On The Naming Of Things

[peterbirks]

I have something of a dislike for two aspects of the English Language:

One is the intrusion of abbreviations where, to be honest, the abbreviation does not achieve much. The latest is the execrable "V-Day", which I noticed on Felicia's blog. At first I assumed that this was some kind of concatenation of VE-Day and VJ-Day. Victory Day? What's THAT all about, I asked myself?

But, no, apparently it's short for Valentine's Day, which is in itself short for Saint Valentine's Day. I don't really think that Dillinger and the like would have gained such a reputation if it had been called the "V-Day Massacre".

The second thing that I dislike is the naming of things in direct contradiction to reality. The only one of these that I can think of at the moment is a "wet bar", although I am sure there are many thousands of other examples out there.

This habit has two negative side effects. The first is that it is harder to remember the names of things when their description does not match reality. A wet bar isn't wet, it's high. Perhaps I have a distinctively literal mind, but when I think of a "wet bar", the image that comes to mind is a bar that is wet, not what most people mean by a "wet bar". And, since the name does not actually evoke what it represents, you cannpt "work out" what it is. You have to be told. This is like the difference between the Roman numeral IIII (meaning, fairly self-descriptive) and the numeral IV (meaning, not self-descriptive at all, but more efficient to write). Eventually we get the completely abstract "4". When you are dealing with frequently repeated concepts, this kind of shorthand is useful. But for physical things that you do not deal with on a day-to-day basis, a more descriptive language is better.

The second negative side-effect is that it makes the teaching of language to children harder. "Daddy, what does "wet" mean?" "It's the opposite of dry, poppet. Water is wet, and it makes other things wet." "So why is that called a wet bar?" "Ahh, that's because, errr...."

There are echoes of 1984 here, with language being wilfully corrupted so that nothing actually means what it seems. We see this all the time with spin doctors, but does it have to be (needlessly, as far as I can see) introduced in the naming of things?


+++++

Despite continued visits to the gym, ny weight has started going up again. Unfortunately I am not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. I've been increasing my weight-training (and the kilos lifeted/pressed), so the gain in weight might well be due to muscle build-up. However, I've also been eating more, so perhaps some fat is creeping back. Or perhaps both. Oh dear, I hope I don't turn into one of those people drinking protein shakes after training, never eating anything but steak and eggs after training and bread & pasta before....

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

V-day: my thought was of a VE/VJ contraction. But I couldn't remember when they were, so I vaguely assumed it was one of those funny holidays they have in the USQA - maybe "Vietnam Day" (they did win that one, didn't they?)

And I'd always assumed a wet bar served wet things. Like drinks. Which I thought would be fine. I wasn't keen on the idea of a dry bar, mind. Um. Google says it's a bar with a sink. I wonder why I should care about that? A bar with no beer, now, I think I'd like to know about that before venturing out.

I spent a pitifully futile 5 minutes trying to explain something about "-ough" endings to Martha when she encountered "trough" for the first time and attempted, entirely sensibly, to apply what she already knew to pronouncing it. I love the language and its perversities but I do wonder how any of us ever learn it to any degree of proficiency. I'm curious to see how Johnny, who's about 6 months into his reading career and has a particularly rule-based approach to things, copes with all the weirdness.

Mike

Spelling

[(Anonymous)]

English spelling really is atrocious. The whole point of having an alphabet (as opposed to thousands of little pictures like the Chinese) is to have a correspondence between sounds and letters. It's somewhat amazing that the rest of the world meekly learns this English nonsense instead of laughing it out of court.

My son's first language is Spanish, in which pronunciation of the written word has a few non-obvious rules to it, but once you've learned the few rules you're home and dry, because the language has the decency to follow its own rules.

-- Jonathan

Re: Spelling

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Of course, we should be careful here not to confuse the bad use of language with the illogicality of English pronunciation, although the use of a rule-based approach to both can have similar ill-intended consequences.

It's a bit unfair to blame English here. The language's very success comes from its ability to import foreign words willy-nilly, and the result of this is that illogical pronunciations are rife. Better, perhaps, to turn this on its head, and ask why a language so shot through (thruff?) with illogical spelling has become so successful. As you say, this is "somewhat amazing". But this is the interesting part. It wasn't political power. You could of course say that it was the British Empire and the American Empire that caused it, but what passes for English today had to win a lot of battles to get where it did in England (and in the US) before that Economic Imperialism took hold.

The problem with language is that it takes on a life of its own. "Through" and "Rough" are both old High Germanic in origin (at least in part -- "through" also has a bit of Sanskrit influence) from old High German "durh" (which moved in modern German to "durch") and "ruh" (now "roh" in German) and yet, in both German and English, the end has changed. And yet in German (which has at least retained some spelling logicality) it is "through" which gets the added guttural, while "rough" retains a silent end (durch, and roh)

www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/evoenglish.html gives an interesting quick run-through of how the modern alphabet tried and failed to cope with the large number of sounds that our mouths produce (which, by the by, makes the duplication of j with the soft g and the k with the hard c even more puzzling). The French and the German written languages have their accents, which English does not, but I suspect that this might even have been something that worked in favour of English, rather than against it. Kind of a "these are the words, this is what they mean, we don't give a fuck how you pronounce them". Net result, you can visit many cities in the world and hear "English" and not have the faintest idea what is being said.

Now, I really have spent FAR too much time on this.

PJ

Re: Spelling

[(Anonymous)]

All languages import foreign words, including Spanish. But Spaniards have managed to integrate these foreign words better than the English have done, so that the written language can be pronounced in a consistent way.

I think English speakers don't integrate foreign words into the existing logic of English because there is no existing logic of English. The language has always been inconsistent and illogical. I see this as a demerit pure and simple.

English does have some merits: the grammar is in some ways simpler than that of competing languages, the lack of accents makes writing easier. But if I hadn't been born into it, I'd really hate having to learn it.

Wet bar?

[(Anonymous)]

I never heard of a wet bar before. I might have assumed it was a bar set up in a swimming pool.

The OED 2nd edition says: "wet bar, N. Amer., a bar or counter in a private house from which alcoholic drinks are served".

-- Jonathan

Re: Wet bar?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was my understanding of the term. A kind of a bar that came up to about the height of the solar plexus. But I had no real knowledge of its meaning, because I would never want to use it in conversation. It's a bad phrase. I suppose that one could equally argue that the phrase "dry" (in terms of no alcohol being available, legally) is an equally bad use of a word.