Countries and people: whose word do you use?

Back in the 1980s, a friend forced me to sit through a video of the Michael Schenker Group. Part way through the gig, the American singer introduced the band, bellowing out, "From Scotland, England: Chris Glen!" Glen left the band shortly after that, which seems an extreme reaction but it goes to show how sensitive people are about nationality.

You can tie yourself in knots about what to call foreign countries and people, or you can just say, "Sod it, I'll use whatever word I want." One should be sensitive to other people's feelings but one can't be totally governed by them. For instance, I've been told that Turks want us to call their country Türkiye, as they do, but all three of my Turkish friends call it "Turkey" when speaking and writing English. Similarly, I'm told the Dutch don't like being called 'Dutch' (see the Twitter exchange on the right), but what's the alternative?
 
There are 80 million people in Turkey and 17 million in the Netherlands. Chances are they don't all have the same opinion, and many of them probably have no opinion at all on what you call them or their country. Don't worry about it.

Other countries are more sanguine. No German would expect an English speaker to call his country Deutschland, and the Japanese are quite happy that we don't call them Nihon-jin (Nippon is also correct, but terribly old-fashioned, like calling England 'Albion'). And, boot on the other foot, what's the Japanese word for 'English person'? Do you know? Do you care? (It's 'Igurisu-jin', if you must know.*) Are you, if you're English, going to insist on the correct term? Of course you're not. In some ways, I'm flattered that they have their own word for my country and language. It suggests it's important to them, and what could be more flattering than that?

Tying yourself in knots will leave you like the hapless Guardian newspaper, which is so desperate to be correct that it can't see any kind of perspective. Look at this exchange from a live report of a cricket match in India in 2011, in which the writer reports the events of the match while fielding emails from fans (not just any cricket match, but one of the greatest ever World Cup matches):

21st over: India 116-1 (Tendulkar 44, Gambhir 33) Five from Yardy's over: two singles, a two and a wide. England have got to take wickets in these middle overs or the death overs could be extremely painful. "Please stop calling it Bengaluru," says Robin Percival. "The English name for the city is Bangalore; just as the English name for Roma is Rome or Moscva is Moscow. I have just returned from spending over five weeks in Bangalore and everyone I spoke to (in English) referred to the city as Bangalore. Of course I do not speak Kannada and if I did I would call it Bengaluru. English language papers in India such as The Hindu refer to the city as Bangalore. Why can't the Guardian?" Don't shoot the style guide adherer. I know I am a maverick, but I will never – never – deviate from the Guardian style guide. My life would not be worth living. (Guardian, 27 February 2011)

Subsequent overs report other readers' comments, including a bemused Sriraghavan B: "I am from Madras, India and I still call it that way as do many of my relatives, neighbours and friends and many more. It never occurred to me that I should say Chennai as I feel that it is not right." 

And God help you if you call all Eskimos Inuits, because most of them aren't. I'm sorry for pasting this whole exchange, but the relevant episode of QI isn't on YouTube and you'd have to register with the website to read it in its original location:

The word "Eskimo" is non-PC in Canada, much as it's fine in Alaska. The particular indigenous person of the north who was featured on QI was a Yupi'ik from Alaska - Sarah Palin's husband is one of those as well - and hence "Eskimo" rather than "Inuit" is the term to use. The plural of Yup'ik is Yupiit.

Had the person been an Aleut, then again "Eskimo" might have caused offence. The Aleut are very sure that they are not Eskimos; while they don't object to "Aleut", they prefer one Unangax̂, two Unangax, three or more Unangan. (Note that most of the Eskimo-Aleut languages have what's called a dual number; this comes between singular and plural and is used when there are two of something. It's rare in European languages; Slovenian and Sorbian have it, and it's on the point of vanishing from Lithuanian.)

The indigenous people of Baffin Island and such like places absolutely are Inuit, although "an Inuit" or "lots of Inuits" are always going to be wrong since "Inuit" is the plural. One Inuk, two Inuuk, three or more Inuit.

While the people of the central Arctic would prefer Inuinnaq to Inuit, they won't get especially upset at the more general word. As for indigenous Greenlanders, the preferred term is Kalaallit, singular Kalaaleq. (There's no dual in Greenlandic.)

(And for those who are interested, here's a case study from QI on how they got the question about Jerusalem - the song - wrong.)

The Guardian style guide might try to do the right thing by pressure groups, but if none of its readers understand what it's talking about then surely it has failed. The readers make their own rules, not always logically, so Pinyin spellings for Chinese names have largely been accepted ('Beijing' instead of 'Peking', etc) while only 'Mumbai' of the new Indian names has really caught on.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: whatever you write, you write for your readers. As soon as you put anyone else's interests before the interests of your readers, you've abandoned your responsibilities as a writer.

Moral: If someone else has their own word for my country or language, I'm not offended. I'm flattered.

* No it isn't. See the comments.

You can't say that!

If you can't bear to read taboo words, don't read on. They're here in full. The post wouldn't make sense if they weren't. My use of them should not imply approval.

Two years ago on BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme, the appropriately named James Naughtie accidentally started saying Jeremy Hunt's job title (culture secretary) before he'd finished uttering his name. Thus, the UK's most prestigious radio programme – the sort of show that can get the prime minister as a guest (and, on one occasion, me) – accidentally broadcast the word 'cunt' just as the nation was settling down to its muesli. 

Everyone had fun at Naughtie's expense, and BBC London radio asked its listeners whether some words were too offensive ever to be uttered; words such as "the c-word, the n-word and the j-word". I was tempted to ring up and ask, "What the cunting fuck is the j-word?" How can you have a reasoned discussion if you're so timid that the audience can't be told what you're discussing? For instance, this story from AP would have had less impact if we had been prevented from knowing what the "racial slur" was.

By the way, if you know what the j-word is, please leave it in the comments below, along with any other choice obscenities that come to mind.

The issue is so charged that an aide to Washington DC's mayor was famously forced to resign in 1999 after describing his budget as "niggardly". He was later reinstated, but others have complained about its use since then, while anti-PC campaigners have sniggered in the background.

So, in the spirit of reasoned discourse, how about a quiz? Question 1 of 1: which of these statements is more offensive?

A) "I don't know if they fags or what
Search a nigga down and grabbin his nuts"
Ice Cube of rap crew Niggaz Wit Attitudes, from the song 'Fuck Tha Police'

B) "Woman is the Nigger of the World" Title of a song by John Lennon (the phrase was coined a few years earlier by his wife, Yoko Ono)

C) "I fucking hate niggers"
Young man on my local high street who was threatening to beat up the black traffic warden who had just given his friend a parking ticket

If you're a grammar pedant or just a lover of words, then it's clearly A, because there's no justification for writing "tha" instead of "the". But if you agree with the apparent media consensus that "nigger" is too offensive a word ever to be uttered or written, then they're all as offensive as each other. This is surely nonsense.

Start typing the Lennon quote into Google and its auto-complete feature offers "woman is the n of the world". Yes, even Google can't bear to let you see this word, although it will happily offer you "fuck", "cunt" and the full wording of The Stranglers' "I Feel Like A Wog". Read into that what you will. 

(For non-English readers, "wog" is a term of general racial abuse, although some say it specifically refers to Indians. It has fallen out of fashion since the 1970s.)

It seems clear to me that C is far more offensive than A or B. NWA, like many other hip-hop groups, are happy to describe themselves as "niggaz". Not only are they reclaiming the word, in the same way as gays reclaimed "queer", but they are also using it as a term of empowerment. This isn't new. Sixties revolutionaries Jefferson Airplane, accused by vice-president Spiro Agnew of helping to destroy American society, sang: "Everything they say we are, we are / And we are very proud of ourselves."

Regardless of the change of spelling, it's still the same word, especially when spoken. That surely disproves the argument that the word can never be uttered. It's only offensive as a term of abuse, which is why it's inconceivable that any non-black person could use it to describe a black person unless they intend to be racially abusive. Simply saying it in a reasoned discussion about language shouldn't be offensive at all, although it certainly jars on the eye and ear. 

Ono and Lennon used it not as a racial description but as a class label. They could have used "serf", but it wouldn't have worked as a slogan and they would have sounded like history professors. 

It would be difficult to accuse NWA of racism, but they could certainly be accused of homophobia. If anyone takes offence at their lyrics, it will be because they called the police "fags", in a way that clearly implies contempt for gay men. It's not the language that's offensive, but the intention behind it: NWA used the politically incorrect "fag" and the far more offensive "nigger", but they were being homophobic, not racist. 


Moral: Fight foul ideas, not foul language.

"-ess" bend: the curious resurgence of 'authoress'

Louise Bolotin took issue with me about the decline of the word 'actress'. I argued that actors and actresses perform distinct roles and so it's not unreasonable for them to have different titles. Read her counter-argument here.

I contrasted it with the word 'authoress', thinking that this pointless and patronising word had almost disappeared. Type 'authoress' into Google and, sure enough, you get 700,000 results, while a search for 'author' returns 2.3 billion results. Even though there are about as many female authors as male ones, the generic term outnumbers the female term by over 3,000 to one. 

So I ran an n-gram on the word 'authoress', just to confirm its demise. Sure enough, use of the word declined by 94% from its peak in the mid-19th Century to the year 2000 (which is where the n-gram graph stops by default). 

But then I took the date range out to 2008, which is as late as n-grams go, and guess what? The word is undergoing a resurgence. If the n-grams are to be believed (and they're not totally reliable), use of the word 'authoress' has more than doubled since the turn of the century and the word is more popular now than it has been for 30 years. Its rise is more than twice as fast as its earlier decline. At this rate, it will be more popular than ever by about 2020.




What's going on here? The only information I can find on the web is from the blog of "authoress" Venus de Mileage (no, really), who defends her use of it here. She also describes herself as a villainess. Every other page I looked at confidently asserted that the word 'authoress' is archaic and no longer used, even though the only available evidence points the other way.

With such scanty information to go on, I can only speculate, based on the observation that Ms de Mileage's website has an overwhelmingly black colour scheme. This makes me think of the Gothic renaissance in literature, which has made a millionaire(-ess?) of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. While vampires have become steadily more popular since the 1960s, the n-gram shows a more interesting phenomenon that mirrors the fortunes of authoress: the return of the archaic spelling 'vampyre':

There's a spooky similarity between the Vampyre and Authoress n-grams, even down to the mini-revival in the late 1920s. Clearly, writers are finding inspiration and a ready market in a genre closely associated with the 19th Century, and signal this by their use of appropriately archaic terms. Maybe this explains the return of 'authoress'.

Moral: Some words die; others become undead.

More confused words

The last time I wrote about oft-confused words, it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. This post isn't the last word on the matter either.


Douse vs Dowse
I have a proof copy of Adrian McGinty's splendid new detective novel, in which it says: "…he tried to dowse the flames…". I presume it got corrected in the published book, so I won't be scurrying off to Typoze.com to log it, though I was puzzled that a relatively rare word replaced a more common one. Normally, it's the other way round. 

In short, dousing means smothering something, usually a fire, with water. Dowsing is searching for water by waving a stick about.

If you want to douse >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
apply to your local fire brigade.

If you want to dowse >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
then the British Society of Dowsers is the club for you. This is a group of people who think it needs a special talent to find water in the rain-soaked British Isles.


Slander vs Libel
If you're going to sue me for anything I write here, sue me for libel. Slander is spoken defamation; libel is written.

So, was the fulminating Calvin Harris wrong to tweet "Looking into taking action on @BBCNewsbeat for that libellous broadcast" (Guardian, 22 November 2012)? In theory, a defamatory broadcast should be slanderous because its statements are spoken, but the courts in various jurisdictions are happy to classify broadcast defamation as libel, presumably because broadcasting is seen as a kind of publication and can be heard by millions.

If you need a mnemonic, remember that 'libel' is the only* word in English that rhymes with 'Bible', a rather well-known written collection of history, folklore, philosophy and libels.

Laws vary around the world, but under English law libel has to be both untrue and defamatory, i.e. damaging to the reputation of the person mentioned.

*Except in New Zealand, where libel also rhymes with 'stable'.

Illicit vs Elicit 
You'd think this was better known, but even Press Gazette recently stated: "The newspaper also insisted there was nothing “elicit or underhand” about the way it obtained the photographs" (8 January 2013; it was later corrected).

They're near-synophones and both come from Latin, but they're unrelated. "Elicit" means to draw out. 'Illicit' is the opposite of "licit", meaning lawful. Despite the similarity, it has no link with 'solicitor' (an English lawyer who doesn't appear in court), which appropriately comes from solicitare, meaning to shake, harass or disturb.

'Illicit' can also be used for something that is actually legal but is frowned upon by society, especially if it involves pleasures that society is annoyed about missing out on.

I know, you knew all that. But it's good to have some more information so you can carry on the conversation after you've humiliated someone by pointing out their mistake.

Scold vs Scald
'Scolding' is a woefully under-used word for a telling-off, and seems unable to break away from being something done only by women to their husbands or children. Who said sexism in language was dead? Oh, hang on, it was me, wasn't it? 

'Scalding' is burning with hot water. Mnemonic-mongers will remember that 'scOld' is 'cOld'. Latin-speaking mnemonic-mongers will remember that 'scAld' is 'cAlidus' (Latin for hot). English holidaymakers in Europe often scald their hands because they don't expect hot water from a tap labelled C (the cold tap is marked F, as in fridge, which is not a coincidence). 

Thanks to Sarah Townsend (@STEcopywriting) for reminding me of that one.

Though vs Although
Nobody mistakes these two words, because they mean the same thing. There are probably style guides that insist on 'although' being the proper form and excoriate 'though' as a barbarous interloper. Me, I couldn't care less. However, as an editor I always change 'though' to 'although' so the speed reader, the tired reader, the reader in a dimly lit pub or the foreign reader won't confuse it with 'through'. 

There's much to be said for purity of style, but the best style is the one that makes it easiest for the reader.


Founder vs Flounder
Fail vs Flail
The problem with these two pairs is that the similarity in spelling is matched by a similarity in meaning, such that either one will make sense in the same sentence. People who are flailing are probably failing too, while an organisation that is floundering could be in the process of foundering. And a person who is floundering in water will probably be flailing, while foundering is the ultimate failing.

Fail is the opposite of succeed
To flail is to flap aimlessly, or to whip someone (the stringy bit of a whip is the flail)
To flounder is to flail in water
Foundering means taking on water and sinking, and is related to 'profound', meaning deep

The important distinction between founder and flounder is that the flounderer can recover. A ship only founders when the waters close over it.



It's scandalous that so many words have to carry the burden of two meanings when there are plenty of English-sounding words that don't actually exist. Words such as 'sharn', 'thring' and 'oblendificacious' would not only beautify the language but would also have won me that last game of Scrabble. It's a vast, unused resource of gorgeous syllables. Really, there's no excuse for such a poorly organised language.


Moral: If we're ever playing Scrabble together, don't forget that "JUXQOCK" is a perfectly valid word, meaning 'a person too timid to challenge an obviously made-up word on a triple-word score'.

The gender agenda

A friend in her seventies tried this riddle on me recently. Perhaps you know it:

"A man and his son are involved in a road accident. They are taken to hospital. The doctor takes one look at the boy and cries out, "My son!" What's the explanation?"

I should probably have scratched my head for a few moments out of politeness (also, that medicated shampoo really isn't working) before saying, "What needs explaining? It's her son." Most people under fifty would say something similar, but this was a genuine riddle for my friend's generation, who grew up when professionals were always assumed to be male.

Terms such as 'woman doctor' and 'male nurse' were useful when some people had trouble imagining such things, but they are hardly necessary now and are rapidly falling out of fashion. The only such phrase that has any currency in the 21st Century is 'male prostitute', since this refers to an industry where the gender of the service provider will always be important to the customer and can crucially affect the nature of the service provided. 

Otherwise, the de-gendering of language has been moving apace, starting with the replacement of '-man' with '-person'. You can argue all you want that 'man' also means 'human person of either sex', but in English the word will always imply 'male person'. It's a pity that we don't have separate words like Latin did (homo as in hominid and vir as in virile), but we don't, and we just have to accept it.

But we shouldn't get over-zealous: the rather lovely song Homo Fugit Velut Umbra translates as 'Man flees like a shadow', and I challenge you to replace 'man' with something gender-neutral without robbing it of all its poetry. But then, art is allowed to break all the rules, or Randy Newman couldn't write a song from the point of view of a child-sex-murderer. But I digress.

Gender-neutral job titles risk mirroring the mealy-mouthed, euphemistic and wordy titles that seem designed to inflate the holder's apparent importance and confuse everyone else, as in person-centred transition facilitator or ambient replenishment controller. For me, whoever empties my bins will always be 'the dustman'. You can't call him (or her, though I've yet to see it) a 'dustperson', and "refuse collector" is a bit too wordy and too uncolloquial. Nor do I see any problem with 'steward' and 'stewardess' or 'waiter' and 'waitress'. There's no need for gender-distinct job titles, since they're exactly the same job, but what harm do they do?

I can't think of any political objection to 'chairperson', although it does lack warmth, which is probably why many people prefer 'chair'. Do we need to go any further? Decades ago, the general assumption was that women were less competent than men and so a recognisably female job title implied a lesser competence. You can't argue with feminists wanting to change that. But anything that replaces the expressiveness of language with long-winded phrases designed to purely to conceal something should be treated with caution. Is a heroine really less heroic than a hero? Is the dustman fooled into thinking his job is more glamorous because someone at the council has changed his job title?

It's not that big a deal nowadays. Generally, there's no need for job titles that specify a gender, but if they already exist and have survived into the 21st Century, perhaps they should be left alone. Good writers instinctively go for the most expressive terms they can. It's right that we've tackled words that misleadingly imply a gender (such as 'chairman'), but words that imply a gender without implying a value judgement (such as 'waiter') do no harm. 

The most misguided example of unsexing the language is the recent trend of actresses calling themselves 'actors'. Not only have they missed the boat by three decades, they seem to ignore the fact that the roles of actors and actresses are distinct. If I were directing Macbeth, I'd be looking for an actress to play Lady Macbeth, not an actor. A white man can play a black man (though it's understandably frowned upon nowadays) and vice versa: when I played King Duncan, Ross was black and nobody thought it odd to have a black nobleman in 11th Century Scotland. In theatre and film, the gender distinction is very clear: actors and actresses play different roles, unlike male and female doctors. If the prestige isn't the same, tinkering with the job title won't make an iota of difference.

If an actress insists on being called an actor, that suggests an unjustified inferiority complex. Helen Mirren calls herself an actress and it doesn't seem to have done her any harm. When "female actors" mount a serious campaign to abolish the Best Actress Oscar, I might take them a bit more seriously. 

And if you believe feminism has further to go, then micro-managing the language is no longer the main priority.

Moral: Language shouldn't be sexist, but nor should it be neutered.

New portmanteaux for smug writers

Rather than keep adding to my list at the end of Let's talk about crapmanteaux, I decided to make a separate list to be updated whenever the mood takes me, or whenever someone comes up with a suggestion that tickles me. 

The original list

Shortmanteau: a single-syllable portmanteau, such as smog or brunch

Crapmanteau: mompreneur, webinar, etc

Momnivore: a mother who copes with stress by comfort eating

Ad choc: the eating of confectionery on impulse

Jazzturbation: aimless, self-indulgent music

Footmauler: any English defender

Gluicide: an overdose for someone who can’t afford proper drugs

Quartomaton: someone with at least 25% of their body replaced by robotic parts

Piesexual: someone attracted to fuller-figured men or women

Pisexual: someone with slightly more than three partners

Hobknob: an obscene cooking injury

Pornucopia: the internet

Prepostrophe: a preposterously misplaced apostrophe

The latest additions
Neologasm: the (probably unjustified) feeling of satisfaction and pleasure one feels when inventing a new word, even though no-one will ever use it and a dozen other people had probably thought of it before you did

Contrapreneur: an unconventional business innovator

Fauxhito: at 2am, someone decides to make cocktails. Unfortunately, they don't have all the right ingredients. Fauxhitos should not be drunk while sober

Prebauchery: lunchtime drinking when there's a party in the evening

Rebauchery: any party that starts while the guests are still hungover from the last one

Apostroppy: How editors react to prepostrophes (thanks to Sarah Townsend)

Linguapreneur: What I'm being here, according to Cathy Relf, who is one herself.

Fauxmosexuality: That bit in films, usually where a pretty girl kisses another pretty girl at the point where the director realises that something more is needed to get adolescent boys into the cinema.


Thanks to Sarah Rakowski for the unsubtle 'shituation', which fulfils all the criteria since it's immediately understandable.

Blahbarian: Writer of long-winded, graceless prose. Most often found in legal practices, government or near the top of customer service departments. This comes satisfyingly close to the original meaning of 'barbarian', which doesn't mean 'bearded person' (as many people believe) but 'one whose language cannot be understood'. It comes from the Greeks, who thought their northern neighbours were saying 'bah-bah'.

Fauxtography: Credit to Snopes, the website where I first saw this word and the place to go before you make a fool of yourself by sharing "Ohmygod they're going to charge for Facebook!". And of course, that picture is a fake.

Cucumbrance: The feeling of being obstructed or weighed down by salad.

Cucumference: Boasting about the size of your willy.

Flexicography: Changing a dictionary definition.

Fleminism: Women's rights in Belgium.

Classhole: Someone who does pointless acts of spite, but with creativity (http://xkcd.com/72/).


Any new suggestions gratefully received.

Slick reporting: the Guardian gets spun by Greenpeace

Whales don't bother me, and I try not to bother them. On the whole, I'm against oil spills and the unnecessary killing of whales. But regardless of that, I prefer my newspapers to deal in facts rather than unfounded prejudices or hysterical assumptions. Nonetheless, I still read the Guardian.

Fact: This is a dead whale. Everything else is speculation

So I was less than impressed by a Guardian article last week implying that the US authorities had suppressed evidence that the Deepwater Horizon spill was responsible for killing a number of whales. There's an irony in the fact that whales have a lot to thank the oil industry for, since its emergence led to a massive reduction in whaling when we realised that fossil oil was a lot better for lighting homes than whale oil. But that's another story.

My job means I know a bit about oil spills without being an expert, but you don't need to be an expert to see that the Guardian's correspondent was being led by the nose. This is a growing problem in journalism, and one that I've touched on before: many journalists let their guard down as soon as they're presented with research that reflects their own beliefs or seems obvious. So when Greenpeace (hardly the most objective of sources) told US Environment Correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg that evidence of whale deaths was being suppressed, she compliantly repeated the activists' line.

In short, Greenpeace was able to get emails proving that the US National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration had prevented the release of photos showing a dead sperm whale. So far, so good. Suppression of information should always be questioned by journalists, and I don't blame Greenpeace for taking the partisan line it did: they're activists. That's their job.

Goldenberg reports Greenpeace's take on the story, but doesn't seem to have bothered contacting the NOAA to ask why the pictures were suppressed, preferring to speculate. To her credit, she does report that the NOAA admits it has no idea how the whale died. She also adds that there are 1,200 whales in the Gulf of Mexico, which should have made her stop and think. 

The discerning reader might ask whether one whale dead from unknown causes – out of a population of 1,200 – is really a story at all. The editors, perhaps aware of the thinness of the story, published three very similar pictures of the whale, even though the Guardian usually makes do with one picture and leaves the printing of several near-identical pictures to the Daily Mail. So it's clear that an emotional reaction was being sought. 

It then published the story under the very dubious headline 'US downplayed effect of Deepwater oil spill on whales, emails reveal'. The US didn't downplay the effect; it didn't know what the effect was. Nor does Greenpeace, as its press release freely admits.

I've got a particular problem with this paragraph:

NOAA did put out a press release about the dead whale. However, the release was edited and shortened in a way which appeared to minimise the effects of oil on whales

If you read the press release, it's clear that the NOAA did nothing of the sort. It did what any science-based agency should do: it reported the known facts unsensationally without speculating or pursuing a separate agenda. Of course that wasn't good enough for Greenpeace, which naturally wants to demonise the oil industry. As I've said, they're activists and that's their job. But that paragraph could have been written by Greenpeace, and a newspaper shouldn't be colluding with anyone to spin the news. 

That leaves the Guardian in the embarrassing position of seeming less objective than the activists who provided the story.

Moral: Believe what you want, unless you're a journalist.