English as She is Massacred

There have been, in recent times, a number of occasions in which I have suffered a severe wince at the pronouncements of newsreaders both in British newscasts and American.

This is quite apart from the appalling standard of English employed by the people who post things on ‘Facebook’ and other social media sites.

Some of those people can be, in part, forgiven because they are, for the large part, uneducated or that they have foresworn to use any education they may have received for reasons best known to themselves.

I was also going to include people who are dyslexic but, on reflection, a friend of mine is dyslexic and, although his spelling is sometimes worthy of a raised eyebrow, his choice of words is never in question.

Let us start with a few examples in order to make my case reasonably (I hope) clear.

During the extensive reporting of non-facts regarding the disappearance of MAS Flight MH370 one of the newsreaders explained to the imagined assembled throng who were, as one, agog to hear her every word that the “...NTSB, an acronym for the National Transportation Safety Board...” We shall dispense with the rest of the story.

Firstly, the NTSB is not an acronym no matter how much she, and the rest of the assembled non-English speaking media people would like it to be. NASA is an acronym. This is because it is a word formed from the first letter of a series of words; hence National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. While I agree that NTSB does, indeed, stand for the National Transportation Safety Board the initials do not form a word; it is, thus, an abbreviation and not an acronym.

There are several ‘nyms’ about. We have ‘homonyms’ from the Greek ‘homus’ that means ‘same’ and is used in ‘homosexual’, for example. So ‘homonym’ is ‘same name’; this means words that are pronounced and spelt the same but have different meanings. A fine example is ‘spring’ that can mean a season of the year, a coil of metal that will return to its previous shape after compression or tension, a leap into the air or, even, water flowing from some point in the ground.

There are ‘synonyms’ and ‘antonyms’. A ‘synonym’ is a word having the same sense as another while an ‘antonym’ is a word opposite in meaning to another. ‘Fast’ is an antonym of ‘slow’.

While we are pondering abbreviations we might consider the increasing usage of the abbreviation ‘lbs’ for pounds. This does not exist. The written expression ‘lb’ is short for ‘libra’, which is the Latin for ‘pound’—and ‘book’, incidentally.

The plural for ‘libra’ is ‘librae’; you will observe, on close scrutiny, that there is no ‘s’ at the end of ‘librae’ thereby giving the lie to the abbreviation ‘lbs’. Thus the announcer on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ telling us that ‘so-and-so is “packing on the ell-beez” is nonsense. Of course, without the ‘zed’* at the end it is less of a catchy sound-bite, as they say.

There have been wars and natural disasters that have, we are reliably informed, decimated the population of a specific area.

Perhaps I could persuade you to examine the idea that we have a decimal coinage system and that the SI units of measurement are also decimal.

‘Deci’ is ‘ten’. Thus ‘decimate’ means to ‘reduce by one tenth’. It is a very precise measurement that is rooted in the myth that it was a punishment meted out to soldiers in the Roman Legions. In fact it comes from ‘decimatus’ meaning ‘tythe’. This is a tenth of your possessions or produce that is given to authority as tax; it continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where the authority was the Church that built tithe, or tything, barns to store it—usually on a Glebe, which is an area of land belonging to the Church.

Nowadays it has become common usage to refer to ‘decimate’ as the destruction of a large proportion of’ land or population, for example.

All languages change. There is little in the English language that existed even three hundred years ago that we should recognise as useful to us now.

We develop, words are introduced from other languages and words are made up from the development of science and engineering.

Three hundred years ago they would not recognise ‘cache memory’ for what it is now even if they knew the word ‘cache’.

Words, old words, take on new meanings. Some of them are at complete variance to their old meanings. Go to a ‘symposium’ and you would be going to meet a drinking partner; while a ‘sinister’ person is, disappointingly, merely left-handed. That is if we accept the purely etymological meaning!

And that, dear fellows, is what we call a ‘contronym’.

*’Zee’: transAtlantically.