h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Job names which distinguish between men and women have been going out of fashion for a long time now. It should not be necessary to have two different names "headmaster" and "headmistress" for the one job. I think that is why the term "principal" started to be used. It may have come from America, I'm not sure. We certainly have the Americans to thank for the more recent "firefighter" and "postal worker" to replace "fireman" and "postman".

German carries the male/female thing to extremes, having different words for most professions. For example, a dentist can be Zahnarzt or Zahnarztin (literally Toothdoctor or Toothdoctoress).

The use of male job names to include female jobs (actor can be male or female, actress can only be female) leads to a strange sort of discrimination. If we hear that Anthony Hopkins is the best actor in the world, we assume there is no-one better than him, male or female. But if Judi Dench is the best actress in the world, we give a pat on the head to Judi for being better than all those other women, but she's not a patch on Hopkins!

Cravat is from the Croatian!

As a general term, 'headteacher' is quite usable, but I'd assume that the bulk of conversations involving heads/principals/whatever will be about a specific person at a specific school, where headmaster/mistress is quite adequate.

Is the term "Head" not used? Only when spoken, of course.

***

Have we ever discussed the expression "to boot" - as in "She was a good swimmer and a good diver to boot" - well not a very good example off the top of my head, but it's the end of a long day at work, and the weather's getting warmer to boot.

(Over about 20°C I don't function very well at any level)

The OED has it that 'boot' is an archaic adjective meaning good or beneficial, so 'to boot' meant 'to the good'. The related comparative and superlative forms survive: 'better' and 'best'.

Maybe so Jack, but doesn't bootlegging come into it at all.

The high rollup-wader style leather boots of highwaymen and pirates had plenty of room for stashing and storing plenty of goods and coins.
A bootlegger was in fact someone wearing such boots with smuggled goods hidden inside, usually but not always bottles of alcoholic bevvies.
To bring out, from one's boot-leg, some surprise last minute offer in any negotiated trade, to sweeten the pot as'twere meant going in 'to boot'. As in:
"I'll give ya two mules for that horse ..and I'll throw in this bottle to boot."


jwf

Yet another in my series of daft questions, but...

Cannot remember if I've asked this here or not, can't find it (although without an index that ain't surprising!). I know what first person is (I did this) and I know what third person is (Jack did that) but is there a second person form and if so, what is it?

Oh, and where does 'ain't' come from?

Sorry to keep bugging you peeps but you keep answering me!

FIrst Person Singular: I do it.
Second Person Singular: You do it.
Third Person Singular: He does it, she does it, it does it.
First Person Plural: We do it.
Second Person Plural: You do it.
Third Person Plural: They do it.

Gnomon,

I thank thee that thou didst omit "thou" as the original second personal singular, but I shouldst not have taken offence if thou hadst used it in this context.

Aint is American colloquial but is actually based on the phonetics of certain UK type immigrants who, we must constantly remind ourselves, brought English to America starting back when Shakespeare was playing live in London. This is called the 'Tidewater' dialect, because obviously, the earliest settlements were on the Atlantic coast.

Think of certain Scots and other northern and rural dialects which still have a long A sound for a soft I.
'Give us' for example is, as I understand it from phonetic entries seen here-abouts, pronounced 'Gay ous' around Glasgow. "Oi, jock, gay ous a fag."

Imagine saying 'isnt' with that accent and it becomes 'aint'.
Well don't just imagine; say it out loud and see how easy it is to slip from a soft I to a hard A in words like pin, sin, thimble...

After a moment you'll find yourself 'talk-ain like a Hayllbilly' and be 'fight-ain' an irresis-'table' urge to 'saing' Celtic folk ballads like the 'Leevin of Lay-verpool'.


jwf

Ist, 2nd, and 3rd persons is the title of a very amusing thread: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F19585?thread=128542

Ain't is one of the most interesting contractions in the language (IMHO). It seems to have originally been 3rd person singular
It is not > it ain't
(Odd, because you would have thought that it sounds more like a contraction of "are not" or "am not". However, as I said, the earliest written refence seems to be 3rd person singular. Had it been possible to get accurate transcriptions of what people were actually saying nine hundred years ago....)
It is now the regular form of two irregular verbs ("to be" and" to have")but it is not accepted in any standard form of written English.
Somewhere in the world it means any or all of the following:
I am not > I ain't
You are not> You ain't (both singular and plural)
He/she/it isn't > He/she/it ain't
We are not >we ain't
They are not > they ain't

I / you /we / they have not got > we ain't got
He/she/it has not got > it ain't got

I can't think of a usage for "thou", but some dialects still use "thee" use it for all cases. So "thee ain't" is possible.

I am reminded, not for the first time, of the delightful song that once graced the lips of Tom the cat from Tom & Jerry: "Is you is or is you ain't my baby?"

I vaguely remember a Roz Chast cartoon showing "Grammatically correct hit songs", which included "You aren't anything but a hound dog" and "It doesn't mean a thing if it hasn't got that swing".

Is "ain't" grammatically incorrect? I would say it is just poor table manners, similar to "me and you" and "if I was". These forms may be non-standard, but they have been around for a long time. You can't say something's grammatically incorrect just because the proles say it.

Jack, I agree with you. If people talk by a set of rules, then that is grammar. Since people regularly say and understand "ain't", it is grammatical. It is not the same grammar as an Oxford don might use, but it is grammar nonetheless.

There is a perception among "learned" people that many uneducated people talk ungrammatically. George Bernard Shaw believed this and his view is given in the film "My Fair Lady" with the song "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?". What he really meant, of course, was "why can't they teach their children how to speak the way I do".

It is grammatically correct in all but the written standard dialects. You won't find it in a newspaper of record or a successful CV, nor in the judgements handed down in the high court, but there are hundreds of other English dialects, some of which belong in this thread.

Has anyone else heard of "happen", used in the Lancashire (I think) dialect of British English (is there another sort? ) to mean almost anything you want it to? It is useful for expressing vagueness without being rude, as it can mean "yes", "no", "maybe", "neither", "perhaps"...

"Coming to the orgy?"
"'appen I might." [or just "'appen."]

Good, eh?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

You have to draw the line from a teaching point of view. But "ain't" isn't ungrammatical in the way 'Me talk pretty' is. It's slang - unacceptable in certain circumstances. You definitely aren't doing people any favours by teaching them to write ain't on a CV, but I think learners need to know what it means when they hear people using it in conversation.

Gnomon, I think you're stretching the point a little to imply that a song in My Fair Lady (a musical by Lerner and Loewe only loosely based on Pygmalion) represents what GBS thought. You're probably right: Pygmalion makes some of the same points and GBS was famously outspoken on language, but I wouldn't cite the musical as evidence!