Everything You Know About English Is Wrong » Chaucer

Faust things first

Bill Brohaugh — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:34:59 +0000

I get bedazzled by online gadgets for their industry, their creativity, their fun, and their potential for wisecrackery. Mostly for the first three items but also for the fourth is my interest in ofaust.com (with a nod to one of the commenters at Language Log for the alert). Submit a bit of writing through the site’s interface, and O’Faust reports whose classic writing the text most closely resembles.

Fearing for the mockery such evaluations would send my way, I first tested O’Faust on the “Late for the Sky” blog perpetrated by my friend and fellow radio comedy writer JohnnyB (his song parodies are superb). JohnnyB’s “Come Fly With Me” installment was gauged to be most like Frank Baum, with 24% similarity. His “I Love LA” entry was gauged, with less confidence at 14%, to be most like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Note to JohnnyB: my evaluation that you exist in your own fantasy world has been independently confirmed.) Oh, and a song parody. JohnnyB’s “Country (First) Rogue”—political parody of John Wasilla’s . . . um, John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”—gets a nicely complimentary 65% similarity to Oscar Wilde.

Feeling then safe to apply the test to my own writing in this blog, I submitted “Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet,” and was given a 23% nod to Edgar Allen Poe. Chills indeed. (As an aside, for the radio show JohnnyB and I wrote for, I composed an ode to an NFL game in which the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Cincinnati Bengals: “Quoth the Ravens, never score”). My “Slurry up and wait” nudged up to 25%, and pointed to Mark Twain. My “Rerenaming names” slipped again to 23% and named—oh, shit—Frank Baum.

Deciding to conduct the ultimate test, I then submitted:

Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: 93% similarity to Mark Twain. Well done, Mr. Twain, but could you work on your Twain homage 7% harder?
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: 99%! Mr. Poe, you’re ruining the curve.
Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” translated to Esperanto: 98% similarity to Leonardo da Vinci. Boy, am I feeling a new Dan Brown plot coming on.
Prologue to Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English): 47% similarity to Shakespeare. 0, now the Shakespeare’s-plays-were-written-by-several-people theorists are dancing in their study carrels!
Prologue to Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales (in modern English): 23% similarity to . . . Shakespeare! Dan Brown! Why aren’t you accepting my calls?!
And, finally, some circular testing—I submit the very blog entry you’re reading at this moment: and . . . sonuvabitch! 68% Poe. I was hoping for Dan Brown.

What we have here is a fail to communicate (bang!)

Bill Brohaugh — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:04:11 +0000

Today’s instruction: Always use fail as a verb! A thing that fails is a failure!

Always use it as a verb, Mr. Brohaugh?

Yes. Without fail! . . . oops.

I bring this up because of Christopher Beam’s recent Slate coverage of the increasing use of fail as a noun (which I discovered by way of Editrix alert). I suggest that Slate’s shot at the noun was not a complete succeed. For one, modern use of the noun is slangish and a bit distracting, but I’m not sure it’s precisely the “Internet meme” that Slate would have it. Fail as a noun was first recorded near the turn of the 13th century. Chaucer used it, as did Shakespeare and Swift. It has been dubbed “obsolete” by the Oxford English Dictionary, with the exception of the fossil phrase, “without fail.”

Is the modern use a revival, or a new formation? Here’s an excerpt from Slate:

Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience.

Yes, but there are other proud neological traditions, as well, such as verb-to-noun conversion? Both the original noun and the original verb use appear about the same time, both brought in from Old French; one was not—in English, at least—a conversion of the other. In the case of the modern use, I suspect it’s conversion and not shortening, just as the noun convert was converted from the verb convert. Particularly in the light that first recorded use of failure comes just under 350 years after fail the noun.

By the way, Slate points to a good blog recording fails: FAILblog, but fails to note its kin, the English FAIL Blog.

And the title of this piece? Just another excuse to honor Paul Newman:

Þe Sunneday Funnye Papyres

Bill Brohaugh — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:35:48 +0000

In another bizarre confluence of the wordie and the foodie in me (and, as it turns out, the Blondie in me, as well), I’ll note that one of my prized possessions, hanging in my kitchen, is the original artwork of the May 27 1961 Blondie daily newspaper comic daily panel. This installment has early ’60s kitchen kitch splashed all over it, with Blondie wearing heels, and an apron over a flowing dress, and son Alexander coming home from school with a dress shirt whose sleeves are rolled up nearly to the point where he might tuck a cigarette pack in them. James Dean, he ain’t. Alexander is trotting a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of unsliced bread to one of those kitchen tables with a silverware drawer on one side.

The ’60s were so long ago. By that I mean the 1360s, the time of Chaucer (and no, the topic has not veered from Blondie). Wordie, meet Blondie . . . in the form of the Japes for Owre Tymes blog. That’s not modern misspelling; that’s Middle English. Japes for Owre Tymes is a delightfully arcane blog that each day translates a modern cartoon into Middle English. I wonder what the Middle English translation of “thought balloon” is?

Check out (yes) Blondie in Middle English here.

Including Blondie in this Middle-English-a-Day endeavor is appropriate, because the strip has been around since 1930—and in comic strip terms, 1930 is the equivalent of Middle English.

Now, let’s take cartoons back to the origins of English: Old English. And we don’t even have to translate. Here’s an installment of The Captain and the Kids (more commonly known as The Katzenjammer Kids):

On the right, look at those words obviously derived from the Germanic speech of the violent, primitive tribes who spoke the very first versions of English—the Angles and the Saxons. On the left, look at those glyphs from some ancient predecessor of English’s great-grandpappy, Proto-Indo-European. Oh, a language lesson unto itself, all in the guise of Turn of That Century comic child intimidation.

Well, maybe not precisely. Anyway, back to Japes for Owre Tymes. Check out the most recent installment for an interesting lesson on the disconnect between language and reality in the form of The Family Circus (and check out Comics Curmudgeon for additional insight on the very same topic).

(By the way, in the early 1360s, Chaucer would have been in his late teens. I wonder if he rolled his sleeves up for his packs of death sticks?)

Speaking deliberately

Bill Brohaugh — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:20:02 +0000

Those of you who deliberate on why words like conversate and orientate seem to permeate sloppy speech and writing, do you abominate deliberate? If we converse and orient, why don’t we deliber instead of deliberate? In fact, we once did; the first recorded use of the verb deliber, from Chaucer, preceded the verb deliberate by about 150 years. Deliber on that for a while.

On the other hand, as difficult as A-Bee-C

Bill Brohaugh — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:02:03 +0000

Additional thoughts on spelling bees, prompted by the recent Scripps National Spelling Bee, won this past Friday by Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra:

The very existence of English spelling bees is often employed as ammunition for spelling reform proponents. English exhibits and accepts incredible variation, and I needn’t give any other examples than this very paragraph, in which, for instance, English and variation employ a two-consonant combination and a consonant-vowel combination to communicate the sh sound. And the spelling of vary can very (or vice versa . . .).

The negatives of spelling reform are:

1) First, first, first and first–it won’t happen. I attribute the impossibility of sweeping change to such factors as pure inertia (witness the success of the U.S. trying to dictate a change to the metric system in the last millennium). Add disagreement over the best reform system–do we accept Ben Franklin’s view that we actually eliminate C, J, Q, W, X and Y from the alphabet? Or do we keep C and adopt the list of 300 respellings dictated by Teddy Roosevelt (who couldn’t even spell his own name phonetically), including, within the context of this discussion, the deliciously appropriate accurst and clipt.

What’s more, even the most successful revamp of spelling–Noah Webster’s work to make the States as linguistically independent from from the Mother Isle as we were politically–gave us little more than fewer instances of U (of which I am in favour), jail instead of gaol (wow! momentous, that, or should I say momentos), and the somewhat less logickal departure of the letter k from words like musick and magick.

2) Successful total spelling reform would render English texts–perhaps even any written today–virtually unreadable within a few generations. The difficulty in reading Chaucer in the original, for instance, lies almost as much in spelling changes as it does in changed meanings and obsolete vocabulary. That’s re-formation, not reformation.

3) Spelling reform would wash the language’s inherent recognition of its linguistic diversity. Change technique to tekneek and the French influence fades from view, to be replaced by a some Nordic cast (or Nordik kast, if you must). To reinforce the point, consider the Scandinavian word skosh–which, because everything we know about English is wrong–is not Scandinavian at all. It’s Japanese. And we see other such fading. How many of us see the Arabic lineage in that pesky high school mathematical study, al-jabr, spelled algebra in English?

Factor 3 is one reason I’m intrigued that 2008 Bee winner Sameer Mishra is aspiring (at 13 years old, yet) to become a neurosurgeon. With his impressive mastery of English spelling, he is already performing a figurative surgery–dissecting and reconstructing the very DNA of this language, vastly rich in origin, nuance and texture.

And, oh yeah, a fourth reason sweeping spelling change won’t happen:

4) Spelling reform would eliminate the televised broadcast of the National Spelling Bee, with its low production costs and high ad revenue. Leave it to a network labeled ABC to continue to govern how we manage our A-B-C’s.

Easy as A-Bee-C

Bill Brohaugh — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:00:15 +0000

Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra, just 13 years old, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Friday, May 30, by spelling guerdon. Which is mostly the correct spelling. The word–meaning “reward, compensation,” primarily in a poetic sense these days–for most of its lifetime has used guerdon as the accepted spelling. Chaucer used it thusly; Shakespeare, as well.

Here’s Chaucer from “The Sompnour’s Tale”:

We have this worlde’s lust all in despight
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby.

Note: lust means “pleasure” here, and despight–despite its spelling, young Mr. Mishra–means “contempt,” and isn’t it a cool word? (A sompnour, by the further way, is a summoner.)

Of course, guerdon isn’t the only “official” spelling, as official as spelling can be over the history of English. Other recorded forms, my trusty OED.com tells me, include (in alphabetical order) gardon, gardoun, gardwyne, gerdon, gerdonne, gerdoun, geurdone, guardon, guardone, guerdoun, gwerddoun, gwerdon, gwerdone, not to mention the comely Scottish variation, gwairdoun.

I think the time has come for Xtreme Spelling Bee. To win, you must orthograph not only the current spelling, but also every variant spelling over the history of the language.

Well, never mind. The contest is already Xtreme. Here are the other words Mishra spelled correctly on the orthopath to winning: demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.

And what was Sameer Mishra’s guerdon guerdon? $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, and reference books galore, perhaps three of which actually containing the word guerdon.

Shameless Plug Alert: For some personal thoughts on spelling bees and why I suck at them, read this sample from my recently published book, in odd coincidence titled Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. End Shameless Plug Alert.