Lex Communis

Oddities of the English Language.

Double Contractions.

The only one I will recognize as a real word is "bo's'n."

10 Untranslatable Relationship Words.

We should add these to the English language:

Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a "vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist."

It’s interesting that saudade accommodates in one word the haunting desire for a lost love, or for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be-experienced love. Whether the object has been lost or will never exist, it feels the same to the seeker, and leaves her in the same place: She has a desire with no future. Saudade doesn’t distinguish between a ghost, and a fantasy. Nor do our broken hearts, much of the time.

Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.

Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world’s most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It’s the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each “strike.” The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way.

Ilunga captures what I’ve described as the shade of gray complexity in marriages—Not abusive marriages, but marriages that involve infidelity, for example. We’ve got tolerance, within reason, and we’ve got gradations of tolerance, and for different reasons. And then, we have our limit. The English language to describe this state of limits and tolerance flattens out the complexity into black and white, or binary code. You put up with it, or you don’t. You “stick it out,” or not.

Retrouvailles (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time.

This is such a basic concept, and so familiar to the growing ranks of commuter relationships, or to a relationship of lovers, who see each other only periodically for intense bursts of pleasure. I’m surprised we don’t have any equivalent word for this subset of relationship bliss. It’s a handy one for modern life.

Stephen Fry on Language.

Fry is a pompous left-wing tooth-ache, but he - or whoever wrote his script - nails some important points about language.

Language, Culture and the Bible.

I have just learned that in Punjabi while there different words for "uncle" - depending on whether the man is your father's brother or your mother's brother or the man who married your mother's sister, etc. - there is no word for "cousin."  Hence, those male family relations that we would call "cousin," "brother", "step-brother" or "second cousin" are simply called "brother."  Ditto for female relations - whether an actual sister or a female cousin, the term used is "sister."

In Punjabi, if you want to distinguish between a true sister and a female cousin, a circumlocution like "the daughter of my father's sister's husband" would be used.

All of which looks a lot like Aramaic in passages like Matthew 13:55:

55Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?


56And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?

And Matthew 27:56:

Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee's children.

So, were James and Joses the sons of Mary the mother of Jesus or sons of Mary the mother James and Joses?

And Jude 1:1:

Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, ....

And Luke 6:

¹² One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. ¹³ When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: ¹⁴ Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, ¹⁵ Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, ¹⁶ Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

So, was the apostle Jude, aka Judas, the son of James or the brother of James?

Obviously, the word "brother" did not mean in First Century Palestine what it means in 21st Century English.

The most aggresively inarticulate generation ever.

Cool Dialect Map.

Patrick Madrid provides a cool dialect map so that we can see all the places where people talk funny.

For example, in many parts of the world, "dawn", "on", and "Don" do not rhyme, notwithstanding the fact that they do.  Apparently, San Francisco is one of those places.

The Central Valley has a purple line drawn around it, presumably because of the fact that in the Central Valley "possum" rhymes with "dinner."

You think you were good in English back in High School...

....then how come you can't understand Caedmon's Hymn recited in Old English?



Via Mark Shea.

The Euphemism Treadmill. - The reason why we have to keep relearning what is and is not acceptible to say in polite society.

According to the Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia:

Euphemisms often evolve over time into taboo words themselves, through a process described by W.V.O. Quine, and more recently dubbed the "euphemism treadmill" by Steven Pinker. (cf. Gresham's Law in economics). This is the well-known linguistic process known as 'pejoration' or 'semantic change'.

In his remarks on the ever-changing London slang, made in Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell mentioned both the euphemism treadmill and the dysphemism treadmill. He did not use these now-established terms, but observed and commented on the respective processes as early as in 1933.

Words originally intended as euphemisms may lose their euphemistic value, acquiring the negative connotations of their referents. In some cases, they may be used mockingly and become dysphemisms.

Obama Language Watch

Obama on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial mentioned the "enormity of the challenges facing us."

Alrighty then, "enormity" means "The quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness." He probably meant "enormousness" or "size."

People make language mistakes, but given the merciless focus on Bush's syntaxical problems, let's keep that in mind for the next time we hear about some Republican mangling the language.

Update: On the other hand, there is this from this Telegraph op-ed on the imminent collapse of the British economy:

Yesterday marked a new low for all involved, even by the standards of this crisis. Britons woke to news of the enormity of the fresh horrors in store. Despite all the sophistry and outdated boom-era terminology from experts, I think a far greater number of people than is imagined grasp at root what is happening here.

This usage may be proper under all meanings of the word, inasmuch as "horrors" can be "morally wicked", albeit it seems strange to be ascribing a moral status to economic events in anything but the most extended metaphorical sense. It's like describing the enormity of a really big hurricane.

I still think that is a non-preferred use of the word, which is normally used to suggest corruption or evil. The better word for a "really big thing that is not subject to moral blame" is "size" or "enormousness" but I suspect that people who use "enormity" aren't aware of its overtone of judgment and think that using words like "size" or, in particular, "enormousness" is unsophisticated.

I'm not alone update: Apparently, a discussion is going on at the Corner about how Obama should learn the meaning of the word "enormity":

I was talking to my friend and NR colleague Kevin Williamson yesterday, and he said, “You know, I wish the president-elect would learn the meaning of the word ‘enormity.’” He keeps saying things like, “I recognize the enormity of what I’m about to undertake.” Kevin quipped, “We may consider the upcoming administration an enormity, but . . .”

It sounds like Obama is using "enormity" because of faux-sophistication.

Of course, if Bush had done something like that, we would never have heard the end of it.