptive water
faithful and loving heart
2
the entire noun phrase in which the epithet occurs:
marked men
3 an
insulting or obscene description of a person:
a politician
invariably under the influence of alcohol or someone’s pursestrings
ergative
Ergative comes from a Greek verb
meaning ‘cause, bring about, create’ and the term is applied to the
relationship that exists between such sentences as:
The plane
landed at Lima.
and:
The pilot
landed the plane at Lima.
where the subject of a verb
becomes the object of the same verb
and a new subject is introduced as the cause or agent of the action. The term ergative is new but the phenomenon it
refers to is not. It was introduced to help explain the fact that many verbs in
English could occur in both transitive and
intransitive sentences:
The stick
broke.
John broke the stick.
Among these are
verbs of change, either in position or state, such as BREAK, CLOSE, CHANGE,
COOK, GROW, MOVE, START, STOP, SPLIT, TEAR and their synonyms.
One of the
main stylistic values of such verbs is that they allow the speaker to avoid
naming the agent, in other words, they are very useful in making excuses:
The dinner burnt. The car stalled. My shirt tore.
There is one other phenomenon
related to the subject of ergativity: the increased use in speech and writing
of verbs with non-logical subjects:
The plane is now boarding at Gate 21.
Your windows
need painting. This book reads well.
The dress
washed beautifully.
See: active voice, case grammar,
passive voice, verb.
ersatz
This word was taken into the
language from German in the late nineteenth century and applied to an
artificial (often inferior) substitute or imitation:
This is ersatz coffee. It’s made from roasted acorns.
Don’t you get the feeling that everything is ersatz these days? Ersatz milk that never knew a cow? Ersatz food—all monosodium glutamate and flavouring!
espccially, specially
These adverbs have essentially the same meaning but can have different
functions and emphases.
Especially tends to occur
before a preposition+noun phrase:
We love eating muffins, especially
in the winter.
or before a subordinate clause:
You must eat well, especially if you are working late.
Specially is more likely to occur before a verb or adjective:
It was specially designed to suit their needs.
and can be prefaced by extra-:
It was extra-specially good
of you.
ethnolect
An ethnolect, from Greek ethnos meaning ‘race, people’, implies
the linguistic behaviour characteristic of an ethnic group. The term has been
applied to Black English, Gypsy English
and Yiddish-influenced English but
has wider applications. The speech patterns of a Scot which are habitually
found in the language of other Scots may be regarded as an ethnolect.
Ethnolinguistics studies language in relation
to race.
See: Anglo-Romani, Black English, dialect, Gypsy,
Yiddish-influenced English.
etymology
Etymology derives ultimately from the
Greek word etumos meaning ‘true,
actual’. The word now refers to the study of the origins and history of the
forms and the meanings of words. For example, we know something of the
etymology of Saturday, which derives
from Old English Saetern(es)daeg from
Latin Saturni dies (Saturn’s day). Saturday is etymologically related to saturnic (affected by lead poisoning)
and saturnine (of a gloomy
disposition) but few speakers of English would relate Saturday semantically to
either of these words.
However, not all etymologies are clear.
Some words, such as humbug have been
adapted from languages which are less well documented than Latin and others
like hype (elaborate promotion of a
record, book or film) may have more than one etymology. Hype may derive from Greek hypo
meaning ‘under’, from hypodermic (under
the skin), and from the Greek prefix hyper
meaning ‘over’, as in hyperbole and
hypermarket. Multiple etymologies are commonly invoked
in the explanation of creole vocabularies.
For example, the word ,
which is found in most Atlantic pidgins and creoles related to English, almost
certainly derives from Twi 
meaning ‘soil, earth, clay’ reinforced
by English dirt/dirty.
See: barbarism,
borrowing, dictionary.
euphemism
A euphemism is a word or
phrase that is substituted for one that is regarded as too explicit, offensive
or unpleasant:
dirty unhygienic
dying terminally ill
poor underprivileged
Euphemisms may
be ephemeral in that a new word may take on the connotations of the word that
it replaced and thus no longer serve a euphemistic purpose:
water closet toilet
They may be
specific to a region (UK toilet can
be impolite in parts of the USA where bathroom
or restroom may be preferred) or
to an occupation (politics, the military). They may also vary according to the
speaker’s viewpoint, so that a gunman who is regarded favourably by the speaker
may be referred to as a freedom fighter whereas
if he is regarded unfavourably he may be described as a terrorist.
Euphemisms can be useful. There are, for example, a great many related
to death and dying, suggesting our reluctance in the English-speaking world to
face the fact of non- existence. Some of these are serious and others
humorously dismissive, but all serve the purpose of distancing us from the
reality:
Serious Humorous
be interred
push up daisies go to heaven kick the bucket pass away cash in your chips
Some of the humorous equivalents for die are quite callous, but it is often appropriate to use euphemisms
in expressing sympathy, when gentler expressions are preferred to the starkness
of die and death.
Euphemisms may be described as a means of directing our thoughts away
from unpleasant realities: old age, death, obesity or poverty; or from bodily
excretions.
Euphemisms are part of the language of advertising and can be useful in
persuading groups not to be pressurised into thinking less of themselves:
Big is
beautiful.
Black is beautiful.
If used as part
of military indoctrination, they can make killing more acceptable by providing
dehumanising terms for the enemy:
gooks
jungle-bunnies
terrs
and by describing war as a military campaign to pacify enemies or liberate friends. Weapons are made less frightening by being named rather than described:
Big Boy
Minuteman
or they are referred to as hardware
or systems.
Euphemisms exploit the language’s capacity for metaphorical expansion.
This capacity is in itself neither good nor bad, but we should always be aware
of the power euphemisms can have to reveal our thoughts and our attitudes to
other people.
See: cliché, connotation, curse and swear,
doublespeak, propaganda, taboo words.
euphuism
Euphuism (from a character called Euphues, created by John Lyly in 1579)
is a style of writing popularised in England in the late sixteenth century but
having roots that go back to the fourteenth. The word is applied to a highly
contrived, intricate prose style characterised
by alliteration, elaborately
balanced constructions, carefully selected words, phrases, clauses, rhetorical
questions, patterned comparisons and similes,
classical and scriptural allusions, and by a desire that the prose should
be seen to be ‘crafted’. The following extract is an example of euphuism:
But his minde was so blemished with detestable
qualities, and so spotted with the staine of voluptuousnesses, that he was not
so much to be commended for the proportion of his bodie, as to be condempned
for the imperfection of his minde.
Robert Greene, ‘The Carde of
Fancie’.
See: alliteration, assonance,
discourse analysis, elegant variation, parallelism, style.
every
Every functions as a determiner:
Every person in the
village tried to vote.
The word every
and compounds involving every-
(everybody, everyone, everything) take singular nouns and verbs:
Every detail is
perfect.
Everybody was delighted.
The only exception to this rule is
when every precedes a cardinal
number:
We visit her every three days.
in contrast to ordinals:
We visit her every third day.
Every causes problems of agreement in such structures as:
Everyone should
do———best.
In the spoken medium, the usual
solution is:
Everyone should do their best.
but, since every+body/one/thing is
singular, grammarians insist the construction should be:
Everyone should do his best.
where his comprehends her. Many
speakers object to the sexism implicit in the choice of personal adjective and
advocate the use of:
Everyone should do his or her/her or his best.
or reversion to the preferred
spoken form:
Everyone should do their best.
Many others feel uncomfortable with all the
solutions and are uncertain what to use here and in question tags involving any-,
every-, some-:
Anyone can do it, can’t he/she/they?
Everybody has rights, haven’t they?/hasn’t he/she?
Somebody locked the door, didn’t
they/he/she?
There are no
easy answers to this problem. It seems only reasonable, however, that language
should not be used to offend people or to reinforce stereotypes. If it is true
that ‘the Sabbath was made for man [and woman] and not man [or woman] for the
Sabbath’ it seems equally true that language must serve its users. The simplest
solution and the one that will most easily be accepted (because it is already
the preferred form in speech) is the use of they/their
as the pronominal and adjectival forms triggered off by any-, every- and some-.
See: agreement,
concord, determiner, sexist language.
everyone, every one
Everyone can usually be replaced by everybody. It is singular and refers to
people:
Everyone here is always
in a hurry.
Everybody here is always in a hurry.
Every one can usually be replaced by every single one. It refers to animate beings (excluding human
beings) and to inanimate nouns:
I counted every one myself and not a single sheep
was missing.
He must really
love garden gnomes! He bought every one in
the shop.
except, excepted, excepting
Except as a preposition implies exclusion:
He’ll talk
about anything except religion and
politics.
It is followed by the accusative
forms of personal pronouns:
He likes
everyone except me/us/them.
and by the base form of the
verb:
We’ll do
nothing except eat, sleep, swim and
relax.
In certain regions except can occur as a conjunction
meaning ‘unless’:
Except you do what
you’re told, you’ll not get far.
but the use of except as a conjunction is archaic and
recessive.
Excepting and excepted are used to
imply exclusion in relatively formal structures involving not, without and always as
in:
We’ll all attend, not excepting the
children. We’ll all attend, the children not
excepted.
Excepting precedes the noun phrase and excepted follows it. The uses above are
grammatical but unusual and would be avoided by many speakers.
exclamation
Exclamation derives from Latin ex+clamare meaning ‘to cry out, utter
loudly’ and implies a type of emphasis that
is signalled by certain conventions: intonation
(in speech), the exclamation mark (in writing), by specific words (e.g. how, what) and by changes in word order.
1 A statement may be converted into an exclamation simply by a change
of intonation or by the use of an exclamation mark:
He was furious.>He was furious!
2
How is used in exclamations. We
can have:
(a) how+adjective:
How lovely!
(b) how+adjective+subject+predicate:
How tall they
are!
(c)
how+adverb+subject+predicate:
How
beautifully she sings!
(d) how+subject+predicate:
How he ran!
3
What also occurs in exclamations,
in such structures as:
(a) what+(a/an/the)+noun:
What a fool! What luck!
What the heck/dickens!
(b) what+(a/an)+adjective+noun
What a rotten
day!
What terrible luck!
(c) what+(a/an)+(adjective)+subject+predicate
What courage they have!
What a
fantastic performance they gave!
4
Rhetorical questions are often used as the
equivalents of emphatic statements:
Am I tired!=I’m extremely
tired.
Can he run!=He can run exceptionally well. Was
she angry!=She was very angry indeed.
Negative rhetorical questions
may function as emphatic positives:
Aren’t they sweet!=They are very sweet.
Isn’t he fast!=He’s extremely fast.
5
Wishes expressed with if only are often exclamatory:
If only I’d
known!
If only I
could have my life over again!
Conventionally, a sentence that
is syntactically incomplete is acceptable if it ends with an exclamation mark:
You told!
An ice cube!
Even worse!
In addition,
the heavy use of exclamation marks in the language used to describe a character
may suggest to a reader that the character is young, shallow, emotional or
given to exaggeration.
See: emphasis, punctuation, sentence, style.
exposition
Exposition is a form of discourse. It is
concerned with explaining or clarifying ideas and tends to be marked by
detailed analysis, defini-tion of terms, the use of comparisons and contrasts,
all of which may be supplemented by diagrams, graphs, illustrations or maps.
See: argument, definition, discourse analysis, narration, style.
fact
The word fact is used in a variety of ways, some
of them inaccurate or misleading. In the phrase the true facts as in:
She tried to
unearth the true facts.
the adjective is redundant, since something that is untrue cannot be a
fact.
Often, fact is used as a filler or discourse marker, included
more for emphasis or
linkage than for its meaning:
As a matter of fact, I don’t think so.
In fact, you’re probably right.
The phrase the fact can be obligatory in sentences where a noun phrase is
required between a preposition and the conjunction ‘that’:
*He did not
take account of that she was ill.
He did not take account of the fact that she was ill.
See: discourse
analysis, discourse marker, fillers.
fad words
Various terms such as fad words or vogue words are applied to items that are popular for a relatively
short time and are used more for their effect than for their precise meanings.
Many are emotive adjectives which reveal more about the user’s attitude than
about the object described (brilliant,
fantastic, phenomenal, wonderful) and others are words which are
popularised by the media (ambience,
charisma, macho).
There are fashions in fad words, the following being popular
in the 70s and early 80s: absolutely (yes),
accomplish (do), affirmative (yes), burglarise (burgle), dialogue (conversation), image (reputation), proceed (go), simplistic (simple),
terminate (end), transportation (transport), utilise
(use).
Such choices
resemble elegant variation, but they
are used not only to impress but to be fashionable. Because they are overused,
they take on some of the characteristics of clichés. The following list includes a number of words, many of
them excellent in the right contexts, which have been diminished by
over-exposure: charismatic, democratic,
disadvantaged, importantly, interface, meaningful, ongoing, relevant,
situation, state of the art, third world, traumatic, viable. Such
fashionable words can lose popularity almost
as quickly as
they gain it. They are tokens of a society where novelty often has more appeal
than accuracy.
Just as there are fashions in using
words, so are there fashions in criticising
certain words. Many purists object
to the use of hopefully as a sentence
modifier or of talk with rather than talk to.
The criterion for condemning a particular usage should be the desire to keep
the language flexible and expressive, accurate and effective.
See: ‘chestnuts’, cliché, elegant variation, jargon.
false etymology
A false etymology is an incorrect description and history of a word,
phrase or morpheme. To claim, for example, that ptarmigan derives from Greek because a number of words such as pterodactyl and ptomaine (poisoning) are Greek is a false etymology. (Its actual etymology is the Gaelic word for the
bird, tarmachan.)
Most false etymologies are the result of accident or circumstance. For
example, many of the African words in the first edition of The Dictionary of Jamaican English were traced to Twi, suggesting a
strong Ghanaian influence on Jamaican
English. When the dictionary was
first compiled (late 50s and early 60s) there were very few dictionaries of
West African languages available, but there was an excellent dictionary of Twi.
Subsequent research has shown that a high proportion of the words found in
Jamaican English and Twi are also found in many other West African languages.
A common type of false etymology arises from a wrongly interpreted
morpheme. The bikini swimming suit
was named after the Pacific atoll Bikini but, since it referred to a two-piece
suit, bi- was interpreted as ‘two’
and the term monokini applied to the
bottom half of a bikini.
See: etymology, folk etymology, flammable.
family tree
The terms for
describing family relationships in any language reflect the structure of the
society. For example, mother-tongue speakers of English use only a limited
number of terms, which are differentiated according to generation and also
usually according to sex:
(parent) father mother (uncle aunt) child son daughter (nephew niece)
sibling brother sister (cousin)
(The bracketed
items derive from French.) Other generations are indicated by prefixing
grand (originally
from French) or great:
grandparent
grandmother grandson
great-aunt great-nephew
great-grandparent
and
relationships created by marriage also derive from the same terms:
?parent-in-law father-in-law mother-in-law stepchild stepson
stepdaughter
Such a simple
system is very inadequate in many societies in India, Africa and the South
Pacific and so the English kinship terms are extended by including items such
as co-sister (brother-in-law’s wife)
in India, co-wife (wives of the same
husband) in West Africa and small papa (maternal
uncle) in Papua New Guinea.
The idea of the nuclear family is often an idealisation, taking little
account of changes (like divorce) or the relationships that can arise from
remarriage.
The metaphor of family trees is
often applied to languages, so that it is commonplace to refer to French and
English as ‘related languages’ or to Indo-European as the ‘parent language’ of
both. This metaphor is then often illustrated by means of such tables as:
 |
As a metaphor,
the table above is useful, but it is utterly unrealistic to pretend that all
linguistic change is orderly and that all influences are in one direction only.
Recent experience shows us that even so-called ‘dead’ languages like Hebrew can
be resurrected and can become the mother tongue of people whose ancestors had
abandoned its use. And if we consider the types of English spoken in Jamaica
and Sierra Leone we see considerable similarities which can be accounted for as follows:
1
Many West Africans from the Sierra Leone
region went to Jamaica in the early seventeenth century.
2 In the
late eighteenth century, many Jamaicans went to Sierra Leone and helped to
found Freetown.
3 In the
nineteenth century, some Sierra Leoneans went to Jamaica to work.
4 In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mission-aries from Jamaica went
to various parts of West Africa, including Sierra Leone.
Such
interaction between peoples cannot be limited to the last four centuries and
graphically illustrates the dangers of assuming one-way traffic in linguistic
influences.
See: etymology.
