Eating eyren in Kent

William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the preface to Eneydos in 1490 in which he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the ‘tamyse’ for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer’s wife and “axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys” but was met with blank looks by the wife who answered that she “coude speke no frenshe.” The sailors had traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were eyren and would remain so for at least another fifty years.

From Bill Bryson‘s ‘Mother Tongue: The English Language’.

Minor atmospheric disturbances

In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx — or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it — and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

From Bill Bryson‘s ‘Mother Tongue: The English Language’.

Babytalking

gibber /jibbr/ • v. speak rapidly and unintelligibly, typically through fear or shock. n. such speech or sound.
gibberish /jibbrish/ • n. unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing; nonsense.

My son Sweeney is walking around the house talking to himself and anything or anyone who will listen. He speaks a most incredibly fluent gibberish. I’m astonished at the sheer variety of sounds coming out of his mouth.

I’ve tried to imitate him but it’s the aural equivalent of an adult trying to draw like a child: close, but somehow missing that special something that makes the original so fascinating.

This morning we speculated that he might have been speaking Russian all this time and we’ve never realised it.

Cliche of the day

A cliche that lives in our media at the moment, like an infestation of vermin, is “going forward” when the speaker simply means “in the future”.

It nests in ordinary speech, especially when an otherwise sensible person has a microphone in the vicinity.

Snobs and snobbism

In an irritating article on Gore Vidal that I found on The Independent’s website, I came across a word I couldn’t forget:

“In his memoirs, rarely for a North American, it is sometimes possible to discern snobbery – or as Vidal prefers to say, ‘snobbism’ – of an almost English intensity.”

Does this mean a person indulging in snobbery is a ‘snobbist’?

Food of the Gods?

My son Tom, who is eight, has an unusual way of looking at things. Listening to him is always amusing and occasionally I learn something.

He is very fond of the computer game ‘Age of Mythology’. I loathe computer games on the whole, but this one has led to intense discussions among the two kids about obscure details of Greek and Roman mythology, which I encourage. Occasionally it gets a bit surreal.

Tom and our friend Anna were discussing the attributes of various gods: Poseidon, Thor, Neptune, Zeus.

Anna: And do you know what the gods eat, Tom? What’s the food of the gods?

Tom: I dunno… Olives?

Careful Tarzan, that forest is full of anachronisms

Part of the charm of getting out of the city for most Australians is the chance of hearing the extraordinary call of the Kookaburra, an indigenous species of kingfisher.

But if you’re not Australian, you’ve probably heard it anyway – certainly, if you’ve ever seen a Tarzan movie. No sooner are the sweaty pith-helmeted hunters making their way with difficulty through the tangled African jungle, than an indigenous Australian bird, many thousands of miles out of its natural habitat, is clearly heard on the soundtrack.

Little did I know that the same anachronism works in reverse, only this time in real life.

My son and I are in the Dandenong Ranges, walking back to the car, when a familiar, thrilling sound rings out.

Me: Do you hear that? That’s a Kookaburra.

Son (8): No. It’s not a Kookaburra… It’s monkeys.

Overheard

“If we do that we’ll be digging our own graveyards.”

Subterranean palindromes

I love this. Weird Al Yankovic doing D. A. Pennebaker’s film of Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – completely in palindromes. I like to think Bob would approve.

Overheard

“I wouldn’t want a husband with cancer in his head.”