by Arthur Black
It’s classic cop-speak. I don’t know why they do it, but it’s weird and sometimes it’s next to unintelligible. And I’m glad to see that some of our local cops are actually swimming against the Blue Tide. Cop reports with a dash of wit in them—who’da thunk it?
It’s coming out of the Saanich Police Department on Vancouver Island in the form of otherwise boring and forgettable crime bulletins. Sergeant Dean Janzen is the public information officer for the Saanich department, and his motive, aside from making a dull chore more interesting, is pretty straightforward. “If you inject a little humour in police reports, you stand a far better chance of the message being carried further.”
What kind of messages? Well, there’s the case of the Chip Bandits. A woman in Victoria was awakened by her growling Chihuahua (hey, would I make this up?), which alerted her to the fact that there were prowlers in her attached garage. The police came, investigated and asked what if anything was missing. “My barbecue-flavoured chips,” harrumphed the woman. A brief search of the neighbourhood turned up a pair of skunk-drunk women sprawled on a lawn munching on—uh-huh! Book ’em, Danno—a bag of barbecue-flavoured chips. The official police report concludes: “It appears the effervescent chips seen shimmering in the moonlight were too yummy to pass up when you have the munchies.” Unquote.
Sometimes the titles of the police reports alone sound like episodes of a sitcom in progress. “A Mister Bean Style Robbery,” reads one; “The Curious Case of the Constantly Stolen Truck,” reads another. And my overall favourite: the report regarding a “man with a gun” incident that the Saanich Emergency Task Force responded to a few weeks back. No shots were fired. No blood was shed. The suspect had in fact a curling iron in his pants. The Saanich police report carried the deadpan heading “Dangerous Hair Styling Incident.”
Some old-school law enforcement types no doubt frown upon Sergeant Janzen and his droll approach to crime reporting, but I think it’s a breath of fresh air. And I look forward to his assessment of the recent theft of two Porta Potties that used to sit in the Saanich Police Department parking lot. I imagine it will read, “Thieves broke into the local police compound and stole two toilets. Police say they have nothing to go on.”
It’s all right, officer. I’ll come quietly.
English as She Is Spoke
If the English language made any sense “lackadaisical” would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
—Doug Larson
But it doesn’t—make any sense, I mean. Why, for instance, would any decent tongue adorn itself with contronyms? These are words that, depending on context, can mean the exact opposite of what they seem to mean. Thus, we have the word “cleave,” which can mean to stick together or to rend asunder. We have “fast,” which can mean speedy—or utterly immobile. A trip to Gay Paree is not the same as a trip over a loose shoelace. The alarm on your bedside clock goes off by going on. A pyromaniac/author could put out a fire—or put out a new book (Fifty Shades of Black, D&M, 256 pages).
And if that author was a sado-masochistic opportunist he could flog himself—or his book (Fifty Shades of Black, D&M, 256 pages).
Don’t panic—I’m about to wind up this contronym tangent I’m on. But do I mean wind up as in “bring to an end”—or wind up as with a baseball pitch?
Forget contronyms, what about verbing? Your English teacher might call it “the practice of denominalizing—turning nouns into verbs.” I call it a viral plague. Much of it is computer-based. “Blog” is a word that isn’t even old enough to vote—it’s derived from “web log” and has led to bloggers, blogging, even blogosphere. Hideous words all, but like warts on a toad, with us for the duration. Likewise “google,” formerly a noun (google it, if you don’t believe me); also xerox, fax and text.
There’s nothing wrong with turning nouns into verbs; it goes on all the time. One can dress in a dress, dream a dream and dance a dance, but where do you draw the line?
For me, it’s at Facebook. I won’t join the social phenomenon because I cringe at the thought of “friending” anyone. It just sounds creepy and vaguely pedophilic. And unfriending????? Puh-leeeze.
I am much more amenable to the idea of paraprosdokians. A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected. The best one I ever heard sprang from the lips of John Wilkes, an English politician who was lambasted by the Earl of Sandwich a couple of centuries ago. The earl roared at him in the House of Commons, “I do not know, sir, if you will die on the gallows or of the pox” (i.e., of syphilis). Quick as a flash Wilkes stood up and purred, “That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your Lordship’s principles, or your mistress.”
Paraprosdokians don’t have to be that exquisitely elaborate. Dorothy Parker was a master (mistress?) of the genre. She once sniffed, “I know a woman who speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.” Another time: “I require only three things of a man: he must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.”
But the master of paraprosdokians? Sir Winston, of course. Churchill once explained his facility with English. It sprang, he said, from his poor scholarship. Other students were taught Latin and Greek but because he was considered “slow” he was taught only English. “As I remained [in third year] three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the English sentence—which is a noble thing.”
It certainly was when filtered through the Churchillian vocal cords.
Such as the occasion when a moustachioed young Winston was confronted by an angry female voter. “Young man,” she sniffed, “I care for neither your politics nor your moustache.”
“Madam,” responded Churchill, “you are unlikely to come into contact with either.”
S’up with English? LOL!
Perhaps of all the creations of man, language is the most astonishing.
—Lytton Strachey
What do you suppose man’s first word was? Not much more than a grunt, I reckon—post-prandial or post-coital most likely, acknowledging a full belly or satisfying sex. What a wonder that we could evolve from such a scattering of glottal oinks and ughs to a world that, according to the Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com), currently features 6,912 tongues spoken by somebody somewhere on the earth’s surface. Eighty-six of those languages are spoken here in Canada. They range from the Afrikaans of South African immigrants to Xaad Kil of our longest-standing citizens on Haida Gwaii.
And of course, there’s English. About 375 million earthlings speak it as their first language but its true power is revealed in those who claim it as linguistic backup. Non-native English speakers outnumber the rest of us by about three to one. Which country do you think has the most people who speak or understand English? Great Britain? The US?
Nope—it’s India. Not surprising when you realize that English is the tongue of choice in international diplomacy, medicine, communications, science, aviation and show biz.
And if you’re a native English speaker as I am, let us go down on our knees together and thank providence for our lucky birthright, because learning to speak English as a second language must be a certifiable nightmare.
Are you kidding? A language in which you fill in a form by filling it out? Your house burns up as it burns down? Wristwatches run but time flies? You tell people you couldn’t care less by saying, “I could care less”?
We’ve got ourselves a language that says it’s perfectly permissible to drive on a parkway but park in a driveway. Our alarm clocks go off by going on, when the stars come out we can see them, but when the lights go out we can’t see anything.
English is also the queen of oxymorons. It permits us to watch “awfully good” “half-naked” “light-heavyweights” pummel each other in rings that are square.
You are allowed, in English, to put your best foot
forward while keeping your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel, your eye on the ball and your tongue in cheek behind your stiff upper lip.
Not to mention knuckling down with your nose in the air, your chin up and your feet on the ground while head over heels.
Unless, of course, you don’t have the stomach for it.
The adjectival form of “quiz” is quizzical.
So the adjectival form of “test” would be . . . ?
And what’s with the word “haemorrhoid”?
Surely that should be “asteroid.”
English is a language designed to torment and befuddle. Imagine trying to teach a non-English speaker how to pronounce “ough.”
It’s an “oo” sound, of course—as in “through.”
Or is it an “uff” sound—as in “tough”?
Or an “ow” sound—as in “plough”?
That’s only the beginning. Here’s a phrase we can all be proud of: Boughs brought nought through—thought enough?
And don’t forget the “up” sound of “hiccough.”
It may be slight consolation that at least one expert thinks traditional spelling—indeed, pretty well all spelling—is on the way out, thanks to the Internet. David Crystal, a linguistics professor at the University of Wales, points out that for the first time in many hundreds of years, much of the printed word is being distributed without benefit of editors or proofreaders. Bloggers blog, texters text and, dare I say, twits tweet—all without any Higher Power correcting or rewriting their efforts. Short forms abound. “By the way” becomes BTW; IMHO stands in for “in my humble opinion.”
Professor Crystal claims to be unfazed by this development. “The vast majority of spelling rules in English are irrelevant,” says the prof breezily.
All I can say is: WTF? Itz all 2 depressing 4 me.
C U L8TR.
If It’s Okay with You . . .
I’d like to write a few lines about a tiny word that is the very glue of the English language, okay? Now, it’s entirely okay if you’re not personally okay with that, but I got the okay from my editor. Usually she shrugs when I suggest a theme and offers a grudging “okay. ”But this time she really liked it. “O-KAY!” she said. “Go for it!”
Versatile little four-letter combination when you think about it—especially when you realize it can be cut in half and still say the same thing. My dictionary recognizes “O.K.” and even “OK” as legitimate variations. They all sound exactly the same to the human ear.
“Okay” is probably the best-known English word in the world. Venetian gondoliers get “okay”; so do Tibetan Sherpas, Australian outbackers, Colombian drug mules and Chinese moneylenders.
So where does okay come from?
How much time have you got?
Over the years linguists have proposed that the expression was swiped from the Scots (och aye), West African slaves (wah kay), the French (au quais), the Choctaw tribe (o keh), the Finns (oikea)—even from a US railway freight agent named Obadiah Kelly who was in the habit of scrawling his initials as a signature on bills of lading.
The only thing pretty much everyone agreed on is that usage as an English expression bubbled up in eastern North America sometime in the early nineteenth century.
By 1840, rumours attributed the phrase to US president Andrew Jackson. Detractors said that President Jackson scrawled O.K. on government documents under the illusion he was using a short form for “all correct.” (Orl Korect?)
Cute story, but highly unlikely. Andrew Jackson was a well-educated man.
Whatever the origins, “okay” was perfectly okay to use through North America by the 1850s—so much so that it appears in the written works of Henry David Thoreau in 1854. Now, a century and a half later, the word has been bisected again. People often signify acceptance with a single syllable instead of two.
“You wanna grab a bite at the Taco Bell?”
“Kay.”
Fortunately, thanks to the work of a US professor named Allen Walker Read, we now know the true origins of this ubiquitous phrase. Professor Read figured it out by poring over back issues of eastern American newspapers published in the early to mid-1800s.
Turns out there was a kind of fad that swept the chattering classes of early nineteenth-century Boston society, in which people wishing to appear clever used abbreviations to replace well-known phrases. Thus, people would say (or write) ISBD instead of It Shall Be Done. Boston’s leading citizens were referred to as OFMs — Our First Men. And anything insignificant was dismissed with SP — Small Potatoes.
Another craze those early language manglers indulged in was faux illiteracy. They liked to pretend they couldn’t spell very well. Thus the Boston aristocracy (Andrew Jackson had nothing to do with it) brutalized the phrase “all correct” into “orl correct”—which got shortened to O.K.
And the rest is history, okay?
Using Phroper English
I love this job. It may not pay much but it’s full of surprises. Yesterday I rambled into my favourite coffee shop and was instantly accosted by one of the regulars. “Hey, Black!” he said by way of introduction. “You called” (insert Member of Parliament’s name here) “a ‘nimrod’ in your column last week. You know what a nimrod is?”
A nimrod, I replied, is a fool, a klutz, an idiot, a clown. You think I was too kind?
“Hah!” said my inquisitor. “You’re dead wrong! A nimrod is a mighty hunter!”
Well, literally and technically, yeah. “Nimrod,” according to the Bible, was a great-grandson of Noah. He became a king and founded Babylon. He was also, legend has it, a guy who knew his way around a bow and arrow, a spear, a dagger and other instruments of interspecies domination.
“Nimrod” ought to reflect that heady lineage and be a word of praise but it’s not. It means, in fact, precisely the opposite. If somebody calls you a nimrod, they are probably Not Your Friend.
Elmer Fudd—especially when he’s duded out in a deerstalking cap, his Eddie Bauer hunting vest and toting a shotgun through the bush, fruitlessly flailing the bushes in search of Bugs Bunny—is a nimrod.
So what do you call a word or a phrase that actually means the opposite of what it’s supposed to mean? You call it a “phrop.” A fascinating chap by the name of Sir Arnold Lunn (mountaineer, world-class skier and amateur wordsmith) made up the word by combining “phrase” and “opposite” and lopping their tails off, nimrod-style.
We use phrops from time to time—at least I know I do. When I say to the annoying lapel-clinger who’s been dogging me at a party, “We must do lunch one day,” what I really mean is, “If I can help it, this is the last time in recorded history that we will be in one another’s presence, unless we have the misfortune to share a common graveyard.” Similarly, when someone launches into a critique of something I’ve written with the words, “With all due respect,” I know that I’m about to be linguistically cross-checked, head-butted, rabbit-punched and groin-kneed and “due respect” will not be much in evidence.
Canadians resilient and adventurous enough to watch the cable TV public affairs channel CPAC may happen upon Question Period from the House of Commons in Ottawa. There they will see phrops flying back and forth like badminton birdies. A reference to a challenge from “my learned colleague” sitting across the floor really means, “I can’t believe I have to waste my time responding to this pompous gasbag.” And when Stephen Harper addresses Thomas Mulcair as “the Right Honourable Leader of the Opposition,” his tone, his body language and those rattlesnake eyes portend a classic phrop in the making.
Canadian politicians, alas, are not in the same league as a silver-tongued phropist like the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote to a novelist seeking his endorsement, “Thank you for sending me your book. I shall waste no time reading it.”
But you don’t have to
go to the House of Commons, British or Canadian, to hear a decent phrop.
When someone butts in front of you with, “I hope you don’t mind . . .” he doesn’t really give a bleep what you think.
When someone says, “I don’t wanna brag, but . . . ” he’s about to brag.
When someone says, “To be perfectly frank . . . ” she’s about to lie.
When someone says, “I’m telling you this for your own good . . .” (see “With all due respect” above).
But a phrop is not always a weaselly linguistic manoeuvre. Sometimes it’s so perfect that it’s sublime. A few years ago, an Oxford language philosopher by the name of J.L. Austin was lecturing a class on the phenomenon of double negatives—when two “no” words are used in the same clause. He told his listeners that many languages use double negatives to make a positive but double positives are never, ever used to make a negative.
From the back of the class came a muttered, “Yeah. Right.”
Words at Work
If the English language made any sense “fish and chips” might be spelled “ghoti and tchoghs.” (Fish: “gh” as in rough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in ration. Chips: “tch” as in catch, “o” as in women, “gh” as in hiccough.) If English made any sense there would not be eight different ways to pronounce the letter sequence “ough” (through, thought, though, cough, rough, bough, thorough—and don’t forget hiccough).
But English, bless ’er, seldom makes sense. Our language is like a rogue blue whale on a methamphetamine run, thrashing through the Sea of Tongues gobbling up choice morsels left and right while wreaking tail-smacking havoc on other etymologies. As the Canadian writer James Nicoll says, “English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
