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

I'll make sure they don't put me in the front row this time. Does it have a viol da gamba part?

Wow, choral singing... That's a great thing to do.

On the church terms debate I remember a story about a building labourer who was doing some work on a church and would update his wife each evening with the latest development.

"We finished the sacristy today."
"We finished the font today."
"We finished the pulpit today" and so on.

Then they were doing some other odds and ends including bathroom fittings and he went home and said to his wife, "We're putting in the urinals tomorrow."
"What are they?"
"I don't know, I'm not a Catholic!"

This arose in another convo but I'm moving it here.

Does "putting your foot in it" properly mean "in your mouth" or just in "it"?

OED doesn't mention "foot in mouth" or indeed putting a foot in anything apart from a place (= setting foot in a house, getting a foot in the door, etc.); my vintage Brewer (1923) refers "You have put your foot in it nicely" (= you have got yourself into a pretty mess) to another saying: "The bishop hath put his foot in it" where "it" means the pot where milk, porridge or meat has been burnt (the bishop hath put his foot in the pot).

The 16th century bible-translator William Tyndale gave this explanation: "because the bishops burn who they lust". He knew all about that. "His pocket-sized Bible translations were smuggled into England, and then ruthlessly sought out by the Church, confiscated and destroyed. Condemned as a heretic, Tyndale was strangled and burned outside Brussels in 1536." http://www.tyndale.org/

My newer Brewer (1981 revision) has a different version. "To put one's foot in it: To perpetrate a blunder, to make a faux pas, to get into trouble. The allusion is obvious. There is a famous Irish Bull, 'Every time I open my mouth I put my foot in it'."

Obvious, my foot. The bull wouldn't have been amusing or memorable at all unless the phrase "put my foot in it" were already established.

Well, given that 'faux pas' means false step, maybe it's the same allusion. To put your foot in s**t, which must've been pretty common back in the good old days.

My thoughts entirely.

Catching up on some backlog bits...

Screed...as well as refering to plaster or concrete, it is also used for the epoxy-based floor coverings used in kitchens, hospitals, etc. It can be moulded up the sides of walls to prevent angular dirt traps.

Scots/British English.
It's a complicated story.

In bygone times (12th/13thC), the court language of Scotland was 'Inglys'. At this time, the English court language was still French, Latin was used for scholarly matters...and in these pre-Chaucerian times, the vernacular spoken by the English didn't really have its own name (and anyway was spoken in four distinct major dialects). Note that the Scottish speakers of Inglys were, of course, Anglo-Saxon incomers: to the Highlanders, most Scots are Sassenachs.

As late as Elizabethan times, Scots and English were certainly regarded as separate languages to the extent that foreign ambassadors would learn each separately. However, following the dual monarchy and the shift of power southwards, Scots started to be regarded as an inferior dialect (and their people - by Dr Johnson at least - as oat-munching barbarians).

The next major change aoccured following the as a result the Act of Union, whereby Scottish parliamentarians sold their governmental rights to clear their debts arising from Scotland's abortive colonial escapades in Darien (Panama). As Burns put it: 'We're bought and sold for English gold/ Such a parcel of rogues in a nation'. Essentially this marked a wholesale takeover of Scottish government by England, and the governing elite suddenly had to learn to speak the English of the English, as opposed to their 'dialects' which had previously been perfectly acceptable. Thus, for example, Burns would have grown up speaking an Ayrshire dialect of Scots. During his career as an Edinburgh exice man, he would have worked in English. When he took to poetry, some of it was in Ayrshire, some in English (no, honestly - it *is* English. More or less.)

The Scots variant continued and continues to have low status. There have been attempts to establish a Scots vernacular by such as the eccentic Hugh McDiarmid. He wrote some very fine stuff in his invented 'Lallans' (eg: http://www.johnmullen.org.uk/text/poetry.pdf - especially the 2nd one) - but part of the point of it is that the reader is meant to make an effort to understand the meaning that undelies the rhythm. Nobody actually speaks like that - although primary school children are sent home with tyepscripts in an incomprehensible language which their parents are expected to help them to memorise for their school assemblies.

On the other hand...Scots language is used in daily, educated discourse without anyone batting an eyelid. The word 'outwith' is ubiquitous. Our parliamentarians will regularly use words such as 'clipe' and 'stomash' and 'stooshie'. Some of these are, perhaps, deliberate nods to the plebeian. However - when the educated *really* want to be plebeian, they are happy to use pronunciations uch as 'jaikit' and 'aff'. (I recall a meating with engineers when they explained a missing part on a CAD drawing as a 'BFA'. 'Bit fell aff') Note, also, that varieties of *Scots* accent are given high status - witness, for example, Malcolm Rifkind.

What was the question again?

You confirm what I was told: that the English language was named as such in Scotland before it was in England (if you accept that Inglys transliterates to 'English'). So it is in a sense primarily theirs. My friend's daughter is studying the Scots language and literature: meaning that Anglo-Saxon language, not Gaelic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4102728.stm

Should the possessive apostrophe stay or go?

(Written communication is more popular and widespread than ever before. I'm interested in how this will change the English language.)

I'm with Burridge. It's already gone in the possessive word its, and who misses it?

Besides, Bernard Shaw tried this reform before, though without success:

http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_4/shaw.htm "George Bernard Shaw had firm and advanced opinions about language, including that the apostrophe was redundant in most cases, as can be seen in the excerpts from Pygmalion (1916)"

See also http://www.dace.co.uk/apostrophe.htm

I don't think any major changes will come through some kind of grand reform - much more likely that 'bad grammar' will just become so widespread it becomes the standard.

One example is the phrase "I want out". None of us would bat an eyelid at that, but I once heard an old, old grammar stickler objecting that it's mangling the Queen's English - not because of the preposition at the end, but because it ought to be "I want *to get* out" - out being a state of being, *to get out* being the thing you want to do. It's not an *object* you desire, as it is with "I want cheese".

The New York cartoonist Roz Chast did a cartoon of "Grammatically Correct Pop Songs", which included "You aren't anything but a hound dog".

Our English teacher would have winced at the roundabout way of saying that, and would havew simplified it to "You're just a hound dog" Whereby hound and dog are the same anyway, so it could even be "You're just a dog".

Still, that's taking it a step further I suppose. First you gotta get rid of all the ain'ts. Aincha.

Colourful language is one thing, but has nothing to do with punctuation. How would you feel about calling this Elviss song? I'd have no problem.

>> "Grammatically Correct Pop Songs",

It's unfair to single out pop songs - unless 'pop' is held to include pre-elvis popular music.

It's just one of those things/ One of those bells that now and then ring (sic)

Admittedly, though, nobody has yet matched Sir Macca's excruciating

This crazy world in which we live in

"It's just one of those things
One of those bells that now and then rings"

-- you couldn't help yourself Ed, you corrected it before giving it as a bad example.

There must be a name for that.

Oh dear! I thought I'd signalled my correction with the '(sic)'.

Next time I'll use subtitles for the hard of thinking.

Doesn't Steven Pinker use this construction as an example of where an alternative grammatical rule would make just as much sense?

One bell rings So one of those bells rings. Subject agrees with verb. Nothing wrong with that is there?

Yes, precisely. But many, many people get the construction 'wrong', to the apparent distress of those more pedantic than Cole Porter.

Pinker (yes, I'm fairly sure he did) argues that Cole Porter is simply following a different but equally sensible rule.