Category: English

Word of the day – skeet

By Simon

Skeet, which apparently comes from Old Icelandic, is a word you’re likely to hear frequently in the Isle of Man. It’s means gossip, more or less. People will ask you, “Got any skeet (at you)?” and will try to find out all about who you’ve seen, where they were and what they were doing, who they were with, and so on. The holder of any juicy skeet will try and keep as much of it to themselves for as long as they can to build up the suspense.

You can also have a skeet (look) at something, for example if you’ve brought something new people will ask for a skeet at it, and having a skeet at the neighbours from behind your net curtains is a common practice.

In Manx the word skeet means sneak or news, and jollys-skeet is a voyeur.

Other meanings of skeet include:

– clay targets used in trapshooting – known as clay pigeons in the UK
– a poker hand consisting of a 9, a 5, a 2, and two other cards lower than 9.
– loud, disruptive and poorly educated person of low social status (in Newfoundland slang)
– to squirt

Ramblage and recreation

By Simon

A photo of the Douglas Head lighthouse

Today while exploring Douglas Head, an rocky headland just south of Douglas, I came across a sign that explained that the area was developed for ramblage and recreation, and other things, in the 1870s. The word ramblage attracted my attention as I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe it’s an old version of rambling. Have you heard it before?

There are quite a few words describe the action of moving along on foot, including walk, ramble, amble, hike, ambulate, march, wander, shuffle, perambulate, plod, run, saunter, stride, stroll, trudge and tramp. I’ve read that in some languages, such as Spanish and French, verbs of motion don’t usually indicate the manner of motion. Is this true of other languages?

Duvet day

By Simon

It rained heavily on and off most of yesterday and I overheard someone on the bus commenting that it was a “duvet day”. I don’t remember hearing this expression before, but from the context I thought she meant that because the weather was so unpleasant, she would prefer to spend the day under her duvet rather than going to work.

According to Wikipedia, a duvet day is a day off from work you take when you’re not sick and don’t have other reasons for staying at home, but just feel like a break. Some people apparently have the right to such days in their contracts. The Phrase Finder adds that this practice dates back to the 1960s and that the phrase first appeared in print in 1996.

Does this concept exist in your country? Are you allowed to take duvet days?

Research projects

By Simon

Chinese Englishes

One of my classmates at university is doing a research project on mutual intelligibility between varieties of English spoken in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK.

It involves listening to recordings of these varieties of English and answering simple questions. The recordings are divided into five sections, each lasting less than 15 minutes, which you can listen to at any time. There’s also a questionnaire to complete.

If you come from one of these places and are willing to help, please go to one of the following pages:

Listening task for native speakers of English
Listening task for native speakers of other languages

Quantifier Intuitions

Here’s another project you could maybe help with: a researcher from the University of Massachusetts Amherst but temporarily based at Bangor University is doing a study exploring the different meanings the words like, all, each, and every have in everyday life, and exploring their effect on the mathematics performance of children with different language and dialect backgrounds.

This involves completing this online questionnaire (43 questions).

Languages and jobs in Spain

By Simon

According to an article I found the other day, a knowledge of languages is required for 27% of jobs in Spain, and the language most in demand is English. So if you speak English and Spanish and would like to work in Spain, there should be plenty of jobs you could apply for.

The article, which is based on information from Infoempleo, a site where you kind find jobs in Spain, also shows that French, German, Italian and Portuguese are in demand in Spain, although to a much lesser extent than English.

The article also mentions that 28% of jobs in the Basque country require a knowledge of Basque, that 13% of jobs in Catalonia require Catalan (this seems quite a low figure given the strength of the language), and that 10% of jobs in Galicia and Valencia require knowledge of the local languages.

I don’t have stats for how many jobs in Wales require a knowledge of Welsh, but I do know that Welsh is needed for many jobs in the public sector.

Accents

By Simon

I went down to Cornwall for my sister’s wedding a few days ago and heard some interesting English accents on the way. While waiting on Bristol station, for example, I heard some people talking in unfamiliar accents that might have been Bristolian. At first I wasn’t sure what language they were speaking – it certainly didn’t sound like English. After listening to it a bit more I realised that it was English after all, but I had to listen for carefully to make out what they were saying. It sounded very fast with a lot of elision.

Have you ever heard someone talking in what sounds like a foreign language only to realise later that it’s actually a language you know?

The announcements on railway stations in the UK are usually in RP English which has been pre-recorded and is then spliced together as necessary. So the way the Cornish place names were pronounced by the station announcements sounded quite different to the way they were pronounced by the Cornish conductor on the train. I really like Cornish accents and acquired bits of one myself while I was there, even though I only stayed for a long weekend.

BBC Voices has examples of Cornish and Bristol accents, though none of the recordings sound like the accents I heard on Bristol station, so maybe the people were from somewhere else.

Yesterday I went the dentist, and while I was chatting to the dental hygienist she detected a Welsh accent in my English and switched to Welsh. So we continued talking in Welsh and she was surprised when I told her that I’m not a native speaker as she’d assumed. Apparently I have a mid-Wales accent in Welsh.

English villages in Taiwan

By Simon

The Taiwan government is planning to spend millions of dollars “improving Taiwan’s English-language environment”, which will include the setting up of two English-language villages, according to this report.

They will improve English language signage and aim to host more international concerts and exhibitions.

The idea of the English villages is to make it easier for the local residents to practise their English. The first village will probably be set up in Hsinchu Science and Technology Park, which has a large number of foreign staff. The villages will have English language signs, local businesses will be encouraged to provide English-language services, and will be given star ratings for the quality of those services.

Taiwan already has at least one English ‘village’ where children can be immersed in the language, according to this report.

Are there similar ‘villages’ in other countries?

This is me

By Simon

One of the seminars I went to this week was on innovation in London English. One interesting point noticed by the researchers was the range of quotatives being used. Quotatives are words and expressions used to introduce reported speech, including “I said” and “she went”.

The most common quotative among young Londoners is “be like”, as in “I was like”, “he was like”, etc. This expression is used with reported speech, and also with sounds and facial expressions indicating different moods and attitudes. There are apparently equivalents of it in many other languages.

A new quotative they found being used in London was “This is me” / “This was me”. I haven’t heard this being used anywhere, have you?

How do you introduce reported speech?

Word of the day – thetatismus

By Simon

Thetatismus is apparently a term used in speech therapy to describe the inability to pronounce one or both of the dental fricatives: /θ/ as in three, and /ð/, as in these.

I came across it in Anthony Burgess’s book A Mouthful of Air – Language, Languages … Especially English.

So now I know what I ’suffered’ from when I was a lad – I couldn’t pronounce /θ/ and didn’t know there was a difference between /θ/ and /f/, so didn’t distinguish between three and free. I also substituted /v/ for /ð/ when it appeared in the middle of words. Even now pronouncing /θ/ is not entirely natural for me and I tend to say /f/ instead when I’m not concentrating.

Word of the day – cuddle

By Simon

Cuddle is an example of a false friend or cognate – it has one meaning in English (to hold (sb or sth) close; a close embrace) and one in Welsh (a hiding place). The pronunciation is different in each language: in English it’s /ˈkʌd.ḷ/ and in Welsh it’s /ˈkɨðlɛ/ or /ˈkɪðlɛ/.

The English word is a variant or cull or coll (to embrace,) which possibly comes from the Middle English couthelen from couth (known).

The Welsh word comes from cudd (hiding, concealment, hiding place; concealed, hidden) and lle (place).

Related words include:
cuddfa / cuddfan – hiding place, retreat, hoard
cuddiad – concealment
cuddiedig – hidden, concealed
cuddio – to hide, cover, bury
cuddiwr – hider
cuddlen – curtain, veil
cuddserch – fondness, affection
cuddswyddog – detective