English

I’m Going to the Bank

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

Which one?

Huh?

Which bank?

I don’t know, does it matter?

Not really, but why did you say the bank if it doesn’t matter?

I don’t know, that’s just what we say.

Have you ever found yourself saying that you’re going to go to a bank? Of course not, that’d be weird, wouldn’t it? But if you think about it, it doesn’t make sense if you’re from a large town or city. When we say the bank, it sounds like we’re referring to a single, specific bank that the listener knows. Now this is fine if you’re in a smallish town with only one bank. But if you live somewhere with more than one bank it sounds strange to say the bank, as though there were only one bank. We do the same with other phrases like… Continue reading →

I Guess That’s Why They Call it The Blues

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

Why do we associate the colour blue with sadness and depression? You can feel blue, have or sing the blues. The third Monday of January is known as Blue Monday and is claimed to be statistically the saddest day of the year, though the study which first this has been debunked as pseudoscience. What can’t be argued, however, is that it’s also the name of a great New Order song:

Most people suggest we think of blue in this way because it’s calming, and that this effect is psychological, being derived from our association of the colour with the passivity of the sky or the hypnotic rhythms of the sea. And even though depression isn’t always passive or sad, it’s heavily associated with sadness, and we do imagine sadness as being a passive, stagnant state. Continue reading →

Surnames

Niall O'Donnell 25 Comments

Have you ever thought about your surname? Do you know where it comes from, what it means? Many English-language surnames are derived from jobs: Continue reading →

Late-Night Thought: Words you Read but Never Say

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

We all have a store of words that we come across again and again as we read, but we never actually hear spoken. So we then either:

a)  have a moment of surprise when we hear it for the first time…

b) hear it spoken aloud, but never associate that sound with its spelling, thinking of them as two separate words (this was the case for me with the word epitome for a long time), or…

c) we go our whole lives never hearing them.

Here are some of the most common words people have this struggle with: Continue reading →

You’ve Made it: You’re an Adjective!

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

Orwellian has become the go-to adjective to describe any situation of seemingly heavy-handed government surveillance or intervention. In a way it’s kind of a compliment, that you produced a work so evocative, so incisive that it comes to be seen as an ideal summation of a specific notion. A part of me also thinks that it’s a shame that those things we usually describe as Orwellian are really only relevant to Nineteen Eighty-Four, and not Orwell’s quite varied body of work.

Kafkaesque is another literary proper adjective (an adjective derived from a proper noun), which is more fitting, as much of Franz Kafka’s work has that sense of an individual dwarfed and alone in a world of uncaring, overwhelming bureaucracy that the adjective describes. If you’re a psychologist you might describe yourself as a Freudian or a Jungian. Much has recently been made of Donald Trump’s Keynesian economic policies. Continue reading →

Lady Mondegreen

Niall O'Donnell 16 Comments

Ireland’s industry

There’s a bathroom on the right

Excuse while I kiss this guy

What do these statements have in common? They’re all mondegreens. What’s a mondegreen, you ask? Let me show you…

Ireland’s industry – Islands in the stream (Islands in the Stream, Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers)

There’s a bathroom on the right – There’s a bad moon on the rise (Bad Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Excuse me while I kiss this guy – Excuse me While I Kiss the Sky (Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix)

A mondegreen is a misheard song lyric. The unusual-sounding word was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 when she wrote about how she misheard the line …and laid him on the green from the 17th-century Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl of Moray” as …and Lady Mondegreen.

I’m quite fond of mondegreens, simply because they can be very funny, but they’re also a great leveller. No matter your mastery of the English language, the rhythms of song lyrics and the accompanying make it often quite hard to heard lines correctly. Plus, we tend to expect language to follow familiar patterns, so it makes more sense to our brains to kiss a guy than kiss the sky. (It’s also only fair to point out that in normal conversational connected speech, Excuse me while I kiss this guy and Excuse me while I kiss the sky sound identical.)

We all have our own mondegreens. The one I always remember from my youth is Prefab Sprout’s “The King of Rock n’ Roll.” I always thought the line Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque was actually Hot dog, jump in fire, how about turkey? Which I think works equally well. I also thought the Transformers jingle proclaimed them to be robots in the skies, as opposed to in disguise. It never made sense to me, because only some of them could fly.

I was surprised to discover that the most-commonly misheard line, according to a British survey was Call me if you try to wake her up from R.E.M’s “Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,” which people mishear as Calling Jamaica. It kind of fits I suppose, but you really need to stretch it! I would have thought Haddaway’s “What is Love” (When You Don’t Hurt Me instead of Baby Don’t Hurt Me) would be more common, or Abba’s “Waterloo” (How does it feel to have won the war? instead of I was defeated, you won the war).

What are some of your mondegreens?

Literally Unbelievable

Niall O'Donnell

Is there a word as commonly misused as literally? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:

In a literal manner or sense; exactly:

‘the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the roundabout’
‘tiramisu, literally translated ‘pull-me-up’’
The opposite of literally is figuratively. We’d mostly use this word if there were a chance that something we said could be taken literally, or if we wanted to refer to both figurative and literal uses of the same phrase. For example:
The mysterious blackout left people both literally and figuratively in the dark.
Yet if the meanings of these two words are so diametrically opposed, why would people make apparently obvious mistakes with them? Here are some of the most egregious mistakes I’ve come across:

Continue reading →