August 16, 2024
I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.
The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.
Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:
I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.
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etymology, language, language history, literature, words | Tagged: 000000, affixes, coolth, Edna O'Brien, etymology, ffffff, irish literature, language, language corpora, language history, literature, morphology, OED, rare words, Seamus Heaney, semantics, suffixes, words | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
November 8, 2023
I was reading Richard Stark’s crime novel Flashfire when the following line took me down an etymological side street:
He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots.
I’d come across the phrase catty-corner before, but not often, and only in novels, as far as I can recall. It’s not part of Irish English.
At first I visualized Parker, the protagonist, walking towards the building along the walls or edges, as cats often do. But catty-corner, as you may well know, means ‘diagonally’, and it has nothing to do with cats – at least not originally.
The adverb (and adjective) has a plethora of variant spellings that include catty-corner(ed), cater-corner(ed), cata-corner(ed), and kitty-corner(ed), with and without an -ed or a hyphen. How these phrases are pronounced is correspondingly mixed – but their geographical distribution follows a pattern, at least in the continental US: mostly catty-corner in the South, across to Texas, kitty-corner elsewhere.*
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8 Comments | etymology, language, language history, phrases, spelling, words | Tagged: 000000, cats, compounding, compounds, dialect, etymology, ffffff, folk etymology, language, language history, phrases, Richard Stark, spelling, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
February 27, 2023
Sometimes what I read tells me what to write about. Other times the hints come from what I watch. This time it’s both. First I read a line in Richard Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions with this mighty stack of intensifying negatives:
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47 Comments | dialect, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, pragmatics, speech, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: 000000, 1, 2, ambiguity, descriptivism, dialect, double negatives, ffffff, grammar, language, language history, language myths, linguistics, misnegation, multiple negation, negation, negative concord, Otto Jespersen, politics of language, pragmatics, prescriptivism, Richard Pryor, sociolinguistics, speech, standardized English, syntax, usage, usage myths, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
October 3, 2022
Here’s a verb I don’t remember encountering before. It crops up near the end of this passage in Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark (1996), where the author describes a dramatic childhood winter in Northern Ireland:
The Germans came only once, made a bombing run on the docks where the American ships were lined up in threes and fours, missed, and never came again. The sirens had given several false alarms before, but this time the throb of the approaching planes seemed to make them more frenetic. We woke to their wild moanings, were carried to safety under the stairs and cradled sleepily between our parents, lightly asperged by the bright drops of cold Lourdes water that my mother would every so often sprinkle on us. I remember the silence when the droning stopped and then the long lamentation of each plane’s dive.
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18 Comments | etymology, language, language history, naming, words | Tagged: asperge, Asperger, aspergillum, aspergillus, dictionaries, etymology, Irish books, James Joyce, language, language history, literature, morphology, naming, Northern Ireland, rare words, religion, Seamus Deane, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
September 15, 2022
Introduction and origins
What’s the difference between continual and continuous? There’s a short answer, but it’s misleading, so – surprise! – I’m going with the long and complicated one.
Some people make a firm distinction between the two adjectives, but others don’t or only sometimes do. The distinction has merit, but it’s not categorical, more the codification of a general but lopsided pattern.
Because the words are so close in sense and use, they’re often used interchangeably (the adverbs continually and continuously even more so). This seldom leads to confusion or difficulty, but it’s also true that each word has domains it specializes in and others it’s less suited to.
Both words come from Latin continuus ‘hanging together, uninterrupted’, continual arriving via Old French continuel. Their endings, –al and –ous, are common adjective-forming suffixes. The words’ more recent history sheds light on their use, but first let’s look at how they’re defined, since this reflects how they’re used and gets to the centre of the problem.
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8 Comments | language, language history, lexicography, usage, words, writing | Tagged: adjectives, adverbs, collocation, confusables, continual, continually, continuous, continuously, descriptivism, etymology, language, language history, lexicography, mnemonic, prescriptivism, semantics, synonyms, usage, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
April 7, 2022
I came across an interesting word in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (Picador, 2007). It appears in the middle of a conversation between an estranged couple, here discussing their son:
‘We talked about it,’ Keith said. ‘But only once.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much. And neither did I.’
‘They’re searching the skies.’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
She knew there was something she’d wanted to say all along and it finally seeped into wordable awareness.
‘Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?
‘Just once. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.’
‘Their mother mentioned this name. I keep forgetting to tell you. First I forget the name. I forget the easy names. Then, when I remember, you’re never around to tell.’
Seeped into wordable awareness is a lovely phrase, and wordable is a curiously rare word, given its straightforward morphology and transparent meaning. It has virtually no presence in large language corpora:
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Posted by Stan Carey
March 25, 2022
On a recent rewatch of the 1979 film The Warriors, I noticed an unusual pronoun spoken by Cleon, played by Dorsey Wright:*
Ourself, once in regular use, is now scarce outside of certain dialects, and many (maybe most) people would question its validity. I’ve seen it followed by a cautious editorial [sic] even in linguistic contexts. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), describing it as the reflexive form of singular we – ‘an honorific pronoun used by monarchs, popes, and the like’ – says it is ‘hardly current’ in present-day English.
But that’s not the whole story, and it belies the word’s surprising versatility and stubborn survival outside of mainstream Englishes, which this post will outline. There are graphs and data further down, but let’s start with usage.
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Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 