Vocal C[h]ords

According to The Guardian, an actress has...

...previously expressed her eagerness to flex her vocal chords on a guest spot on Glee, and for a spell was attached to a Judy Garland biopic.

Aha! I thought. There's a topic for a post. Because, you see, there are cords in your throat that vibrate to produce sound. Several people's vocal cords vibrating at the same time will produce a chord.

So I go to the OED. I look up cord. I get down to section 2.b and there it is.

Now applied generally to a nerve trunk, and spec. to certain structures, esp. the spermatic cord, spinal cord, and umbilical cord, the vocal cords; see these words.

Ok. I'll see those words. I turn to the entry for vocal and to my shock and flabbergasterment, I see this in section 6.a:

Operative or concerned in the production of voice. Freq. in vocal chord, vocal fold, vocal organs, vocal tract, etc.

So I can't really criticise The Guardian at all. Or if I did, I'd have to sneer at the OED too, which is blasphemous. I would have no lexicographical backing or supply chain. I would just be alone, muttering maledictions, straining my vocal kords, and shouting myself horse.

The Inky Fool was feeling a little horse that day.

Ou Sont Les Prawns D'Antan?

The best book I know on English usage is Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson. I don't agree with all of it, mind you; I make it a point not to agree with all of anything, just in case. Yet my thoughts this morning turned to this entry.

barbecue is the only acceptable spelling in serious writing. Any journalist or other formal user of English who believes that the word is spelled barbeque or, worse still, bar-b-q is not ready for unsupervised employment.

Incidentally, a barbecue is a framework of sticks. You can cook stuff on such a structure; but the first use in English, way back in 1697, was to a barbecue bed.

[We] lay there all night, upon our Borbecu's, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the Ground
   - William Dampier A New Voyage Round the World

Now I must dash as I'm spending the afternoon at a BB-queue.

Llareggub Yobs

I was told the other day that a yob was a backwards boy. I didn't believe it. So many etymologies are much too neat and fanciful, especially the ones that involve acronyms and the movement of letters (shit does not mean Store High In Transit). But having pooh-poohed the idea I returned to my burrow and checked a dictionary only to discover that it really is backslang.

Backslang was a code used by Victorian costermongers and Edwardian thieves. There appears to have been quite a wide (and potentially limitless) vocabulary. I'm not sure how far you can credit The Box of Delights* (1935) with linguistic accuracy, but in it two would-be kidnappers use the phrase "Kool slop" which is explained thuslyly:

We would point out that the mystic words uttered by the reprobates are common thieves' slang: 'Kool slop' is what is called back slang: the words Look Police turned backwards. It is a familiar warning in the underworld.

This seems credible because the thing about backslang is that you have to be able to spell. To know that yob is boy backwards means that you know that Y can function as a consonant or a vowel - knowledge that would be denied to your typical urchin before the educational reforms of the 1880s.

[Londoners: there's a lovely point that when the tube was built it was assumed that most of the passengers would be illiterate so they wouldn't know when the train had arrived at their stop. That's why each station has a different pretty pattern of tiles. It is for the use of the illiterate. The same goes for pub signs, but I'm wandering.]

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas is the only good radio-play ever written, and is set in the Welsh town of Llareggub, which is deliciously convincing as all Welsh place names are invented by throwing consonants into a blender, or by very lazy Countdown contestants.

However, the reversible nature of Llareggub was considered so obvious by the printers that early editions changed it to Llaregyb, just to be on the safeside.

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, inky in his cool front parlour or poem-room, tells only the truth in his Lifework--the Population, Main Industry, Shipping, History, Topography, Flora and Fauna of the town he worships in--the White Book of Llarregub.

Which shows that I am not the only inky fellow in the land.
 
It is the glamour of grammar, let a human into the secrets of the written word and he will start playing with anagrams, acronyms, palindromes and semordnilaps; inventing, rearranging, tangling and encrypting.

There is an almost holy feel to it, which is perhaps why so many people spend so much time trying to decode the Bible. Of course, this is hard for English speakers (unless you believe the King James Version to be divinely inspired), but in Hebrew you can have hours of fun counting the alephs and deducing the mind of God. As Coleman says in Antic Hay when asked who the devil he is:

'I am that I am,' said Coleman. 'But I have with me [...] a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue; for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end with the magic syllable. And finally,' indicating himself, 'plain Dog, which being interpreted kabbalistically backwards, signifies God. 'All at your service.'

"I am that I am", is another of God's titles and a picture of NATASHA I is used to similar effect in Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel while Red Rum, who won the Grand National whilst I was being born, had his name rudely hijacked by Stephen King. I have blogged before on the wonderful word mooreeffoc, any schoolchild knows which cheese is made backwards and anybody who will pay a pound for a bottle of Evian water is just that.

Yet I'm sure I'm forgetting one of the great examples of what are apparently called semordnilaps (palindromes backwards). And it's not even T.S. Eliot's morbid insistence on his middle initial.

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet.
   - Auden (allegedly)

Dylan Thomas' map of Llareggub

*No prizes for guessing what book I re-read a couple of weeks ago.

P.S. There's a good article on backslang here.

Everything is not alright

Am I alone in my aversion to “alright”?

A neon sign above the Millbank entrance to Tate Britain is currently assuring us that “everything is going to be alright”. To me, the sentence provokes an instinctive shudder – how can everything be all right, when it is spelled “alright”*? But I worry that this is fast becoming a minority view, an eccentricity - although the Telegraph, Times and Guardian all back me up, at least in their official style guides (the Telegraph's describes "alright" as an "abomination").   

I responded with equanimity to the use of “alright” by East 17, Supergrass and, more recently, Lily Allen – pop stars are allowed some leeway in matters of spelling and grammar. Aaron Britt, in the New York Times, wrote an eloquent and persuasive article not just defending but celebrating the use of “alright” in pop, arguing that it means “something different from the "satisfactory, average or mediocre" that all right conveys…what... countless…pop musicians mean is "sublime, fantastic, second to none." Alright is better than just all right; it's the best, the greatest, the tops”.

But increasingly, “alright” is being used as a standard spelling, even by those who make no pretence to youth or trendiness. The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal,  a poster advertising social work. Even the OED admits “alright” into its pages without comment, tracing it back to the nineteenth century (when it first appeared in the Durham University Journal) and describing it as a “frequent spelling of all right”. The only glint of censure comes in one of its citations – from HW Fowler, who in Modern English Usage declared that “there are no such forms as all-right, allright, or alright, though even the last, if seldom allowed by the compositors to appear in print, is often seen…in MS”. I take comfort from this, although I recognise that clinging to the recommendations of a 1926 usage guide is slightly pathetic.

Dogberry thinks that there is a distinction between “all right”, as an adjective meaning “satisfactory”, and “alright”, as a phrase used to express agreement or acquiescence, or as a conservational marker to signify a change of topic or the beginning of a talk or discussion. I can see where he’s coming from – for some reason, “Alright class, here’s your assignment” (Wall Street Journal, 5 February 2010) is marginally less jarring than “Well, that’s alright then” (Financial Times, 14 December 2009). The very fact that the word can be found in serious newspapers like the FT and WSJ is a sign that it has successfully insinuated itself into standard English – although, gratifyingly, “all right” is still used ten times more frequently in British newspapers than “alright”.

  * Apparently – according to Sandi Toksvig, writing in the Sunday Telegraph’s Seven magazine – the sentence is supposed to make you feel depressed, although not because of its spelling. Rather it is designed to evoke 'the ways in which the opposite is the case' – i.e. remind you of all the reasons why things will not be all right. Or alright.

Hmmm.

Taliban Taleban

Taleban in The Times, Taliban on the BBC. The first casualty of war is not innocence but regularised spelling.

The high command meet to work out how they're spelled

P.S. The only proper rhyme I can think of for Taliban is Caliban from The Tempest. This makes me suspicious.

Anti-sceptic

                                                                                                   

Reading CityAM on the train this morning, I was intrigued to learn about the Salt Cave, a London clinic where visitors can treat their colds or asthma by breathing in sodium chloride.

According to the owner of the clinic, salt has "anti-sceptic" properties - I can only think she meant antiseptic, unless she really was referring to the ability to overcome sceptical clients' doubts about the efficacy of the treatment.

The article also had a long sidebar on complimentary therapies.

Distress signals

I have just been invited to pay £125 for a spa treatment which includes a "distressing scalp massage". Being a sensitive soul, I find the mispelling distressing enough on its own without paying £125 to be upset further.

Another two words which look similar but have opposite, or near-opposite meanings, are energise and enervate (which originally had something to do with cutting a horse's tendons, but now means to weaken, to destroy someone or something's capacity for vigorous effort). I was very distressed when I found Oliver James (or his editors) had used "enervate" throughout Affluenza to mean "energise" - I found it impossible to take any of his advice seriously after that.

A distressing scalp treatment

Tonite

A sirenical young lady once texted me with the simple message "drink tonite?"  This threw me into a panic as tonite is a high explosive made of pulverised gun cotton impregnated with barium nitrate and I didn't think anyone knew that I was, at the time, addicted to drinking it.  I'd down pints of the stuff at a sitting.

It turned out that there had been a misunderstanding and she was simply illiterate.

2C12H14O4(NO3)6 = 18CO + 6CO2 + 14H2O + 12N