Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Diatribe on Language
Phoenixine One-Hundred and Three, March 1998
This column began life as a record of my reading and if you jump to the end of it you will indeed find this
month's book discussion. But before we get there we have a light-heartedly phrased but quite serious
discussion of something completely different (so to speak) which simply won't work properly in my more
usual mingled (some might say mangled) format. Sorry.
Words are the tools we use to communicate ideas. Without words it is not possible to live outside your
skull and interact with the other (hopefully word-using) people around you. Anybody who has visited a
country whose language they do not speak is well aware of the feelings of isolation and frustration that
are caused by an inability to speak (and an inability to read if the written form is markedly different from
your own).
However even when people are supposedly speaking the same language we still often find that the
words that are used can convey meanings that are quite different from those intended. George Bernard
Shaw once remarked that the Americans and the English were two nations separated by a common
language.
Sometimes it is a matter of accent (or, less commonly, dialect). The average New Zealander's utter
inability to pronounce any vowels on the left of the sound spectrum often makes them incomprehensible
to other English speakers. "What have pigs got to do with hanging out the washing?" my mother once
asked me in bewilderment after having been involved in a charming (but from her point of view
increasingly surrealistic) discussion about the merits of various different kinds of clothes pegs.
The effect seems to get worse the further south you travel -- I know somebody from Invercargill who
(on a good day) can say "o" and "u". On a bad day only "u" can be articulated. Perhaps if I ever visit the
Chatham Islands I will find that they gave up vowels years ago and now communicate only with
consonants.
More seriously, the communication gap can also be widened when perfectly familiar words are used in
ways that fail to match their meaning. I came across just such a phenomenon recently when I sat
through a Microsoft training course. The training material kept using the word "enumerate" in a context
that I found very puzzling. The word means "to count" (though more subtle actions may also be implied).
However the course used it in a sense that seemed to suggest the action of looking in turn at a
collection of things and doing something unrelated to counting on the basis of what you found. In other
words to "iterate" through the collection. Once I figured this out, I simply assumed that in American
English "enumerate" had a different meaning than it had in English English and thought no more about it.
Later, after the course, I looked the word up in both an American and an English dictionary -- the
definition was the same in both! Enumerate simply does not mean what the Microsoft training material
claims that it does. By bending the meaning for their own purpose until it broke, they not only failed to
communicate with me, they completely mislead me, which is worse. Only Humpty Dumpty can get away
with forcing a word to mean what he wants it to mean. Microsoft are nowhere near that powerful (yet).
All they succeed in doing is muddying the waters.
The written word is a communication tool that that tends to require an even greater precision than the
spoken word. When we speak we can often get away with solecisms that would be unacceptable if
written down. For example, many people say asterix when they would (of necessity) write asterisk (I
attribute this laziness of speech to the enormous popularity of the eponymous comic book character).
A more recent phenomenon is the elision of contractions such as "should've" into the phrase "should
of". In terms of pronunciation it is not hard to determine why this has happened (try saying the two
phrases out loud). However a far more worrying trend is that the latter phrase is now starting to appear
quite regularly in printed material (I have seen it in several novels recently). This is simply not acceptable.
If you wish to avoid contractions (as many people do) then spell the words out in full ("should have");