In "Johnson: A few favourite things", R.L.G. briefly presents and reviews a few useful tools for those doing research or study that involves language, including online dictionaries, both English-English and multi-lingual and websites offering advice on English grammar and actual usage by native speakers (2014).
R.L.G. also gives a glowing review of the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that magnificent monument to scholarship that I've been enjoying for some years now, having ditched the antique CDrom version and the impressive but much less practical paper version. My old book version OED, all 17 volumes, now looks very impressive on my brother's bookshelves in Australia, but I suspect it's almost never used. It was great for exercising the arm muscles when I used to use it. The online version is enormously more useful, so I use it all the time. But as I suggested in class on the first day, it's not the most useful dictionary of English for most people, and with an annual subscription as well, I didn't think it should be on my list of useful references for AEP students. The other dictionaries, Oxford and other, on that list are more useful, and free to use.
Google’s N-Gram Viewer, to which I added the parenthetical note (fun) is, however, on the list, and R.L.G. seems to enjoy it as much as I do. It's a cool tool for exploring the history of how frequently words and phrases have been used in English. For the link on the blog, it opens at a page displaying a comparison of the frequency in English writing over the past 200 years of the synonyms prostitute (a little negative), whore (very negative connotation) and sex worker (neutral connotation) - it appears that English people didn't like to talk about this sort of topic between around 1820 - 1920, but after society loosened up a bit following the Second World War, sex talk appears to have become more common in English writing. I guess that prior to 1820, there was a lot of discussion on the topic, and that it was very much opposed or otherwise negative since the term whore was more popular than the less offensive prostitute. It's not surprising that sex worker has a much more recent history in English usage. I just tried another one: this time comparing the frequencies of the words dog, cat and horse over the past couple of centuries. Cats and dogs both appear to have remained fairly constant in attracting people's attention, whereas horses have declined in interest since around 1900, when the motor car started its rise to popularity: on the whole, it's probably better to have streets with a bit of air pollution than covered in horse pollution.
Perhaps you don't share my peculiar passions for words and their history, but I hope that some or the tools on the list might be useful. And after I just checked them out on R.P.G's recommendation, I might add Grammar Girl or Language Log. I'm inclined to favour the more boring looking Language Log, run from the University of Pennsylvania and founded by Geoffrey Pullum, one of my favourite English grammarians, but Grammar Girl does look practical and fun.
The most recent entry at Language Log is "WHO: 5 percent of calories should be from sugar", which is a complaint about the poor English language of the World Health Organization (WHO) in its report recommending less sugar (Partee, 2014). Perhaps Barbara Partee feels a bit the way I do when I see technic used to mean "technique" - even in vocabulary and grammar, academics argue, and always have. But we're all allowed to make mistakes: I often see some awful ones when I read my blog posts a day or two later. I usually don't change them if there are already comments on the post. And in comments, you can't edit after publishing, so my mistakes are there forever. (And after writing this paragraph, I decided to change the title of this post. And of course add a new reference citation to the list.)
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References
R.L.G. (2014, March 5). Johnson: A few favourite things: Language tools. The Economist, Prospero. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-tools
A note on the author's name: articles in The Economist do not normally give the name of the author, but some Economist blog articles do, although usually not a full name but a display name such as the one here. When you write the reference citation, use the name given, which in this case is R.L.G.
ReplyDeleteThe response here grew much more than I'd planned when I started writing it, but one idea led to another and another, so I kept writing.
I'm happy with this summary of my chosen article - it's short and covers the important ideas well.
ReplyDelete