folk etymology
Folk etymology is the alteration of a
learned or unfamiliar word by ordinary users of a language. The alteration
involves reinterpretation towards a similar sounding, more familiar word or morpheme so that the term makes more
apparent sense to the user. Sill is
an unfamiliar word in Northern Ireland and so window sill has been transformed into windy stool; and in Cameroon, blindfool
replaces the less meaningful blindfold
in both literal and metaphorical uses:
We used smoke
to blindfool (i.e. mesmerise) the bees.
Folk etymology
has always been involved in vocabulary change and development. Forlorn hope, for example, has been
reinterpreted from Dutch verloren hoop meaning
‘a lost group’, and bridegroom has
two morphemes which are meaningful to contemporary users of English
(bride+groom) but the second involves folk etymology. Bridegroom comes from Old
English bryd (bride)+guma (man) but guma was replaced because it ceased to be meaningful. And the
exclamation Great Scott! is probably
an anglicisation of Gruss Gott!
reinforced by the prestige of Scott of the Antarctic.
Contacts between speakers of
different dialects or different
languages increase the likelihood of folk etymologising. In the Isle of Man, we
find lemoncholy (melancholy), in
South Africa coronations (carnations),
British soldiers referred to Ypres as Wipers,
damsel jam and Welsh rabbit are
widely used by dialect speakers in England for damson jam and Welsh rarebit,
and in Ireland and parts of the USA we find such examples as:
cowcumber for cucumber piano rose for peony rose
sparrow grass for asparagus
Folk etymology can provide productive morphemes. The compound Hamburger steak, for example, was
clipped (see clipping) to hamburger. Coincidentally, ham looked and sounded like a
description of the meat, and burger began
to be treated like a free morpheme, giving such forms as:
baconburger beefburger steakburger turkeyburger
or indeed a burger for any kind of heated meat
sandwich.
Although some folk etymologies, like bridegroom, enter the standard language, the pressure of written
norms usually limits folk etymologies to speech and oral cultural traditions.
See: etymology, false etymology.
food and drink
With food and drink as with so many areas of culture there are
considerable differences in UK and US
terminology. The commonest differences are listed below:
UK USA
angel cake plain cake, angel food cake
Aubergine eggplant
Bap hamburger bun
biscuit (sweet) cookie
Chips French fries
Courgettes zucchini
Crisps chips
Grill broil
Jam jelly
Jelly jello
Kipper smoked herring
Marrow squash
Milk cream
Mince chopped/ground hamburger meat neat (i.e. without water) straight
Porridge oatmeal
Scone biscuit
single cream table cream
soft drink soda, pop
Spirits liquor
Sultanas raisins
Sweets candy
swiss roll jelly roll
Swede rutabaga
Takeaway fast food
whiskey cocktail highball
with ice on the rocks
Some foods are characteristically
British:
bubble and squeak (fried mashed potato and cabbage)
Cornish pasty (meat and vegetables in pastry)
Lancashire hotpot (type of stew with layers of meat, onions and potatoes)
stout (type of beer)
Yorkshire pudding (baked batter eaten with
meat and gravy)
(An interesting phenomenon
is the proliferation of words for types of bread: bap, barm bread, bridge roll, bun, cob, granary, oven bread, shuttle,
soda bread…many of which are regionally marked.)
There are
also some characteristically American foods:
blueberry pie corn bread
hominy grits (cooked corn kernels)
pumpkin pie
root beer (carbonated soft drink)
See: Americanism,
Anglicism, meals, UK and US words.
footnotes
A footnote is a reference or explanation
usually occurring at the bottom of a page. The style of a footnote should
follow established conventions so that the reader may use the information easily
and profitably. This style should also be consistent with that used for
references and bibliographical details.
It is essential to acknowledge your sources not only when you quote
directly from another writer but also when you rephrase or paraphrase what
someone else has written. Cite the original source of a quotation, naming a secondary source only when the primary source
is unobtainable. If you do not acknowledge your debt to another writer you may
be accused of plagiarism. It is not,
however, necessary to give references to familiar sayings, line references for
very short poems, or detailed information about something that is widely
accepted as common knowledge.
Footnotes must be numbered consecutively throughout an article or
chapter. Never number notes by pages. Type each number in arabic numerals,
slightly above the line, after any punctuation. Do not use full stops or
parentheses with the footnote numbers. The footnotes themselves may be typed at
the end of each chapter or article. If they are printed in this position they
are often known as endnotes. If
footnotes are typed at the foot of the
page (in a dissertation, for
example), they should be in single spacing with a triple space between the text
and the first footnote and with a double space between footnotes. The first
line of the footnote should be indented five spaces, and the footnote number
should be slightly raised and separated from the note by one space.
See: abbreviations, bibliography, dissertation, quotation, typescript.
foregrounding
Foregrounding is a stylistic term with two
main implications.
1 Its broader implication refers to ways in which linguistic details
may be emphasised. This type of foregrounding involves deviation from an established norm
and may be illustrated by the disruption of the rhythmic pattern in a poem,
by heavily punctuated passages in a novel, by the occurrence of patterned alliteration, by the use of incongruous
collocations or by violating the set
conventions for the representation of speech and narrative. It is a means of
establishing a hierarchy of significance whereby the reader is consciously or
unconsciously made aware of the structural and/or semantic priorities of the writer.
In ‘The Outing: A Story’, for example, Dylan Thomas uses unconventional
narrative techniques to foreground his ideas:
If you can call it a story. There’s no real
beginning or end and there’s very little in the middle. It’s all about a day’s
outing, by charabanc, to Porthcawl, which, of course, the charabanc never
reached, and it happened when I was so high and much nicer.
2 The narrower
meaning of foregrounding (or fronting) refers to changes in word order whereby an object,
complement or other sentence component is shifted to the beginning of a
sentence or poetic line for emphasis:
A fool he called me.
A gold medal
was what he won. It was the butler he saw.
A good example
of foregrounding is attributed to St Philip Neri who, on seeing a criminal
taken to the scaffold, said:
There but for the grace of God go I.
Foregrounding
is frequently used for emphasis in poetry:
No longer
mourn for me when I am dead, Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give
warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile
world with vilest worms to dwell.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 71
It often
occurs in informal speech:
That I must see.
Found her, did you?
and in humorous
prose (often combined with other devices such as functional shift and word
play):
The spectacle that followed
is already a legend of awfulness.
A man called Wolper, famous for such things, devised
it, and this was, one trusts, his masterpiece. Wolper than this we do not get. This
was the Wolpest. You thought 76 trombones was the conventional showbiz
hyperbolic maximum? Shame on you! Wolp had ordered 96. Hell, there were 48
sousaphones. And 144 trumpets. A gross, I
believe it’s called.
Observer, 5 August,
1984, p. 22 See: cleft sentence,
deviation, Irish English, Yiddish influences.
foreign words in English
English
speakers have always borrowed words from other languages and indeed an
examination of the foreign words found in
English provides interesting insights into the contacts made by speakers of
English and their attitudes to the people and items contacted.
The process of anglicising the pronunciation (and sometimes the
spelling) of a borrowed word is erratic. Words in popular use (café, parka/anorak) are easily
absorbed, whereas those limited in use may retain their non-English spelling
and pronunciation (Angst, consommé, sotto
voce). In the written medium, words that are still regarded as foreign are
italicised. Pronunciation is a useful guide to what is and what is not regarded
as foreign although it is not infallible. (Some speakers, for example, still
rhyme trait with day while others rhyme it with date.)
Another guide is pluralisation and agreement (cactuses, this data is available…, lingua francas).
Some speakers include foreign words in their English for reasons of
prestige. French and Latin, for example, are still associated with culture,
education and privilege and it is not uncommon in parliamentary debates in
Britain to find an educated speaker attempting to put an uneducated colleague
at a disadvantage by using such fixed phrases as:
a fortiori (with stronger reason) a priori (from
the former) amour propre (self
esteem) bête noire (pet hate)
The inclusion
of such phrases may be more a symptom of snobbery than of education and may be
more useful for communicating attitude than meaning. There is no intrinsic
merit
in peppering
one’s English with foreign words or phrases. Many have become part of the
language and may be used freely but others that are intended to put a listener
at a disadvantage should be avoided.
See: accent marks, borrowing, italics.
foreword, preface
A foreword is an introductory essay or
statement at the beginning of a book and is normally written by someone other
than the main author of the work. In contrast, a preface is an introduction to a book, article or thesis written by
the author. A preface usually includes the author’s aims, refers to any points
of difficulty or dispute, comments on any assistance received, and acknowledges
permission to reprint anything in the copyright of another author.
formal English
In the spectrum of English styles, formal English is at the opposite end to slang. It is characterised by particular choices at all levels of
the language: slower speech with less assimilation
and vowel reduction; choice of words (acquire/receive
instead of get, enjoyable instead
of nice); formulas (Dear Sir/Madam,
Yours faithfully); syntactic choices (infrequent use of first person
singular pronoun, full negative form not,
occurrence of passives); and longer, more complex sentences. Formal English
is suitable for academic writing, business letters,
job applications, speeches, and in contexts in which ceremony and
impersonality predominate.
Formal English is in no way superior to informal English. Each is
appropriate to a particular context and the use of formal English in a context
where it is not required is as inappropriate as the wearing of a heavy coat on
a hot day.
See: colloquial English, register, style.
formula
The plural is formulae in scientific or formal English and formulas in
other contexts. Formulaic patterns occur in all languages and help individuals
to deal with conventional encounters. Often, slight variations in a formula can
indicate different levels of formality
: Dear Sir is formal and impersonal, whereas Dear Bob is informal and friendly.
Many formulas
are phatic, easing interpersonal transactions: Hello!, Hi!, How are you?, How do you do?, You’re welcome! I’m sorry
for your trouble/I’d like to express my sympathy on your recent bereavement. Some
are not meant to be taken literally. How
do you do?, for example, does not invite detailed information on one’s
health.
See: phatic communion.
functional shift
Functional shift describes the movement of a
word from one class to another. For
example, a noun such as sandwich is
now frequently used as a verb:
I was sandwiched between two of the biggest men I’ve ever seen.
A similar shift is apparent with
trade names as in:
Will you hoover the floor for me?
and:
Did you Maclean your teeth today?
The shifts can be from noun
to verb (as above), verb to noun (drivein,
take-away), adverb to verb (He has
upped the prices.), adjective to noun/verb (This green has a lot of yellow in it./The Greening of America), conjunction
to noun (You and your ifs and buts!) and
almost any word can be turned into a verb if slotted into the frame:
I’ll———you!
A functional shift that is
considered unacceptable is known as an impropriety.
A word may be acceptable in one region and an impropriety in another. The verb suicide is generally considered an
impropriety in the UK, but is fully accepted in the USA where, according to Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary, it
was first recorded in 1841. Some usages are borderline (e.g. to author, to deadpan) and others seem
to have little chance of being adopted: we have to bugle/drum/fiddle/pipe/trumpet/whistle but not *to cello/guitar/piano. Usefulness often
determines whether or not a functional shift is accepted but there is an
arbitrary element here as in other types of word formation.
With many English words we cannot be absolutely sure which class the
word first appeared in, but in contemporary English the tendency is usually to
shift from noun to verb. This movement may reflect our need to name new
objects, discoveries and inventions (satellite,
orbit, shuttle) and then, as these become familiar, our need to refer to
their functions. Thus we have first a tape-recorder
and then to tape-record/tape.
Many such changes are quickly accepted because of their wide applicability.
If used to
excess, the practice of functional shifting may lead to confusion. It can also,
however, be a source of succinctness in the language.
See: multifunctionality, word formation.
fused sentence
The terms fused and run-on sentence
are applied to a sentence such as the following from a major newspaper:
Yorkshire were
always up with the required scoring rate, their biggest enemy was the weather.
which consists of two sentences
and should have a conjunction, a semi-colon or a full stop/period after ‘rate’.
Fused sentences should be
avoided. See: sentence.
future
In some languages, future time is signalled by a change in the form of the verb:
English French Latin Spanish
I see je vois
video veo I shall see je verrai videbo
vere
In English,
futurity does not involve a modification of the headverb as it does in French,
Latin and Spanish. It is most frequently signalled by five patterns, all of
which tend to collocate with such temporal adverbials as soon, tomorrow, next week.
1 will/shall+the base form of the headverb:
She will do her best.
We shall succeed.
Traditionally,
will was said to mark futurity with
second and third person subjects:
you/he/she/it/they
will go
whereas
‘shall’ occurred with first person subjects:
I/we shall go.
but there is
considerable regional variation regarding the use of will/shall, with ‘will’ being the preferred form, irrespective of
subject, in Ireland, Scotland and parts of the USA. In formal writing, it is
still advisable to follow the rule, but in speech the problem disappears
because ’ll is used irrespective of
person:
I’ll go and
he’ll go and she’ll go. In fact, we’ll all go.
2
BE going+to
infinitive:
I’m going to
work harder next year.
There are a number of variants of this pattern including: BE about to: He’s about to retire.
BE on the
point of: He’s on the point of retiring.
BE to: He’s to
retire.
3
BE+the present participle of the headverb:
I’m resigning
next month.
He’s arriving this
afternoon.
4
will/shall/’ll+be+present participle of the headverb:
He’ll be arriving on the
noon train.
I shall be
wearing black. They’ll be leaving soon.
5
the non-past tense:
He leaves for Paris at dawn.
She arrives tomorrow.
See: auxiliary,
head, tense, verb.
Gambian English
The population
of the Gambia (West Africa) is approximately 600,000 and the official language
is English. The Gambia came under British jurisdiction as early as 1588 and was
governed for parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the
Crown Colony of Senegambia. It gained its independence in 1965.
Apart from Gambian English, which forms part of the
spectrum of West African Englishes, there
are two useful lingua francas, namely
Wolof (an African language which is frequently used between anglo-phone
Gambians and francophone Senegalese) and Aku, an English-related creole, derived from Sierra Leone Krio.
See: creole, pidgins and creoles, Sierra Leone English, West
African English.
gender
The word gender is used in linguistics as a means
of classifying nouns into such categories as masculine, feminine or neuter.
There are essentially two types of gender:
1
natural gender, where the sex of the item in
the real world determines its classification in a language. Thus, in English, a
woman is a female and is classified
as being feminine and a man is a male
and is classified as being masculine.
2
grammatical gender, which has little or
nothing to do with sex in the real world but where the term feminine, for example, is applied
because a word has a particular ending (Latin insula meaning ‘island’) or because it may be modified by the
feminine form of an article or adjective as in
Spanish:
Esta naranja
es muy cara. (This
orange is very dear.)
Unlike
languages such as Latin or French, English makes little use of grammatical
gender. Nouns are either masculine, feminine or neuter and they take the
appropriate pronoun:
The man was tired. He had been awake all night.
The woman was
tired. She had been awake all night.
The dog was tired. It had been awake
all night.
There are, however, some exceptions to
this pattern.
Some nouns refer to animate
beings of indeterminate sex (baby, cat,
child, member, parent, pet, student). Ignorance or options concerning the
sex of the referent can lead to
awkwardness
about he or she since there is no
singular pronoun serving both. Increasingly, they is being used as a singular for this purpose:
Will each individual please check that they have completed the necessary forms.
Many guides to
usage repeat that he has traditonally
served for references to both sexes, a practice that was introduced into
English in the seventeenth century.
Feminine endings and masculine and feminine forms of nouns do occur,
but they are unsystematic and are declining in popular use (waitress, actress, comedienne, lady doctor). Most poetesses and
actresses would prefer to be called poets and actors, and so, incidentally, be
taken more seriously. Where the gender distinction persists, it is usually
socially significant as in such sets as:
lord lady
duke duchess
king queen
Certain
machines or vehicles over which man has traditionally had control are referred
to as she, namely ships, motorbikes
and, to a lesser extent, cars. In a similar way, the sun (powerful) and day
(light, pleasant) have been depicted in English literature as masculine,
whereas the moon (weaker) and night (dark, less pleasant) have been portrayed
as feminine. West African Pidgin English takes this a step further, calling the
right hand manhan and the left wumanhan. The perception of a country as
masculine or feminine probably reveals something about national parental or sex
roles: Germany, for example, is a fatherland, whereas Ireland is Mother Ireland
or ‘Dark Rosaleen’.
See: female, sexist language.
genitive
The term genitive is normally applied to a case
ending which is attached to nouns to
indicate possession:
John’s book
It is John’s.
In English,
there are two methods of indicating possession:
the dog’s tail
the tail of
the dog
and it is the first method, signalled by the case ending ’s which is referred to as the genitive case. The ’s method of indicating possession is more likely to be used with
animate nouns:
John’s foot
the cat’s
foot/paw the foot of the hill
The genitive
marker can be attached to phrases:
the King of
England’s six wives
the man at the bottom of the
street’s wife
although this
phenomenon is more likely to occur in speech than in writing. The ’s marker is
also frequently attached to temporal nouns to indicate relationships such as
duration:
a day’s time (i.e. within a
period of twenty-four hours) and appropriateness:
a winter’s tale (i.e. a tale suitable for
winter).
