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Summary
Summary
Do you cringe when a talking head pronounces "niche" as NITCH? Do you get bent out of shape when your teenager begins a sentence with "and," or says "octopuses" instead of "octopi"? Do you think British spellings are more "civilised" than the American versions? Would you bet the bank that "jeep" got its start as a military term and "SOS" as an acronym for "Save Our Ship"? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you're myth-informed. Go stand in the corner-and read this book!
In Origins of the Specious , word mavens Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman explode the misconceptions that have led generations of language lovers astray. They reveal why some of grammar's best-known "rules" aren't-and never were-rules at all. They explain how Brits and Yanks wound up speaking the same language so differently, and why British English isn't necessarily purer. This playfully witty yet rigorously researched book sets the record straight about bogus word origins, politically correct fictions, phony français, fake acronyms, and more. English is an endlessly entertaining, ever-changing language, and yesterday's blooper could be tomorrow's bon mot-or vice versa! Here are some shockers: "They" was once commonly used for both singular and plural, much the way "you" is today. And an eighteenth-century female grammarian, of all people, is largely responsible for the all-purpose "he." The authors take us wherever myths lurk, from the Queen's English to street slang, from Miss Grundy's admonitions to four-letter unmentionables. This eye-opening romp will be the toast of grammarphiles and the salvation of grammarphobes. Take our word for it.
Author Notes
Patricia T. O'Conner, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review , has written four books on language and writing--the bestselling Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English; Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing; Woe Is I Jr.: The Younger Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English; and You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online.
Stewart Kellerman has been an editor at The New York Times and a foreign correspondent for UPI in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. He co-authored You Send Me with his wife, Patricia T. O'Conner, and he runs their website and blog at grammarphobia.com. They live in rural Connecticut.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestselling word maven O'Conner (Woe Is I) is that rare grammarian who values clear, natural expression over the mindless application of rules. In her latest compendium, she debunks the hoariest of false strictures, many of them concocted by evil latter-day pedants seeking to bind the supple English tongue with the fetters of Latinate grammar. A preposition, she proclaims, is a fine thing to end a sentence with. To deftly split an infinitive is no crime to her. And starting a sentence with a conjunction gets her approval, as well as Shakespeare's. Other misconceptions she targets include the idea that "woman" has a sexist etymology and that the British speak a purer form of English than do Americans,. Ranging through the history of English from Beowulf to the latest neo-lo-gisms, the author accepts change in a democratic spirit; proper English, she contends, is what the majority of us say it is (though she can't resist making a traditionalist plea to preserve favored words like "unique" and "ironic" from corruption). Writers will appreciate O'Conner's liberating, common-sense approach to the language, and readers the entertaining sprightliness of her prose. (May 5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Readers describing the opening chapters of this trove of linguistic lore may consider surprising an apt word. But then O'Conner and Kellerman will school them in the historical distinction between surprising and astonishing. Still, most readers will welcome the corrective schooling. After all, the authors assault illusions about language with such elan that the whole process entertains and even amuses. True, it may hurt to part with cherished but apocryphal anecdotes and folk etymologies. (Alas, we must bid farewell to the endearing story about Churchill skewering pedants who opposed sentence-ending prepositions.) But most readers will cherish the gains, as real understanding replaces the semantic superstitions obscuring common expressions ( rule of thumb ) and constructions (the double negative). But besides opening up a lexical treasury, the authors teach substantive linguistic lessons. Readers learn, for example, why Americans should shed their unwarranted sense of linguistic inferiority to the British and why the guardians of correctness must recognize the inevitability of language change. No one has ever coaxed more fun out of dictionaries.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF language were set in concrete, there would be no call for new books on how to use it. These days, most such books are at pains not to seem prescriptive. In 1996, Patricia T. O'Conner gave us the admirably entitled "Woe Is I," aptly subtitled "The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English." In this lucid and sensible book she criticized the use of "hopefully" to mean "It is hoped" or "I hope": "Join the crowd and abuse 'hopefully' if you want; I can't stop you. But maybe if enough of us preserve the original meaning it can be saved. One can only hope." Now, in "Origins of the Specious," she says, "I'm not hopeful about convincing all the fuddy-duddies out there, but here goes: It's hopeless to resist the evolution of 'hopefully.' " So use it, she says. "Hopefully, the critics will come to their senses." According to how you look at it, O'Conner has turned on her fellow preservationists ("fuddy-duddies," is it?), or she has evolved along with the language. In "Woe Is I," she took a hard line on the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested." Now she says the one, generally speaking, means the other, because "as we all know, in English the majority rules. All those usage experts will eventually come around. . . . You can take a stand, use 'disinterested' to mean not interested, and risk being thought an illiterate nincompoop by those who don't know any better." You'll note that "those who don't know any better," here, are the "usage experts." That is a bit much, coming from someone who is widely regarded as a usage expert. O'Conner goes on, however, to offer characteristically good advice, which is to finesse the issue (that is, to avoid confusion) by using "impartial" instead of "disinterested" and "not interested" instead of "uninterested." But enough about her. I say that only because in this new book, O'Conner, a former editor at the Book Review, and her husband, Stewart Kellerman, are coauthors who express themselves corporately as "I." They explain in an authors' note: "Two people wrote this book, but it's been our experience that two people can't talk at the same time - at least not on the page. So we've chosen to write 'Origins of the Specious' in one voice and from Pat's point of view." "Origins of the Specious" adeptly demolishes plausible but insupportable etymologies of "brassiere" (a garment whose inventor was not named Titzling), "rule of thumb" (nothing to do with wife beating) and other obliquely derived phrases and words. Which is not to say that the couple a k a "I" are beyond reproach. "I was a philosophy major in college," write Pat and Stewart (if I may be so bold), "so I have no excuse if I mess this up." Well, she/they does/do. The issue is "begs the question." The authors deftly lay out this expression's history and its traditional, logical definition: "taking for granted what you're trying to prove." But they go on to say, "English speakers have treated 'beg the question' illogically for more than a century and a half," which is no doubt true enough - but the authors' example, from Henry Adams, is quite consistent with the traditional meaning. The expression has been used, they write, "to mean avoiding, raising or dismissing a question, as well as prompting a different one." They thereby miss a chance to frame the contemporary usage issue more distinctly. Currently, "begging the question" almost always means, O.K., "prompting a different" question - but prompting with an urgency derived less from cogency than from the word "beg." Chicagotribune.com recently carried a far-fetched controversy over the decision of another newspaper's magazine section to run a cover photograph of an interracial couple kissing. "It's as if the couple is begging for attention," one posting contended about public displays of interracial affection. "Which begs the question of how real their affections were." The traditional usage of "beg the question" was analytic, probative. The current one lends itself to special pleading. English, we are reminded in "Origins of the Specious," is not "as logical as, say, Fortran or Cobol, or even Esperanto." Segue to Arika Okrent's fascinating "In the Land of Invented Languages." Shouldn't language be rational, foolproof, universal? Many people, in the passionate belief that it should be, have concocted alternative, ideal-in-principle tongues. Okrent lists 500 manufactured languages, dating back to Lingua Ignota (around A.D. 1150) and including Universalis Nyelvnek (1820), Ixessoire (1879), Ro (1908) and Prjotrunn (2006). Of the 500, the two spoken by the most people today are Esperanto and Klingon. (Modern Hebrew isn't exactly invented ; it revives and expands an existing liturgical and literary language that had functioned as a marketplace lingua franca.) Okrent, though no Trekkie, has gone so far as to make herself vocally proficient in Klingon, which was developed, and is still overseen, by the linguist Marc Okrand for the extraterrestrial world of "Star Trek." The author - who, according to the jacket copy, has "a joint Ph.D. in the department of linguistics and the department of psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago" - examines a variety of would-be languages and related philosophical tenets (there are no pure ideas, all signs depend on conventions) in a rigorously linguistical way. And yet her book is a pleasure to read. It shows how language systems connect, or don't connect, with people. THE most interesting character she turns up is Karl Kasiel Blitz, who changed his name, for connotative reasons, to Charles Bliss and set out to invent "a better, simpler system of pictorial symbols, 'a logical writing for an illogical world.' " In the 1940s he created Blissymbolics, which failed to transform human understanding but did prove a godsend - as a gateway to English - for children so impaired by cerebral palsy that they couldn't speak. Over Bliss's symbols hovered Bliss himself. Of his desire to realize substantial income from his decades of work, Okrent is rather less understanding than she might be. But she makes it clear that Bliss, personally, was no bargain. He was ecstatic when a rehabilitation center in Toronto recognized Blissymbolics' therapeutic usefulness - indeed, he offered its speech therapist his hand in marriage. But when the center applied his language too loosely, by his standards, he flew into tirades. "The more successful the program became, the more Bliss complained. . . . He was outraged that in one of their textbooks, they showed his symbol for vegetable . . . next to a picture of various vegetables, including tomatoes. They had totally misunderstood his system! This was the symbol for things you eat (mouth symbol) that grow underground! Tomatoes don't grow underground!" To catch on, Okrent concludes, a language must be useful to some particular culture. A popular presentation at the 2007 Language Creation Conference, she reports, was given by a librarian whose "language, Dritok, was born when he began to wonder if it was possible to make a language out of chipmunk noises. . . . The examples he gave sent waves of glee through the audience they sounded so strange, so inhuman, but there was a detectable structure or system that gave Dritok a scent of 'languageness.' He had also worked out aspects of a cultural context. . . . Dritok is the language of the Drushek, long-tailed beings with large ears and no vocal cords." Speakers of Esperanto are brought together by visions of world harmony. Speakers of Klingon have in common that they "are enjoying themselves. They are doing language for language's sake, art for art's sake. And like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned." Klingon's grammatical rules are flexible. "The language is just messy enough to be credible." Roy Blount Jr.'s most recent book is "Alphabet Juice."
Choice Review
In this wonderfully titled book, O'Conner and Kellerman explode many false claims and assumptions that mislead language lovers. Fans of O'Conner's earlier books (Woe Is I, 1996, and other works) passed along their linguistic betes noires, and in them the authors found a mix of fact and fiction, which they report on here in ten cleverly titled chapters. O'Conner and Kellerman correct familiar grammatical shibboleths (split infinitives, the singular "they," beginning sentences with conjunctions); report on the historical pronunciations of "schism," "niche," "flaccid," "forte," and so on; and clear up the folk etymologies of some coarse words (even using Grimm's law to refute one common misconception). Is British English more correct than American? The opening chapter explains the essential conservatism of the American language. Other chapters dissect Americans' love-hate relationship with French and report on the origins of some socially correct, incorrect, and troublesome expressions. Sprinkled throughout are historical tidbits (such as the origin of "jeep" in the Popeye comic strip and the myths of Eskimo snow terminology and of secret meanings in the Gee's Bend quilts.) This book should be in every collection devoted to the English language and on every language-lover's bookshelf. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. E. L. Battistella Southern Oregon University
Library Journal Review
Inspired by answering language questions on talk radio and through email, journalists and grammar book authors O'Conner and Kellerman keep explaining the English language in ten topical chapters. While some grammar and etymology questions are familiar, other topics are happily fresh. An example of this is the first chapter, which considers authenticity, namely, whether American or British English retained more original vocabulary and pronunciation. Skillfully drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary and other research tools, the writers always present conversational prose with different kinds of wordplays. For instance, regarding using pronouns, they write, "But one word is missing.the word that I would have used instead of 'he or she' in the last sentence." Because the work aims to explain even more than guide, it emphasizes historical background more than other recently published books such as June Casagrande's Mortal Syntax and Paul Yeager's Literally, the Best Language Book Ever. With an accessible tone and full of information, this work is recommended for public libraries.-Marianne Orme, Des Plaines P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Stiff Upper Lips Why Can't the British Be More Like Us? Winston Churchill gave the folks at Bartlett's plenty of fodder for their books of Familiar Quotations: "so much owed by so many to so few" . . . "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" . . . "this was their finest hour" . . . and more. But he didn't describe England and America as "two nations divided by a common language," though thousands of websites say so. What he did, though, was pass along a great story about how the two nations were indeed divided by their two Englishes at a meeting of Allied leaders during World War II. "The enjoyment of a common language was of course a supreme advantage in all British and American discussions," Churchill wrote in The Second World War. No interpreters were needed, for one thing, but there were "differences of expression, which in the early days led to an amusing incident." The British wanted to raise an urgent matter, he said, and told the Americans they wished to "table it" (that is, bring it to the table). But to the Americans, tabling something meant putting it aside. "A long and even acrimonious argument ensued," Churchill wrote, "before both parties realised that they were agreed on the merits and wanted the same thing." I'm no mind reader, but I'll bet the Brits at the table felt their English was the real thing, while the Yanks felt apologetic about theirs. If there's one thing our two peoples agree on, it's that British English is purer than its American offshoot. My in-box gets pinged every week or two by a Brit with his knickers in a twist or an American with an inferiority complex. A typical comment: "Why do you refer to 'American English' and 'British English' Surely it should be 'American English' and 'proper English.'" Ouch! Is their English really more proper--that is, purer--than ours? Which one is more like the English spoken in the 1600s when the Colonies and the mother country began diverging linguistically? First of all, "American English" and "British English" are how authorities refer to the two major branches of English, and reflect the changes in the language since the Colonies separated themselves linguistically from England. The differences are many, but they're minor from a grammarian's point of view. Most have to do with spelling, pronunciation, and usage. En?glish grammar is English grammar no matter where you live, despite a few exceptions here and there. The truth is that neither English is more proper. In some respects American English is purer than British English: We've preserved some usages and spellings and pronunciations that have changed over time in Britain. But the reverse is also true. The British have preserved much that has changed on our side of the Atlantic. In many cases, it's nearly impossible to tell which branch has history on its side. Take "table," the word that gave those Allied leaders such grief. In the eighteenth century, the phrase "to lay on the table" could mean either to bring up or to defer. By the nineteenth century, the Brits had preserved one of those meanings and the Yanks the other. So the verb "table" meant one thing there and quite another here. In case you're wondering who should get the credit for that crack about "two nations divided by a common language," the answer is nobody exactly. George Bernard Shaw was quoted in 1942 as saying, "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." But nobody is certain where or when he said it. What we do know is that Oscar Wilde said the same thing in different words in 1887: "We have really everyt Excerpted from Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language by Stewart Kellerman, Patricia O'Conner, Patricia T. O'Conner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xiii |
| 1 Stiff Upper Lips Why Can't the British Be More Like Us? | p. 3 |
| 2 Grammar Moses Forget These Commandments | p. 17 |
| 3 Bad Boys of English And Why We Still Love 'Em | p. 44 |
| 4 Once Upon a Time The Whole Nine Yards of Etymology | p. 61 |
| 5 Sex Education Cleaning Up Dirty Words | p. 79 |
| 6 Identity Theft The Great Impostors | p. 93 |
| 7 An Oeuf Is an Oeuf Fractured French | p. 109 |
| 8 Sense and Sensitivity PC Fact and Fiction | p. 121 |
| 9 In High Dungeon And Other Moat Points | p. 153 |
| 10 Brave New Words The Good, the Bad, the Ugly | p. 174 |
| Afterword Morocco Bound | p. 197 |
| Notes | p. 205 |
| Bibliography | p. 245 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 249 |
| Index | p. 253 |
