(no subject)
Today I am happy, just because I woke up very early and decided not to stay in bed but get up, finish some reading, play some guitar, and still get out of the house in time to get a paper and have a coffee before work. Then I had the pleasure of following a girl with the most beautiful bottom I've ever seen all the way across town to the office, a walk which cheered me up immeasurably and convinced me yet again that an arse only fulfills its true potential when it's in motion.
I am taking these small bonuses for all I can get, because this is going to be the most hellish week at work. I've got caught up in the current trend for what the media world likes to call UGC, meaning ‘user-generated content’, meaning, to be generous, that we're going to take credit for what other non-paid creative people have done, or, to be less generous, that we're prepared to broadcast a load of amateurish shite because managers can't resist a new initialism. In practice this means I'm trying to help a student put together her papercut animation film about lesbians in Brighton. The edit has 14 tracks of video and 9 of audio, which makes it the most complicated timeline I or anyone I know has ever worked on. It's taken three weeks already....a lot of resources (and time) for 3 minutes of regional telly.
A couple of weekends ago I went to Murcia, in southeastern Spain, and I meant to write about it when I got back, but I was thrown into such a malaise when I came back to work that I couldn't write anything, and now I've more or less forgotten it all. But I did finally pick up some details of the local dialect (or language - etc), whose most noticable feature is that Ds get completely elided between vowels, so that the perfect endings have a distinctive "ao" sound. There is a delicious local kind of coffee they drink called café manchado, which is espresso with a layer of condensed milk at the bottom, and it's absolutely as awesome as that sounds - they say it as café manchao which confused me for ages. It means stained coffee, but sounds tastier in Spanish.
Once again the philologist in me and the writer (well, journalist) in me can't agree. As a linguist I obviously get very irritated with the sort of language mavens who write articles implying that the difference between misusing an apostrophe and murdering a family-member is merely one of degree. But still. When I hear someone use hoi polloi to mean ‘elite’, as someone just did on News 24, part of me wants to drive round to Television Centre and garrotte them with their radio-mic, even while the other part of me is noting it down with fascination. This contradiction can be analysed in lots of ways, and David Crystal has done it best in his unashamedly descriptivist book The Fight for English. But good descriptivism is about describing all the connotations of a word, including the fact that if you use it on a job application you're going to get laughed at. For me it's not about preserving the ‘purity’ or ‘clarity’ of the language, which is nonsense on every level for anyone who's spent more than 20 minutes thinking about it; it's just to do with what it reveals about the guy who said it. I am bound to conclude that he simply doesn't know what hoi polloi means, which tells me that he doesn't read much. The problem with language change is that it's often propogated by mistakes, hence by ignorance, and so until a mistake has gathered a certain amount of critical mass it's natural enough to be keen to avoid it in writing or speaking - even though I might scurry off later to analyse the semantics.
I am taking these small bonuses for all I can get, because this is going to be the most hellish week at work. I've got caught up in the current trend for what the media world likes to call UGC, meaning ‘user-generated content’, meaning, to be generous, that we're going to take credit for what other non-paid creative people have done, or, to be less generous, that we're prepared to broadcast a load of amateurish shite because managers can't resist a new initialism. In practice this means I'm trying to help a student put together her papercut animation film about lesbians in Brighton. The edit has 14 tracks of video and 9 of audio, which makes it the most complicated timeline I or anyone I know has ever worked on. It's taken three weeks already....a lot of resources (and time) for 3 minutes of regional telly.
A couple of weekends ago I went to Murcia, in southeastern Spain, and I meant to write about it when I got back, but I was thrown into such a malaise when I came back to work that I couldn't write anything, and now I've more or less forgotten it all. But I did finally pick up some details of the local dialect (or language - etc), whose most noticable feature is that Ds get completely elided between vowels, so that the perfect endings have a distinctive "ao" sound. There is a delicious local kind of coffee they drink called café manchado, which is espresso with a layer of condensed milk at the bottom, and it's absolutely as awesome as that sounds - they say it as café manchao which confused me for ages. It means stained coffee, but sounds tastier in Spanish.
Once again the philologist in me and the writer (well, journalist) in me can't agree. As a linguist I obviously get very irritated with the sort of language mavens who write articles implying that the difference between misusing an apostrophe and murdering a family-member is merely one of degree. But still. When I hear someone use hoi polloi to mean ‘elite’, as someone just did on News 24, part of me wants to drive round to Television Centre and garrotte them with their radio-mic, even while the other part of me is noting it down with fascination. This contradiction can be analysed in lots of ways, and David Crystal has done it best in his unashamedly descriptivist book The Fight for English. But good descriptivism is about describing all the connotations of a word, including the fact that if you use it on a job application you're going to get laughed at. For me it's not about preserving the ‘purity’ or ‘clarity’ of the language, which is nonsense on every level for anyone who's spent more than 20 minutes thinking about it; it's just to do with what it reveals about the guy who said it. I am bound to conclude that he simply doesn't know what hoi polloi means, which tells me that he doesn't read much. The problem with language change is that it's often propogated by mistakes, hence by ignorance, and so until a mistake has gathered a certain amount of critical mass it's natural enough to be keen to avoid it in writing or speaking - even though I might scurry off later to analyse the semantics.