How English is changing

2005.04.15 — Culture | Language | by Roland Grant

In my last couple of articles, I explored how German is being reformed and how English should be. Before you imagine that English language reform is impossible for cultural or financial reasons, consider that the language is changing anyway.

Like any language, English is changing in several ways: pronunciation, spelling, and grammar.

In the last ten to twenty years, we have seen several changes in pronunciation, mostly due to confusion over spelling.

Reference: Accented Reading Alphabet (ARA) pronunciation guide.

Will & shall

When is the last time you heard someone use shall in casual conversation? Gray-haired grammarians may argue that there is a useful distinction between them, but most speakers disagree. The traditional distinction is that will indicates personal choice and shall indicates a prediction of the future, but Douglas MacArthur changed that forever with "I shall return."

Hopefully

Altho hopefully being used to mean "we all hope that" didn't appear until the early 20th century, it's here to stay. There is an obvious correlation with words like thankfully and fortunately, which have been used to modify the whole sentence that follows them for centuries. Linguists may argue that fortunately means "it is fortunate that" and not "we all fortune that," but thankfully means "we all are thankful that" and that's close enough for most people.

Tsunami & tidal wave

In the last fifteen years or so, tsunami gradually became the term of choice for news reporters and documentarians when talking about the phenomenon. These folks generally take their cues on such things from the researchers and experts in the field in question, of course, so we can assume that the term became popular there first.

The older term, tidal wave, is often said (dismissively) to be misleading or even incorrect because the waves have nothing to do with the tide. Sometimes in the next breath, these same sources explain that tsunami is Japanese for "harbor wave" without recognizing the irony that the phenomenon also has nothing to do with harbors. In both cases, it's like referring to all fires as house fires.

Americans have a hard time pronouncing tsunami because TS is not a natural initial consonant cluster in the language (it appears only in tsar, which itself is usually pronounced zär), so they generally pronounce it tsúnämï without the T. Personally, I don't understand why we don't just use giant wave or superwave. That describes the phenomenon accurately without resorting to hard-to-pronounce and innacurate foreign borrowings. But tsunami seems here to stay.

Long-lived

This phrase comes from "long life." A creature or program that has a long life is said to be lõng-líved with a long I sound. The change of F to V is the same as that found in wolf to wolves and elf to elves (and formerly in staff to staves, but that changed generations ago). But since live and líve are spelled the same, and since the lived is a common verb and líved is a rare adjective, it is easy to become confused about the pronunciation. Now, even the most proper speakers rhyme it with sieved instead of jived.

Erring

Much like long-lived, it used to be popular to pedantically correct people who say érr instead of err. They've pretty much given up now, thankfully, and even the most proper television newspeople say it. The comparison to error is simply too strong to maintain such a pointless difference.

Cache & cachet

When the US military invaded Iraq in 2003, the news coverage was much more intense than it had been even for the invasion of Afghanistan. Suddenly, every American soldier was looking for a "caćhé" of weapons or loot. How this word came to be mispronounced by the entire US military is a mystery, but anything so institutionalized could well be here to stay. Cachet (caćhét) is a real word, of course, which means "mark of distinction." I don't think anyone was searching Iraq for marks of distinction. The problem, of course, is that cache (caćhe) sounds like cash (caśh). Too bad it hasn't gone the other way (more German and less French) to become cache; the comparison to catch is more natural and eventually the spelling would change as well. Looking for "a catch of weapons" sounds pretty natural even now.

Lay & lie

Long the bugbear of grammarians, lie and lay continue to be mixed up, but now people are caring less and less. Lie is what things do themselves; lay is what you do to something else. This is the same distinction as between sit and set (which show no sign of changing). But there's too much confusion between lie like a lazy cat and lie like a politician. So, it's likely that lay will come to mean "prostrate oneself or something else" while lie will come only to mean "tell falsehoods."

Hung & hanged

Only a few years ago, learned men would tell you that signs are hung and criminals are hanged. This is somewhat similar to the sit/set and lie/lay distinctions, but it is a false distinction. The verb in both cases is hang, and the action is the same; the only difference is the (initial) living state of the criminal. This is a positive development, then, but unfortunate in that hanged would be the better overall choice, since it is regular while hung is irregular (technically, it is a "strong" Anglo-Saxon verb because it changes its primary vowel). Exacting speakers will still say hanged. My recommendation is to hang them.

If I was & were

The subjunctive is weak in English ("be that as it may" is part of it), and is gradually going away. Constructions like "if I were involved" and "it's important that he be involved" are starting to sound ungrammatical to native speakers. Instead, they substitute "if I was involved" and "it's important that he is involved" and everyone is happy.

Capitalization

Capitalization has always been a bit hinky in English. The founding fathers capitalized whatever seemed important in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, so who are we to tell office workers that customer service representative and sales manager should not be capitalized? Some will back off when you point out that queen, president, and doctor aren't capitalized unless they appear with a name, but others will press on resolutely, upper-casing review process and accounting codes. Such is the way of the world. Indeed, Wikipedians have a bizarre convention of capitalizing "president" and "vice-president" regardless of context, despite all traditional and current publishing conventions.

Comprised & composed of

It has become quite common to say "x is comprised of a, b, and c." Traditional usage requires the construction "x comprises a, b, and c." The culprit is likely confusion with "x is composed of a, b, and c," which is correct. It is probably a demonstrated fact that comprised of is now standard usage, considering that some people will confidently "correct" examples of comprises to is comprised of. The best a pedant can hope for is to avoid the word altogether.

Chomping & champing at the bit

You can hardly blame people for mixing up a common verb chomp with one that only appears in one old saying. Champing has essentially the same meaning anyway, so it's likely that champing will disappear forever.

Flush & flesh it out

It's unclear why many people say "let's flush this out," rather than "let's flesh this out," but it's so common that it seems likely to take over the traditional saying. Fleshing something out refers, naturally, to putting proverbial meat on the proverbial skeleton of an idea. Flushing something out presumably refers to scaring the details out of the underbrush, and presumably not flushing it down the proverbial toilet.

Verbal & oral

Careful writers (and speakers) still make the old a distinction between what is verbal (written or spoken words) and what is oral (use of the mouth for any purpose), but most regular people do not. Perhaps because of its increasingly public use in the phrase oral sex, oral has ceased to be used for things having to do with speech and verbal is substituted, usually as a direct opposite for written. In the business world, phrases like "verbal agreement" and "verbal transition" are common, as if they are informal, spoken exchanges and not formal documents.

Buffalo & bear

There is a weird trend among Americans to treat more and more animal singulars as their own plurals. This trend uses sheep, deer, and fish as the model and extends it, for unknown reasons, to buffalo, bear and even turkey instead of buffaloes, bears, and turkeys. One would hope the trend would go the other way, toward regularizarion of sheeps, deers, and fishes, but this appears not to be the case. Perhaps plural bear and buffalo are merely a fad.

Forecastle & gunwhale

Long ago, some lexicographer foolishly asked sailors how to pronounce the various words associated with sailing, and the result was many years of fo'c'sle, gun'l, and bosun, pronunciations for forecastle, gunwhale, and boatswain, among a number of others. That trend is slowly reversing, at least in the US, particularly among the US Navy. The full pronunciation of forecastle won't get you keel-hauled, altho it may be awhile longer before boatswain and cockswain recover.

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Andrea Marquez writes:

Loved your explanations! I was looking for the correct way to say "flesh it out" but I've always used "flush" never knowing I was incorrect! Incidentally, I'm surprised you don't have something about "jive" and "jibe" -- so many people get that incorrect (as I did until a couple of years ago when I looked it up).

Roland Grant replies:

Excellent example of another shift. Jive means "to kid or mislead" (as in jive talk) while jibe means "to agree with" (from a nautical term for moving the sail to match the wind direction). But the black music connotation that jive also has (as in jive music), suggests to some people that it means "to be in harmony with" or something similar, which is a rather ironic shift. Since black culture is more current than old sailing terminology, it's likely that jibe will fade away completely.

That reminds me of another example: "If that's what you think, you've got another thing coming." Judas Priest even wrote a song based on that saying. But the traditional wording is "...you've got another think coming." It's a joke based on the difference between the verb think and the noun thought, but the anti-grammatical punchline is lost on many people and the language is poorer for it.

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