In a comment on my post Gender in French, Pat Franczyk shows the danger of confusing the meanings of these two words.

It has often been said that “language has gender, but animals and plants have sex”. The ambiguity of the second half of this aphorism shows why gender is often used to mean ‘sex’. The OED gives examples as early as 1387 of gender in which the meaning is obviously ‘sex’ , but to my eyes, most if not all of the examples can be interpreted as being ironic, and the first edition says that this meaning is ‘now only jocular’ (published October 1898).

In the course of the 20th century, gender came more and more to mean ‘sex’ in the sense of the biological assignment to either male or female, probably because sex was being increasingly seen solely as what the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines as “the physical activity that two people do together in order to produce babies”, leading to the joke answer to the question on a form requesting personal information: “Sex? – Yes, please!” rather than “Sex? – (fe)male”. Continue Reading →

I’ve recently come across two words I’d never seen before. The immediate reaction is to think that the writer has either mis-remembered another word, or simply made it up on the hoof:

“To cut this delay, the control unit briefly richens the fuel/air mixture fed to the engine and at the same time causes air to be injected in the exhaust port.”

“Smirke’s front hall was repristinated, so that it looked once more like the entrance to a great museum, not a railway station waiting-room.”

What is wrong with enriches in the first case, and returned to its original state in the second? Admittedly, the latter uses five words instead of one, but what is this word?

The Simpsons cartoon has introduced the word embiggen to the language (“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man”), but has it?

In all three cases, these lexical items have occurred before. The OED gives three separate 19th century examples of richen, and one 17th century and one 19th century example of repristinate. According to Wikipedia, embiggen appears in an 1884 publication Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc by C. A. Ward.

They are all well-formed words: adjective + en (e.g. darken); -ate, verb-creating suffix (e.g. hyphenate); re-, prefix meaning ‘again’. Even embiggen has the equivalent embolden.

On the other hand, when Edna Krabappel says she never heard embiggens until she came to Springfield, Ms Hoover (Lisa’s teacher) replies “It’s a perfectly cromulent word”. The meaning of cromulent is less clear: does it mean “ordinary”, “normal”, or instead “well-formed”?

I’m sorry I’ve been ‘absent’ for a couple of weeks, but pressure of other work has meant that this blog had to take second place. However, …

As John Wells says in his comment to my last post, we are dealing with two constructions here: in case, and in case of.

In case, followed by a clause, is unambiguous, and could be replaced in very formal English by the obsolescent or at least highly literary conjunction lest: “Don’t run lest you fall over”.

It is the in case of construction which causes the problems. I wonder if we see here not merely a difference between American and British usage, but a generational difference. I have been asking my friends about the original example sentence that I used, and without exception, those of my age and older are uncomfortable with it, and would prefer my alternative “In the event of fire, do not use the lift”. Adrian Morgan’s suggestion that the ‘knowing smiles’ are from an acceptance that “highly formal language can be funny sometimes” is not the case in my experience.

I’m indebted to Jack Windsor Lewis for reminding me that the OED, 1^st edition, has two British examples of in case of meaning ‘in the event of’ (Vol 2, page 143: case: II, Phrases, 10 d). Admittedly this was published in 1889, but the later of the two quotations is dated 1745. There is also an example from Washington Irving, dated 1832. This seems to me to imply that the usage may have become obsolete in British English, but has now crossed the Atlantic again, like so many other usages, and is accepted by the younger generation of British English speakers as quite unexceptionable.

Burchfield’s edition of Modern English Usage has one example each of in case and in case of, (‘Take your umbrella in case it rains’ and ‘In case you want me, I’ll be in my office’) and this example of in case of (meaning ‘if’) confirms ds’s and Philip Taylor’s view that the clause containing in case of should precede the main clause of the sentence. I think this may actually be a ‘rule’ of English, and would explain ds’s feeling that it is more ‘elegant’. It’s strange that while dictionaries and books on English usage give examples, they don’t make this word order explicit, but it seems to work, and could be the reason why the ‘wrong’ order on European notices is so noticeable.

Wherever I go in Europe, I seem to see signs outside lifts that say “Do not use the lift in case of fire”. Inevitably, one of the British people standing waiting for the lift to arrive then says “We shouldn’t use this lift, because it might catch fire”. Knowing smiles are exchanged, meaning “Foreigners can’t get English quite right, can they?”

This is another example of the ‘same language false friends’ that I wrote about in another post. In US English, there is nothing wrong with the sentence, where “in case” means “if”, so the whole sentence means “Do not use the lift if there is a fire”. In British English, however, “in case” means “against the possibility”: “Do not use the lift because there may be a fire”.

The British English warning should read “In the event of fire, do not use the lift”.

Jack Windsor Lewis’ blog 151 mentions the fact that ‘ch’ is counted as a single letter when alphabetising Welsh, Spanish (but not Portuguese) and Czech. Double ‘ll’ is likewise a single ‘letter’ in both Welsh and Spanish (as an example, lomo comes before llegar in a list of Spanish words), and ‘aa’ (increasingly old-fashioned alternative to ‘å’) in Danish and Norwegian, where it is given the last place in the alphabet.

This leads me to ask: how are these letters treated in crosswords compiled in the relevant languages? Do the ‘ch’ ‘ll’ or ‘aa’ occupy a single box, or are they spread over two boxes as they would be in English crosswords?

Some years ago I had a dispute with a very reputable linguist on the question of whether Korean orthography was a syllabary or an alphabet. I maintained that it was an alphabet since each ‘block’ making up a syllable was transparently made up of individual strokes whose phonological value was constant. His counter argument was that in Korean crosswords, the whole syllable is necessarily placed within one box, and that therefore the writing system is a syllabary.

We agreed to disagree.