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Concise Oxford Dictionary

July 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling one-volume desktop reference

Choosing a dictionary can be very much a matter of personal taste, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary has several features which have always made it a great favourite with writers. It is based upon the monumental Oxford English Dictionary and its latest supplements, which gives it a very good pedigree. At a practical level, it’s perfect for the desktop and easy to handle. I always reach for this one first. For the latest edition, Oxford’s lexicographers have rewritten every entry to represent English as it is used today.

There are over 240,000 words, phrases and meanings covering current and historical English, and specialist and technical areas. Each entry is now clearer and more accessible, with the most modern meanings placed first, and definitions given in a clear and straightforward style. Authoritative guidance on grammar and usage is provided in highlighted boxes, and there are also new Word Formation panels that show how complex words are created.

Full explanations of pronunciation, inflexion, and historical derivation are offered in a systematic manner, and the latest edition also includes a wide range of abbreviations. The Concise Oxford was first published one hundred years ago, and this centenary edition continues the tradition of providing an authoritative coverage of English as it is used today.

Another welcome feature (added as a result of reader-demand) is guidance on matters of disputed and controversial usage. Now you can be warned about that possible non-PC faux-pas (both included) – and it also shows the differences for spellings in American English.

I’ve actually got two copies: one old and battered with use which has been on the bookshelf for years; the other a recent edition which was a present to my office when I moved here.

The critic Cyril Connolly once said that if you knew all the words in the Oxford Concise, you would have a big enough vocabulary to be civilized, fluent, and literate. The jacket-cover advert isn’t exaggerating when it says “The world’s favourite”. If you only have room for a single dictionary, it should be this one.

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Concise Oxford English Dictionary (12^th updated edn) 2011, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.1728, ISBN: 0199601089

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Conjunctions – how to understand them

August 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Conjunctions – definition

There are two main types of conjunctions:

Co-ordinating conjunctions join together parts of a sentence which are of equal status.
Subordinating conjunctions join together parts of a sentence which have a complex relationship.

Examples

There are five co-ordinating conjunctions in English:

and or nor but for

There are many more subordinating conjunctions:

whereas, where, if, because, while, as, when, since

Use

Co-ordinating conjunctions are used in the following statements:

Jim and Sally are going to the concert.
Give me that gun or I’ll call the police.
Neither a lender nor a borrower be.
We have no lemons but we do have some limes.

NB! It is possible for a word to be a conjunction in one sentence and a different part of speech in another.

The words and, or, nor, but, for are all co-ordinating conjunctions.

They are conjunctions because they usually join together parts of a sentence.

They are co-ordinating because the parts they join are of equal rank. For example:

We have no limes but we do have some lemons.

Conjunctions should not be confused with adverbs such as:

moreover, besides, so, consequently, however, also

Take the following statement:

The weather was bad last Tuesday so we stayed at home.

Here the word so links the two parts, but it creates a sequence and a sense of cause and effect — rather than the joining of two equal statements.

The conjunction may not always be placed between the words being linked. It can appear elsewhere:

Because I was tired, I went to bed early.

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Consonants – how to understand them

August 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Consonants – definition

The terms vowels and consonants refer to the sounds which make up the spoken language.

Vowels are open sounds and consonants are relatively closed.

The idea that English has five vowels – a, e, i, o, and u – is slightly misleading. This statement refers to those letters of the alphabet which can be used to represent some of the many open sounds of the language.

Examples

Here are some examples of words which end with a vowel:

agenda, bar, go, queue, tea, empty

Here are some examples of words which end with a consonant:

brick, hat, grab, tap, plum, fuss, does, which, belong

Use

The terms vowel and consonant are fairly loose terms for the vast variety of sounds which make up any language.

Most people are comfortable with words which are spoken as

vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant

This sequence of sounds is easy to articulate – as in potato.

Consumer products are given such terms because they are easily repeated and memorised:

There are approximately forty-two vowel sounds and fifty consonant sounds in English.

The written code which attempts to represent all known sounds in all known languages is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The symbols comprising the code are used in dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of a word:

hat = /hæt/

The code can be useful to non-native students of any language as a guide to pronunciation — provided they understand the code.

If the code has been learned, a speaker can—in theory!— read out a paragraph in any language without understanding its meaning. [Accomplished actors have been known to use this technique.]

Phonology is a complex and detailed study of language sounds in which the smallest unit of sound is known as a phoneme – one single sound which cannot be split up into anything smaller as part of a particular language.

English spelling and English pronunciation have an extremely loose connection. This is a product of the history of the language, the wide-ranging mixture of speakers, and the important fact that speech and writing in any language are two separate systems.

Linguists regard speech as primary and writing as secondary.

We acquire speech naturally, just as we grow taller or get a second set of teeth. Writing on the other hand has to be learned – in the same way as we learn to drive a car.

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Damp Squid: English Laid Bare

June 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how language is changing – and why

Truth be told, this is quite an advanced book on language use written from deep within the research vaults of the English linguistic history, but it’s written in a language that most people will be able to understand. Behind the apparently frivolous and amusing selection of examples in Damp Squid, Jeremy Butterfield is offering a serious update on how lexicography is conducted in the digital age.

Dictionaries are no longer constructed from contributions handed in on slips of paper by enthusiastic amateurs: they are compiled by software programs crunching vast stockpiles of words stored in databases – known as the ‘corpus’. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs.

The complete database (of the Oxford Corpus) contains over two billion words, and is being expanded at the rate of 350 million new words every year. The Corpus reveals those words we use most frequently (the, is, to and) – but it has to be observed that these are based on written evidence – not the language we speak.

He looks at the origins of English language, which comes from a bewildering variety of sources – Old English, French, Norse, Greek and Latin, plus words borrowed from more than 350 other languages.

The current social activities generating most new words include information technology, lifestyle, media, sport, ecology, fashion, and cuisine. These new words are coined by making compounds from old terms (bedmate, streetwise) clipping and back-formation (advert, emote) portmanteau (chortle, podcast) eponyms (Biro)and foreign suffixes such as —ati (It: glitterati) —ista (Sp: Guardianista) and —fest (Gr: bookfest).

He has a good chapter on irregularities of spelling and pronunciation, culminating in a review of ‘eggcorns’ – understandable mistakes such as just desserts, free-reign, and baited breath – many of which are so widespread there is a danger of their becoming accepted.

He is a fully committed descriptivist. That is, his job as he sees it is to record the manner in which the English language is used, no matter how much it might change its meanings. Hence the title of the book. He argues that damp squid makes just as much sense as the original damp squib – because we hardly ever use the term squib any more. This might infuriate traditionalists and prescriptive grammarians, and it does neglect to note that a squid can hardly be anything other than damp, since it lives in the sea, so the metaphor loses all its force: it fails to make an imaginative connection between two disparate things.

In fact he takes things even further in his conclusion, where he delivers a vigorous critique of what he calls the ‘language Nazis’ – those people who write to newspapers complaining about the decline of the English language (and are aided and abetted by the BBC).

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Jeremy Butterfield, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.179, ISBN: 019957409X

Dialect – how to understand it

August 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Dialect – definition

The term dialect refers to any variety of a language used by a group of speakers.

It refers to the content of the utterance rather than the pronunciation.

Examples

There are two main types of dialect in English:

Regional varieties of speech which relate to a particular geographical area.
Standard English which is used by speakers and writers in any area.

Use

The term dialect used to refer to deviations from Standard English which were used by groups of speakers.

Political awareness has now given us the current concept of dialect as any developed speech system.

Standard English itself is therefore now considered to be a dialect of English — equal in status with regional dialects such as Scottish or social dialects such as Black English.

The concept of dialect embraces all aspects of a language from grammar to vocabulary.

NB! Dialect is not the same thing as accent.

Linguists take a descriptive view of all language phenomena. They do not promote the notion of the superiority of Standard English.

This is not to say that Standard English and Received Pronunciation are considered equal to other forms by the majority of speakers, but certainly attitudes are becoming more liberal.

This may be as a result of the increase in mass media in Britain and the exposure this provides to varieties of English such as American English and Australian English.

The past participle ‘gotten’ as in ‘he had gotten into his car’ is Standard American English — whereas it would be an aberration if used by a native British speaker.

The concept of a dialect used to be applied to a deviant form of the standard which had no written version. This is no longer the case. The written form of Standard English is now considered as a dialect. Thus we may write in a variety of dialects — one of which is the Standard English which most of us employ.

Dialect poetry has become popular recently, along with the shift in perception which political correctness has demanded.

Writers have for centuries attempted to represent dialect utterances in their work. Shakespeare often gave his yokels such items. Snout the tinker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says “By’r lakin, a parlous fear.”

The novelist D.H.Lawrence represented the Nottinghamshire dialect in many of his novels by interspersing Standard English with utterances such as “Come into th’ut” spoken by Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Perhaps the most interesting factor here is that the writer needs to use the English alphabet in the attempt to write dialect terms. This is not always possible, and so one of the skills a dialect writer needs is the ability to select those words which lend themselves to representation by means of the orthodox alphabet.

Some contemporary regional dialect forms are ones which have remained as such after being eliminated from what is now Standard English. An example of this is the Scottish ‘kirtle’ which was replaced in Standard English during the Old English period by ‘skirt’.

Some of the terms used to command the sheep dogs in Cumbria and Northumbria are unrecognizable in any dialect. They have remained intact since Old English or Middle English times.

This is an interesting phenomenon and explicable when one considers that the utterance is necessarily one-way, with the dog as the listener! For this same reason, we can’t accurately define this set of commands as a contemporary dialect.

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Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

specialist scientific style guide and reference

This Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors is aimed at scholars working in an academic setting and people writing or editing scientific papers – say in book publishing or the mass print media. It gives exact details of how scientific matter is presented in written form – both in terms of the correct spelling for scientific terms and the manner in which scientific data such as equations are rendered on the page. It’s part of a set of specialist dictionaries and style guides produced by Oxford University Press.

The OUP is the number one source for reference books of this kind, and the series manages to compress huge, unwieldy databases of information into a handy, useable format. This single volume includes over 9,700 entries which reflect accepted usage, and it follows the recommendations of international scientific bodies such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

It gives clear guidance on such matters as spellings (American English and British English), punctuation, abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes, units and quantities, and symbols. Also included are the correct spelling of chemical and medical terms; short explanations of the meaning of scientific concepts; basic data about famous scientists; explanations of acronyms; and definitions of terms.

There are appendices with lists of chemical and electro-magnetic symbols; the periodic table; scientific symbols; and a list of web-based resources. It provides substantially enlarged coverage from previous editions, with increased coverage of the life sciences, and new entries in physics, astronomy, chemistry, computer science, and mathematics.

This comprehensive and authoritative A-Z guide is an invaluable tool for students, professionals, and publishers working with writing in the fields of physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, biochemistry, genetics, immunology, microbiology, astronomy, mathematics, and computer science.

These style guides are in a curious format – royal sixteenmo – which is smaller than a conventional book, but too bulky to be pocket-sized. But I must say that it looks quite diminutively handsome on my shelves alongside its colleagues the New Oxford Spelling Dictionary, New Hart’s Rules, and the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation.

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New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.451, ISBN: 0199545154

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Dictionary of Contemporary Slang

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

It’s very difficult for dictionary compilers to keep up with the development of slang. Would you have known what chav and bling meant a year ago – in 2004 that is? But Tony Thorne’s compilation certainly captures most of the new street language that is passing into common usage as I write towards the end of 2005. Of course some of it may not last, but I have the feeling his selection is well-judged.

He offers more than 15,000 definitions, many of the terms drawn from the worlds of drugs, sport, youth culture, and television, as well as traditional slang topics such as sex, money, and bodily functions. He also explains how and when the terms are used, with notes on nuance, tone, and associations. The language items are drawn from Britain, America, and Australia, as well as other English-speaking countries. He gives plenty of examples of usage and cites sources wherever possible.

He defines slang quite persuasively as “language selected for its striking informality”. And of course it’s is a loose enough term to encompass irreverence, vulgarity, new jargon, and obscenity – as well as the coded terms used by minority groups as a sort of secret language.

I was glad to see that he acknowledges one of my favourite sources of contemporary slang – Roger’s Profanisaurus – and cites it as the source for their wonderful synonym for bonkers which seems to still be in general circulation – “He’s gone completely hatstand“.

He also includes Cockney rhyming slang, which is still popular and spawning new variants all the time – although his entry on the now-disgraced Garry Glitter does not illustrate a beverage as other slang dictionaries claim, but a body part – itself a slang term. (I’ll leave you to work that one out.)

And he’s good at keeping dated slang in the lexicon. Probably not many people under forty would know that ‘gams’ is a slang term for shapely legs (on a woman of course) or that it comes from the Old Northern French term gamb – obviously itself closely related to jambe.

He’s also good at noting the mutiple possible meanings of words: fag can be a male homosexual or something you smoke. [Oops! it’s all a linguistic minefield.] So – a typical entry runs as follows, fully explaining the term:

naff adj

tasteless, inferior, shoddy, and unappealing. Naff had existed in working-class slang for at least 40 years by the time it became a vogue word in the later 1970s. It had been used in the jargon of prostitutes to mean nothing or negligible. In the theatrical, criminal and street-trading milieus it meant third-rate or poor quality. The word’s sudden popularity occurred probably because it was seized upon by TV scriptwriters (particularly Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais in the comic series Porridge) as an acceptable euphemism for fuck in such forms as ‘naff-all’ (meaning fuck-all), naffing and naff off. Naff’s ultimate origin, which seems to be 19th century, is nonetheless obscure. It has been claimed that it is a backslang form of fann(y) (in the sense of females sex organs) or an acronym or alteration of a phrase involving the word fuck (‘not a fucking fart’ or similar). Neither etymology is attested (or particularly convincing), and the similarity to NAFFI is probably coincidental-

‘To be naff is to be unstylish, whatever that may mean.’

(The Complete Naff Guide, Bryson, et al, 1983)

A lot of the examples he gives are actually US slang which is passing into UK usage, but he explains the provenance. He includes phrases as well as individual words – as in choke the chicken and smuggling peanuts.

Tony Thorne knows his stuff. There’s no slack here. The language of the street is up front. He doesn’t pretend to the sort of historical depth you get with Eric Partridge, but this is as up-to-date a dictionary of ‘strikingly informal’ contemporary language as you are likely to find.

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Tony Thorne, Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, London: A and C Black, 3rd revised edition, 2006, pp.512, ISBN: 0713675292

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Dictionary of Foreign Words & Phrases

July 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

What is the plural of fez? How should we pronounce millefeuille? And where would you see a strabismus? The words can come from anywhere: the Latin, German, and French by whom we were once occupied, imports from Britain’s own former colonies, and modern coinages from around the world. The Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases includes a guide to pronunciation, over 8,000 entries, and the words and phrases are drawn from over forty languages – including Afrikaans, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Hindustani, Latin, Malay, and Turkish.

If ever you had any doubt concerning the English Language’s propensity to soak up and use words from many other languages, have a look at this amazing collection. Entries run from the Greco-Roman import abacus, a cappella, and ab initio through futon and moloch to tamagotchi and the German Zwischenzug, which didn’t mean ‘through train’ as I thought but turned out to be a chess move.

There are details of the history of each word or phrase, including its language of origin and any original spelling, and an account of its current use in English. There’s also an appendix in which the terms included are listed by their language of origin as well as the century during which they were introduced into English.

Quotations are used throughout the text to illustrate the terms in their English context. A typical example reads as follows:

deus ex machina noun phrase L17 Modern Latin (translation of Greek theos ek mekhanes, literally, ‘god from the machinery’). A power, event, or person arriving in the nick of time to solve a difficulty; a providential (often rather contrived) interposition, especially in a novel or play.

The ‘machine’ was originally the device by which deities were suspended above the stage in the theatre in classical antiquity. The phrase is generally used in its entirety but also occurs abbreviated to ex machina, with another agent of providence substituted for deus (see quotation 1996(2)).
attributive 1996 Spectator The deus ex machina resolution of the drama may provide one of the most feeble denouements in all opera.
1996 Times In this ideal scenario, growth in Europe turns up and deficits come down without anyone on this side of the Atlantic having to do anything. EMU ex machina.

This is a wonderfully rich and useful source of reference. Like most other specialist dictionaries, it profits by ommission. That is, all the obvious and boring stuff is left out. What remains is an excellent source of reference for anyone who is interested in words and their origins.

Because the entries are from such a wide variety of sources, reading continuously is a curiously refreshing experience. It might seem a bit nerdish to admit the fact, but I read the entire collection from cover to cover.

Oh, and by the way, the plural of fez is fezzes. Bet you didn’t know that.

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Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2010, pp.432, ISBN: 0199543682

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Dictionary of Modern Slang

May 28, 2010 by Roy Johnson

street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

As the editors say in their introduction to this latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, ‘A year, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, is a long time in slang’. In fact the principal difficulty in compiling lexical resources of this type is what to leave out – because a great deal of slang is very evanescent. Oxford University Press have the advantage of compiling their dictionaries from the huge ‘Corpus’ of recorded language use which makes up the data base from which their publications are compiled. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs. The database contains over two billion words, and expands at the rate of 350 million words a year.

So this assembly of what’s current has a better chance than most of being directly relevant – though you should remember that in order to qualify for inclusion in a dictionary, words have to be written down, not simply spoken. OUP also stipulate that they have to remain there for some time before they are considered for inclusion in dictionaries

The entries of this compilation run from abso-bloody-lutely and Acapulco gold via manky and meeja to wuss, yuckie, and zonker. As you can perhaps detect from this random selection, it’s rather polite in tone. There’s little of the ribaldry of Roger’s Profanisaurus or the scholarly rigour of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

There are lots of very dated references such as Ally-Pally (BBC) and Andrew (the navy) which I seriously doubt are in general circulation now – except with people over retirement age. But I was glad to see that it includes rhyming slang, as well as street language from other English-speaking cultures such as America and Australia, so the book could be useful if you’re thinking of emigrating.

There are also some linguistic curios in the form of words for which the etymology is simply not known – such as eighty-six (to refuse to serve someone in a restaurant) and others which just seem genuinely unusual and very entertaining – such as copacetic (outstanding) and gamahuche (cunnilingus or fellatio).

There is a certain respect given to lewd slang. The editors don’t balk at including carpet-muncher and mantee, but these entries are noticeably brief, and ladies in sensible shoes doesn’t get listed. They offer bristols and boobs, but not headlamps or hooters. I also looked in vain for the expressive rack, the amusingly faux-naive front-bottom, and the very well known Ugandan discussions. Entries on some less contentious issues are almost embarrassingly passé – such as goggle box (television) and knuckle sandwich (a punch).

There’s also a thematic index – because many of the terms are drawn from the worlds of drugs, sport, youth culture, and television, as well as traditional slang topics such as sex, money, and bodily functions. I always think that compilations of this kind are quire good fun, but all in all, there’s not much here that your maiden aunt could object to.

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John Ayto and John Simpson, Dictionary of Modern Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (second edition) 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0199232059

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Dictionary of Rhyming Slang

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

rhyming slang explained and brought up to date

Would you know what to do if you were left on your Jack Jones for a day with the saucepan lids? Rhyming slang originated in early nineteenth century London. Everyone knows that apples and pears = ‘stairs’, and whistle and flute = ‘suit’. Here’s how the system works. The rhyming word is the second of a pair, and the connection is not always obvious – as in Derby Kelly = ‘stomach’ (belly). But usage is made more complicated by the fact that it is the first, non-rhyming word which is spoken – so you go up the apples to bed, not the pears. This new Dictionary of Rhyming Slang explains explains all the well-known terms, and many you will never have heard of before.

If that is not complex enough, the inventive and playful strain of rhyming slang is seen in the tendency to transfer via rhyme from the original term to more and more remote associations – as in bottle and glass = ‘bottom’ (arse), which becomes bottle; but that in its turn is rhymed with Aristotle, which is shortened to arris, which then in its turn is rhymed with April in Paris. Are you still with us?

The most commonly used terms in John Ayto’s amusing collection are coined for the perennial slang topics – body parts, sex, the lavatory, crime, drink, gambling, illness, and death. But he also covers such topics as work, sport, and even household objects.

It was once thought that rhyming slang was dying out, but the recent fashion for using celebrity names has proved this not to be true – as in [the now disgraced] Garry Glitter = ‘pint of bitter’, abbreviated to a Garry of course. The alternative might be to order a couple of Britneys (Spears).

All the people whose names have been memorialised in this way are given thumbnail biographies. Thus, the cast immortalising haemorrhoids includes Michael Miles, Nobby Stiles, Valentine Dyall, and Emma Freud.

[It is interesting to see that John Ayto cites Roger’s Profanisaurus Rex amongst his sources of authentic persuasive coinings. If you follow that link, be warned – it’s much stronger stuff.]

Drink does much better than food, rhyming slang is obviously largely the province of the male, and it often embeds itself so deeply into general linguistic usage that we are hardly conscious of it – as in porkies (porky pies) for ‘lies’, and loaf (loaf of bread) for ‘head’.

There’s a big index, so you can easily locate any term you hear but whose meaning you can’t guess (as I couldn’t with balaclava). This is an excellent and certainly bang up-to-date account of what is obviously still a thriving sub-set of English Language.

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John Ayto, Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.309, ISBN: 0198607512

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best-selling one-volume desktop reference

free pages from our English Language software program

Conjunctions – definition

Examples

Use

free pages from our English Language software program

Consonants – definition

Examples

Use

how language is changing – and why

free pages from our English Language software program

Dialect – definition

Examples

Use

specialist scientific style guide and reference

street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

rhyming slang explained and brought up to date

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