gerund
The name gerund is given to -ing forms which are derived from verbs and which can function as nouns:
Being and doing are more important than having.
Although
gerunds function as nouns, they retain some of the attributes of verbs in that
they can often take an object:
Smoking cigarettes can seriously affect your health.
and be
modified by an adverb:
Smoking regularly can seriously affect your health.
When gerunds
occur in such structures as:
He does not approve of my smoking.
the
possessive adjective is frequently replaced in colloquial speech by an object
pronoun:
He does not
approve of me smoking.
The possessive
form of the adjective is more acceptable in formal contexts but the object
pronoun is widely used in what Henry Sweet describes as ‘the speech of
slippered ease’.
See: -ing forms, noun, verb.
GET
GET is perhaps the most frequently used verb in English. It has such a wide
range of literal and metaphorical meanings that it is possible to construct a
lengthy utterance without using any other verb:
When it got light, he got up and got dressed quickly. He got himself
some breakfast, got his papers together and got ready for work. He got a
newspaper at the corner, got the 7.20 bus to town and got to his office by
7.50. After getting the lift to the sixth floor he got to his desk by
his usual time and got down to the job at once.
Because GET is
so frequently used in speech, it has often been criticised in writing and
teachers have warned generations of children to avoid get and nice. It is
stylistically inappropriate to overuse any word but it is equally inappropriate
to avoid GET altogether.
GET can occur
in five main structures:
1 with a direct object where it can mean ‘acquire, catch, gain
possession of, obtain, receive’:
He got a prize for his poem.
They all got a cold.
2
with a direct object+a to-infinitive it is
equivalent to ‘cause, persuade’:
She got him to stop smoking.
3
with a direct
object+adjective/adverb/preposition phrase it means ‘cause to become, come or go’:
I got my
shoe wet.
Get the children out.
Get it out of the house.
4
with an auxiliary+a direct
object/to-infinitive/past participle it is the equivalent of ‘have’:
I’ve got $20.
He’s got to
go.
You should get those repairs done now.
5 with a
direct object+a past participle it can function like a passive:
She has got herself elected.
He got his son suspended.
In UK English, the past tense and past participle of get are identical:
I got a letter from him this
morning.
I’ve got a new computer.
In US English, gotten is
used as the past participle:
I’ve gotten a new computer.
He’s gotten a big raise in
pay.
It is not
used, however, when have got means
‘must’:
I’ve got to go.
See: prime verbs,
UK and US words, US English.
Ghanaian English
Ghana in West
Africa has a population of approximately 12 million, many of whom speak the
official language of the country, English. Britain established six coastal
settlements in Ghana in the seventeenth century and English was acquired by
many Ghanaians as a second language. The quality of Ghanaian English has always been closely modelled on British norms and Ghanaians tend to pride
themselves on the excellence of their English. The country attained
independence in 1957 and English has
continued to be
the most widely-used language in education, politics, commerce and literature.
See: African English, West African English.
gobbledygook
The word gobbledygook was coined by a Texan
congressman, Maury Maverick, to describe the verbose, pompous language of
official communications. Such language is often meaningless to the average user
of English but continues to be used in official documents, possibly as a way of
impressing the lay person.
In many countries the Plain English Campaign has tried to counter the
worst effects of gobbledygook by writing ‘translations’ of the more confusing
official forms and documents and by offering advice on how such forms should be
written.
Gobbledygook can be wasteful of both time and money. The Guardian (24 July, 1979), for
example, describes how the Department of the Environment produced a form for a
loft insulation scheme which was so confusing that thousands of forms were
incorrectly completed. Salford Council printed a special guide to accompany the
form but no one could understand that either!
Obviously, it would be simpler and more economical if official, legal
and business documents could be written in clear, intelligible English in the
first place. We would then be spared the verbal inflation which can transform
seven words from the Lord’s Prayer:
Give us this day our daily bread
into the
following seventy-six:
We respectfully petition, request and entreat that due and adequate
provision be made, this day and the date hereinafter subscribed, for the
satisfying of these petitioners’ nutritional requirements and for the
organising of such methods of allocation and distribution as may be deemed
necessary and proper to assure the reception by and for said petitioners of
such quantities of baked cereal products as shall, in the judgment of the
aforesaid petitioners, constitute a sufficient supply thereof.
The Observer, 27 February, 1977
See: circumlocution,
jargon.
gofer
Gofer (also
gopher) derives from go for and refers to someone who runs
errands:
As well as two
people at the desk, we’re going to need a gofer.
The word
probably became popular not only because it filled a gap, but also because it
sounds the same as gopher (a small
burrowing animal). Less common analogous forms are dufer (do for) and godufer (go
do for).
good
Good is
normally used as an adjective or noun:
They did a good
job.
Your work is
not good. It’s for your own good.
Both good and well can be used to express physical states:
I feel good.
I feel well.
with
good in such contexts being
equivalent to a more emphatic well.
Occasionally
and mostly in speech, good occurs as
an adverb:
I do it good.
He was fixed good and proper.
Such usage is to be avoided in formal
contexts.
Good can be used as an
adjectival intensifier in such sentences as:
We walked a good six miles.
You stayed a good three hours.
See: adjective,
adverb, better.
gradable
Gradable has three main uses:
1 It can be
applied to adjectives and adverbs to describe the fact that they
can occur in positive, comparative and superlative forms:
Positive
Comparative Superlative big bigger/less big biggest/least big likely more/less likely most/least likely
2
The term is used in semantics to refer to
adjectives like good/bad, high/low,
soft/hard which have no absolute values. A big fly is smaller than a small
bird because big is understood to
imply ‘big in the context of flies’. These adjectives are often described as
‘implicitly graded adjectives’ and they are different from adjectives such as male/female which are absolute. To
state, for example:
X is not male.
implies:
X is female.
but to state:
X is not bad.
does not imply:
X is good.
3
It is occasionally applied to parts of speech which can substitute
for each other but which differ in degree:
a
chip of Very nice marble
a piece of terribly nice marble
a block of extraordinarily nice marble
See: adjective,
adverb, antonym, comparison of adjectives and adverbs, degree, semantics.
graduate
Although the
essential meaning of graduate is
shared by speakers in the UK and the USA, there are a number of differences in
usage.
The noun graduate (pronounced 
) normally refers to the holder of an
academic degree:
She is a graduate of Delhi University.
In the UK a
person who is studying for a higher degree is normally referred to as a
postgraduate whereas graduate suffices in
the USA.
The commonest use of the verb graduate (pronounced 
) in both the UK and the USA is as an
intransitive verb with the meaning of ‘receive an academic degree’:
They graduated from Harvard in 1976.
In the USA,
the verb can also be used transitively to mean ‘grant an academic degree’:
They graduated 600 students.
See: degrees, education.
grammar
The word grammar is not an easy one to define
because it has been used to comprehend many different facets of, and approaches
to, language. Yet all definitions of grammar
have one thing in common: they all deal with the ways in which larger units
of language such as sentences are
constructed from smaller units.
1
Normative
(Prescriptive) Grammar implies the body of rules necessary to use the language ‘correctly’. Such grammars tend to prescribe not describe socially-acceptable usage. They tell us, for example,
that:
To whom did
you refer?
and:
He is taller
than I.
are correct,
whereas:
Who did you refer to? He is taller than me.
are incorrect.
Normative grammars are unpopular in academic circles today but, although they
were aimed at the middle classes and at people who were attempting to better
themselves, the core of what they taught was accurate.
2
A Descriptive
Grammar tends
to be based on a corpus (speech or writing or both). It does not prescribe any
particular usage but may generalise from the particular corpus studied to the
language as a whole.
3
A
Comparative/Contrastive Grammar compares/contrasts two languages, A and B, usually
to help speakers of A acquire B or vice versa. Such grammars tend to point out
the areas of potential difficulty likely to be met by speakers of A (or B) as
they learn language B (or A).
4
A Pedagogic
Grammar is
designed specifically for teaching purposes and so may grade the language in
terms of what is easy to learn. A grammar that concentrates on teaching a
particular section of English, for example, to a special group of people such
as scientists or economists is often described as ESP (English for Special/Specific
Purposes).
5
Intuitive
Grammar is
the innate knowledge of a language possessed by a native speaker, a knowledge
which enables a speaker to make ‘infinite use of finite means’ by producing and
understanding acceptable utterances and to evaluate degrees of acceptabilty by
recognising, for example, that:
a flaming fist
is more
acceptable than:
*a foot fist
*flaming fist
a
6
A Theoretical
Grammar attempts
to theorise about the nature of Language as well as about individual languages.
Such grammars often deal with the common denominators that are found in all
human languages.
7
Transformational
(Generative) Grammars postulate two levels of language (surface structure and deep structure) and attempt to relate
the levels systematically.
In many UK grammars, the term grammar
tends to refer to one level of language only, namely syntax (i.e. all that is not phonology
and all that is not semantics).
Increasingly, however, and especially in US grammars the term comprehends all
levels of language:
Phonology—the
study of sounds and sound patterns Morphology—the study of words and affixes
Syntax—the study of groups of
words Semantics—the study of meaning
and models of
grammar try to reproduce the native speaker’s ability to associate sound with
meaning and meaning with sound.
See: linguistics, transformational grammar.
guess
The expression I guess is a colloquial discourse marker
popularised by speakers of US English. It is similar in function to:
I believe/feel/imagine/reckon/suppose in my opinion/view
it seems to me
and serves to
make an assertion less dogmatic:
I guess you’re
right.
You’re right, I guess.
See: shibboleth,
UK and US words.
Guyanese English
The Co-operative Republic of Guyana, formerly
British Guiana, was a British colony
from 1814 until 1966 when it gained its independence. It became a republic
within the Commonwealth in 1977. The population of under 1 million has English
as an official language but many Guyanese speak an English-related creole, called Creolese.
See: Caribbean English, pidgins and creoles, West Indian English.
Gypsy/gypsy
The word Gypsy derives from Egyptian because it was believed that
the Romani people came from Egypt. In fact, they came from India and the Romani
language has still a great deal in common with other Indic languages such as
Hindi and Sanskrit.
When the word is used to refer to a Romani, then an upper case ‘G’
should be used, just as it is when we refer to an American, a Canadian, a Catholic or a Jew, because the word Gypsy covers
both race and culture.
Because Gypsies have often been treated as social outcasts, the term gypsy has been extended to include
‘wanderer, wanton, untrustworthy’ and the derived verb:
I was gypped.
is as racist
and offensive as the equivalent:
I was jewed out of it.
See: Anglo-Romani,
racist language.
h silent and dropped
The initial h is often silent in words originally
borrowed from French:
heir(loom) honest hour
and this usage, together with the regional
(and nonstandard) tendency to drop initial h
from words like:
ham
house husband
has caused some
confusion in the pronunciation of words beginning with the letter h. The confusion is not limited to
individuals: Webster’s dictionary recommends an historic occasion but not an
hotel while Collins’s dictionary prefers a historic decision.
The rule
formerly applied was that an should
be used before a word beginning with h
when the
initial syllable was unstressed:
an habitual offender an hereditary title an
historian
an hotel
an hysterical outburst
This rule is gradually disappearing and h is being treated like other
consonants.
The social stigma attached to dropping initial h has resulted in hypercorrections
where an h is prefixed to words (heggs for eggs) which should not have them. The pronunciation of h as haitch
and not aitch is also a
hypercorrection.
See: accent, hypercorrection, shibboleth.
hardly, scarcely
Hardly and the more formal scarcely
are somewhat unusual adverbs in
that they can cause inversion when used as temporal adverbs:
…Hardly are those words out
When a vast
image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight…
W.B.Yeats, ‘The Second
Coming’
and they
overlap with negatives and resemble some modals in their ability to introduce
shades of doubt into a sentence:
He was not a fiend.
He may not
have been a fiend. He was hardly a fiend.
They may
function as adverbs of degree:
We could hardly bear to
wait.
I can scarcely hear you.
in which role
they tend to occur after the subject and auxiliary (if there is one) but before
the headverb (cf. almost, nearly, quite).
In this role, they carry a negative implication
(cf. barely, rarely, seldom) but
denote not an absolute negative (such as not,
never) but a degree of negativity (‘almost
not’):
We scarcely knew him. That’s
hardly fair.
and are approximately equivalent
to:
We almost didn’t know him.
That’s almost unfair.
They may also function as temporal
adverbs, usually co-occurring with the past perfect and a when clause:
I had hardly opened the letter when I
realised my mistake.
They had scarcely spoken when their differences
became apparent.
These usages are similar to
constructions involving no sooner, which
however takes a
than clause:
I had no
sooner opened the letter than I realised my mistake.
The essential function of words
like hardly and scarcely is to provide a degree of subtlety or uncertainty that the
absolute contrasts of positive and negative do not allow.
See: adverb, head, modality, negation.
HAVE
HAVE is a prime verb, is irregular in its morphology:
Non-past: (I/you/we/they) have, (he/she/it) has
Past/Past Participle: had
Present Participle: having
and can function as both as an auxiliary:
She has been all round the world.
and as a full verb:
He has a lovely home.
As an auxiliary, HAVE
1 occurs in Position 2 of the Verb
Phrase if there is a modal:
We may have seen an intruder.
2
triggers off the past participle of the verb
that follows:
You could have hidden.
3 can
occur in non-finite constructions:
having seen the
problem
to have played for the
Barbarians
4 can be
followed directly by not/n’t:
I have not (haven’t) heard the results
yet.
5
can exhibit past/non-past contrasts when it
occurs initially in the verb phrase:
He has sung.
He had sung.
6
can exhibit morphological changes in the
non-past, depending on the number and person of the subject:
I/you/we/they have seen the film.
John/Mary/it has seen the mouse.
There are some differences
between UK and US uses of HAVE as a full verb. Generally, speakers of UK English do not use the dummy
auxiliary with HAVE:
UK USA
Have you any wool? Do you have any wool? Has she a
computer? Does she have a computer?
In colloquial speech in the UK HAVE got is the preferred form:
Have you got any wool?
Has she got a
computer?
See: auxiliary, GET, UK and US grammar.
head
If we look at the sentence:
That young man
in blue may have seen the Boston burglar.
we can isolate two noun phrases:
that young man in blue the Boston burglar
and one verb phrase:
may have seen
Each phrase has
a head or headword, the element of central importance around which other
elements may cluster in a fixed order. In our example, the heads are man, burglar and seen.
A noun head
or headnoun can be a proper noun:
ancient Egypt
a pronoun:
it
a deverbal noun (or nominalisation):
our arrival
or a common
noun:
the tree on my left
The order of items in a noun phrase is:
Determiner+Modifier(s)+Head+Modifier(s)
where only the head is absolutely
obligatory:
D M H M
the mythical man in the moon a short, fat man on my left man
The headword or headverb in a verb
phrase is the unit which occurs finally: Modal+Auxiliary HAVE+Auxiliary BE1+Auxiliary
BE2+Head
and where the head alone is obligatory:
Modal HAVE BE1 BE2 H
may Have been being watched Has been being watched
may be watched is being watched
watched
See: auxiliary,
noun phrase, verb phrase.
headlines
The language of headlines shares many features with journalese and with advertising: use of
abbreviations, acronyms, alliteration,
ambiguity, rhyming, puns, unusual
word order and simple (often
predictable) vocabulary. It has, however, a number of features which allow us
to discuss headlines as a sub-genre of journalism.
1
Not only are the words in headlines often
short, but they are frequently used as shorthand sensationalism:
Blazing busman horror
Blood flows in Brixton’s orgy of violence
Five burned to death in sex ban fury
Words commonly
occurring in such contexts are: curb,
cuts, horror, freeze, mole (i.e. ‘spy’), orgy, probe, snag, switch, vow.
2
The grammar of headlines results from a
desire to create a strong impact in a short space. Subjects and auxiliaries may
be omitted:
[Miners have been] Starved back to work
as may copulas:
Shaun [is] on right line
articles:
[A] Tight rein for Robert
and genitives:
Maggie[’s] praise for pit war police
3
A headline may consist of a series of nouns,
sometimes as many as four:
Leeds Bus Crash Drama Motorway Madness Fog Pileup
These are often difficult to
unravel.
4
If a finite verb occurs, the non-past tense
is preferred:
Martina wins again
but non-finite verbs are common:
No-go areas ruled out
and futurity is frequently
signalled by an infinitive:
Government to be asked for help
See: journalese, telegraphese.
hear, listen (to)
The verb HEAR implies perceiving sounds whereas LISTEN implies making a conscious effort to hear:
We heard the sound of the
boys talking. We listened to what
they were saying.
When the
emphasis is on the receiver’s effort, LISTEN is used. Thus, we may hear a talk, recital, performance or broadcast
but listen to records when we play
them ourselves. This distinction is similar to that between SEE and LOOK (at).
HEAR is used with the meaning of ‘perceive with the senses’ in some
varieties of English such as the pidgins used in Cameroon and Vanuatu. This
meaning is apparent in the Cameroonian proverb:
Man wei i i biabia na i 
hia di smεl.
(One who burns his beard will
first notice the smell.)
Similarly, in
Standard English, HEAR can have a wider application than aural perception when
it is used as a loose synonym for BELIEVE:
I hear John has been injured.
Verbs of
perception (HEAR, SEE) rarely occur with progressive aspect whereas LISTEN and
LOOK frequently do:
How can you hear when you aren’t listening?
He didn’t see me although he was looking in my direction.
See: aspect, see.
hendiadys
Hendiadys derives from Greek hen dia dyoin meaning
‘one through two’ and refers to a combination of words such as:
nice and tired
where ‘nice
and’ functions as a modifier of ‘tired’, the expression meaning ‘nicely tired’.
Other frequently used examples are:
fine and dandy good and ready nice and warm well and truly
See: figurative language.
hiatus
This term is
applied to a phonological phenomenon. When two vowels are juxtaposed and both
are clearly enunciated, a break occurs between them which is known as hiatus. There is, for example, a hiatus
after pre- in preempt and after re- in reassess. The word hiatus, deriving from Latin hiare
meaning ‘to yawn’, can be somewhat misleading in that it suggests a gap or
silence between two vowels, whereas in normal speech we usually introduce a
glide from one to the other.
Different regions deal with hiatus in individual ways. Occasionally the
hiatus is reinforced by a glottal stop:
my own> 
or, in certain contexts, such as:
awe-inspiring law and order
people from the south of England
introduce an intrusive ‘r’:
awe-rinspiring
lawrand order 
In formal speech, it is advisable to
employ hiatus between juxtaposed vowels.
See: elision,
intrusive vowels and consonants.
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English refers to the English
used in Ireland by people whose ancestral mother tongue was Gaelic. It has two
main sub-varieties: Southern Hiberno-English, where the strongest non-Gaelic influence
is Southern British, and Northern Hiberno-English, where Scottish influence has
been strong.
Both
sub-varieties are rhotic and are
marked by: 1 strong aspiration of
syllable-initial /p, t, k/:
pin 
tin 
kin
2 a tendency to use clear l (i.e.
the l sound in light and not the l
sound in gull) in all contexts.
3 a tendency to use Gaelic words, albeit with English endings:
banshee (fairy woman) banshees keeny (cry,
lament) keenying
4 a
tendency to use Gaelic-inspired verbal constructions:
She came in and her singing. I’m after seeing the child.
5
a tendency to use Gaelic-inspired idioms:
There’s good
buying on the potatoes today.
She hasn’t her
sorrows to seek.
6
a tendency to use Gaelic-derived metaphors,
similes and proverbs:
The year is wearing thin. as mean as get out
There’s a truth in the last
drop in the bottle.
The easiest way to distinguish
between Southern and Northern Hiberno-English is to examine the pronunciation
of three trees. Speakers of Southern
Hiberno-English say:
tree trees
while speakers of Northern
Hiberno-English say:
three threes
See: Anglo-Irish, Irish English.
hire, lease, let, rent
There is some overlap and a
certain amount of confusion on the part of UK and US speakers with regard to
the precise usage of these verbs.
Hire is most commonly used to mean ‘pay for the temporary use of
something’:
We hired a marquee for the garden party.
A second meaning of ‘allow the
temporary use of something for payment’ is less widely used but is perhaps
growing in popularity, especially when hire
co-occurs with out:
We hired out the marquee that was badly
damaged.
In the UK hire usually refers to a short-term agreement and does not include
people or accommodation:
He hired a car/bus/bicycle for a week.
The car was hired (out) to John Smith.
In the USA, hire is most frequently used to mean ‘give a job to someone’:
We should be
able to hire 400 new workers next
year.
You’re hired.
Lease means ‘pay for the use of something for a specified time’ or
‘allow the paid use of something for a specified time’:
The British leased Hong Kong until 1997.
The Chinese leased Hong Kong to the British until
1997.
Let meaning ‘provide accommodation for an agreed payment’ is more
common in UK than in US English:
She lets the cottage to the same family
every summer.
Rent like hire can mean
‘pay for the temporary use of something’:
Mary rented the house from her father.
In UK usage, rent usually
implies a longer period of time than hire:
We hired a car for a week.
We rented the
same cottage for twenty years.
and can be used for
accommodation as well as property. In US usage rent is common for both short and long-term contracts:
We rented an automobile for a week.
See: antonym, household and accommodation.
homonym, homograph, homophone
Homonym comes from Greek homo (same)+onyma (name) and refers to words which have the same spelling and
pronunciation but different meanings:
post 1
piece of timber 2 affix to a wall (post a
placard) 3 send a letter 4 place where soldier is stationed 5 after (post-war)
Words which
have the same spelling but which differ in meaning, origin and possibly also in
pronunciation are called homographs (i.e.
written the same way):
bear 1 animal 2 endure
Words that are
pronounced the same way but which have different meanings, spellings or origins
are called homophones (i.e. same
sounds):
pail pale
pair pare
Words may be
homophones in some regions but not in others. In Southern British English, for
example, the following are homophones:
paw poor pour
as are:
Mary marry
merry
in some speech communities
in the USA. See: antonym, synonym.
Hong Kong English
Hong Kong has two official languages,
namely Cantonese and English, although Cantonese is much more widely spoken
since it is the mother tongue of 98% of the 4+ million people in the colony.
English has considerable prestige in Hong Kong because it is the
language of most international trading and a good command of the language is
essential in business.
Phonology
The accents of
most speakers are influenced by their Cantonese mother tongue and so have much
in common with those described for Chinese
English. In addition, the following tendencies are apparent:
1 the use
of fewer vowel contrasts, with /i/ being used for /i/ and 
as in seat and sit,
/u/ being used for /u/ and 
as in cooed and could and /a/ being used for both /æ/ and
as in hat and hot.
2
the use of /o/ and /e/ instead of 
and 
in words such as boat and bait.
3 the occasional substitution of /s/ for /∫/ so that ship sounds like sip.
4 the lack of aspiration with initial /p, t, k/ so that mother-tongue
speakers of English often hear Hong Kong pet
as bet, tin as din, cut as gut. Some speakers use a glottal stop rather than /p, t, k/ when
these sounds appear finally in a word:
5
the occasional substitution of /r/ for /l/:
English>/iÅ‹gri∫/ willing>/wiriÅ‹/
6
the simplification of consonant clusters either by omitting a consonant at the end of a
word (especially when the word ends in /t, d/):
band>/ban/
last>/las/
or introducing
a vowel into an initial cluster:
grass>/garas/
state>/setet/
Vocabulary
1
Vocabulary items have been adopted from
Chinese but the popular ones are those which relate to clothing or food and
they are widely known throughout the English- speaking world:
cheongsam (dress with high collar and slits in skirt)
chop suey (dish with vegetables and
meat)
chow mein (dish with meat, vegetables and noodles)
2 A few
examples of China Coast Pidgin English have been recorded in Hong Kong in the
1970s. Among these are the use of piecee in counting:
One piecee, two piecee…
and number one to mean ‘best, excellent’.
3 Gwailo meaning ‘devil’ is occasionally used as a disparaging
term for an expatriate.
Grammar
Most users of English
approximate to the standard norms in writing but the following features are
found in spoken English:
1 a tendency to treat all nouns including fruit and work as count
nouns:
three fruits four works
2
the recapitulation of the subject:
My English it is not good.
3
frequent deletion of a/an: I work in office.
4
the occasional use of the wrong third person singular
pronoun, with he being
used for
she:
This is my mother. He is on
holiday here.
See: Chinese
English.
hopefully
Hopefully as an adverb modifying a verb in such sentences as:
They waited hopefully for their results.
It is better
to travel hopefully than to arrive.
has always been
acceptable. As a sentence modifier, equivalent
to ‘it is to be hoped’,
hopefully
has been considered unacceptable by many writers and clumsy by others.
Kenneth Hudson
(1977) includes hopefully in The Dictionary of Diseased English, referring
to it as ‘German/American’ and mentioning ‘certain dangers in its use’. Hopefully has been criticised in the USA
as well as the UK, and Webster’s Ninth
New Collegiate Dictionary (1983) notes ‘the irrationally large amount of
critical fire’ drawn by the usage, critical fire that is not aimed at other
similar sentence modifiers such as fortunately/unfortunately,
interestingly and presumably.
In spite of all the adverse criticism levelled at hopefully it is now firmly established as a sentence modifier
throughout the English-speaking world.
See: adverb, ‘chestnuts’, dangling modifier, modifier, purist.
household and accommodation
Many of the
terms relating to the structure, functioning and occupation of the home are
different in the UK and the USA. The commonest differences are:
UK USA
Aluminium aluminum
blind (on window) shade
block of flats apartment building
camp bed cot
chest (of drawers) bureau, dresser clothes
peg clothes pin
Cooker stove
Cot crib
Cupboard closet
curtains
(heavy) drapes dummy (for a baby) pacifier
Dustbin garbage/ash/trash can
Eiderdown comforter/quilt
elastic band rubber
band
estate agent realtor
first floor second floor
flat (rented) apartment
flat (owner
occupied) condominium/condo Garden yard
ground floor first floor hotel rate (+meals) European
plan hotel rate (room only) American plan
Kettle tea kettle
Larder pantry
Let lease/rent
Lift elevator
lodger roomer
maisonette flat
methylated
spirits/meths denatured alcohol Net
curtains sheers
paraffin kerosene
power point/socket outlet/socket semi-detached duplex
sideboard buffet single storey open-plan ranch house
skirting
board baseboard tap faucet, tap
(thermos)
flask thermos bottle washbasin/sink sink
wash wash up
wash up do
the dishes Welsh dresser hutch
Many of the US terms are widely
understood in Britain and other parts of the world and some (e.g. socket and sink) are replacing their UK equivalents.
See: Americanism, Anglicism, hire, UK and US words.
hybrid
A hybrid is a word composed of elements from more than one language:
Cumberland—Celtic (Cumbri)+Old English (land) feminism—Latin
(femina)+Greek (-ismos) Grimstone—Norse
(Grim)+Old English (stan) refill—Latin
(re-)+Old English (fyllan) television—Greek
(tele-)+Latin (videre) womanise—English
(woman)+Greek (-izein)
The term is also occasionally
applied to a pidgin or creole which
incorporates elements from two or more languages. A sentence such as:
Wuna bin giv
mi palava boku.—You gave me a lot of trouble.
from a West African Pidgin
English derives wuna from Igbo, bin, giv and mi from English, palava from
Portuguese and boku from French.
See: pidgins and creoles, word formation.
hypallage
Hypallage, deriving from Greek hypo- (under)+allassein (exchange), is a figure of speech in which the attributes
of one element of a statement are transferred to another element. Thus a
descriptive adjective may be shifted from the noun to which it applies to
another noun. A well-known example of such a transferred epithet comes from
Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard:
The ploughman
homeward plods his weary way.
The natural
headnoun of ‘weary’ is ‘ploughman’ and not ‘way’ but the adjective is
transferred for emphasis.
Other more commonplace examples of hypallage are:
He bade her a sad farewell.
(presumably
it was ‘he’ and not the ‘farewell’ that was ‘sad’)
There was an awkward silence.
See: figurative language.
hyperbole
Hyperbole derives from Greek hyperbole meaning ‘excess’. It is a
figure of speech employing extravagant exaggeration in order to emphasise a
detail or a succession of details. We find such colloquial uses of hyperbole as:
There were millions of people in the stadium.
We had a pizza
the size of today and tomorrow. The news spread like a bushfire in a drought.
It is
occasionally used in poetry, as when Richard Crashaw in ‘The Weeper’ describes
Mary Magdalen’s eyes as:
Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious
oceans.
See: figurative language.
hypercorrection
In all speech communities
where nonstandard variants exist, certain forms are stigmatised. The
stigmatised forms may relate to pronunciation (girl rhyming with oil, ’ouse for
house or walkin’ for walking), to
choice of words (a brave day for a fine/good day, lonesome for lonely), to prepositional use (for to go instead of to go, take for instead of take after), to verb forms (I seen for I saw, he shoulda went for he
should have gone).
Often, in the process of
modifying towards the standard, a speaker will overcompensate and produce
hypercorrect forms such as garding for
garden, heggs for eggs or I have did/saw, and speakers who worry about using adjectives as
adverbs have produced more importantly for
more important, thusly for thus, singlehandedly for singlehanded and badly for bad as in:
How are you? Not too badly.
Hypercorrection
is common in speakers who are or who would like to be socially mobile upwards.
See: h silent and
dropped, (more) importantly, Standard English.
hyphenation
Hyphenation refers to the process of joining words or morphemes by means of a
hyphen. The word hyphen comes from
Greek hypo (under) +hen (one) and it is a punctuation mark used to indicate:
1 compound words:
father-in-law life-form
2 compound
attributive adjectives:
foot-and-mouth disease mother-tongue
speakers
3
the breaking of a word at the end of a line 4
the syllables in a word:
hy-per-son-ic
Hyphenation
is much commoner in compound words in the UK than in the USA.
See: compound,
punctuation, syllable.
hypothetical
A hypothetical situation is one that may
or may not occur or have a parallel in the real world. Hypothetical
questions/statements often involve the use of an if clause and the modal should/would/’d
in the main clause:
If you had such
power, what would you do?
If I had your talent, I’d be a lot more confident.
When BE occurs
in the if clause there is a tendency
to use were, irrespective of the
number of the subject, if the hypothesis is farfetched or improbable:
If I were a blackbird I’d
whistle and sing.
If they were us they’d feel
the same.
In colloquial
English, there is a growing tendency to use was
with first and third person singular subjects, especially when the
suggestion is possible:
If I was a teacher I’d have firm ideas on
discipline.
See: modality, subjunctive.
-ic, -ical words
Many adjectives have two forms, one ending
in -ic and another in -ical (classic/al, economic/al, historic/al)
and there is no comprehensive rule which allows us to predict which ending
is likely to be correct in any specific context. It seems, however, that -ical
adjectives are more widely used than -ic adjectives and are also more likely to
be used metaphorically:
Keats has often been praised for his lyric gifts. John was lyrical
in his praise of the meal.
Some adjectives are only
found with an -ic ending: academic,
alcoholic, allergic, analgesic, artistic, Byronic, catholic, dramatic,
emphatic, fantastic, ferric, linguistic, phonetic, phonic, tragic, semantic,
specific, syntactic, traumatic. Some of these
adjectives used to have
-ical endings (fantastical, tragical) and
some are used in popular speech with -ical endings (academical, dramatical) but such forms are regarded as
nonstandard. Many recent adjectives are coined with -ic endings only (bionic, electronic, morphophonemic,
synthetic, systemic).
A number of adjectives occur
only with the -ical ending: clerical,
clinical, critical, heretical, geological, grammatical, lexical, musical,
physical, radical, technical, topical, tropical.
A few adjectives can occur
with both -ic and -ical endings and with the forms being in free variation: arithmetic(al), egotistic(al), fanatic(al),
geometric(al). It is probably true that the -ic ending is more likely to
occur in the written medium and the -ical variant in the spoken.
A number of
frequently occurring adjectives exist in both forms but with a difference in
their meanings: classic(al), comic(al),
economic(al), historic(al), lyric(al), politic(al). The differences may be
illustrated by such sentences as:
His plans make good economic sense.
He’s economical to a
fault—perhaps ‘mean’ would be a more accurate label.
Tomorrow will be an historic occasion—the
tenth anniversary of independence.
There are quite good historical documents from the period.
Many nouns also end in -ic, including arithmetic, clinic, fanatic, music.
See: adjective.
identifying relative
clause
This term is an
alternative to defining clause and
refers to a clause which limits or reduces the scope of the nouns or noun
phrases it modifies:
The women who wore seat belts escaped.
The clause in
bold tells us that only those women who wore seat belts escaped.
