Wordorigins.org

John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun, enumerates the various zombie rules that some people still cling to. There are no surprises on the list, but it’s nice to see them all listed all together. If he missed any, I can’t think of what they might be.

I’m pleased that I’m guilty of enforcing only one of these rules with my students: “Insisting on who for people, that for animals and objects.” I’ve gotten better at letting it slide, but it still irks the hell out of me whenever I see it, and the urge to pick up the blue pencil is a strong one.

[Discuss this post.]

Kory Stamper of the Harmless Drudgery blog points out the problems with correcting the grammar of others.

Ben Trawick-Smith of the Dialect Blog has found a copy of The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation from over fifty years ago. It’s an interesting nugget. I didn’t know that American broadcasters had such guides, but I shouldn’t be surprised.

Heaven is a word that dates back to the Old English heofon. Its earliest sense is that of the sky, the firmament in which the stars are placed. From Beowulf, line 1571:

swa of hefene hadre scineð rodores candel
(as from heaven, the candle of the sky clearly shines)

The plural form that is commonly used today also dates back this far. From c.825 in the Vespasian Psalter, from Psalms 8:3:

Ic gesie heofenas werc fingra ðinra
(I see the heavens, the work of your fingers)

The sense meaning the abode of God, the afterlife, appears a little bit later. From a translation of the gospel of Matthew, c.1000:

Fader ure þu þe eart on heofene
(Our father, you who are in heaven)

The English heaven has cognates throughout the Germanic languages.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition)

The title of this YouTube video is rather hyperbolic, but it makes a pretty persuasive case and gives a succinct lesson in how rhyme works in poetry along the way.

(Tip o’ the hat to Elisa Tersigni)

Ed Smith over at the New Statesman has a rather good criticism of Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell’s essay is often trotted out as justification for grammatical prescriptivism, probably because of the six simple rules for good writing that Orwell promulgates. It is only second to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style in this regard. Of course, neither Orwell or the prescriptivists realize that Orwell himself runs roughshod over his rule #4, “Never use the passive where you can use the active.” In the essay Orwell uses the passive voice in about twenty percent of his sentences, while most writers of his era used it in only about ten percent. It seems that Orwell (Strunk and White, too, but that’s another story) didn’t know what the passive voice is, or at least wasn’t very good at spotting it in his own writing.

But Smith skips the grammatical skirmishes and drives a knife into the heart of Orwell’s argument that plain English inherently makes for clearer communication:

Newspaper headlines are a dialect of English in their own right. They don’t operate under the same grammatical and stylistic rules that normal prose does. In a brief post on the Lingua Franca blog, Allan Metcalf outlines the basic rules that govern headline writing.

I’ve never seen these rules codified before. It’s kind of neat.

The British Library has put the Beowulf manuscript on line. Beowulf starts on folio 132r. The library’s announcement is here.

The manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, contains two separate codices that have been bound together. The first, the Southwick Codex, occupies the first ninety-three folios. The Beowulf manuscript, also known as the Nowell Codex after sixteenth century antiquarian Laurence Nowell who owned it at one point, follows on 94r and contains five Old English works, a life of St. Christopher, a description of the Wonders of the East, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle, and two poems, Beowulf and a verse translation of the book of Judith. The date of the composition of Beowulf is unknown, but the manuscript, the only surviving copy of the poem, was copied c. 1010 C.E.

The manuscript was badly damaged in a 1731 fire at the aptly named Ashburnam House. As a result, the manuscript pages have been bound in paper frames to prevent further deterioration.

This British phrase, meaning the whole thing, dates to at least 1979, and it’s of unknown origin. No one knows what or who monty refers to.

The earliest known use of the phrase is in the 30 August 1979 issue of The Stage and Television Today in which one of the members of a singing duo describes how they were discovered by a talent agent:

We went out one Friday night to a pub with the boys and after a while we got up and sang a song. There was a fellow sitting there with the full monty on, big gold rings, all that. “I’m from London,” he said. “You come back with me and I’ll sign you up.”

The sense meaning total nudity stems from the 1997 film of that title. Prior to the movie, the full monty did not especially connote nudity. From Simon Beaufoy’s script:

Horse: No one said owt about going the full monty to me...
Gaz: We’ve got to give ‘em something your average ten-bob stripper don’t.

While we have no idea where the phrase actually comes from, that hasn’t stopped people from proffering explanations. Here are a few. None of these have any reliable evidence to support them:

• It refers to Field Marshal Montgomery’s habit of meticulously planning his assaults, including intensive and detailed artillery preparations;
• It refers to Montgomery in full-dress uniform with all his medals;
• It refers to Montgomery’s habit of eating a large breakfast each morning;
• Breakfast, but not Montgomery’s, instead it’s the one served by Mrs. Montague at the Lennox Cafe in Bognor Regis, West Sussex;
• It refers to expensive formal clothing purchased at the tailor shop of Montague Burton;
• It is gambler’s slang derived from the game of three-card Monte;
• It is a corruption of the full amount;
• It derives from a television commercial for fruit juice in which an actor asks for the full Del Monte;
• Finally, it could come from Australian and New Zealand slang, a monty being a bet (especially on a horse) that is a sure thing.

Sources:

Shapiro, Fred, ”Times (London) Article on My Antedating of ‘Full Monty,’” ADS-L, 8 February 2013.

Oxford English Dictionary, New Edition.

University of Toronto linguistics professor J. K. “Jack” Chambers was on CBC radio Sunday talking about the Great Vowel Shift. It’s one of the better explanations of the topic in under ten minutes that I’ve heard. And radio is a much better medium to explain sound changes than anything in writing. There’s probably not much here for those that already know about the topic, but if you don’t or are still confused by the Great Vowel Shift, it’s well worth a listen.