Grammar that makes you cringe

[Cudzoziemiec]

What's striking in that list of core words from Palari/palare/polari/whatever is how many of them have entered mainstream English. "Send up" isn't even slang, is it? The inclusion of "cod" to mean "awful" seems rather similar to "codswallop" and "cod piece" and other fishy slang, which makes me wonder how much of that list actually originated as, er, this gay slang beginning with P.

It's like hipsters are trying to appropriate Queer culture

Didn't the Queers appropriate it from the Punch & Judy men?

Quite.  Even the name Palare indicates that it's a magpie language, using elements of foreign languages - some picked up on the newly fashionable foreign holidays, some from immigrant communities in London (notably Yiddish), Cockney rhyming slang, backslang from the market porters etc etc.

Yiddish is causing me quandaries right now. I'm reading some short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer and each one is translated from the Yiddish by a different person in a different way. This is fine when purely Yiddish or Hebrew terms are used, as I don't know them anyway! But most of the stories are set in Frampol, which is a real town in Poland - I've never been there but I lived in the region and I've been to lots of the places mentioned. So in one story we have Zamosc and in another Zamoshoh. The first is the Polish spelling, bar diacritics, but the second - is that a reproduction of the Yiddish pronunciation? Is the "oh" a misprint for "ch"? Does Yanover refer to the town of Janów or possibly to Janówa or even Janowo? Almost certainly the first as it's the next town but the others are far away. Not really a problem and the logic of presenting Janów as Yanover for an English-speaking audience who don't know the places is clear - but then a word like halacha is used, which apparently is something to do with Jewish religious law - is that "halatcha" as if it was English or "halakha" as if it was written in Polish? Or maybe something else?

Not really grammar, more like marketing! and the stories are good anyway!

[hellymedic]

Halacha is indeed Jewish Law and practice.
It is derived from the Hebrew verb for 'to walk'.

It's rather moot discussing spelling when a word has travelled from Hebrew to English via Polish and Yiddish (and quite probably several others en route) when these languages have different script systems. Yiddish was mostly written using Hebrew script for a middle European language¹, to stymie censors.

1) Known pejoratively as 'schlechtes Deutsch' by Jews in Germany.

[Gareth Rees]

So in one story we have Zamosc and in another Zamoshoh. The first is the Polish spelling, bar diacritics, but the second - is that a reproduction of the Yiddish pronunciation? Is the "oh" a misprint for "ch"?

If you do a Google Books search on Zamoshoh you'll see that the Singer story is the only place this spelling appears, so it's clearly a misprint, and your guess that it was supposed to be Zamoshch seems plausible: Wikipedia says that the Yiddish for Zamość is Zamoshtsh.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I think there are two ways you can go, at least with the place names: you can use the conventional Polish spelling or you can transliterate the Yiddish into something that represents the pronunciation to an English speaker. The first is accurate, checkable and reproducible, but doesn't really help most people reading the stories; the second is vague and subjective but potentially more comprehensible to the average reader. Lack of consistency is a problem and both rely on knowing what the original name is. Sometimes the inconsistency is in the source - I've encountered this problem with Japanese names in Polish documents I've been translating into English. Have they been declined as if they were Polish? Sometimes they have, sometimes not, and sometimes they've been transliterated into an English spelling - which then might have been subjected to Polish declinations! If you're not familiar with the original it can be easy to accidentally mangle a name.

[hellymedic]

I think there are two ways you can go, at least with the place names: you can use the conventional Polish spelling or you can transliterate the Yiddish into something that represents the pronunciation to an English speaker. The first is accurate, checkable and reproducible, but doesn't really help most people reading the stories; the second is vague and subjective but potentially more comprehensible to the average reader. Lack of consistency is a problem and both rely on knowing what the original name is. Sometimes the inconsistency is in the source - I've encountered this problem with Japanese names in Polish documents I've been translating into English. Have they been declined as if they were Polish? Sometimes they have, sometimes not, and sometimes they've been transliterated into an English spelling - which then might have been subjected to Polish declinations! If you're not familiar with the original it can be easy to accidentally mangle a name.

This is often a problem for genealogists when names have been transliterated by generations of wandering Jews.
In Israel, people's names are given in Hebrew, sometimes with no reference to any European spelling, which might have remained consistent despite multiple changes in pronunciation. Much information can be lost this way; there are many ways to pronounce 'Goldstein'.

[pcolbeck]

My sons personal statement for UCAS. Full of commas in the wrong places, incorrect use of apostrophes, semicolons sprinkled in seemingly at random and incorrect capitalisations of the first letter of words. Worse it had been run past his tutor and the head of year both of whom had pronounced it excellent. Perhaps they should run them all past the head of English as well ....

[Auntie Helen]

My sons personal statement for UCAS. Full of commas in the wrong places, incorrect use of apostrophes, semicolons sprinkled in seemingly at random and incorrect capitalisations of the first letter of words. Worse it had been run past his tutor and the head of year both of whom had pronounced it excellent. Perhaps they should run them all past the head of English as well ....

chip off the old block?

[pcolbeck]

My sons personal statement for UCAS. Full of commas in the wrong places, incorrect use of apostrophes, semicolons sprinkled in seemingly at random and incorrect capitalisations of the first letter of words. Worse it had been run past his tutor and the head of year both of whom had pronounced it excellent. Perhaps they should run them all past the head of English as well ....

chip off the old block?

Oh hell !

[clarion]

Oh he'll what?

[Bledlow]

My sons personal statement for UCAS. Full of commas in the wrong places, incorrect use of apostrophes, semicolons sprinkled in seemingly at random and incorrect capitalisations of the first letter of words. Worse it had been run past his tutor and the head of year both of whom had pronounced it excellent. Perhaps they should run them all past the head of English as well ....

chip off the old block?

Oh hell !

Fine, as long as you're consistent. There's no good reason for the possessive apostrophe. Refusing to use it didn't stop me getting a grade one English language O level, back in the days of six passing grades.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Uggh! It's ugly but your rewriting alters the meaning - the comma after technology implies Apple should not have ownership over any technology. In practice both are clear in meaning though. I'm already cringing at myself.

[clarion]

'such as'?

[citoyen]

2) Speech marks for emphasis.

Surely the speech marks are there because it's a quote?

Anyway, while I'm here...

Good.

As in: "How are you?" "I'm good."

I dare say Gareth will be along in a minute to cite some 17th-century example of good being used as an adverb, and I've already accepted that it's a battle not worth fighting, but it still grates somewhat.

(The earliest example that springs readily to my mind is James Brown. I admit that "I feel well" wouldn't have quite the same ring to it.)

[Cudzoziemiec]

"I feel well" implies, to me, that your health is good, whereas "I feel good" is an emotional state. Similarly "I'm good" would once have anticipated "...at [activity]". I reckon it's the slow death of the adverb. Run quick, walk slow.

[Nuncio]

I annoy my children in lots of ways, but one of them is to say that I'll be the judge of their morality when they answer 'good' to a 'How are you?'.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Do you also give them absolution when they say "My bad"? 

[Salvatore]

I annoy my children in lots of ways, but one of them is to say that I'll be the judge of their morality when they answer 'good' to a 'How are you?'.

He's not joking.

[red marley]

Extra grumpy points for using "I'm good" to indicate that you do not wish to receive a refill^* of your beverage^* of choice by your server^* this morning^*.

^* Give me surly European cafe culture over US below-minimum-wage-I-need-tips-to-survive imperialism any day.

[citoyen]

Heh. I seem to have touched a nerve with that one.

[Wowbagger]

I tease children with the good/well substitution which has become current newspeak.

Doubleplusunwell = sickasaparrot.

[tiermat]

An email circulated today, at work:

Subject: Christmas Tree's

Please note that the Christmas Tree’s will now be installed on Tuesday 26th November starting in $LOCATION_1* from 06.30am and in $LOCATION_2* about 10.00am.

*Locations changed to protect the innocent

[red marley]

I think that's legitimate if the tree's bought from a greengrocer's shop.

[L CC]

I annoy my children in lots of ways, but one of them is to say that I'll be the judge of their morality when they answer 'good' to a 'How are you?'.

As a parent who habitually responds with 'is that like safely or actually safely? In what way is it like?' I would happily appropriate that.


Except that I use it myself. 

[Tim Hall]

I thought you plant trees. Does installing them imply that these are software trees?

I think you have to have root privileges to do that.

[Ewan Houzami]

Not exactly grammar, but pretentious types who end a comment with 'plus ca change...' when they mean ''twas ever thus' . Often seen on CiF.