The Lexicographer's Rules

Here’s my latest column from the Malaysia Star.

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One of the things we know to be true about all languages is that they all have words for certain concepts and things, like mother, water and moon. The things everyone has, needs, or sees.

There are also words for concepts and things that are less universal, but still widespread.

For example, in New York City there is something called a dollar van, which I’ve mentioned here before. Dollar vans are privately-owned passenger vans that operate along loose regular routes, just like city-run buses. They used to cost only a dollar, thus the name.

However, the same basic idea—a privately owned van or truck serving as public transportation—goes by different names in other countries.

In Haiti, they’re called tap-taps. There, they are often colourfully painted with extravagant scenes, sometimes memorialising a loved one who has died.

In Mozambique, they’re called chapas.

In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, they’re called matatus.

Another thing that seems to appear in culture after culture (and language after language) is a pride in being slow or late. There are many places in the world where precise times are just guidelines, not absolutes.

It’s a way of saying, “We’re slow and proud of it”, and to make a little bit of fun of one’s community. Admittedly, sometimes these terms are used by unkind outsiders who aren’t accustomed to a carefree attitude towards schedules and deadlines.

In Hispanic cultures, it’s called mañana time. Mañana means tomorrow in Spanish.

In the English-speaking parts of the Caribbean, it’s called island time.

I remember this term well from when I lived on the island of St Croix. “What time is the boat coming?” someone would ask. “Island time,” someone else would answer.

In Rarotonga, a part of the Cook Islands in the Pacific, they call it Raro time.

In Bamfield, British Columbia, they call it Bamfield time.

Throughout Africa, it’s called African time, especially by non-Africans who don’t always mean it in a friendly or understanding way.

In Malaysia, it’s of course called Malaysian time.

I’ve even seen it called doper time, referring to the casual and informal way in which drug dealers and drug users treat the hours of the day. If you’re already breaking the law, breaking the clock is much easier.

Living on mañana time or island time means a store might open or close late. A boat or train is bound to be late. A party might not have any guests until hours after it was supposed to start. Some guests might not show up at all, with no explanation.

One of my favourite word lists that I keep is the name of all the kinds of food that are basically a fried pastry with a vegetable, fruit or meat filling.

In the United States, we have turnovers. Most people know them as being stuffed with fruit (the McDonald’s restaurant chain has particularly sweet ones: good to taste but bad for your waist), although you can also have vegetable turnovers.

The Chinese have what we call pot stickers in English, crescent-shaped little dough-wrapped morsels that can have any sort of vegetable or meat filling, though not fruit.

The British, of course, are known for their pasties. There are also empanadas from Latin America and the related empadas and empadinhas from Portugal and Brazil.

There are samosas from India and patties from the Caribbean. There are also Iranian samboosas and you might even throw in East European pierogies.

In Malaysia, there’s of course, the curry puff.

Not all exactly alike, but, you know, all are filled, fried dough.

My all-time favourite idea for which a lot of languages have a different expression is the term for sunshower, that is, when it is raining and the sun is shining at the same time.

About 10 years ago, Bert Vaux compiled a list of these for the Linguist List and the topic has come up a couple of times on our radio show. I’m always seeing new ones, too.

Lots of cultures think sunshowers have to do with someone, or some animal, having a wedding: devils, hyenas, rats, birds, bears, tigers, foxes, donkeys, jackals, an old woman, a widow.

Some cultures think of it as someone or something giving birth: a deer, a rabbit, a hyena, a fox, a leopard, a wolf. In Armenian, it’s specifically a wolf giving birth on a mountain.

The devil features large in many of these expressions. In the American South, when there’s a sunshower, they might say the devil is beating his wife. They say this, too, in Hungarian. In Dutch, he might also beat his mother. In Jamaica, they say the devil and his wife are fighting over a chicken bone.

In Korea, they might call it a fox rain or a tiger rain.

In Dutch, they say there’s a fair in hell.

In a bunch of places, it’s also called a monkey’s birthday.

Of course, to some people it’s simply hujan panas.

The Scottish Language Dictionaries program has had its funding withdrawn by the Scottish Arts Council.

SLD, a charity, is responsible for the Dictionary of the Scots Language online (which offers at no charge the 22 volumes of the Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, and other works), the Concise Scots Dictionary, the Essential Scots Dictionary, and other reference works.

As a regular user of DSL, I write this email in order to encourage my colleagues to support SLD in any way they can.

To ensure that they stay in operation, SLD is holding a fundraiser by auctioning celebrity-related items on eBay, including stuff from actor Alan Cumming, radio presenter Andrew Marr (whose “Start the Week” podcast is one of my must-listens), the shooting script for the movie Sweet Sixteen, dinner with Hardeep Singh Kohli--he’ll cook, a signed photo of actor Robbie Coltrane, and other items.

The auction.

The main site.

A story in the Scotsman about the funding and fundraiser.

Thanks.

A hat-tip to the SouthWest Writers’ group, which mentioned Double-Tongued Dictionary in its July-August newsletter. Thanks!

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

Note that these columns are written for an audience that may not speak English as a first language. In them I often explain things that are obvious to a native speaker of English but may not be to an English-learner.

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One of the hardest things to get a handle on when trying to understand the everyday speech of an average English-speaker is the way it is littered with apparently useless little words and phrases.

The most derided is like, but there are also um, err, you know, ah, well, and dozens more. Linguists call them disfluencies. A disfluency is a break in the steady flow of speech.

Some years ago at university, I heard a classmate use the disfluency I mean 35 times in less than two minutes. It was irritating to hear and it made me think she was stupid.

But I now know that those throwaway words aren’t quite so disposable as they seem. For one thing, they can contain information. For another, they can be guideposts to someone else’s way of acting.

Even the brightest people use them. Andrew Marr’s program Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 features some of the top minds of our era talking about their areas of expertise. Many of them write successful books and give well-received lectures. They’re intelligent, thoughtful people.

Yet, they almost compulsively tend to start their answers to questions with the word “well”.

A guest on the programme might say something like (I am inventing this so as to not cause anyone any embarrassment), “Well, I’m not sure when the buboes first began appearing, but we know for certain when the plague died out.”

(A bubo is a dark, incredibly swollen lymph node in the armpit or groin, historically known as a symptom of the Black Plague that swept through Europe and killed millions in the 1600s.)

What is the “well” doing there at the beginning of the sentence?

Well, as Neal Norrick writes in his book Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk, anyone telling a story tends to pause at the beginning of the tale. Those pauses, Norrick writes, “encourage audience attention and participation”.

Using words like well, um, or you know at the beginning increases a listener’s anticipation. In just the little bit of time it takes to say them, listeners come to greater attention and grow ready for what the speaker really has to say.

Those little words also allow the speaker, just for the briefest moment, to collect his thoughts, order his words, and come up with the best opening line he can think of.

Even storytellers who have told a tale hundreds or thousands of times will find a way to hem and haw (to speak uncertainly or indecisively) in order to draw all eyes and minds to the next words in the story, which are the most important ones by far.

Um is a particularly interesting disfluency. It is often used unconsciously as a way of stalling for time when one does not know what to say. It and other disfluencies are also used when you do not want someone else to take over the conversation, so you say something like, “As I was saying, uh, um, er, there was an, uh, um, time I could speak off the cuff and didn’t need notes.”

(If you do something off the cuff, you do it in an impromptu way, without rehearsal or preparation.)

By filling the holes in your thoughts with those filler words, you keep the listener hanging on. When it is used consciously, however, the speaker uses um as a showy way of taking a pause. For example,

Speaker 1: What are you doing in my car?

Speaker 2: Ummm…

Speaker 1: Oh! Sorry! I have a Honda the same colour. I thought you were in my car.

The second speaker, instead of getting angry or defensive, uses a long drawn-out um to give the first speaker a chance to come to the correct conclusion. It saves them from having a disagreement and, perhaps more importantly, it lets the first speaker go away without feeling too stupid. It allows him to identify his mistake himself.

I mean is the disfluency I still notice the most and which I think most people don’t notice at all.

One of its main purposes is editing, that is, when you’re speaking and you need to go back and correct, explain, or amend something you said.

For example, “There is no way I’m getting in that car. I mean, it stinks like a dead animal and the seats are missing.” Or, “She’s too good for her job. I mean, she’s so good at it that she should be promoted.”

In the first sentence, I mean is a way of introducing why you won’t get into the car.

In the second sentence, I mean is followed by an explanation that you didn’t mean that she thought the work was beneath her or that she is a snob who has an unbelievably high opinion of herself. You just thought she was good at her work.

I mean, you know, like, um, more next time.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star has been posted. The column is based on a radio essay that I wrote in June 2007 but never aired. In short, I’m endorsing the use of quotation marks for emphasis. John McWhorter more or less agrees in a column he published in the New York Sun in August 2007.

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There’s a chain of restaurants in the United States called White Castle that sells greasy, yummy, little, oniony hamburgers in paper boxes.

On those boxes is printed the slogan Buy ‘em by the “sack.” The double quote marks around “sack” are theirs, not mine. They are what is called “scare quotes.”

Scare quotes are usually found around very short phrases or around single words in order to call attention to those words in a negative way. They aren’t used to quote someone, they’re used to call into question whatever words are found within them. They instil doubt.

For example, in the movie Citizen Kane, scare quotes appear on the screen in a screaming newspaper headline, Candidate Kane Caught in Love Nest with “Singer.” Singer is in scare quotes as a way of suggesting that Kane’s sweetie, Susan Alexander, was little more than a floozy (a woman of loose morals) and not much of a singer.

White Castle, it turns out, has been using quotes around “sack” since at least the ’50s and probably longer. Because of the way the company uses them, I prefer to call them something other than scare quotes.

For one thing, they’re not really calling the word “sack” into question. There’s no scaring to be done, no fear to be instilled, no doubt to be sown. I suppose there are cheap laughs to be had by reading Buy ‘em by the “sack” as if the “sack” were only pretending to be a sack but is instead something else, like a tugboat or a banana. That’s the kind of intentional misunderstanding you have to make in order to think that those quotes around “sack” shouldn’t be there.

They belong there because the company is calling attention to the word. “Sack”, perhaps, wasn’t a word that everyone would use. Some might prefer “bag”, since “sack” historically has been much less used in some parts of the United States to refer to the folded paper container your purchases are packed into at the grocery store.

So if they’re not scare quotes around “sack”, what are they?

I suggest the term shout quotes. And I suggest that the use of quotations for emphasis be condoned for casual use by all language authorities: hired, self-appointed, or otherwise.

There’s a weblog called the “Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks” and on the photo-sharing website Flickr, there’s a fantastic picture pool called “quote abuse.” Both mock the use of quotes used to emphasise or draw attention to a word.

But as examples on both sites show, there are proper, natural, widely understood rules behind using shout quotes, even if they’re taught in no grammar or style book that I can find.

They’re appropriate when you have no other easy way to indicate emphasis. They’re appropriate when used, for example, in casual sign-making. They’re appropriate when bolding or underlining is not possible. They’re appropriate when used by people who don’t do typesetting for a living.

One picture shows a handwritten sign that says, “Sorry”, but there will be no pumpkin soup served today!

Well, for lame laughs, we could assume those are scare quotes and that the writer meant they weren’t really sorry. But that’s an uncharitable reading. The only way you could truthfully assume that the sorry was insincere would be to also assume that the sign-writer was incapable of even the simplest lie about being sorry. Clearly, with the shout quotes, the sign-writer meant that “sorry” was to be emphasised. Perhaps the pumpkin soup is extraordinary and they really were sorry it was not being served.

The intentional misreading of the shout quotes as scare quotes does grow rather thin. The sign that says We Love “Sushi” makes one commenter on Flickr wonder whether the sign-maker meant “cat” in place of “sushi.” See, if “sushi” is in quotes it must mean that the word is dubious, right? Maybe they’re selling cat-meat instead of fish?

No! They just wanted to emphasise the word “sushi.” Very simple. You have to go out of your way to get it wrong.

A truck door that says our drivers are “safe” drivers could make you wonder whether that company does indeed define “safe” differently from everyone else—besides leaving you wondering who they are trying to convince, when safe-driving behaviour alone should do the trick.

But of course, all they meant to do was to emphasise the word “safe”, in much the same way that in sign after sign, “do not” or “please” are put inside shout quotes that emphasise the strongest sentiments of their authors.

I endorse the use of quotation marks for emphasis, even in extreme cases. One example I collected is of a sign in a bar advertising half-off bottles of beer during happy hours. There are four shout quotes, one in each corner, decorating the page as much as they are enclosing the text, but all of them emphasising the discount.

That perfect example of using quotes for emphasis is something I can drink to.