Chaucery Blog

The Dialecticon is now available in the Chaucery fun section of this site. It was inspired by an old blog entry on Americanisms, and allows anyone to easily see how synonyms vary according to location. For example, how much more common is the term 'sidewalk' in the US compared to the British term 'pavement', and what about in Canada and Australia? Now, go play...

Updated 12 May 2007: I've added some more examples to the dialecticon, including some which demonstrate how to use it to compare the spelling skills of various countries. Did you know that almost half of British web pages containing the word 'dumbbell' spell it incorrectly?

Posted by James at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A quick glance at the birth notices in the local paper shows that 90% of babies' birth weights are announced in pounds and ounces, despite noone of parenting age who was schooled in Australia being instructed in anything other than metric. I suspect that if you asked these new parents to do some calculations in imperial measurements that they'd fail spectactularly. It's doubtful that they'd know their own weight in anything other than kilograms, which makes comparisons with their offspring rather difficult.

Another area where imperial measurements have steadfastly refused to be supplanted is in computer monitor sizes. They are solely advertised as being 17", 19" and the like. However, televisions have, for as long as can remember, been sized in centimetres, with the old standard sizes being 35cm (small), 51cm (medium) and 63cm (large). Interestingly, with the recent growth in popularity of much large screens, some are being advertised in both centimetres and inches. Perhaps this is due to overflow from the computer industry, from where LCD monitors are being sourced for LCD televisions.

Posted by James at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To the traveller and geography student alike it can be perplexing that a single name can be applied to multiple countries. On the one hand, North and South Korea have an easy to understand border. The adjacent South American countries of Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) also make geographical sense. Even the two Congos seem appropriately positioned. But how do four countries, only two of which are adjacent, come to be named Guinea?

Guinea is the name given to the coastal areas of western Africa between the tropic of cancer and the equator. The word "guinea" is derived from a Berber word meaning "black man".

The area which was to become the country of Guinea was detached from Senegal in 1890. It became French Guinea in 1895, and with a referendum in 1958 became the independent country of Guinea.

In the 19th century the Portuguese had a base at Bissau, a city to the north of the aforementioned French area of Guinea. Including the surrounding area of influence this was known as Portuguese Guinea, until independence was declared in 1973 and its name changed to Guinea-Bissau.

Far to the south of the aforementioned guineas, just north of the equator, the Spanish had in some form been holding land since the 18th century. In the early twentieth century their local territories were united as Spanish Guinea. This became Equitorial Guinea in 1963 after some autonomy was given, and then it became fully independent in 1968.

The south Asian island of New Guinea was named in 1545 by Spaniard Ynigo Ortis de Retez, apparently due to the resemblance between the islands' inhabitants and those found on the African Guinea coast. The eastern half of the island was annexed by Indonesia in 1969. The western half, the country of Papua New Guinea, became independent from Australia in 1975.

Posted by James at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many words have more than just a single meanings. The determination of the intended meaning from its context is a skill learnt early on in language development. For example, differentiating set as referring to a bone healing, as opposed to a film stage, is straightforward. However, when a word has two or more meanings which are similar enough to fit into the same context, then we can encounter problems.

The main meaning of famous is well-known, but it can also mean first-rate. Thus, if an unknown Harry Smith is described as famous, we can't rely on language structure forcing only one meaning to fit. Instead, we depend on other clues being given. For example, if he was only mentioned in a footnote as a famous author, we would have to assume one of the meanings. Alternatively, if he was described in a paragraph lauding his achievements, then the intended meaning would be obvious.

Infamous, literally not-famous has only the single definition, that of having a bad reputation. This allows the possibility that the description of famous and infamous can be applied to the same person. However, the strangeness of this mitigates its use. 'Adolf Hitler, famous and infamous leader ...' anyone?

[As a rather confusing aside, famous also has an archaic meaning of ill repute.]

Notorious is a good, solid synonym for infamous. However, it is also a synonym for widely known, or famous.

Known widely : famous, notorious
Known widely and esteemed : famous
Known widely and unfavorably: infamous, notorious

Now that that's all cleared up, you can get to see a whole world of confusion out in the real world. The first result on Google for "famous and infamous" is currently The Great, the Famous and the Infamous. Here, if famous meant 'known widely' then 'great' and 'infamous' are superfluous. If it meant 'known widely and esteemed', then 'great' is superfluous. Indeed, the whole first page of google results will give you a headache. Wasn't life simpler when you didn't think about this stuff?

Posted by James at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Wikipedia is a good source of unusual lists. I accidentally came across the List of self-contradicting words in English. It's interesting to speculate on how these meanings came about.

Bolt As a transitive verb, it means "to secure something in place (with a bolt)". But as an intransitive verb, it means "to leave or run away from (quickly)".

Buckle As a verb construction of the noun buckle, which is a device for clasping a belt together, it means "to secure, tighten, hold"; otherwise, it means "to weaken, collapse".

Posted by James at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following the interesting results I found in Prevalence of Americanisms I wrote a short Perl script to query Google using their web API.

For the previous results I used Google with the site: operator to restrict the results to particular countries based on the server's domain. Using their web API I was able to target these results more specifically, using an option which determines site locations based on the "top level domain name of the server and the geographic location of the server IP address". This would now correctly identify those numerous sites in the .com space but which reside in other countries, presumably giving more accurate results for my survey. In addition, I could now include US sites, which are impossible to distinguish based on domain name alone.

* fortnight / two weeks isn't a strict pairing, because two weeks can often be used in UK english where fortnight is not applicable. However, it's still useful as a comparison between countries.

The Australian and UK results (the languages with which I am more familiar) look to be more accurate than the previous table.

I wanted to put up an online tool to enable anyone to determine the ratios for any words, but I don't have the web server facilities at the moment.

I didn't know that cell phone was so popular in the UK, though I have been noticing its increasing use on the BBC's international services.

Note that I had to use "write us as" rather than "write us" so as to exclude some other common usages such as "write us a letter". For example, "write me a letter soon" is normal UK english, but "write me soon" is not.

Updated 20 June: Fixed tv aerial / tv antenna results. Added write to us at / write us at, mobile phone / cell phone pairs.

Updated 30 June: Added aeroplane / airplane, father christmas / santa claus, gaol / jail, infant school / kindergarten, liquorice / licorice, maths / math pairs.

Updated 10 July: Added many more pairs, and tried (unsuccessfully) to make the table layout more readable. I should really colour-code each entry, with shades indicating how great the ratio is.

Posted by James at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(aka Prevalence of Briticisms)

There are many differences between US and UK english. To quantify some of the differences, and the situation in other english-speaking countries, I used Google to determine the ratios of the frequencies of various synonyms which distinguish the languages.

The burgled / burglarized pair is the most polarised result, with the former used 65 times more often in UK websites than the latter. In Canada, on the other hand, burgled is used only just about half as often as burglarized.

The aluminium / aluminum result is odd. The large amount of aluminium mining occurring in Australia leads to both forms being most common there in terms of total usage. However, the UK version is almost 10 times more popular in Australia than the US version, whereas in the UK it's less than twice as popular. I don't know a good reason for that.

Another odd result is that color is more popular than colour in Australia. Children are taught colour at school, and I know of nobody who uses color. However, for foreign companies it seems to be a word that they just don't bother adjusting to the native spelling.

The biggest disparities in the UK are where it's a different word, rather than just an alternative spelling. You'd expect culture to preserve these with more vigour.

I'm also struck by how in Australia the US term tv antenna is 21 times more popular than its UK equivalent tv aerial, for which I have no explanation.

Addendum: I am contemplating writing a tool to automatically query Google for these statistics. Stay tuned.

Posted by James at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fridge is a nice, easy-to-spell word. It's unfortunately the cause of the frequent misspelling of its full-length relation, refrigerator. As you can see, a d has crept into the short form. From this, people mistakenly back-form the original word to refridgerator. To prompt yourself just remember that the short version is spelt differently from its big brother.

Posted by James at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The misuse of reign for rein is quite common, perhaps because of the decreasing uses of rein in everyday life. Even CNN are guilty, erring in the title of a piece about oil: OPEC keeps tight reign on taps. There are over 8000 hits found for "tight reign" on Google, all of which are wrong.

The easy way to remember which to use in a particular situation is to know that reign, meaning the period during which a monarch rules, is derived from reg, or rex, meaning king. So, seeing the 'g' in reign should remind you of regal. Hence, the other rein must be the horse one.

Posted by James at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wrinkles.

Posted by James at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An aside to a flu vaccine story in the Washington Post says:

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, released an ad Friday calling Kerry "the most liberal man in the Senate" and "the most liberal person ever to run for president."

• Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
• Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

(Obsolete) Morally unrestrained; licentious.

In this country, liberal is such a positive term that parties from both sides of politics are associated with it. The conservative party was founded on the bold idea of naming itself the Liberal Party. At no time were their policies liberal, so it seems to be a sly way of forcing people to think liberal when talking of that party. More straightforwardly, the parties to the left, Labor and the Greens are both seen as being liberal in policy.

Posted by James at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whilst Summer 2004 might mean around July 2004 to some, to us Southern Hemispherians it means either January 2004 or December 2004. Thus, program release dates given as a season are not very useful for a global audience.

You'd think that a large company such as Microsoft would appreciate small matters such as its geographically-dispersed customers. However, their latest DirectX SDK is described as Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (Summer 2004).

Posted by James at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is an interesting group of words that changes their spelling according to usage (in British/Aus English at least). For example, practice (noun) versus practise (verb), and licence (noun) versus license (verb). Less well known to me is peninsula (noun) versus peninsular (adjective). People often misspell the former because of its similarity to the easy-to-spell insular. Once you note that both insular and peninsular are the adjective forms, it becomes easy to remember the odd one out.

As you might expect, these words have the same origin. Insula is Latin for island, thus an insular nature is isolated, like from an island. Peninsular has the pene Latin prefix, meaning almost. Hence, it's a piece of land that's almost an island.

Posted by James at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So what does blurred vision have to do with the crucifixion wounds of Jesus?

It starts with the branding of slaves with a tattoo. This mark was known as a stigma, from stig, to prick (tattoos are created by pricking the skin with ink-filled needles). The term stigma was then generalised to apply to the slaves themselves, and thence to a distinguishing mark of social disgrace, such as 'the stigma of being in prison'. From a similar origin came the meaning of any mark on the skin, and of the marks of crucifixion in particular.

Back on a different track, but to the same source, the blurred vision of astigmatism is caused by an oddly-shaped eyeball preventing light rays from merging at a single point on the retina. Thus we have a + stigma, where 'a' means 'not', and stigma is from the greek for 'point' (and 'prick').

Incidentally, stigmata and stigmas are both acceptable plurals for stigma.

Posted by James at 2:39 PM | Permalink

Burgle and burglarize: Two words, invented at around the same time to describe what a burglar does, are pretty strictly divided between British and US usage. In Australia, and in Britain, you'd be looked upon quizzically, if not openly mocked, for using burglariz(s)e when the simpler and more common option is available. On the other hand, in the US the term burgle would seem rather jocular.

Posted by James at 1:25 PM | Permalink

For a while there was confusion in the Perth venue scene due to the existence of both the Perth Superdrome and the Perth Superdome. Though both have since been renamed, it is interesting that such similar words with such difference origins should be used to describe such similar structures.

Drome is from the Greek Dromos, meaning race course or running track. It can be found in words such as hippodrome, a horse-racing course, and palindrome, a word that is the same running backwards as forwards.

Posted by James at 4:10 PM | Permalink

The Oxford University Press has been looking at common language mistakes of the present time.

But it has been replaced by misuse of "diffuse" or "defuse" (as in "A coach can diffuse the situation by praising the players").

Research for the new Concise Oxford English Dictionary, published today, found that this word crime was committed in some 50% of examples on the database. It is now rated as the commonest in the language.

Second commonest is uncertainty over when to use "rein" or "reign", found in 26% of examples, as in "A taxi driver had free reign to charge whatever he likes".

Third most frequent (21%) is "tow" instead of "toe", as in "Some pointed to his refusal to tow the line under Tony Blair". Fourth (12%) is "pouring" instead of "poring", as in "He spent his evenings pouring over western art magazines".

Posted by James at 10:59 AM | Permalink

Hallmark sentimentality, maybe; and aabb rhyme scheme, for sure; but these lines are not iambic pentameter -- they're anapestic tetrameter.

My lack of knowledge of the subject makes some of the jargon on the Language Log hilarious.

Posted by James at 10:14 PM | Permalink

The descriptions of the recent Internet Explorer and Internet Information Systems security problems in many online stories include the zero-day designation, such as in The Register: Internet Explorer. Quick, call security!.

While some speculate that an IIS zero day was used to own the servers, my guess is that the hosting boxes were not patched against a recent vulnerability (something like MS04-11). I would normally say "Hey, you should have been patched" and gone about my business. But this event is a bit different.

A good definition of this term is given by About.Com in Zero-Day Exploits

The Holy Grail for malicious program and virus writers is the “zero-day exploit”. A zero-day exploit is when the exploit for the vulnerability is created before, or on the same day as the vulnerability is learned about by the vendor. By creating a virus or worm that takes advantage of a vulnerability the vendor is not yet aware of and for which there is not currently a patch available the attacker can wreak maximum havoc.

Posted by James at 12:00 PM | Permalink

A week ago my football team lost, in a performance the local rag described disparagingly as disinterested. Hardly a put-down, I thought to myself, imagining the clinical demolitions of other teams by a certain very distant team. Maybe it was their game plan to keep emotions out of the game.

Enough of this folly. The word the journalist was looking for was uninterested, meaning bored. The umpires, on the other hand, were the disinterested people on the field, being unbiased and impartial, bless 'em.

It's this disinterested word that's the problem. If it had never been invented, and we'd been forced to use its synonyms, we'd have no problem. But, as its usage has increased. remembering its difference from the aforementioned uninterested has proved tricky. To wit, I offer the uninterested onion.

Imagine a large onion with a hole right the way through it. It has been bored. It is a bored onion. The start of onion rhymes with uninterested. Whenever you're planning on using disinterested or uninterested think of the bored onion.

I couldn't think of a good memory aid for disinterested, except the unbiased disinterested dispute-settler. It doesn't have the right ring about it. Anyway, give it a go. You do have a few neurons spare to store these aids, don't you...

Posted by James at 9:33 PM | Permalink

A current example of the meaning of a word changing before our eyes is enormity. As I had learnt its meaning to be 'extreme wickedness', I got a jolt when I read the following in today's paper:

A $15 million Lotto win is not the type of gold rush people expect in Meekatharra.

The small mining town 760km north-east of Perth was in shock at the weekend and coming to grips with the enormity of the win and what it could mean for the town.

A noted on Dictionary.com:

This distinction between enormity and enormousness has not always existed historically, but nowadays many observe it. Writers who ignore the distinction, as in the enormity of the President's election victory or the enormity of her inheritance, may find that their words have cast unintended aspersions or evoked unexpected laughter.

Is the extra four letters too high a price to pay for clarity?

Posted by James at 11:37 AM | Permalink

Pointed to by the source of all language-related goodness on the web, the Language Log, is an article about the increasing use of British expressions in US language.

Another phrase that started across the pond and is almost always used metaphorically is "at the end of the day," an equivalent of the American "when all is said and done." A couple of years of overuse sucked all the life out of it, and now no self-respecting American writer would perpetrate it. A LexisNexis search reveals that it's still quite popular in the U.K., however.

It's strange to learn that many terms that I see and hear every day are foreign to some English-speakers.

Posted by James at 5:04 PM | Permalink

You'd have thought that a number was something easily defined. However, there are cases in everyday life that don't seem to follow the rules. My number plate, for example, consists entirely of letters. Similary, the PIN for online usage of my library may contain only letters, if I choose.

In the former case, the terminology probably came into existence when licence plates were only serial numbers, with letters being added with the growth in number of cars. For the latter, I can only think that the people documenting the system were thinking of the ATM PIN analogy, rather than the more usual (and correct) password.

Posted by James at 3:33 PM | Permalink

Whilst wandering through Bold Park today I came across a large placard describing the revegetation project in progress, consisting of the removal of weeds and the planting of native plants. It noted that this work was necessary because of a wildfire in 2000 that burnt out many hectares of the park.

In Australia, fires in the bush have until now been universally known as bush fires. The term wildfire has been reserved for the idiom like wildfire, such as in the news spread like wildfire. I suppose the land management authorities will use this change as linguistic sleight-of-hand to claim that their new pratices have eliminated bush fires.

An aside: I have just hit my first Google error ever (since I started using it in 1998 or 1999).

Server Error The server encountered a technical error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.

Is this the start of their decline?

Posted by James at 10:20 PM | Permalink

As an indication of how Australia is progressing in its steady move from British terminology to American terminology it is instructive to read to often funny English-to-American Dictionary.

anorak n. As well as being a waterproof jacket, an anorak is someone who's a little bit too knowledgeable about one subject. Generally a subject like seventeenth century flower pots or steam trains, rather than athletic sexual positions or gunfighting. Americans (and also Brits, as our languages merge ever closer) would call them "geeks". I have a feeling that it's because train-spotters all wear brightly-coloured anoraks, but I've no real basis for thinking that. This is just another example of me foisting my half-thought-out biased views on the general public via the one-way medium of the web. I love this dirty town.

Posted by James at 5:17 PM | Permalink

Inspired by some comments in Private Eye, today's question is should Letters Page be Letters' Page. On first glance, the apostrophe looks okay - the page belongs to the letters. But no, the page is just where the letters are, there's no ownership involved.

Let's take a more obvious example. I propose a Trousers Convention. With an apostrophe, Trousers' Convention would imply a gathering of trousers to talk about some other, unidentified topic. Without the apostrophe, we infer it to be a gathering of people to talk about trousers. There, easily done.

Posted by James at 11:47 AM | Permalink

So, you've been having problems spelling inoculate. It just doesn't look right, having just one 'n', especially when you compare it with words such as innocuous.

Let's start with the easy one, innocuous. This is formed by in, meaning 'not', and nocuous meaning harmful (eg. noxious). Hence the double 'n'.

Inoculate is from in, this time meaning 'in', and oculus meaning eye (eg. ocular). The connection to vaccinations is that trees were inoculated by grafting foreign buds (eyes) into them, like grafting viruses into people.

Posted by James at 10:03 PM | Permalink

I believe that the web has become ubiquitous enough that the www. prefix to web addresses should be dropped. They were there originally as a convenient way that servers distributing web content could be distinguished from those serving ftp, gopher or news (usenet), eg. www.me.com, ftp.me.com, gopher.me.com and news.me.com. Because of the prevalence of the web over these other forms, I think it's safe to assume that without a prefix (ie. me.com) the web site should be assumed. For the site administrator, this is a simple matter of ensuring that the DNS for that address is properly mapped, eg. setting me.com to map to the same IP address as www.server.com.

I remember some years ago when there was a discussion on how to pronounce the www. prefix, which consists of an inordinately long ten syllables. Hopefully, this argument can be made moot by eliminating the prefix altogether. Surely advertisers will welcome this change, which will allow for snappier web addresses in their advertisements. In addition, the public will have shorter addresses to memorise.

On the subject of web addresses in the mass media, I wonder how long it will be till announces can standardise on pronouncing '/' (the solidus) as slash, rather than the unneccessary forward slash. I can't imagine anyone mistakenly thinking that slash might be short for backslash.

Finally, whilst reading I was thinking how cool it would be to have the web address http://blackchamber.com/, given the groovy associations with ciphers and code-breaking, eg. from The Black Chamber:

For centuries, nations around the world have operated Black Chambers, secret rooms where they attempted to decode the messages being sent by their rivals. The French operated the Cabinet Noir, in Vienna the Geheime Kabinets-Kanzlei was the home of Austria's greatest codebreakers, and in Britain there was Room 40 and then Bletchley Park.

However, it seems all the related web addresses have been taken by black chambers of commerce. For example, http://blackchamber.com/ takes you to the Silicon Valley Black Chamber of Commerce. That seems to be a rather perculiar choice of abbreviations. I would have said that the most important aspect of that title is "commerce", closely followed by "chamber of". A "chamber of commerce" is a well-known term. In lesser importance would come "Black" and "Silicon Valley", as adjectives relating to the chamber of commerce. To me, "black chamber" is only a workable abbreviation of the entire title for people who are told what the abbreviation stands for. It is not self evident. To me it has only two meanings, its literal one, of a black room, and its historical one, of a cryptography group.

Of course, the English language is the product of its ever changing usage. If enough people use a term for it to become generally accepted, then that's the final say on the matter.

Posted by James at 2:26 PM | Permalink

Established in Australia since 1965, the HSBC Group has a network ...

Sometimes misuses like this can be justified as archaic, slang, or just rare. Unfortunately for HSBC, there are no alternative uses for since that fulfill any of these - see Google's dictionary source for a list.

Posted by James at 12:44 PM | Permalink

For a computer user, this story is quite funny:

Technology firms supplying Los Angeles County with hardware have been asked to avoid using the words "master" and "slave" to describe their products.

Within LA County an exhaustive search has been mounted to find all equipment labelled with the offending descriptions.

In many cases the labels have been replaced or taped over with others reading "primary" and "secondary".

Posted by James at 9:56 AM | Permalink