Diacritiques

In my pursuit of acquiring at least some of the trappings of British geek and pop culture, getting a basic grasp on Doctor Who I came across a word that I hadn’t been aware the English language possessed.

This is from last Staturday’s episode (”Utopia”), about 7 or 8 minutes in. The protagonists have just arrived in an unknown location and are walking through a dark rocky landscape. While the Doctor is rather pensive and monosyllabic, his companions, Captain Jack Harkness and Martha Jones, are chattering away. There is an undercurrent of jealousy, and at one point Martha gets a bit snippy. Here’s how the Doctor calls them to order:

To me, the interjection after “end of the universe” sounds pretty much like the French word hein. Moreover, it has here exactly the meaning of hein: something like a rather aggressive question tag, which could be glossed as “right?” or “isn’t it?”

But here’s the problem. If I transcribe this passage as:

• You two — we’re at the end of the universe, hein? Right at the edge of knowledge itself, and you’re busy … blogging! Come on.

… then it looks to the reader as if the speaker was speaking with a French accent, which would be misleading.

I asked some irquaintances for other, more English-looking spellings. The suggestion that might fit best was hunh.

(That this was one of the funniest TV quotes I’ve encountered in a while may have contributed to my noticing this.)

1. The awesomest eye-chart ever.

   Though I can’t exactly see myself rattling off “GEORGIAN CAPITAL LETTER LAS, LEFTWARDS DASHED ARROW, GURMUKHI LETTER AI, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH PROSGEGRAMMENI, TAMIL LETTER I, BOX DRAWINGS DOWN HEAVY AND UP HORIZONTAL LIGHT, ORIYA DIGIT SEVEN, VULGAR FRACTION ONE SIXTH, PARENTHESIZED IDEOGRAPH FOUR” at the optometrist’s.#[a] Yet.

2. In other news, it has come to our attention that fungi (pl.: fungi) has joined the ranks of countable singular nouns. Congratulations.

   It sounds like something out of a comic book, although scientists already know that fungi will eat asbestos, jet fuel, and plastic. It has also been shown to decompose hot graphite in the ruins of the Chernobyl power plant, which melted down in 1986. The plant’s release of large amounts of radiation appears to have attracted black hordes of fungi. But how does it work?

   According to Ekaterina Dadachova and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City, the fungi Cryptococcus neoformans and two other species use melanin, also a pigment found in human skin, to transform radiation into energy to use as food for growth.

   (Technology Review, via apostropher.)

3. The Guardian, or rather, Angelique Chrisafis on this Monday’s Guardian Newsdesk podcast, has some strange ideas about adjectives:

   (Note: neither tsunami nor tidal wave counts. The full mp3 can be downloaded here)

[a]: The line I just read looks like this: Ⴊ ⇠ ਐ ῼ இ ╁ ଠ ୭ ⅙ ㈣ — got all your Unicode fonts installed?

So I’m quietly editing one of literally hundreds of overdue eggcorns — the lovely image of being in (a) high dungeon — when I come across a cite from an academic publication that so strikingly illustrates Hartman-Skitt-McKean’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation that I hesitate at first to believe my eyes. I read it once, I read it twice, but no, the writer sounds far from being punning and playful. The venue is the journal College English, the year 1983, and the topic a raging controversy over who is licensed to dispense advice on English usage, and what it should be. In a letter to the editor, Paul Kaser of Kings River College, Reedley, CA, writes:

Newsweek’s Educational Division’s inaccurate touting of their “Forty Mistakes” as the most common errors of English usage hardly justifies Suzette Haden Elgin’s shrill denunciation of their effort (CE, September 1982). Her article gives the impression that the Newsweek staff members (perhaps mere journalists!) have been caught poaching on the royal academic preserve and therefore deserve to be slapped down and mocked with name-calling and populist disdain.

Is this why Professor Elgin got into such high dungeon over the list? Clearly she wants to attack exaggerated squeamishness over English usage, but need she, in doing so, insist that “I Love to Refer Back to the First Time We Met” and “I Called You No Less Than Three Times a Day” are not usage errors? As James Thurber warned, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.”

Professor Elgin demonstrates in her first sentence that she is not concerned with such nit-pickeries as misplaced modifiers (”I only wish …”), but this unconcern hardly gives her leave to denounce as pedants and quibblers those who are troubled by such sloppy use of the language. […]

Two Comments on Suzette Haden Elgin’s “The Top Forty Mistakes”. Paul Kaser, Bertram Lippman. _College English, Vol. 45, No. 8 (Dec., 1983), pp. 824-826_

Just like this impassioned letter, the first pages of both Suzette Haden Elgin’s original article and her reply to the criticism are accessible on JSTOR.

On the front page of this Saturday’s Guardian’s “Work” section, an article of a familiar genre: Under the heading Bad education, Emma-Jayne Jones and Robert Ashton bemoan the decline of spelling, punctuation and “grammar” skills, and the disastrous effect this has on the employment prospects of young people: Recruiters say grammatical sloppiness is depressingly common […]