John Gordon Ross

Even with the abundance of flesh available on the Internet nowadays, the word “nipple” elicits schoolboy humour, and my Guitar Nipple thread (Is Guitar Nipple a Hoax?) caused more hilarity than interest on the Delcamp forum. Some reactions:

– “Watching topic to keep abreast of developments”

– “I’ll ask my teat-cher”

– “I think you’ve managed to milk this subject for all it’s worth.”

– “Now that we have all gotten that off our chest…”

My favourite so far:

– “Apparently it only tends to afflict people who play from mammary.”

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I posted the following on Jean-François Delcamp’s classical guitar forum, but just in case any guitarists in the know run across this post first:

There’s a thread going about the recently disclosed cello scrotum hoax which I don’t want to hijack. But the doubt is raised. by none other than Baroness Murphy herself, who must be a most remarkable person. According to her widely reported confession, Doctor (as she then was) Murphy invented the condition cello scrotum in a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1974, inspired by “reports in the BMJ about the alleged condition guitar nipple, caused by irritation when the guitar was pressed against the chest,” says Reuters, which adds that Doctor Murphy “also said she suspected “guitar nipple” had been a joke.”

The Reuters story is more or less the same as that given by the BBC news site (you’ll find it in the Cello Scrotum thread) and other online press. The only exception I have noticed is the version from FoxNews, which reads like something from a different planet altogether and maintains that Doctor Murphy and her husband had also invented guitar nipple as a hoax. But I think this account is probably the result of drug or alcohol abuse by the journalist responsible and that we can safely disregard it altogether.

Now, the cello scrotum story being recent and amusing, it’s quite difficult to find references on the Net to “guitar nipple” which are not related to it. But I have seen the odd thing, and it seems that until now “guitar nipple” has been taken more or less seriously as a more or less real complaint. Not a particularly serious one, and not a mysterious one either, just a typical occupational inflammation. There’s a Telegraph article here, and an abstract of a study of the literature here.

Wikipedia now refers to “guitar nipple” as a hoax, if only in its entry for “cello scrotum” (that’s not an invitation to more Wikipedia-bashing, please, it’s just a comment).

It seems to me that between us we really should be able to answer this question more or less definitively. We have a number of doctors on the forum – what’s the gen from them? Has anyone here actually been diagnosed as having guitar nipple, or does anyone know anyone who has?

You never know, we could get ourselves in the medical literature, here.

I’ve always been uneasy with tolls. I mean, a toll entails stopping someone at point C who has left A and needs to get to B and charging them money before allowing them to continue. So what is the difference between that and pointing a blunderbuss at your victim and saying “Stand and deliver?” Unfortunately, quite a lot of work comes my way from companies in this lucrative line of business and the translation on my desk at the moment has given me cause for thought (obviously, I don’t mention my clients by name in this blog or give clues as to who they might be, however rat-like they may be). Considering the company’s future strategy in the toll market, the document notes that one policy will be to develop a system for setting the toll charge not, as is usually the case, according to the vehicle’s characteristics, but depending on its “occupancy,” i.e., how many people are travelling in it. Spine-chilling, isn’t it?

I have also learnt that there is a company (not clients of mine, but I won’t mention their name either) which produces an infra-red detector for this purpose, so there will be no point in your getting the kids to hide under the seat.

David Beaver has a post on Language Log about George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. I find much to disagree with in Mr Beaver’s post, and Language Log’s Comments Policy says “blog comments should be short. If you have a lot to say, post it on your own blog and link to it.” So here it is.

To begin, I’ll confess that I don’t get the title: “Orwell’s Liar.” Is this a reference to Orwell’s work (the expression “Stalin’s liar” seems to be his), is it directly calling Orwell a liar as other commentors have interpreted, or is it something you have to be a linguist to understand? Never mind, I expect I am being slow and I don’t think it is central in any way. The text of the post begins:

“Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law.”

The parallel between “language crime” and Orwell’s famous “thought crime” is clever, but Orwell’s essay pretends nothing of the sort. It is a complaint, one repeated thoroughout the ages by many cultured but less-than-young people, that things are worse than they used to be. The body of the essay, which Mr Beaver discusses only cursorily, is a discourse on what Orwell sees as vices in the use of English, with a few guidelines thrown in at the end to help writers avoid them.

“Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases of poor writing, he provides no evidence that earlier times had been perennially populated by paragons of literary virtue. He proceeds to shore up the declining language with style suggestions that, regrettably enough, have never turned a Dan Brown into a George Orwell.”

Come on, David, is Orwell “laying down the law,” or giving feeble style suggestions? It is true that Orwell does not prove that things had been better before then, and I don’t really see why he should, for the examples he gives to illustrate his thesis would have been instantly recognizable to his readers of 1946 as a kind of modern-speak (an effect they may have lost). And Orwell does say in so many words that the English language is in decline. Or, I insist, was, in 1946. Mr Beaver does not agree, and while I am not a linguist and much less a linguistic historian, I would venture to suggest that the English language has had many ups and downs since then, and 1946 could well not have been a high point – the best young minds in the English-speaking world had been involved in the war for the preceding seven years or so, bureaucracy was ingrained, and so on. British English could well have been in especially poor condition, for one thing because its influence was contracting. The world had yet to come to the universal conclusion that English was the business langage of the future, the injection of dynamism that came with immigration and the expansion of English in the not-yet-former colonies had not happened, and the explosion of English that would come with rapid technological progress, television and the Internet was decades away.

“Customers who buy into Orwell’s shit also buy Strunk and White…”

Now this is objectionable in different ways, the least important of which is the scatology, though that alone was pretty well guaranteed (calculated?) to provoke a number of strong protests in the post’s comments. As a Brit, I had never heard of Strunk and White, looked them up and found that they and their work are poorly seen in circles of descriptivist linguistics (as opposed to the prescriptive kind, the sort that tells people how they should use language. Language Log is firmly in the descriptivist camp). Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style seems to have been the standard grammar book in the US for the last half-century and more, so I am not surprised that it is loathed by some. I won’t defend it, or any other grammar book (here), but I must point out that to say “Strunk and White stink, therefore so does Orwell” is nonsense.

And this is where David Beaver’s thesis is essentially wrong. His argument is not against Politics and the English Language so much as against rules about the use of language – prescriptivism. He targets Orwell’s essay in order to support his position – “Orwell is wrong, so I am right.” And to do so, he makes assumptions about Orwell’s thinking which are not supported by the text. Orwell does not says “these are rules English users must follow,” but “follow these rules to avoid using English in the ways I have described.”

David Beaver has managed to highlight the two basic flaws in the anti-prescriptivist case. The first is that it is obsolete, for the battles have been fought, won and lost and to be strictly descriptivist today is like a classically minded music school lecturer acknowledging that “There may be some merit in pop music” – it is redundant, no-one cares. The other (which may well be a contradiction of the first) is that people want rules. Not we’ll-send-you-to-the-headmaster-if-you-split-an-infinitive rules, but helpful rules, how-to rules. And they want them now as much as ever or more so. Running a Google search on “how to write” (complete with quotation marks) returns 18,500,000 results: how to write a novel, how to write an essay, an abstract, a resume, for the web, a dissertation, headlines, a scientific paper, plain English, and so on. Orwell’s essay could almost be retitled “How Not to Write Bad, Pretentious or Overtly Politically Manipulative English,” and there is no need to read into it a desire to dictate how people should use language. Instead, it points out how dreadful English can be when misused. Who could argue with that?

I recognize that not everyone can tune in instantly to Orwell’s wavelength, and it may be that David Beaver is simply (deliberately?) listening in on a different frequency (I take his posting with the tags “Peeving” and “Prescriptivist Poppycock” to indicate that we should not take him entirely seriously). I once explained Orwell’s admiration for what he termed the “decency” of the working classes to my convent-school educated mother. Entirely missing the point, she said, in her plummiest voice and with not a trace of irony, “How very condescending of Mr Orwell.”

There’s a light-hearted discussion going on over at Language Log about the Hokey Cokey, provoked by the Telegraph digging up the old story about its lyrics being anti-Catholic (a distorsion of “the Latin “hoc est enim corpus meum” or “this is my body” used by Catholic priests to accompany the transubstantiation during mass,” says the Telegraph). I think most people would feel intuitively that the idea is nonsense, simply because its associations with pub sing-songs and music hall suggest it must be more modern than that (not very modern, though – it immediately conjures up images of the Black and White Minstrels in my mind).

A slightly curious thing about the Language Log thread is that the posters have mostly been considering the words of the song, rather than its musical characteristics or its dance movements. This is not surprising, they are linguists, after all, but it does show how easy it is for a particular mind set to get in the way of clear thought.

I’m not sure I entirely believe in what is being called “The Girl Effect,” but this is a mean Flash video:

You’ll find the original on Girleffect.org. The idea is that investing in education of, specifically, girls rather than boys is the best way to improve the economies of developing countries (and so make the world a better place all round).

I don’t doubt the underlying idea, I just can’t see that it would continue to work as effectively once it had got started. Some sort of limiting effect would come into play, surely? I mean, what happens when a large number of these girls decide they are entitled to a better deal and start dropping out or rioting? Just because they don’t doesn’t mean they won’t.

The video’s effectiveness, as so often, comes largely from its simplicity – entirely animated text. Cool.

Corinne McKay of Thoughts on Translation has touched a nerve with her post on “We just translate”…or do we?” Translators have two often contradictory goals: accuracy of translation, and quality of language. She gamely mentions failing two translation tests in a row for different agencies, one on the grounds that her translation was “too faithful to the original” (which wasn’t very well written, they wanted it improved upon), the other because it “sounded great in English, but it strayed too far from the original.”

This is a topic dear to the hearts of translators everywhere, I suspect: we’ve all been on the wrong end of a stinging “too literal” or “too free, too liberal,” and probably both (occasionally, you might even have received the same criticism for the same job, which is really galling). So how do you know what to aim for? Pragmatism says “give the customer what he wants,” which usually means “make it sound good,” but not always. In my comment on Corinne’s post, I mention a ding-dong I once had with an advertising agency bigwig who insisted on having a phrase translated into English with a double meaning it simply did not have in Spanish. What I didn’t include in my comment was my suspicion that the translation might have been for the agency’s English-speaking head office in New York or wherever, and was part of some control procedure – in other words, the bigwig didn’t want his bosses to know that the slogan had gone out on the Spanish media lacking that double meaning.

There doesn’t seem to be any objective criterion you can use in this regard, unfortunately. I do feel that we should not improve on the original and that this should not be expected of us, but we live in the real world. All too often, the bottom line is keeping the customer happy.

Incidentally, in the same thread I have come across the word “finesse” used as a verb in a way I have never seen before. The phrase is “finessing marketing copy,” meaning improving or refining it, (especially?) as part of the translation process. I can see it catching on.

A post on Talk Wordy to Me led me to an entertaining on-line etymology quiz which I recommend to language buffs. It is, as TW puts it, “freaking hard.” TW got 6 out of 10 right on two occasions before deciding enough was enough, and I am pleased to say that I got 7 out of 10 on my first and so far only attempt – I think it was something of a fluke,* and there’s no sense in pushing my luck. You’ll find the quiz at http://etymologic.com.

* Middle English floke, fluke, from Old English flōc; akin to Old English flōh chip, Old High German flah smooth, Greek plax flat surface, and probably to Old English flōr floor — more at floor. That’s the trouble with etymology, once you get going it’s hard to stop.

Found on Overheard Everywhere (I run the feed from Overheard in the Office on the Whittle It page, but I love them all, even if many of the entries sound more scripted than accidentally eavesdropped on):

The Best Apples Don’t Go Into Applesauce. Or Teaching

English teacher (about Don Pedro in Much Ado about Nothing: “Don” in Spanish means “wicked cool guy.”

Absence from the UK meant I had never seen Fry and Laurie until I caught a post on Jill Sommers’ blog, Musings from an Overworked Translator (here’s a hint, Jill – ease up). She posted the following language-related Fry and Laurie YouTube video which made me laugh out loud even though I don’t know who, if anyone, they are parodying.

Here’s another, with the slightly black depth of humour that comes with truth. For there really are people who complain about the word “gay” having been somehow sequestered, as if its captors were likely to demand a ransom for it, aren’t there?

Incidentally, I totally share Jill’s admiration for Blackadder-foil-turned-Super-House-Physician Hugh Laurie, in my case compounded by his enviable musical abilities, which make me suspect he’s a Jack-of-many-trades like myself. But much better at it.