English language

Revert Back to Me

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

This phrase is one that’s become increasingly common in business emails in the last couple of years. Basically, it just means get back to me or reply to me. For example:

Revert back to me when you’ve finished the report.

Find out what time they want to have the meeting, then revert back to me when it’s been organised.

It’s part of the strange new world of business jargon: blue-sky thinking, move the needle etc. And while a lot of these short-lived buzzwords can be annoying, revert back to me tends to be the focus of particular anger. The main reason for that is because the word is basically being used incorrectly. Revert means to change to a previous state or action. So for example, someone might revert to a childlike state after a traumatic incident. A werewolf, with the passing of the full moon, might revert to its human state. It’s basically similar to return, but is more specifically similar to transform back. So what someone’s saying when they use revert back to me is transform back into me. Well, I never actually was you in the first place, so that’d be pretty hard! Continue reading →

Ooh La La!

Niall O'Donnell 61 Comments

In honour of the European Championships being held in France, and specifically the Ireland vs France second-round match this afternoon, I want to look a little bit at the influence of the French language on English. A whole history of this would be exhaustive and exhausting, as there has been a lot of exchange between the languages over the centuries. After the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, French became the language of the royal court and politics, and remained so for about 300 years, so it’s not surprising that a lot of French words entered the English language.

I’m more interested in words that we’ve taken directly from French, and what they say about our attitudes towards the language as well as French people. The long, long history of antagonism and outright war between England and France in the last couple of millennia has, I think, led to some conflicting feelings about French evident in the way that English uses some of its words. We’ve always had conflicting stereotypes about the French: romantic, sophisticated, with great food and drink, but also rude and arrogant (I’ll just restate that these are stereotypes and not my opinions).

And so we tend to feel that the French language sounds beautiful, elegant and sophisticated, and the areas in which we most commonly use French words reveal a lot about our positive stereotypes about the French. Continue reading →

The Oxford Comma

Niall O'Donnell 23 Comments

I’ve visited France, Germany and Spain this year.

I’ve visited France, Germany, and Spain this year.

You probably don’t see any difference between the above pair of sentences. But what about this pair:

On Twitter I’m following my friends, Stephen Fry, and Miley Cyrus.

On Twitter I’m following my friends, Stephen Fry and Miley Cyrus.

The second sentence is quite ambiguous. Do I mean that I follow my friends on Twitter, in addition to the celebrities Stephen Fry and Miley Cyrus? Or do I mean to say that Stephen Fry and Miley Cyrus are my friends, and I follow them on Twitter? The latter would probably make for some interesting dinner-party conversations, but that’s probably not what I meant, is it?

Still, just to be sure my meaning is clear, I can use the first sentence, with the comma between Stephen Fry and Miley Cyrus. A comma like this, before the last item in a list of three or more items, is known as the Oxford comma, as it’s an element of the house style of Oxford University Press. There’s quite a bit of debate about whether or not to use the Oxford comma, and it has its strong supporters as well as determined detractors. Some style guides recommend its use, some suggest avoiding it, and others don’t mention it at all.

Why use it? As we see above, it can resolve ambiguity in cases where the first item in a list might seem like it’s referring to the second and third items. More generally, it can avoid ambiguity when two words in a list could be joined together as one item, or could be separate items. For example: Continue reading →

What Yacht?

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

Just  a short post tonight as it’s late, I’ve had three pints of delicious local Buried at Sea chocolate stout, and I’m quite tired after watching Ireland dramatically beat Italy in the European Championships to qualify for the next round.

I think those last two might be related actually…

Also, well done to Wales, Northern Ireland and England for also qualifying. And well done to Italy and my Italian friends who might be reading this: you still finished top of the group, though I’m not sure playing Spain is a fair reward for that!

Anyway, less football, more English. These last few days, there’s been quite a nice yacht in Galway docks and out sailing in the bay. Apparently it’s a superyacht, according to Google. Well. it’s certainly very nice. Seeing its mast over the rooftops of the Claddagh as I’ve walked to work in the mornings has made think again about how strange the word yacht is.

Yacht.

Look at it there, with a silent ch and not caring who knows about it! It’s the only modern English word with a silent ch.

Pronouncing ch as the old Greek /k/ as in charisma, character and psyche? No problem.

Or with a soft, swishy French /ʃ/ as in machine, chef or machete? Oui, bien sûr!

But a silent ch!? It takes a really special word to get away with that. A word like yacht. Continue reading →

The Error of our Ways

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

After doing my shopping today, I was approached by a young couple. They were from Argentina, and were travelling round Ireland as part of their journey across Europe. They were looking for the apartment they were couchsurfing in (I hate giving directions in Galway, as there are too many small, non-parallel streets, and no-one in Galway knows streetnames apart from the best-known ones).

I spoke with them for a bit and was impressed by their level of English. I knew immediately that they were Spanish speakers, but they spoke quite fluently, and were very easy to understand. Of course they made some tiny errors, none of which affected my ability to understand them, and I probably didn’t notice some other errors. That can actually be a drawback to teaching English: you get so used to some of the more common errors that you stop noticing them. Continue reading →

What’s in a Name?

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

I thought today I’d write a short post about some common names, and their origins. I’m always interested in names, where they come from, and the links between names and other names, and words in general. Here are a few of my favourites: Continue reading →

IT

Niall O'Donnell 18 Comments

Where would the English language be without this simple two-letter word? Without it we wouldn’t be able to refer to an object that isn’t clearly male or female for a second time, without repeating the whole word. Like any pronoun it makes speech and writing simpler and more fluid.

But it also has its little quirks. Like when we say:

It’s raining.

What’s raining?

Just, it, you know? It’s raining!

See also it’s cold, it’s quiet, it’s five o’clock etc.

The meaning of these sentences wouldn’t cause much difficulty for any students, beyond absolute beginners. Yet some people still get confused by them because they expect it to refer to something concrete. This is another classic case of confusion caused by thinking about what grammatical rules would seem to demand, as opposed to looking at the practical use of language. It might not seem to make sense to use it when it doesn’t refer to a clear object, yet, every English sentence needs a subject, and impersonal verb phrases don’t have an agent doing the action, so let’s just stick It at the beginning of the sentence and not think too much about it. Continue reading →