Apostrophes in plurals

There is a simple riposte that all grammarians are familiar with hearing. It goes something like this: "The rules are too complicated and who gives a stuff anyway? People know what I mean."

Boots: remarkably thick, even by cat standards

True, and I know what my cat means when he follows me into the kitchen and wraps his tail around my leg. He wants feeding. In fact, almost every attempt by my cat to engage my attention can be translated as "Feed me". 

So "They know what I mean" is only a valid argument if you aspire to no higher level of communication than my cat, who is remarkably stupid even by cat standards.

When it comes to apostrophes in plurals, those who say the rules are too complicated seem to have devised a rule of their own that is almost infinitely more convoluted than the real rule. As far as I can gather, it goes something like this:

No apostrophes in plurals, unless it's a foreign word, an abbreviation, an acronym, a word I don't know how to spell, a word that ends in a vowel that isn't 'e' or word that is in any way a bit funny or unusual

Poor me. I'm going to stick with the super-intellectual rule laid down by those Grammar Nazis (or is that Nazi's?)

No apostrophes in plurals

Admittedly, that's a simplified version. The full, long form is as follows:

No apostrophes in plurals. Ever

That includes abbreviations, which is much easier now that dots are considered fussy. Sorry if that's too complicated. Leave your WTF?s in the comments section.

Moral: The simpler the rule, the easier it is to devise something far more confusing

The Olympic visitor's phrasebook

July and August will see the UK spend two weeks enjoying the fruits of a £9-25 billion (depending on how you do the sums) investment in a Festival of Minor Sports. It has another name, but it is illegal to use it unless you are a multi-billionaire corporate sponsor.

Of course, very few British people will be at the events themselves, since most of the tickets are too expensive or have been promised to bureaucrats, politicians, sponsors or other apparatchiks and freeloaders, while unauthorised persons within a five-mile radius of any venue are likely to be shot with bazookas if they come near. Special measures have also been taken to ensure that the most important visitors need never see the vulgar plebs known as 'Londoners'. However, the more adventurous might find themselves dealing with the colourful patois used by the locals, so please cut out and keep this guide in order to save embarrassment:

Words and phrases you might encounter

"Welcome to London"

Sit down, shut up and empty your pockets. We'll be along to strip-search you in three hours.

"A good service is operating on all routes"

A train will arrive eventually. Probably.

"We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you"

We can't be bothered supplying the service you've paid for. What are you going to do?

Choob

Spelt 'tube', this is London's underground railway. For the convenience of all, it stops running just before the pubs close.

Pub

Where Londoners gather before fighting each other.

Pub grub

Something wriggling in your salad.

Night bus

Mobile vomitorium

The Bill

Police

The Fuzz

Police

The Filth

Police

Crisps

Thinly cut potatoes, deep fried and dusted with industrial waste, known as 'chips' in the USA.

Chips

Deep-fried potato sticks, known as 'French fries' in other parts of the world, except in France, where they are unknown.

Chippy

A carpenter, or a shop selling fish, mystery-meat pies and deep-fried horse penises.

Yingerrrrrluuuund!

A word of obscure origin, chanted in a pub before hitting a foreigner.

Yeeearsenooooo! Cheeyelseeyee! Cmonyouspurs! Meeewor!

Names of London football teams. Chanted in a pub before hitting another Englishman. Other clubs are available, but if you hear the names 'Fulham' or 'Queens Park Rangers' chanted menacingly then you have entered a surreal plane of alternative reality.

"Do what, John?"

"Pardon?", in the sense of "Say that again and I'll lamp you."

Lamp

Hit

"May I help you?"

Spend some money or get out.

"Got a light?"

Give me your wallet.

Moral: The English are charming when sober, whenever that is.

Over-egging the pudding

The Guardian seems to have a fascination with sports writers who construct sentences in much the same way a seven-year old bakes a cake. The basic ingredients are there, but then their enthusiasm gets the better of them and before you know it, a simple jam sponge is adulterated with noons, hundreds and thousands, half a bowl of Coco Pops, mashed banana and a sausage roll.

Chief football writer Kevin McCarra is the master when it comes to producing collections of thoughts that all vaguely relate to the subject but are thrown onto the page in a random order. When enough sentences have been written, the result is split into paragraphs and published as an article. 

Now the football season is over, the torch has been passed to Mike Selvey, who brings his own unique talent to the task of making cricket seem more baffling than it really is. 

Whereas McCarra uses the Random Sentence Generator®™, Selvey has his own fog machine. The result is that his sentences resemble a forgetful old man shuffling round his flat trying to find his glasses. Midway through the search, it becomes clear that he has forgotten where he started and is no longer sure exactly what he was looking for. Here's how he describes Ravi Bopara's innings in yesterday's one-day match against Australia:

He and Eoin Morgan, who was within the merest smudge of a mark on Hotspot of being lbw to the second ball he faced (Aleem Dar, the third umpire may have heard a noise as well for it transpired that the inside edge was scarcely detectable by Snicko either), had added 79 in 73 balls for their fourth-wicket partnership when, having made 82, with eight fours, from 85 balls and with the testing total of two runs needed from 29 deliveries, he attempted the sharpest of singles to Brett Lee at mid-off, who flung down the stumps with the batsman still well short in his dive. (Guardian, 2 July 2012)

The sentence starts with Bopara, but by the end Eoin Morgan, Aleem Dar, Snicko and Brett Lee have all got involved. The poor verb somehow has to make sense of 105 other words, 24 of them nouns. It's an impossible task. 

Speaking of McCarra, he seems to have an understudy in Barney Ronay:

No doubt due in part to Ukraine playing in Donetsk on the same night, but also, perhaps, appropriate tribute to that reigning-in, the one-bank-of-eight defence that here was absent from the start. (Guardian, 15 June 2012)

It's always good to remove unnecessary ingredients from a recipe, but I strongly recommend keeping the main verb. I'd also recommend learning the difference between 'reign' and 'rein'.

Moral: Put two nouns and a verb into a bowl. Stir gently. Leaven with commas and lightly season with adjectives. Add no more than one conditional clause or the mixture will not rise.

A dialect with its own army

I can't find the original source, but someone once said that a language is just a dialect with its own army. People my age have had to get used to this, what with the proliferation of new countries since 1990. Europe now has fifty sovereign states, which is why the Euro 2012 football championship takes two years to get from the qualifying rounds to the final. If they'd held it in 1875 (and if England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales didn't insist on competing separately), they would only have needed a three-way play-off between Montenegro, Andorra and Luxembourg before getting straight down to the last 16.

Language gets intimately tied up with politics. A dialect often becomes a language simply because the map-makers have started drawing new borders. A Slovakian friend recently lamented that his younger countrymen could no longer understand Czech, whereas he could because he was born in Czechoslovakia when it was still one country with one language. My friend from Kiev claims she can speak Russian pretty fluently, whereas I'd always thought Ukrainian was just a dialect of Russian, partly because it was (almost) never a separate state. Another friend whose native tongue is Flemish has no problems holding a conversation in Dutch (and, being fluent in Swedish, claims to find Danish reasonably easy), while her French needs a little work, meaning she understands the people of the neighbouring country better than half of her own compatriots. 

When I visited Yugoslavia in 1974, I was told "the language" of the country was Serbo-Croat. That single language is now four: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. If the distinction seems political, you could easily argue that the idea of a single Serbo-Croat language was just as political.

Similarly, Norway has spent most of its century of independence promoting Nynorsk ("New Norwegian"), an artificial recreation based on older Norse dialects, as a way of distinguishing Norwegian from Danish - the language of its foreign occupier till 1814. 

This is all very confusing to those of us brought up in an era when it was thought that 1 country = 1 people = 1 language, with the exceptions of a few awkward minorities like the Welsh and the Basques and the outer provinces of the last two empires: the USSR and China. The lesson is clear: you aren't a nation without your own language.

And yet the UK and the USA have been separate countries for a couple of centuries now, but they still maintain that they speak the same language: English. Still, America has been assiduously developing a different style for about 170 years, which enables the Americans and the British to argue about what is 'right'. This provides fuel for plenty of transatlantic bickering of every hue, from the illuminating to the infuriating and the downright silly. The arguments are also spiced up by Australians, South Africans, Canadians, Scots and others who feel that their own variations of English are just as valid and who hate being ignored. 

Disparage his language, and you'll find that even the most liberal of internationalists sleeps in pyjamas cut from the national flag.

Moral: Speak English. It makes everything simpler. British English for preference. But not Geordie. Or Brummie. And definitely not Scouse.

Pub quiz: guess the word origin

"They took everything we had – and then they came back for our language."

Most countries have a historical association with the British, usually based on folk memories of several thousand red-coated psychopaths coming over the hill and grabbing everything of value, leaving nothing but a signed portrait of Queen Victoria and the rules of cricket printed on a tea towel. Even after the empire had gone, we continued our campaign of international cultural vandalism through a triple-pronged assault of football hooliganism, The Benny Hill Show and the first four Black Sabbath albums. 

An Englishman's idea of 'abroad' should resemble a weekend in Cleethorpes but with nicer weather. As I have discovered, if you ask for the local delicacy and insist that you don't want chips with it, most foreign waiters will assume you are Irish, Australian or Canadian. Not only will they then give you better service, but they won't ask you to return the nation's valuables - which have been in a locked cellar in the British Museum since 1879 - or accuse you of selling their great-uncle into slavery.

And yet, when it comes to language, the British have been remarkably open-minded about other people's. We notoriously despise their cuisine, take no interest in their culture except to steal it and regard their history as seriously lacking unless it contains a regiment of the British Army. But when it comes to words, we'll happily blag anything that's going, either because it expresses a concept we don't have a word for (pyjamas) or we just like the sound of it (kharzi). So an English-speaking cricket commetator has no problem using the Urdu word doosra for a certain type of delivery, but a French football commentator risks the wrath of the Académie Français if he says kick instead of the correct but unwieldy coup à pied.

So, pour yourself a pint of foaming best bitter and see if you can guess where English stole the following words. Most English vocabulary comes from Low German, French, Latin or Greek, so there are no examples from those four. Two of the names are also related to the names of geographical regions, and one also gave its name to a well-known language. Award yourself a whisky chaser if you can guess (or already know) which.

Anorak
Arsenal
Balcony 

Bungalow
Galore

Guerilla
Horde  
Juggernaut
Kamikaze 

Kharzi

Robot
Typhoon

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Anorak 

The 'ak' combination gives it away as a non-English word. Not surprisingly, it's from the Greenland dialect of Eskimo-Aleut, where such an invention was essential for survival.

Arsenal

This comes from Arabic, and was transmitted into European languages during the seven centuries of Muslim Spain.

Balcony

This effectively means 'high wood beam' and comes from Italian via the Germanic Lombards, though I have also seen it claimed as Persian. Since their language is technically a closer relative of English and German than French is, it wouldn't be surprising if the Persians came up with a very similar-sounding word for a similar thing. It also means we can pretend that, when Xerxes invaded Greece in the 5th Century BCE, he looked at the mountainous, wooded country to the north and named it 'The Balkans'. Sadly, that's a fantasy since the name didn't come into use till over 2,000 years later. There might also be a Turkish origin. Somewhere on the internet, Turks, Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians will be fighting to the virtual death on this one. My advice is, don't join in.

Bungalow

From Gujarati. A one-storey building common in Bengal, from which it takes its name (similarly Bangladesh). 

Galore

Irish Gaelic, meaning enough, so it's galling that one of its more famous uses is in the Scottish novel and film, Whisky Galore. 

Guerrilla

Spanish. War is one of the few Germanic words to force its way into Romance languages, with W being replaced by G to make guerre in French and guerra in Spanish. In the Peninsular War, the Spanish fought small actions against Napoleon's forces, calling them "little war": guerrilla.

Horde

Mongolian, of course. The ordos is a Mongolian camp, and the dialect spoken in the Mongol camps in northern India became known as Urdu. But Europeans adapted the word and used it to describe the people instead (the Poles added the 'H'). At its peak, the Russian branch of the Mongol Empire was so wealthy that was known as The Golden Horde, which to my mind is one of the best names any country has been given. The European football championships will be played in part of their old territory in a few days. Wouldn't "England v The Golden Horde" look great on the fixture list?

Juggernaut

Hindi: the large cart on which the image of the god Krishna was conveyed: jagat - earth, nath - lord. 

Kamikaze

Japanese. When Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, tried to invade Japan, his fleet was driven back by sacred winds (kami kaze). The Japanese invoked the same spirit when trying to fend off the Americans in World War II, and the English word describes their methods rather than the original sense.

Kharzi

Zulu, meaning latrine. It's one of the coarser slang words for lavatory, but I love the sound of it. Not to be used in polite company. Kenneth Williams' character in Carry On Up The Kyber (the best of the Carry On films) was the 'Khasi of Khalabar'. 'Up the Kyber', of course, is rhyming slang and is too rude to explain here. 

Robot

Czech. Robota means forced labour and the 'rbt' combination betrays its relationship with the German arbeit. The word even found its way into French during the ancien régime, when a peasant's duty to work on the lord's land was known as robot. The word was adapted by science fiction writers after Karel Capek used it in his 1920 play RUR.

Typhoon

Chinese. But you knew that one already, didn't you?

So, how did you do?

Killer communications

And the award for simple, direct English goes to … The Ministry of Defence.

I know, it's hard to believe. These are the same people who talk about "collateral damage" (killing civilians) and "friendly fire" (killing your own side). And yet, when they need to get a message across and the PR people aren't watching, they can be admirably direct.

Yesterday I was killing time in Southend-on-Sea, so I drove out to the mud flats near Great Wakering. That involved crossing an MoD firing range that's open to the public at weekends. As you drive in, there's a sign warning you not to touch anything you might find, 

"or it might explode and kill you"

I can't think of a clearer, more concise way of putting it. No "ignition hazard" or "potentially unsafe ordnance"; just a direct statement of the risk, with the blunt addition of "you" to stress that the danger is personal rather than abstract. I would have taken a picture, but there was an equally strong warning not to do that. These people have guns. It's best to do what they say.

The poet John Donne said, "Each man's death diminisheth me, for I am involved in mankind," and yet the thought of my own death has a particular significance. I'm less engaged by "a potential risk to members of the public", but "you might die" gets my full attention.

Moral: There is eloquence in brevity.

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Sentence doctor: don't lose the thread

This sentence is so complicated that the writer has tied himself in knots and said the opposite of what he means. It’s bad enough that you hide your meaning from your reader, but so much worse when you manage to hide it from yourself:

“Compared to the loss-making average east-west container freight rate of $1,110 per unit in full-year 2009, the 1Q10 rate of $1,295 is still low by historical standards and must be below the breakeven point for carriers, even allowing for their recent cost cuts.”

Look at “compared to” (it should be “compared with”, but we’ll let that go for now). Strip out the extraneous words and the sentence actually reads, “$1,295 is low compared with $1,110,” which is nonsense.

This is the danger of the “compared to/with” construction so beloved of business writers: it declares a relationship between two things while excusing the writer from saying – and sometimes even thinking – what that relationship really is. It is harder to fall into this trap if we have the courage to use that beautiful, simple, neglected word “than”. 

So we should write “x is lower than y” instead of “Compared to … [followed by 10 words]… $1,110, … [then another 10 words] … $1,295 is still low.” All those extra words only serve to sever the logical link between the key parts of the sentence, such that before he is half way through the sentence the writer has forgotten what he is comparing with what. This is how I talk when I’m drunk. My friends forgive me because I’m happy to buy a round and sometimes fall over amusingly. Our readers are less tolerant.

The following has almost the same word count but is much easier to understand:

“The east-west rate of $1,295 in the first quarter is a big improvement on the $1,110 average for 2009. But it is still low by historical standards and must be below the breakeven point for carriers, even after their recent cost cuts.”

Mostly this is because the words are in a natural order: “x is a big improvement on y” is better than “compared to y, x is low”. I have also replaced "1Q10" with "the first quarter", because words are easier to understand than numbers, and I have deleted "full-year" because it's redundant.

Moral: Keep sentences simple, especially when making comparisons, and use comparatives followed by 'than'.