Jeremy Butterfield, "Damp Squid. The British Language Laid Bare"

Read from June 3^rd to 7^th 2021

My rating : 

 

Jeremy Butterfield’s Damp Squid would be nothing more than a Linguistic 101, if the disinhibited, casual approach did not make the book a funny reading for everyone, not only for would-be linguists.

The main objective of the essay is to convince grammar police and other language nerds that language is not a holy instrument to be carefully approached and used, but a live organism, forever growing and changing. Therefore, the author browses The Oxford Corpus (the 2006 edition, with over two billion words taken from contemporary English all over the world) in search of examples and statistics to illustrate it. If you didn’t know (I didn’t 😊), the Corpus (created in 1961 under the name of The Brown Corpus, which gathered then an impressive million words) is a collection of machine-readable different texts, organised in 40 domains (business, religion, sport, weblog etc.), each with its own subdomains.

Even though it is not a perfect instrument, the Corpus is a very valuable source of information about frequency of words and phrases, about their birth and productivity (like ‘blog’ that has given blogosphere, blogospheric, blogospherical, bloggerati – the big-cheese bloggers, bloggocks, blogstipation – the blogger’s block, Bloglish – based on Spanglish to describe the language of the blog), spelling variants, meanings coming into the language (like ‘anorak’ – the British equivalent of the US nerd and geek, whose ‘nerd’ meaning has put a negative trait even on the ‘garment’ meaning: ‘She was wearing tacky grey trousers and an unflattering blue anorak.’), patterns that influence spoken and written communication (ready-made metaphors and idiomatic expressions people play creatively with), neologisms etc.

The author organizes all this information in eight sections that speak about the size of the English language, the origins of the words, the causes of the spelling errors, the meanings in the context, the uses in the context, the idiomatic phrases, the definition of the grammar and the linguistic importance of the style. As I said, from a scientific point of view there is nothing new in the study for those familiar with general linguistics, even if they are not specialists (I, for example, do not pretend I am one, although I have taught several generations of students about vocabulary dynamics), therefore I will point out only some disparate facts either I did not know about or simply amused me:

•  in British “there are twelve words naming a pea pod, and 34 different ways of saying ‘to throw’”, and 79 in American for a dragonfly);

•   ailurophobe is a person afflicted with ailurophobia, a morbid fear of cats;

• online activity is the source of some amusing new words like cyberchondria (diagnosing yourself with a disease you’ve read about online); cobwebsite (a site that hasn’t been updated), data smog (overwhelming excess of information), doppelgoogler (someone with the same name as you that you found on internet), egosurfing (search for your own name on the web), linkrot (hyptertext links that lead nowhere), 404 (a stupid person);

•  Janus words or ‘contronyms’ are words used by speech communities with a contrary meaning: bad and wicked for ‘good’. fat rewritten as phat for ‘excellent’;

•  “starve” comes from the Viking verb steorfan meaning ‘to die’ that went through a narrowing process to mean today only ‘to die of hunger’;

•  words’ meanings can go up or down in time: sophisticated had at first the negative connotation ‘deprived of primitive simplicity or naturalness’) and enthusiasm was used in the eighteenth century to criticize religious reformers; on the contrary, silly meant in Old English, ‘happy, blissful, fortunate’ before becoming a pejorative word, and knave went through a similar process, originally meaning simply a young boy, then a servant or somebody in a lowly social position, as opposed to a knight, and finally, a rogue;

•  we are often quoting Shakespeare without knowing it, when we use phrases like ‘cold comfort’ (King John), ‘wild goose chase’ (Romeo and Juliet), ‘tower of strength’ (Richard III), ‘sorry sight’ (Macbeth), ‘cruel to be kind’ (Hamlet), ‘to the manner born’ (Hamlet);

•  ‘to the manner born’ is subject either to folk etymology, ‘to the manor born’ or word-playing: ‘to the manure born’ (about one who loves horses);

Someone criticizing a restaurant writes: ‘The lunch menu is laminated, which is difficult to bear if you are to the menu born like me.’

• the title itself is the Shakespearian expression ‘damp squib’, deformed by folk etymology because the word ‘squib’(= firework) is not used outside the idiom anymore, and in the speaker’s mind ‘squid’ intensifies the idea of dampness. The same for ‘at one fell swoop’:

The obsolete adjective fell (= ‘cruel, ruthless’) puzzles people, so they reinterpret it. Bird imagery, as we saw earlier, is very common in English, so it is not surprising to find in one fowl swoop.

• glamour is a corruption of grammar, and it was used in Scotland to mean a magic spell. The connection between the two was created because grammar was perceived as the preserve of those who had Latin, and their skills were assumed to include the occult. The modern meaning of ‘attractiveness’ for glamour is a mid-twentieth century shift;

•       there are some “folk commandments of English usage (…): thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition; thou shalt use shall rather than will with ‘I’; thou shalt not say disinterested when thou meanest ‘not interested’; thou mayest not start a sentence with and or but”;

•  moreover, because of the ‘proper’ usage established during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a lot of dictionaries, grammars, books on rhetoric, style, and elocution appeared, a ‘linguistic morality’ (Randolph Quirk) began to take shape, with the following commandments:

o   There is only one correct English. But, is there, when the same person can use, let’s say for the word ‘drink’ either alcoholic beverage (official) ,refreshment (formal, official), drink (general), swift pint, swift half (informal), bevvy (Scots, Northern English, informal), wee dram (Scots, friendly)?;

o   Not following the rules is to contribute to language degeneration. The absurdity of this statement was pointed out by Victor Hugo when he asked, after a member de l’Académie Française had declared that French language began to decline in 1789, ‘À quelle heure, s’il vous plaît?’;

o   Previous meanings and uses of a word are better than later ones. This is an ‘etymological fallacy’, because language changes mainly through metaphor, and, without it, it would become neutral;

o   The borrowings from other languages corrupt the purity of English language. No comment there😊.  

Overall, an interesting study that try and captures the life of the English language (but can be extrapolated to any other language) healthy and picturesque mainly because of the ordinary speaker and not language specialists:

To use Shakespeare’s time-honoured phrase, our ability to look at language through corpora constitutes a true sea change in the study of English. In a sort of human genome project for language, evidence from a corpus allows dictionary makers and linguists to look both at the whole genetic structure of English, and at the genetic make-up of each and every word. They can build up a picture of English as used and validated by the entire language community who speak it—for in the end it is speakers, not dictionaries, who decide how language is used.