English spelling is full of oddities and inconsistencies. Humorists and reformers alike love to string together non-rhyming orthographic siblings like “The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough“.

The humorist pauses for the laugh, but your true reformer plows (ploughs?) ahead with serious mean (I mean mien). Joe Little, my buddy from high school, is a true reformer. He puts his money where his mouth is too. Not only is he the director of the reform-oriented American Literacy Council, he actually traveled to Washington DC for the recent Spelling Bee so that he could protest its very existence. Not that he has anything against clever kids like Anamika Veeramani. It’s just that he thinks that, as his sign says: “English Spelling Spells Trouble”. Listen to what he has to say in this sympathetic USA Today video. By the way, that’s Joe in the bee costume.

Where do you come down? Are you convinced? Should English spelling really be reformed? The ever-informative Language Log has a good discussion about the relationship between spelling vs. rate of learning. But it all seems to be fairly equivocal. On the face of it, English spelling IS nutty. But who gets to reform it? And what gets left behind?

As I see it, the simplification of Chinese characters is a good historical lesson to learn from. In the name of stamping out illiteracy, Chairman Mao pushed through a set of drastically simplified characters. It’s easy to see the motivation, but the old characters didn’t go away, and as a result, some 2000 new (simple) characters have been added to the traditional set of around 50,000 characters. Is Chinese better off or not? The debate rages on.

Finally, now that you’re wound up about spelling, would you risk a wound to your pride by attempting the Spelling Bee’s sample test? If you take it, let us know how you did.

Some headlines are so spectacularly ambiguous that you might read them through three or four times and still have no idea what they mean. As you might expect, the wordheads over at the Language Log have come up with name for this kind of headline parsing problem: crash blossoms. Why? Here is the story behind the name.

At Testy Copy Editors.com, a worthy colleague, Nessie3, posted this headline:

Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms

(If this seems a bit opaque, and it should, the story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)

It’s just a new name for an old problem, of course, but it’s still fun to collect them. Two more from the Language Log.

McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers. Yum! said Sir Galahad as he licked the ketchup and grail grease from his lips.

This one is not so much amusing as truly vexing to fully unwind: Scottish National Party signals debate legal threat.

Can you add any?

It’s a professional hazard. Just as Mark Twain could never look at the Mississippi the same way once he became a riverboat captain, Simonson can’t look at the tombstone in a Western without thinking How did Helvetica (1957) and Eurostile (1962) end up on a tombstone in the year 1885?

When it comes to language, regular readers of the Star Chamber will know that frequent contributor Alan Kennedy is the local expert. This week he has a few thoughts to share about actors and accents.

GIMME SOME CAW-FEE! I MEAN COR-FEE….KOE-FEE ?

by Alan Kennedy

Many people whose opinions on film and TV I respect, and generally agree with, have recommended that I check out the series “The Wire”. This was an HBO police drama set in Baltimore which is now available on DVD. Indeed, the series has been acclaimed as one of the best in recent history – and for some, one of the best ever. So, I got the first “Season One” DVD and started watching with great anticipation. And a problem soon emerged. One of the principal characters on this hyper-realistic show, “Jimmy McNulty”, spoke with an accent that could best be described as an accent no one speaks with in real life. And, that, for me, was a problem too distracting to overlook.

I’ve heard of bird watchers who get annoyed if the chirping of a Canadian bird is heard in a film set in Florida, and musicians who fume when a violin is held incorrectly by an actor. My lawyer wife scoffs at legal dramas which depict events, decisions, and dialogue that would never occur in the real legal world (but she can keep watching). In my case, as a language teacher and accent modification coach, some bad accents are literally too distracting to sit through.

My subsequent check on the web revealed that actor Dominic West, who played the McNulty character, is from Yorkshire, in England. I could have foreseen there would be problems when I read in his bio that, to get the part, as he remembers it, “I just did my best DeNiro impression”. This was his preparation to play a Baltimore cop. In another interview, he revealed that he used a “general east coast American accent”. Really? Is that so. So – who were you trying to sound like? Robert DeNiro’s outer-boroughs New Yorker? A John Waters–style working class Baltimorian? A Harvard professor? Well – guess what it ends up sounding like…a guy from Sheffield England, imitating DeNiro in some scenes, remembering what his accent coach told him about Baltimore-speak in others (e.g. “hours” as [æriz]), and generally adding and dropping the post-vocalic [r] sound willy-nilly. I know, I know, some may say “Get over it! He’s a good actor, it’s a good show, accents are hard!” Well, I’ll cop to it. It’s clearly my problem, not Dominic West’s. In my defense, someone took the trouble to point out his dialectal inconsistency on a website, and posted an representative video sample here:

(warning: strong language)

McNulty’s English accent rears its ugly head

We all know that some British TV actors are very good – almost deceptively so, once you learn that they’re British – at convincing American accents. Hugh Laurie (“House”) and Ed Westwick (“Gossip Girl”) are often cited as current examples. In films, I have seen performances by such actors as Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton, Christian Bale and Gary Oldman where the American accent is indistinguishable (at least its overall effect) from that of American co-actors.

And what is it about Australians that they can so often do convincing American accents? This phenomenon includes a long list which, to my mind, includes Kate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce, Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths (“Six Feet Under” & “Brother & Sisters”), Julian McMahon (“Nip/Tuck”), and, of course, the late Heath Ledger. I have heard different explanations for this, ranging from an alleged closeness of Australian English phonology to that of American English (I don’t buy that) to the idea that an Australian actor can’t have a successful career, or come to Hollywood, unless he/she has already demonstrated a convincing American accent in the first place.

APTITUDE FOR ORAL MIMICRY

Linguists and language teachers have long noticed that ability to mimic an accent (or the sounds of a foreign language) is not necessarily a function of “intelligence”. In fact, there is a school of thought out there, supported by research, that some people have a higher “Aptitude for Oral Mimicry” (AOM) than others, and it is quite independent from intelligence or other abilities, including acting talent. I think most of us believe this – it explains the valedictorian who gets an “A” in French but has a terrible accent. It explains the aforementioned Robert DeNiro, who doesn’t seem to be able to – or want to – act in a different accent. We don’t hold that against him, and indeed he’s widely considered one of our country’s best. Nevertheless, we notice those actors who do have this skill, and enjoy it. Many Brits have told me that Gwyneth Paltrow’s British accent is very good (and she keeps getting hired to do it, so the higher-ups must agree). Actors like Meryl Streep and Edward Norton – two of the best at this, in my opinion – can be relied on to perform believably in any sort of accent. 

My curiosity on this topic prompted a tour of the web, just to see what comments people were making – in print, on blogs, wherever – about actors who were especially good or especially bad in performing with an accent not their own. First off I will say that the names Sean Connery, Kevin Costner and Keanu Reeves come up the most often, making this perhaps our Top 3 “Hall of Shame”. Speaking of Sean (common wisdom is “he sounds Scottish in everything”), quite a few pundits out there in the blogosphere have mentioned the 1986 fantasy film “Highlander” as a bad accent connoisseur’s dream. Here we have lead actor Christopher Lambert, a French speaker, trying to speak English with a Scottish accent, and sidekick Sean Connery trying to speak English with a Spanish accent!

NICE TRY, YANK!

In the “Americans trying do British unsuccessfully” category, these particular performances come up a lot: Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”; Don Cheadle in the “Ocean’s 11” films; Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in “Star Wars” (but only for the first part of the first film, strangely); and – the clear winner –

Dick Van Dyke’s caricature of a Cockney accent in “Mary Poppins”. This is perhaps Hollywood’s most iconic bad accent. NPR Film Critic Beth Accomando maintains that the term “Dick Van Dyke accent” is actually used in England to describe failed attempts by Americans to sound British.

In the “Americans trying for other foreign accents” sphere, these are often mentioned: Brad Pitt trying to do Irish in “The Devil’s Own” and Austrian German in “Seven Years in Tibet”; John Malkovich trying for Russian in “Rounders”; Nicholas Cage going for Italian in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”; Rosanna Arquette going for Quebec French in “The Whole 9 Yards”; and Halle Barry going for Swahili (and then abandoning it later ) in “X Men”. I have to admit, I have not actually seen any of these films, but the performances keep coming up on the web as victims of mockery, so perhaps it’s just as well. 

As far as American actors trying to do a regional American accent not their own, a different list of performances predominates. In the category of “going for Southern”, Kevin Costner in “JFK”, Nicolas Cage in “Con Air”, and Meg Ryan in “Courage Under Fire” are often mentioned. People seem divided about Kevin Spacey in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”: some feel his bad accent caused the film to flop; others feel he did O.K. I have noticed that the Boston accent seems particularly hard to nail for many actors, even great ones. No one seems to think that Jack Nicholson’s Boston accent in “The Departed” was consistent or realistic (but many would also argue that he was great anyway). I would add that Alec Bladwin and Leonardo DiCaprio had accent trouble in the same movie, and honestly, after one hour of people talking about whose “faw-thah was a good kaw-up” and whose “faw-thah was a bad kaw-up” I had to turn it off. Yes, I “walked out of “ (TIVO-version) this Oscar-winning Best Picture because of the accents. A recent appearance by Julianne Moore on TV’s “30 Rock” was, to me, a classic example of a very good actor doing a very unconvincing Boston accent. Ditto Laura Linney in “Mystic River”.

YOU CAN’T FOOL ME, FURRINER!

Aside from Dominic West, I have found myself distracted by Joely Richardson (British) on “Nip/Tuck”, whose British vowels and [r]-lessness creep in to her speech every once in a while. I have not seen either New Zealander Anna Paquin in “True Blood” (trying for “Nawlins”) or Scottish actor Ewan McGregor(trying for American Southern) in the film “Big Fish” – but many comments on the web indicate that these performances have grated on the nerves of viewers. I can say that Jude Law’s performance in “Cold Mountain”, playing a Confederate soldier, was distractingly unconvincing (the patriot in me wonders which American actor lost a job opportunity for that hire to happen). According to one humorous blogger, Law’s southern accent was so jarring that after every line she half-expected the character to add “…by order of the his majesty, the KING!”.

IT’S OFFICIAL

I did find two published lists of specific bad movie accents from actual film critics, which I’ll share here:

Top-10 worst according to Empire (UK film magazine) in 2003: 

1. Sean Connery “The Untouchables” (Scottish English trying for Irish English)
2. Dick Van Dyke “Mary Poppins” 
3. Brad Pitt “Seven Year in Tibet” 
4. Charlton Heston “A Touch of Evil” (trying for a Mexican Spanish accent) 
5. Heather Graham “From Hell” (American doing Cockney)
6. Keanu Reeves “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (trying for British)
7. Julia Roberts “Mary Reilly” (trying for Irish)
8. Laurence Olivier “The Jazz Singer” – 1980 remake (Brit trying for New York Jewish)
9. Pete Postlethwaite “The Usual Suspects” (Brit trying for Pakistani accent) 
10. Meryl Streep “Out of Africa” (trying for a Danish accent)

Top-10 worst according to Beth Accomando (NPR critic & President of San Diego Film Critics Society): 
1. Mickey Rooney “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (trying for a Japanese accent)
2. Keanu Reeves “Little Buddha”/”Dangerous Liaisons”/”Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Beth Accomando explicitly named him “the actor who most consistently fails at accents”) 
3. Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” 
4. Demi Moore “Flawless” (trying for British)
5. Dennis Quaid “The Big Easy” (trying for New Orleans)
6. Hilary Swank “The Black Dahlia” (going for what’s described as a “strangely clipped, aristocratic accent which is a complete distraction”).
7. John Wayne “The Conqueror” (trying for some kind of Asian accent playing Mongolian Genghis Kahn) 
8. Dick Van Dyke “Mary Poppins” 
9. Humphrey Bogart “Dark Victory” (trying for Irish)
10. Arnold Schwarzenegger “Raw Deal”(Beth feels that in this early Ah-nold vehicle he seemed to be trying in vain to sound like a native speaker of American English, a tactic he later [wisely] abandoned). 

- I personally cannot agree that Meryl Streep belongs on the top list (or any such list)… I also think that if you fault Schwarzenegger for unsuccessfully trying to tone down his accented English, then you have to add in the likes of Penelope Cruz, Gerard Depardieu, Jackie Chan, Antonio Banderas, and a whole slew of non-native English speakers for whom the gap between “how their English sounds” and “how they want it to sound” is difficult to assess or prove.

So – what do you think? I find that people who like movies and TV usually have an opinion on this.

Please weigh in!

Does it make sense to try to figure out which language is truly the hardest? This is the question that an entertaining essay in the Economist by Robert Lane Greene tries to answer. As you might expect, he doesn’t produced a single answer, but he does give some remarkable facts about languages with difficult sounds (!Xóõ in Botswana has more than twenty clicking sounds) and grammars (Bora in Peru has 350 genders).

My friend Alan, the famous Star Chamber guest author on all matters linguistic, forwarded the article to me with a note that he’d come across it on the Language Log. I recommend reading both the article and the Language Log commentary, because watching linguists argue is almost as much fun as watching statisticians argue, and there many fine points here up with which for discussion to be put.

I especially liked Greene’s comment on long words: “Agglutinating languages—that pack many bits of meaning into single words—are a source of fascination for those who do not speak them.” I am certainly guilty of this. Language Log commenter Bill Poser elaborates as follows.

A point that frequently arises is the idea that languages that pack a lot of information into words are difficult. Is it really self-evident that it is harder to deal with complex words than with multi-word phrases that convey the same information? If a language puts a lot into a word but does so in a transparent way, so that words are easy to parse, interpret, and construct, why should this be difficult? It may well be that the perception of difficulty here merely reflects unfamiliarity, which is likely true of quite a few of the features often cited as leading to difficulty.

Doubleplusgood pointgespoken! Nothing is more contemptible than familiarity, nor more exotic than something that is exoticnessful. Nevertheless, I can’t help but be tickled by a comment from a reader of the Economist article that in Inuit, one can say “it can be very slippery on the deck” with the assertion Quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.

I Rotis for Typophile a few years back…

I Meta man once. I said, “Avenir seen you somewhere before?”

He replied, “I was elected Centaur once. Joanna know what happened? Italia what happened. The Air Force took a Janson me. They put me in charge of Arial maneuvers. But the DIN was terrible. I lost my Tempo and stormed out Didot. I shouted, ‘Avant Gardes posted Ronda clock! To Helvetica Mandarin chief! Peignot attention to him!’

“They said, ‘This Stymie went too far.’ Well, no more Beton Ronda bush. I admit I made some Eras. It cost me my Courier. Univers see it until it’s too late.

“Bodoni hurts when I laugh. Now, I spend my Times Roman the streets.” He walked away singing Myriad a Little Lamb.

I wondered Weidemann was saying all these crazy things.

Franklin, I don’t give a Dom.

(My sincerest apologies. Please don’t bother to Melior complaints to me.)

Taken from Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: Groan Extra Bold Extended. I added the font hyperlinks.

The punning style reminds me of Howard Chace’s masterful Anguish Languish (see also a related digression on this site).

Now that you’ve reviewed all your fonts, you’re ready to tackle Sporcle’s Name That Font game. Or if you’d rather relax, sit back and watch Helvetica, the movie about the font. It’s good.

When presented with a new dictionary, I always look up the word haruspex. Similarly, when presented with a new pronunciation site, of all the difficult words I could choose, my mind immediately turns to Qatar. Inogolo has it (KAH-tur), but then again, this is intended to be an American English version of the country name. Can we find a native version of the same name? Here’s Slate dedicating a page to the problem: How Do You Pronounce “Qatar”? It’s got some lovely linguistic jargon… The middle “t” is perhaps the trickiest part. It is known as a velarized consonant, which means the back of the tongue must be pressed against the mouth’s roof to achieve the requisite effect. The page even features a recording by an Arabic professor. But the prof’s name is Terri DeYoung. Nothing against the good Doctor, but I’m guessing she didn’t grow up on the Persian Gulf.

I was despairing of finding an instructive native when I came across this segment from the Daily Show. It’s both painful and funny to watch John Oliver correct the Qatari ambassador to the UN on HIS pronunciation of Qatar. And sure enough, when you hear the ambassador say the name, it is an ear-opening experience.

Oliver is a brutal straight man, and when his subject doesn’t want to play funny, things get tense.

Now sit back and enjoy as our very own Star Chamber Language Maven (quick: maven… what language is that from?) Alan Kennedy regales you with still more language yarns, this time on borrowed words in English.

Can I Borrow a Cup of Déjà Vu?

by Alan Kennedy

Linguists use the term “borrowed” to refer to words that come into one language from a second, and get used frequently enough that they become like a first language word. As an example – we don’t really feel like we are speaking Swahili when we say we went on a safari (even though that is a word borrowed from Swahili; it means “journey”). You can often tell that a word has been borrowed from another language because the spelling seems non-English (e.g. tsunami, gesundheit, déjà vu) – but sometimes the non-English origin is not as evident.

When I first mentioned the linguistic notion of “borrowed words” to my wife Karen, she pointed out that it’s kind of a stupid term, because the language users are not planning to give the word back, nor have the originators been left without the word. [Queen Elizabeth to the President of Tanzania: "thanks awfully for letting us use the word safari. It has been ever so useful, but we’re quite done with it now, you may have it back".]

Similarly, another term for this phenomenon, “loan words” is inaccurate. [We like saying karaoke, and we refuse to give it back to Japan, goddammit! Take baseball in exchange. You’re welcome.]

Nevertheless, linguists use the term “borrowed word” or “loan word” this way, and it is a useful concept, despite the misnomer.

The term borrowing is not usually applied to words with roots from other languages (like Latin and Greek). It refers more to words that not only didn’t come from Old English (a Germanic family language) but which have been taken, whole hog, from some other language and eventually find their way into English dictionaries. Sometimes the words are borrowed just as they are, and sometimes they are modified in spelling or pronunciation to make them more “English-like”. Let’s take cocktails as an example. Vodka comes to us directly from Russian, водка, pronounced quite similarly in that language, and letter-for-letter transliterated into English letters. Whisky, on the other hand, comes from the Gaelic word uisge which means “water” and is pronounced “oosh-kyuh”. (I will make no jokes here about how Scots drink/consider/treat whisky like water, in deference to my hard-working immigrant ancestors).

The language from which English has borrowed the most, by far, is French. A quick glance at a selection of fairly common words which we all know, and which are in the dictionary, makes the case:

… and this is just a partial list. Note that in almost every case, we English speakers are not pronouncing these words using usual English pronunciation rules. No one rhymes “buffet” or “chalet” with “get” by mistake (or “Chevrolet” for that matter); no one rhymes “corsage” or “sabotage” with “luggage”. We know these French rules so well, that they have become almost like alternative English pronunciation rules. Why do we English speakers borrow so much from French? Well, the Norman Conquest of England has a lot to do with it. And besides that, look at a map – France is England’s close neighbor. In that situation, linguistic borrowing frequently results.

Like all languages, English has borrowed many food words. The reason is perhaps self-evident. Which is easier to say: “I like sliced raw fish placed atop portions of sticky vinegared rice” or “I like sushi”? If people in some foreign locale have created an awesome dish with many ingredients or a specific recipe, it’s convenient to just take their word. Like any other words, some food words are borrowed fully (spaghetti, croissant, baklava) and some are modified a bit as they come into English (pretzel comes from the German bretzl; saffron from the Arabic زعفران “za’faran“). Because food words are so culturally rooted, English speakers have a sense that that they are using borrowed words when they say things like shish kebab (Turkish), smorgasbord (Swedish) or dim sum (Cantonese).

For non-food words, English speakers (according to my informal poll) tend to be less clear about where a loan word has come from. I’m not talking about obvious ones like karaoke or boomerang or aloha. I’m thinking more about words like cobra (Portuguese), robot (Czech), and boondocks (Tagalog). Even if you know a word is a loan word, you may not be able to guess which language. Can you guess where we get the words maven, chimpanzee, or yacht? Give yourself a minute.

O.K., the answers are Yiddish, Bantu (Southern Africa), and Dutch. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know. This stuff is really not considered common knowledge.

Native American Indian languages have contributed many words – not just in place names, but in words that seeped into American English and then became part of English at large. Aside from the culturally rooted terms like moccasin, teepee and tomahawk that we all tend to know, there are many words for animals (e.g. chipmunk, moose, coyote, possum, raccoon, jaguar, cougar) and foods (e.g. pecan, squash, persimmon, avocado) that English speakers did not likely know about until they came to the Americas. Well-known concept words from native American languages include totem (Ojibwa), kayak (Inuit) and pow-wow (Narragansett).

Here’s a little story using borrowed words. Take minute to read it and, if you want, underline words that you think probably came into English directly from another language.

I’m going on vacation next month, and this time I’m really gung-ho to head northward to satisfy my wanderlust. I have visions of cruises in and out of icy fjords, maybe stopping to sled across the tundra. I’m staying in an ice hotel – which even has an indoor health center; I can’t imagine a sauna in an igloo! The last trip I took was a fiasco, really a catastrophe. We went to Bali, thinking it would be a relaxing, angst-free time. The brochure for our resort showed guests in turquoise silk pajamas, eating caviar, shopping in colorful outdoor bazaars and feeding orangutans and giraffes. The reality was a run-down place which bordered a kind of jungle canyon. We had a feeling there was something less than kosher about the place as soon as we drove up. For one thing, it was covered with graffiti. The little kiosk which sold shampoo and things was always closed. Our bungalow was tiny; the bed was more like a futon with a saggy mattress. The room was stuffy but we couldn’t go out onto our patio to get a breeze because the weather seemed to veer between monsoon, typhoon and tornado the entire time.

Ready? here’s the answer:

I leave you with this final thought: hakuna matata.

No, that saying was not an invention of the Disney Corporation. It’s real Swahili language.

But you knew what it meant, didn’t you?

Read the commentary under the map. There’s some good stuff in there. Most poignant to me is the Esperanto taunt Estas Volapuk al mi! (“It’s Volapük to me!”). Volapük is another made-up language, and it’s so uncool that even the Esperanto speakers make fun of it. Man, if you can’t sit at the same lunch table with the Esperanto speakers, you are one sad wanker.

I don’t mean to sound glib. I like O Fortuna as much as the next drinker of sugary beverages. I do. But what is it about the piece that inspires so much schlock? Maybe it’s because it delivers pretense, bombast, and orgasmic payoff in one incredibly compact package.

Anyway, from Steve Crandall’s blog I came across this helpful explanation of the puzzling lyrics of Orff’s chef d’oeuvre.

Fun stuff, and it puts me in mind of mangled and misheard lyrics of all kinds. Kiss This Guy is a site dedicated to misheard lyrics. The title comes from the well-known Jimi Hendrix riff from Purple Haze, “‘scuse me while I kiss this guy.”

The idea of garbled prose acting as a proxy for a real story is the basis for Howard Chace’s masterpiece, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (Little Red Riding Hood). Upon seeing the wolf in Grandma’s clothing, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut was moved to remark on the size of her nose:

O, Grammar, water bag noise! A nervous sore suture anomalous prognosis!”

Chace’s efforts are justly famous. But in his epic Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames (Mother Goose Rhymes), Luis D’Antin van Rooten shows us that the effect also works across language barriers. How’s your French? Read this out loud.

Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles.

This is either the story of a little man finding surprise in the famous old Parisian market, or the story of a giant egg man astride a battlement. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

Martin Wattenberg replied to my Twitter message, “And lacking a name for the decade, no one talks about it. Sapir-Whorf redux?” I had just been pondering this. Sapir-Whorf says that the nature of our thinking is colored by the nature of our language. So, if the linguistic “handle” for the First Decade is particularly slippery, perhaps it will transitively render the things that happened that decade as less memorable.

It’s been a newsworthy decade by any measure, but I can’t help but wonder if, historically speaking, George W. Bush will get off easier than otherwise because he had the good fortune to stumble into an exceptionally forgettable decade.

Does anybody know of languages where the First Decade doesn’t present any linguistic difficulties? Presumably in such a language the first decade of each century would show to better effect in the history books.