language

All the Feels

Niall O'Donnell 15 Comments

All the feels.

#AlltheFeels

Your Facebook or Twitter feed no doubt features a few occurrences of this phrase. And you know, it’s fine, in the right place. A picture of two otters holding hands. A baby and a puppy playing. Manipulative, schmaltzy John Lewis Christmas adverts (I haven’t seen the latest one, but I gather it’s about a family buying a dog a trampoline for Christmas). Those situations which give you a nice warm feeling inside for a brief time.

As I’ve noticed it being used more and more though, I tried a little experiment. I searched for “All the feels” on Facebook (that’s about the extent of my social-media penetration), and the first five public posts brought up the following: Continue reading →

Hey Baby!

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

Baby One More Time

Be My Baby

Baby I Love You

Baby Blue

Baby Baby

Baby It’s You

Baby Boy

Baby Come Back

…and so on. Why is baby (or babe) such a romantic word, that it would be featured in so many song titles like that? We’re so used to it, but if you step back and think about it, it’s a bit strange. There’s no obvious connection. Austrian ethnologist Konrad Lorenz suggested that babies’ cuteness was an evolutionary advantage, providing an incentive for adults to look after them. He believed that men sought similar signs of attraction in women, such as large eyes. Men calling women baby would therefore be a sign of this attraction. That seems a bit too easy though. Even if such an attraction did exist, it would be subconscious, so it would be unlikely that men would consciously refer to women as baby for that reason. And of course now baby is used across genders, though that’s probably more a sign of increased gender equality. Continue reading →

S: the Story of a Letter

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

If you’re a native English speaker, you probably don’t think about individual letters too often. Why would you? You use them pretty much automatically. So if I asked you to talk about the letter s, you might not have much to say. But for people who have to learn English, it’s quite important, and can prove to be a tricky little customer.

The first area of confusion is with plurals. Most languages don’t add s to make a plural, like English does, so it can be very hard for speakers of those languages to remember to add the s. Even when some languages do add an s, it’s in a slightly different way. Portuguese and Spanish, for example, often add an s to a noun to make it plural. But, they also add an s to adjectives describing those nouns, leading a lot of Portuguese and Spanish speakers to do the same thing in English. French is similar, but the s is generally silent, meaning that a lot of French speakers don’t pronounce it even if they write it.

But the most common area of error is with third-person singular verbs. That might sound like gibberish, but let me demonstrate: Continue reading →

The T-Shirt, the Shepherd, and the Wardrobe

Niall O'Donnell 16 Comments

One day, maybe only 10 years ago, I was flicking through some manner of catalogue, and my eye was momentarily drawn to a t-shirt. Seeing it laid out flat, I idly thought to myself That really looks like a lower-case t. After a few moments, it hit me: that’s why they’re called t-shirts! I was amazed, but also immediately annoyed with myself. How had I not noticed it before? It was so obvious! Even worse, how had I not even wondered why it was called a t-shirt before? I’d gone my whole life never thinking about this strange name. For someone who likes to think of himself as alert and conscious of how language works, it was embarrassing. Continue reading →

What a Drag it is to See You

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

You might have noticed that Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, for “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Some people have expressed surprise at this, feeling that a lyricist shouldn’t be given the award. I don’t see why not though. First of all, there’s not such a difference between poetry and song lyrics. They’re very similar structurally, tending to be divided into verses, and share the same concerns with rhythm and rhyme. I think some people feel that because song lyrics need to match the song’s music, they’re therefore less important than less important than the words of a poem or a novel which the writer was not required to match to anything. But I don’t think that’s much of an argument: all that should matter is the words, and if they’re good, and can be appreciated on their own, without music, then why shouldn’t that count as literature?

Anyway, to celebrate Bob’s win, here are some of my favourite of his lyrics in no particular order, and without commentary, because sometimes I just like them for their own sake: Continue reading →

Exploitation

Niall O'Donnell 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been watching the Marvel TV programme Luke Cage on Netflix, when I can find a spare moment. One thing that’s quite apparent early on is that it’s heavily indebted to, and deliberately homages, the blaxploitation genre of movies. In the 1970s, these films were cheaply-made, stylised (and stylish) films featuring African-American protagonists, usually fighting back against oppression from The Man, and looking quite cool while they did it.

This genre was a sub-genre of the exploitation film. In a way the exploitation film had been around since the birth of cinema: cheaply-made films with risque topics aimed at teenagers. What we now recognise as the archetypal exploitation film (cheap production values, questionable acting, sexy young people, violence, more sexy young people) came to prominence in the 70s. Continue reading →

From Ireland to Jamaica

Niall O'Donnell 10 Comments

The English language has an amazing variety of accents, not just internationally, but within different regions of countries. One of the most recognisable, and oft-imitated, is the Jamaican accent. And of course people often imitate it badly. And when they do, a common remark is that they sound more Irish than Jamaican. Well, that’s no coincidence… Continue reading →