The Brunch Table

So in the one linguistics class I took in college, I learned that changes in the way we use language can be “prescriptive” (spreading from authorities out to the general public) or “descriptive” (vice-versa, when some creeping nonstandard thing that ordinary people do eventually becomes the right way to do it).

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen some prescriptive attempts at introducing gender-neutral pronouns, most commonly some variation on “he-or-she.” But as Wikipedia relates, these constructions haven’t fared too well:

…these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility. Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones.

However, despite the lack of an official solution, the desire to ditch the old usage endured. Soon enough, an elegant descriptive alternative began to spread through the language–perhaps some future scholar can work out exactly when it started. It’s not enshrined in any style guide I know, and it’s still considered nonstandard in print, but I’ve heard it in ordinary speech all my life. And today, I noticed this:

As Facebook goes, so goes the English-speaking world, I’ll wager.

Here’s a wonderful clip from the BBC’s Mongrel Nation, a series of educational shorts in which Eddie Izzard illustrates an episode from British history by placing himself in some kind of embarassing public situation.

In this one, he explores the common ancestry of Germanic languages by first learning some phrases in Old English and then visiting the Netherlands to try them out on a Frisian Dutch person.

(direct link)

I did a little linguistic research this afternoon–isn’t counting Google hits the best way to answer usage questions?

Hanukkah: 16,900,000
Chanukah: 3,930,000
Hanukah: 1,110,000
Hanuka: 639,000
Chanuka: 596,000
Channukah: 535,000
Chanukkah: 340,000
Hanukka: 124,000
Chanike: 958
Khanike: 882
Chanikke: 4

Oh, and while we’re at it…
Kabbalah: 3,830,000
Kabala: 1,250,000
Kabbala: 997,000
Qabalah: 276,000
Kaballah: 203,000
Kabalah: 147,000
Qabala: 123,000
Qabbalah: 80,600
Kaballa: 50,100
Kabballah: 36,800
Qaballah: 18,400
Qabbala: 16,700
Qabballah: 964
Qaballa: 869
Kabballa: 630
Qabballa: 563

All I want for Hanukkah is for the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Israel to invent us a pinyin already. (I mean, if they’re going to rub out the nonstandard dialect of my ancestors, they might at least improve my search results.)

It’s been linked elsewhere for other purposes, but I find this this 1978 New Yorker profile on Johnny Carson fascinating for reasons besides the subject material. The article is only as old as I am, but it sounds so…old.

It’s not just the odd unfamiliar word (I had to google minatory, “foreshadowing evil,” and causerie, “idle conversation”).

It’s not the somewhat short-sighted cultural commentary:

“This drives yet another nail into the coffin lid, already well hammered down, of Marshall McLuhan’s theory that TV has transformed the world into a global village. (Radio is, as it has long been, the only medium that gives us immediate access to what the rest of the planet is doing and thinking, simply because every country of any size operates a foreign-language service.)”

It’s not even the pre-New-World-Order reference to how baseball fandom “annexed Japan.”

Now that I think about it, it’s really just that the author uses the word “digital” to mean “relating to the fingers.” It took me about thirty full seconds to parse that sentence. You try:

” I note the digital mannerisms (befitting one who began his career as a conjurer) that he uses to hold our attention during his patter. “

See?

If you ever find yourself wondering how to pronounce a tricky word or name, try searching for “(the word) pronounced” in Google. For example:

• Maciej pronounced
• Pilates pronounced
• Rijndael pronounced
• WYSIWYG pronounced

If you look at those results, you can see why it works—when people are writing about odd words, they tend to add “(pronounced _________ )”.

Remember the part in Alice in Wonderland where she hears the story of the sisters who live at the bottom of a treacle well? Well, I realized today that I still don’t know exactly what treacle is. When I first read the book as a kid, I think I concluded that it was something purple and sticky, with a slightly medicinal artificial-fruit taste, kind of like Sweet-Tarts.

Thanks to google, I now know that treacle is the British word for molasses. What an anticlimax.

Lustration. Strangely enough, it literally means “purification.” It’s used to describe the purging of officials from the old regime under a new government.

The English word Hell, referring to the Christian afterlife of eternal punishment, comes from the Old English Hel, a borrowed Norse word for the land of the dead.

The Greek originals of the Christian Testaments use Hades, the land of the dead in Greek mythology, where their Old English descendants use Hel. The very earliest Greek Christian writings, though, use the Hebrew word Gehenna instead.

In the original Hebrew of the Torah, the Christian Old Testament’s references to Gehenna are mostly replaced by a different Hebrew word, sheol. Although Jewish oral tradition has various theories on the rewards and punishments awaiting souls in the afterlife, the Torah itself doesn’t offer much of an explanation on the matter.

Sheol is not an explicitly religious term. In ancient Judea, when a city garbage dump grew too large, the authorities would have it burned down to make room for more. The resulting fiery mess was called a sheol. In ancient Judean literature, a sheol, a mountain of fire, was used as a poetic metaphor for earthly death.

Gehenna, or Ge-Hinnom, was the name of ancient Jerusalem’s municipal landfill.

Source: Wikipedia