The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  cu see you

  cul8r see you later

  cya see you

  dk don’t know

  eod end of discussion

  f? friends?

  f2f face-to-face

  fotcl falling off the chair laughing

  fwiw for what it’s worth

  fya for your amusement

  fyi for your information

  g grin

  gal get a life

  gd&r grinning ducking and running

  gmta great minds think alike

  gr8 great

  gsoh good sense of humour

  hhok ha ha only kidding

  hth hope this helps

  icwum I see what you mean

  idk I don’t know

  iirc if I remember correctly

  imho in my humble opinion

  imi I mean it

  imo in my opinion

  iou I owe you

  iow in other words

  irl in real life

  jam just a minute

  j4f just for fun

  jk just kidding

  kc keep cool

  khuf know how you feel

  18r later

  lol laughing out loud

  m8 mate

  nc no comment

  np no problem

  oic oh I see

  otoh on the other hand

  pmji pardon my jumping in

  ptmm please tell me more

  rip rest in peace

  rotfl rolling on the floor laughing

  ruok are you OK?

  sc stay cool

  so significant other

  sol sooner or later

  t+ think positive

  ta4n that’s all for now

  thx thanks

  tia thanks in advance

  ttfn ta-ta for now

  tttt to tell the truth

  t2ul talk to you later

  ttytt to tell you the truth

  tuvm thank you very much

  tx thanks

  tyvm thank you very much

  wadr with all due respect

  wb welcome back

  w4u waiting for you

  wrt with respect to

  wu what’s up?

  x! typical woman

  Y! typical man

  yiu yes I understand

  9

  Personal English

  English

  British English

  Twentieth-century British English

  Twentieth-century British standard English

  Twentieth-century British standard religious English

  Twentieth-century British standard religious English as heard in sermons

  Twentieth-century British standard religious English as heard in sermons given by the Reverend Fred Smith

  ‘If you’ll forgive the intervention, gentlemen, the mome raths did not gyre and gimble. They outgrabe.’ (See p. 126.)

  Punch, 10 July 1985

  In a sequence such as this, it is possible to see the way the study of English moves from the language as a whole to the language of an individual. Fred Smith’s English has many features which will be shared by other language users in the categories named – other preachers, other clergy, other standard British speakers. There are certain features of the kind of language used for preaching – certain words, grammatical patterns and (especially) tones of voice – which will be found regardless of who is actually giving the sermon. These more-or-less predictable linguistic traits have been discussed in Chapter 6.

  But Fred Smith is Fred Smith, linguistically as well as visually. His physique, personality, and background make him different from all other users of English. We can recognize him, in particular, from the quality of his voice or his handwriting. He may have a distinctive blend of regional accents (see p. 63), or a special way of pronouncing certain sounds. He will have his favourite words or turns of phrase, or a preference for certain kinds of grammatical construction. And, much less noticeable, he will have a predictable tendency to develop his points in a certain way – a penchant for analogies, perhaps, or certain kinds of metaphor. His congregation will undoubtedly be aware of some of these traits, especially if he has a vivid and memorable style – or, of course, if he hasn’t.

  These individualistic features of English deserve study too. For the most part, they are relatively unimportant. When we listen to people, we do not spend much time paying attention to what it is about their language that makes them different. Indeed, it is not at all easy to listen to or read anyone with frequent and prominent linguistic idiosyncrasies. An unusual voice quality is a distraction, as is eccentric handwriting, or a persistent use of a particular idiom. But there are several cases where the individuality of someone’s use of English – their personal style – is considered to be a matter of importance.

  Authorship research

  Consider what would happen if you found an old manuscript in your attic which purported to be a previously unknown Shakespeare play. How would you decide whether the language was genuinely Shakespeare’s? The main way would be to select a number of stylistic features from the works definitely known to be Shakespeare’s and compare their use with the same features in the new text. Are they used with the same frequency, and in the same way? Depending on the degree of similarity, a plausible case for Shakespearean authorship could be established.

  Such techniques never make a cast-iron case. If the style of the new text were identical, it wouldn’t rule out the possibility that someone had made a forgery – a successful copy of Shakespeare’s style. And if it were very different, it wouldn’t rule out completely the possibility that Shakespeare had written it – it might have been a product of an ‘early’, immature period, for example, or perhaps he was experimenting with a new style (something authors often do). None the less, if the stylistic features have been carefully chosen, and if the texts are long enough for some serious counting to be done, a close stylistic correspondence would make a very strong case for identical authorship.

  An investigation of this kind was carried out by the Swedish linguist Alvar Ellegård in 1962, in an attempt to discover the authorship of a series of political letters which appeared in the London daily paper the Public Advertiser between 1769 and 1772. The letters were signed ‘Junius’. Their criticisms of the government made them very popular, and they were often reprinted in pamphlet form. But it was never discovered who Junius was. Ellegård counted the words in the letters (over 80,000), and compared them with a million-word norm of political literature from the same period. Some words were found to be more common in the letters than in the norm, and some were found to be less common. Altogether, 458 lexical features were used, along with 51 synonym choices (such as whether Junius used on or upon, commonly or usually, till or until, know

  An extract from the ‘Junius’ letters

  If we see them [the people] obedient to the laws, prosperous in their industry, united at home, and respected abroad, we may reasonably presume that their affairs are conducted by men of experience, abilities and virtue. If, on the contrary, we see an universal spirit of distrust and dissatisfaction, a rapid decay of trade, dissensions in all parts of the empire and a total loss of respect in the eyes of foreign powers, we may pronounce, without hesitation, that the government of that country is weak, distracted and corrupt.

  not how or do not know how. For example, Junius preferred until to till in 78 per cent of possible instances – a feature shared by only one in seven contemporary writers in Ellegård’s sample. These features were then compared with a sample of over 230,000 words taken from the known works of the most likely contender for authorship, Sir Philip Francis. The similarities were so significant that Ellegård was able to conclude with confidence, ‘We have identified Junius with Francis’.

  Another case of this sort of reasoning – much more famous in its day – was the controversy over whether Shakespeare’s plays could have been written by his contemporary Francis Bacon. An American geophysicist, T. C. Mendenhall, in
vestigated the question by using ‘word spectra’ – profiles of the way in which authors used words of different lengths, which he thought could be as uniquely identifying as metallurgic spectrograms. He counted the length of about 400,000 words from Shakespeare’s plays and an unspecified but very large sample from the writings of Bacon. He broke the sample down into smaller counts, based on single

  works, and found that in each single count from Shakespeare there were significantly more four-letter words than three-letter words. Bacon, however, used more three-letter words than four-letter words, and also had a higher proportion of longer words. However, statistical evidence does not convince everyone. As one sceptic remarked when Mendenhall’s findings were published in 1901: if Bacon could not have written the plays, ‘the question still remains, who did?’!

  An interesting application of authorship research in recent years has been in connection with court cases – an application that sometimes goes under the name of ‘forensic linguistics’. In a typical situation, the prosecution argues that incriminating utterances heard on a tape-recording have the same stylistic features as those used by the defendant, or, conversely, the defence argues that the differences are too great to support this contention. A common defence strategy is to maintain that the official statement to the police, ‘written down and used in evidence’, is a misrepresentation, containing language which would not be part of the defendant’s normal usage.

  Arguments based on stylistic evidence are usually very weak, because the sample size is small, and the linguistic features examined are often not very discriminating. But in several cases they have certainly influenced the verdict, and in one well-known case, subsequent analysis definitely supported the contention that there had been a miscarriage of justice. This was the Timothy Evans case. In 1950, Evans was hanged for the murder of his wife and child at 10 Rillington Place in London. Three years later, following the discovery of several bodies at the house, John Christie was also hanged. After considerable discussion of the case, a public inquiry was held, which led to Evans being granted a posthumous pardon in 1966.

  A central piece of evidence against Evans was the statement he made to police in London on 2 December 1949, in which he confessed to the murders. Evans was largely illiterate, so the statement was made orally, and written down by the police. At the trial, he denied having anything to do with the murders, claiming that he was so upset that he did not know what he was saying, and that he feared the police would beat him up if he did not confess.

  In 1968, Jan Svartvik, a Swedish linguist, made an analysis of the Evans statements, amounting to nearly 5,000 words. It proved possible to show that the language contained many conflicting stylistic features, such as those italicized below. Utterances 1–3 contain several examples of non-standard speech; utterances 4–6 contain items that would be somewhat unexpected from an illiterate person.

  I done my day’s work and then had an argument with the Guvnor then I left the job. He give me my wages before I went home…

  I said, ‘I thought you was going to Brighton’…

  I didn’t want nothing to do with it…

  She was incurring one debt after another and I could not stand it any longer so I strangled her with a piece of rope and took her down to the flat below the same night whilst the old man was in hospital…

  I accused her of squandering the money…

  He handed me the money which I counted in his presence…

  The incriminating statement was analysed into five sections, three of which contained background information (Type A), and two of which contained the details of the murders (Type B). Evans later denied that the latter paragraphs were his. Can this be shown from the style?

  Svartvik examined just six grammatical features, all to do with the way Evans connected his clauses:

  Clauses not linked to any other clauses, e.g. ‘He paid me the money.’

  Clauses linked by and, or, but, or so, e.g. ‘My wife was always moaning about me working long hours so I left…’

  Clauses linked by words like then or also, e.g. ‘I then made my baby some food and fed it…’

  Clauses linked by sharing the same subject, e.g. ‘The van come Monday afternoon and cleared the stuff out.’

  Clauses linked by words like if, when, before, that, etc., e.g. ‘He then asked me if it was paid for’.

  Clauses linked by words like who or which, e.g. ‘He handed me the money which I counted…’

  The results are shown on the following page:

  * * *

  Type A Type B

  (%) (%)

  1. 92 37.1 10 20.0

  2. 17 6.9 15 30.0

  3. 30 12.1 1 2.0

  4. 50 20.2 17 34.0

  5. 45 18.1 5 10.0

  6. 14 5.6 2 4.0

  * * *

  * * *

  Total 248 50

  * * *

  The differences turn out to be highly significant. For example, note the way Type A paragraphs are linked by words like then (criterion 3); these are hardly ever used in Type B. And the proportion of the and type (criterion 2) is also very different.

  The samples are very small, so the conclusions must be tentative. But the analysis undoubtedly corroborates Evans’s denial: from a linguistic point of view, the paragraphs which he later claimed were untrue are very different indeed from the rest of his statement, which to the end he continued to assert was the truth.

  Deviant English

  Stylistic analyses of the above kinds need large samples to work on, because the features of language they are looking for are part of the basic structure of English. Everyone uses such words as and or then, so any idiosyncratic use of these words is unlikely to show up until a great deal of usage has been processed. But there is another way in which personal linguistic identity can be established, and that is to find features which are unique – deviations from the normal structure of the language that are used by only one person (or, of course, by people imitating that person). This kind of evidence can be discovered from very small samples. Sometimes, just one sentence can be enough, as in this example:

  we) under) over, the thing of floating Of

  ; elate

  shyly a-live keen parallel specks float-ing create

  height,

  No one but e. e. cummings has played with the typographic features of the language to such an extent. It is a distinctive feature of his poetry, and – whether we understand and like it, or not – it uniquely identifies his style.

  Literature – and poetry in particular – is the domain where English deviates most markedly from the norms we are used to in everyday conversation. But it is not the only domain to break the normal rules of the language, of course. Humour regularly bends or breaks linguistic rules, as we have seen (p. 107), as does advertising. Beanz meanz Heinz breaks a spelling rule. Drinka pinta milka day breaks the word-spacing rule. Why do you think we make Nuttall’s Mintoes such a devilishly smooth cool creamy minty chewy round slow velvety fresh clean solid buttery taste? doesn’t actually break any rule, but it does stretch our ability to cope with a long sequence of adjectives almost to breaking-point.

  Less noticeably, religious language deviates from normal usage: those who believe in God, it has been observed, are continually trying to say what cannot be said, and thus have to bend the language in order to express their sense of something that exists beyond language. Theologians are repeatedly having to walk along the ‘edges’ of language in an attempt to talk about spiritual realities; The Edges of Language is in fact the title of a book on the subject by the American theologian Paul van Buren (1972). And in everyday religious contexts, too, words which in other situations would seem meaningless, absurd, or self-contradictory are accepted as potentially meaningful. A sentence such as I eat your body and drink your blood would normally be expected only in the worst kind of horror movie; but in a Christian religious context, the words operate on a different level of meaning, conveying different associations. And John Donne c
oncludes one of his ‘Divine Meditations’ (XIV) with a series of paradoxes:

  Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I,

  Except you’ enthrall mee, never shall be free,

  Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

  Deviant English can be found in yet other areas. In the clinical field of language disability, for example, a major preoccupation is to draw up profiles of people whose command of English is inadequate, in order to define precisely the symptoms of their condition. Adults who have suffered brain damage, such as a stroke, commonly come out with markedly deviant language. Children, too, can fail to learn English along normal lines, and produce language which is bizarre. Here is an example of the latter – from an essay written by a profoundly deaf sixteen-year-old on the film Star Wars:

  The Star Wars was the two spaceship a fighting opened door was coming the Men and Storm trooper guns carry on to Artoo Detoo and threepio at go the space. The Earth was not grass and tree but to the sand, R2D2 and C3PO at going look for R2D2 walk the sand people carry away Artoo Detoo sleep.

  The field of psychiatric disturbance also provides many examples of language which deviates – often in meaning rather than in structure – from the patterns we expect to find in normal conversation.

  But it is in poetry where deviant uses of English really come into their own. Distinctiveness can be found at any of the levels of structure discussed in Part I, and often involves several levels at work together. An obvious way in which poetry deviates from other forms of writing is in its use of lines and (less predictably) verses. The line is the critical factor.

  Almost anything

  Can be made to look

  Poetic,