“The month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May.”
— Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur
Vanessa Redgrave sings “The Lusty Month of May” in Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot
After you’ve put your right hand in, and then you’ve taken it out, and then you’ve put it in and out a couple of times and shaken it all about, is it a cokey or a pokey that will follow your hokey? Continue reading
“The past 12 months have seen the passing of the last WWI combat veteran, one of golf’s greatest players and the man who introduced the iPhone to the world,” wrote the BBC in 2011.
Hmm … Is this all about the Oxford comma? (With its lone comma, that sentence sounds as though Steve Jobs could have been a golf champion and the last surviving veteran of the first world war …) No, that’s for another time and place; this is about past and last — two adjectives that are very similar to look at and are sometimes synonymous, but are often actually lifetimes apart.
Recency and finality are what it’s all about here, and the fact that last can describe either state is what sometimes causes confusion and ambiguity. Continue reading
An update on the migrant vs. refugee word usage issue: one media outlet is doing the right thing.
Last week, Al Jazeera English announced that it was no longer using the word migrant. As Barry Malone, the online editor of the news outlet, wrote on its blog:
“The umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean. It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.
…
“When we in the media do this, when we apply reductive terminology to people, we help to create an environment in which a British foreign minister can refer to “marauding migrants,” and in which hate speech and thinly veiled racism can fester.
“We become the enablers of governments who have political reasons for not calling those drowning in the Mediterranean what the majority of them are: refugees.
…
“For reasons of accuracy, the director of news at Al Jazeera English, Salah Negm, has decided that we will no longer use the word migrant in this context. We will instead, where appropriate, say refugee.”
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“Mediterranean migrants: Deadly capsize ‘captain’ in court” — BBC
“The grim job that haunts Italy’s migrant patrols” — CNN
“A Magnet For African Migrants, Italy Seeks A New Approach” – NPR
“What happens to African migrants once they land in Italy during the summer?” — The Independent
“After rescue, a long, agonizing wait for migrants in Italy” — Yahoo News
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a migrant is “a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions.” A refugee is “a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.”
Are the thousands of desperate people who are fleeing a chaotic and dangerous war-torn Libya and risking their lives to cross perilous waters in overcrowded dinghies to escape their homeland really “migrants”? Are they not “refugees“?
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In the mid-’50s, shortly after moving to rural Stony Point in New York state, the avant-garde American composer John Cage started to develop his fascination for mushrooms. As his biographer Rob Haskins explained, “He made much of the fact that the dictionary entries for ‘mushroom’ and ‘music’ are so close together.”
And he was right: they’re virtually alphabetically joined at the hip. Separated only by mushy (if you ignore the dodgy mushrump, which is actually a variation on the shroom as we commonly know and name it), mushroom and music make magic together, in many an artful mind …
In a scene towards the end of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s riveting production of Wolf Hall (part II), which has recently been transplanted from London’s West End to Broadway, one of the king’s guards strides downstage and announces loudly and gravely the name of his newly arrested charge: “Boleyn!” (And just in case the history books haven’t spoiled it for you yet, I won’t specify which member of the Tudor family bearing this name is about to be escorted to their new lodging in the Tower of London.) Curiously, in pronouncing the identity of his Boleyn prisoner, the guard places careful emphasis on the first syllable, so that the name rings out over a hushed audience in the Winter Garden Theater in a way we’re not used to hearing it: “BULL-uhn!”. Continue reading
TGIF. In usage and grammar news this month: Taylor Swift defending her grammar; the pet peeves of American copy editors; the language of cancer; the very distinctive sound of the NPR podcast voice; annoying musical abbreviations; and a war on farcical western names adopted by the Chinese. Continue reading
The National Association for Equality in the Workplace (NAEW) has announced an ambitious and somewhat controversial initiative — in cooperation with the US English Teachers Coalition — to remove “hot button” gender phonemes from standard American English over the next five years, ensuring that our vocabulary no longer contains gender-suggestive syllables or spellings. The NAEW launched the campaign today, explaining its 62-month goal to “de-gender” our lexicon by July 2020 — allocating five months per letter of the alphabet to phase out gender-suggestive words, with an extra couple of months built in to address the large percentage of male-dominant “m” words. Continue reading
Watching a TV review of the new off-Broadway musical comedy Placebo (in which “Louise is working on a placebo-controlled study of a new female arousal drug”*), I learned something interesting — not about myself or female arousal drugs, but about the word that gives the show its title. It didn’t always mean a therapy that provides a psychological benefit rather than a physiological effect or a dummy drug used in clinical trials. Apparently the word’s etymology is revealed and discussed in the early part of the new play, so we’ll do the same here (but without the arousal effect) … Continue reading
“After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music.”
“Your day breaks, your mind aches / You find that all the words of kindness linger on / When she no longer needs you”