Alex Steer

1194 words | ~6 min

Book history tells us that books are the results of processes, and that what we might think of as the 'final form' of a book might, in fact, not be.

Consider this post, for example. The activity of writing it is, of course, a process: its producer (that's me, though it's unfashionable to say so) writes text, a process which takes time. He can also delete and rewrite text. Nor is the time taken necessarily continuous: the producer can go pause for lunch, go to work, go on holiday. He can even go back, in the case of a blog post, and change things after he's saved it. It's even possible that he might get bored, abandon the work (as Coleridge supposedly did when interrupted during the writing of Kubla Khan), even die, and be replaced as producer by someone else who adds more material, and gives more time to the work. (This is what happened, very notably, in the case of the medieval French poem the Roman de la Rose. It's what didn't happen to Dickens's final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood: it is unfinished.) I'm not dead, for the record - but you've only got my word that I'm the same person who began writing this post. Writing is a process; it takes time. We tend to think of the 'final form' as the last possible snapshot in a series, the point after which the text does not change.

But form is not just about language. You might view the 'final form' of this post, once I've hit 'publish', on a computer screen. But your 'final form' is different from someone else's, as it's on a different screen. And what if you print the post out? Then the 'final form' takes on a very different material form, no longer pixels on a screen but ink on paper. Your Penguin paperback copy of Hard Times may contain the same words as the serialization of the novel in Household Words in the 1850s, but its form is not the same. In Household Words it was surrounded by periodical journalism; in your Penguin paperback, by critical notes. In serialized form it was packaged for reading in small chunks; in paperback form, as a whole novel. Such differences in material context might affect your reading of Hard Times, just as watching a box set of the first season of The West Wing might make you react differently from someone who watched it unfold over an entire season for an hour a week. Republication is all part of the process of making and remaking texts.

As well-adjusted literary critics, we're getting used to this, but sometimes it's easy to forget, especially when the form of a work seems more or less fixed. At the extreme, consider the reaction to early modern humanist textual critiques of biblical texts, or more recent critical studies of the Koran. Holy books can sometimes resist being read as processes (or, at least, some of their interpreters can be quite resistant to this idea). Less extremely (and here we get to the point), consider the OED.

It's easy to think of the Dictionary as something immutable - or, even, to think that historically it has been so, even though it is now under revision. This can lead to attempts to treat the OED either as if it is locked permanently in the past or as if it belongs entirely to the present. The latter approach can lead to unfair accusations. One of the most common, which is my example here, is the idea that the OED's editors have been biased towards Shakespeare because they attribute to him so many first uses for words which a little light searching can antedate.

This has been a curiously long-standing accusation. (For one of its most sustained developments, see John Willinsky's book Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED.) As soon as you start to think of the OED as a process and not an object, though, it unravels.

For starters, the OED was not published en bloc. The 'first edition' was published in alphabetical fascicles (rather like serializations, but less racy) between 1884 and 1928. Supplements to OED1 were published in 1933 and in the late 1970s/early 1980s. In 1989 the texts of OED1 and the Supplement volumes were compiled to form OED2. The current revision, OED3, is adding lots of new material and revising and improving upon the old.

It's now 2008, 124 years since the first fascicle of OED1 was published. Thinking about it like that, it's very clear that the OED is a process, and that's why it's faulty thinking to accuse OED1 text of being biased towards Shakespeare because you can find an antedating for a word on the internet. The internet (and here's a shocker) did not exist at any point between 1884 and 1928. Indeed, research resources for the history of English were pretty basic compared to today, especially for the medieval and early modern periods. The OED's lexicographers used what material was available to them at the time. Shakespeare, unlike many since-rediscovered Elizabethan authors, was well represented in critical editions, concordances, etc. Put simply, if you were looking for evidence of a word in use in early modern England, and both Shakespeare and an obscure pamphleteer had used it, you might find the Shakespeare usage and not the pamphleteer because you had a Shakespeare concordance or a text of Shakespeare to hand, and the pamphlet was in some remote library somewhere, unknown. Of course, the editors and their assistants did read lots of obscure early modern texts, but they couldn't catch as much as a full-text search through Early English Books Online can today. Seen today, this can look like a pro-Shakespeare bias, but it's a selection bias, not a genuine editorial one. To try to apply the 'bias' line to first usages, in particular, is ridiculous: the OED editors always looked for the earliest uses of words they could find, and they always included them. They did not hide earlier quotations to make Shakespeare look good; they simply did not know the earlier quotations existed. That would not be pardonable today, but they are not writing it today.

The OED is being written today, though. The difference between what could be done then and what can be done now is one of the motivators for the ongoing revision: the process of making and remaking the OED needs to be resumed. New editors have picked up where old ones left off, and they change things. The OED's form now, consulted online, is no more its final form than the first fascicle was in 1884 or the completed first edition was in 1928. It keeps going, like the language it records.

205 words | ~1 min

I'm working on a few language-related things of possible general interest at the moment. One is for this blog, and is intended in follow-up to this post (and this follow-up) on Language Log, relating to the history of the meaning of the controversial phrase 'to bear arms' (in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution). As far as I know no historical lexicographers have got seriously involved in this yet, and it deserves a more detailed treatment than it's had so far.

The other, not for publication here yet (because it's for publication elsewhere), is a corpus-based analysis of the changing profile of philanthropy in the UK press over the last five years. Some fairly brute-force searches are already turning up some interesting patterns, though I've got a lot to do to refine them. All being well, I'll post here sometime in the next few months on the results and the methodology used for this.

I'm also doing some research on the history of the word 'charity', though I'm not saying what for (yet, anyway).

1358 words | ~7 min

BBC News Online's Magazine section has declared war against an adverbial phrase.* The phrase in question is 'going forward', which is singled out as a prime example of 'office speak': the kind of professional jargon that, at least to the writer of that piece, 'cloaks the brutal modern workplace in such brainlessly upbeat language'.

Having just moved from the world of academic research and editing to a profession in which I routinely deal with people from a business and accounting background, and being as I am just across the Thames from the dreamless spires of the City, I can sympathize to some extent, if only by attesting to the extraordinary prevalence of the term. It's worth explaining, though perhaps with less of a wearied sigh than the BBC website has managed, that 'going forward' means, in essence, 'from now on', or 'in future'. I'd never heard it being used 'in the wild' until I consorted with business people, I'll admit. But my two questions are: why do they use it, and why is it so hated?

The answers to these two questions may be related. The key to both of them is an understanding of the nature of jargon. Jargon is what sociolinguists call specialized discourse, and what lexicographers still sometimes refer to as technical vocabulary. This is perhaps a slight misnomer, as it suggests that jargon is restricted to technical professions. It isn't: it can be found anywhere where people with shared expertise want to save themselves some time, be they painters, priests, or papyrologists.

Jargon of most kinds has the capacity to induce incredible loathing, indignation, and rage in the most mild-mannered of people. I say most kinds, because there are some kinds of specialized discourse which are so entrenched that they usually pass beyond lay scrutiny. No-one seems to object (thankfully) that scientific or mathematical papers are frequently incomprehensible to those without the appropriate training. (If you are interested in how scientists talk, I recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book which brought us a new sense of word 'paradigm', and with it the concept of the paradigm shift.) But it's not hard to find examples of people lashing out at specialized discourses which are perceived to be rather closer to what we might call 'everyday' or 'public discourse'. The jargon of literary theorists, for example, is frequently the target of scathing abuse, arguably based on the fact that literature is felt to be so much a part of public discourse in so many parts of the world (consider the role of vernacular literature in national identification and determination, past and present - and visit Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey if you don't believe me), yet literary theorists often talk about it in ways that require a lot of specialist understanding. Sometimes, of course, the charge of obscurantism can be shown to be justified. Very rarely, though, does anyone get around to suggesting that the popular idea of literature as public or national or communal is limited and incomplete, and that, by being rather anti-populist, literary-theoretical jargon might be reflecting another view of the history of writing, one that flows rather less smoothly through the world. (That's definitely outside the scope of a blog post, though.)

If you buy superficially my idea that literature is a type of cultural activity which is considered public and whose jargon is hated for unsettling that idea, then might we say the same about business? Far more central to the economy than the production of literature (on the whole), commerce has been a public discourse since at least the thirteenth century, when the first commodities trading associations began their work. 'Business' is now a huge part of the UK's economy, and millions of us are within its sphere of influence. It's so widespread that - unlike the language of literary theorists, or of pure mathematicians - the language of business routinely follows us out of the office and into the street, onto the television, into the newspapers. Little wonder, if so many of us spend so much of our lives using a shared jargon, we find it hard to put down at the end of the day, or assume that others outside the speech community will know exactly what we mean.

Perhaps that's why 'office speak' is so hated. So prevalent, always there, but always slightly jarring because slightly different. Terms like 'leverage', 'upscale' and 'capacity-build' aren't widespread enough to be unambiguously common currency: they will mark you out as a desk warrior just as surely as banging on about architraves will mark you out as a plasterer. Or a lunatic.

Of course, there is jargon and there is jargon. Jargon may be used to cover up painful truths or to disguise points of contention. In this case, I'd agree, it might be worth taking a stand, as George Orwell led the way for us to do with the concept of Newspeak. But not all jargon is newspeak. Is 'going forward' really 'cloak[ing] the brutal modern workplace' in a way that 'from now on' is not? My short answer is no.

So, to answer my second question first, what role does the term have in business jargon? Well, that's a bit of a false question, as it assumes that linguistic redundancy needs a reason, and it doesn't. But its prevalence should make us ask about its origin.

It seems to come from the practice of management accounting. Company accountants are, as you'd expect, necessarily rather concerned about making sure that their companies have enough money to be going on with in order to survive financially. Income can, after all, ebb and flow somewhat across a financial year. (Imagine you work for a company that makes greetings cards. While birthday cards may keep the money coming in all the year round, you can expect to see big spikes at Easter, Christmas, Mother's Day, etc.) So, when preparing accounts and budgets, accountants tend to take a company's income for the year, subtract its expenses, and see what surplus profit is left over (or, if they've overspent, what the deficit is). Assuming this surplus isn't given straight to the company's shareholders as a dividend, it is carried over onto the balance sheet for the following year. Thus a company that has a surplus that it carries over is said to have that surplus 'going forward' from one year's accounts to the next.

This term has solidified into an adverbial phrase and acquired a more general sense meaning 'in future', 'from now on'. But, you might say, in this use it scarcely counts as jargon: you gain no value from using 'going forward' compared to 'from now on'. This is true: in fact, it's a piece of jargon that has lost much of its technical sense. The technical sense is, of course, still widely used. You just don't hear it, as you'd expect, outside the context of management accounting, where it carries on harmlessly.

It seems perverse, then, to attack 'going forward' as a piece of 'office speak'. The problem is not that it's an inaccessible piece of jargon, but that it's not jargony enough. In the end, the problem is that it's a perfectly straightforward term that's still slightly unfamiliar in many contexts. And so, in the end, the attack on 'going forward' boils down to little more than some people encountering an unfamiliar term and slating the people who use it, because they prefer their own. To pretend otherwise is, I fear, to cloak the brutal modern world of public discourse with brainlessly upbeat cod-sociolinguistics.

* On a side note of unbelievable pedantry, the title of the above-linked article ('Are you going forward? Then stop now') ambushes the unwary reader slightly, as here 'going forward' is constructed from the present participle of the verb and the adverb 'forward', whereas in the phrase which is the focus of the article's loathing 'going forwards' is an adverbial compound. I did say it was almost unbelievably pedantic...

278 words | ~1 min

A note from the intersection of lexicography and hip-hop: listening to 'American Boy' by Estelle feat. Kanye West is a worthwhile experience in itself because it's a good tune, but the rap section in the middle particularly deserves attention because of its rather playful appropriation of contemporary British slang.

Who killin em in the UK. Everybody gonna to say you K, reluctantly, because most of this press don't f**k wit me. Estelle once said to me, cool down down don't act a fool now now. I always act a fool oww oww. Aint nothing new now now. He crazy, I know what ya thinkin. Ribena, I know what you're drinkin. Rap singer. Chain Blinger. Holla at the next chick soon as you're blinkin. What's you're persona about this Americana Brama? Am I shallow cuz all my clothes designer? Dress smart like a London Bloke. Before he speak his suit bespoke. And you thought he was cute before. Look at this peacoat, Tell me he's broke. And I know you're not into all that. I heard your lyrics, I feel your spirit. But I still talk that CAAASH, cuz a lot wags want to hear it. And I'm feelin like Mike at his Baddest. The Pips at they Gladys. And I know they love it, so to hell with all that rubbish.

'Before he speak his suit bespoke' is also the best tailoring-related pun I've heard in any song this year.

Link: lyrics.

526 words | ~3 min

Finding myself at a car boot sale over the Easter weekend, I started reflecting (because there wasn't much worth buying) on the phrase to go car booting, and its formation. The compound car boot is its most obvious component. It's in a specific sense, meaning (and shortened from) car boot sale (which is, in turn, taken from the more literal sense of car boot, being that from which one's unwanted stuff is sold). One can say, in British English, 'I went to a car boot this morning', and no-one will think you're strange (unless it's a cold morning).

But what about the -ing? The automatic assumption is that to go car booting (or to go running, fishing, etc.) involves a participle of the verb, so there must be a verb to car boot, meaning to attend, buy, or sell at a car boot sale. However, the -ing forms in these examples are properly nouns: to go ?-ing is a contraction of to go on ?-ing or to go a ?-ing (think of the carol 'Here We Come A-wassailing'), with the -ing-word the name of the activity, and a noun. So, car booting in to go car booting is a (compound) noun. Nor does it even presuppose the existence of a verb to car boot: nouns ending in -ing can form by taking an existing noun and adding the suffix -ing, without the need for a verb to act as an intermediary. (The word parenting is a good example: it forms from parent (the noun) and -ing, not from the much rarer verb to parent.) An important caveat is that while nouns of action do not suppose the existence of the verb, gerunds of action do. If you say 'I like running', then running is the noun. But if you say 'I like running races', then running is a gerund, a word with some of the properties of a noun (in this case, being something it is possible to like) and some of the properties of a verb (in this case, taking an object, 'races'). Gerunds are considered to be forms of verbs. So, if you saw a new word chopsticking in the phrase 'I hate chopsticking', that could be a noun of action derived straight from the noun 'chopstick'. But if you saw it in 'I hate chopsticking prawns' (i.e. taking 'prawns' as an object), you'd have to assume that you were dealing with the gerund of chopstick, verb, because nouns can't take objects.

As it happens, there are examples of both car booting as a noun and car boot as a verb going back to at least the late 1980s. Roughly the time some of the things you see for sale at certain car boot sales first hit the stands, by the looks of them.

247 words | ~1 min

This came up in a pub conversation (as many of the best things do): should daddy longlegs (or long legs), another name for the crane fly in British English and the harvestman in American English, be pluralized as daddies longlegs?

My well-trained lexicographer's response, of course, was 'it really doesn't matter': it could be pluralized like that, or as daddy longlegses, or without alteration as daddy longlegs. But, in the interests of interest, here are the resulting (and no doubt massively noisy and so only slightly suggestive) results for number of Google hits:

Daddy longlegs: c124,000 Daddy long legs: c460,000 Daddies longlegs: 9 Daddies long legs: c391 Daddy longlegses: c216 Daddy long legses: c585 Daddies longlegses: 1 (!) Daddies long legses: 0

Finding the unmutated plural is trickier, but "daddy longlegs are" returns c1780 hits, and "daddy longlegs have" c536.

The conclusions?

1. Plural forms with legses are more common than those with daddies.
2. If anywhere near accurate, daddy long(-)legs may be the commonest plural, suggesting that the plurality of the legs component may be tacitly extended to the whole lexical item.
3. It really doesn't matter.

131 words | ~1 min

And a quick note to herald the arrival of the latest updates to OED Online. These, published yesterday, represent a quiet revolution in historical lexicography, as the new published material consists of high-profile ranges of words revised out of sequence (much as the OED has for some years added high-profile new entries across the alphabet), rather than the next part of the normal alphabetical rolling revision (currently complete from M to quit shilling). More info about the out-of-sequence revision here.

I worked on some of these entries myself (and no, I'm not saying which ones), so it's good to see them available to the public.

426 words | ~2 min

This post by John Crace on the Guardian Arts blog is unfortunate. It contains a claim by a former lecturer of mine concerning Milton's contributions to the English language:

According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge University and fellow of Milton's alma mater, Christ's College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country's greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229.

There are two things wrong with this. The first one Gavin Alexander concedes quite readily, to some extent: 'The OED does tend to privilege famous writers with first usage,' he writes. This is true, though it's too often been used to create the mistaken impression that famous authors have been given first dibs because they're famous. Not so: the OED's policy has always been to include the earliest available example for a sense that may be found. It's easy to forget, in these days of EEBO, Google Books, etc., that during the initial round of editing (the first edition was published in fascicles from 1884 to 1928) there were quite severe restrictions on what was available in consultable editions or concordances, especially for the medieval and early modern periods. Though it's now routinely possible to antedate these first examples from Milton, Shakespeare, et. al., it wasn't then. It's a case of material constraint rather than editorial bias.

But the other mistake is more serious, and has begun to be pointed out in various quarters. The numbers suggest that Gavin Alexander has searched for 'Milton' and 'Shakespeare' in the 'first cited author' module available in the OED Online advanced search. What he's neglected to realize, though, is that until the current round of revision (from 2000 onwards) the OED abbreviated 'Shakespeare' as 'Shakes': type this in, and you will get a further 1663 results for Shakespeare as first-cited author. Milton does not even come close to second place, either: searching 'Chaucer' returns 2006 results, 'Cursor' (for Cursor Mundi) has 1609, 'Lydg*' (for John Lydgate) 783, etc.

A definitely cautionary tale, this one, about the dangers of hasty corpus linguistics. (Not a phrase I thought I'd use today.)

229 words | ~1 min

On the subject of Facebook neologisms, Laura Varnam tells me that Stuart Lee, in his English Language lecture (Oxford English FHS Paper 1) the other week set students the challenge of coming up with a new word. (The result of the same exercise last year was 'bipod', meaning to share headphones with someone while listening to an iPod or similar, has made it as far as the Urban Dictionary and was cited as part of the language of the 'MySpace generation' by the Guardian.)

This year's task was to find a word for the moment when you log into Facebook and find someone has posted an embarrassing photo of you. The resulting verb is beautiful: facewhack.

I suspect the influence of 'gobsmack' and 'Googlewhack'. With my lexicographer's hat on, I'd say that the word describes the action, not the resulting feeling: to upload an embarrassing or inappropriate photograph of (someone) to the Facebook website; to cause (a person) shock or alarm by doing this. But however you read it, it's wonderful.

So, if you like it, start using it. Happy facewhacking.

197 words | ~1 min

Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter of the 23rd February directed me to this article (Observer Magazine, 3 Feb 2008, p.9), and to the word sleevefacing: the practice of obscuring one's face (or other body parts) in one's Facebook profile picture by holding up a record sleeve, especially one similar enough to its surroundings to cause a visual illusion.

It's a lovely example of a coinage that will probably never get past its very restricted context of use, and of a word playing catch-up with the phenomenon it describes. 'Sleevefacing' is an unusual creation, probably simply from sleeve + face (n.) + ing, since it would require a new sense of 'face' (v.) meaning something like 'to have (something) as one's face; to make a surface covering of (something)'*, which itself would barely be applicable outside this context.

Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand irregular neologisms in this case, so: http://www.sleeveface.com.

* Cf. OED face v. 13.