With it no longer being ‘odds on’ for a barbecue summer in the UK this year, it’s time for the British to get back to talking about their favourite subject: the rain. OUP UK Publicity Manager Juliet Evans has been speaking to Jeremy Butterfield, author of Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, about different ways we talk about rain, in English as well as in other languages.
Language expert Jeremy Butterfield has been examining our fascination with the weather using the Oxford English Corpus, Oxford University Press’s database of over 2 billion words. ‘The Eskimos are commonly supposed to have dozens of words for snow (they haven’t, but it’s one of the most enduring language myths around),’ says Jeremy. ‘But even supposing it were true, English speakers could play them at their own game when it comes to rain.’
Describing your average British Bank Holiday weather:
• It’s pouring
• It’s pelting down
• It’s raining cats and dogs
• It’s bucketing it down
• It’s raining pitchforks
‘People have come up with several explanations for the cats and dogs image,’ comments Jeremy. ‘One suggestion is that it is a corruption of the obsolete French word catad(o)upe, meaning ‘waterfall’; another peddles the idea that cats and dogs sheltering in the thatch of houses were washed out by heavy storms; another that because of poor drains dead cats and dogs could be seen floating down the streets during rainstorms, making it look as if they had fallen from the sky.’
‘However, if it can pitchforks, why not cats and dogs? Many other languages use animal imagery too. And the Welsh language even goes one step further, by bringing in humans: Bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn (‘It’s raining old women and sticks’)!’
How to talk about the rain in other languages:
Spanish
Caen chuzos de punta
It’s raining sticks tip downwards (literally, ‘sticks are falling tip downwards’)
French
Il pleut des crapauds et des chats
It’s raining toads and cats
Il pleut des vaches
It’s raining cows
Il pleut des clous
It’s raining nails
Brazilian Portuguese
Chove pra cachorro
It’s raining ‘for the dog’
German
Es regnet Bindfäden
It’s raining pieces of string
Welsh
Bwrw cyllyll a ffyrc
It’s raining knives and forks
Bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn
It’s raining old women and sticks
Today I’m bringing you a post written specially for OUPblog by Jeremy Butterfield, author of Damp Squid. In it he examines what people like and dislike about language, and how linguistic changes come about.
Speakers hold very strong views about what’s right and wrong, good and bad in language; and they are hugely creative with it, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally.
With regard [sic] to what’s good or bad, the media have pounced on a list of the ten most hated phrases and expressions in English. In pole [poll?] position comes “at the end of the day”; in the middle “I, personally”; and at the bottom “it’s not rocket science.”
But you can bet your bottom dollar* that everybody’s hate list would be different. The Washington Post books blog lists these uses, none of which are in my list: that said, indeed, stunning, walking the walk, talking the talk, and pro-active. While Lynne Truss wages war on profligate punctuation, William Safire deflates flapdoodle and gobbledegook. In Britain the Queen’s English Society laments that words “ain’t wot they used to be,” while the American Literary Council, with more imagination, continues to champion spelling reform.
As the Latin tag has it: “quot homines, tot sententiae”—there are as many opinions as there are men. But if I worked for the town council of Bournemouth, Britain, I would be in deep doo-doo for using such an elitist language as Latin at all. The council has outlawed a score of words, including via and vice versa, on the grounds that most people don’t study Latin these days. Other councils have banned French in lieu and vis-à-vis. Why stop at Latin and French? Most people don’t study German, Greek or Italian, so while we’re at it, why not proscribe words from those languages too?
Which leads me to ask: where do our linguistic hate lists come from? Are they passed on as cultural memes, or are they purely personal?
At the end of the day [sic], personally, I [sic] think they are both. As the song from South Pacific says: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear…”, and people learn to hate these phrases—as they learn any prejudice—from family, teachers, peer groups and media. But others are individual, even idiosyncratic; and both types can be extremely irrational. When donning my linguist’s hat, I say there is no such thing as “good” and “bad” in language: using such words constitutes a major category error. Doffing my linguist’s bonnet, though, I want to scream when I hear another glib politician talking about “moving on” and “drawing lines” under scandals and disasters. But is that a linguistic judgement or a moral one?
The second aspect I mentioned is creativity. Possibly at least half our language consists of gobbets we endlessly recycle: if it didn’t, communication would be unbearably fatiguing. But that still gives us tremendous leeway to be creative. We can pun, not just for momentary amusement, but also to create new words which stand the test of time: doppelgoogler, fauxtography, churnalism. We can invent outrageous similes: as useful as discussing the odds on sunrise tomorrow/as a bus pass in the Mojave/ as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition.
People can also modify—subtly, or less subtly—some of the language gobbets they inherit. Take “damp squid” itself. Originally, something disappointing could be described as “a bit of a damp squib.” Compared to many idioms it is not old, the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dating back only to 1847. Now, a squib is a firework, and damp fireworks don’t ignite, whence the association with disappointment. Originally, the metaphor was “transparent”: it didn’t need interpretation. But nowadays most people have forgotten what a squib is, so they have to assimilate this unknown word to one they do know. Moreover, if they only ever hear the phrase, and never read it, it is easy to imagine how their ears replace squib with squid, and, hey presto, a new idiom is born. In the Corpus the original is still much more common, but on Google the newer version is in the majority.
If we change English in this way, we are indulging in “folk etymology”. Folk etymology is what happens when people alter words and phrases to make them fit their understanding of English. Classic examples are cockroach, bridegroom, and chaise lounge, which are now an accepted part of the language.
Presumably, such changes start individually somewhere—or possibly several people modify the word or phrase in the same way at around the same time. Individual changes of this kind are called “eggcorns”, from an erroneous spelling of acorn. For changes to be defined as “eggcorns”, they must make semantic and conceptual sense (otherwise they are just plain old malapropisms).
If you listen and watch out for them, you may be surprised. Some of my favourite eggcorns and folk etymologies are: to nip something in the butt, Jesus crisis (from a 3-year-old), escapegoat, to pass something with flying collars, post-dramatic stress disorder, and chickens coming home to roast.
*The Oxford Corpus tells me that “to bet your bottom dollar” is used much more in Britain than in the US, as I suspected.
Yesterday I gave you a fun little quiz about the original forms of commonly-used phrases. How many did you guess correctly? The answers are below, along with an extract from the book - Damp Squid by Jeremy Butterfield - which explains what happens with some of these changes in the English language.
Some changes in the English are the result of people torturing alien word shapes to extract a confession of meaning. Chaise lounge (instead of chaise longue) is one example, and another is in one foul swoop (rather than one fell swoop). The reasoning seems understandable. Fell no longer exists as an adjective in its own right, and is therefore not meaningful. It makes great sense to reinterpret it as a more common word which seems to convey the meaning of the phrase: something cruel and underhand. The many variations on fell revealed by the Oxford English Corpus show people struggling to make the phrase meaningful for them: full, foul, fall, fatal, fallow, flail, fowl, felled, feel.
Inventions like foul swoop are known as ‘eggcorns’, and often affect words or meanings used only in stock phrases. Eggcorns are the result of people using analogy and logic—which in language are often fallible guides—to literally rewrite a word’s history. Invented in 2003 by the linguist Professor Geoffrey Pullum, the name came from the chance sighting of the spelling eggcorn when ‘acorn’ was meant. The change was not arbitrary: it made some kind of semantic and conceptual sense. The difference between eggcorns and folk etymologies is that they are individual, rather than collective.
Linguists and word buffs can get very excited about eggcorns because they show language changing before our very eyes, and often throw light on how and why. They can also illuminate how it has changed in the past—apart from which many eggcorns have a folksy charm all their own.
So, without further ado, here are the answers from yesterday’s quiz:
Just Deserts: this is the original form, from the verb ‘to deserve’.
Strait-Laced: referring to the bindings which were drawn tightly on a corset – or indeed a straitjacket.
Minuscule: this is the actual spelling, though it is commonly mistaken.
Free Reign: Reign as in a monarch, not rein as in a leash.
Bated Breath: meaning diminished, as in abate.
Praying Mantis: because of their prayer-like stance.
Fell Swoop: see above
Hammer and Tongs: ‘Tongs’ are used by a blacksmith, along with a hammer.
No Love Lost: though people are increasingly saying ‘no love loss’ according to the findings of the Oxford English Corpus.
Those of you who are, like me, blog-o-holics, will no doubt have seen some of the coverage for our book Damp Squid, by Jeremy Butterfield. The blogs picked up on the 10 most annoying words and phrases in the English language, but that’s not all that’s in the book. Jeremy Butterfield also examines phrases that have been slightly distorted over the years, so that what we say is often not what was originally meant.
So today I’m bringing a fun little quiz to see how much you know about the origins of phrases we say every day.
Can you spot the original version of these well-known phrases?
just desserts OR just deserts
straight-laced OR strait-laced
minuscule OR miniscule
free reign OR free rein
with baited breath OR with bated breath
preying mantis OR praying mantis
fell swoop OR fowl swoop
hammer and thongs OR hammer and tongs
no love loss OR no love lost
Check back tomorrow for full answers and explanations!
I note that these lists tend to discriminate against phrases just for being used often, but that seems like a marker for utility to me. Indees, that said, we need a paradigm shift toward proactively criticising mis-uses, like “I could care less”, or “… to no end” (rather than “no end”).
At the end of the day, I personally think what matters should be clarity, not mere novelty. It’s not rocket science after all.
You say that “on Google the newer version ['damp squid'] is in the majority”. A quick Google gives 119,000 hits for ‘damp squib’ but only 14,400 for ‘damp squid’. Did you restrict your search in some way? (I’ve never heard ‘damp squid’, incidentally, and I’m surprised to read that “most people” don’t know what a squib is. Fireworks are still popular, aren’t they?)
Hello, Mark
Well I did my search from the UK, but it was on the whole web. Problem is, Google figures change all the time. But I’ve just checked, and squiD 1,160,000 is while squiB is 124,000.
If I restrict my search to the UK, the respective figures are 55,300 and 42,900. I believe lots of people really don’t know what a squib is - I first read it as a child in Oscar Wilde’s “Remarkable Rocket” from his Fairy Tales, but hardly recall coming across it again outside the idiom. Certainly in Scotland most people know what a squib is, and perhaps that’s true of parts of the US as well.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for your response. I’m afraid I can only replicate anything like your results by searching *without* using quotation marks to search for the phrase. Of course, one would expect many pages about squid to include the word ‘damp’ somewhere or other. But since the point is to check the use of the *phrase*, you need to include the quotation marks. In case I’m not being entirely clear, what you need to type into Google is not:
damp squid
but instead:
“damp squid”
Try that, and see what results you get.
Jeremy
I worked for OUP from 1981 until 1994; One of the first titles I was involved with was the “Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English”, which I thought was brilliant. English like what I spoke, with examples. Where else would you find the phrase “Don’t take your car to that garage, they made a balls-up of mine”? I was immediately smitten with words and explanations. Idioms such as this and Quotations go arm-in-arm, so to speak.