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This book takes its title from an entry under “H” in The Economist Style Guide. Talking of “horrible words”, the guide says that while words that seem horrible to one writer may not be horrible to another, “if you are a writer for whom no words are horrible, you would do well to take up some other activity”.
FIRST CHAPTER – SLIP SLOPS
1) The first chapter is about “slip-slops”. The term comes from Mrs Slislop, a character
from Henry Fielding’s novel, which accidentally misused words, for example, “fragrant for flagrant” or “ˈvir(y)ələnt for violent”. A slipslop is, in fact, is a meaningless or ˈtraif(ə)liNG talk or writing, for example, “childish slipslop”, which refers to the way in which infənt use to speak. Word-switches have long been referred to by most English speakers as “malaproprism”, whose name comes from Mrs Malaprop, who used to speak in a confused way. Making the difference between the two, we can say that while a slipslop tends to make a modest amount of sense, a malaproprisms is less believable and plausible. In fact, a malaproprism is the substitution of one word with another of completely different meaning, but of similar sounds, for example, “raptus and lapsus”. It’s surely reasonable to suppose that in years to come, slip slop will have been absorbed into the version of Good English. We all help to shape the language: as a matter of fact, we are for sure misusing some words already, making a choice without even realising it.
SECOND CHAPTER – FOLK ETYMOLOGIES
2) The second chapter concerns “etymologies”, which seem to help us understand the
meaning of words through their history, where there is a disagreement about what they really mean. The meaning of a word is above all a matter of custom, in fact, Rebecca Gowers mentions the following example: the words “orphan” and “stepchild”, that, at first, were tricky to understand because of the wide meaning, but, at the end, thanks to the etymology of “stepchild”, the matter was solved. It is also introduced the concept of “etymological fallacy” through to the example of the word “beach”, which happens to have no known origin. Where a word has unquestioned roots, there are these roots should be definitive. Then, we also have the example of “condone” which, according to a common misconception, means “to allow or approve”, whereas, if you look back at its Latin origin, it means “to forgive”. If a “common misconception” about the meaning of an English word is common enough, how the meaning came about will be irrelevant to whether or not it is, in practice, for now, correct. Then we have the “folk etymology”, which is a change in a word resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one. For example, Jane Austen used “noonshine” as a pet substitute for “nuncheon” the ‘noon-drink’ or midday snack of the time. At last, the example which gives the name to the chapter’s subtitle is the word “harbringer”, a descendant of the 12th^ century – herbergere – originally a provider of lodgings, whose current meaning was arrived at only after it had started to be used to denote a person sent scouting ahead to find lodgings or camping grounds for a party of followers, knights, an army. One might wonder whether, with so much muddle behind it, the recent jump to harbringer is really such a crime.
THIRD CHAPTER – CONVERSION, VERBIFYING
3) The third chapter concerns the process of conversion, which is responsible for the
creation of a word from an existing one without any change in its form. This process can be realized from a verb to a noun or from a noun to a verb. Some examples of verbs deriving from nouns are: fox > to fox; ape > to ape; fish > to fish; badger > to badger and dog > to dog and cloud > to cloud. For all these words, it took years and even centuries to become verbs. Instead, the opposite process is represented by those examples: walk > to walk, think > to think. As the OED shows, some words were first converted from nouns to verb either decades or centuries ago, for example, the verb “to conference” which dates from 1848 and would be used by Thomas Carlyle and the verb “to dialogue” which dates from 1582 and was used by Shakespeare, and finally “to text” which even though it sounds modern, it’s not, because it was attempted in 1564, when William Bullein wrote it for the first time. Sometimes the register of the new word could be affected because of the change in word class, for example the verb “to off” derives from the adverb “off”, which for a gangster ‘to off a rival’ can sound slangy. It’s often ambiguous to understand if the word considered is either a verb or a noun but this can be clarified by the speaker’s stress pattern in the speech or the writer’s punctuation on the page. For example, if you think to the sentence “Bus Stops Moving”, “bus stop” could be considered as a noun and a verb or as a noun modifying a noun.
FOURTH CHAPTER – BACK FORMATIONS; IZE-MANIA
4) In the fourth chapter the author continues her path on how new horrible words
(verbs) can be generated, analyzing the phenomenon of back formation, which according to OED, consists in deriving a word from another one in a way that might well give the impression of the derivative word’s having come first. For example, we may think that the verb “to burgle” gives rise to the noun “burgler”, but it’s actually the contrary. Not all back formations are verbs: the adjective “greedy” seems to derive from the noun “greed”, but in reality, the process works in the other way round. Other examples are “diplomat”, which derives from “diplomatic”, itself derived from “diploma”. It remains that the stock idea of a back-formation is that of a verb derived from a
noun. In fact, if you think of ize-mania, it is that process which generates verb adding -
ize or -ise to nouns, such as, “to jeopardise” deriving from the medieval noun “jeopardy”. Perhaps because -ize or -ise is so easy to wield, verbs formed this way can appear lightweight and humorous.
FIFTH CHAPTER – THE PAST TENSE
- Another way to create horrible new words is by misusing verbs that already exist,
as it is explained in the fifth chapter. In particular, the best area of attack is the past
tense. When it comes to the past tense forms, there are 2 categories: the regular or weak verbs, which simply add -ed to the present and irregular or strong ones, which realize the past using different paradigms. However, not every verb stays in a single camp: it is normal in today’s British English to use both burnt and burned, both kneeled and knelt, quit and quitted. Sometimes one can use different past-tense forms of a single verb in the same sentence without being contested. It is also true that in some cases
example, the noun chatmate may be literal, but the verb to brickwall is metaphorical.
There are some compounds such as hogwash, pitfall, bugbear and so on, which are
hundreds of years old. Compounds are constantly being formed in English, in particular, they’re used to name new entities, to give edge to an existing idea and then, there are compounds whose appeal lies in being concise, nailing what it
previously took a whole phrase to express, for example, buzzkill means to quench a
general state of excitement.
NINE CHAPTER - PARTICULAR COMPOUNDS
- The compounds at issue in this chapter are different from those of the last only since here includes one of the little indeclinable words or ‘particles’ that we met in
Chapter 7: in, out, up, down, off, on, over, under, etc. These compounds are known as
“particular compounds”, for example, the verb to outsource, upsell, offshore, inbox,
offline etc. This type of compounds gives us adjectives too, so that we can have
ongoing problems, upscale suburbs, an actor’s breakout role, the offline word. Football
has coined its own example in the wantaway player – one who would like to shift team. Kingsley Amis described ongoing as a “popular horror” and explained that nobody who uses it in ordinary conversation without being humorous is to be trusted. The particles we’re discussing can be interpreted in many ways, and it follows that the
compounds that use them can be too. Think of verbs like onlight (‘alleviate’), onopen
(‘make intelligible’) and outbeard (‘outdo through a show of defiance’). If these
definitions do not come readily to mind when we look at the words, then it should be no surprise to discover that compounds of this type tend to change sense over time.
TEN CHAPTER – PORTMANTEAU WORDS
10) Modern dictionaries call words like slythy (lithe + slimy) and chortle (chuckle +
snort) ‘blend’; a century ago they were referred to as “contaminations”. We use them
all the time, but some go down quite badly, such as guestimate, which is an example
of portmanteau classified as “horrible word”. Dumpty compared the results to a portmanteau, because they give two meanings packed up into one word’. A slightly older portmanteau word is “smog”, a blend of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’ inspired by the dreadful air pollution of the late Victorian period. A portmanteau word is not always easy to understand, think of “staycation” which refers to holiday spent at home. There have been many failed portmanteau words
such as sexsational, which was coined in 1928 and must have had high hopes for the
term as a laster but has never become mainstream. Many portmanteau words may
sound childish or convey a feeling of silliness: the adjective glocal – global blended
with local – for all the ethical thinking behind its use, will be undone in the minds of
many, simply, it sounds daft. Some words get blended with others so regularly that the shortened part comes to qualify as what is called a “combining form”. There are classical prototypes for this
manouevre. Electro-, for example, now forms a ‘bound element’, used in electroplate,
electrostatic and electromagnetic. Now, let’s consider two examples of non-words,
such as alright and nother. The unitary alright is a merged form of all right, has for
generations been written off as dismally illiterate. In fact, as Bill Bryson explains, “alright ought never to appear in serious writing”, even though Collins claims that the contrast between ‘all right’ and ‘alright’ might occasionally be helpful, as it is shown in “your answers are all right”. Nother is another premium non-word, despised but persistent, particularly identified with the phrase ‘a whole nother’. It is a good example of what linguists call “metanalysis” or “false splitting”. Nother, is a very old word and
can be found in Beowulf, around the year 1000, where it is used to mean “neither”.
Nowadays its use is still uncertain, but it cannot be denied that a(nother) is deft, because it seems to be used.
ELEVEN CHAPTER – SYNCOPE, MUMBLING, MANGLING
- In this chapter the author introduces the concepts of “syncope”, “mumbling” and
“mangling”. A syncope is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word,
especially the loss of an unstressed vowel, for example, bosun from boatswain and
jetsam from jettison. The merest suspicion of syncope is thought to be a kind of
horror, in fact, Simon Heffer declares that substituting ‘specialty’ for ‘speciality’ is pretentious or just silly. Similarly, the word “adaption” creates some worries, being the shortest form of the word “adaption” and considered to be a misused form. Then, it is introduced the concept of “mumbling”, which is a way of speaking quietly and in a way that is not clear, lowering the voice or partially closing the mouth so that the words are difficult to understand. We can find evidence of mumbling in Shakespeare and Byron’s literature, such as, “hoo”, “bah” and “uff”. All these “interjections” have become conventional and are now part of ordinary English speech. We have our own modern interjections too. Numerous people have now slipped into using “meh”, “deh”, and variations on “eww” – threatening to leave earlier forms like “phsaw”, “phooey” and “yikes” in the shade. In the manual “Don’t” by ‘Censor’ it’s suggested not to mangle words, trying to avoid meaningless exclamations, such as “Oh, my!” “Oh, crackey!”, etc. When we use exclamations like - “hmm” “mmnn” – instead of giving an answer, we want to persuade the people talking to us that we’re interested in what they’re saying. But for our purposes, those good old catch-alls mumbling and mangling, provide a great realm of imprecision where dreaded non-words are occasionally born.
TWELVE CHAPTER – BABY TALK
- Among all the motives for deliberately interfering with the usual forms of our words, there is one that reigns supreme: the wish, broadly speaking, to render one’s language infantile. Many scholars believe that using this kind of baby talk in an attempt to support speech in the very young is sensible and good - and that it works. There are, however, further motives for deploying such vocabulary that have nothing to do with promoting language-acquisition in children’s way of speaking. One is flirtation. The word ‘ducky’ first enters the records of English in the writings of Henry VIII, who used it in a letter to Anne Boleyn as a pet term for her breasts. In a conventional account, those who use baby language to flirt cast themselves in either a needy or a protecting role, but the transaction has the potential to be far thinner. Baby language may be used – flirtatiously or otherwise – to veil indelicate subjects. “Piddle” has been a childish word for urinating since the late 18th century or “tummy” from stomach, and the lavatorial use of “poop”. Given that baby talk is implicitly hierarchical, it can also be deployed to convey contempt. For example, “diddums” – i.e. “did thems” mistreat you?” – is resolutely unkind. A feature of baby talk is the vocal comicalities, which seems to be difficult to spell. An infant generally moves from simple babbling to reduplicative babbling, such as in words like “mama, dada, we we, boo boo”. This kind of childish lexical is found in ordinary adult vocabulary too: in fact, the “reduplicative compounds” are really common in English: dilly-dally, wishy-washy, zigzag, flip-flop are all examples in which the vowel changes. Reduplicative compounds do not only come across as childlike, but so strong is their association with childish speech that it would be hard to coin a new example which not sound as childish. It may by this point be striking you that n one sane would risk speaking publicly in a baby language, even to a baby. And certainly, the limits are tight on what
FIFTEEN CHAPTER – NEGATIVES, OPPOSITES
- This chapter introduces the negatives and the opposites, which can be both used in an attempt to approach the divinity, as Smith in his hymnal did (“immortal, invisible God”), and in comical situation, as Shakespeare did (“My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun”). As seen, when it comes to adding negative affixes (dis-, im-, in-…) it is prefixes that dominate. Moreover, the book gives us the example of the word bender, which was used in the past to turn a statement into its own opposite. Just as bander did, so nowadays negative prefixes (dis-, im-, in-, -non-, de-, un-, ig-, ab) exist in order to make the reverse on an amenable word: thus dis- make disagreeable from agreeable, de- and un- make defreeze und unfreeze from freeze, and so on. Negative constructions are perfectly capable of changing meaning over time, as in the case of invaluable and priceless, which both now mean broadly of incalculable worth, whereas in the past they used to mean of no worth at all. The word disappoint has strayed even further from its original meaning. Because it once suggested dis-appoint, but its modern meaning is far from being the opposite of appoint. This is because various words in English that many people wrongly understand to begin with a negative prefix. Some of negatives have lost their positives over the course of the century: for instance, the adjectives exorable and consulate died over time. Some negatives, on the contrary, have never had their positive at all: the word disastrous is formed from parts meaning, but there has never been an astrous in the language to mean fortunate. Of course, opposites or notional opposites are not always formed using negatives. Thomas Nashe coined the idea of going on footback as an alternative to horseback. As regard to opposites, it is possible to have more than one opposite for a word: immoral and amoral for moral, unlawful and lawfulness for lawful.
SIXTEENTH CHAPTER – DOUBLE NEGATIVES
- The author in this chapter deepens the topic of negatives, in particular analyzing the “double negative”. It can cause annoyance and, as Simon Heffer explains, it is an offence against logic and it shouldn’t have place in civilized writing. This is because two negatives cancel each other out. And simply as a matter of good style, he believes, one should express one’s thoughts in a positive form (everyone is here? better than no one is missing?). This phenomenon was called by Greeks litotes, which is a rhetorical figure in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary. Mr. Heffer rules on double negatives that they are unfunny if they attempt to be humorous and if they are an attempt to be funny, they fail. Louis Armstrong gives as an example of what linguists call “negative concord” with his statement “the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public”. It could be seen by some as illogical, but it is nothing more than emphasis, even though Mr. Heffer remarks that deploying negatives for emphasis is a common feature of vulgar usage. Examples of litotes and negative concord can also be found packed into single words, as in the case of the word irregardless. Indeed, Johnson in his dictionary calls it a barbarous ungrammatical conjunction of two negatives.
SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER – WORLD INFLATION
- In this chapter the author introduces another form of emphasis, or overemphasis:
word inflection , a phenomenon which adds a bit of lexical oomph to our regular
vocabulary by simply sticking on a prefix and interpreting it as an intensifier (morphemic pleonasm). Indeed, pre-prepared and pre-planned are thought to add
emphasis, but for some people they only mean prepare and planned. Sometimes words can be interpreted in different ways, such as in the cause of “precautious”; it can either refer to “the taking of precautions” or “very very cautious”. However, it is bound to be classed as vile. Adding a needless prefix to create a new word can be easy, but even easier is to drag strong terms away from their literal or customary context so as to exploit their hyperbolic qualities but this effect can be short-lived. The
decreasing of the rhetorical force of such words as epic, abysmal and awesome
mirrors the fate of many stock phrases that use repetition for emphasis. A rush of negatives is by no means the only way that this is achieved. For starters, there are numerous standard pairs in English, the stagey ‘lo and behold’, the strategic ‘all well and good, but…’, the teasing ‘maybe, maybe not’. Expressions of this kind can become so deeply embedded in the language that their duplicate nature rarely strikes us. There are also single-word examples of this doubling. Consider ‘haphazard’.
Hazard is a word of Arabic origin meaning ‘chance’. Hap, as in perhaps or happen,
originally Scandinavian, also means ‘chance’. Thus, one might argue that haphazard
could as well be ‘haphap’ or ‘hazardhazard’. There’s also the label of syntactic pleonasm, which is is the use of more words or parts of words than are necessary or sufficient for clear expression (for instance, "black darkness", "burning fire"). Such redundancy is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria and might be considered a fault of style.[1] Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Some of the more popular forms of pleonasm come across as shameless noise, others, on the contrary, appear more calculating. Beauty companies, to avoid blunt untruth, often resort in their advertising copy to pleonastic assertions that are hard to unscramble, as for instance in this strapline from the cosmetic company Lancôme: “Wrinkles appear visibly reduced”.
EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER - IMPRECISION
- According to chapter 18, another way to misuse English is being vague with words
of number and measure. It could be the case of certain, myriad and decimate. As the
OED shows, when it comes to analyze the Greek origin of the word myriad, should
mean “ten thousand”; but it’s actually used to refer to an uncountable large number, though it’s not clear yet whether it should be used as an adjective or not.
Another interesting example is that of the words decimate and decimation, which in
the past referred to the taking of a tithe. Nowadays, lots of linguists point out that it means an exact amount of a reduction , since it comes from the Latin dec-, 10, so it is related to the value 10. English provides many other words whose specific values have been altered in defiance of their etymology. The noun journey, for instance,
comes from the Old French journee or ‘day’, and in English was used from the 13th
century to mean ‘a day’s travel’. Some time after journey’s travelling sense was
established, it began to be used also to mean ‘a day’s labour’, making a journeyman a
day-labourer. Similarly, the definition of the word “quarantine” derived from Latin, was a forty-day period during which a widow had the right to remain in the property of her deceased husband, whereas nowadays it refers to a period during which one has to stay isolated. Another form of imprecision is the careless use of false singulars and
plurals, which is common enough, for example, the Latin plural data can legitimately
be used in the singular in English. ON REGISTER Our choice of verbal register is, in the most general sense, our choice of the type and grade of our language in relation to the circumstances in which we are using it. This
Swift wrote that English is ‘overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our language’. In a number of editions of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, numerous slang terms are glossed in the same way. Tuzzy-muzzy: ‘the monosyllable’; bottomless pit: ‘the monosyllable’ and so on… Often monosyllabic words are used in poetry and in prose to substitute longer words. English monosyllables are not all always automatically low and worthless, and some are as elevated as any words can be. The value of monosyllables is still discussed nowadays, in fact, to ask a person to put something ‘in words of one syllable’ means ‘be clear and get to the point’. But it is also true that if we describe a person as monosyllabic, we are saying that he or she is uncommunicative. Mr Heffer categorizes some monosyllables as pure slang and says they have no place in respectable writing, such as in the case of the words biff, bop, bonce, dweeb, bint and so on… In short, individual monosyllables, as much as any words can end up being identified with particular registers.
TWENTY ONE CHAPTER - BOVRILISATION
- This chapters starts with John Humphrys’s statement, according to which those ‘vandals’ who use ‘grotesque abbreviations’ in their text messages are ‘pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences, raping our vocabulary’. He explained that the
putting of u for you or 4 for for was destroying our language. There are many types of
word shortenings: abbreviation, acronym, initialism. Abbreviation is a general term for a word made from the beginning of other words (LMK – let me know); an initialism is an abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately (BBC) while an acronym, on the contrary, is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other
words and pronounced as a word (e.g. ASCII, NASA). An acronym like Soweto, or laser,
may become so settled in the language that we rarely think of it as an abbreviated form. And even an initialism can come loose its origins. Paul Berg noted that English words had been being pruned by ‘unknown gardeners of the language’ for centuries.
There are a lot of abbreviations which are really old, for example, Mr from Master is
first found in 1447; the shortened form fan, from the 1860, meaning broadly an
‘admirer’, is derived from the word fanatic. In the 18th^ century, many notable writers
took a stand against words pared down in this manner. In fact, Swift, in his work, used
words such as ‘nite’ for night, ‘ppt’ for poppet, in order to parody the verbal habit of
that time. As all ridiculous words make their first entry into a language by familiar phrases, they maybe will in time be looked upon as a part of English language. For
example, vizzing may never have gained a hold, incog for incognito is now pretty
recherché and pos or pozz did not survive in common use either. But the miserably
curtailed mob is of course fully ‘part of our Tongue.’ And rep, too persists, though it still feels like a shortening. The 19th^ century saw a similar mixed bag of responses to shortened words: zoo for zoological gardens, cits for citizens and phone for telephone. During Victorian age, there were people who complained about the use of some
words, saying, for example, not to use the abbreviation gent. (vulgar) for gentleman,
under any circumstances. In Victorian period were newspapers were full of truncated forms, for instance, it was common to find writing of sort: ‘XPD teacher’, ‘Ex.refs.’, ‘clergyman’s Dtr’. This was also the era of what we now call ‘shorthand’, including system of single-sign abbreviations sometimes referred to by those who first devised
them as a grammalogues’. Examples of younger bovrilized forms are peeps for
peoples, HIFW for ‘how I feel when’ and MFW for ‘my face when’ and lol to mean
‘laugh out loud’. The internet is full of English that has been altered and this is fertile ground for display linguistic one-upmanship. A general label for one simple code often
used to distort English is leetspeak, using numbers to approximate the appearance of
some of the letters.
TWENTY TWO CHAPTER – MACRONIC HOO-HA
- Chapter 22 is a kind of summary of the previous chapters regarding some misuses of the English language. In fact, it is said that by using every trick in this book we could achieve a macaronic style, which is characterized by a mixture of vernacular words mixed up0 together with Latin words or Latinized words or with words from one or more other foreign languages.
TWENTY THREE CHAPTER –
- In the final chapter it is provided the definition of gripers who are the guardians of good English. In fact, they complain about all the misuses described in this book; some of them find no need of new extra words, claiming that they are corrupting English. Most of the guardians of what they declare to be Good English advocate a style that is calm, lucid and direct but they do not always achieve these qualities themselves.
