Diacritiques

The Eggcorn Database has its own forum now. I also made some changes to the posting rules. Oh, and we’ve managed to pass the threshold of 500 eggcorns this month.

Sometimes apparently simple entries can turn out to be more complex than meets the eye. Yesterday, Kaz Vorpal entered the substitution of flounder v. for founder v. This one had been suggested several times and is cited in many collections of usage advice, but I always resisted entering it. I saw it as an example of a confusion about which is which among two “complicated” words. (My rule of thumb for eggcorns: a “difficult” word is replaced with an “easy” one.) So I edited Kaz’ entry accordingly. But Arnold Zwicky didn’t agree, and he had the data to show that some people think of flounder, the fish:

In fact, some people have explained to me that “flounder” is the word to use, because a ship in this sort of distress flops about like a fish — a flounder, in particular — out of water. The association with flounder (the fish) seems to be unetymological: OED2 labels it “of obscure etymology”, suggests various non-fishy sources, and gives as its earliest sense the not particularly fish-related ’stumble’ (attested from 1592). But then the sense extended to ’struggle violently and clumsily, struggle in mire’ and the way was open for comparison to a flopping flounder. (Suspiciously, several of the OED2’s citations actually mention fish.)

Now wouldn’t that make for a great borrowing into German, where the fish is called Flunder?#[1] Herumflundern (gloss: flounder about/around) has a great sound to it.#[2] And indeed, at least one person has had the idea already:

• Das Problem scheint in der Tatsache zu liegen, dass wir irgendwo mittendrin stecken, und herumflundern wie ein Fisch ausserhalb des Wassers. (link)
  [The problem seems to lie in the fact that we are stuck somewhere in the middle of this, and are floundering about like a fish out of water.]

And there seems to be a dialectal German verb, flundern, which I’m not familiar with.

[1]: Much, much better than what the Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, does with their “InfoPoints” , “Economy Vierer” compartments, “Bahn & Bike” trains and the “BahnCard Teen” (a travel pass for 12 to 17 year olds). [2]: And it’s an occupation I’ve been getting much practice in lately. I’m starting to suspect short-term memory problems, but that’s another topic.

The software upgrade seems to have gone all right (please report any problems you may have with this site). Posting, on the other hand, has been light; mainly because I’m recovering from a particularly tenacious cold/cough/bronchitis, which has me look at the more substantial posts in the pipeline and shake my head in disgust about their lack of clarity and conciseness.

To tide you over, some more levity. The language blogs have been abuzz with posts about swearwords lately — their origins, their usages, and the annoying tendency of some media to censor, edit or otherwise partially camouflage the offending words, blatantly disregarding the speakers or authors who chose them in the first place. (Search engines still have problems retrieving the appropriate posts, but for a small sample, try this and this Technorati search — I just can’t get their Boolean operators to work correctly.)

In the latest instalment of this meta-series, Arnold Zwicky approvingly cites the Guardian, whose editors have no problem printing relevant quotes in full:

Sir Richard [Mottram] put it more succinctly. He is said to have told a colleague: “We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department’s fucked. It’s been the biggest cock-up ever and we’re all completely fucked.”

The Guardian Style Guide — always a pleasant read, and at the very least you’ll enjoy the cartoons (see above) — has the following to say:

fuck
do not describe this as “a good, honest old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word” because, first, here is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon word (they spoke Old English) and, more important, it did not appear until the late 13th century
see swearwords

swearwords
We are more liberal than any other newspaper, using words such as cunt and fuck that most of our competitors would not use.
The editor’s guidelines are straightforward:
First, remember the reader, and respect demands that we should not casually use words that are likely to offend.
Second, use such words only when absolutely necessary to the facts of a piece, or to portray a character in an article; there is almost never a case in which we need to use a swearword outside direct quotes.
Third, the stronger the swearword, the harder we ought to think about using it.
Finally, never use asterisks, which are just a copout.

Asterisks are explicitly forbidden. Very sensible advice.

On the same topic, when I was talking about this sort of thing with my friend Kareen some time ago over a pleasant cup of tea under her plum trees, I was reminded that the asterisks, periods or underscores of avoidance aren’t an English-only phenomenon. In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre published a play called La P… respectueuse. “P…” stands for “Putain”, whore. Here, the avoidance is achieved with a standard ellipsis: three dots, which according to French typographic rules are printed without a preceding blank space. The number of dots does not equal the number of elided letters. Kareen surmised that literary scholars and the like would refer to the play as “La Putain respectueuse”, though.

New entries in the 2005 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary.

I was slightly surprised about the new sense of neoconservative. There must have been some semantic variation over the last few years.

Here are two really-much-too-long-drawn-out noun phrases I found in today’s idle browsing. The first one is from an AP wire (emphasis mine): An independent commission to oversee coastal restoration and hurricane protection work in Louisiana has been proposed by the Louisiana congressional delegation. It would be called the “Protecting Essential Louisiana Infrastructure, Citizens and […]

J’ai besoin de votre jugement grammatical. Voici six phrases : J’en ai parlé avec quelqu’un, mais je ne me rappelle plus qui. Jacques a discuté du problème avec un de ses supérieurs, mais je ne sais pas avec qui. J’ai parlé de quelque chose avec Marie, mais je ne me rappelle plus quoi. Pierre a fait ce travail pour un […]

From the Washington Post (reg. req’d I think; you can also try to access the article via bugmenot). National Guard crews are setting up double rows of coiled razor wire in front of the tracks and will continue to do so until the fencing blocks the ravaged coast for 30 miles. […]

I mean those who collect dangling modifiers in published writing. This is from Jonathan Freedland’s opinion piece in today’s Guardian: Like a character in Shakespearean tragedy, race is America’s fatal flaw, the weakness which so often brings it low. I’m not even sure this counts as a mere dangling modifier: the imagery is just too […]

The canonical example for a speech act that can cause real harm has long been “screaming ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre”. Maybe this should be replaced with “screaming ’suicide bomber’ in a packed crowd”. All in all, last week has been rather too murderous. (I am aware that neither of these utterances is a performative act the […]

J’ai déjà fait allusion à cela : certaines locutions semblent plus enclines que d’autres à se laisser transformer en poteaux roses. Et le phénomène peut transcender les frontières linguistiques. Ainsi, le pauvre bouc émissaire pointe le nez déguisé en bouquet misère, bouquet mystère, bouc et misère, bouc et mystère et ainsi de suite. Mais son homologue […]

[I’ve considered giving this post the English title Pragmatic breakdown because breakdown is just so much more expressive and general than the French panne, which mostly refer to cars breaking down. But the event this is going to be about happened in the French blogosphere, so a French title is it.] Yes, I know, I owe […]