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Compact Dictionary for Students

July 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

dictionary + writing and study skills

Despite record-breaking results in GCSEs and A levels, many employers, colleges, and universities complain that they have applications from people who cannot spell or write good English. This is not to say that ‘standards are falling’ – which I don’t believe. On the contrary it seems to me that standards are actually rising – because we are surrounded in print, on screen, and everywhere else by high-quality writing. But more employers and teachers now expect people to be able to produce similarly clear prose, free from ambiguity and grammatical errors.

So Oxford University Press have come up with a brand-new dictionary to help students in colleges and universities not only grasp the meanings and spellings of words, but to understand their origins. With over 144,000 words, phrases, and definitions, it offers comprehensive coverage of current English and is perfect for student reference and everyday study needs. They have also done their best to reduce the normally intimidating appearance of pages in a dense book of reference. Each headword is printed in blue instead of the usual black, and this gives the page a lighter tone. It makes the twelve hundred page book (not so compact!) much easier to use.

The really big bonus however is an additional central section which explains how to brush up your English, and how to produce essays and dissertations. It also covers reports and summaries, advice on note-taking and referencing, and preparing CVs and job applications.

Throughout the text there are also notes giving advice on the use of good English, and highlighting the differences between commonly confused words such as empathy and sympathy, and affect and effect, as well as thousands of example phrases showing words in context.

There are also boxed explanations of common problems and misunderstandings. So – the entry on forbear runs as follows:

forbear¹ /for-bair / verb (past forebore; past. part. forborne) stop oneself from doing something. – ORIGIN Old English.

USAGE Do not confuse forbear with forebear. Forbear means ‘stop oneself from doing something’ (he doesn’t forbear to write about the bad times ) while forebear (which is also sometimes spelled forbear) means ‘an ancestor’ (our Stone Age forebears).

There is guidance provided on which verbal register a word belongs to – that is, if it’s formal or informal, dated (rotter) literary, technical (dorsal), derogatory (bimbo), offensive, or euphemistic (powder room).

If you were just embarking on a course at college or university, this would be a very good investment. It’s comprehensive, completely up to date, and with Amazon’s discount, a bargain at the price.

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Compact Oxford English Dictionary for Students, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.1210, ISBN: 0199296251

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Computers and Language

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on computers, teaching, and writing

What has been the impact of the PC in the classroom? Computers and Language is collection of essays presenting the results of studies monitoring research on the subject, and it offers one or two extended position papers and guides to software. John Pratt for instance explores the commonly observed phenomenon that students tend to be less inhibited in exploring writing programmes than their tutors – a point reinforced by other contributions. Maybe the next generation will have a different attitude to composition if they have grown up in front of a screen rather than a note book?

Chris Breeze argues in a letter to his headmaster that working on a PC encourages children to re-draft their work. Most teachers of writing would probably agree that this is something to be encouraged. It is interesting to observe however that one or two of the articles start out as a celebration of the PC as a liberating tool for students, but then gradually reveal the author’s wish to control production. Teachers rule – OK?

There are a couple of [obligatory?] chapters dealing with Hypertext as an adjunct to constructing narratives. Stephen Marcus inspects the use of Hypertext programmes [GUIDE, HYPERCARD] and makes what in the hands of school-age children might be rather ambitious claims for them. If the debates currently raging in the alt.hypertext newsgroup are anything to go by, this is still a contentious issue. There is as yet no fictional hypertext which has staked a claim for aesthetic distinction – but its defendants point out that no other medium produced a masterpiece at first outing.

The most engaging and informative contribution is from Noel Williams – a straightforward review of the software available to assist authors in the post-writing phase. He examines programmes such as GRAMMATIK (then still in version IV) WRITER’S WORKBENCH, and CORPORATE VOICE. In the end he comes down heavily in favour of Ruskin. Like most other commentators on this type of spell- and grammar-checking software, he suggests that people should not be intimidated by rule-governed programmes, encouraging us to “ignor[re] those parts of the system which do not match … writer’s needs”.

One of the main problems with articles and publications of this nature is that they are now rapidly superseded by software updates and discussion which takes place more immediately on the Internet. Nevertheless, there is probably good reason for a place for this collection in the departmental library.

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Moira Monteith (ed), Computers and Language, Oxford: Intellect, 1993, pp.159, ISBN: 1871516277

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 Writers and Editors

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

difficult cases of spellings and expressions

The Dictionary for Writers and Editors has been ‘repurposed’ from its original larger-scale edition to sit alongside the New Oxford Spelling Dictionary, New Hart’s Rules, and the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation. These form a group of new reference sources for writers and editors who are concerned with preparing texts for publication to the highest possible standard. It’s a specialist dictionary for writers, journalists, and text-editors. It offers rulings on words and spellings which are commonly problematic.

For instance, do we write Muslim or Moslem, customise or customize? It covers the names of well-known people and places, foreign words and commonly-used phrases such as petit-bourgeois and persona non grata. Entries run from A as a letter or paper size to Zydeco music and Zyklon B.

Many of these items are in any good dictionary, but this one eliminates all the non-problematic words and makes the book easier to use. It also deals with abbreviations, capitalization and punctuation. I looked up amendment [one ‘m’] superseded [yes – it’s spelt with an ‘s’] and manageable [it keeps the ‘e’]. It can also be used as a quick guide to many niceties of writing (the difference between hyphens and dashes) and as a potted source for historical names, dates, and places of importance.

At first glance, there might not seem much difference between this and an ordinary dictionary, but the process of selection and the emphasis on explanations of common problems makes it a very useful resource. This latest edition offers a huge revision and update on the original. Entries have been expanded on doubtful or variable spellings (“gettable” not “getable”); the punctuation of dates and spellings of proper names; and all those other little things that are so difficult to be consistent about when writing. It is also an invaluable guide to words that are often confused such as biannual (twice every year, or every six months) and biennial (every two years).

It is designed to be used in conjunction with New Hart’s Rules, which gives details of how text should be edited in preparation for printing. The headword is set in bold sans-serif, which makes it more immediately legible, though it might seem strange if you are used to the OUP tradition of bold Roman. There are four appendices: mathematical and logical symbols; proofreading marks; a list of diacritical accents; and tables for transliterating Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Russian.

It should certainly be amongst the reference tools of anybody who takes a serious interest in writing. The new smaller handbook format is a matter of personal taste, but it certainly looks a handsome little tome flanked by its three cousins.

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The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.434, ISBN: 0198610408

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Dictionary of British Place Names

July 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

origins of UK town, hamlet, and village names

Have you ever wondered how places such as Eccles, Stoke Poges, Great Snoring, Lower Peover, or Leighton Buzzard get their names? This Dictionary of British Place Names will tell you, and give you details about the historical background. The reason there are so many unusual names for British towns, villages, and hamlets is of course that the UK has been invaded by so many different nations in the past. They have left their languages stamped all over the land.

And as the author of this specialist dictionary points out, foreign languages actually persist in place names more than in the living language, because place names are not likely to change, whereas the spoken language does. There are over 17,000 entries listed here – alphabetically, from Abbas Combe in Somerset to Zennor in Cornwall. Most place names come from Old English, Danish, Norse, and Celtic, with only a smattering from Norman-French, and Latin. And not all of the etymologies are as obvious as they might seem.

For instance, many place names which occur a lot can in fact come from different origins. Broughton occurs in several counties and combinations such as Broughton Astley (Leics) and Broughton Poggs (Oxon). But the name can come from ‘brook farmstead’, ‘hill farmstead’, or ‘fortified farmstead’.

The opposite phenomenon also occurs – where the same thing can give rise to different names. Thus Keswick and Chiswick both come from ‘cheese farm’.

Most of the names listed are likely to be at least a thousand years old, and structurally they are often in two parts. The first may be a place, person, tribal, or river-name – and it qualifies the second part. Thus Bakewell was originally Badecanwelle formed from Badeca + wella = ‘Spring or stream of a man called Badeca’.

There’s a glossary of common elements in British place names – such as baernet, land cleared by burning; mynster, minster or large church; and stoc, outlying farmstead or hamlet. This occurs in my own home town of Stockport – which I notice has just appeared in the designed-for-Xmas novelty publication, Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK.

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A.D. Mills, Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2011, pp.576, ISBN: 019960908X

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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 + writing and study skills

essays on computers, teaching, and writing

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

difficult cases of spellings and expressions

origins of UK town, hamlet, and village names

street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

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