Stephen Fry, and why he's wrong.

According to the invariably inaccurate Yahoo! Answers, the average vocabulary of human Americans currently hovers around 10,000 words.

I'm unconvinced, partially because the cited "source" for the Yahoo! Answer is actually an article attempting to disprove that 10,000 words in the average vocabulary.  But mainly because I'm pretty sure the average American can name more than 10,000 fast-food brands.

I kid, my American readers (although I would argue that simply clicking on a page and staring blankly at a large cacophony of letters doesn't technically count as reading). An American with a vocabulary of 10,000 words is unlikely to be able to list 'cacophony' as one that they understand.

This is a relief to me, as I have used it incorrectly.

But that doesn't matter.

Because you don't know what it means.

Let us unshackle ourselves from the burden of any further introduction in which I make points that will later be relevant. No, instead we sally forth onto the main event.

I am troubled by the future of the English language.

When people talk to me and use phrases like "bored of", I get annoyed.
Then they get annoyed at me because I'm annoyed.

"Why does it matter?" they ask "you still understand what I mean"

The smarter and pseudo-smarter amongst them may quote Stephen Fry, who once said on QI (and I paraphrase):

"Language must change. It always has done, and to try to stop it now is foolish".

I must disagree, Stephen, I must.

See, I think it would be a perfectly rational statement if it were not for one thing. One thing that has revolutionised us, and continues to do so:

The internet.

Let me explain. English is a fairly universal language. Though apparently not as common a first language as Spanish or Mandarin Chinese, it by far the common second language.

There are estimated to be over 1.025 billion people who speak Mandarin Chinese to a reasonable degree. 845 million of those are native speakers.
English only has about 350 million native speakers, but has over 1.5 billion who understand it to some degree.

Ergo, English is the most important language for overcoming international barriers and establishing meaning. It is therefore absolutely vital that we preserve it as close to its taught form as possible.

What good is 1.5 speakers of English all speaking a completely different type of English that no-one understands. The internet has broken down barriers. We are now more able to communicate than ever before.

We need to keep the English language as what it is, because without it, we lose our best chance to improve the only thing that can ever help us empathise with the world around us: communication.

Practice, and how you can't do it.

Here's something a lot of people get wrong. Including me.

Practice and practise.

Practice is a noun.
"I've got basketball practice in the evening"

Practise is a verb.
"I'm going to practise basketball this evening"

Kinda silly really.

Rich cultural history.

You would not believe how many travel guides I read which contain some reference to a "rich heritage" or "rich cultural history". Every guide to anywhere features these words... and they tell you nothing!

Everywhere and everything has a rich cultural history.

I can tell you that this blog has a rich cultural history.
So does the office I'm sitting in.

"Rich cultural history" doesn't mean anything. It's just a phrase with no tangable quality that can be copy-and-pasted into any document about somewhere to make it seem interesting.

To read this will only take you a moment... mwahahahaha.

The English language is full of units of measurement that fundamentally mean about the same thing, but nevertheless, cannot be specifically defined.

Many
Several
A lot
A few
Loads
Numerous
Some

Dictionary.com humourlessly defines several as being "more than two, but fewer than many". It then goes on to define "many" as "a large number".

Also: a "moment".
A moment is the most stupidly non-specific amount of time.

"I'll be with you in just a moment" probably means between 10 seconds and 10 minutes.

"A moment in history" could last hours, maybe days.

We have the word "minute": a nicely prescribed 60-seconds. Easy.

But no.
The English language has corrupted minute, so now it can mean anything. Someone says "I'll be with you in a minute" and they take, I don't know, perhaps 88 seconds to be with you.

They meant a "moment".
And then we're just back to where we started.

See, this is just another example of our language conspiring against us to make things more difficult for us.

English hates you.

Plurali, and why that is definitely wrong.

So what did I learn today? This:

Graffiti is plural.
Who knew?
I didn't.
One piece is a graffito.
Graffito comes from the Italian meaning "little scratch" or "scribble". It doesn't quite translate that way anymore, but it did.

The same is true of spaghetti. A single strand is a spaghetto. My mum told me that. I'm sure there are other examples of Italian words tricking me with their rare -o singular and common -i plural, but I can't think of any.

Here's another thing about plurals.

So in English, our standard way of making plurals is by adding an "s", or at least a variation that ends in "s".

Word becomes words.
Baby becomes babies.
Box becomes boxes.

However, I'm sure you were already aware, being skilled users of the English language, that we have some plurals that don't end in "s".

Woman becomes women.
Foot becomes feet.
Mouse becomes mice.

There are many examples.

Some people use octopi as the plural for octopus, but this is incorrect. Octopuses is correct. The -i ending tends to be Latin words, fungus becoming fungi, for example. But octopus is a Greek word, not Latin, so it has never been correct to say octopi.

My favourite plural (yes, I have a favourite plural) is: passersby.

It's the only word I can think of (and feel free to shatter my dreams by finding other examples) where an "s" is used to indicate plural, but that "s" isn't found at the end of the word.
I am aware of hyphenated examples such as "days-off" or "sisters-in-law", but I can't think of a single word like passerby which is changed in this way.

Of, my worst enemy.

I think it's Ben Goldacre who said something to the effect of: you should never judge people on things that they have said, you should only judge them on things they have written. We all say silly things sometimes in the "heat of the moment", things that don't reflect what we actually think most of the time.

You can blog in the "heat of the moment" too, and update your Twitter, and your Facebook status. So maybe I'm being unfair to people when I criticise their use of language on such mediums. But this is a blog, of course. And as I said a second ago, if people are not be judged on the content of blogs, then you are not allowed to judge me for judging someone, because either way we are just as bad as each other.

Moving on to the point.

I have another thing that annoys me.

And it's "of" again.
Bored of.

You can't be bored of something. You can be bored with something, and you can be bored by something.
Take another example at I just makes you sound stupid.

"I am bored by your grammar pedanticism" becomes "I am impressed by your grammar pedanticism"

"I am bored with your grammar pedanticism" becomes "I am impressed with your grammar pedanticism"

"I am bored of your grammar pedanticism" becomes "I am impressed of your grammar pedanticism"

It is never "bored of".

Exploding heads, and how they don't actually happen.

Okay, so here's something else that annoys me: the use of the word "literally". I don't mind it when it's used for comic effect, in the sense that the person is aware of the stupidity of using "literally", when it becomes a parody of itself.

"Literally" means taken in the literal sense. In other words, you are saying something which is not hyperbolic or any other figure of speech.
It seriously annoys me when people say something like "I literally can't understand why people like this kind of music".
You literally can't understand? Merely the concept of  understanding is beyond your comprehension? No.

You don't tend to hear "literally" used an awful lot in speech or even written, but when you do it is almost universally used incorrectly just as a way of emphasising something. I was reading an article quite recently which featured the line "It literally blew my mind".
No. It figuratively blew your mind.

Stop saying literally. Be interesting.

Of, and the difficulty of explaining what it is.

I get annoyed when people write "could of". Aggravatingly, though, I'm not too good at explaining why.
I can tell them that what they are trying to say is "could have" and the problem comes from the fact that it is almost exclusively pronounced "could've" these days. The next question is inevitable: what's wrong with "could of"?

The explanation is extremely simple. "Of" isn't a verb, and if you remove the "could" before it, that becomes obvious:

"I could have gone swimming" becomes "I have gone swimming"
"I could of gone swimming" becomes "I of gone swimming".

This is difficult to explain, however, because the chances are if you're someone who doesn't know the difference between "could've" and "could of", you probably don't know what a verb is, either. Not due to stupidity or anything, just because the rules of grammar are not interesting to you... or perhaps because of stupidity.

Second language users of English don't have this problem, this is because they have to reconstruct what they want to say, they've had to learn the rules of English. For first language users this is a natural process. For example learning other tenses in different langauges seems very difficult for us, but in English we just naturally understand.

Failure, and how I am not one.

It's answer A, by the way.

Lunch breaks, and what you should do with them.

At my internship. Second day.
This is my lunch, and I'm writing. You'll understand the irony* in just a second (look out for it: it has a 1) before it).
The internship is fun. I spend all day doing two things:

1) Writing.
2) Researching about what I'm going to write about.

One of things I have to research after lunch is the correct usage of the phrase "all year round".
Is it:

a) All year round
b) All-year-round
c) All year-round
d) All-year round

If I can't come back to you by 5 o'clock and tell you, then I'm afraid my life is a failure.

*I may have made this point before. I forget. Ask most people what irony is, and they will struggle to tell you. They usually resort to an annecdote. For example, they'll say "it would be ironic if a man was to write a book on how to avoid bankruptcy, and then go bankrupt the following day" or "it would be ironic for a someone devotes their life to arguing buses are much safer than cars, to then die in a bus crash". Note the Alanis Morrisette song "Ironic" for many other examples.

But that's not irony, my friends. Irony is saying one thing, and meaning something else. Through common usage, however, irony has come to mean this, sort of, incongruity between what we think should happen, and what does happen.

160, and why you cannot text anymore characters without spending an extra 10p.

Ever wondered why SMS text messages are limited to 160 characters?
I'm not asking whether you care, just whether or not you've wondered.

I've read a few theories, and they are all fairly boring.

A popular possibility is that Freidhelm Hillebrand, a German communications researcher who conducted a personal study on the length of average sentences, figuring that even complex sentences tended to be shorter than 160 characters. He and his team set out to standardise the new medium of mobile phone communication, and as texts were not expected to be anything like as important and succesful as they have become, this fairly massive decision was taken quite easily.

I have also heard that GSM (the universal code that phones communicate with) texts are limited to 256 characters, but 96 of them are used up with the information of who has sent the message, who it is going to, and other background information. This leaves 160 characters for your message.

Another argument is something complicated to do with something called the Protocol Description United (PDU) and the Digitial Coding Scheme (DCS).

I'm not in a good position to tell you which is correct. I just read things, and write them. I'm a writer, after all, not a frickin' scientist.

Taking offence.

I don't know if I made this point before but I'm fairly difficult to discriminate against.

Being white, male, young and (around the) middle class is certainly a good start. No physical or mental handicaps, no obscure religous beliefs, no obesity, no ginger hair.

Perhaps then, I am not in the best position to be lecturing people about when they are allowed to be offended. But I'm going to anyway.

Like when people complain to about TV shows that have a gay kiss, or too much violence, or something else that penetrates their narrow minded understanding of the world. It doesn't matter if you get offended. Just don't watch it. If anything, take from it that as long as they are not insiting hatred (and there is a clear fucking difference) words can't hurt you. Words can't do anything apart from in your mind.

A trio of t-shirt, and why that would be stupid.

A pair of trousers?

Really?

A pair means two, you understand. But a pair of trousers does not mean two trousers. It means one.
Now, presumably, it's called a pair of trousers because there are two legs to go in it.
But a t-shirt has two holes for arms, and we don't call that a pair of t-shirt.

Admittedly a t-shirt has an extra whole for the head to go through, so perhaps it should be a trio of t-shirt. But then again, if you're a male (or indeed a female who has purchased a SheWee) there is a third hole available on your pair of trousers; you just choose not to use it as often.

The humorless reality of it is that before we had any ability to make clothes properlly, trousers were individual things that you pulled onto your legs. When we manage to figure out a way to make them all in one the linguistic phrase of a pair of trousers just stuck around.

And for some reason has also been applied to any clothing for your bottom half, conjoined or otherwise.

Just another example of English being stupid.

-Ghrrrr.

This blog is quick becoming simply an aggressive attack on the English language. I don't mind though, English definitely deserves it.

English is ridiculous. A good example of this is words that end with -gh.
There seems to be literally no rule for what the -gh actually sounds like. Contrasting examples are numerous to say the least:

Laugh is an "f" sound.
Hiccough (so often misspelled "hiccup" that the word has entered the language) is a "p" sound.

Then you have:
Sigh is an "i" sound.
Bough is a "w" sound.
(The difference here is that the -gh is basically silent, or at the very least there is a slightly implied "h" or "y" sound at the end.)

So, we have established that rule is:
-gh is an almost silent ending, with an implied "h"y sort of sound, but can also be an "f" or a "p".

Genius? I think not.

EDIT:
I made a point about "hiccough" being misspelled as "hiccup", but it seems I have made a mistake, or at least wandered into a bit of a grey area. I am fascinated by etymology, and I wanted to make sure that what I thought I knew about hiccough/hiccups was correct. I'm sure I had read it somewhere online, but as it turns out this is a good reason not to trust someone because they sound like they know what they are talking about.

In "The concise dictionary of English etymology" (1993) Walter W. Skeat argues that "the spelling hiccough seems to be due to a popular etymology of from cough, certainly wrong; no one ever pronounces the word. Properlly hiccup, or, in old books hicket or hickcock which are still better forms."

So there you go. "Hiccup" is correct.

Disappearing dyslexics.

Just a short one today. (Please let us refrain from any "that's what she said!!!!!"'s)

So, you've heard the words dysfunctional and discontinue, right?
Now, as is often the case with the stupidity of the English language, the dys- and dis- have two entirely different meanings, despite being said exactly the same way. I swear our ancestors did it just to confuse us.

Dys- usually means "bad" or "wrong" or "impaired".
Dis- usually means to "stop" or an "absense" or "not".

So now you know, and anytime you hear someone using a dys-/dis- word you will be able to establish which vowel is at the center.