I've been puzzled by two terms recently -- "recall" and "interesting children".
Recall, in the sense of calling to mind, or remembering, is well known. So is the idea of recalling someone to duty.
But a couple of years ago the news media began referring to a "recall referendum" for President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
That suggested that he had ceased to be president some time ago, and now was being recalled to duty as president, something similar to what happened to Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, until she was assassinated, so she didn't return to office.
But no, President Chavez wasn't returning to duty, since he was already there. The "recall" referendum actually meant just the opposite from what one would expect. It was not to recall him to duty as president, but actually to kick him out. In the event, he wasn't kicked out, but stayed there.
But since then the talking heads on South African TV and radio have begun talking about the "recall" of the late President Thabo Mbeki. I haven't heard anyone saying that Tony Blair was "recalled" as British prime minister, but perhaps that is not far off.
This came up for discussion in the alt.usage.english newsgroup, where people began discussing words that mean opposite things in American English and other varieties of English.
Two well-known examples are "table" and "moot point". In most English speaking countries if you table a report, you present it to a committee or other deliberative body to consider and discuss. In American English, however, if you table a report, you do the opposite -- you decide not to discuss or consider it.
Similarly, a "moot point" is usually a debatable one, one that one disagrees with, but in American English it means a point that is not worth debating.
So "recall" seems to be another word like "table" -- meaning one thing in one place, and the opposite in other places.
Well, not quite, as it emerged from the discussion in alt.usage.english.
In the US, many elective offices, such as that of the president, are for a fixed term. There is no provision for presidents or governors or mayors to resign, as Tony Blair and Thabo Mbeki did. So in some cases they can have a kind of "unelection", where they can unelect certain officials -- not the president, apparently, but the governors of certain states and mayors of certain cities. And, paradoxical as it may seem, this "unelection" is called a "recall"; only instead of recalling someone to office, if there are enough votes, the person is removed from office.
So the talking heads better wise up. Thabo Mbeki was not "recalled", not even in the American sense. He felt obliged to resign, which is something different. We did not have a general election to unelect him, which is what "recall" means in the American sense.
The other term, "interesting children", is much older, and the problem with it is that nobody seems to remember what it meant.
It was found in death announcements in newspapers, especially in Ireland, about 150 years ago, where one would find things like "two interesting children died last week". Or "Emma Jane Smith, daughter of Mr John Smith, an interesting child, died last Tuesday".
It was obviously so familiar that no one saw fit to explain it, and now I can't find anyone who knows what it actually means. I've written more fully about it in my genealogy blog.
If anyone has some definite information about it, please let me know.
Showing posts with label interesting children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interesting children. Show all posts
04 March 2009
22 December 2008
Changing language
I feel pretty,
Oh, so pretty,
I feel pretty, and witty and gay,
And I pity
Any girl who isn’t me today.
Back in the early 1960s that song, from the musical West Side Story, was quite popular.It was played on the radio, and people hummed and sang it a lot.
It was especially popular among my gay friends at the time, and they sang it with, um, gay abandon, as a pun.
Now, however, the double entendre has been lost. I don't think anyone nowadays would write a song using "gay" in that sense; it would probably be misunderstood by most of those who heard it, and could no longer be used as a pun.
I bought a second-hand copy of Chaucer's poems recently and have been reading them, a few pages at a time, and that got me thinking about how language changes. One of the difficulties of reading Chaucer, of course is the spelling. Even familiar words are sometimes hard to recognise because of the unfamiliar spelling. The meaning of unfamiliar words can sometimes be worked out from the context, but at other times I have to resort to the footnotes.
I have no difficulty in reading books published 100 years ago. Books published in the middle of the 19th century present few difficulties, apart from occasional allusions to features of contemporary culture that are unknown today. One phrase still puzzles me from that period. Newpaper reports and death announcements often referred to "interesting children". "Daisy Smith, an interesting child, was accidentally drowned at a family picnic last week." If anyone knows what "interesting child" meant to the writers of such reports, please let me know.
Early 19th-century literature presents few problems. Much of Jane Austen and William Hazlitt's writing looks as if it could have been written today.
Mid-eighteenth=century literature is quite easy to understand, though there are turns of phrase and elements of style that look unfamiliar. Boswell, in his Life of Dr Johnson uses "that" followed by a comma as we use "which" today. Dr Johnson, of course, compiled the dictionary that did much to standardise English spelling, and that is what makes literature in subsequent periods easier for us to read.
A century earlier, Pepys's diary and the writings of Jonathan Swift can be understood, though there are more obscure allusions, and turns of phrase that wouldn't be understood today. Some modern editions have updated spelling, to make them easier to read. The Book of common prayer dates from this period too.
Go back half a century, and you have the King James Bible, though it too is often published with updated spellings. Until about the 1950s or so it was familiar to most English-speaking people, and perhaps helped to keep older versions of English alive for many. Even if they were not part of people's active vocabulary, there were many things that people understood. Though the language was archaic, even for the time, it often made more sense to 20th-century readers than the contemporary writing of Shakespeare.
Reading backward in time is one thing, but reading forward is another.
Most of the words used by Hazlitt, for example, are part of English today, and so we can read Hazlitt without difficulty. But what would Hazlitt have made of 21st-century English?
I wonder, too, how long the backward compatibility (would Hazlitt have understood that?) of English will last. After 300 years the Book of Common Prayer has been abandoned, along with the King James Bible, and the Coverdale psalms in the BCP were a century older. And now many words are being removed from dictionaries. As one could speak of a "pre-Johnson era", perhaps we are entering a post-Johnson era.
Jonathan at Thicket and Thorp drew my attention to this article, which describes how many words have been removed from a children's dictionary:
And to think that we read nursery rhymes to our children about "One old Oxford ox opening oysters"!
The point of a dictionary, or at least one of the points, is that one can find the meanings of unfamiliar words that one comes across for the first time. Many of the words removed have to do with the countryside and rural life, which children brought up in cities might want to look up if they read about them in books. But today's harmless drudges seem to think that they should not be allowed to.
Which reminds me... a word that seems to enter the vocabulary of children within the first couple of weeks of starting school for the first time is "allowed". Perhaps that should be compulsory.
Oh, so pretty,
I feel pretty, and witty and gay,
And I pity
Any girl who isn’t me today.
Back in the early 1960s that song, from the musical West Side Story, was quite popular.It was played on the radio, and people hummed and sang it a lot.
It was especially popular among my gay friends at the time, and they sang it with, um, gay abandon, as a pun.
Now, however, the double entendre has been lost. I don't think anyone nowadays would write a song using "gay" in that sense; it would probably be misunderstood by most of those who heard it, and could no longer be used as a pun.
I bought a second-hand copy of Chaucer's poems recently and have been reading them, a few pages at a time, and that got me thinking about how language changes. One of the difficulties of reading Chaucer, of course is the spelling. Even familiar words are sometimes hard to recognise because of the unfamiliar spelling. The meaning of unfamiliar words can sometimes be worked out from the context, but at other times I have to resort to the footnotes.
I have no difficulty in reading books published 100 years ago. Books published in the middle of the 19th century present few difficulties, apart from occasional allusions to features of contemporary culture that are unknown today. One phrase still puzzles me from that period. Newpaper reports and death announcements often referred to "interesting children". "Daisy Smith, an interesting child, was accidentally drowned at a family picnic last week." If anyone knows what "interesting child" meant to the writers of such reports, please let me know.
Early 19th-century literature presents few problems. Much of Jane Austen and William Hazlitt's writing looks as if it could have been written today.
Mid-eighteenth=century literature is quite easy to understand, though there are turns of phrase and elements of style that look unfamiliar. Boswell, in his Life of Dr Johnson uses "that" followed by a comma as we use "which" today. Dr Johnson, of course, compiled the dictionary that did much to standardise English spelling, and that is what makes literature in subsequent periods easier for us to read.
A century earlier, Pepys's diary and the writings of Jonathan Swift can be understood, though there are more obscure allusions, and turns of phrase that wouldn't be understood today. Some modern editions have updated spelling, to make them easier to read. The Book of common prayer dates from this period too.
Go back half a century, and you have the King James Bible, though it too is often published with updated spellings. Until about the 1950s or so it was familiar to most English-speaking people, and perhaps helped to keep older versions of English alive for many. Even if they were not part of people's active vocabulary, there were many things that people understood. Though the language was archaic, even for the time, it often made more sense to 20th-century readers than the contemporary writing of Shakespeare.
Reading backward in time is one thing, but reading forward is another.
Most of the words used by Hazlitt, for example, are part of English today, and so we can read Hazlitt without difficulty. But what would Hazlitt have made of 21st-century English?
I wonder, too, how long the backward compatibility (would Hazlitt have understood that?) of English will last. After 300 years the Book of Common Prayer has been abandoned, along with the King James Bible, and the Coverdale psalms in the BCP were a century older. And now many words are being removed from dictionaries. As one could speak of a "pre-Johnson era", perhaps we are entering a post-Johnson era.
Jonathan at Thicket and Thorp drew my attention to this article, which describes how many words have been removed from a children's dictionary:
Some of the words removed: mistletoe, goblin, altar, bishop, monastery, monk, psalm, saint, sin, duchess, duke, decade, heron, kingfisher, lark, ox, oyster, thrush, weasel, apricot, ash, county, cowslip, fern, hazelnut, primrose, sheaf, walnut, willow.
And some included: Blog, voicemail, attachment, database, cut and paste, celebrity, creep, citizenship, EU, brainy, boisterous, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, biodegradable, dyslexic, food chain, trapezium, alliteration, curriculum, classify, block graph.
And to think that we read nursery rhymes to our children about "One old Oxford ox opening oysters"!
The point of a dictionary, or at least one of the points, is that one can find the meanings of unfamiliar words that one comes across for the first time. Many of the words removed have to do with the countryside and rural life, which children brought up in cities might want to look up if they read about them in books. But today's harmless drudges seem to think that they should not be allowed to.
Which reminds me... a word that seems to enter the vocabulary of children within the first couple of weeks of starting school for the first time is "allowed". Perhaps that should be compulsory.
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