Grammar that makes you cringe

[Bledlow]

Power cut does not necessarily mean power failure. It can be planned & scheduled, as with power cuts in Japan since the tsunami last year, where schedules have been published & warnings given.

'Outage' should mean the same as 'cut' in this context.

[Peter]

Yes, but there are three lines on the graph....

[Bledlow]

Ooops!

[Kim]

Yes, but there are three lines on the graph....

One for each phase

[Kim]

I suppose that both 'outage' and 'failure' could be used to describe an unknown loss of power, especially in the increasingly common situation of dealing with equipment on a remote site where you know that it's no longer receiving power, but have yet to determine why.

"The servers shut down due to a power outage" could mean the cleaner chose the wrong socket for the hoover, or the breakers tripped, or there was a power cut.


Incidentally, is anyone else irked by the trend to translate "shut down" as "turn off" in British English localisations of popular operating systems?  To me, the former implies the operating system cleanly (or not so cleanly) killing processes and unmounting volumes and so on, while the latter merely implies powering down the hardware.  It's almost as bad as using 'programme' to refer to software, especially as a verb. 

[Gareth Rees]

The graph is from Google Ngram Viewer. As I'm sure you know, Google have been digitizing books on an industrial scale for the last few years, and currently estimate that they have about 4% of all the books ever published. The Ngram Viewer uses this corpus to draw graphs showing changes in the usage of words or phrases over time (as a proportion of all printed words). If you've ever wanted to know when Chili became Chile or the changing fortunes of Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus, or when the Great War became the First World War, or any other question that can be phrased in terms of the relative popularity of particular words, then Ngram Viewer is your tool.

The graph I drew shows the relative frequency over time in Google's corpus of the three phrases, power outage, power failure, and power cut. You can see that power failure has always been the most popular term, but power outage started to appear in the early 1970s and has gained in popularity ever since, overtaking power cut in the mid-1980s and still going strong. So this confirms Peter's original suspicion that power outage is a term that has been gaining in popularity over the last few decades.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Black out
Brown out
Load shedding

[Arch]

The graph is from Google Ngram Viewer....

Cool!

I just looked up something I've wondered about - when did 'haulage' become 'logistics'?

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=haulage%2Clogistics&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Not really relevant though, unless they are digitising the logos on HGV's too...  Fun though!

I refuse to look up 'supply chain solutions' though.

[Andrij]

Headline from an article on the "Utility Weekly" website:  SSE agrees to buy Ireland fossil generation assets.

I never knew they generated fossils in Ireland.

[clarion]

Utility Weekly sounds like a periodical for everyday cyclists.

[Andrij]

Utility Weekly sounds like a periodical for everyday cyclists.

Sadly, UW is not that exciting.

[madcow]

 "due to an earlier accident" . It appears in most traffic reports .

"Earlier" has ben morphed into an adjective. It just sounds wrong (to me ) and yet we know what is meant. 

[Peter]

It would be ok if the "earlier" came "later"!  This is known as de-adjectivising.

[madcow]

I agree but even the BBC (Radio 2 listener mostly) expresses it the" wrong" way.

[rower40]

"due to an earlier accident" . It appears in most traffic reports .

"Earlier" has ben morphed into an adjective. It just sounds wrong (to me ) and yet we know what is meant.

"Early" is an adjective as well as an adverb.  ("The Early bird...")  So "Earlier" is a comparative adjective, just as "Earliest" is a superlative adjective.  So I'm completely OK with "earlier accient".

[citoyen]

I'm not bothered by "earlier" used as an adjective, but it got me to wondering what would be a better word to use in that context. Previous, perhaps?

Then I realised that the word is redundant. Of course the accident happened earlier. Or indeed previously. No one would close a road in anticipation of a later accident, would they? This isn't Minority Report.

d.

[Pickled Onion]

"due to an earlier accident" . It appears in most traffic reports .

"Earlier" has ben morphed into an adjective. It just sounds wrong (to me ) and yet we know what is meant.

"Early" is an adjective as well as an adverb.  ("The Early bird...")  So "Earlier" is a comparative adjective, just as "Earliest" is a superlative adjective.  So I'm completely OK with "earlier accient".

Yes, it's fine. As long as there were two accidents, and the other was was also early.

Otherwise, surely it should be "because of an accident earlier"

[Gareth Rees]

"Due to an earlier accident". It appears in most traffic reports. "Earlier" has been morphed into an adjective. It just sounds wrong (to me) and yet we know what is meant.

Can you explain why earlier sounds wrong to you here?

Do other comparatives sound wrong to you, or is it just earlier? How do you feel about "the taller man", "the later Roman Empire", "the higher learning", "a better world", "the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary"?

[clarion]

Only if there is an equivalent comparator.  Earlier than what?  Earlier than now?  That's redundant.  Earlier than another accident, well maybe.

[hubner]

"Earlier accident" meaning not happening now or the immediate results of an accident, ie they're not now dealing with the accident.

Meaning it happened earlier. Earlier than now.

Language is loaded with redundancies, it's perfectly normal.

[citoyen]

Stating why it is wrong doesn't explain why it sounds wrong, especially when "we know what is meant".

When something like this sounds wrong to us, I suspect it's often to do with the way we were brought up/educated/otherwise indoctrinated.

My first boss's pet hate was dangling modifiers. Since working for her, I find myself highly sensitised to them (as I may have mentioned earlier in this thread), though most people seem not to notice them, never mind care about them.

d.

[drossall]

... was was ...

<OT>Reminds me of the old challenge to use the same word consecutively, as many times as possible, in a sentence that still makes reasonable sense. Intervening punctuation is allowed, but not other words. For example, the dance "can-can" would be two instances of "can".</OT>

(click to show/hide)

You can get seven in a sentence about a teacher who:

...while marking essays, noticed that Peter, where Mary had had 'had', had had 'had had'.

[Salvatore]

... was was ...

<OT>Reminds me of the old challenge to use the same word consecutively, as many times as possible, in a sentence that still makes reasonable sense. Intervening punctuation is allowed, but not other words. For example, the dance "can-can" would be two instances of "can".</OT>

(click to show/hide)

You can get seven in a sentence about a teacher who:

...while marking essays, noticed that Peter, where Mary had had 'had', had had 'had had'.

See also here

I like the one about the walk in the Cambridgeshire town held in the early part of the year, and its associated piece of music called the 'March March March March'.

While riding in northern Germany in August 2010 I noticed that a farmer had created a tourist attraction in his crop of what the Americans call 'Indian corn'. The German expression is 'Maislabarynth', the english would be 'maize maze', and if it belonged to a Top Gear presenter, might be 'May's maize maze'.

[rogerzilla]

Americans have "corn maze" which is a big FAIL compared to the beauty of "maize maze".  To Americans corn=maize, to us corn=some general unidentified cereal, or wheat.  The other stuff is, of course, sweetcorn.

A word that is particularly confusing is "momentarily", which to us means "for a short while" or "briefly" but to them means "in a short while", where we'd say "shortly" or "presently".

[Wendy]

Mealies.