Snow Patrol

According to the show QI, it's a commonly held fallacy that Inuit languages have 100 (or whatever the claim is) words for snow.

What speakers of these languages do have in their linguistic toolkit is a plethora of demonstratives, a grammatical area sadly sparse in English - this, that, these and those. That (ha!) is not the topic of this post, however: please research this interesting usage of demonstratives in Inuit languages elsewhere.

English, in fact, has plenty of words for snow and for describing snow: snow falls, it dumps, it comes in the form of sleet, hail, in a blizzard, in powder and in slush. This week a new member of the lexical family came to my attention as it fell in Auckland: graupel. This is the form between snow and sleet and has been bothering Kiwis in this, an Arctic winter by Antipodean standards.

Have a look here for more information about graupel. It sounds very menacing and reminds me of my favourite Russian word, grom, whose rather wonderful onomatopoeia reveals its meaning: thunder.

Weather words are great, aren't they?

Polish and paint.

We paint our toenails. I don't, to be honest. Mine are pretty ugly. But anyway, we paint them - that's the verb we choose to describe and name this particular action.

It's a funny one because the substance we use to carry out this action is not nail paint, but nail polish.

But if you ask (or demand) someone to "Polish my toenails!", as my five year old daughter did yesterday in the swimming pool, it sounds a bit odd. As if the toenails were painted, but the paint was of such poor quality that the job required a little extra with some Kiwi and a couple of sturdy brushes. Polishing shoes is in the same area, after all. 

The reason this blog exists

linguophile

11 up, 5 down

1. One who loves language so much, that it becomes an irritation to all those in contact with said person. 2. One who majors in linguistics at a pretentious liberal arts college.  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=linguophile This is me. My lovely wife is a wonderfully patient woman, but we have busy lives. She doesn't have time to listen to my musings about the language we're surrounded by, what it means and where it's leading.  So I'm going to record it here instead.

The Apprentice

I love The Apprentice. I think it's brilliant, brutal, and deeply admire the contestants for their hard work, creativity, and unfailing self-confidence in the face of such stark criticism, evinced by their often total lack of common sense.

I also love it as a window onto my generation.

One thing I noticed from the last series, won by Tom (who I want to be friends with), is how the candidates tried to ingratiate themselves to Lord Sugar through their use of language. Have a look at their antics in the boardroom and see how they use reflexive pronouns instead of personal pronouns to attempt to create a formal distance, and therefore appear more elevated, and, in their minds, intelligent.

"That was myself, Lord Sugar."

"I look at yourself and see a successful man"

The question is whether the fact that this use of language appears more intelligent in people's heads will influence whether it becomes a feature of the language. English has lost its 'respectful' pronouns, unlike other languages (vous, usted) - and this could be an example of how English is streamlined and less needlessly complex than other languages, or a gap in the market ready to be exploited by a group of sales executives lapping at Lord Sugar's bowl of sycophancy.

Only time will tell, but I hope that in years to come the OED and descriptive grammars cite The Apprentice as the origin of this new usage.

I love my daughter's spelling of this adjective. She wrote "I was sged". She was writing "scared" - her phonetic spelling made perfect sense.