kluge/kludge --- ESR's theory of language norms

[Eric S. Raymond]

This posting is part one of two parts.

Pursuant to requests from several posters, it describes the theory of
language norms I operate from when editing the Jargon File.

Part two will detail my present understanding of facts in the kluge/kludge
usage controversy, and a draft revision of the relevant entries. If you are
not interested in general questions about the definition of language
correctness, hit 'n' now.

1. Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism
-----------------------------------
The most frustrating thing for me about the kluge/kludge thread has been wading
through the repeated assertion that there is no standard for "correctness" of a
usage in language other than popularity. Typically, this has been intertwined
with the assertion that condemning the usage of any subcultural group as
"incorrect" is equivalent to declaring them no-good shits and attempting
cultural genocide on them.

Both assertions are flat wrong --- not sustainable through ten minutes of
serious thought about the issues. Let's take them in order and see why.

Historically, there have been two poles in the argument over how "correct"
language is defined.

One extereme position (prescriptivism) is that it is defined an elite of
language experts (lexicographers, grammarians, teachers, writers) who tend the
"natural" pre-existing language like a garden, pulling weeds and planting seeds
to encourage growth in productive and beautiful directions.

The other extreme position (descriptivism) is that "correct" language is
defined by usage. What the majority sanctions is correct, even if it violates
whatever norms of orthography, usage and pronunciations existed before.

Both extremes have arguments to bolster their position. To avoid repeated
intonation of two very similar words, I shall refer to them as the Blue and Red
positions (political reference intentional; the debate has been influenced by
political parallels for three hundred years).

To a Blue, the Red position is a recipe for chaos and ugliness, as thousands of
random mutations destroy the coherence, utility and beauty of shared language.

The Red replies that every living language is an evolving entity. Individual
language changes appear random, and some actually are random. Very often,
though, especially in matters of pronunciation and grammar, language evolution
displays natural-law-like regularities over long time scales. Thus, language
changes should be viewed not as random but as as the working out of natural
processes which themselves maintain the utility of language.

The Blue replies that even if that's true, some changes are simply errors which
degrade the language. Misspellings are a problem when they impede
communication; bad grammar and misused vocabulary is a problem when it erodes
the speaker's and listeners capacity to make useful distinctions in speech and
in thought. Awestruck contemplation of the wondrousness of language evolution
on the long scale doesn't fix that kind of problem in day-to-day communication,
any more than awestruck contemplation of the technological progress of humanity
will fix a flat tire.

The Red replies that even if that's true, he's reluctant to grant anybody the
moral authority to prescribe norms, because that position has been so
frequently abused by narrow-minded pedants in the past.

The Blue growls that *somebody* has to do the routine maintainence work,
teaching, and error-checking, and should it be someone who really *cares* about
the language or an unwashed barbarian who thinks is can all be let drift!?!
The Red snarls that if the Blues had had their way we'd still be speaking
Middle English. And they proceed to bludgeon each other into insensibility
with heavy reference works.

Both sides have their points --- and the points are related to the *function*
of language. Some aspects of language are very subject to functional
disruption by random change, other less so. The Blues tend to fort up around
the sensitive bits (grammar, syntax, orthography) and let the Reds have their
way with pronunciation and language-register questions. The Reds (barring a
few radicals in the sociolinguistic school) tacitly accept these spheres of
influence. Vocabulary is the no-man's land where most of the battles get
fought.

Anybody who does serious work as a lexicographer, teacher, or any other kind of
language authority sooner or later has to decide where he falls on the Blue/Red
spectrum.

Neither extreme is tenable. The failings of prescriptivism are too well-known
to need rehashing here; English, in particular, neither needs nor wants an
equivalent of the Academie Francais. Current political fashion is also
pro-Red, with a fair amount of muttering about language norms being politically
incorrect and instruments of oppression. However, this fashion is not
reflected in the way language is *taught*, which is fortunate; the few
experiments in pedagogy from a doctrinaire Red position have been practical
disasters for the students, and quickly dropped.

That brings us to the second assertion --- that any normative language directed
at dialect or variant usage is bad, and that when directed at the preferred
usage of any self-conscious group it is tantamount to parochialism, cultural
imperialism, or even some kind of Nazi-like desire to declare the dialect-users
contemptible inferiors.

If we accept that language is first and foremost a tool, a tool of
communication, then we must accept that language variance and change can
validly be criticized on functional grounds. That is, there will be some
changes which can *functionally* be called bad things, without reference to
their users, because they damage the tool.

Spelling errors that create a ambiguities with other words make good simple
examples. One particularly jarring one we see on the Net with some frequency
is the misspelling of the verb "lose" as "loose". This is functionally bad,
and thus incorrect in a very strong sense. If it were to become majority
usage, the capability of English would be damaged. Thus, Blue condemnation of
it is a service to all users of English.

This one example suffices in principle to refute the extreme descriptivist
position. Many others could be added. It can also be observed that the
"cultural imperialism" argument easily degenerates into whining, special
pleading, and grievance-collecting.

Many readers will observe that the lose/loose example is too easy; it doesn't
grapple with tough issues such as the "correctness" of slang. It wasn't meant
to. To call the tougher cases, one has to decide what prescriptive norms are
worth defending. Because once one has admitted that popularity of usage isn't
always and everywhere determinative, the way is open for other kinds of claim.

Here's another example that should make this clear. Consider the word
"hacker". It is probably now the case that the majority of English-speakers
who have heard or seen this word mean it to signify "computer criminal".
Almost everybody reading this article knows that it originally meant something
much more complex and generally positive, and it's a fair bet most of you still
use it that way and believe that's what it "really" means, even if you think
reclaiming the word in popular usage is a lost cause.

If you are an extreme Red, a radical descriptivist, what do you have to
conclude when you think about what "hacker" *really* means? Ahhh...so you've
got a Blue streak after all, do you?

One can make the functional argument that the "criminal" meaning of the word
damages English's ability to distinguish between enthusiasts and vandals.
That's certainly true, and compelling.

But there are two other arguments which, if we've abandoned the radical-Red
position, are not obviously nonsense. One is historical; the word "hacker" had
a good and useful meaning until a few people with high media profiles got it
wrong and propagated the error widely.

The other is territorial. It can be cogently claimed that the community of
self-described hackers *owns* the word "hacker", gets to define it by pointing
to themselves, and has a right to defend it from abuse by others. (Nor is this
at all unususual; physicists similarly own the word "neutron", for example.)

Most hackers believe all three of these claims to some degree. Now: what
should a *lexicographer* believe? In evaluating the "correctness" of a usage
or language change, how much should one weight popularity? historical claims?
expert authority? conformance to pre-existing patterns of the language?

2. Editorial Philosophy
-----------------------

I believe there is no cut-and-dried answer to the above question. Not only are
all these criteria significant, but their relative significance varies a great
deal from case to case. The only criterion I'm prepared to apply everywhere is
the semantic one --- a change is bad, and worth fighting with all the
prescriptive opprobrium one can muster, if it impedes communication or erodes
the language's capacity to make useful distinctions.

Let's take a closer look at how this criterion interacts with more traditional
prescriptivist criteria, with examples. A usage or change can, as I see it,
fall into one of five categories:

1. Prescriptively incorrect, semantically bad
Examples: Misspellings that create ambiguity, like the "lose/loose"
confusion. Usage bugs like improper use of the subjunctive. Promiscuous
use of "scare" quotes.
My choice: Call it incorrect and fight it, no matter how popular
it gets.

2. Prescriptively incorrect, semantically neutral
Examples: Pronunciations and spellings that are nonstandard but
recognizable, and which (in the latter case) conform to the rules of English
orthography. Grammatical "errors" like splitting an infinitive or putting a
preposition at the end of a sentence.
My choice: This is language evolution in action. Not a problem. When a
usage like this goes over 50%, I'll call it correct.

3. Prescriptively incorrect, semantically good
Example: Dixie usage of "you-all" or "y'all" as an unambiguous second-person
plural.
My choice: Screw the prescriptivists, this kind of change is good. (I use
"you-all" myself by choice and encourage it in others, despite being a Yankee
born and bred with a neutral Standard American accent.)

4. Prescriptively correct, semantically bad
Example: "flutist" and "flautist" have the same dictionary meaning.
My choice: This is an etymological doublet waiting to happen, like
shirt/skirt or bishop/episcopal in Anglo-Saxon. Encourage it to split (I tell
people who describe me as a "flautist" that I play jazz/folk/rock and would
much rather leave "flautist" to people who play in symphony orchestras).

5. Prescriptively correct, semantically neutral or good
No change needed, these cases are not an issue.

Besides this semantic criterion, there are a few others that I take fairly
seriously. The significant ones, for the present discussion, are:

1) Orthographic correctness
The widespread belief that English spelling is hopelessly irregular is
wrong.
According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Language, English spelling
is about 75% regular; the regularity is obscured because most of the
irregularities occur in the 400 most common words. Other sources give
figures of about 80%.
What *is* true is that the orthographic rules of English are complex,
much more so than those of (say) Spanish or Turkish. That is, the
algorithm one must use to translate phonetics into a correct spelling
is relatively complex. Nevertheless, adult learners of English routinely
acquire it.
Accordingly, the regularity of English orthography *is* in fact worth
defending. I am accordingly prepared to describe a written usage as
`incorrect' if the spoken usage is prior and the written form it is not a
correct transcription of the spoken form.

2) Ownership of terms of art by a community of experts
I discussed the term "hacker" above. It's important to note that expert
communities only own a word in their context. To see how this works, consider
the word "mogul".
To a historian, a "mogul" is a person associated with the Mogul or Mughal
dynasty of India. To a skier, a mogul is a large lump or pile of snow. In
informal general English, a mogul is a powerful person, the term being
especially associated with the film industry.
The historian's mogul is a term of art in the strict sense. Anyone who used
it in a history book with any other denotation would be wrong (unless it were a
history of Hollywood or skiing). Usage could probably not change this; the
historian's mogul has too much historical inertia.
The skier's mogul is owned by a different and looser community of
experts. If you use it to mean something else on a ski slope, you're
probably wrong --- but it's possible that usage *amomg skiers* might broaden
or change over time, and if it did, their sense would be determinative
for the ski slope.
Nobody owns the general slang use of "mogul". It is therefore extremely
subject to usage mutation.

3) Kind of denotational change
Vocabulary has preferred directions of mutation. It is much more common
for a slang term to either broaden or narrow in denotation than for it to
shift to a different and disjoint meaning (within the same usage context).
When the latter happens it's a fair presumption that someone has made
an error.
As a hypothetical example: let's supposed that we encountered, in 1993,
the slang term "bumpf" for legal papers. Now, let's suppose it's
1995 and we collect three uses of "bumpf": (1) a subpoena, specifically
excluding other kinds of legal papers, (2) any kind of record-keeping with
legal and financial implications (3) wealthy criminal defendents.
One can make a strong presumption that use (3) is an error. If one happens
to know the original World War II use of "bumpf" to mean "propaganda leaflets"
it's fair to say *prescriptively* that sense (3) is "incorrect".

3) "Correct" is nearly orthogonal to "popular"
------------------------------------------------

"Popular" is an observational criterion --- how many people use it? "Correct"
is a structural one --- does it violate the norms that make language an
effective tool of communication? The two are nearly orthogonal.

Slang uses which are popular but incorrect are actually not very common. If
this surprises you, bear in mind that we are not speaking of the pedantic
"incorrectness" of, say, splitting an infinitive. Language evolution is driven
by peoples' need and desire to communicate --- thus, even when inventing slang
and ephemera, they tend (if unconsciously) to follow generative rules that
preserve and extend their *ability* to communicate.

For example: it is very rare for written English slang to violate English's
orthographic rules. Apparent exceptions to this rule usually turn out to be
cases in which slang is following the rules more regularly than the older
portions of English's established vocabulary (show-biz use of "nite" for
"night" is a good example). *Real* exceptions are curiosities that call for
individual investigation, and probably signs of transmission error.

Because slang is usually "correct" in the only sense that matters to me
(as opposed to a true-Blue language pedant), and because hackers tend to
be more picky about semantic correctness than the average speaker of
English, occasions on which I feel any need to get prescriptive are rare.
In fact, I believe the kluge/kludge war is the first serious one in the
three-year history of the new Jargon File and over 3,000 entries.

I do not expect such occasions to get any more common. :-)
--
Eric S. Raymond <e...@snark.thyrsus.com>

[Eric S. Raymond]

This is part two of two parts. In part one, I discussed my theory of
language norms. This posting will detail my (significantly revised)
present understanding of the facts in the Great Klu[d]ge Controversy,
including a draft pair of {kluge} and {kludge} entries.

0) Introduction
---------------
In a previous posting <1mMNkg#M05Fk6L2YX28S2ljDdF04FNKT=e...@boojum.thyrsus.com>
I challenged those who objected to the the File's description of "kludge" as
incorrect to respond with facts rather than flamage.

In particular, I adduced four different ways in which the judgement of
incorrectness might be challanged. In brief, these were:

1. Demonstrate that the word "kludge" has a separate history in Great
Britain or elsewhere.

2. Demonstrate the "kludge" *predates* "kluge" and so may have given rise to
it, rather than the reverse.

3. Refute the orthographic argument that "kludge" is an invalid spelling of
the original "kluge" pronunciation.

4. Demonstrate that pronunciation change driven by misspellings in written
media is a normal process of linguistic evolution.

I) New Evidence
---------------
Numerous posters responded in ways that ran the gamut from scholarly
dissertation to pure flamefest. By far the most factual and interesting
responses came from Don Stokes, Stewart Fleming, Dan Tilque, Stuart Stremler
and Jim Finniss. I applaud these gentlemen for their thoroughness and
civility.

1. Independent history of "kludge"

In <1993Aug5.0...@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis reported that his uncle
Ron, ex-RAF, uses both /kluhj/ and /klooj/ in different senses; /klooj/ for a
clever hack, /kluhj/ for a nasty one.

Stewart Fleming reported that "kludgie" or "kludge" pronounced /kluhj/ has
long been in use in Scotland as a term for an outdoor toilet.

In <1993Aug11.1...@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis says that "kludge"=/kluhj/
is widely known in Great Britain in the hackish sense by non-techies.

I am prepared to treat these reports as fact.

Mr. Finnis goes on to advance a theory that "kludge"=/kluhj/ entered British
military slang via servicemen in Scotland, influenced by Northern English slang
"clag" (grunge, muck).

Mr. Finniss also proposes that the American use of "kludge" was transmitted
from Britain and miscegenated with an already-established "kluge"=/klooj/,
partially displacing the "kluge" spelling but not its pronunciation.

I consider these parts of his theory extremely plausible, worth adding to
the etymology of "kludge" as an origin account.

Finally, Mr. Finniss proposes that the "kludge" spelling was transmitted
during or immediately after WWII by returning American servicemen.

The vector is plausible but the timing is, IMO, not. The "kluge" spelling
dominated in the U.S. until the mid-1970s, a quarter-century later. I think
that argues for later transmission, pointing the finger back at the 1962
Granholme article.

My guess (which I'm prepared to put in the File as a "probable") is that the
chain went Britain -> Granholme-1962 -> U.S. In fact, Granholme sounds like a
British name. If we could confirm that he was British, I'd say that would pin
it down fairly hard.

2. Use of "kludge" prior to and possibly ancestral to "kluge"

Given its meaning, Scots "kludge" probably predates U.S. "kluge". However,
I think the weight of evidence is on the side of the two words having different
origins.

In particular, the new evidence is consistent with the traditional etymology
linking "kluge"=/kluj/ to German "klug" (clever). Final /oog/ is rare to
nonexistent in English, and /ooj/ is the phonotactically nearest thing it could
have mutated into.

On the other hand, if U.S. "kludge" were actually *derived* from Scots
"kludge", it's fairly hard to see how the American "kluge" and /kluj/ could
have happened, especially since they seem to be *older* than "kludge" in the
U.S. by (dating from earliest sources known to me) at least fifteen years.

At one point, Don Stokes suggested the (untenable, I think) theory that
/kluhj/ developed in Great Britain because /klooj/ is phonotactically excluded
in British English, but the reverse certainly isn't true; /kluhj/ would
certainly have been acceptable in American English. So "kluge" must have
gotten established for some other reason.

3. Refute the orthographic argument against "kludge" for /klooj/

No one did this convincingly, though Don Stokes took a valiant hack at it in
<650...@zl2tnm.gen.nz>. All his examples were both archaic and rare. When one
has to dig back to at least 1570 for a confirming example one is definitely
straining.

4. Orthographic change altering pronunciation as a common mechanism

No one did this very convincingly, either. A lot of people got confused and
posted irrelevancies about various kinds of phonetic drift. Best efforts were
from Dan Tilque in <24kmir$6...@techbook.techbook.com> and Stuart Stremler
in <930814034...@ucssun1.sdsu.edu>; they discussed some cases
arising from 17th-century attempts to Latinize English.

Since both the orthography and pronunciation of English were in serious flux
at the time for reasons independent of the Latinization crusade, I can't
consider these examples very demonstrative. For purposes of this
discussion, I think I would need to see examples in Modern English.

II) Conclusions and Revisions
-----------------------------
The new evidence justifies substantial revisions. Prescriptively, use of
"kludge" in Great Britain can no longer be described as incorrect, but my
contention that "kludge" is the wrong spelling for the American
pronunciation stands.

Here is what I now plan to put in 3.0.1:

:kludge: 1. /klooj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common)
spelling of {kluge} (US). 2. /kluhj/ n. Commonwealth hackish
for {kluge}, sense 1. Appears to have derived from Scots
`kludge' or `kludgie' for an outdoor toilet, via British
military slang. It apparently became confused with U.S. {kluge}
during or after World War II; some Britons from that era use both
words, but {kluge} is now uncommon in Great Britain. `Kludge'
in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from /kluge/ in that
it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth
hacker wants to be associated too closely with. Also, `kludge' is
more widely known in British mainstream slang than `kluge' is
in the U.S. 3. v. To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've
kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."

:kluge: /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever] 1. n. A Rube
Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or
software. (A long-ago "Datamation" article by Jackson
Granholme said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching
parts, forming a distressing whole.") 2. n. A clever programming
trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if
not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves
{ad-hockery} and verges on being a {crock}. In fact one
edition of the TMRC Dictionary defined `kludge' as "a crock that
works". 3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason.
4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this
routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better
way." 5. [WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a {rude}
manner.

Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling
`kludge'. Reports from {old fart}s are consistent that
`kluge' was the original spelling, reported around computers as
far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of
*hardware* kluges. In 1947, the "New York Folklore
Quarterly" reported a classic shaggy-dog story `Murgatroyd the
Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces, in which a `kluge'
was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial function. Other
sources report that `kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era
for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but
consistently failed at sea.

However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade
older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of
a device called a "Kluge paper feeder" dating back at least to
1935, an adjunct to mechanical printing presses. The Kluge feeder
was designed before small, cheap electric motors and control
electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams,
belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its
operations from one motive driveshaft. It was accordingly
tempermental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly
difficult to repair --- but oh, so clever! One traditional
folk etymology of `kluge' makes it the name of a design engineer;
in fact, `Kluge' is a surname in German, and the designer of the
Kluge feeder may well have been the man behind this myth.

{TMRC} and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to
have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII
military slang (see also {foobar}). It seems likely that
`kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics
projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
venerable Building 20, in which {TMRC} is also located) during
the war.

The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the
{Datamation} article mentioned above; it was titled "How
to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling may
have been imported from Great Britain, where {kludge} has an
independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to
hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in
the USENET group alt.folklore.computers over the First and
Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think
{kludge} was just a mutation of {kluge}).

The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers
pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its
meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'. British hackers mostly
learned /kluhj/ orally and use it in a restricted negative sense
and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly learned
the word from written American sources and tend to pronounce it
/kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!

Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's
meaning.

My thanks to all who assisted in uncovering the facts of these matters.
Any more evidence further complicating or contradicting this picture *will*
be cheerfully accepted.

[Steve Davis]

e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

[lots]

It's still rhymes with fudge.

Stratocaster
--
Steve Davis (st...@cis.ksu.edu)
Kansas State University

"I have a tan line around here somewhere ... Oh under my watch!" - DLT

[Mike 'the Bard' Whitaker]

In article <1mT1Cc#M11rjc55R3Lt98r1QGT1OPCGZ=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>1. Independent history of "kludge"
>
> In <1993Aug5.0...@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis reported that his uncle
>Ron, ex-RAF, uses both /kluhj/ and /klooj/ in different senses; /klooj/ for a
>clever hack, /kluhj/ for a nasty one.

Interestingly, a while back I asked colleagues at work (despite the
mail address, work = Cambridge, England) for definitions of hack and kludge.
One definition I got back did note the above pronounciation difference,
with the observation that /kluhj/ was a nasty hack, with all the "ickyness" of
three-day old fudge (and a spurious and tongue in cheek assertion that this
explaned the pronounciation.)
--
Mike Whitaker +44-223 | mi...@ug.eds.com (preferred) \ Me: Bards just
Shape Data/EDS 371565 | mwhi...@cix.compulink.co.uk \ KNOW things...

[Barry Rowlingson]

Well I've been following this language debate with intense interest...
<yaaawn>

But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
Adventure game:

plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????

What about xyzzy?????

Is there any more folklore on these words, like where they came from
and other usages? I notice xyzzy is the cheat word for minesweep
on Windows...

Barry
------------------------
maa...@cent1.lancs.ac.uk
------------------------

[Lennart Regebro]

In article <1mT1Cc#M11rjc55R3Lt98r1QGT1OPCGZ=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

>:kludge: 1. /klooj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common)
> spelling of {kluge} (US). 2. /kluhj/ n. Commonwealth hackish
> for {kluge}, sense 1. Appears to have derived from Scots
> `kludge' or `kludgie' for an outdoor toilet, via British
> military slang. It apparently became confused with U.S. {kluge}
> during or after World War II; some Britons from that era use both
> words, but {kluge} is now uncommon in Great Britain. `Kludge'
> in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from /kluge/ in that
> it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth
> hacker wants to be associated too closely with. Also, `kludge' is
> more widely known in British mainstream slang than `kluge' is
> in the U.S. 3. v. To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've
> kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."

YES! We WON!!!!
(Sorry, couldn't help it! :)

This further enhances my view of Eric as a sensible person, and will also
remove the need for a KLUDGE part in the Swedish Jargon file, which I am in
the process of trying to revive.

Thanks, all.

--
Lennart Regebro, Stacken Computer Club reg...@stacken.kth.se
Kludge rhymes with Fudge and Sludge by meaning and sound.

[Adam Roach]

In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de> maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:
>
> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
>Adventure game:
>
> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????
>
> What about xyzzy?????

Plug and zizzy, from my background.

Let's see... I know xyzzy was an Infocom thing as well as the minesweeper
hack. I seem to recall a program on our vax from a few years back
called xyzzy which people used before the vax IRC client. Anyone else
seen this turn up other places?

-Adam Roach
ad...@tamu.edu
--
Adam Roach (aka Myrddin, Lowry) | "...Actually, Adam, I don't think it
Internet: ad...@tamu.edu | matters, unless you plan to change
THEnet: ZEUS::ABR8030 | the `Hiroshima' decor for your room."
Uunet: ...!sequent!geac!tamu.edu!adamr | -My father, on bedroom color schemes

[Andy Rabagliati]

Thanks to Eric for a scholarly analysis of the kluge / kludge debate.

Under the heading :-

>1. Demonstrate that the word "kludge" has a separate history in Great
> Britain or elsewhere.

Someone mentioned (I forget who, and it has disappeared off my
newsspool) the similarity in meaning of the British word fudge (verb).

I am British, and it seemed a very strong argument. Fudge (v.) is
synonymous with hackerish kluge, and is in common usage to describe
Heath Robinson style fixes.

I have no references, and it may only have served to "pull" the
pronunciation of kluge to kludge.

Cheers, Andy. [ a /klooj/ man, myself ]

[David Casseres]

Eric Raymond has posted a pair of long, careful, thought-out articles on a)
his own orientation as a lexicographer of computerese and all-around language
fan, and b) his position on the "correct" spelling and pronunciation of the
word kludge. (I use quotation marks not to disparage but only because the
validity of the whole idea of correctness in language is under debate.)

I think Eric and I disagree about a few things, but on most of them I choose
not to argue right now. I have excerpted a couple of points that I must
comment upon:

In article <1mT150#M91jMBj4vPd9l5lb1Pv6mKvNR=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> Eric S.

Raymond, e...@snark.thyrsus.com writes:
>If we accept that language is first and foremost a tool, a tool of
>communication, then we must accept that language variance and change can
>validly be criticized on functional grounds. That is, there will be some
>changes which can *functionally* be called bad things, without reference to
>their users, because they damage the tool.

Never! I would sooner speak Managementspeak than "accept that language is
first and foremost a tool, a tool of communication." That's like saying "the
brain is first and foremost a control mechanism for regulating heartbeat and
respiration." There's some truth in it somewhere, but it misses the point
terribly. And outside of technical disciplines, it is very hard to find any
cases where the usefulness of language for communication is actually, in real
life, impaired by changes in language.

>Spelling errors that create a ambiguities with other words make good simple
>examples. One particularly jarring one we see on the Net with some frequency
>is the misspelling of the verb "lose" as "loose". This is functionally bad,
>and thus incorrect in a very strong sense. If it were to become majority
>usage, the capability of English would be damaged. Thus, Blue condemnation of
>it is a service to all users of English.

Blue condemnation of this usage (which I *hate*, btw) may be a service, but
not because the misspelling would damage the communicative capability of
English. It would be no worse than the shared spelling of the noun "wind" and
the verb "wind," and English is full of such pairs, yet it still works just
fine.

>This one example suffices in principle to refute the extreme descriptivist
>position. Many others could be added.

I have read and heard many others, and the vast majority of them are just like
the lose/loose example -- i.e., they are bogus. The alleged damage to English
turns out upon the most casual inspection to be imaginary.

No, there is a reason to condemn the usage but it has nothing to do with
utility in communication; it is a matter of style, and the Blue camp does not
like to admit that style enters into these matters because style is mutable
and context-dependent, just like usage itself.

The Red camp doesn't much like it either, as it seems to offer the same sort
of prescriptivism under a slightly different banner. Well, too bad for both
camps. Language can indeed be prescribed, and respectable people do it all
the time, but it's silly to claim that our prescriptions are what keeps the
language useful. We are prescribing *what we like to hear and read.*

>It can also be observed that the
>"cultural imperialism" argument easily degenerates into whining, special
>pleading, and grievance-collecting.

But this is itself a special pleading, since *all* arguments about language
easily degenerate as described. Furthermore, the "'cultural imperialism'
argument" is a straw man; the Red argument against Blue rarely mentions
anything of the sort.

The real argument against Blue, often stated in this newsfroup, is that in the
great preponderance of actual cases, the Blue position turns out to be
*factually wrong.*

I cannot emphasize this too strongly. The actual champions of the Blue
position are mostly *not* an ultraliterate elite but a rather confused lot of
literate but unsophisticated folks, many of whom turn out to be heavily
influenced by cultural/political concerns that may be expressed in terms of
language but are not really about language. And these folks tend to rely on a
sort of folk-history of the "rules" of English.

So there. Eric, my criticism of the Blue camp doesn't apply to you, but I
thought it ought to be stated because you made the argument against Red.

As for kludge, Eric has done the homework and published the facts.
Personally, I rhyme it with Scrooge and spell it as you see here, because
that's how it came down to me many years ago. I don't doubt that the original
spelling had no "d" in it, and that the "d" was first put in out of some sort
of mistake; but a spelling that originates as a mistake and eventually becomes
near-universal really isn't a mistake any more -- it's how the word *is
spelled.* And as for pronouncing it like fudge, if I hear that from an
American I assume he or she hasn't been around computing for very long; but if
I hear it from a British Commonwealth person I know that that's the *actual*
pronounciation they have learned in the usual way.

So, should the "d" and the fudge pronunciation be called "errors" in a
dictionary? Guess what, I really think that's up to the lexicographer.

-------------

David Casseres
Exclaimer: Hey!

[mathew]

e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

[ 219 lines deleted ]

Yeah, that'll do fine. I can't believe the verbosity of your
response, though.

mathew

[Dave Brown]

In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de> maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:

>Well I've been following this language debate with intense interest...
><yaaawn>
>
> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
>Adventure game:
>
> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????

Actually, pronounce it 'pluch' with the 'ch' like in the Scottich
'loch' or German 'Buch' and the 'u' like in 'plug'.

> What about xyzzy?????

Taking my cue from 'xylophone', I pronounce it 'zyzzy'

--
Dave Brown -- dagb...@napier.uwaterloo.ca -- (416) 669-5370
"Your mother told you that you're not supposed to talk to strangers,
Look in the mirror, tell me, do you think your life's in danger?"
--Ozzy Osbourne

[Roger Lustig]

Here we go again. I'll limit my comments to general issues of linguistics.

In article <1mT150#M91jMBj4vPd9l5lb1Pv6mKvNR=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>This posting is part one of two parts.

>Pursuant to requests from several posters, it describes the theory of
>language norms I operate from when editing the Jargon File.

>Part two will detail my present understanding of facts in the kluge/kludge
>usage controversy, and a draft revision of the relevant entries. If you are
>not interested in general questions about the definition of language
>correctness, hit 'n' now.

>1. Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism
>-----------------------------------
>The most frustrating thing for me about the kluge/kludge thread has been wading
>through the repeated assertion that there is no standard for "correctness" of a
>usage in language other than popularity.

I think you'll find far less of this on closer examination than you may have
thought at first.

By "there is no standard" you seem to mean "there is no *single* or *unitary*
standard." Yes, many people claim this.

However, there are *standards.* They are not universal. Different standards
apply in different communities, at different times, and in different places.
Americans and English both speak English -- but the standards are different
in the US and in England. The standard of English in the US is not what it
was 50 years ago. The standard of English used in the boardroom is not the
standard for the barroom.

As for "popularity," that implies some sort of majority vote. As I've
pointed out elsewhere, such a thing is impossible; however, we have
no way oftelling what the language is, other than by observing what
people say. What people say (and write) *is* the language. There is
no other definition.

>Typically, this has been intertwined
>with the assertion that condemning the usage of any subcultural group as
>"incorrect" is equivalent to declaring them no-good shits and attempting
>cultural genocide on them.

Typically, this isn't the case either. Language -- and discussion of language--
has long been used as a tool to divide classes and ethnic groups, from
Biblical times (shibboleth!) to the nonsense about "'ain't' ain't in the
dictionary" we were all fed in second grade to the satirical invention
of U/Non-U. Language politics is very real.

For a classic mindless use of same, check out Edwin Newman's discussion
of "you know" in _Strictly Speaking_.

"Incorrect": a terrible word to use unless one can specify one's standard
of correctness. In language debates, leaving off that definition is the
source of most of the misunderstanding, rancor, and general unpleasant-
ness.

>Both assertions are flat wrong --- not sustainable through ten minutes of
>serious thought about the issues.

They're also straw men. Very few people actually make the arguments
as you have stated them.

>Let's take them in order and see why.

>Historically, there have been two poles in the argument over how "correct"
>language is defined.

Historically, most of the argument has been located nowhere near either
pole.

>One extereme position (prescriptivism) is that it is defined an elite of
>language experts (lexicographers, grammarians, teachers, writers) who tend the
>"natural" pre-existing language like a garden, pulling weeds and planting seeds
>to encourage growth in productive and beautiful directions.

Lexicographers? You must be joking. Dr. Johnson *started* that way, but
abandoned that approach as he learned more about the language. Since
then, people like Noah Webster have attempted to change the language,
or define a "pure" subset, but most lexicographers do nothing of the
sort you describe. Lexicographers tend to be sowrn enemies of prescrip-
tivism.

Now, if you would argue that people *think* that's what lexicographers do,
fine. But that's not clear from the above.

>The other extreme position (descriptivism) is that "correct" language is
>defined by usage. What the majority sanctions is correct, even if it violates
>whatever norms of orthography, usage and pronunciations existed before.

No. Not the majority. That's a fatal misconception.

Descriptive linguistics doesn't generally care about majorities. Overwhelming
ones are interesting, but 51-49 or 60-40 doesn't mean much about correctness.

(For that matter, most descriptive linguists don't even use the word
"correct.")

Descriptivists describe. "Correct" isn't a description. Descriptivists
*observe* that some writers are highly regarded, that some usages enter
the language and/or disappear, that the highly-regarded writers have
a disproportionate effect on usage.

Most of all, they define the space they're working in. A word may be
standard in literary uses, but not in informal speech, or vice versa.
Same for a construction or idiom.

>Both extremes have arguments to bolster their position. To avoid repeated
>intonation of two very similar words, I shall refer to them as the Blue and Red
>positions (political reference intentional; the debate has been influenced by
>political parallels for three hundred years).

Alas, you've misstated both sides so drastically that what follows is
pretty useless wrt language discussions.

>To a Blue, the Red position is a recipe for chaos and ugliness, as thousands of
>random mutations destroy the coherence, utility and beauty of shared language.

No, not "shared language." If there is a Blue position, it doesn't care
much about sharing. Imposition has more to do with it.

>The Red replies that every living language is an evolving entity. Individual
>language changes appear random, and some actually are random. Very often,
>though, especially in matters of pronunciation and grammar, language evolution
>displays natural-law-like regularities over long time scales. Thus, language
>changes should be viewed not as random but as as the working out of natural
>processes which themselves maintain the utility of language.

Not bad, though I'd say "increase" rather than "maintain."

>The Blue replies that even if that's true, some changes are simply errors which
>degrade the language. Misspellings are a problem when they impede
>communication; bad grammar and misused vocabulary is a problem when it erodes
>the speaker's and listeners capacity to make useful distinctions in speech and
>in thought. Awestruck contemplation of the wondrousness of language evolution
>on the long scale doesn't fix that kind of problem in day-to-day communication,
>any more than awestruck contemplation of the technological progress of humanity
>will fix a flat tire.

Quite right; that's what some people say. Trouble is, they're hard-pressed
to *demonstrate* any of the damage. The history of English is full of
all the evils you mention; and yet we have not been reduced to babbling,
even though 99% of the malapropisms, misspellings, changes in syntax and
usage have been adopted by those who take this view.

>The Red replies that even if that's true, he's reluctant to grant anybody the
>moral authority to prescribe norms, because that position has been so
>frequently abused by narrow-minded pedants in the past.

I've never met any red-tinged person who even remotely took that stance.
The typical Red reply is: Show me. Show me that these things *do*
cause problems. Show me that these so-called errors arose from anything
but natural speech impulses, hte ones generated by intent and need to
communicate.

>The Blue growls that *somebody* has to do the routine maintainence work,
>teaching, and error-checking, and should it be someone who really *cares* about
>the language or an unwashed barbarian who thinks is can all be let drift!?!

No, that's not the Blue argument either. The Blue argument attaches *moral*
value to the "maintenance" of the language; it is anything but routine.

>The Red snarls that if the Blues had had their way we'd still be speaking
>Middle English. And they proceed to bludgeon each other into insensibility
>with heavy reference works.

Actually, the Blues tend to carry nothing heavier than Fowler, and they
generally haven't read *that* closely either.

>Both sides have their points --- and the points are related to the *function*
>of language. Some aspects of language are very subject to functional
>disruption by random change, other less so. The Blues tend to fort up around
>the sensitive bits (grammar, syntax, orthography) and let the Reds have their
>way with pronunciation and language-register questions. The Reds (barring a
>few radicals in the sociolinguistic school) tacitly accept these spheres of
>influence.

You know, Eric, by now it would be quite useful for you to have named at
least one or two names in your description of the two camps. This might
be aproblem -- because the two camps that are actually out there don't
really come very close to your descriptions of them.

>Vocabulary is the no-man's land where most of the battles get
>fought.

Actually, a great deal of the noise comes from discussions of particles.

>Anybody who does serious work as a lexicographer, teacher, or any other kind of
>language authority sooner or later has to decide where he falls on the Blue/Red
>spectrum.

Anyone who does serious work as a lexicographer has already decided.

>Neither extreme is tenable. The failings of prescriptivism are too well-known
>to need rehashing here; English, in particular, neither needs nor wants an
>equivalent of the Academie Francais.

Francaise, but who's counting? 8-)

>Current political fashion is also
>pro-Red, with a fair amount of muttering about language norms being politically
>incorrect and instruments of oppression.

Huh? Current political fashion calls for back-to-basics, "conservative"
schooling. The PC-language debate (which is far smaller than its detractors
blow it up to be) has hardly anything to do with the usage issues we're
talking about, and is generally used as a stick to beat opponents of
all stripes with. PC is by now an all-purpose insult, since "commie"
doesn't work anymore.

>However, this fashion is not
>reflected in the way language is *taught*, which is fortunate; the few
>experiments in pedagogy from a doctrinaire Red position have been practical
>disasters for the students, and quickly dropped.

Example? Source?

Counterexample: I went to a very liberal school 20 years ago. Grammar
was never taught --though there was an 11th-grade course in linguistics.
Egregious errors in composition were sometimes pointed out, but not as
a rule.

I think there are more writers among my class than there are members
of any other profession.

(Of course, this isn't a "doctrinaire Red position," but then, nobody
holds that position, and nobody'e ever taught from it.)

For a view of the traditional postion and its flaws, see Evans and
Evans' introduction to their _Dict. of Contemp. Am. Usage_ (1957).

>That brings us to the second assertion --- that any normative language directed
>at dialect or variant usage is bad, and that when directed at the preferred
>usage of any self-conscious group it is tantamount to parochialism, cultural
>imperialism, or even some kind of Nazi-like desire to declare the dialect-users
>contemptible inferiors.

Bash that straw man, willya! Imagine--the debate hasn't even started, and
Godwin's Rule is satisfied: you've mentioned the Nazis.

Sorry, this won't do. Give some examples of what you claim is such as position.

>If we accept that language is first and foremost a tool, a tool of
>communication,

We don't. Next question.

>then we must accept that language variance and change can
>validly be criticized on functional grounds.

Arguments as to functionality are always welcome; but they require
more evidence than ever seems to get packed when the barbarians-at-the-gate
arguments are raised.

>That is, there will be some
>changes which can *functionally* be called bad things,

Care to name a few? Omit individual misspellings and typos.

>without reference to their users, because they damage the tool.

I've never seen one. Have you?

>Spelling errors that create a ambiguities with other words make good simple
>examples. One particularly jarring one we see on the Net with some frequency
>is the misspelling of the verb "lose" as "loose". This is functionally bad,
>and thus incorrect in a very strong sense. If it were to become majority
>usage, the capability of English would be damaged.

Care to demonstrate that? Two arguments against:

--there are literally thousands of pairs of words that are spelled the same
and mean different things. Many of these weren't always spelled the same.
Nothing seems to have been lost; we can still communicate.

--if there *is* a difficulty or ambiguity, people tend to be smart enough
to find a way around it. A new idiom, a context-signaling word, or even
a new word to replace one of the meanings will work just fine. Too
complicated, you say? Look at the complications introduced by schoolmarmish-
ness.

>Thus, Blue condemnation of it is a service to all users of English.

Unless the Blues happen to be wrong about

a) the nature or source of the error

b) the consequence of leaving it uncorrected (or, more accurately, unbadgered)

The Blues tend to be wrong about one or both of thse with mind-numbing
regularity. Such services I can do without.

>This one example suffices in principle to refute the extreme descriptivist
>position.

No. I don't see any refutation above, for several reasons:

--You have misrepresented the positions and their constituencies

--You have begged dozens of questions, notably those of evidence for your
assertions, both definitional and logical.

>Many others could be added. It can also be observed that the
>"cultural imperialism" argument easily degenerates into whining, special
>pleading, and grievance-collecting.

As David has noted, all arguments easily do this, speaking of special
pleading...

>Many readers will observe that the lose/loose example is too easy; it doesn't
>grapple with tough issues such as the "correctness" of slang.

On the contrary, it's far more complicated than you think. Why have
thousands of similar overlappings *not* trashed the language over the
centuries? What will be the measurable consequence of this one, if
it becomes more common?

>It wasn't meant
>to. To call the tougher cases, one has to decide what prescriptive norms are
>worth defending.

Before doing that, it is recommended that one establish the existence of such
norms and their relevance to the language.

>Because once one has admitted that popularity of usage isn't
>always and everywhere determinative, the way is open for other kinds of claim.

Everybody admits that. That doesn't validate your *particular* counterclaim,
though.

>Here's another example that should make this clear. Consider the word
>"hacker". It is probably now the case that the majority of English-speakers
>who have heard or seen this word mean it to signify "computer criminal".
>Almost everybody reading this article knows that it originally meant something
>much more complex and generally positive, and it's a fair bet most of you still
>use it that way and believe that's what it "really" means, even if you think
>reclaiming the word in popular usage is a lost cause.

>If you are an extreme Red, a radical descriptivist, what do you have to
>conclude when you think about what "hacker" *really* means? Ahhh...so you've
>got a Blue streak after all, do you?

Nice try.

A descriptivist -- a real one, not one of your straw ones -- will conclude
that it *really* means both.

That's right, both. Imagine: a word having two meanings! Which meaning
applies in a given case? Why, that's for the context to determine. If
I'm reading the Daily News, I know what it means there. If I'm reading
comp.sci.hack.hack.hack, it probably has the other meaning.

Y'know something, that's how *all* words get their meanings determined.
My medium-sized desk dictionary has 31 meanings for the noun "head" --
plus 12 verb meanings, and 3 for the adjective "head." Never in my
life have I wondered which one was being meant: the thing on my shoulders,
the mouth of the river, the bossman, or the toilet. It was always so
easy to make that choice that I never noticed myself thinking about it.
And I can't recall being wrong, either.

Nor have I *ever*, *EVER* wondered to myself which meaning was the "real"
meaning. As far as communication goes (remember communication?) that's just
not an issue. They're *all* real, just like both meanings of "hacker."

>One can make the functional argument that the "criminal" meaning of the word
>damages English's ability to distinguish between enthusiasts and vandals.

And when one does so, one is wrong. English per se has *no* ability
to distinguish. But its speakers have a *remarkable* ability.

For what it's worth, you seem to have turned the tables on yourself
here. Your complaint is almost an argumentum ab PC -- not so much
unlike arguments about "Redskin" or "Indian" or "Gypsy".

>That's certainly true, and compelling.

"That's certainly true" is the closest you've come to giving evidence
for one of your assertions, eric -- and it's not very close.

>But there are two other arguments which, if we've abandoned the radical-Red
>position, are not obviously nonsense. One is historical; the word "hacker" had
>a good and useful meaning until a few people with high media profiles got it
>wrong and propagated the error widely.

a) It still does have a good and useful meaning.

b) IN fact, it now has *two.*

c) Even if it didn't, so what? Evolution happens, and attaching excessive
value to a single word seems a tad, well, fetishistic. If people misunder-
stand you when you use a word, don't complain so hard about evil media types
who spoiled your fun--make up another word! After all, it worked *last* time.

>The other is territorial. It can be cogently claimed that the community of
>self-described hackers *owns* the word "hacker", gets to define it by pointing
>to themselves, and has a right to defend it from abuse by others. (Nor is this
>at all unususual; physicists similarly own the word "neutron", for example.)

Alas, a few bad apples (in this case, criminal hackers) spoiled that particular
barrel for you. It's *no longer* in your domain. Nor is ownership of
a term permanent, or assumed to be so. All kinds of physical terms have
taken on informal meanings; ditto jargon from everywhere else.

After all, *you* stole "hacker" from the taxi drivers... 8-)

>Most hackers believe all three of these claims to some degree. Now: what
>should a *lexicographer* believe? In evaluating the "correctness" of a usage
>or language change, how much should one weight popularity? historical claims?
>expert authority? conformance to pre-existing patterns of the language?

Why should one evaluate "the correctness of a language change"? I still
don't know what that term is supposed to mean.

Why not just *note* it, and note its extent, its sources, and the applicable
contexts and dialects and regions?

>2. Editorial Philosophy
>-----------------------

>I believe there is no cut-and-dried answer to the above question.

I'm not convinced it's a question.

>Not only are
>all these criteria significant, but their relative significance varies a great
>deal from case to case. The only criterion I'm prepared to apply everywhere is
>the semantic one --- a change is bad, and worth fighting with all the
>prescriptive opprobrium one can muster, if it impedes communication or erodes
>the language's capacity to make useful distinctions.

Big if, big beg.

What's a "useful distinction"?

How can you tell that the language's capacity has been eroded?

When is communication impeded?

(In the case of "hacker," keep in mind that it was originally not in
use at all outside a certain community. The change in community,
and thus in context, came with the added meaning. When you get
right down to it, the general complaint about "hacker" is that
the people who never used it before are using it differently than
those who did use it before. In my experience, it is *quite*
easy to tell which camp one is currently visiting.)

>Let's take a closer look at how this criterion interacts with more traditional
>prescriptivist criteria, with examples. A usage or change can, as I see it,
>fall into one of five categories:

>1. Prescriptively incorrect, semantically bad
> Examples: Misspellings that create ambiguity, like the "lose/loose"
>confusion. Usage bugs like improper use of the subjunctive. Promiscuous
>use of "scare" quotes.

Sorry, but what's semantically bad here? *EVERY* use of the subjunctive
contradicts some previous form; its use has diminished drastically. I
know of no general rule for determining "proper" uses.

> My choice: Call it incorrect and fight it, no matter how popular
>it gets.

Fine. But be prepared to offer a hell of a lot more evidence than
a) you have so far
b) prescriptivists generally do.

>2. Prescriptively incorrect, semantically neutral
> Examples: Pronunciations and spellings that are nonstandard but
>recognizable, and which (in the latter case) conform to the rules of English
>orthography. Grammatical "errors" like splitting an infinitive or putting a
>preposition at the end of a sentence.
> My choice: This is language evolution in action. Not a problem. When a
>usage like this goes over 50%, I'll call it correct.

This is *not* language evolution in action. Split-infinitive and ending
with a preposition have *never* been bad English; instead,they are rules
borrowed from Latin a few hundred years ago, originally in the service
of *teaching* Latin -- not English. At worst they are matters of style.
Nor are these usages new; your claim about "evolution" is backward.
The *rule* arose out of bad scholarship, and is fortunately receding
again.

Oh, and how do you propose to count those 50%? 50% of what?

>3. Prescriptively incorrect, semantically good
> Example: Dixie usage of "you-all" or "y'all" as an unambiguous second-person
>plural.
> My choice: Screw the prescriptivists, this kind of change is good. (I use
>"you-all" myself by choice and encourage it in others, despite being a Yankee
>born and bred with a neutral Standard American accent.)

That kind of *what*? Change? Again, it's been around far longer than
complaints against it.

>4. Prescriptively correct, semantically bad
> Example: "flutist" and "flautist" have the same dictionary meaning.
> My choice: This is an etymological doublet waiting to happen, like
>shirt/skirt or bishop/episcopal in Anglo-Saxon. Encourage it to split (I tell
>people who describe me as a "flautist" that I play jazz/folk/rock and would
>much rather leave "flautist" to people who play in symphony orchestras).

Um, that's *you* making up a distinction. If anything, "flautist" is
a modern (1860) affectation from the Italian.

Why encourage anything? Why not let it be?

>5. Prescriptively correct, semantically neutral or good
> No change needed, these cases are not an issue.

Now, all we have to do is:
--decide just which prescriptively bad things really are bad, etc.;
no two "authorities" seem to agree.
--figure out what we're going to do about it, and how.

As the above shows, it's *much* harder to make arguments for one's
position than it is to take a position. And before we go around
telling people that they're talking wrong -- and talking is, after
all, the thing that just about everyone is competent at -- let's
make sure we have a case.

>Besides this semantic criterion, there are a few others that I take fairly
>seriously. The significant ones, for the present discussion, are:

>1) Orthographic correctness
> The widespread belief that English spelling is hopelessly irregular is
>wrong.
> According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Language, English spelling
>is about 75% regular; the regularity is obscured because most of the
>irregularities occur in the 400 most common words. Other sources give
>figures of about 80%.

That's "hopelessly irregular" by most standards. Works out to one
or two words per sentence. In Hungarian, for example, it's about 99.5%,
the rest being loanwords for the most part.

> What *is* true is that the orthographic rules of English are complex,
>much more so than those of (say) Spanish or Turkish. That is, the
>algorithm one must use to translate phonetics into a correct spelling
>is relatively complex. Nevertheless, adult learners of English routinely
>acquire it.

With great difficulty, though. English is not spelled *phonetically*;
that is the problem.

> Accordingly, the regularity of English orthography *is* in fact worth
>defending. I am accordingly prepared to describe a written usage as
>`incorrect' if the spoken usage is prior and the written form it is not a
>correct transcription of the spoken form.

Again, we use those 400 words an awful lot, and just the confusion in
"bough, cough, though, rough,through, hiccough" is sufficient to reject
any pretense of "correct transcription of the spoken form."

>2) Ownership of terms of art by a community of experts
> I discussed the term "hacker" above. It's important to note that expert
>communities only own a word in their context. To see how this works, consider
>the word "mogul".

Still, ownership of this sort can disappear in the twinkling of an eye, as
a technology becomes common, as a metaphoric use ofr the word is found, as
the world changes around the word.

> To a historian, a "mogul" is a person associated with the Mogul or Mughal
>dynasty of India. To a skier, a mogul is a large lump or pile of snow. In
>informal general English, a mogul is a powerful person, the term being
>especially associated with the film industry.
> The historian's mogul is a term of art in the strict sense. Anyone who used
>it in a history book with any other denotation would be wrong (unless it were a
>history of Hollywood or skiing). Usage could probably not change this; the
>historian's mogul has too much historical inertia.
> The skier's mogul is owned by a different and looser community of
>experts. If you use it to mean something else on a ski slope, you're
>probably wrong --- but it's possible that usage *amomg skiers* might broaden
>or change over time, and if it did, their sense would be determinative
>for the ski slope.
> Nobody owns the general slang use of "mogul". It is therefore extremely
>subject to usage mutation.

But everyone owns the whole word! And if I wish to use one of the above
meanings metaphorically, even metonymically, who will stop me from doing
what has been done to a hundred thousand words in the past?

>3) Kind of denotational change
> Vocabulary has preferred directions of mutation. It is much more common
>for a slang term to either broaden or narrow in denotation than for it to
>shift to a different and disjoint meaning (within the same usage context).
>When the latter happens it's a fair presumption that someone has made
>an error.
> As a hypothetical example: let's supposed that we encountered, in 1993,
>the slang term "bumpf" for legal papers. Now, let's suppose it's
>1995 and we collect three uses of "bumpf": (1) a subpoena, specifically
>excluding other kinds of legal papers, (2) any kind of record-keeping with
>legal and financial implications (3) wealthy criminal defendents.
> One can make a strong presumption that use (3) is an error. If one happens
>to know the original World War II use of "bumpf" to mean "propaganda leaflets"
>it's fair to say *prescriptively* that sense (3) is "incorrect".

"Fair prescriptively" must mean "without much point," then. Why not note
the synecdochal use of "bumpf" by lawyers to refer to their clients, who,
to the lawyers, aren't much more than the legal papers whose production is
billed at $300/hr?

>3) "Correct" is nearly orthogonal to "popular"
>------------------------------------------------

>"Popular" is an observational criterion --- how many people use it? "Correct"
>is a structural one --- does it violate the norms that make language an
>effective tool of communication? The two are nearly orthogonal.

Well, they would be if anyone had ever identified structural "norms that
make language an effective tool of communication." Linguists have
identified structures, but nobody has shown the connection between
a given structure and the usefulness of a language -- mainly because
languages vary so widely in their structures.

Sorry -- this is snobbery at its worst.

>Slang uses which are popular but incorrect are actually not very common. If
>this surprises you, bear in mind that we are not speaking of the pedantic
>"incorrectness" of, say, splitting an infinitive. Language evolution is driven
>by peoples' need and desire to communicate --- thus, even when inventing slang
>and ephemera, they tend (if unconsciously) to follow generative rules that
>preserve and extend their *ability* to communicate.

All of which has little to do with *either* "correct" or "popular." Generative
rules don't work because of popularity; they insure that *unusual* words
will get across too if employed in the right context.

>For example: it is very rare for written English slang to violate English's
>orthographic rules. Apparent exceptions to this rule usually turn out to be
>cases in which slang is following the rules more regularly than the older
>portions of English's established vocabulary (show-biz use of "nite" for
>"night" is a good example). *Real* exceptions are curiosities that call for
>individual investigation, and probably signs of transmission error.

Or dialect transcription. btw, that's not show-biz.

But then, slang is *by definition* not written. As soon as it's written,
it's in a different linguistic mode from its orignal one.

>Because slang is usually "correct" in the only sense that matters to me
>(as opposed to a true-Blue language pedant), and because hackers tend to
>be more picky about semantic correctness than the average speaker of
>English, occasions on which I feel any need to get prescriptive are rare.
>In fact, I believe the kluge/kludge war is the first serious one in the
>three-year history of the new Jargon File and over 3,000 entries.

Is it slang, though? I admit that it was originally a spoken-only usage,
but it seems more like jargon.

>I do not expect such occasions to get any more common. :-)

How about "mung"?

Eric, I've been hard on you here because you were pretty hard on the
entire world, notably those who actually spend their lives studying
language and its principles.

You present the debate as one between two camps, with color-names so
as not to imply that one has any particular standing over the other.

Alas, this is not so. Your so-called reds are in fact those who
devote their lives to scientific investigation of language; hardly
any linguists are noticeably "blue." Since you already applied
Godwin's Rule, I'll go you one better: often the Blue-Red debate
reads like arguments between WW II historians and the Institute for
Historical Review. The facts *and* the logical consistency are
not distributed equally between the two sides.

Then there's the matter of misrepresenting the Blue and Red
positions, which I already discussed -- but which leads me
to the most distressing aspect of your whole presentation.

You are not the first to discuss this topic!

There is an *extensive* literature on standards of English. It
is well over a hundred years since this debate started for real,
so it wouldn't be too much work for you to find out more about
what the various parties really say, and how and why they say
it.

One text you should check out, if you can find it, is Lounsbury's
_The Standard of English Usage_. It was published by Yale in
1906, so you can't really accuse it of modern liberal permissive
whatever. It discusses the nature of standards, and of arguments
about them.

Another is one I've already mentioned: Evans and Evans. The
introduction is a take on language problems and how and why they
arise.

Finally, a book whose title is, I think, "Say what you mean," and
whose author is Copeland or some such. (HELP!) Again, the
introduction is a careful consideration of prescriptivist
arguments -- with the difference that it names names. Therest
of the book is a usage guide.

I am not a linguist myself; the number of errors I make in these
discussions should be proof of that. But I do not make the error
of assuming that the experts are, by virtue of their expertise,
wrong.

Roger

[Jonathan R. Ferro]

ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
[A lot]

Actually, even more than netnews discussions of language norms and
politics, I dislike responses in which each sentence of the original
post is replied to individually. Thank you, Eric, for taking the time
to cull out the information necessary for a comprehensive result so that
I may now return this thread to its proper, killed state.

-- Jon Ferro Einsprachigkeit ist heilbar

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> Roger Lustig wrote:
> Here we go again. I'll limit my comments to general issues of linguistics.

Rather than reply to this, I'm going to have a life. :-)

The Great Klu[d]ge War has dragged on long enough; I posted Part One to explain
my reasoning and *close* the matter, not to open another debate. I will
continue to accept evidence pertinent to it. I will even keep an eye out for
some of the books you mention. But I will not get sucked into arguing language
theology with another amateur. That way lies madness...

[Roger Lustig]

In article <4gQMnH_00...@andrew.cmu.edu> "Jonathan R. Ferro" <jf...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>[A lot]

>Actually, even more than netnews discussions of language norms and
>politics, I dislike responses in which each sentence of the original
>post is replied to individually.

I'm not too fond of beets.

>Thank you, Eric, for taking the time
>to cull out the information necessary for a comprehensive result so that
>I may now return this thread to its proper, killed state.

So sorry to impose. On the other hand, I *do* retain the text I'm
discussing when engaging in close argument, because the particulars
of the argument -- especially when we're talking about language,.
for heaven's sake! -- are crucial.

>-- Jon Ferro Einsprachigkeit ist heilbar

Roger D.b.d.

[Stephen Usher]

In article <1mT150#M91jMBj4vPd9l5lb1Pv6mKvNR=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

> One can make a strong presumption that use (3) is an error. If one happens
>to know the original World War II use of "bumpf" to mean "propaganda leaflets"
>it's fair to say *prescriptively* that sense (3) is "incorrect".

I thought you might like to know that in Britain (at least everywhere I've
been), the word "bumpf" is used to mean advertising literature. eg. "Well I
read through all the bumpf on the dishwasher and decided I didn't want it."
As you can see, this is very close to the WWII meaning. I've never heard it
used to mean legal letters, however. I wonder if this is another drift of
language between the US and the UK?

> Eric S. Raymond <e...@snark.thyrsus.com>

Steve
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer Systems Administrator, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Oxford University.
E-Mail: st...@uk.ac.ox.earth (JANET) st...@earth.ox.ac.uk (Internet).
Tel:- Oxford (0865) 282110 (UK) or +44 865 282110 (International).

[Dave Woodman]

In article <24r312$d...@tamsun.tamu.edu> abr...@tamsun.tamu.edu (Adam Roach) writes:
>In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de> maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:
>>
>> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
>>Adventure game:
>>
>> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????
>>
>> What about xyzzy?????
>
>Plug and zizzy, from my background.
>

Any to think I always thought that the 'gh' was silent, in the same way that
it is in the word plough (plow, in the US, I believe).

Dave.
--
==============================================================================
= My e-mail address might be woo...@bnr.ca, but Maidenhead is definitely =
= in Britain... My employer is entitled to disagree with anything but this! =
==============================================================================

[Steve Hayes]

In article <1mT150#M91jMBj4vPd9l5lb1Pv6mKvNR=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

>That brings us to the second assertion --- that any normative language directed
>at dialect or variant usage is bad, and that when directed at the preferred
>usage of any self-conscious group it is tantamount to parochialism, cultural
>imperialism, or even some kind of Nazi-like desire to declare the dialect-users
>contemptible inferiors.
>
>If we accept that language is first and foremost a tool, a tool of
>communication, then we must accept that language variance and change can
>validly be criticized on functional grounds. That is, there will be some
>changes which can *functionally* be called bad things, without reference to
>their users, because they damage the tool.
>
>Spelling errors that create a ambiguities with other words make good simple
>examples. One particularly jarring one we see on the Net with some frequency
>is the misspelling of the verb "lose" as "loose". This is functionally bad,
>and thus incorrect in a very strong sense. If it were to become majority
>usage, the capability of English would be damaged. Thus, Blue condemnation of
>it is a service to all users of English.

>Many readers will observe that the lose/loose example is too easy; it doesn't

>grapple with tough issues such as the "correctness" of slang. It wasn't meant
>to. To call the tougher cases, one has to decide what prescriptive norms are
>worth defending. Because once one has admitted that popularity of usage isn't
>always and everywhere determinative, the way is open for other kinds of claim.
>

Thank you very much for a very informative post. I select the three
paargraphs above for reply, because they illustrate the main problems I face
as an editor of academic texts.

At least half the students of our university (which is a distance-education
institution) speak English as a second language. This means that if they
find a word or term they don't understand, they need to look it up in a
dictionary. One of my principles as an editor, therefore, is that if it's
not in the dictionary, it must be clearly defined in the text I am editing,
or must be recognized jargon of the subject concerned. If a term is used
outside the discipline in which it is recognized jargon, then it should
still be defined, or not used. To descriptivists, that may seem
prescriptivist, but the alternative seems to be persecuting students, who
have enough difficulties anyway without having language ideologists adding
to them.

An example is "constitute". In the jargon of phenomenologists it means
something almost exactly the opposite of the normal dictionary meaning of
the word. If a person says "I constitute my world", I assume that that
person is a solipsist. But a phenomenologist means something else by it (
though it might be argued by the cynical that there isn't much difference).

But the phenomenological sense has crept into other disiplines as well,
where it is used indiscriminately, without any clear indication of which
sense is being used. It would have helped a lot if the phenomenologists had
used a word whose ordinary meaning was closer to the one they wanted to
convey.

It seems to me that when descriptivists want to enforce their rule that
every malapropism immediately becomes part of the language, the only result
will be that communication becomes much more difficult.

============================================================
Steve Hayes, Department of Missiology & Editorial Department
Univ. of South Africa, P.O. Box 392, Pretoria, 0001 South Africa
Internet: haye...@risc1.unisa.ac.za Fidonet: 5:7106/20.1
steve...@p1.f20.n7106.z5.fidonet.org
FAQ: Missiology is the study of Christian mission and is part of
the Faculty of Theology at Unisa

[Jim Finnis]

In article <1mT1Cc#M11rjc55R3Lt98r1QGT1OPCGZ=e...@snark.thyrsus.com>
e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) burbled:

>II) Conclusions and Revisions
>-----------------------------
>The new evidence justifies substantial revisions. Prescriptively, use of
>"kludge" in Great Britain can no longer be described as incorrect, but my
>contention that "kludge" is the wrong spelling for the American
>pronunciation stands.
>

Agree!

>Here is what I now plan to put in 3.0.1:
>
>:kludge: 1. /klooj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common)
> spelling of {kluge} (US).

OK, fair 'nuff

> 2. /kluhj/ n. Commonwealth hackish
> for {kluge}, sense 1. Appears to have derived from Scots
> `kludge' or `kludgie' for an outdoor toilet, via British
> military slang. It apparently became confused with U.S. {kluge}
> during or after World War II; some Britons from that era use both
> words, but {kluge} is now uncommon in Great Britain. `Kludge'
> in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from /kluge/ in that
> it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth
> hacker wants to be associated too closely with. Also, `kludge' is
> more widely known in British mainstream slang than `kluge' is
> in the U.S. 3. v. To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've
> kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."
>

I don't have any quarrel with this; you are probably right about the timing.
Granholme's article probably had a great deal to do with the later application
of "kludge" by Americans to the other word "kluge".

>
> Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's
> meaning.
>

Isn't it just...

>My thanks to all who assisted in uncovering the facts of these matters.
>Any more evidence further complicating or contradicting this picture *will*
>be cheerfully accepted.
>

And my thanks to Eric for continuing to listen to those of us posting
*facts*, and for behaving like a gentleman throughout what could have
become, and very nearly did become, an extremely nasty flamefest.

{candle on}
And my antithanks to those people who either accused Eric of being
a fascist b*****d, or accused us of being backward and ignorant Limeys
who can't spell or talk right.
{candle off}

Whoa, what an interesting meme complex kludge/kluge is..

>--
> Eric S. Raymond <e...@snark.thyrsus.com>

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Finnis, | Unit 6A, Science Park, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, SY23 3AH
Clef Digital Systems |
cl...@aber.ac.uk | Tel.: 0970 626601 Overseas: +44 970 626601

[Jim Finnis]

In article <24r80n$r...@news.mantis.co.uk>
mat...@mantis.co.uk (mathew) burbled:

Seemed reasonable to me. A complex (but silly) issue like this deserved
a properly thought out and cogently argued response. Great, I say.
And remember - the Jargon File is (through the book) partly Eric's
livelihood (I believe).

>mathew

[Jim Finnis]

In article <CBx5o...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Brown) burbled:

>In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de> maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:
>>Well I've been following this language debate with intense interest...
>><yaaawn>

hehehehehehehe

>>
>> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
>>Adventure game:
>>
>> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????

I say "plooo", like "Hugh", probably influenced by "Pugh"
(Pugh, Pugh, Barney(tm) McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb. Ring any bells?)

>--
> Dave Brown -- dagb...@napier.uwaterloo.ca -- (416) 669-5370
>"Your mother told you that you're not supposed to talk to strangers,
> Look in the mirror, tell me, do you think your life's in danger?"
> --Ozzy Osbourne

[Colin Kendall 6842]

In article <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>
>Y'know something, that's how *all* words get their meanings determined.
>My medium-sized desk dictionary has 31 meanings for the noun "head" --
>plus 12 verb meanings, and 3 for the adjective "head." Never in my
>life have I wondered which one was being meant: the thing on my shoulders,
>the mouth of the river, the bossman, or the toilet. It was always so
>easy to make that choice that I never noticed myself thinking about it.
>And I can't recall being wrong, either.
>

I have to go home and do something about my head. Do you think I mean the thing
on my shoulders, or my toilet?

By the way, what makes you think "Dog the ran down street the" is
ungrammatical?

[Larry Jones]

In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de>, maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:
> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
> Adventure game:
>
> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????

I guess I'm in the minority here, I've always pronounced it "ploog".

> What about xyzzy?????

"ziezee"
----
Larry Jones, SDRC, 2000 Eastman Dr., Milford, OH 45150-2789 513-576-2070
larry...@sdrc.com
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere
in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin

[Jens Stark]

maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:

> What about xyzzy?????

> Is there any more folklore on these words, like where they came from
>and other usages? I notice xyzzy is the cheat word for minesweep
>on Windows...

Yes: Definitely. Data general's AOS/VS uses it a lot. The older, 16bit CLI
responded to XYZZY with "Nothing happens".
Then they released the CLI32, which, logically enough, has this command as
well.
It's response : "Twice as much happens."

Gruss,
Jens

[Andy Traff]

In article <CBx5o...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Brown) writes:
>In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de> maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:
>>
>> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
>>Adventure game:
>>
>> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????
>
>Actually, pronounce it 'pluch' with the 'ch' like in the Scottich
>'loch' or German 'Buch' and the 'u' like in 'plug'.

Plugh rhymes with blue.

>
>> What about xyzzy?????
>
>Taking my cue from 'xylophone', I pronounce it 'zyzzy'
>

ExWhyZedZedWhy

Traff

[Jim Finnis]

In article <pettsj-18...@visigoth.demon.co.uk>
pet...@visigoth.demon.co.uk (James Petts) burbled:

>In article <1993Aug18....@aber.ac.uk>, cl...@aber.ac.uk (Jim Finnis)
>wrote:

>
>> {candle on}
>> And my antithanks to those people who either accused Eric of being
>> a fascist b*****d, or accused us of being backward and ignorant Limeys
>> who can't spell or talk right.
>> {candle off}
>

>Shouldn't that last word be "correctly," or am I just missing the irony?

Congratulations! Your Irony-Spotter's prize, a boxed set of Oscar Wilde's
complete boyfriends, will be winging its way to you by return of post...

>--
> ===> James Petts <===
>
>The dust blows forward 'n' the dust blows back

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1mTVyy#M0F37B6600KN70sLbqW18f3H6=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>In <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> Roger Lustig wrote:
>> Here we go again. I'll limit my comments to general issues of linguistics.

>Rather than reply to this, I'm going to have a life. :-)

One.

>The Great Klu[d]ge War has dragged on long enough; I posted Part One to explain
>my reasoning and *close* the matter, not to open another debate. I will
>continue to accept evidence pertinent to it. I will even keep an eye out for
>some of the books you mention. But I will not get sucked into arguing language
>theology

Two.

>with another amateur.

Three.

>That way lies madness...

Eric, if you don't want to discuss things further, that's fine. But why throw
in three *more* insults and misrepresentations?

This isn't theology, any more than any other field of study is. In fact,
descriptive linguistics is fairly close to science, far more so than most
other historical or sociological pursuits.

And as for our both being amateurs, well, no. Neither of us does
this for a living, and I respect your work on computer lingo, but
one *can* read some books on what the whole business is about and what
linguists do.

Roger

[Roger Lustig]

In article <hayesst...@risc1.unisa.ac.za> haye...@risc1.unisa.ac.za (Steve Hayes) writes:
>
>It seems to me that when descriptivists want to enforce their rule that
>every malapropism immediately becomes part of the language, the only result
>will be that communication becomes much more difficult.

Which descriptivists are those? I've never heard that stated, claimed,
or implied, other than in the most trivial sense -- that every act of
speech is in some sense part of the language. Suffice it to say that
descriptivists are not so stupid as not to realize that about 99% of
all malapropisms disappear again almost immediately.

One more time: can you name these people, or are they straw men?

Roger

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>In article <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:

>>Y'know something, that's how *all* words get their meanings determined.
>>My medium-sized desk dictionary has 31 meanings for the noun "head" --
>>plus 12 verb meanings, and 3 for the adjective "head." Never in my
>>life have I wondered which one was being meant: the thing on my shoulders,
>>the mouth of the river, the bossman, or the toilet. It was always so
>>easy to make that choice that I never noticed myself thinking about it.
>>And I can't recall being wrong, either.

>I have to go home and do something about my head. Do you think I mean the thing
>on my shoulders, or my toilet?

How nice for you. You've posted a statement without a context. Gold star.

>By the way, what makes you think "Dog the ran down street the" is
>ungrammatical?

The universality of article-before-noun in English, and the instantaneous
rejection of the sentence by all speakers of the language.

Check out a book on grammars for a rigorous definition of the term.

Roger

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug18.0...@zaphod.earth.ox.ac.uk> Stephen Usher wrote:
> I thought you might like to know that in Britain (at least everywhere I've
> been), the word "bumpf" is used to mean advertising literature. eg. "Well I
> read through all the bumpf on the dishwasher and decided I didn't want it."
> As you can see, this is very close to the WWII meaning. I've never heard it
> used to mean legal letters, however. I wonder if this is another drift of
> language between the US and the UK?

The example was *hypothetical*. It's a *fiction*, for illustrative purposes
only. Oh, god, I hope I haven't launched an urban legend...

[Colin Kendall 6842]

In article <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>>In article <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>
>>>Y'know something, that's how *all* words get their meanings determined.
>>>My medium-sized desk dictionary has 31 meanings for the noun "head" --
>>>plus 12 verb meanings, and 3 for the adjective "head." Never in my
>>>life have I wondered which one was being meant: the thing on my shoulders,
>>>the mouth of the river, the bossman, or the toilet. It was always so
>>>easy to make that choice that I never noticed myself thinking about it.
>>>And I can't recall being wrong, either.
>
>>I have to go home and do something about my head. Do you think I mean the thing
>>on my shoulders, or my toilet?
>
>How nice for you. You've posted a statement without a context. Gold star.
>

That's the point. Sometimes there is no context. E.g., you are walking
down the hall past my office and you overhear me say "I have to go
home and do something about my head". That's all you hear. You say
that you have never in your life wondered about the meaning, so I
presume you have had a remarkable life in that you have never heard
such a remark without context. Most of us, I think, have this sort
of experience frequently.

>>By the way, what makes you think "Dog the ran down street the" is
>>ungrammatical?
>
>The universality of article-before-noun in English, and the instantaneous
>rejection of the sentence by all speakers of the language.
>

How do you know it's universal? How do you know all speakers reject
it? Have you taken a poll?

I think that claiming that "all speakers" do something is even more
hard to justify than claiming that a majority do something, for which
you have recently taken others to task.

>Check out a book on grammars for a rigorous definition of the term.
>

I'm not really interested. If I wanted to discuss things in rigorous
linguistic terms, I'd try sci.lang.

Your constant admonition of others to read technical books about
language is, I think, more of a waste of time than the admonitions of
the prescriptivists.

It's sort of like studying butterflies. You can read a lot of books
about butterflies, or you can go out in the field and observe
butterflies over the course of several decades. Or you can do both.
But I don't see any basis for claiming that he who merely observes
knows less about butterflies than he who reads the books.

You remind me of some doctors who are pissed off when chiropractors,
acupuncturists, and others that they label quacks, who have not spend a
great number of years in medical school, profess to be able to cure
people. Sometimes these "quacks" have great success, even though they
don't have a traditional, formal medical education.

[Geoff Mccaughan]

Stephen Usher (st...@earth.ox.ac.uk) wrote:
>In article <1mT150#M91jMBj4vPd9l5lb1Pv6mKvNR=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>> One can make a strong presumption that use (3) is an error. If one happens
>>to know the original World War II use of "bumpf" to mean "propaganda leaflets"
>>it's fair to say *prescriptively* that sense (3) is "incorrect".

>I thought you might like to know that in Britain (at least everywhere I've
>been), the word "bumpf" is used to mean advertising literature. eg. "Well I
>read through all the bumpf on the dishwasher and decided I didn't want it."
>As you can see, this is very close to the WWII meaning. I've never heard it
>used to mean legal letters, however. I wonder if this is another drift of
>language between the US and the UK?

My understanding of the origin of this word is that it is a contraction of
'bum fodder', meaning toilet paper, and thus any worthless paper item. Legal
briefs, advertising and propaganda would all seem to fit nicely.

--
Geoff, Sysop Equinox (equinox.gen.nz) +64 (3) 3854406 [6 Lines]
"If you have to run heating in winter, you don't own enough computers."
Vote SPQR Ski Nix Olympica Freedom for Axolotls

[Geoff Mccaughan]

Dave Woodman (woo...@bnr.ca) wrote:

> Any to think I always thought that the 'gh' was silent, in the same way that
>it is in the word plough (plow, in the US, I believe).

In my previous hometown, a family by the name of Clough [pronounced as in
'rough'], ran a business manufacturing farm implements, in particular
ploughs. They had a big sign out the front advertising "CLOUGH'S PLOUGHS"
which led one to wonder if it should be pronounced "Clow's Plows" or
"Cluff's Pluffs". 8-)

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug18....@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis wrote:
> And remember - the Jargon File is (through the book) partly Eric's
> livelihood (I believe).

Wow. You're right. I never thought of it quite that way, before, but by the
terms of my ethics about trade, that does imply that I have a implicit contract
responsibility to serve my customers. I'm a libertarian, which means that for
me "Value for value received" has almost the status of a religious obligation.

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <32...@heimdall.sdrc.com> Larry Jones wrote:
> I guess I'm in the minority here, I've always pronounced it "ploog".

I hope this doesn't start another flamewar...

I pronounce it as it's written --- /ploogh/, where /gh/ represents an
aspirated g+h like the medial sound in "bughouse".

And "xyzzy" is /kzizzy/.

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1993Aug19.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>In article <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>>In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>>>In article <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:

>>>>Y'know something, that's how *all* words get their meanings determined.
>>>>My medium-sized desk dictionary has 31 meanings for the noun "head" --
>>>>plus 12 verb meanings, and 3 for the adjective "head." Never in my
>>>>life have I wondered which one was being meant: the thing on my shoulders,
>>>>the mouth of the river, the bossman, or the toilet. It was always so
>>>>easy to make that choice that I never noticed myself thinking about it.
>>>>And I can't recall being wrong, either.

>>>I have to go home and do something about my head. Do you think I mean the thing
>>>on my shoulders, or my toilet?

>>How nice for you. You've posted a statement without a context. Gold star.

>That's the point. Sometimes there is no context. E.g., you are walking
>down the hall past my office and you overhear me say "I have to go
>home and do something about my head". That's all you hear. You say
>that you have never in your life wondered about the meaning, so I
>presume you have had a remarkable life in that you have never heard
>such a remark without context.

Certainly not in the context of communication. When I overhear snatches
of conversation, I know that people aren't trying to communicate with
me. Likewise, when I hear a speech synthesizer chucking out random
sentences, I don't worry about not understanding.

>Most of us, I think, have this sort of experience frequently.

And some of us have the sense not to base a theory of communication
on it.

Besides, if I *wanted* to, I could generally eavesdrop a bit more
and get some context. Usually, however, manners and lack of interest
ensure that I won't.

>>>By the way, what makes you think "Dog the ran down street the" is
>>>ungrammatical?

>>The universality of article-before-noun in English, and the instantaneous
>>rejection of the sentence by all speakers of the language.

>How do you know it's universal? How do you know all speakers reject
>it? Have you taken a poll?

No, but I hired a linguist to do one. Or rather, I relied on a few
hundred years's research before daring to make such a statement.
Nobody has ever observed a dialect in which that's an accepted
sentence; and believe me, if a linguist suddenly came across
speakers who *did* use such a construction, they'd publish it in
a minute.

Anyway, aside from concocted, non-natural-speech things like the
above, have *you* ever heard or read anyone putting article after
verb? Surely if people did this we'd have found an example by
now.

>I think that claiming that "all speakers" do something is even more
>hard to justify than claiming that a majority do something, for which

No, it's quite simple. One merely has to restrict oneself to the
class of things that nobody's ever observed.

If nothing else, my claim is on the level of, say, "There are no
five-legged birds." I can't scour the universe to check,
but it's not an unreasonable statement or assumption.

>you have recently taken others to task.

Different matter entirely. With the "majority" stuff, we
are dealing with usages that quite obviously *do* exist with
some frequency. We don't have to hunt for examples; in fact,
what generates comment is usually people being irritated by
the *frequency* of their use.

In other words, we are talking about things that are demonstrably
established in the language *to some extent.* Lack of evidence
(after a good deal of looking) makes it pretty clear that "dog the ran"
is *not* part of the language in any sense other than one constructed
purely for argument's sake.

At any rate, there's another aspect to this, one from cognitive
linguistics or psycholinguistics in general. The jarring effect
that putting the article after the noun has on a listener has
been demonstrated; it is a *structural* mistake to just about
anyone who grew up with English.

Which is not the case with the usage examples we were talking about.

>>Check out a book on grammars for a rigorous definition of the term.

>I'm not really interested. If I wanted to discuss things in rigorous
>linguistic terms, I'd try sci.lang.

Disqualified by expertise once again, eh?

>Your constant admonition of others to read technical books about
>language is, I think, more of a waste of time than the admonitions of
>the prescriptivists.

You don't have to go that far. A simple introduction to what linguistics
*is* will suffice. One need merely learn a little about methods, about
what the terms mean, and the history of the trade. No real technical
knowledge required.

>It's sort of like studying butterflies. You can read a lot of books
>about butterflies, or you can go out in the field and observe
>butterflies over the course of several decades. Or you can do both.

Alas, what butterflies *are* is far more easily defined than what
errors are in language. Any five-year-old can have a pretty good
idea of what a butterfly is, and may confuse it with a moth, but
not with much else. However, language and language change and
language errors aren't that easily schematized, and one's experience
with language "out in the field" is unlikely to carry one far enough
to allow one to generalize without actually finding out what the rest
of the world is like.

>But I don't see any basis for claiming that he who merely observes
>knows less about butterflies than he who reads the books.

Books are not constituted of butterflies. They *do* contain lots
of words, however. More words than one is likey to encounter in
one's few linguistic communities.

Oh, and most of our speech and reading and listening are not done in
a context of observing or noticing the words or usages we're discussing.
Most people talk and listen as much as you or I, but never *once*
think about "Different than" unless a teacher brings it up. And yet
they've heard it several thousand times!

>You remind me of some doctors who are pissed off when chiropractors,
>acupuncturists, and others that they label quacks, who have not spend a
>great number of years in medical school, profess to be able to cure
>people. Sometimes these "quacks" have great success, even though they
>don't have a traditional, formal medical education.

I don't know why I should remind you of such, since I'm not a linguist.
But I *have* thought about what it might mean to label a usage an
"error." That's all. And I do know that if a doctor doesn't look at
available evidence, then by golly, they're a quack.

Roger

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> Roger Lustig wrote:
>Eric, if you don't want to discuss things further, that's fine. But why throw
>in three *more* insults and misrepresentations?

No insult of any kind was intended.

One reason I don't want to hash these issues over with other amateurs like
myself is that I'm now exchanging email with a professional linguist. That's
a better use of my time and likely to produce higher-quality results for the
File.

[Philip Hart]

In article ... (Roger Lustig) writes...
>In article ... ... writes:

(riveting discusion of 'head', in and out of context, deleted)

There has been some discussion recently, unfortunately often
phrased in terms of "correctness", about different meanings
and uses of words. Someone objected to Roger Lustig's example
(which I understood to show that native speakers can easily
deal with wildly different meanings of words) of 'head',
on the basis of needing context. I didn't think the objection
was apposite, but perhaps with other sample words one will
reach different conclusions (rambling long ones, in my case.)

For example, I'm fond using 'one' as a general pronoun,
especially in letters - I feel it's useful to keep 'you' for
the person I'm writing to. (By the way, was there ever a word
in common use for "person to whom one is writing"? My Am.
Heritage Dictionary doesn't have 'correspondent' or 'ant'
with such a meaning.) But I'm the only American I know who
uses it in writing or speech, so I imagine it must sound odd
to my friends there.

Another (poor) example is 'egregious' - I had learned it from
Latin as meaning 'outstanding' (out of the herd) and was amazed
when I found it had come to mean 'outstandingly bad'. I
presume there must have been a time when the word couldn't
be used safely. 'Hacker' is perhaps a similar case - it's
inconvenient to have to make assumptions about how the
person one is talking to will interpret the word, though
admittedly one has to do this for many words.

My favorite example of a useful word I wish hadn't evolved
is 'gay'. Of course it serves an excellent purpose in current
English, and no such elegant word as 'lesbian' comes to mind
since 'homo', which is for example perfectly acceptable in
French, is pejorative in English. There are probably very
few people in my generation who even know that 'gay' meant
(sic) 'merry' or 'jolly'. (My AHD from '81 has 'licentious'
fourth, and 'homosexual' fifth and last.) The latter two words
aren't useful anymore, either, at least in America (though maybe
no one's merry there, as one would infer from the posts one sees
on this group. Is the weather particularly bad this summer?)
Ok,so I'll make do with 'happy', but it irks me to be constrained;
and while I will happily ignore the Flintstone's theme ("We'll
have a gay old time!") or West Side Story's "I feel ... gay"
(I've heard kids laugh at this line), I can't help flinching when
I read the word in Yeats, for example. He was fond of it, I think -
"Lapis Lazuli" comes to mind, with "Hamlet and Lear are gay"... I
know what Yeats intended there, but my enjoyment of the poem is
slightly diminished by the unintended overtones.

I don't suggest trying to freeze the language, as seems to have
been done in French, though it does have advantages - I was
delighted to find that one year of modern French enabled me to read
17th century plays in French with about the same effort it takes me
to read Shakespeare. The richness and diversity of English is a
source of endless delight. But richness has to be weighed against
muddiness or dissonance. Those who think the true purpose of
language is as a medium for poetry (ok, I'll allow myself one smiley)
may, I hope, be excused for asking that we not be maligned for
labeling the occasional word or phrase or meaning - "unfortunate",
say, or "brings a loss of precision". (Especially if we're
allowed to disparage the occasional dead metaphor [I for one
would have found my use of 'riveting' at the beginning of my
post a bit chancey - oh no, the dreaded phrase "look it up in
a dictionary".]) And that the occasional use of "ignorant" or
"misuse" in such discussions be treated gently, if the result of
well-intentioned inaccuracy or even ignorance, if only because we
(well, I) tend to feel that the language is impoverished as much
by ill-tempered and impolite writing as by weak writing. :^)

- Philip Hart
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Apolgies for blathering. Du musst dein Leben aendern. RMR
---------------------------------------------------------------------

[Richard N Kitchen]

In a previous article, Ge...@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan) says:

>Dave Woodman (woo...@bnr.ca) wrote:
>
>> Any to think I always thought that the 'gh' was silent, in the same way that
>>it is in the word plough (plow, in the US, I believe).
>
>In my previous hometown, a family by the name of Clough [pronounced as in
>'rough'], ran a business manufacturing farm implements, in particular
>ploughs. They had a big sign out the front advertising "CLOUGH'S PLOUGHS"
>which led one to wonder if it should be pronounced "Clow's Plows" or
>"Cluff's Pluffs". 8-)
>
>--

Dr. Seuss wrote a book called "The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the
Dough."

--
Rick Kitchen da...@cleveland.freenet.edu
"I felt like I was in the room all by myself when I was talking to her."
--Margo Cody, "Black Tie Affair"

[Mirabelle Severn & Thames]

In article <20AUG199...@vsopp4.cern.ch> ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch (Philip Hart) writes:
>Apologies for blathering.

If only all the Usenet blathering were so mild.

>[Refers to an earlier "riveting discusion of 'head'"]
>[...Let us be] allowed to disparage the occasional dead
>metaphor (I for one would have found my use of 'riveting'
>at the beginning of my post a bit chancey...

Why? I thought the word was used rather widely in that
sense. (But then, I used the moribund subjunctive in my
first sentence.)

>...There are probably very

>few people in my generation who even know that 'gay' meant
>(sic) 'merry' or 'jolly'. (My AHD from '81 has 'licentious'
>fourth, and 'homosexual' fifth and last.) The latter two words

>aren't useful anymore, either, at least in America...

What do you mean? Are there places in the U.S. where "merry"
and "jolly" are becoming obsolete? Or am I misunderstanding
your post?

Naomi

[Don Porges]

In article <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:

>In article <1mT150#M91jMBj4vPd9l5lb1Pv6mKvNR=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>

>>Here's another example that should make this clear. Consider the word
>>"hacker". It is probably now the case that the majority of English-speakers
>>who have heard or seen this word mean it to signify "computer criminal".
>>Almost everybody reading this article knows that it originally meant something
>>much more complex and generally positive, and it's a fair bet most of you still
>>use it that way and believe that's what it "really" means, even if you think
>>reclaiming the word in popular usage is a lost cause.
>
>>If you are an extreme Red, a radical descriptivist, what do you have to
>>conclude when you think about what "hacker" *really* means? Ahhh...so you've
>>got a Blue streak after all, do you?
>
>Nice try.
>
>A descriptivist -- a real one, not one of your straw ones -- will conclude
>that it *really* means both.
>
>That's right, both. Imagine: a word having two meanings! Which meaning
>applies in a given case? Why, that's for the context to determine. If
>I'm reading the Daily News, I know what it means there. If I'm reading
>comp.sci.hack.hack.hack, it probably has the other meaning.

>
>Y'know something, that's how *all* words get their meanings determined.
>My medium-sized desk dictionary has 31 meanings for the noun "head" --
>plus 12 verb meanings, and 3 for the adjective "head." Never in my
>life have I wondered which one was being meant: the thing on my shoulders,
>the mouth of the river, the bossman, or the toilet. It was always so
>easy to make that choice that I never noticed myself thinking about it.
>And I can't recall being wrong, either.
>

>Nor have I *ever*, *EVER* wondered to myself which meaning was the "real"
>meaning. As far as communication goes (remember communication?) that's just
>not an issue. They're *all* real, just like both meanings of "hacker."
>

Well, yeah, but...

although I mostly agree with what you're saying, let's look at a case a
little closer to "hacker". Let's look at "revisionist". I think the
story goes like this:

At one point there was a trend in history to re-examine certain things
that "everybody knows". Things like the American Revolution was fought
for the right to be free from the English yoke; the American Civil War
was fought to end slavery; the USSR started the Cold War; and so on.
These historians, who called themselves "revisionists", held that the
first two were much more caused by conflicts among monied interests
that had been admitted; others got onto whose fault was the Cold War;
and so on. As the examples show, this was a mostly left-leaning trend,
and it was populated with legitimate academic historians. I may be
wrong about these details, but it went something like that. These
historians were "revisionists".

Some time later, neo-Nazis decided that they would describe their
crackpot theory that the Holocaust never happened as "revisionism".
They didn't do this by accident; they did this in order to lend their
claims legitimacy. This isn't language evolving; this is deception.

I'd like to say something like "those aren't real revisionists..they've
stolen the term from real historians, but they aren't historians, and
should not be called revisionists." By the hardcore philosophy given
here, can I say anything like that? Can I say it the first time I
hear it used by a neo-Nazi? Can I say it now, when the usage has
spread enough that everybody knows what "alt.revisionism" contains?

Yes, I know about Godwin's law; the case in question is the best
example I can think of, despite that.

--
-- Don Porges
por...@inmet.camb.inmet.com
..uunet!inmet!porges

[Mark Brader]

Eric S. Raymond (e...@snark.thyrsus.com) writes:

> :kludge: 1. /klooj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common)

> spelling of {kluge} (US). ...

[~80 lines deleted]

> Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's
> meaning.

Well, that's an improvement, but it doesn't take into account my point of
view. I was introduced to the word as "kludge /klooj/", and on learning
the above history, my decision is that I will continue using it that way.
My reason is that it is "appropriate in view of the word's meaning" that
its spelling be *irregular in a unique way, as the result of a historical
accident*. As far as I'm concerned, this adds sufficient {flavor} to offset
any other issues.

Before posting this, I asked Eric if he would consider changing the above
text if I found enough other people who agreed with my reasoning. To my
surprise, he said no; but I'm curious in any case if anyone else does
take this point of view.
--
Mark Brader, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, utzoo!sq!msb, m...@sq.com
Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be
aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic
political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.
-- Eric S. Raymond, The New Hacker's Dictionary / Jargon File

This article is in the public domain.

[Philip Hart]

In article <1993Aug20.1...@sco.com>, nao...@sco.COM
(Mirabelle Severn & Thames) writes...

>
>In article <20AUG199...@vsopp4.cern.ch> ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch
(Philip Hart) writes:
>>Apologies for blathering.
>
>If only all the Usenet blathering were so mild.

Shouldn't that be 'blatherings'? Where's my dictionary...

>
>>[Refers to an earlier "riveting discusion of 'head'"]
>>[...Let us be] allowed to disparage the occasional dead
>>metaphor (I for one would have found my use of 'riveting'
>>at the beginning of my post a bit chancey...
>

>Why? ...

I was referring to the use of dead metaphors - in this case,
using a rivet to fasten something. Arguments against them
include their showing laziness (can I say 'slovenliness' on
Internet without offending?) and (more relevantly for my
post) the fact that if one is trained to read poetry or just
closely, these metaphors produce grotesque images - as if
the discussion had been driving rivets into my head (well,
not so far off). And as you would have discovered if you
had looked up the word (shame on you!) you would have
discovered that 'rivet' actually has to do with hammering
a head on to a piece of metal. The imagery, and the
abstruse, "I'm cleverer than you are and I don't even
care to point it out to you except that indirectly I do
anyway" pun, are just too heavy for what should function
as a lightly sarcastic aside. Sorry for pounding you
over the head with this self-serving explanation, but ...
you made me. (I'm trying not to use smileys; ideally,
good writing will convey the desired tone without
any lazy newfangled devices.)

>
>>...There are probably very
>>few people in my generation who even know that 'gay' meant
>>(sic) 'merry' or 'jolly'. (My AHD from '81 has 'licentious'
>>fourth, and 'homosexual' fifth and last.) The latter two words
>>aren't useful anymore, either, at least in America...
>
>What do you mean? Are there places in the U.S. where "merry"
>and "jolly" are becoming obsolete? Or am I misunderstanding
>your post?

Tell me you're not English, uh, British...
"It was a jolly party. The host was a merry dude."
Doesn't sound very much like American English to me, though
I've been away for a while... Anybody care to tell me if
I'm crazy to think 'merry' and 'jolly' bit the dust (ouch!)
in the US because the popular culture doesn't prize jollity?
Anyway, I wouldn't say they're "obsolete" - I said " aren't
useful", by which I meant that everyone knows what they mean
but I can't think of a circumstance where I would use them
out of single or double quotes in speech, in prose, or in
poetry. It's sad - short, expressive words that fit
well in the mouth and have useful rhymes and express joy:
and now they're dead. Well, now I'm depressed. Might as
well go read my Fortran code and weep. Please write
back and tell me you're familiar with English English
and 'merry' and 'jolly' are alive and well there - is
the Chunnel open yet?

night,
Philip

--------------------------------------------------------
am I awake yet? Herr, es ist Zeit. RMR
-------------------------------------------------------

[Pete Moore]

Philip Hart (ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch) wrote:

>By the way, was there ever a word
>in common use for "person to whom one is writing"?

Addressee?

[ stuff deleted ]

>Apolgies for blathering. Du musst dein Leben aendern. RMR

I, for one, thought it was worth reading.

--
+------------------- pe...@bignode.equinox.gen.nz -------------------+
| The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things |
| that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some |
| of the grace of tragedy - Steven Weinberg |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Tom Lane]

m...@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) writes:
> I was introduced to the word as "kludge /klooj/", and on learning
> the above history, my decision is that I will continue using it that way.

I learned the word the same way, over twenty years ago. Nonetheless,
I plan to adopt the "kluge" spelling. (damn, had to edit out a "d" there.
fingers have a mind of their own...) I found the non-flame parts of this
discussion most interesting/enlightening, and I think esr's final position
is the correct one.

I'd like to add my congratulations to esr on extracting the useful info
from what was largely a flamewar, while maintaining his civility throughout.

regards, tom lane

[Jeff Lee]

In article <2531lo$4...@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>, da...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Richard N Kitchen) writes:
> In a previous article, Ge...@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan) says:
>>Dave Woodman (woo...@bnr.ca) wrote:
>>
>>> Any to think I always thought that the 'gh' was silent, in the same way that
>>>it is in the word plough (plow, in the US, I believe).
>>
>>In my previous hometown, a family by the name of Clough [pronounced as in
>>'rough'], ran a business manufacturing farm implements, in particular
>>ploughs. They had a big sign out the front advertising "CLOUGH'S PLOUGHS"
>>which led one to wonder if it should be pronounced "Clow's Plows" or
>>"Cluff's Pluffs". 8-)
>

> Dr. Seuss wrote a book called "The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the
> Dough."

Then there's my favorite four words for showing why the English language is
more difficult than most:

tough though trough through

===== Jeff Lee / jl...@smylex.uucp / jlee%smyle...@tscs.tscs.com =====
===== SCA: Lord Godfrey de Shipbrook, Trimaris Chart Herald =====
===== Per pale azure and argent, a clarion counterchanged or and gules =====

`This learned Constable is too cunning to be understood.'

[Dan Tilque]

e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>

>4. Orthographic change altering pronunciation as a common mechanism
>
> No one did this very convincingly, either. A lot of people got confused and
>posted irrelevancies about various kinds of phonetic drift. Best efforts were
>from Dan Tilque in <24kmir$6...@techbook.techbook.com> and Stuart Stremler
>in <930814034...@ucssun1.sdsu.edu>; they discussed some cases
>arising from 17th-century attempts to Latinize English.
>
> Since both the orthography and pronunciation of English were in serious flux
>at the time for reasons independent of the Latinization crusade, I can't
>consider these examples very demonstrative. For purposes of this
>discussion, I think I would need to see examples in Modern English.
>

Well, in the 17th century, they did speak Modern English, more or less.
But you want more recent examples. My source here is Bryson[1] pages
96-97, but he uses others as sources.

Words that changed spelling to reflect pronunciation:

verb forms such as doth, hath -> does, has

Well, that's a 17th century change again, but supposedly the old
written forms stayed around for about 50 years after the
pronunciation changed. Bryson doesn't give any more recent
examples, but how about oeconomy -> economy, masque -> mask,
shew -> show.

Words that changed pronunciation to match spelling:

waistcoat was "west-kit"
victuals was "vittles" (and still is in some dialects)
forehead was "forrid"
husband was "husban"
soldier was "sojur"
pavement was "payment"
zebra was "zebber"
swore was "sore" (silent 'w' like sword still has)

He doesn't always give the dates of when they changed (perhaps because
it's usually difficult to pin them down precisely), but says that
husband, soldier, and pavement were spoken that way at the time of the
American Revolution and zebra and swore changed in the 19th century.

[1] The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Bill Bryson,
1990 ISBN 0-888-07895-8

---
Dan Tilque -- da...@techbook.com

[Geoff Mccaughan]

Dan Tilque (da...@techbook.techbook.com) wrote:

>Words that changed pronunciation to match spelling:

> forehead was "forrid"

Was??? Still is as far as I know. How do you pronounce it?

[Gabe M Wiener]

In article <Geoff...@equinox.gen.nz> Ge...@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan) writes:
>
>>Words that changed pronunciation to match spelling:
>
>> forehead was "forrid"
>
>Was??? Still is as far as I know. How do you pronounce it?

Most Americans, including this one, pronounce it as you would pronounce
the two component words "fore" and "head."

--
Gabe Wiener -- gm...@columbia.edu -- N2GPZ -- PGP on request
Sound engineering, recording, and digital mastering for classical music
"I am terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music
will be put on records forever." --Sir Arthur Sullivan

[Piers Cawley]

In article <1993Aug18....@aber.ac.uk> cl...@aber.ac.uk (Jim Finnis) writes:

>
> In article <CBx5o...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
> dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Brown) burbled:

>
> >In article <RVE...@math.fu-berlin.de> maa...@mathssun4.lancs.ac.uk (Barry Rowlingson) writes:

> >>Well I've been following this language debate with intense interest...
> >><yaaawn>
>
> hehehehehehehe

>
> >>
> >> But how does everyone pronounce that magic word from the original
> >>Adventure game:
> >>

> >> plugh : like 'plug' or 'pluff' or 'plooj' ????
>
> I say "plooo", like "Hugh", probably influenced by "Pugh"
> (Pugh, Pugh, Barney(tm) McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb. Ring any bells?)

I'm pretty sure it should be:
Hugh Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert Dibble, and Grubb.
--
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Piers Cawley, 2 Widford Park Place, Chelmsford, ESSEX, CM2 8TB. |
| pdca...@iest.demon.co.uk pdca...@cix.compulink.co.uk |
| Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there lived a . . . |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Piers Cawley]

In article <1993Aug17.1...@gallant.apple.com> David Casseres <cass...@apple.com> writes:
> >Spelling errors that create a ambiguities with other words make good simple
> >examples. One particularly jarring one we see on the Net with some frequency
> >is the misspelling of the verb "lose" as "loose". This is functionally bad,
> >and thus incorrect in a very strong sense. If it were to become majority
> >usage, the capability of English would be damaged. Thus, Blue condemnation of
> >it is a service to all users of English.
>
> Blue condemnation of this usage (which I *hate*, btw) may be a service, but
> not because the misspelling would damage the communicative capability of
> English. It would be no worse than the shared spelling of the noun "wind" and
> the verb "wind," and English is full of such pairs, yet it still works just
> fine.

Especially when you consider the *other* verb "wind", eg. "The
Huntsman winded his horn".

[Piers Cawley]

In article <Geoff...@equinox.gen.nz> Ge...@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan) writes:

>
> Dave Woodman (woo...@bnr.ca) wrote:
>
> > Any to think I always thought that the 'gh' was silent, in the same way that
> >it is in the word plough (plow, in the US, I believe).
>
> In my previous hometown, a family by the name of Clough [pronounced as in
> 'rough'], ran a business manufacturing farm implements, in particular
> ploughs. They had a big sign out the front advertising "CLOUGH'S PLOUGHS"
> which led one to wonder if it should be pronounced "Clow's Plows" or
> "Cluff's Pluffs". 8-)

They weren't based in Slough were they?

[HER...@auvm.american.edu]

In article <1993Aug20.1...@sco.com>, nao...@sco.COM (Mirabelle Severn &

Thames) says:
>
> (But then, I used the moribund subjunctive in my
>first sentence.)
>

The subjunctive isn't even close to being moribund. It seems to me
that many or most people who claim that it is don't understand
what the subjunctive is. It's certainly true that in the single
instance of the verb to be, the subjunctive form is changing, and
has indeed changed completely for many speakers, who might say
"I wish I was dead" or some such thing. Now if the subjunctive
had really gone away, you'd have "I wish I am dead"--that is,
the present indicative. But no English speaker would say this.
Nor would any native speaker say "I wish I have a million
dollars". This subjunctive, which I will call the general
subjunctive, is alive and well, thanks. The special subjunctive,
formed from the infinitive rather than the preterite indicative,
is, however, moribund. So you used the living subjunctive, not
the moribund one.

H.

Herschel Browne
American University

[HER...@auvm.american.edu]

In article <20AUG199...@vsopp4.cern.ch>, ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch (Philip Hart)
says:

>
>and while I will happily ignore the Flintstone's theme ("We'll
>have a gay old time!") or West Side Story's "I feel ... gay"
>(I've heard kids laugh at this line), I can't help flinching when

Where does "I feel ... gay" occur in West Side Story? I once played
Tony, long long ago, and I don't recall it.

[Wendi Dunlap]

<HER...@auvm.american.edu> writes:

>Where does "I feel ... gay" occur in West Side Story? I once played
>Tony, long long ago, and I don't recall it.

In "I Feel Pretty" --

I feel pretty
oh so pretty
I feel pretty and witty and gay!
and I pity
any girl who isn't me today

etc. Every time I see this movie at the local movie house,
the audience always snickers at that bit. then again, they snicker every
time Maria sings, so...

The funny thing is that even the cynical jokers in the audience usually
cry at the end, anyway. ;)

--
| Wendi Dunlap * litl...@u.washington.edu | "They're not dead, they're |
| Currently playing on my stereo: | metaphysically challenged! |
| The Fastbacks, ...And His Orchestra | --MST3K |

[HER...@auvm.american.edu]

In article <2590ot$r...@news.u.washington.edu>, litl...@mead.u.washington.edu

(Wendi Dunlap) says:
>
><HER...@auvm.american.edu> writes:
>
>>Where does "I feel ... gay" occur in West Side Story? I once played
>>Tony, long long ago, and I don't recall it.
>
>In "I Feel Pretty" --
>
> I feel pretty
> oh so pretty
> I feel pretty and witty and gay!
> and I pity
> any girl who isn't me today
>

Well....hm...they must have changed the lyrics for the
movie, then. The song that *I* know goes:

I feel pretty,
oh so pretty,
I feel pretty and witty and bright,
and I pity
any girl who isn't me tonight.

The scene, after all, takes place in the evening when Maria
is getting ready for her hot date with Tony. Little does she
know, etc. etc. Are you sure you're remembering this correctly?

[David Sewell]

Sorry to be jumping into this thread late, but has anyone mentioned
the entry for "kludge" in the brand new _Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary_, 10th ed.? (This is the successor to the _Webster's
Collegiate_.) Here's the entry in full, substituting only
English-style pronunciation for the dictionary's umlauted characters:

KLUDGE \'klooj\ or KLUGE \'klooj, 'kloo-jee\ n [origin unknown]
(1962): a system and esp. a computer system made up of poorly
matched components

Eric R., I hope you'll send a copy of the NHD to Merriam-Webster and
politely suggest that they do their homework before the 11th edition
comes out! --But where in the devil did they get the alternate
pronunciation of "kluge" from?

Sorry if any of this has appeared in the discussion; I haven't seen it
& it's not in the articles still on my server.
--
David Sewell "It is better to be silent and
ds...@lion.ccit.arizona.edu be real, than to talk and be
dse...@violet.ccit.arizona.edu unreal." --Ignatius Martyr

[Ken Arromdee]

One of the differences between "hacker" or "revisionist", and "kludge", is
that you get issues of self-identification for the first two; a group can
reasonably say they don't want others claiming to be part of their own group.
"kludge" is not a label applied to people, so this issue never comes up.
--
"On the first day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Leftover Turkey!
On the second day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Turkey Casserole
that she made from Leftover Turkey.
[days 3-4 deleted] ... Flaming Turkey Wings! ...
-- Pizza Hut commercial (and M*tlu/A*gic bait)

Ken Arromdee (arro...@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu)

[Jim Finnis]

In article <1mVNjl#M3PjpX64b0CGvBG10r33OjnVr=e...@snark.thyrsus.com>
e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) burbled:

>
>I hope this doesn't start another flamewar...
>

Naaaa.. all the real diehards will have spontaneously combusted by now.

>
>I pronounce it as it's written --- /ploogh/, where /gh/ represents an
>aspirated g+h like the medial sound in "bughouse".
>
>And "xyzzy" is /kzizzy/.

Neat.. the only word in "English" with a final aspirated sound... magic
indeed.
Although I think this is one of those words that was never intended to
be spoken (I mean, surely no-one ever actually *said* "xyzzy"?) so
maybe we can pronounce it how the hell we want...

What was that you said about another flamewar....? :-)

>--
> Eric S. Raymond <e...@snark.thyrsus.com>

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Finnis, | Unit 6A, Science Park, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, SY23 3AH
Clef Digital Systems |
cl...@aber.ac.uk | Tel.: 0970 626601 Overseas: +44 970 626601

[Dave Woodman]

In article <PDCAWLEY.93...@iest.demon.co.uk> pdca...@iest.demon.co.uk (Piers Cawley) writes:
>In article <Geoff...@equinox.gen.nz> Ge...@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan) writes:
>
>>
>> Dave Woodman (woo...@bnr.ca) wrote:
>>
>> > Any to think I always thought that the 'gh' was silent, in the same way that
>> >it is in the word plough (plow, in the US, I believe).
>>
>> In my previous hometown, a family by the name of Clough [pronounced as in
>> 'rough'], ran a business manufacturing farm implements, in particular
>> ploughs. They had a big sign out the front advertising "CLOUGH'S PLOUGHS"
>> which led one to wonder if it should be pronounced "Clow's Plows" or
>> "Cluff's Pluffs". 8-)
>
>They weren't based in Slough were they?

Come on now, everyone knows that you should pronounce Slough as if you were
vomiting...

A certain Poet Laureate had the right idea during WWII (pre his Laureate
spell) when he wrote

"Come friendly bomb, drop on Slough
Because it 'ain't fit for humans now!"

Good 'ole John!

Cheers,

Dave.

--
==============================================================================
= My e-mail address might be woo...@bnr.ca, but Maidenhead is definitely =
= in Britain... My employer is entitled to disagree with anything but this! =
==============================================================================

[whee...@logica.co.uk]

In article <21AUG199...@vsopp4.cern.ch>, ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch (Philip Hart) writes:
> In article <1993Aug20.1...@sco.com>, nao...@sco.COM
> (Mirabelle Severn & Thames) writes...
>>
>>In article <20AUG199...@vsopp4.cern.ch> ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch
> (Philip Hart) writes:

(lots of stuff deleted...)

> Tell me you're not English, uh, British...
> "It was a jolly party. The host was a merry dude."
> Doesn't sound very much like American English to me, though
> I've been away for a while... Anybody care to tell me if
> I'm crazy to think 'merry' and 'jolly' bit the dust (ouch!)
> in the US because the popular culture doesn't prize jollity?
> Anyway, I wouldn't say they're "obsolete" - I said " aren't
> useful", by which I meant that everyone knows what they mean
> but I can't think of a circumstance where I would use them
> out of single or double quotes in speech, in prose, or in
> poetry. It's sad - short, expressive words that fit
> well in the mouth and have useful rhymes and express joy:
> and now they're dead. Well, now I'm depressed. Might as
> well go read my Fortran code and weep. Please write
> back and tell me you're familiar with English English
> and 'merry' and 'jolly' are alive and well there - is
> the Chunnel open yet?

Pardon me for butting in!!

"Merry" and "jolly" are still very much part of the British vernacular - in a
sort of a way.

First, just about all English speakers - yes, Americans too - say "Merry
Christmas" (at least at Christmas time). "Merry" is now used mostly to
describe the state of being tipsy with drink, and the obvious enjoyment
thereof. Other than that, it's rare, except in songs: "Old King Cole was a
merry old soul..." etc., etc.

"Jolly" is sung in songs too: "For he's a jolly good fellow". Apart from that,
its use is restricted to certain social classes (if I may be permitted to use
such a term). "I'm jolly well going to..." expresses absolute determination in
wishing to do something; there's often a little annoyance in there, too. "She's
a jolly person" is unusual in that other adjectives are likely to spring to the
speaker's mind first.

"Gay" has essentially disappeared from use except as a euphemistic borrowing
for "homosexual", much to the chagrin of the older generation. However, the
adverb "gaily" is still alive and well. If you said "a gaily painted cottage",
no-one would assume that you were making statements about the proclivities of
the decorator or occupier.

As for the Channel Tunnel, I doubt there are any linguistic concerns on either
side. The worries on the British side are concerned with the increased chance
of rabies entering Britain. The French probably fear the invasion of London
escapees wishing to buy Normandy cottages (gaily painted ones), and
day-trippers out to strip the hypermarkets of cheap lager. Both of which are a
more fearsome prospect than rabies.

Yrs rabidly - Steve

[Roger Lustig]

In article <20AUG199...@vsopp4.cern.ch> ha...@vsopp4.cern.ch (Philip Hart) writes:

>In article ... (Roger Lustig) writes...
>>In article ... ... writes:

>(riveting discusion of 'head', in and out of context, deleted)

>There has been some discussion recently, unfortunately often
>phrased in terms of "correctness", about different meanings
>and uses of words. Someone objected to Roger Lustig's example
>(which I understood to show that native speakers can easily
>deal with wildly different meanings of words) of 'head',
>on the basis of needing context. I didn't think the objection
>was apposite, but perhaps with other sample words one will
>reach different conclusions (rambling long ones, in my case.)

>For example, I'm fond using 'one' as a general pronoun,
>especially in letters - I feel it's useful to keep 'you' for
>the person I'm writing to. (By the way, was there ever a word
>in common use for "person to whom one is writing"? My Am.
>Heritage Dictionary doesn't have 'correspondent' or 'ant'
>with such a meaning.) But I'm the only American I know who
>uses it in writing or speech, so I imagine it must sound odd
>to my friends there.

My AHD3 gives it as its first meaning. As long as you apply
a possessive pronoun to "correspondent," it's clear that you're
referring to someone with whom you exchange/are exchanging
letter.

>Another (poor) example is 'egregious' - I had learned it from
>Latin as meaning 'outstanding' (out of the herd) and was amazed
>when I found it had come to mean 'outstandingly bad'. I
>presume there must have been a time when the word couldn't
>be used safely.

We'll probably never know. Even OED isn't sure of what brought
about the change -- a long time ago, to be sure -- and suspects
an ironic use as the catalyst.

>'Hacker' is perhaps a similar case - it's
>inconvenient to have to make assumptions about how the
>person one is talking to will interpret the word, though
>admittedly one has to do this for many words.

Indeed. Just think of old meanings of "conversation" and
"intercourse."

>My favorite example of a useful word I wish hadn't evolved
>is 'gay'. Of course it serves an excellent purpose in current
>English, and no such elegant word as 'lesbian' comes to mind
>since 'homo', which is for example perfectly acceptable in
>French, is pejorative in English.

Others have been tried: Mattachine, for instance.

>There are probably very
>few people in my generation who even know that 'gay' meant
>(sic) 'merry' or 'jolly'. (My AHD from '81 has 'licentious'
>fourth, and 'homosexual' fifth and last.) The latter two words
>aren't useful anymore, either, at least in America (though maybe
>no one's merry there, as one would infer from the posts one sees
>on this group. Is the weather particularly bad this summer?)
>Ok,so I'll make do with 'happy', but it irks me to be constrained;
>and while I will happily ignore the Flintstone's theme ("We'll
>have a gay old time!") or West Side Story's "I feel ... gay"
>(I've heard kids laugh at this line), I can't help flinching when
>I read the word in Yeats, for example. He was fond of it, I think -
>"Lapis Lazuli" comes to mind, with "Hamlet and Lear are gay"... I
>know what Yeats intended there, but my enjoyment of the poem is
>slightly diminished by the unintended overtones.

That's life, I'm afraid. But then, would you prefer that the
term common in Wilde's time had survived? In those days, one
was "musical."

btw, we still hear about "gay banter," "don we now our gay
apparel," etc. People who snicker about the lines above
probably get off on any mention of the word "organ" or "prick"
or "little tom tit" or "ass" in the sense of a beat of burden.

>I don't suggest trying to freeze the language, as seems to have
>been done in French, though it does have advantages - I was
>delighted to find that one year of modern French enabled me to read
>17th century plays in French with about the same effort it takes me
>to read Shakespeare. The richness and diversity of English is a
>source of endless delight. But richness has to be weighed against
>muddiness or dissonance.

Alas, it's too late for that, by about 927 years. When English
became a creole via the Norman conquest, it was all over for
a "pure" language that evolved gracefully. Dipping into Latin
or French for new words is a habit from those days; fooling
around with them was Shakespeare's special pride.

>Those who think the true purpose of
>language is as a medium for poetry (ok, I'll allow myself one smiley)
>may, I hope, be excused for asking that we not be maligned for
>labeling the occasional word or phrase or meaning - "unfortunate",
>say, or "brings a loss of precision". (Especially if we're
>allowed to disparage the occasional dead metaphor [I for one
>would have found my use of 'riveting' at the beginning of my
>post a bit chancey - oh no, the dreaded phrase "look it up in
>a dictionary".]) And that the occasional use of "ignorant" or
>"misuse" in such discussions be treated gently, if the result of
>well-intentioned inaccuracy or even ignorance, if only because we
>(well, I) tend to feel that the language is impoverished as much
>by ill-tempered and impolite writing as by weak writing. :^)

If only it were that simple.

For one thing, "ignorant" is an insult whenever you call someone that.
It's never a technical term only. I must disagree with you here;
it's those who write about language who should be more gentle, (as
you most certainly are); and their gentility should be accompanied
by a little confirmation of what they think are the facts. Noblesse
oblige.

Finally, I think the best attitude to take is simply one of fatalism
born of understanding of the history of the language. It's just
guaranteed that words will undergo this process, and we can't tell
which word is next.

Roger Lustig (Lustig meaning "gay", of course.)

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1mVsvl#M3hy4040kKxRL1D7RPZ3C5LBc=e...@snark.thyrsus.com> e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>In <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> Roger Lustig wrote:
>>Eric, if you don't want to discuss things further, that's fine. But why throw
>>in three *more* insults and misrepresentations?

>No insult of any kind was intended.

OK.

>One reason I don't want to hash these issues over with other amateurs like
>myself is that I'm now exchanging email with a professional linguist. That's

Ah. Well, that was hard to figure out from your long posting, because usually
when people post manifestoes like that --especially ones that carry on a debate
within them -- they're interested in hearing from others.

>a better use of my time and likely to produce higher-quality results for the
>File.

That's up to you. However, I *do*stand by my assertion that you misrepresented
the "Blue/Red" debate rather badly.

Roger

[Roger Lustig]

In article <CC2ru...@inmet.camb.inmet.com> por...@beretta.camb.inmet.com (Don Porges) writes:
>In article <1993Aug17.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>At one point there was a trend in history to re-examine certain things
>that "everybody knows". Things like the American Revolution was fought
>for the right to be free from the English yoke; the American Civil War
>was fought to end slavery; the USSR started the Cold War; and so on.
>These historians, who called themselves "revisionists", held that the
>first two were much more caused by conflicts among monied interests
>that had been admitted; others got onto whose fault was the Cold War;
>and so on. As the examples show, this was a mostly left-leaning trend,
>and it was populated with legitimate academic historians. I may be
>wrong about these details, but it went something like that. These
>historians were "revisionists".

I've never encountered this history for the word before.

The original meaning of "revisionism" as far as I can tell was the
attempt to soften revolutionary communism into something more
reform-oriented. Later, it took on another Red meaning: the idea
that Marx's works required revision and could not be treated as
gospel.

"Revisionist" is a little older, and referred to those who revise
views, etc. in general; it also had an ecclesiastical meaning
toward the end of the last century.

>Some time later, neo-Nazis decided that they would describe their
>crackpot theory that the Holocaust never happened as "revisionism".
>They didn't do this by accident; they did this in order to lend their
>claims legitimacy. This isn't language evolving; this is deception.

Did *they* do that? I know they called their shop the Institute for
Historical Review, but I'm not sure they call themselves revisionists
as much as others call them that. Note that most people call them
Holocaust Revisionists when they don't just call them creeps.

>I'd like to say something like "those aren't real revisionists..they've
>stolen the term from real historians, but they aren't historians, and
>should not be called revisionists." By the hardcore philosophy given
>here, can I say anything like that? Can I say it the first time I
>hear it used by a neo-Nazi? Can I say it now, when the usage has
>spread enough that everybody knows what "alt.revisionism" contains?

You've picked a Word From Hell, is the problem. "Revisionism" has
been used, mainly as an insult (not unlike, say, "Capitalist roader"
in Maoist China), in so many different contexts that it's a real
problem.

I'm not sure there *was* the historical movement you describe, not
as such, in any case. Which historians are you thinking of? When
did they work?

>Yes, I know about Godwin's law; the case in question is the best
>example I can think of, despite that.

Then we're lost! 8-)

Seriously, though, it's simply a political word that has been used
as a stick to beat all kinds of dogs.

Roger

[whee...@logica.co.uk]

In article <1993Aug20.0...@Princeton.EDU>, ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
> In article <1993Aug19.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>>In article <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>>>In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:

>>It's sort of like studying butterflies. You can read a lot of books
>>about butterflies, or you can go out in the field and observe
>>butterflies over the course of several decades. Or you can do both.
>
> Alas, what butterflies *are* is far more easily defined than what
> errors are in language. Any five-year-old can have a pretty good
> idea of what a butterfly is, and may confuse it with a moth, but
> not with much else. However, language and language change and
> language errors aren't that easily schematized, and one's experience
> with language "out in the field" is unlikely to carry one far enough
> to allow one to generalize without actually finding out what the rest
> of the world is like.

Actually, while a five-year-old may have a concept of a butterfly, an
entomologist will tell you how difficult it really is to classify them, to
distinguish them from moths, and in some cases, from other insects. If you
look deeply into a problem, the problem gets deeper. In this respect, it's a
very good analogy. Species and species change constitute one of the biggest
problems in biology, and biologists spend a great deal of time arguing about
the classification of their observations.

>>But I don't see any basis for claiming that he who merely observes
>>knows less about butterflies than he who reads the books.

There isn't, but there can't be any claim for the converse, either; surely, you
must do both? (A good biologist would.)
>
> Books are not constituted of butterflies. They *do* contain lots
> of words, however. More words than one is likey to encounter in
> one's few linguistic communities.

As far as the analogy is concerned, the words are the butterflies: documented
but incomplete records of what people have themselves observed (used). Then
the discussion may begin: this word is extinct; this word is not a butterfly,
it's a moth. However, just because it's documented as a butterfly, it doesn't
mean that it IS a butterfly, because the system of classification may have
changed, or the compiler may have made a mistake. One is hardly likely to get
a view of the current classification by dredging through all previous ones from
time immemorial.

Another reasonable analogy is that of the legal system. This is an attempt to
define a collectively-held notion of right and wrong, originating from a basic
set of morals (I suppose). Our notion of right and wrong shifts over time,
such that what was immoral or wrong centuries ago is now OK (at least, legal).
Individual morals have changed, and along with them, the collective legal
system. Yet at any given time, for a given population, there is an absolute
statement of the law (which is interpreted to a greater or lesser extent by
judges, supposedly erudite guardians of it). It isn't by any means perfect,
but it works. What was legal or illegal years ago is irrelevant today, except
for its historical interest. The point is this: if you were to teach people
how to obey the law, you would outline the basics as they apply today, and you
can have a concept of right and wrong, however vague it may seem. It's not
absolute, but hardly non-existent, either.

Does anyone disagree that there is an approximation to the collectively-held
language in our heads called English, that has a standard at any one time? Or
is there a near-infinite number of dialects, one for each speaker?

Sorry to drone on - Steve

[Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879]

My father, Lawrence W. Jones, was in the U. S. Army Signal Corps in World
War II, with service behind the lines in Germany at the time of the German
surrender. I asked him if he knew the word kluge/kludge, offering both
pronounciations, and here is his (E-mail) reply:

---- cut here ----
Yes, I have "kluge" (rhymes with Huge) as part of my vocabulary
stemming from either war years or undergraduate days; very probably WWII.
I always used it to refer to a makeshift repair or shortcut in getting
something going; e.g., using a coat hanger for a TV antenna (would be a
typical example). It can be used for either electronic or mechanical fixes.
It is also either a noun (i.e. "Let's rig up a kluge for this busted thing")
or a verb, often with "up" (i.e. "Can you kluge up a repair for that whatsis?")
The connotation is of a quick and dirty "field expedient" fix, without recourse
to fancy shop work or resources. An interesting place to look might be in
WWII signal corps manuals, especially later editions toward the end of the
war. I will scavange among friends here to see what else I can learn; e.g.
Uncle Nels (who is still up at the Lake).
---- cut here ----

This is definitely not an MITism, his reference to undergraduate days refers
to Northwestern University.
Doug Jones
jo...@cs.uiowa.edu

[Roger Lustig]

The subjunctive is *changing.* Note how "may have" has been
replacing "might have" all over the place. I've seen it in the
NY Times several times...

Roger

[Roger Lustig]

I feel pretty,
Oh, so pretty,
I feel pretty,
and witty, and gay...

Roger

[Pierre Jelenc]

In article <1993Aug23.140721.1@condor>, <whee...@logica.co.uk> wrote:

>Does anyone disagree that there is an approximation to the collectively-held
>language in our heads called English, that has a standard at any one time? Or
>is there a near-infinite number of dialects, one for each speaker?

Isn't it in fact both?

Pierre

--
Pierre Jelenc
rc...@panix.com

[HER...@auvm.american.edu]

In article <1993Aug23.113305.1@condor>, whee...@logica.co.uk says:
>
>"Gay" has essentially disappeared from use except as a euphemistic borrowing
>for "homosexual", much to the chagrin of the older generation.

"Gay" is not by any stretch a *euphemism*. I really can't imagine
in what sense it's a borrowing, either.

[Wendi Dunlap]

<HER...@auvm.american.edu> writes:

>In article <2590ot$r...@news.u.washington.edu>, litl...@mead.u.washington.edu
>(Wendi Dunlap) says:
>>
>><HER...@auvm.american.edu> writes:
>>

>>>Where does "I feel ... gay" occur in West Side Story? I once played
>>>Tony, long long ago, and I don't recall it.
>>

>>In "I Feel Pretty" --
>>
>> I feel pretty
>> oh so pretty
>> I feel pretty and witty and gay!
>> and I pity
>> any girl who isn't me today
>>
>Well....hm...they must have changed the lyrics for the
>movie, then. The song that *I* know goes:

>I feel pretty,
>oh so pretty,
>I feel pretty and witty and bright,
>and I pity
>any girl who isn't me tonight.

>The scene, after all, takes place in the evening when Maria
>is getting ready for her hot date with Tony. Little does she
>know, etc. etc. Are you sure you're remembering this correctly?

Absolutely sure. But -- you're right too. BOTH verses are in the song. I
forget which one comes first; would have to look it up, and my script is
in my storage locker. :)

--
| Wendi Dunlap * litl...@u.washington.edu | "They're not dead, they're |
| Currently playing on my stereo: | metaphysically challenged!" |

| The Jam, _Extras_ | --MST3K |

[HER...@auvm.american.edu]

In article <25b61p$d...@news.u.washington.edu>, litl...@mead.u.washington.edu

(Wendi Dunlap) says:
>
>Absolutely sure. But -- you're right too. BOTH verses are in the song. I
>forget which one comes first; would have to look it up, and my script is
>in my storage locker. :)

I too have a script. Mine is in Portugal! A colleague of mine says
she has the sheet music at home, so she's going to bring it in
tomorrow. Gosh this is important!!

[Gary Sloane]

Don Porges writes:

> Let's look at "revisionist". I think the
> story goes like this:

[varying accounts of the American Revolution,
Civil War, holocaust accounts deleted]

> These historians, who called themselves "revisionists", held that the
> first two were much more caused by conflicts among monied interests
> that had been admitted; others got onto whose fault was the Cold War;
> and so on. As the examples show, this was a mostly left-leaning trend,
> and it was populated with legitimate academic historians.

Actually, I believe this term "originated" as a Marxist term of
derision for those whose grasp, orientation, or spin on the dogma
revised revolutionary theory in such a way as to rob it of its
revolutionary content. I don't recall whether this goes back to
Marx and Engels, but certainly Lenin (in _State and Revolution_ and
"Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International", and
perhaps in _What Is To Be Done_ [published in 1905]) and the polemics
associated with the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960's (in which
the Chinese Communist Party accused the Soviet Communist Party of
revisionism) predate the fashionable adoption of this term by
modern historians.
---
Gary Sloane slo...@adoc.xerox.com (415) 813-6767
"ERRATA: For `errata' read `erratum'"

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1993Aug23.140721.1@condor> whee...@logica.co.uk writes:
>In article <1993Aug20.0...@Princeton.EDU>, ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>> In article <1993Aug19.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>>>In article <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>>>>In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:

>>>It's sort of like studying butterflies. You can read a lot of books
>>>about butterflies, or you can go out in the field and observe
>>>butterflies over the course of several decades. Or you can do both.

>> Alas, what butterflies *are* is far more easily defined than what
>> errors are in language. Any five-year-old can have a pretty good
>> idea of what a butterfly is, and may confuse it with a moth, but
>> not with much else. However, language and language change and
>> language errors aren't that easily schematized, and one's experience
>> with language "out in the field" is unlikely to carry one far enough
>> to allow one to generalize without actually finding out what the rest
>> of the world is like.

>Actually, while a five-year-old may have a concept of a butterfly, an
>entomologist will tell you how difficult it really is to classify them, to
>distinguish them from moths, and in some cases, from other insects. If you
>look deeply into a problem, the problem gets deeper. In this respect, it's a
>very good analogy. Species and species change constitute one of the biggest
>problems in biology, and biologists spend a great deal of time arguing about
>the classification of their observations.

But do *laypeople* engage in this debate a lot? You see, *everybody* uses
words, and therefore develops an informal idea of right-and-wrong when
it comes to language. What's usually missing is the rguments behind such
judgments.

>>>But I don't see any basis for claiming that he who merely observes
>>>knows less about butterflies than he who reads the books.

>There isn't, but there can't be any claim for the converse, either; surely, you
>must do both? (A good biologist would.)

Of course. Not that most of us *observe* language morethan 1% of the time
when we're out using it...

>> Books are not constituted of butterflies. They *do* contain lots
>> of words, however. More words than one is likey to encounter in
>> one's few linguistic communities.

>As far as the analogy is concerned, the words are the butterflies: documented
>but incomplete records of what people have themselves observed (used). Then

Uh-uh. We have books *about* usage. And fairly complete ones, certainly as
far as historical usage goes. Citations are one thing; large catalogues,
with a system behind them (however well applied) are another.

>the discussion may begin: this word is extinct; this word is not a butterfly,
>it's a moth. However, just because it's documented as a butterfly, it doesn't
>mean that it IS a butterfly, because the system of classification may have
>changed, or the compiler may have made a mistake.

True enough, but deattribution is not something one does just because one
feels like it. One needs a great deal of evidence to contradict a generally
accepted authority.

(Ever try deattributing someon's authorship of something in a scholarly
context? I have. It's the hardest thing in the world, and rightly so.
The establishment digs in its heels, and the burden of proof is squarely
on you.)_

Back to your metaphor. Sure, one can talk about whether the classification
has been done correctly, but it's far more interesting to do so when one
has evidence, and when one can actually explain what one *means* by "moth"
or whatever. In language discussions, the meaning of "error" or "Americanism"
or "slang" or "ignorant" is rarely enunciated, and on close inspection turns
out to mean "I don't like it" or "My grammar-school teacher told me not to say
it this way."

Which leads to the next problem: over the years, much has been published about
language -- far more than about butterflies -- that is demonstrably incorrect
or nonsensical. Simply counterfactual. (See Lounsbury for some historical
examples.) Now, no lepidopterist would even give the time of day to evidence
from a sixty-year-old book that was full of factual errors, out of date, and
lacking in references and other supporting evidence. Nor would a scholarly
discussion of butterflies include opinions from laypeople such as
"over half the people think this is a moth" or "it looks like a moth to me,
based on years of looking at butterflies and other things with wings."

>One is hardly likely to get
>a view of the current classification by dredging through all previous ones from
>time immemorial.

Not the same thing at all. Old words are not old classifications -- they *are* words, even if we don't use them in speech today. And we *do* read old
books. They have not ceased to be words.

History is important in another sense here. If something is claimed to be
a neologism, one may consider evidence like this in order to determine its
pedigree, since its history -- or lack of it -- was the issue in the
first place.

Unlike butterflies, words *can* be invented out of thin air, and at a moment's
notice. Such words may remain in the language; most disappear almost as fast
as they came.

Your analogy falls short in that you speak of previous classifications, not
of old butterflies. The history of usage is the history of the word itself,
not only of its classifications.

>Another reasonable analogy is that of the legal system. This is an attempt to
>define a collectively-held notion of right and wrong,

Most definitely not! Collective opinion is rarely the guiding force behind
legal systems. (If it were, do you suppose we'd have the Bill of Rights
anymore in this country?)

>originating from a basic set of morals (I suppose).

Not that, either. I suspect you'll find that the Framers disagreed on all
sorts of moral issues as well.

>Our notion of right and wrong shifts over time,
>such that what was immoral or wrong centuries ago is now OK (at least,
>legal).

Or not, as the case may be.

But that's irrelevant to the topic, just as the general public doesn't vote
on what lepidopterists should think.

The problem with language debates is that the issues are *not* moral ones,
even though some people dress them up that way; there *is* no clear idea
of right and wrong underlying many of the opinions.

>Individual morals have changed, and along with them, the collective legal
>system. Yet at any given time, for a given population, there is an absolute
>statement of the law (which is interpreted to a greater or lesser extent by
>judges, supposedly erudite guardians of it). It isn't by any means perfect,
>but it works. What was legal or illegal years ago is irrelevant today, except
>for its historical interest. The point is this: if you were to teach people
>how to obey the law, you would outline the basics as they apply today, and you
>can have a concept of right and wrong, however vague it may seem. It's not
>absolute, but hardly non-existent, either.

Nobody said otherwise. But:

a) "obeying" isn't an issue here. Everybody learns to talk, and does so
without recourse to rules (non-natives excepted, of course).

b) Of course, some people would *like* to make it an issue of "obeying",
as long as it's *they* who get obeyed.

c) Regional dialects, different levels of formality, etc. make a codification
of right and wrong on a global level impossible.

d) Changes in language are not legislated or promulgated by the judiciary.
They just happen, and enter the language by a more-or-less evolutionary
process. In other words, there is no record of language change per se;
one has no recourse to lawbooks. The only books available record behavior,
and such recording is necessarily done over time.

e) Obviously, what was said years ago *is* relevant to the language today,
for many reasons: we read old books, patterns of usage over time determine
the status of a word, and most important, the people who insist on judging
other people's speech most harshly tend to be conservatives who *claim*
to be upholding some standard from older times. Shall we not determine
whether *that* standard is as they say?

>Does anyone disagree that there is an approximation to the collectively-held
>language in our heads called English, that has a standard at any one time? Or

Yes.

Rather, there are *several* standards, which are (imperfectly) defined by
place, (in-)formality of situation, age of speaker, and so on. I have never
heard of any approximation such as you mention, that was not utterly
simplified to a few rules and a few words. Throw in pronunciation, and
the rest of the commonalities get flushed in short order.

>is there a near-infinite number of dialects, one for each speaker?

Those are idiolects. A great amount of regularity can be observed in
communities, but not nearly so much for the whole English-language
community, which spans the globe.

It's not an all-or-nothing situation; there are shades and degrees here.
But there is also a great deal of evidence to be considered, and many
people who talk or write about "correct" usage diverge from their
colleagues in lepidoptery and law by not even caring, or knowing about,
that evidence.

Roger

[Don Porges]

In article <1993Aug24.0...@spectrum.xerox.com> slo...@xerox.com writes:
>Don Porges writes:
>
>> Let's look at "revisionist". I think the
>> story goes like this:
>
>[varying accounts of the American Revolution,
>Civil War, holocaust accounts deleted]
>
>> These historians, who called themselves "revisionists", held that the
>> first two were much more caused by conflicts among monied interests
>> that had been admitted; others got onto whose fault was the Cold War;
>> and so on. As the examples show, this was a mostly left-leaning trend,
>> and it was populated with legitimate academic historians.
>
>Actually, I believe this term "originated" as a Marxist term of
>derision for those whose grasp, orientation, or spin on the dogma
>revised revolutionary theory in such a way as to rob it of its
>revolutionary content.

That's the second appearance of this version of the story -- Roger's
being the first -- so I'll grant it. And unfortunately, it *does*
undercut my argument, which was partly based on Eric's theory about
who "owns" a word, in particular one that describes someone or some group,
and whether those people can complain if their name is "taken away."
(And, incidentally, I was misremembering what "IHR" stands for -- I
thought the R was Revisionism.)

But I still suspect that the name "revisionism" was taken by neo-Nazis
as deliberate confusion, although now the question of confusion with
*what* is open.

[Next up, on Words From Hell: Messianic Judaism. No! Stop! OK.]
--
-- Don Porges
por...@inmet.camb.inmet.com
..uunet!inmet!porges

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug23....@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis wrote:
> Neat.. the only word in "English" with a final aspirated sound... magic
> indeed.

Not really. Many people pronounce the interjection "ugh" with aspirated g+h.

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug23.1...@news.uiowa.edu> Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879 wrote:
> This is definitely not an MITism, his reference to undergraduate days refers
> to Northwestern University.

Very interesting, if not (to me) particularly surprising. Reinforces my
suspicion that "kluge" entered hackerdom from military slang. If you can
find that Signal Corps manual and there's anything relevant in it, I'd
love to see it.

[Roger Lustig]

In article <CC9s6...@inmet.camb.inmet.com> por...@beretta.camb.inmet.com (Don Porges) writes:
>In article <1993Aug24.0...@spectrum.xerox.com> slo...@xerox.com writes:
>>Don Porges writes:

>>> Let's look at "revisionist". I think the story goes like this:

>>[varying accounts of the American Revolution,
>>Civil War, holocaust accounts deleted]

>>> These historians, who called themselves "revisionists", held that the
>>> first two were much more caused by conflicts among monied interests
>>> that had been admitted; others got onto whose fault was the Cold War;
>>> and so on. As the examples show, this was a mostly left-leaning trend,
>>> and it was populated with legitimate academic historians.

>>Actually, I believe this term "originated" as a Marxist term of
>>derision for those whose grasp, orientation, or spin on the dogma
>>revised revolutionary theory in such a way as to rob it of its
>>revolutionary content.

>That's the second appearance of this version of the story -- Roger's
>being the first -- so I'll grant it. And unfortunately, it *does*
>undercut my argument, which was partly based on Eric's theory about
>who "owns" a word, in particular one that describes someone or some group,
>and whether those people can complain if their name is "taken away."
>(And, incidentally, I was misremembering what "IHR" stands for -- I
>thought the R was Revisionism.)

I'll add that OED gives *several* early "revisionisms", most of them
Marxist; oddly enough, AHD gave *only* the Marxist one in the 2nd
edition. AHD3 has added a line for the general use of the word.

>But I still suspect that the name "revisionism" was taken by neo-Nazis
>as deliberate confusion, although now the question of confusion with
>*what* is open.

I confess that I haven't *seen* the usage you mention. Are you sure
that it was a neo-Nazi sysadmin who created alt.revisionism? I
suspect that this is a tag stuck *to* the Holocaust revisionists.

>[Next up, on Words From Hell: Messianic Judaism. No! Stop! OK.]

"Real Jews believe in..." Uh-huh.

Alechem scholem,
Roger

[Buckley Charles]

As an interseting little twist, I first learned this term as kludge (as in
fudge) while in the military. However, the dynamics are a little foggy as I
was stationed in England at the time. Who knows where that particular
pronounciation came from? This was in the mid-80s, so it has no bearing on the
origination of the word.

--
Charles Buckley buc...@ucsu.colorado.edu
It's turtles all the way down.
Just another West Virginia exile in the land of make believe.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.

[whee...@logica.co.uk]

I KNEW someone was going to pick me up on this - after I had posted it.

Not that this will force me to apologise in any means, but I will in the same
breath assure everyone that I was not intending to be prejudiced in any sense.

OK, the challenge is out. If "gay" isn't a euphemism, or a borrowing, what is
it? Are homosexuals "gay" in the older generation's sense of the word? They
may well be happy, but not all of them are carefree, decorous or
brightly-coloured!!

And of course, it's certainly less of mouthful than "homosexual". No pun
intended.

Joking apart, it would be interesting to know how the term entered the
language, and how homosexual people feel it describes them.

Steve

[whee...@logica.co.uk]

In article <1993Aug23.1...@Princeton.EDU>, ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
> In article <1993Aug23.140721.1@condor> whee...@logica.co.uk writes:
>>In article <1993Aug20.0...@Princeton.EDU>, ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>>> In article <1993Aug19.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>>>>In article <1993Aug18.2...@Princeton.EDU> ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>>>>>In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>
>>Actually, while a five-year-old may have a concept of a butterfly, an
>>entomologist will tell you how difficult it really is to classify them, to
>>distinguish them from moths, and in some cases, from other insects. If you
>>look deeply into a problem, the problem gets deeper. In this respect, it's a
>>very good analogy. Species and species change constitute one of the biggest
>>problems in biology, and biologists spend a great deal of time arguing about
>>the classification of their observations.
>
> But do *laypeople* engage in this debate a lot? You see, *everybody* uses
> words, and therefore develops an informal idea of right-and-wrong when
> it comes to language. What's usually missing is the rguments behind such
> judgments.

They do - but you are right to say that speech is in everyone's domain, and
biological classification - in the scholarly sense - isn't. [What was missing
was the 'a' in 'argument' ;-) ]

>>>>But I don't see any basis for claiming that he who merely observes
>>>>knows less about butterflies than he who reads the books.
>
>>There isn't, but there can't be any claim for the converse, either; surely, you
>>must do both? (A good biologist would.)
>
> Of course. Not that most of us *observe* language morethan 1% of the time
> when we're out using it...
>
>>> Books are not constituted of butterflies. They *do* contain lots
>>> of words, however. More words than one is likey to encounter in
>>> one's few linguistic communities.
>
>>As far as the analogy is concerned, the words are the butterflies: documented
>>but incomplete records of what people have themselves observed (used). Then
>
> Uh-uh. We have books *about* usage. And fairly complete ones, certainly as
> far as historical usage goes. Citations are one thing; large catalogues,
> with a system behind them (however well applied) are another.

Is "uh-uh" "no"? As "ah-ha" is "yes"? :-)

We also have books about classification - also a parallel.

>>the discussion may begin: this word is extinct; this word is not a butterfly,
>>it's a moth. However, just because it's documented as a butterfly, it doesn't
>>mean that it IS a butterfly, because the system of classification may have
>>changed, or the compiler may have made a mistake.
>
> True enough, but deattribution is not something one does just because one
> feels like it. One needs a great deal of evidence to contradict a generally
> accepted authority.
>
> (Ever try deattributing someon's authorship of something in a scholarly
> context? I have. It's the hardest thing in the world, and rightly so.
> The establishment digs in its heels, and the burden of proof is squarely
> on you.)_
>
> Back to your metaphor. Sure, one can talk about whether the classification
> has been done correctly, but it's far more interesting to do so when one
> has evidence, and when one can actually explain what one *means* by "moth"
> or whatever. In language discussions, the meaning of "error" or "Americanism"
> or "slang" or "ignorant" is rarely enunciated, and on close inspection turns
> out to mean "I don't like it" or "My grammar-school teacher told me not to say
> it this way."

Yes. The analogy is limited. Still, one ought to define what a moth is, and
to what they are related, before one can say your new insect is a moth. To me,
Americanism is not pejorative at all, and isn't concomitant with "error", by
the way.

> Which leads to the next problem: over the years, much has been published about
> language -- far more than about butterflies -- that is demonstrably incorrect
> or nonsensical. Simply counterfactual. (See Lounsbury for some historical
> examples.) Now, no lepidopterist would even give the time of day to evidence
> from a sixty-year-old book that was full of factual errors, out of date, and
> lacking in references and other supporting evidence. Nor would a scholarly
> discussion of butterflies include opinions from laypeople such as
> "over half the people think this is a moth" or "it looks like a moth to me,
> based on years of looking at butterflies and other things with wings."

We've discussed this before - and I agree with you. There can be some be good
as well as the bad, though. There are some charlatans in the world of biology,
too; people who simply want power and authority. A common human failing?

>>One is hardly likely to get
>>a view of the current classification by dredging through all previous ones from
>>time immemorial.
>
> Not the same thing at all. Old words are not old classifications -- they *are* words, even if we don't use them in speech today. And we *do* read old
> books. They have not ceased to be words.

Their usage may cease - become extinct - that was the point I made. A dodo is
still a bird, but an extinct one.

> History is important in another sense here. If something is claimed to be
> a neologism, one may consider evidence like this in order to determine its
> pedigree, since its history -- or lack of it -- was the issue in the
> first place.

Similarly - the evolutionary family tree of an animal lineage.

> Unlike butterflies, words *can* be invented out of thin air, and at a moment's
> notice. Such words may remain in the language; most disappear almost as fast
> as they came.

Speciation and extinction?

> Your analogy falls short in that you speak of previous classifications, not
> of old butterflies. The history of usage is the history of the word itself,
> not only of its classifications.
>
>>Another reasonable analogy is that of the legal system. This is an attempt to
>>define a collectively-held notion of right and wrong,
>
> Most definitely not! Collective opinion is rarely the guiding force behind
> legal systems. (If it were, do you suppose we'd have the Bill of Rights
> anymore in this country?)

The USA is still a democratic nation!! You can vote to change your system,
althogh it changes via your elected representatives!

>>originating from a basic set of morals (I suppose).
>
> Not that, either. I suspect you'll find that the Framers disagreed on all
> sorts of moral issues as well.

I said "originating". The Ten Commandments seems like a mixture of morals and
basic law (not that these are the basis of legal systems!).

>>Our notion of right and wrong shifts over time,
>>such that what was immoral or wrong centuries ago is now OK (at least,
>>legal).
>
> Or not, as the case may be.
>
> But that's irrelevant to the topic, just as the general public doesn't vote
> on what lepidopterists should think.

Its relevance is that over time, what people observe alters. This must equally
be true of usage? Do you agree?

> The problem with language debates is that the issues are *not* moral ones,
> even though some people dress them up that way; there *is* no clear idea
> of right and wrong underlying many of the opinions.

Do you think there is a clear right and wrong in law? What are courts and
judges for?

>>Individual morals have changed, and along with them, the collective legal
>>system. Yet at any given time, for a given population, there is an absolute
>>statement of the law (which is interpreted to a greater or lesser extent by
>>judges, supposedly erudite guardians of it). It isn't by any means perfect,
>>but it works. What was legal or illegal years ago is irrelevant today, except
>>for its historical interest. The point is this: if you were to teach people
>>how to obey the law, you would outline the basics as they apply today, and you
>>can have a concept of right and wrong, however vague it may seem. It's not
>>absolute, but hardly non-existent, either.
>
> Nobody said otherwise. But:
>
> a) "obeying" isn't an issue here. Everybody learns to talk, and does so
> without recourse to rules (non-natives excepted, of course).

OK - but there are mental rules for grammar, usage, etc., that get 'obeyed' (I
can't think of a better term).

> b) Of course, some people would *like* to make it an issue of "obeying",
> as long as it's *they* who get obeyed.
>
> c) Regional dialects, different levels of formality, etc. make a codification
> of right and wrong on a global level impossible.

Agreed.

> d) Changes in language are not legislated or promulgated by the judiciary.
> They just happen, and enter the language by a more-or-less evolutionary
> process. In other words, there is no record of language change per se;
> one has no recourse to lawbooks. The only books available record behavior,
> and such recording is necessarily done over time.

If legal changes were purely legislated, they would probably get more extreme!
There must be some form of evolution there too; exactly how, I don't claim to
know. (By the way, doesn't the OED record, to some extent, change?)

> e) Obviously, what was said years ago *is* relevant to the language today,
> for many reasons: we read old books, patterns of usage over time determine
> the status of a word, and most important, the people who insist on judging
> other people's speech most harshly tend to be conservatives who *claim*
> to be upholding some standard from older times. Shall we not determine
> whether *that* standard is as they say?

Yes - but as you pointed out in an earlier discussion, we cannot be held by
what our ancestors would have said.

>>Does anyone disagree that there is an approximation to the collectively-held
>>language in our heads called English, that has a standard at any one time? Or
>
> Yes.
>
> Rather, there are *several* standards, which are (imperfectly) defined by
> place, (in-)formality of situation, age of speaker, and so on. I have never
> heard of any approximation such as you mention, that was not utterly
> simplified to a few rules and a few words. Throw in pronunciation, and
> the rest of the commonalities get flushed in short order.

Standard written English is a global written standard. You and I seem to be
able to discuss things without too much dialectical problem (apart from
"uh-uh"). :-)

>>is there a near-infinite number of dialects, one for each speaker?
>
> Those are idiolects. A great amount of regularity can be observed in
> communities, but not nearly so much for the whole English-language
> community, which spans the globe.
>
> It's not an all-or-nothing situation; there are shades and degrees here.
> But there is also a great deal of evidence to be considered, and many
> people who talk or write about "correct" usage diverge from their
> colleagues in lepidoptery and law by not even caring, or knowing about,
> that evidence.

Indeed - but most people speak of "correct" in terms of how they might like a
foreigner, or a child, to be taught to speak, prejudices apart.

> Roger
>
Regards, Steve

[Dennis Baron]

>>>
>>>"Gay" has essentially disappeared from use except as a euphemistic borrowing
>>>for "homosexual", much to the chagrin of the older generation.
>>
>> "Gay" is not by any stretch a *euphemism*. I really can't imagine
>> in what sense it's a borrowing, either.
>>

>OK, the challenge is out. If "gay" isn't a euphemism, or a borrowing, what is

>it? Are homosexuals "gay" in the older generation's sense of the word? They
>may well be happy, but not all of them are carefree, decorous or
>brightly-coloured!!
>

Like it or not, _gay_ has had a sexual connotation functioning alongside
the less marked and more frequent sense for about 3 centuries. Its
application to homosexuals represents a semantic shift but not a drastic
change. As for the debate over whether the "old" meaning of _gay_
is in decline, Merriam-Webster says no, OED says yes. Maybe it's in
decline in the UK, maybe they're both wrong.

Dennis
__

deb...@uiuc.edu (\ 217-333-2392
\'\ fax: 217-333-4321
Dennis Baron \'\ __________
Department of English / '| ()_________)
Univ. of Illinois \ '/ \ ~~~~~~~~ \
608 S. Wright St. \ \ ~~~~~~ \
Urbana IL 61801 ==). \__________\
(__) ()__________)

[Don Porges]

In case I was unclear: I do *not* think the creator of the alt.revisionism
group, whoever that may be, was a neo-Nazi. I *do* think that the usage
is widespread enough that the name was chosen because it seemed a
reasonable description of what the group was for.

[Ulrich Mayring]

e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

>In <1993Aug23....@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis wrote:
>> Neat.. the only word in "English" with a final aspirated sound... magic
>> indeed.

What about 'neat'? Or, to a lesser extent, 'app'?

Ulrich

[HER...@auvm.american.edu]

In article <1993Aug25.115629.1@condor>, whee...@logica.co.uk says:
>
>In article <93235.142...@auvm.american.edu>, <HER...@auvm.american.edu>
>writes:
>> In article <1993Aug23.113305.1@condor>, whee...@logica.co.uk says:
>>>
>>>"Gay" has essentially disappeared from use except as a euphemistic borrowing
>>>for "homosexual", much to the chagrin of the older generation.
>>
>> "Gay" is not by any stretch a *euphemism*. I really can't imagine
>> in what sense it's a borrowing, either.
>

>I KNEW someone was going to pick me up on this - after I had posted it.
>
>Not that this will force me to apologise in any means, but I will in the same
>breath assure everyone that I was not intending to be prejudiced in any sense.
>
>OK, the challenge is out. If "gay" isn't a euphemism, or a borrowing, what is
>it? Are homosexuals "gay" in the older generation's sense of the word? They
>may well be happy, but not all of them are carefree, decorous or
>brightly-coloured!!
>
>And of course, it's certainly less of mouthful than "homosexual". No pun
>intended.
>
>Joking apart, it would be interesting to know how the term entered the
>language, and how homosexual people feel it describes them.

I meant neither to take nor to show any offence. I was merely taking
issue with a statement that struck me as utterly wrong. By "euphemism"
we generally mean a word that is used to disguise the unsavory nature
of the thing that the word it displaces denotes. Okay? Do we agree on
that? Euphemism is, in my view, the besetting sin of English, which
is prone to indulge in it to an extent that I think is unimaginable
in most other Western languages. That little room where you shit and
piss--there is no longer a word for it in the language that isn't either
a euphemism or hopelessly vulgar, just like the verbs for the eliminative
functions that I used earlier in this sentence.

"Gay" isn't anything like this. Calling "gay" a euphemism is like saying
that "black" instead of "negro" is a euphemism. It isn't. The political,
if you will, dynamic of the substitution of one word for the other has
nothing to do with an attempt to deny or disguise the unpleasantness
of the thing ultimately indicated. If you think the love of men for
men or of women for women is unpleasant, then that's your problem....
"gay" doesn't even *want* to address that. (Nor, of course, do most
Lesbians care to be called "gay".)

To a great extent, I think, "gay" is an assertion on the part of the
people who embrace that word as a name for their identity of the right,
the power, to call themselves by a name of their own choosing. In some
ways, I think it's similar to deaf people rejecting the term "hearing
impaired", which most deaf people *hate* (at least in my experience).
"Deaf", surely, isn't a euphemism. Obviously the history of these
terms is very different; the parallel isn't in the history of the
terms but in the political resonance that they now carry.

Personally (as a person to whom the word "gay" would apply in most
modern people's vocabulary), I don't care and never have much cared
for the word. I use it in this sense because it's readily understood
in this sense by practically everyone who speaks English. Also, the
"loss" of the other senses of the word hardly impoverishes the language.
Long before it became politically fashionable, and ever since, I rather
preferred the word "queer"; it implies a sort of special distinction,
a special grace, that I have always liked the sound of.

As to "borrowing": In discussion of language, this word is usually
used to describe the use in one language of a word from another
language, or the use in one specialized vocabulary within a single
language of a term originally part of a different specialized
vocabulary. "Gay" seems to fit neither of these cases.

As to the history of the word, there are conflicting opinions,
and all of my sources are in Portugal at the moment.

Oh, and I liked the "mouthful" joke.

[Gene Haldeman]

In article <1993Aug18.1...@lds.loral.com> ken...@lds.loral.com (Colin Kendall 6842) writes:
>

>I have to go home and do something about my head. Do you think I mean the thing
>on my shoulders, or my toilet?

Oh, come now. How many times have you walked into a conversation at a
point like this and assumed you knew the context? This is a specious
argument and I'm sure you can do much better, if you work at it a bit.

[whee...@logica.co.uk]

Some people still think it unpleasant, and I suspect that this will always be
the case. Yet at the time of coinage, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a
lot of shame and guilt attached to homosexuality (look at Oscar Wilde, for
example: only a century ago).

To my ears, "gay" is a pleasant word, while "homosexual" is not; it has the
word "sex" embedded in it, which many people may feel offended by (not myself,
mind you). There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, just as there is nothing
wrong with the bodily functions that you mention above, it's just that people
try to avoid talking directly of sex. Euphemism. "Straight" for "heterosexual"
is another.

> To a great extent, I think, "gay" is an assertion on the part of the
> people who embrace that word as a name for their identity of the right,
> the power, to call themselves by a name of their own choosing. In some
> ways, I think it's similar to deaf people rejecting the term "hearing
> impaired", which most deaf people *hate* (at least in my experience).
> "Deaf", surely, isn't a euphemism. Obviously the history of these
> terms is very different; the parallel isn't in the history of the
> terms but in the political resonance that they now carry.

"Hearing impaired" seems to me to be the euphemism; a "politically correct"
attempt at not using the "ugly" word "deaf" (which, to me, implies "stone
deaf"). ("Lots" of "quotation marks" in that "sentence".)

> Personally (as a person to whom the word "gay" would apply in most
> modern people's vocabulary), I don't care and never have much cared
> for the word. I use it in this sense because it's readily understood
> in this sense by practically everyone who speaks English.

Undeniable. But why don't you like it? (Just interested.)

> Also, the
> "loss" of the other senses of the word hardly impoverishes the language.

I know plenty of people who flatly disagree with you. My father's generation,
for starters. They feel they can't use a "perfectly good" term that readily
springs to mind because of its implications to listeners.

> Long before it became politically fashionable, and ever since, I rather
> preferred the word "queer"; it implies a sort of special distinction,
> a special grace, that I have always liked the sound of.

To me, "queer" sounds the most hurtful description possible for homosexuality.
I thought it was used by thugs who sought pleasure by humiliating gay men. It
implies deviation, deceit, and various other unpleasant connotations that I
would never wish to attribute to myself. Perhaps this is a US/non-US
distinction.

> As to "borrowing": In discussion of language, this word is usually
> used to describe the use in one language of a word from another
> language, or the use in one specialized vocabulary within a single
> language of a term originally part of a different specialized
> vocabulary. "Gay" seems to fit neither of these cases.

So the word does not now have a new specialised meaning, different from its
former specialised meaning? I think you are wrong.

> As to the history of the word, there are conflicting opinions,
> and all of my sources are in Portugal at the moment.

I'll check in my Oxford Etymological Dictionary this evening.

> Oh, and I liked the "mouthful" joke.

It was a "Freudian Slip" at the keyboard.

> H.
>
> Herschel Browne
> American University

Regards, Steve

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1993Aug25.123848.1@condor> whee...@logica.co.uk writes:
>In article <1993Aug23.1...@Princeton.EDU>, ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:

>>>> Books are not constituted of butterflies. They *do* contain lots
>>>> of words, however. More words than one is likey to encounter in
>>>> one's few linguistic communities.

>>>As far as the analogy is concerned, the words are the butterflies: documented
>>>but incomplete records of what people have themselves observed (used). Then

>> Uh-uh. We have books *about* usage. And fairly complete ones, certainly as
>> far as historical usage goes. Citations are one thing; large catalogues,
>> with a system behind them (however well applied) are another.

>Is "uh-uh" "no"? As "ah-ha" is "yes"? :-)

Ayup.

>We also have books about classification - also a parallel.

Who uses them? Lots of people use usage guides -- of whatever
provenance, quality, approach, etc. -- for some of their work.
Butterflies are at most a hobby for the non-professional.

>>>the discussion may begin: this word is extinct; this word is not a butterfly,
>>>it's a moth. However, just because it's documented as a butterfly, it doesn't
>>>mean that it IS a butterfly, because the system of classification may have
>>>changed, or the compiler may have made a mistake.

>> True enough, but deattribution is not something one does just because one
>> feels like it. One needs a great deal of evidence to contradict a generally
>> accepted authority.

>> (Ever try deattributing someon's authorship of something in a scholarly
>> context? I have. It's the hardest thing in the world, and rightly so.
>> The establishment digs in its heels, and the burden of proof is squarely
>> on you.)_

>> Back to your metaphor. Sure, one can talk about whether the classification
>> has been done correctly, but it's far more interesting to do so when one
>> has evidence, and when one can actually explain what one *means* by "moth"
>> or whatever. In language discussions, the meaning of "error" or "Americanism"
>> or "slang" or "ignorant" is rarely enunciated, and on close inspection turns
>> out to mean "I don't like it" or "My grammar-school teacher told me not to say
>> it this way."

>Yes. The analogy is limited. Still, one ought to define what a moth is, and
>to what they are related, before one can say your new insect is a moth. To me,
>Americanism is not pejorative at all, and isn't concomitant with "error", by
>the way.

Well, that takes us straight to the history of the word!!! "Americanism"
has been used in England since around 1850, when language writers noticed
that English was being affected by American usages more and more. It was
often used to dismiss usages that were not American at all, just as
"Scotticism" had been used for a while before that. It very often *was*
used dismissively.

In the discussion going on here, "Americanism" was indeed used pretty
much the same way that "error" was. And it was being used in about the
same sense as dismissive 19thC English writers used it.

>> Which leads to the next problem: over the years, much has been published about
>> language -- far more than about butterflies -- that is demonstrably incorrect
>> or nonsensical. Simply counterfactual. (See Lounsbury for some historical
>> examples.) Now, no lepidopterist would even give the time of day to evidence
>> from a sixty-year-old book that was full of factual errors, out of date, and
>> lacking in references and other supporting evidence. Nor would a scholarly
>> discussion of butterflies include opinions from laypeople such as
>> "over half the people think this is a moth" or "it looks like a moth to me,
>> based on years of looking at butterflies and other things with wings."

>We've discussed this before - and I agree with you. There can be some be good
>as well as the bad, though. There are some charlatans in the world of biology,
>too; people who simply want power and authority. A common human failing?

Perhaps, but their influence is not felt unless, like Lysenko, they get
political support. Language tyrants can intimidate people by the
thousands with their misinformation -- it's in a book so it must be
true -- and since everyone *uses* language directly every day, as opposed
to the results of biological research, the problem is perhaps of a different
order.

>>>One is hardly likely to get
>>>a view of the current classification by dredging through all previous ones from
>>>time immemorial.

>> Not the same thing at all. Old words are not old classifications --
>> they *are* words, even if we don't use them in speech today. And we
>>*do* read old books. They have not ceased to be words.

>Their usage may cease - become extinct - that was the point I made. A dodo is
>still a bird, but an extinct one.

As long as we're *reading* them and *understanding* them, they're not
extinct! The books we read influence our speech and writing, even if
nobody writes in that particular style anymore. Extinction is a tricky
thing here. Or rather, it has several levels. (Some words or usages
in Shakespeare *aren't* known to the average reader, but many more are,
even if they're not used commonly today.)

>> History is important in another sense here. If something is claimed to be
>> a neologism, one may consider evidence like this in order to determine its
>> pedigree, since its history -- or lack of it -- was the issue in the
>> first place.

>Similarly - the evolutionary family tree of an animal lineage.

*Slightly* similar. We use such a tree for *entirely* different
purposes.

>> Unlike butterflies, words *can* be invented out of thin air, and at a moment's
>> notice. Such words may remain in the language; most disappear almost as fast
>> as they came.

>Speciation and extinction?

More like spontaneous mutation, adaptation, etc. A lower-level thing.

>> Your analogy falls short in that you speak of previous classifications, not
>> of old butterflies. The history of usage is the history of the word itself,
>> not only of its classifications.

>>>Another reasonable analogy is that of the legal system. This is an attempt to
>>>define a collectively-held notion of right and wrong,

>> Most definitely not! Collective opinion is rarely the guiding force behind
>> legal systems. (If it were, do you suppose we'd have the Bill of Rights
>> anymore in this country?)

>The USA is still a democratic nation!! You can vote to change your system,
>althogh it changes via your elected representatives!

But the system of constitutional change and of representation ensures that
changes in collective opinion will *not* generally bring about a change
in law, until such pressure is quite strong.

>>>originating from a basic set of morals (I suppose).

>> Not that, either. I suspect you'll find that the Framers disagreed on all
>> sorts of moral issues as well.

>I said "originating". The Ten Commandments seems like a mixture of morals and
>basic law (not that these are the basis of legal systems!).

I *meant* originating. One can agree on a legal system without agreeing
on the principles behind it. This is the crux of the argument against
"Original Intent" scholarship.

>>>Our notion of right and wrong shifts over time,
>>>such that what was immoral or wrong centuries ago is now OK (at least,
>>>legal).

>> Or not, as the case may be.

>> But that's irrelevant to the topic, just as the general public doesn't vote
>> on what lepidopterists should think.

>Its relevance is that over time, what people observe alters. This must equally
>be true of usage? Do you agree?

I don't follow. What people observe to be usage? Or what people use?

>> The problem with language debates is that the issues are *not* moral ones,
>> even though some people dress them up that way; there *is* no clear idea
>> of right and wrong underlying many of the opinions.

>Do you think there is a clear right and wrong in law? What are courts and
>judges for?

To implement principles of right and wrong as defined in the law. Those
are framed in terms of hypotheticals, which must be applied to the
individual case.

Yes, when a judge or jury proclaims a verdict, they *are* saying that
what the defendant did was or was not wrong in the sense of the law.
It's the "in the sense of" part that is missing from many statements
about usage.

>>>Individual morals have changed, and along with them, the collective legal
>>>system. Yet at any given time, for a given population, there is an absolute
>>>statement of the law (which is interpreted to a greater or lesser extent by
>>>judges, supposedly erudite guardians of it). It isn't by any means perfect,
>>>but it works. What was legal or illegal years ago is irrelevant today, except
>>>for its historical interest. The point is this: if you were to teach people
>>>how to obey the law, you would outline the basics as they apply today, and you
>>>can have a concept of right and wrong, however vague it may seem. It's not
>>>absolute, but hardly non-existent, either.

>> Nobody said otherwise. But:

>> a) "obeying" isn't an issue here. Everybody learns to talk, and does so
>> without recourse to rules (non-natives excepted, of course).

>OK - but there are mental rules for grammar, usage, etc., that get 'obeyed' (I
>can't think of a better term).

ABSOLUTELY! However, *these* rules are not the ones that are invoked
by most writers on usage. Nor are they universal.

>> b) Of course, some people would *like* to make it an issue of "obeying",
>> as long as it's *they* who get obeyed.

>> c) Regional dialects, different levels of formality, etc. make a codification
>> of right and wrong on a global level impossible.

>Agreed.

>> d) Changes in language are not legislated or promulgated by the judiciary.
>> They just happen, and enter the language by a more-or-less evolutionary
>> process. In other words, there is no record of language change per se;
>> one has no recourse to lawbooks. The only books available record behavior,
>> and such recording is necessarily done over time.

>If legal changes were purely legislated, they would probably get more extreme!
>There must be some form of evolution there too; exactly how, I don't claim to
>know. (By the way, doesn't the OED record, to some extent, change?)

To a *great* extent. After all, it's "A New Dictionary on Historical
Principles."

>> e) Obviously, what was said years ago *is* relevant to the language today,
>> for many reasons: we read old books, patterns of usage over time determine
>> the status of a word, and most important, the people who insist on judging
>> other people's speech most harshly tend to be conservatives who *claim*
>> to be upholding some standard from older times. Shall we not determine
>> whether *that* standard is as they say?

>Yes - but as you pointed out in an earlier discussion, we cannot be held by
>what our ancestors would have said.

Of course not. But we must know what they said, so that we may avoid
being buffaloed by those who hold up the language of those old times
as a standard while claiming that some of the usages from that time
are actually neologisms that degrade standards, etc.

>>>Does anyone disagree that there is an approximation to the collectively-held
>>>language in our heads called English, that has a standard at any one time? Or

>> Yes.

>> Rather, there are *several* standards, which are (imperfectly) defined by
>> place, (in-)formality of situation, age of speaker, and so on. I have never
>> heard of any approximation such as you mention, that was not utterly
>> simplified to a few rules and a few words. Throw in pronunciation, and
>> the rest of the commonalities get flushed in short order.

>Standard written English is a global written standard. You and I seem to be
>able to discuss things without too much dialectical problem (apart from
>"uh-uh"). :-)

Actually, standard written English varies pretty widely from place to
place, too. Nor is it defined all that well; and change doesn't
happen everywhere at the same time. The "may have/Might have"
distinction that I've noticed is disappearing from the New York
Times is an example. I'm sure that that particular item is being
treated differently elsewhere.

Yes, SWE has a great deal of commonality in terms of passive use.
However, nobody *just* writes English, as opposed to speaking it
(OK, so there are a few exceptions...). There are very few people
to whom "The English Language" means just the written kind.

>>>is there a near-infinite number of dialects, one for each speaker?

>> Those are idiolects. A great amount of regularity can be observed in
>> communities, but not nearly so much for the whole English-language
>> community, which spans the globe.

>> It's not an all-or-nothing situation; there are shades and degrees here.
>> But there is also a great deal of evidence to be considered, and many
>> people who talk or write about "correct" usage diverge from their
>> colleagues in lepidoptery and law by not even caring, or knowing about,
>> that evidence.

>Indeed - but most people speak of "correct" in terms of how they might like a
>foreigner, or a child, to be taught to speak, prejudices apart.

Actually, they speak of it in terms of how they *think* they'd like
it taught. What they say they say, and what they actually *do* say,
are two different things.

As are language learning by foreigners and by children. Foreigners
*are* taught to speak; children learn it by themselves, for the most
part. And they learn those rules you mentioned above, without anyone
teaching them.

Roger

[Jim Finnis]

In article <1mYCx5#M75gkJV2xB6Yy2KZjcd7CjVh8=e...@snark.thyrsus.com>
e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) burbled:

>In <1993Aug23....@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis wrote:
>> Neat.. the only word in "English" with a final aspirated sound... magic
>> indeed.
>
>Not really. Many people pronounce the interjection "ugh" with aspirated g+h.

That's odd, I've always pronounced it as a gutteral...

>--
> Eric S. Raymond <e...@snark.thyrsus.com>

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Finnis, | Unit 6A, Science Park, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, SY23 3AH
Clef Digital Systems |
cl...@aber.ac.uk | Tel.: 0970 626601 Overseas: +44 970 626601

[Eric S. Raymond]

In <1993Aug26....@aber.ac.uk> Jim Finnis wrote:
> In article <1mYCx5#M75gkJV2xB6Yy2KZjcd7CjVh8=e...@snark.thyrsus.com>

> >Many people pronounce the interjection "ugh" with aspirated g+h.
>
> That's odd, I've always pronounced it as a gutteral...

In America, the guttural would be usually be rendered "ucch" --- as in "yucch".

[Robert L. McMillin]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1993 14:25:55 EDT, <HER...@auvm.american.edu> said:

> In article <1993Aug23.113305.1@condor>, whee...@logica.co.uk says:
>>
>>"Gay" has essentially disappeared from use except as a euphemistic borrowing
>>for "homosexual", much to the chagrin of the older generation.

I have recently read that gay in the sense of homosexual has roots in
Hollywood ... not surprising when they call W. Hollywood "Boys' Town".

--

Robert L. McMillin | Surf City Software | r...@helen.surfcty.com | Dude!
"It's okay to stare at my ear. I know you can't help it." -- Bongo

[William R. Ward]

In article <RLM.93Au...@helen.surfcty.com>, r...@helen.surfcty.com (Robert L. McMillin) writes:
) I have recently read that gay in the sense of homosexual has roots in
) Hollywood ... not surprising when they call W. Hollywood "Boys' Town".

I don't know where it originated, but what I have heard (this is
probably folk etymology, but what the hell) is that it originated as a
kind of password for finding other homosexuals without letting
heterosexuals know (and thus persecute you) that you are gay. The
scenario went something like this:

A gay man walks into a bar, and sits next to a possible recruit. He
says something like "I'm feeling quite gay today." If the other
person thinks he means "happy," then he's struck out, but if the other
person catches his meaning, they can start to flirt, without having to
risk being gay-bashed.

This sort of thing would be taking place about a hundred years ago,
when homosexuality was far less popular than it is now (to say the
least).

This has all the trappings of a folk etymology; it makes some sense
logically but it looks too much like a reconstruction. Any thoughts?

--Bill.
--
William R Ward __o __o 1803 Mission St. #339
Bay View Software and Consulting _-\<,-\<,_ Santa Cruz CA 95060 USA
Voicemail +1 408/479-4072 (_)/---/ (_) her...@cats.ucsc.edu
The Hermitage BBS +1 408/457-1357 (1200 & 2400 baud, MNP/5, 8/N/1)

[Don Porges]

In article <CC9s6...@inmet.camb.inmet.com> por...@beretta.camb.inmet.com (Don Porges) writes:

I'm following myself up here because I've lost the response(s) to this.

I've since looked this up in a recent book, DENYING THE HOLOCAUST by
Deborah Lipstadt. Her version agrees with my original claim, with
the added fact what I thought to be the "original" revisionist
historians took the name themselves from an earlier school, which
believed that the Treaty of Versailles was in fact a mistake on
the part of the winners of WWI because it over-punished Germany
and led to the resentment that the Nazis were able to exploit.
She agrees that the later school, the one that re-evaluated post-WWII
American foreign policy, called themselves revisionists in an attempt
to echo this earlier group; and that the holcaust-denyers took the
name themselves in order to misleadingly claim scholastic respectablity.
She explicitly refuses to use this term to describe them, for that
reason. She does not mention the Marxist use of the term, although
that could certainly have influenced the original term.

She also points out that in a sense, anyone doing any original historical
research is, some sense, a revisionist, since the goal is to learn
something new about the past.

[Michael Covington]

In article <257cfr$c...@techbook.techbook.com> da...@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Tilque) writes:
>e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

>>4. Orthographic change altering pronunciation as a common mechanism

>Words that changed pronunciation to match spelling:
> waistcoat was "west-kit"
> victuals was "vittles" (and still is in some dialects)
> forehead was "forrid"
(etc.)

This is what Raimo Anttila calls "pronunciation spelling" (the
opposite of "spelling pronunciation").

A recent example is "solder", which is normally pronounced "sodder"
over here, but has changed to "sole-der" in the UK.

--
:- Michael A. Covington, Associate Research Scientist : *****
:- Artificial Intelligence Programs mcov...@ai.uga.edu : *********
:- The University of Georgia phone 706 542-0358 : * * *
:- Athens, Georgia 30602-7415 U.S.A. amateur radio N4TMI : ** *** ** <><

[mathew]

In article <25ug9c$3...@hobbes.cc.uga.edu>,

Michael Covington <mcov...@aisun3.ai.uga.edu> wrote:
>A recent example is "solder", which is normally pronounced "sodder"
>over here, but has changed to "sole-der" in the UK.

*BOGGLE*

mathew

[00hfs...@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu]

In article <25ug9c$3...@hobbes.cc.uga.edu>, mcov...@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
> In article <257cfr$c...@techbook.techbook.com> da...@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Tilque) writes:
>>e...@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>>>4. Orthographic change altering pronunciation as a common mechanism
>
>>Words that changed pronunciation to match spelling:
>> waistcoat was "west-kit"
>> victuals was "vittles" (and still is in some dialects)
>> forehead was "forrid"
> (etc.)
>
> This is what Raimo Anttila calls "pronunciation spelling" (the
> opposite of "spelling pronunciation").
>
> A recent example is "solder", which is normally pronounced "sodder"
> over here, but has changed to "sole-der" in the UK.
>

I can think of a couple of systematic examples of pronunciation spelling in AmE:

-alm, now with the /l/ pronounced, as in calm, palm, balm, almond, psalm, etc.,
reminiscent of Mikes "solder" example, although I haven't heard that
pronunciation over here.

-or, the infamous "new agentive morpheme" I posted about last month, which now
frequently gets pronounced, by a narrowly definable class of speakers,
as if the suffix were the word "oar."

============================================================================
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Associate Director (317) 285-1797 (fax)
University Computing Services 00hfs...@virgo.bsuvc.bsu.edu
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[Raphael Mankin]

In article <1993Aug31.093708.21729@bsu-ucs> 00hfs...@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu writes:

>
>I can think of a couple of systematic examples of pronunciation spelling in
> AmE:
>
>-alm, now with the /l/ pronounced, as in calm, palm, balm, almond, psalm, etc.,
> reminiscent of Mikes "solder" example, although I haven't heard that
> pronunciation over here.
>

Our local livery stables recently had a horse called Psalm. The stable girls
are not the world's most educated and one day one of them was heard asking
"What does 'P@sal@m mean?" with the accent on the first schwa. Ever after the
horse was known as Possum.

--

Raphael Mankin When you run aground, _gybe_ off.

[Michael Covington]

Yes, the US pronunciation is older. It is not uncommon for American English
to preserve older forms of things that have changed in Britain.

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <26h1u5$a...@hobbes.cc.uga.edu>,
Michael Covington <mcov...@aisun3.ai.uga.edu> wrote:

>Yes, the US pronunciation is older. It is not uncommon for American English
>to preserve older forms of things that have changed in Britain.

`gotten'.

(Thankfully, American Cultural Imperialism comes to the rescue! :-)

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ...
wol...@emba.uvm.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance.
uvm-gen!wollman | It is a bond more powerful than absence. We like people
UVM disagrees. | who like Shashish. - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant

[Jonathan Stockley]

In article <26h1u5$a...@hobbes.cc.uga.edu>, mcov...@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
|> In article <25v8to$a...@news.mantis.co.uk> mat...@mantis.co.uk (mathew) writes:
|> >In article <25ug9c$3...@hobbes.cc.uga.edu>,
|> >Michael Covington <mcov...@aisun3.ai.uga.edu> wrote:
|> >>A recent example is "solder", which is normally pronounced "sodder"
|> >>over here, but has changed to "sole-der" in the UK.
|> >
|> >*BOGGLE*
|>
|> Yes, the US pronunciation is older. It is not uncommon for American English

Is that pronounced "odder" :-)

|> to preserve older forms of things that have changed in Britain.

--
Jo Stockley | "Life is just a bowl of All-Bran...
jona...@sybase.com | You wake up every morning and it's there."
j...@netcom.com | -- Small Faces, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake.