SCOSE NOTES
Language researcher Irene Poinkin summarises recent discussions at SCOSE, the ABC Standing Committee on Spoken English.
An ongoing source of mistaken
complaints to the ABC about
declining grammatical standards is the “rule” that adverbs ending in -ly must be used in expressions like “it doesn’t come cheap”. One listener said, “This sounds terrible. Why was the adverb not used? ‘It does not come cheaply’ sounds so much better and is, with respect to the intention of the comment, more accurate”.
Her reaction reflects a belief in a simplistic rule, possibly instilled in primary school, has made her insensitive to what is actually being said. The idiom calls for “cheap”, the short rather than long form, because it’s about something not being available for a small price (cheap); it’s not about something being done in a cheap way (cheaply).
Another listener objected to the expression “act crazy”, saying it should be “act crazily”. The ABC staffer answering the complaint wasn’t sure which was right:
“I prefer ‘act crazily’, which I think is more correct. However, ‘act crazy’ strikes me as more common (perhaps American?).” This is an interesting response, illustrating the tension between vaguely remembered teachings and an awareness of the common usage. (Also, when in doubt, blame the Americans!)
In yet another complaint the target was “they emerged triumphant”. Perversely, the listener thought only the full form of the adverb “triumphantly” was correct. But the expression has nothing to do with the manner in which the people emerged. What matters is the resulting state – they were triumphant when they emerged. And this combination of a copular verb and a predicative adjective or adverb is not at all new or mistaken. It’s ordinary idiomatic usage. Other examples are: appear busy, go hungry, play rough, run wild, plead guilty, hold dear and sleep easy. (There is of course a difference between sleep easy and sleep easily. The latter means you have no trouble falling asleep.)
Listeners have been noticing odd stress patterns in the speech of presenters on TV and radio. If they hear you say things like “The cause of the fire is unknown” (a real example), who could blame them for ignoring your message or muttering to themselves how incompetently you have delivered it. The important words are cause and unknown, not of – “The cause of the fire is unknown”. Stress the content words (i.e. nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs, demonstratives and question words), rather than the function words (i.e. prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and pronouns), unless there’s a good reason to do otherwise.
It pays to work on developing your vocabulary. A couple of seldom used expressions attracted attention when they were used incorrectly. In an interview on Media Watch in August the Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland said:
“I would like to see a protocol developed that can be activated rather than waiting for the good officers of the relevant organisation.”
At least, that’s what it sounded like, not only to those who recorded the official transcript but also to the ABC staff who prepared the Media Watch transcript. It so happens that “officers” and “offices” sound the same in Australian English, but “good officers” makes no sense in the context – McClelland had in fact used the expression good offices.
On the 7.30 Report one evening the interviewee, the artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway, used an unfamiliar word. It sounded like “incubala”, and lo and behold there it was in the transcript the next day:
“It makes sense to make an attachment to those paintings which we might not have seen in person, but we are familiar with through chocolate boxes, tea towels and all that other incubala you buy in gift shops all over the world.”
The speaker was apparently thinking of incunabula (pronounced /in-kyooh-NAB-yooh-luh/), but this doesn’t fit the context either. In Latin incunabula meant swaddling clothes or things of the cradle, but in English it came to refer to books from the infancy of book production, especially those printed before 1501. It is sometimes anglicised as incunables /in-KYOOH-nuh-buhlz/.
A final example warns us to be alert to the unintended connotations of what we’re saying:
“A bishop in Britain has advised churches not to use holy water in order to prevent the spread of swine flu.”
If holy water could prevent the spread of swine flu, it would be a sin not to use it. That wasn’t the point. A simple change in word order would have fixed the problem:
“To prevent the spread of swine flu, a bishop in Britain has advised churches not to use holy water.”
Click here to read the SCOSE Notes in the previous edition of Australian Style (16.1). |
|
