The latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published this week, and there have been a spate of articles about some of the new words that are in the dictionary for the first time, including custard cream and neet. The OED is a repository of the words we use – it’s a descriptive rather than a prescriptive publication. Our current preoccupations with the economy are therefore well represented, with sub-prime, non-dom, and boiler room all getting in for the first time.
The regular updates of the OED are ignored or mocked by people who have an authoritarian attitude to language (and probably to everything else in their lives).
I’ll let you look up the new financial words for yourselves, but I’ll explain that a custard cream is a type of biscuit (cookie, if you speak American English) with a vanilla cream filling. It’s the iconic snack offered to donors after giving blood, so much so that the National Blood Service in the UK have a sticker with the slogan “I’d give my right arm for a custard cream”!
A neet, on the other hand is less tasty then a cream-filled biscuit. It’s an acronym to describe a young person “not in employment, education, or training”.
Tag language
A custard cream? That’s neet!
Reading by numbers
I am indebted to Karen Schriver, author of Dynamics in Document Design, for posting a note to the Info-Design Cafe mailing list about a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about readability formulas.
In his article “Can you read as well as a fifth-grader? Check the formula” columnist Carl Bialik discusses the readability formulas included in word processing software such as Microsoft Word, and discusses the value of the mechanical application of such formulas. He has opinions from both supporters and detractors of readability formulas, and counts both Karen Schriver, and Professor J. Peter Kincaid, one of the original instigators of the Flesch-Kincaid formula used in Microsoft Word, amongst those who question the value of the formulas.
I recently read a far more sustained attack on readability formulas, and in particular on their “dubious use” by the UK’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES), written by Martin Cutts of the Plain Language Commission. In Writing by numbers: are readability formulas to clarity what karaoke is to song? Cutts complains that public bodies like the DfES use readability formulas as part of their propaganda and ignore the obvious shortcomings of what he terms “crude” tests. He notes that the main problem with readability tests is that:
[those] who apply them uncritically tend to assume that any 10-sentence [passage] with, say, 12 polysyllabic words is as good and clear as any other with 12 polysyllabic words. But its grammar and punctuation may be poor and its message muddled, ambiguous or misleading. Such findings are only likely to emerge after usability testing (not readability testing) or editorial scrutiny or both.
In an effort to offer an alternative to the flawed readability formulas, Cutts and the Plain Language Commission have published a Plain English Lexicon, available free of charge for download from their website. The lexicon helps you find out whether the words you write will be easily understood, by comparing their grade level in the US Living Word Vocabulary (LWV) and their frequency in the UK British National Corpus (BNC). Words that have low LWV grade levels and high BNC frequencies should be easily understood by readers on both side of the Atlantic, according to Cutts. As long as the spelling isn’t too different over there.
Apostrophe overload
I am currently revising some user-facing documentation for a new client. The existing documents were prepared by a member of staff, no longer working for the company concerned, who had never had any training in technical writing skills. There’s a series of about a dozen Word documents of about 20 pages each. All the formatting has been done without the use of styles, additional white space has been added with empty paragraphs, and all the graphics are floating. Even the Table of Contents has been created manually. These are all examples of inefficient ways to use Microsoft Word, and they are typical of work produced by people who are, in terms of their documentation skills, well-meaning amateurs. (They may well excel in their own professional fields, and they are probably really nice people too!)
I can deal with all these things, and if I am asked to, I can show people how to save time and energy by doing things in different ways that allow for consistency and repeatability across document sets.
The thing that has really upset me with these particular documents is the poor quality of the writing itself. The most grating offence against accepted current usage that this writer is guilty of is the use of an apostrophe to indicate the plural of nouns. I’ve seen “operator’s”, “user’s”, “extra’s”, and “area’s” – not one of them indicating a possessive – in just a few pages. Poor Lynne Truss would be having a fit by now, and to tell you the truth, I am nearly there myself.
Why "correctness" matters
Native speakers of English – or any other language – seem to know how to use their own language, and what is correct in language use, even without formal study of the rules of grammar. People just seem to know “what sounds right”. Many very wise people have written about this at length and I wouldn’t dare try and compete with Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker or David Crystal.
Sometimes, as languages grow and develop, confusing situations occur with different meanings or different rules for similar sounding words. While recognising that language changes, we try to pass on these more sophisticated usages as they are keys to subtle yet meaningful variations in our speech and writing. Those of us who love clarity and correctness (and I count myself amongst them) can be upset when distinctions are lost, and this week Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich eloquently bewailed the apparent loss of one distinct variation in usage. The particular distinction that bothered Schmich was the difference between “lie down” and “lay down”. This is a distinction that I understood automatically, but I had to go to Michael Swan for a formal explanation. “Lay” means to put down carefully, says Swan, and takes an object. It has a regular form, but an awkward spelling in its past tense (“laid” not “layed”). “Lie”, meaning to be or become horizontal, is an irregular verb, with the past tense “lay”. It’s easy to see how this may confuse some people.
The unhappiness that people like Schmich and I feel when distinctions are lost is not due to us being “old-fashioned”, or “conservative”, but because we believe that the variety that correct usage entails enriches language, while casual and thoughtless usage makes language poorer for all of us.
Worse than hieroglyphics
An article by Sam Dunn in today’s Independent on Sunday compares the user information that accompanies financial products to Egyptian hieroglyphics, and unsurprisingly, the hieroglyphics come off best.
For some unscrupulous companies, jargon and obscure language can help to sell products or services. Customers cowed or dazzled by technical or impressive-sounding language will be reluctant to shop around for alternatives.
