Johnson

BRIAN COWEN, Ireland's prime minister (or to use the Irish, An Taoiseach) has been struggling in recent weeks to save the Irish economy and Fianna Fail, his political party, not to mention his own career—one poll showed nine out of ten want him gone. But he is hopeful that the Irish language has a future. On the same day he participated in a rare meeting with the Council of State, which has met just over a dozen times since 1937, to consider banking legislation, he unveiled a plan to triple the number of daily Irish speakers in 20 years.

Although, Irish is the first official language according to the Irish Constitution, less than half, 42%, of the 4.2m living in Ireland can speak some Irish, and only 3% use Irish as their household language. Until recently, UNESCO's "Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger" classified Irish as "definitely endangered". This status has since been improved to "vulnerable", though fears persist that the language could die without help, even in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking regions.

This vulnerability prompted a ten-year study on how to strengthen the language, the results of which were unveiled on December 21st. For the first time, Ireland has a "comprehensive long-term plan for the Irish language", said Mr Cowen. The 13 objectives are ambitious. As well as tripling the number of daily speakers of Irish, the plan hopes to increase the number of people with some knowledge of Irish from the 1.66m to 2m over 20 years. It also hopes to increase the number of speakers in the Gaeltacht by 25%.

To achieve these goals, the strategy determined that "normalisation" of the language is required. Already this sounds better than being force-fed Irish poetry in school for state tests, as was the practice for generations. The "normalisation" begins at home. Early intervention measures include encouraging and supporting parents to raise children bilingually. The Gaeltacht is to be promoted as a holiday destination. The new strategy calls for increasing the number of Gaelscoileanna (Irish schools), and encouraging adults as well as children to attend them. Gaeltacht communities will have to come up with a language plan within two years to keep their "Gaeltacht" status, and Irish language grants from the government. New communities could become part of the Gaeltacht if they meet linguistic criteria. Other measures include keeping Irish as an obligatory subject up to Leaving Certificate level.

Some worry that the plan may be overambitious. Certainly, it seems that the €1.5m set aside for year one of the plan does not seem enough to implement all the plan's measures, but Mr Cowen pointed out that even €1 billion would not be enough to ensure that everyone in Ireland spoke Irish. The strategy does have cross-party support, which is encouraging, especially with a looming general election, which could force Fianna Fail out of government.

The Irish have a funny relationship with their native language, a mixture of pride and resentment. Many raise their eyes at the "wasted" money spent in printing government documents in English and in Irish. But most also don't want to see Ireland become Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam (A country without a language, a country without a soul)—or as my own mother sometimes says of my own Irish ability, "is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste" (Broken Irish is better than clever English).

Among the words we (almost) never use in The Economist are our correspondents’ names. I say “almost” because the special reports are signed, as is each editor’s valedictory article (here is the one by our previous editor, Bill Emmott). But other articles have no bylines. Here is the explanation of the policy, lifted from the “about” page of our website:

Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed, often disputed, each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.”

From my own experience, the biggest practical consequence of anonymity is to invest our correspondents with an odd sort of glamour. More than once, people to whom I have introduced myself at conferences and the like have questioned me closely on my career and qualifications, saying that they are curious to know “what sort” of people write for The Economist. It reminds me of the Ankh-Morpork Times in Terry Pratchett’s book, "The Truth", in which the articles are also unsigned. Over breakfast, one of the editor’s fellow lodgers speculates as to the identity of the authors. “Oh, they’d be special people for doing this,” replies another. Really, he asks. “Oh, yes,” comes the reply. “They wouldn’t allow just anyone to write what they like. That stands to reason.”

Surprisingly often, people seem to think that because our articles are unsigned, we in some sense operate undercover. (One blogger, Kevin Drum, went so far as to try to "out" as many of the writers who blog, since initials are given here, as he could.) In the course of musing on Brazilian politicians’ nicknames in a previous post, I had reason to mention my own surname (Joyce). “OMG,” commented one reader. “I thought Economist correspondents were supposed never to reveal their names!” I’ve just spent a few happy minutes imagining what my work life would be like if that were the case: my business card with a blank where the name should be... turning up to interviews in a Mission-Impossible-style latex mask... responding to receptionists’ requests to know who’s calling with a laconic, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you...”

The truth is, of course, more prosaic. Even though you can’t tell for sure who wrote which article, you can look us up in our media directory, and if we write for our sister publication, Intelligent Life, or chair one of our conferences or moderate one of our debates, our names are given. But the enduring fascination with our policy of anonymity is a reminder that sometimes the most powerful words are the ones that aren’t said.

GULLIVER got to the video advertising Word Lens before I could. Andrew Sullivan marvels that it's "not science fiction". Indeed it looks pretty amazing, though being a Droid man myself I, like Gulliver, am as yet unable to test drive it.

I will say, in the spirit of Christmas grinchiness, that the freeze-frame translation contains several mistakes. The English reads "And it goes the other direction." This is translated word-for-word as "Y lo va el otro dirección". But the "lo" is a Spanish object pronoun (for "it") that shoulnd't be there in subject position, and you wouldn't just say "la otra direccion", but "en la otra dirección" in Spanish. And "direccion" is feminine, so it isn't "el otro".  In other words, it should just read "Y va en la otra dirección".  And this is a simple sentence, in one of the most common pairings (Spanish-English) for translation software.

It's both frustrating and heartening just how slowly computer translation has improved. Frustrating because I, like anyone else, would love to paste the text of a foreign newspaper article into Google Translate and know I could rely on the correctness (and readability) result. Heartening, in that it's good to know not all human abilities can easily be replaced by computers. 

THIS morning's electronic postbag brings the memo from Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo!, to her employees about an impending round of layoffs:

I want to share some tough news with you. Today, we began notifying some Yahoos that they will lose their jobs. Most of the reductions will come from the Products org and, when completed, will affect about 4% of the company.

[...] This was a tough call, but a necessary one. We need to make these changes now to ensure that Products is structured and running the way we want as 2011 begins. And that means we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others.

It's not uncommon for there to be an official or unofficial name for a company's employees (Googlers, Microsofties). Perhaps within Yahoo!, everyone is used to this nomenclature. But when I read the memo I can't help thinking of Jonathan Swift. As the OED puts it:

"Degraded and bestial". An appropriate description, perhaps, of how it feels to be canned just before Christmas.

THE Wall Street Journal, in reporting that American consumers are spending again, quotes Chris Christopher, an economist at IHS Global Insight:

I wouldn't break out the Champagne, but things are looking better.

At first I thought perhaps they pay economists at IHS Global Insight more than they pay reporter-bloggers at The Economist. (The stuff we break out upon hearing good news in the G. household is likely to be a modest cava.)  But it's not clear that Champagne here is intended to mean the nice stuff from Champagne. Journal usage seems to be all over the map: it's capital here and here, despite the references not obviously being to wine from Champagne.  But this article, about the  region and its wines specifically, calls the stuff "champagne". I think it's fair to say that the Journal hasn't decided on a rule. The Economist has no style-book ruling, but we seem to use lower-case in practice, following a general preference for lower-case.

The Champagne people have, of course, something to do with the controversy, with a long-running "Champagne comes from Champagne" ad campaign. Fair enough. It's usually a compliment when your product is successful enough that it loses its initial capital. To hoover, photoshop and google can all be found uncapped, as can parmesan, cheddar, colby and swiss cheeses, all originally toponymic. Companies typically push back. (Adobe wants you to say "to edit with Photoshop CS™ editing software" or some such tosh.)  Regions didn't do so as much until fairly recently, but now, as a dizzyingly detailed Wikipedia article will tell you, Parma ham, Roquefort cheese and even Melton Mowbray pork pies can only be sold as such if they come from those places, which will hope that you capitalise them.

The anti-authoritarian streak in me doesn't like being told what to do by the self-important, even if the inner Economist, er, economist appreciates brand equity. And the linguist says that it doesn't matter what the Champagne folks do or even what the style books of prestigious publications say. The long-term trend in words that become high-frequency and generic is to go lower-case, and there's not much that will stop it.

ENGLISH needs a proper adjective to cover the United States of America and its citizens. “American” is formally ambiguous, even if the context generally makes it clear. It is already awkward when you want to talk about the American representative at the Organisation of American States, but if, say, Unasur, the Latin American block, ever gets itself in gear, the phrase “the American response to the crisis” might get more problematic.

Using "United States" as an adjective, or even US (banned at The Economist, lest too many capital letters "spatter the paper"), brings its own problems: is the apostrophe needed in “the United States’ ambassador”? There’s none in the formal name of the United States Mint, for example. The “Yankee ambassador” would side-step the problem neatly, but—leaving aside the fact that only outside America does "Yankee" mean all Americans—does the world's most powerful country really want its representative to be a Connecticut Yankee (or any other kind) at Queen Elizabeth's court?

Other languages have the same problem, and their responses differ. Spanish uses americano for all inhabitants of the Americas, though in practice, so little unites them that there is hardly ever cause to use the word. It also has in its armoury norteamericano, which commonly refers to citizens of the United States even though it technically means Mexicans and Canadians too; estadounidense, a latinate adjective from Estados Unidos, which is at least precise, but is rarely heard outside formal speech (well, try saying it); and of course yanqui and gringo, terms not conducive to good diplomacy. Portuguese, too, has estadunidense.

One might posit that only because these languages are spoken in Latin America do they have the need to differentiate one type of American from another. Yet the French language's links to the Americas, in the form of Quebec, don’t seem to have had the same effect. Etatsunien or états-unien does not even show up in the dictionary of the Académie Française, while Wikipedia in French acknowledges the word's existence but says it would be like using "Usonian" or "United-Statesian" in English; the French style is to say américain. The Germans don’t mess around and will call you US-amerikanisch (so good they named it twice) if they need to be clear—though they spoil this by being just as likely as everyone else to overlook the Mexicans when they say nordamerikanisch. Chinese, on the other hand, can address the problem head-on by appending the specific ideograms for country or continent to the same phonetic root (美国 meiguo, for the country, 美洲 meizhou for the continents).

In despair one might turn to poetry. But even here no help is to be found: Columbia as a personification of the United States is just too like Colombia. All that effort to end up with “the Columbians beat the Colombians 2-0”? No.

If you accept that the need to differentiate is growing as new world powers emerge, you accept that sooner or later our fecund language will see something coined or an old favourite leap to the fore. In fact, according to the Urban Dictionary, it has already happened:

Similar to United Statians, USAnian is a term used mostly by expats to denote North Amerians [sic] who are not Canadians.

Any better ideas?

MY only excuse for failing to produce any Johnsonia during R.L.G.'s absence last week is that I've been very busy on a new business venture here at The Economist—of which I can say little, except that it involves one hecka lot of meetings. And so I've been more exposed than usual to business English and its peculiar phrases. These could be explained simply as cultural markers of the business tribe, but I suspect each one contains its own subtle cues and subtext; herewith my attempts to speculate on their origins and meaning.

Reach out

Usage: R.L.G. griped about this one a while back, but it's not just PR people who use it. Among the people I work with, at least, "I'll reach out to Joe" seems to have almost entirely replaced "I'll contact Joe" and "I'll talk to Joe".

Source: I don't know—an inversion of what used to be called public relations, propaganda or proselytism and is now called "outreach", perhaps? Or else an inexplicable Motown reference?

Subtext: The phrase implies an added effort, a stretch beyond the normal, and the subtext usually seems to be either "I'll do Joe the grudging favour of asking his opinion even though he wouldn't normally get half a look into what we're doing", or "I'll take the risk of asking Joe for his advice even though he's probably far too busy and probably sees our project as a threat to his entire existence". A little less cynically, one might argue that "reach out" should in fact be considered a distinct phrasal verb meaning "to talk to someone outside one's normal circle of contacts".

As an aside, though, I will note that another of the phrases "reach out" seems to be displacing in business-speak is "get in touch with", which seems normal to us now but was probably decried as a barbarity in its day. (Its original meaning, says the OED, is the one that signifies being aware or informed, eg, "to be in touch with public opinion").

Touch base

Usage: "Let's touch base tomorrow" means "let's talk tomorrow". Unlike "contact" and "talk to", though "touch base" doesn't seem to have been eclipsed by "reach out".

Source: Baseball, I presume, which may explain its resilience in a country that loves sporting metaphors. Yet if so the metaphor is strangely inept, given that in the sport, "touching base" is a solitary, win-lose action: the runner and the fielder vie to touch base first. In this case, by contrast, touching base means collaborating.

Subtext: The word "touch" lends an air of lightness and brevity: "touching base" implies a quick conversation, a reassurance that you won't take up too much of someone's time, whereas "reaching out" doesn't. It also implies informality. I would venture that the dictionary definition of "to touch base" should be "to hold a meeting that does not require any of the parties to check calendar availability on their BlackBerrys".

To your point

Usage: It's terribly important, at least in American business meetings, to be constantly acknowledging the contributions other people have made, so that everybody feels included. But instead of "as you said" or "as Jane mentioned", it's "to your point" or "to Jane's point".

Source: No real mystery here: it's the common phrase "make a point". But I think this is a clue to the real meaning, which is...

Subtext: Since it's possible—oh, so possible—to say a lot at a meeting without making any points at all, saying "to Jane's point" is, in the continuing spirit of positivity and good team relations, a way to bestow even greater recognition upon Jane's contribution. After all, if something is worthless, we say it "has no point", and business documents are all in bullet points. So I will posit that a "point" is now actually a discrete unit of measurement (soon to be adopted under the Système International) for useful contributions. Kilopoints, megapoints, nanopoints et alia all to follow, just as soon as someone has invented the measuring tools.

Going forward

Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:

I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.

or

Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.

Source: Not a clue.

Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:

“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).

(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)

I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.

Deep(er) dive

Usage: To take a close or closer look: "I'll do a deeper dive on those figures on Monday."

Source: Umm... diving.

Subtext: There's something athletic, soulful even, about the thought of physically diving into a spreadsheet, kicking around in its dusky deep columns, paddling lazily through the surf of numbers, digging for hidden gems among its pivot tables, and coming up for air gasping but ecstatic, with the decimal points cascading down your forehead. It could be a subtle signal to colleagues of the effort you are about to make as you hold your breath and plunge into the numbers. Or maybe it's nothing more than an attempt to romanticise to yourself what is otherwise a soul-deadening activity.

If you enjoyed these, please suggest some other examples of corporate-speak for cultural analysis.

SORRY for the long hiatus. One of your New York-based Johnsons has been on holiday in California, and the other too busy to post. But normal service will now resume.

While in California, I remembered that teens and young adults there say "hella" as an intensifier: "she's hella tall" (from "hell of", grammatically suspect as it may be).  What I hadn't seen is that this has been euphemised for the pre-teen set. Sledding with some friends in Yosemite National Park, I heard a seven-year-old boy brag to his father, of his sled, that it was "hecka fast".  Of course it was.

This isn't new, of course, but just the first time I'd heard it. There's even a 2004 paper, "It was hecka funny: Some Features Of Children's Conversational Development", by a few western academics, if you care to hear the sociolinguistics of hecka. Enjoy, and stay with us, reader: Johnson is hecka back.

IN MACON, Georgia, a Thanksgiving meal like the one I had on Thursday typically takes about six weeks off your lifespan. The food here is delicious, and it is not healthy. Which puts me in mind of another food-related post, again of a distinctly unhealthy kind. Via Nancy Friedman, I learned of "10 Awesome Turkey Recipes" from Buzzfeed, including Turbaconduckenriblets, described as “Made of riblets individually wrapped in bacon stuffed with stuffing into a deboned chicken, wrapped in bacon stuffed with stuffing into a deboned duck, wrapped in bacon stuffed with stuffing into a deboned turkey, wrapped in woven bacon strips." Turbaconduckenriblets of course takes its inspiration from the Turducken, deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck stuffed into a deboned turkey. (The whole thing is sliceable, and I can attest that it's really not bad.)

Turducken seems a straightforward portmanteau, albeit of three parts rather than two.  But what is Turbaconduckenriblets?  I don't know what to call it when we have entire words in the middle of word-pieces strung together quite like this.

It reminds me of a skit on the comedy series "Mr. Show" with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk. Two competing entrepreneurs invent a spread that is a ready mixture of mustard and mayonnaise. No need to put them on your sandwich individually, see?  But when the makers of Mayostard and Mustayonnaise find each other, they become bitter rivals. Eventually they realise that they can join forces, but neither company wants to give up too much of its original name. So in the style of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Mustmayostardayonnaise is born. What is a portmanteau with a reversed version of itself inside itself to be called?  Digest that with your Thanksgiving meal this weekend.

BY SOME estimates, half of the world's 7,000 languages will disappear in the next century. K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, has made a career documenting some of them—and advocating for keeping them alive. A film about his exploits (with a fellow linguist, Greg Anderson), "The Linguists", was nominated for an Emmy award, surely a first for that academic discipline. Most recently, Mr Harrison has written a book with National Geographic: "The Last Speakers". We asked him about what is lost when a language dies.

Johnson:  What is a "language hotspot", and what are the characteristics of the typical hotspot?

Mr Harrison: "Language hotspot" is a term I coined in 2006, inspired by the biodiversity hotspots model. Languages are unevenly distributed around the globe (both geographically and demographically), and they face uneven threats. The hotspots model helps us to visualise and track this global trend, and to prioritise resources. A language hotspot is a contiguous region which has, first of all, a very high level of language diversity. Secondly, it has high levels of language endangerment. Thirdly, it has relatively low levels of scientific documentation (recordings, dictionaries, grammars, etc.). We've identified two dozen hotspots to date, in places such as Oklahoma, Paraguay, India, Papua New Guinea and Siberia. With a scientific team from National Geographic, we are visiting the hotspots to take the pulse of some of the world's most endangered languages.

The hotspots model yields some surprises: The Oklahoma hotspot has 26 languages belonging to 9 language families. It includes Yuchi (Euchee), an isolate language which may have as few as seven speakers and is now the focus of a community-led revitalisation effort. Bolivia, a country with just under 12 million people, boasts 37 languages belonging to 18 language families. Europe, with 164 languages and 18 language families, has significantly less diversity than Bolivia.

The hotspots model allows us to visualise the complex global distribution of language diversity, to focus research on ares of greatest urgency, and also to predict where we might encounter languages not yet known to science. This was recently borne out by our documentation of Koro, a small language in India that is new to science. (See National Geographic's Enduring Voices project for an interactive map.)

Johnson: What do we lose when we lose a language?

Mr Harrison: The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded. In "When Languages Die" (2007) I wrote "When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday." Only some cultures erect grand built monuments by which we can remember their achievements. But all cultures encode their genius in their languages, stories, and lexicons.

Each language is a unique expression of human creativity. We find millennia of careful observation of the natural world and human behaviour, knowledge of flora and fauna (often not yet known or identified by scientists), and some of the secrets of how to live sustainably in challenging environments like the Arctic or the Andean Altiplano.

We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages—monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands—erode.

Continue reading "Seven questions for K. David Harrison" >>

400M people speak English as their first language; another 1.4 billion as a second tongue. Born 1,600 years ago among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, English became global as a result of trade, conquest, migration, the media and the rise of the economic power of America.

A new exhibition at the British Library just down the road from two of London’s main immigrant entry points, Kings Cross and Euston railway stations, traces for the first time the incredible journey launched by the Frisians, Saxons, Angles and Jutes who sailed to south-east England and whose descendants created the Vespasian Psalter in the eighth century. Alongside an image of King David playing the harp are the words, “Dominus inluminatio mea” and underneath “Dryhten inlihtnis mine” (“The Lord is my light”).

Difficult to understand for today’s English speaker, the roots of the language are nonetheless discernibly there. From the Vespasian Psalter the journey moves on through England’s early literary heroes, Beowulf, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and on to Jonathan Swift, who wrote that “the English Language, as it is spoken by the politest part of the nation, and as it stands in the writings of our most approved authors, often offends against every part of Grammar.”

Henry Alford was among the earliest grammar policemen to write a “Plea for the Queen’s Style Guide” as was Robert Lowth, bishop of London and professor of poetry at Oxford University, whose anonymous grammar was reprinted 45 times between 1762 and 1800. Lowth had a lifelong fascination for the preposition, but could never make up his mind whether it was indeed a sin of taste to end a sentence with one. Others who came later were made of sterner stuff, prompting the famous comment perhaps apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill: this was regulated English “up with which we will not put”.

The curators of “Evolving English” have been clever to focus not just on English at school and English at work, but English at play. From spoonerisms to malapropisms, puns and palindromes and the 1,800 words invented by William Shakespeare—among them "green-eyed", "go-between", "well-read" and "zany". Strange then that the exhibition fails to explore the one thing that, above all, gives English its witty flexibility, its gift for pun and double meaning, and that is the absence of accents and grammatical gender. No masculine, feminine, neuter, acute, grave or cedilla for your free-spirited Anglophone. Not only was Shakespeare the greatest English writer, he could have been no other kind.

“Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices” is at the British Library, London, until April 3rd 2011

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We've done a number of entries on overused words and clichés. This is one of the few that merits a stand-alone entry in The Economist's stylebook:

Although duels and gauntlets have largely disappeared into history, modern life seems to consist of little else but challenges. At every turn, every president, every minister, every government, every business, everyone everywhere is faced with challenges. No one nowadays has to face a change, difficulty, task or job. Rather these are challenges—fiscal challenges, organisational challenges, structural challenges, regional challenges, demographic challenges, etc. Next time you grab the word challenge, drop it at once and think again.