Jobs that begin with the letter 'L'

Such as 'lexicographer', were one of the subjects on our local radio station today, so I spent ten minutes talking to Lesley Dolphin, host of the BBC Radio Suffolk afternoon show, about the life of a lexicographer. There is a link here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00kl2rj/Lesley_Dolphin_11_10_2011/

(the interview is from about 0.55.21 and goes up to about 1.05.00)


Because this is on BBC's 'Listen again' Iplayer facility I think it will expire on Oct 18th 2011 (one week after the show was aired) and it is probably only available in the UK.


Here are some of the points that came up:

• Yes, at some point someone did write every entry that you read in the dictionary. At some point there was a blank screen that was filled in by a fallible human to the best of their abilities. And therefore it is occasionally wrong.
• There are lots of ways to decide what to write in a dictionary but, because we now have a lot of evidence (Corpus) you would have to work very hard to persuade me that you would write a better dictionary without looking at Corpus or other genuine real-person language output
• Language changes and always has done. English is no exception (and maybe changes more than some others)
• You don't need to patrol language. Just record it. Language is perfectly capable of protecting itself.

Parsing the 'Today' programme

Strange things can happen to you when you are working all day on dictionaries. In exactly the same way that a period reading Victorian Novels can render one insensible to the quotidian language of the 'mobile vulgus' so can an excess of lexicography do funny things to your brain's word-centres.

I once spent six months working on a project in which we had to produce a full list of all the patterns and collocations of 500 common verbs. This meant we spent all day long thinking about and describing how 'spend' or 'charge' or 'offer' could fit into all its possible sentences. Go on, you have a go:

In one of its common senses, you can spend something, usually money, but this 'something' could be realised by lots of nouns and noun phrases:

• spend £50
• spend your inheritance
• spend far more than you really ought to have done
• spend all the money that you had saved up for the Christmas presents
• spend nothing (yes, even an amount that is zero can be a kosher object for this verb)

and because this is a fairly standard English transitive verb, you are just as likely to find the noun or noun phrase preceding the verb in a passive structure:

• by this point all the money had been spent
• what I spent on that guitar would have kept me in roll-ups for a year
• £80bn is being spent on bailing out the banks

The upshot of all this time spent looking hard at verbs and sentences is that you become very familiar with the whole way that natural English sentences work. It is far beyond the kind of parsing that people used to do at school, because that was usually done with made-up sentences. No, you end up listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 in the morning and you find yourself parsing the sentences as people speak. Ho-hum... fill the cafetiere... Adverbial clause indicating time frame ...boil the kettle...Object clause preceding transitive verb in passive...check the toast....verb in perfect continuous form..... It is a strange experience.

The feeling that it leaves you with is quite refreshing though. Too often 'grammar' is seen as an external force that stops you doing the wrong thing. In fact the real grammar is the hugely flexible but still constrained set of preferences and obligations that allow you to make up totally new sentences that a casual listener can absorb while making the coffee (or which a casual lexicographer can absent-mindedly parse)

Terrestrial television, corded phones and dumb bombs...

Go on, what is the connection between those three things?

Think a bit....

OK - they are all names that were invented to specifically refer to the 'default' word that we used to use before a particular technical development occurred. So before 'Satellite television' came along 'Terrestrial television' was just called 'television' (because it was pretty much all terrestrial and nobody had thought this was a fact worth mentioning). And before 'cordless phones' were invented a 'corded phone' was just called a 'phone'

I'm sure there must be a technical term for this, but in it's absence I would call it the 'terrestrial television syndrome'. I would be very glad to collect other examples of the phenomenon - and even gladder to receive people's predictions for new words that will emerge in this way.

For example, if 'designer babies' become the new norm, then what do you call the other kind?

"Oh, the nose? Yes, Charlie was a ***** baby".

What term is going to fill that gap? Artisan baby? off-the-peg baby?

On the birdiness of birds

During our lexicographical training we were introduced in a practical way to some of the things that seemed very arcane knowledge during an English degree, but which turn out to be your bread-and-butter when writing a dictionary.

For example, in one session we had to consider the 'birdiness of birds'. This section borrowed some of the images and ideas from Jean Aitcheson's book 'Words in the Mind' http://www.amazon.co.uk/Words-Mind-Introduction-Mental-Lexicon/dp/0631232443 and specifically the chapter dealing with 'bad birds and better birds'

OK, imagine that your task is to 'draw a bird'. How many times do you need to repeat this task until someone comes up with a picture of a penguin, or an ostrich, or a chicken? The whole idea of 'bird' just works so much better with a sparrow or a pigeon.

• Has wings: - check
• Has feathers - check
• Can fly - check
• would fit (although unwillingly) into a breadbin - check

how many of these questions get a positive answer for an ostrich or a penguin? You can think of the entire birdy race as a huge picture, with those goody-two-shoes sparrows right at the middle and then an expanding circle of less-than-perfection going out all the way through crows (a bit too single-coloured) then ducks (rather too fond of swimming) all the way out to the bird-in-name-only that is the penguin. OK I admit their beaks are perfectly birdy, but that's about it.

Now the thing that I would invite you to consider is -getting away from easily visualised concepts like birds - which is the tooliest tool, the jobbiest job and the emotioniest emotion?

Chinese Sayings - No 2

虎头蛇尾 (hǔ tóu shé wěi) 

This one literally means "tiger's head and snake's tail" and it is used for something with a fine start and a poor finish (anyone who has been watching Leeds United games for the last couple of years will know how this feels). I think the usual translation for this one is 'to run out of steam'

Strimmer or Weedwhacker?

The trouble with British English and American English is that we are all really good with the differences that we know about, but are universally rubbish with the ones we don't know about. Hands up how many of you genuinely knew that the the other bunch used the 'other' name above for one of these.

And there are so many other daily objects that just don't get into the movies/cinema or that don't come up in the Brit/US differences in the picture dictionaries. Yes, we know it's trunk/boot and hood/bonnet, but how do you find out about the ones you've never heard of? I worked on a dictionary that had a list of the Brit/US differences that people had pointed out so far. It was already 1600 words and rising. And far from complete.

I'd be very interested to hear suggestions for new, unknown differences.

Why Semantic Engineering?

The very first job that I had in lexicography, more than 20 years ago, involved writing a 'production dictionary' - basically a Thesaurus that also told you not just the different words that you could use for a particular meaning, but also what the difference was between each of those words. This formative experience has left its mark. I can't overhear someone say 'pop round if you are near my office' without wondering why they chose that verb or that tense and not one of the hundred other ways of saying it. It's gone too far to stop now. It's my burden, curse, albatross....

Chinese Sayings - No 1

釜底游鱼 (fǔ dǐ yóu yú)

This literally means 'a fish swimming in the bottom of a cauldron' and the meaning is 'someone whose fate is sealed' (because the heat is going to be turned up soon). I suppose the closest English equivalent might be 'dead man walking' but that is a little bit too Godfather-ish

Famiolects

“Would you draw the bloomin curtains – you’ll be seen from Wallace’s Bog!”

I completely understand what this means, have heard it many times and have used it many times too. But the phrase ‘Wallace’s Bog’ has a special status for me, because I have never heard it or used it except to members of my direct family.

I would guess that you can easily think of a phrase that has the same status for you – something that you are very familiar with but which you only use within the family. I would say this is one of the words that make up my famiolect (TM?), that subset which is part of a language, part of a dialect but is actually an emblem of a family group and of the language that holds that group together.

Here are a few more words and phrases from my famiolect with my stab at a translation or explanation. I would love to hear yours:

1. ·         Gowk: an apple core. Eg (when our mother had made an apple pie) “does anyone want the gowks” (one would gnaw on them in an absent-minded rather than desperate way, I hasten to add)
2. ·         Plodging: what you did at the seaside when you rolled your trousers up and shuffled into the small breakers. Eg: “We spent the day plodging and stopping seagulls from nicking our sandwiches” (NB I know that in some parts of the country this was common parlance, but not in the part where we lived)
3. ·         “I like to hear frogs..” a rude comment on someone else’s bombast or self-obsession. The missing second half which everyone understood was ‘..farting in the stubble’
4. ·         Banaclat: we didn’t know that nobody else’s father in our street said this when he went off to work. Nor did we realise for many years that is was a remnant of the Gaelic that my father heard around him when he was a child.

So what words and phrases make up your famiolect? What things do you only use (with pleasure and gusto) when surrounded by your family? And do you know why those particular phrases? Was it migration? An ear for colourful language? An obsessive attachment to Gilbert and Sullivan? What built your famiolect?