English language

How to Disappear Completely

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

21st June 1997, Dublin, Ireland:

Touring their hit album OK Computer, Radiohead play in front of 33,000 fans at the RDS arena. Terrified at having never played in front of such a big crowd before, lead singer Thom Yorke later has a nightmare in which he imagines himself naked, floating down the River Liffey and being pursued by a tidal wave. This dream inspires the song “How to Disappear Completely,” which appeared on their following album, 2000’s Kid A. The song is a slow, melancholy, beautiful one, and very personal, dealing with the mental breakdown Yorke suffered after the critical and commercial success of Ok Computer. It directly refers to Thom’s dream in the opening verse: Continue reading →

I Before E, Except…

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

i before e, except after c.

Most native English speakers are familiar with this rule of thumb. It’s quite handy, isn’t it? With words that have i and e together in the middle of them, it can be hard to remember what order they should be in. How marvellous then, to have a rule that’s not only easy to remember, but rhymes too! But if you’ve learned English, you’ve probably grown to mistrust anyone who claims that a rule is 100% airtight… Continue reading →

Daily Prompt: Border

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

via Daily Prompt: Border

Borders are inherently interesting, as places where two different cultures meet and, usually, blend together. Of course this is often especially true of languages, as can be seen in areas where nations with two different languages share a border. Take Catalan, for example. It’s much more similar to French than Castilian Spanish is, due to Catalonia’s proximity to France, and history of cultural exchange.

English, being so widely-spoken, has picked up many words from other languages, both from indigenous languages of English-speaking countries, and the languages of immigrants. I could spend hours writing about that, but what the prompt made me realise is that the United States is the only English-speaking country to share a border with a country with another first language (and there is also of course the Vermont-Quebec border in the north). Continue reading →

Smile! :-D

Niall O'Donnell Leave a comment

I miss smileys. Specifically, I miss the old simple ones you could create on your Nokia brick, or in your college emails. I probably didn’t appreciate them at the time. As a pretentious 17-year old, I no doubt looked down on such a corruption of language! How could people be so lazy as to use a crude little picture to represent what they could easily convey with words, if they just took a moment to think about it. It was the death knell for the English language, and blah blah blah!

But then, probably in the mid-2000s, and probably on MSN Messenger, I saw something remarkable. I typed in a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis, and when I hit enter, they transformed, transcended simple punctuation, and became something truly other: a bright, beaming, yellow little face. How did I do that? I thought. Did I break the computer!? After a little tentative experimentation, I realised that the computer was rendering my little faces as it presumed I wanted them to look: in a better-looking, more comprehensible form. And I understood that. Only, it still didn’t sit well with me… Continue reading →

Little Timmy and Me

Niall O'Donnell 15 Comments

First of all, I’d like to thank Spanglish Jill for giving me the idea for this post.

We’ve probably all found ourselves in a situation like this:

Little Timmy: Yesterday, John and me went to the beach and…

Heartless Teacher: No, Timmy, it’s John and I!

Little Timmy: Huh?

Heartless Teacher: You don’t say John and me, you say John and I! John and me is for vulgarians only…

Little Timmy: Oh, ok. John and I went to…

It’s one of those golden rules we have drilled into us repeatedly as children that we never forget, like i before e except before c (more on that in the future): never say (insert name) and me.

But, does this rule always hold? The fact that I’m asking should tell you the answer… Continue reading →

The Price is not Right

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

You’re on holiday, maybe in Spain or Italy, and you want to buy something in a shop. No problem, you have a few basic phrases to survive in that situation. So you go find it on the shelf, but before you take it to the counter you check the price because you know the prices can be different from home. And what’s this? It costs…

€15,99!!?? Continue reading →

Getting your Message Across

Niall O'Donnell 7 Comments

Yesterday evening at about 6.30PM I had a moment of panic. I realised that in my rush to leave, I hadn’t read over my post and italicised all the words I should have. I couldn’t go back, and wasn’t in a situation to do it on my phone. It would just have to stay in that condition for a few hours, which aggravated me. Letting something unfinished like that out into the world seemed so sloppy.

What needed to be changed? Not much really, just two or three cases where I was referring to words, and not using them, and wanted to italicise them to make that clear. For example: “I’ve been trying to use the word application…” instead of “I’ve been trying to use the word application…”

A minor change, really, and most of my stress was due to my being a stickler for detail. Because, the post was probably quite comprehensible without my revisions (which of course I still made last night). Putting the word before application made what I wanted to say clear enough. Given also the topic of the blog and the specific context of the post itself, there was probably little ambiguity in the post. And it’s great that language can make things so clear for us, do so much of the heavy lifting of comprehensibility with words alone. But still, I’m drawn to being precise as I can in my use of language, just to be sure… Continue reading →