This week’s language headlines include the publication of new slang dictionary, and an entire book devoted to that tiny piece of punctuation, the period, and a tip-off about audio recordings of famous authors whose voices would otherwise be lost.
Transcript of “Language Headlines (minicast)”
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I’m Grant Barrett. Oh, what a difference a letter can make. The Moscow Times reports this week that Tatiana Tetrachina was stripped of her Russian citizenship because a government clerk’s typewriter was missing a single letter. Instead, a different vowel was used, making her Tetrachina rather than Tetrachina and making who she said she was and who her paper said she was disagree. Public outcry over the matter has since caused her citizenship to be reinstated. But Tatiana is still pursuing it in the Russian courts. In Slate magazine, Eugene Volokh takes a look at names that are so weird that they were brought before the courts. There’s the nine-year-old New Zealand girl named Tallulah does the hula from Hawaii. Yes, that’s the entire name.
There’s someone named they th e y. There’s Darren Lloyd Bean spelled Darren Qx Bean and more Santa clauses than a Santa Claus convention. Caroline Winter fills in for William Sapphire in the New York Times magazine where she discusses why we capitalize the pronoun I. She says in short, the lowercase I is hard to see on the page. But an uppercase I is a cinch to read. She suggests just for a little self-humbling that we capitalize you. Why oh you instead?
Also in the New York Times, Nicholson Baker gives a favorable review to Am and Shay’s book Reading the OED, in which he spent an entire year reading the print version of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Baker calls the book oddly inspiring and says the effect of this book on me was to make me like Am and Shay and briefly to hate English. Finally, dictionary editor Erin McKean asks in the Boston Globe why people use a word and then sheepishly wonder if it is really a word. She writes, whenever I see not a real word used to stigmatize.
What is usually a perfectly cromulent word, I wonder why the writer felt the need to hang a big sign reading.
I am not confident about my writing on it. What do they imagine the penalty is for using an unreal word? A ticket from the dictionary police?
Cromulent, by the way, is a made-up word from the Simpsons. It means good or fine and okay, fine. That’s all for this week’s language headlines.
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Last year British slang lexicographer Jonathon Green struck a deal with the publisher Chambers Harrap to create an exhaustive dictionary of English slang. Now, says the London Telegraph, the first fruit of that relationship has appeared in the form of the Chambers Slang Dictionary.
The main sources of slang, Green says, have remained the same: sex and sexual organs, drinking, and terms of abuse. But, there are always innovations. The Telegraph offers some of them: boilerhouse, modern British rhyming slang for spouse. Jawsing, US teen slang for lying. And, muzzy, an Irish word for a naughty child.
Michael Quinion reviews the dictionary.
In the Paper Cuts blog of the New York Times, Jennifer Scheussler reviews On The Dot by Nicholas and Alexander Humez. It’s an exhaustive look at the period or the dot, that little piece of punctuation that does so much. And I do mean exhaustive. The book is so digressive and sometimes so far afield of its subject matter that you might find yourself flipping to the front to make sure you’re still reading the same book.
In the discussion forum on that page, I discovered the “fini.” This is a new piece of punctuation created by Dave Rosenthal, an assistant managing editor at the Baltimore Sun. The fini is a square instead of a circle.
Dave says, “A period is usually a fine way to end a sentence. But when there’s a forcefulness attached to the words, I worry that the period will roll away. It is, after all, just a tiny black ball.”
Do you want to find out what Virginia Woolf and John Steinbeck sounded like? They’re part of an audio collection from the British Library, called “The Spoken Word: British Writers.” It was discussed and played on NPR’s All Things Considered.
The audio is a rare find, as many recordings of the early days of radio were never saved. Recordings by George Orwell, for example, have yet to be found, even though he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
