I’ve just been sent a PR release plugging a touter of sports tickets and I know my readers are keen on swearing (even my devoted reader in Guatemala).
So, although I only rarely pass on commercial plugs…
BEWARE… SWEAR WORDS AHOY!… obviously only in the pursuit of sociological insight…
Ticketgum.com conducted a Reddit analysis of which British football (US translation: soccer) fans swear the most online and therefore, presumably, in reality.
Apparently Ticketgum is “the ultimate place for buying football, rugby, and tennis tickets online”. I’m not entirely sure that is a good selling line as “ultimate” might mean it’s the last place you should go to buy tickets. Also, “Ticketgum is a secondary marketplace that offers resale tickets, prices may be above or below face value.” I’m not sure why high levels of online swearing would encourage unofficial ticket buying in the real world. Or perhaps I’m being naive.
Such things are a mystery to me, but I do know how Ticketgum or their agents allegedly did their sociologically-valuable research.
To do it…
Each team’s subreddit profile was ‘scraped’ (that’s what it says here, presumably at the bottom of the online barrel) to determine: total posts, total comments, total words and total swear words. Any teams with fewer than 5,000 words used on their subreddit were excluded from the study due to insufficient data.
Using the data collected, the proportion of swear words used out of the total words was determined.
Finally, the proportion of swear words for each subreddit were ranked in ascending order to reveal the fans which swear the most frequently.
Now to the nitty gritty…
The most favoured swear word among football fans is ‘fucking’. Hardly a surprise. It is the top swear word for 28 football clubs’ fans. A league table of other favourites is sadly not available.
England’s Newcastle United FC is the English Premier League team with the sweariest fans, cursing every 116 words ‘on average’.
Scottish football teams, though, trounce them. Celtic fans reach a total of 4,408 swear words out of 396,668 total words, the most of all teams studied. They average a swear every 100 words in their subreddit: a whopping 805 swear words out of over 80,000 words analysed. Another Scottish club, Rangers FC, come second with fans averaging a swear word per 104 words. The team’s fans total 3,097 swears out of 322,509 words analysed.
Possibly this is unsurprising, given that both Rangers and Celtic are from Glasgow where, truly, the word ‘cunt’ can and often is used as a term of affection…
The football team subreddits with the highest proportion of swearing
Football Team
Total Words
Total Swear Words
Swear words per total words
1
Celtic FC
80,689
805
100
2
Rangers FC
322,509
3,097
104
3
Cardiff City
83,478
797
105
4
Leeds United
761,677
7,074
108
5
Newcastle United FC
621,759
5,342
116
6
Manchester United
863,914
7,195
120
7
Chelsea FC
1,079,988
8362
129
8
Sheffield United
232,522
1,795
129
9
Brighton & Hove Albion
214,498
1648
130
10
Liverpool FC
1,303980
9743
133
Fans of the Welsh club Cardiff City swear almost as frequently as Rangers’ (every 105 words on average).
The first English clubs to make an appearance, in 4th, 5th and 6th places, are Leeds United, Newcastle United and Manchester United – all clubs from Northern England.
The only Southern English teams in the Top Ten are Chelsea (from London) and Brighton & Hove Albion (South Coast) at 7th and 9th.
Proof, if proof were needed, that Southerners are a bunch of wimps.
And, arguably, the Scots also have better stadium songs…
Her 12-year-old daughter told her “That’s the stupidest rizz I’ve ever heard!”
Ariane (like moi) had never heard the word before, but I told her “That is real mazda!”
I asked the Claude AI (a competitor to ChatGPT) what “rizz” meant. It replied:
The slang term “rizz” has a few different meanings in modern usage:
Rizz is sometimes used when complimenting someone’s outfit or look. For instance: “Those shoes are rizz bro!”
Rizz can refer to having confidence, style, and attraction or magnetism towards the opposite sex. For example: “He’s got so much rizz with the ladies.”
It can also mean being smooth, charismatic, and having swagger or game when interacting with someone you’re attracted to. As in: “He was spitting so much rizz last night talking to those girls.”
In rap or hip hop lyrics, rizz is sometimes used to refer to flashy jewelry, especially diamonds. Like: “Check the rizz on my wrist.”
Rizz can also just be used as a general term meaning something is really awesome or cool. As in: “Whoa, that new video game is rizz!”
So in summary, rizz is a slang term mainly used to refer to being charismatic, having swagger and confidence – especially when attracting romantic partners. It can also just mean something is really great or excellent. The term became popular in hip hop culture and now sees widespread use in modern slang.
Yesterday, Ariane spotted and shared this online:
Credit: @mrlovenstein
Very true.
So I asked Claude AI: “What is the latest trendy word on the street?” and got this reply:
Trendy slang is always evolving, but here are some words and phrases that seem to be quite popular and contemporary “on the street” lately:
Lit – Meaning something is exciting, cool or hyped up. For example, “That party last night was lit!”
Bae – A term of endearment for one’s romantic partner or love interest. As in, “Come over later, bae.”
Fleek – When something is perfectly done or on point. “Her makeup is on fleek today.”
Clap back – To respond to criticism or insults. As in, “Don’t mess with her, she’ll totally clap back at you on social media.”
Snatched – Another word for gorgeous or beautiful in reference to someone’s appearance. “Her outfit at the premiere had her looking snatched.”
Extra – Over the top or excessive behavior. For example, “Why are you being so extra?”
GOAT – Stands for Greatest Of All Time, used to refer to someone highly skilled or talented. “LeBron James is the GOAT of basketball.”
Thirsty – Trying too hard to get something or someone’s attention. As in, “He needs to stop with the constant selfies, it’s thirsty.”
Slay – To do really well at something. For instance, “You totally slayed that gymnastics routine!”
So in summary, those are some slang words that seem to be frequently used, especially among young people communicating informally. Language is always evolving, so I’m sure new trendy terms will continue to emerge and gain popularity!
That is real mazda…
If anyone can make up and get a new word on the street, then I figured I should have a go. At first I thought of “That’s real sofa-bed” but that didn’t feel quite right. So I then thought of “real mazda”. I guess it came to mind as a synonym for “amazing”.
I am going to tell everyone things are “real mazda” for a while and claim it is the latest buzzword on the street. I hope you will help me in this futile and vainglorious attempt.
Sassanid relief at Naqsh-e Rostam showing Ahura Mazda presenting the diadem of sovereignty to Ardashir I (Source: Derfash Kaviani, Wikipedia)
I looked up “mazda” in dictionaries to see if it means anything and it turns out it does – it means ‘light’ or ‘wisdom – and its origin comes from Ahura Mazda, a god of intelligence and wisdom, the one true god of Zoroastrianism.
Which is a bit of coincidence, as one of Ariane’s roots is Parsi Indian – the Parsis went to India from Persia around the 8th-10th centruries and they were Zoroastrians.
So I think – by happenstance and blind luck – the rejoinder “That’s real mazda” has a chance of sounding as if it means something.
I asked Claude AI by typing in “That’s real mazda”. Claude AI obviously remembered I had been asking about slang and gave me this reply:
I’m afraid I don’t understand the phrase “That’s real mazda” in this context. Mazda is an automotive company that makes cars, so I don’t see how it applies here as a slang term. Perhaps you were looking for a different word that sounds similar to “mazda”? Or maybe you intended a different meaning that I’m missing with this phrase. Could you please clarify what you meant by “That’s real mazda”? I’d be happy to try and make sense of the saying if you can provide some more context about how it was intended to be used. Let me know if you can expand on this at all!
I can see AI developing. It could be double plus good mazda. Or not.
A large number of these blogs over the years have been interviews or, more precisely, transcriptions of chats with other people. I record everything so that I can make certain I quote the people I talk to exactly.
I type exactly what they say.
Except, of course, there has to be a certain amount of tidying-up of what they say. I have to take out the gaps, stumbles, repetitions, umms and ahhs and errrms and general ramblings of normal speech, because almost no-one ever speaks in fluent sentences.
At college, part of the course I took involved radio production and part involved linguistics.
One afternoon, we were asked to go off in groups of three or four and have a short recorded conversation with each other about anything, then transcribe the exact words which had been spoken.
Three or four of us went off and had an interesting, fluent chat about something-or-other.
But, when the recording was transcribed – writing down every word exactly as spoken – we realised we had not conversed in sensible, coherent or even necessarily meaningful sentences. Our ears and brains had cut out all the crap and what we thought we heard was what the other person INTENDED to say rather than what he/she actually said.
So transcribing interviews is a laborious process. It can take three times as long to transcribe a chat as it took for it to happen. So an hour of chat might take three hours to transcribe even before turning it into something which flows. And then, of course, there is intonation – or even a casual or ironic glances of the eyes. Intonation and unspoken implication can totally change the meaning of what is said.
In the 1960s there was a very late-night BBC TV series which aimed to help people – mostly new immigrants – learn English. It included acted-out scenes. One such sketch took place in a Post Office with a long queue.
When he eventually reached the counter, the first customer simply asked for “A first class stamp, please…”
The second customer – not a native English speaker, but trying to be very polite – asked for “a first class stamp, PLEASE”… The Post Office person serving him, bristled.
The point being made was that, by emphasising the PLEASE with that particular intonation in that particular situation, instead of being polite, the impression the customer communicated was extreme annoyance at having queued for so long. The sentence was polite. The communicated emotion was confrontational annoyance. The intonation mis-communicated the actual spoken words.
Because transcribing a recorded chat can be time-consuming and very dull, a few years ago, I tried to use speech recognition software, thinking it would type out what was said in real time and I would only have to do some minor tidying-up and re-punctuation of some sections.
It turned out I was being over-optimistic, as the below section of a chat with an anonymous British comedian shows. The eventual edited interview, I think/hope, showed them in their true vocally fluent light.
This is how the speech recognition software transcribed the exact recorded words…
What happened was that was. My most successful show today. And that was me as me whereas before that. I had been. Doing character based. Comedy. And I was. The. One. Who was the most successful. Because I trained for many many years to be an actor. And so I didn’t really want to do stand up. But I did that show with me and it was the most successful. And. I. Think I just felt like I’d plateaued plateaued be. That I didn’t have much else to say.
It’s all out of love with it because it was fantastic but I’ve got. To come back. With something else. I wanted it to be. And I didn’t want to rush into the mix. And I kind of had enough of the whole Edinburgh. Training I’ve done about. Six Edinburgh’s in a row. By that point. You don’t want what you’ve got. Well. You know I did. Six. Shows. Including that one up to 20 as I’d been reading yeah. You know. All. Went.
Yeah. So you need. Help basically. So I had someone. Who was amazing. Help me out. Did. She was. Just. Like. Those bums on seats. It was the least. Stressful. One. And I just felt that if I didn’t follow I wanted it to be as good. As much. And I just didn’t feel like. It. Felt like I. Felt a bit jaded my head. And. The thought of having another show and doing the same. Circuit. Again straight away. So. This. Year. I just. Might.
I mean I’ve always done. Acting and. That’s. What. I really wanted was. And. I had. Up until that point as. Where. What. I call a mortgage. Job. Which most people. Have. Which was an office job. A horrible office job five. Days a Week. With. You. Know not made to any of my strengths and just to just pay the bills. I started to build. Quite. Happy. And. I thought you know what it’s. Time to move on. So I did.
That might be an extreme case but I think it shows some of the ways real people talk, constructing thoughts as they speak… To an extent, it ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it. That’s what gets results.
Conversation – and writing – is about communication and the human brain is designed to spot patterns, so clarity is often in the ear and the brain of the beholder far more than the mouth of the speaker.
The B vocabulary. The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.
Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases compound words. They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, ‘orthodoxy’, or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an orthodox manner’. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost its second syllable.
Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because –trueful, –paxful, and –loveful were sliightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: ‘Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.’ But this is not an adequate translation.
To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.
These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour,justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them.
All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods.
In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death.
In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex — that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime.
In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society.
An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation ‘good’ when applied to the Party and ‘bad’ when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation.
In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations.
Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune.
The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.
In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last.
The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
Two things had a big impact on me when I was young.
One was seeing film footage of the Nazi’s Belsen concentration camp when I was around 11 or 12.
The other big impact was reading George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was around 14 or 15.
George Orwell died in London, on 21st January 1950 at the early age of 46.
So his works came out of copyright in the UK on 1st January 2021.
The Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four fascinated me almost as much the novel itself.
Here it is…
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.
Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.
The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life — for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field — but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them.
So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms.
The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife.
Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix –ful to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding –wise. Thus for example, speedful meant ‘rapid’ and speedwise meant ‘quickly’. Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding –ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in –wise: the –wise termination was invariable. The word well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.
In addition, any word — this again applied in principle to every word in the language — could be negatived by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis, doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant ‘warm’, while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, ‘very cold’ and ‘superlatively cold’. It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc.
By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well — indeed, better — expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in –ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding –s or –es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding –er, –est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech.
A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.
The funeral of Prince Philip takes place in England today and it seems to have encouraged an outbreak of dodgy journalese… First of all I read this on a BBC post…
One can only imagine what connections the military units had had with Prince Philip on the grass, which is how that can be read.
Later, this more jaw-dropping Antipodean literary blunder was spotted online:
It is easy to make an English language faux pas.
English can be a subtle language, as this Facebook posting (also today) makes clear:
My chum Ariane Sherine’s 9-year-old daughter is astonishingly creative. It is perhaps not surprising that she is very literate as her mother has been a columnist for multiple broadsheet newspapers and has written books while her father also writes for a prominent broadsheet newspaper.
But she is also very musically and visually talented – again, something in the genes.
Last week, she got a new painting set as an early 10th birthday present and did this:
Admittedly it is based on an image she saw online. But the original has different colour tones, the blossoms on the tree are different and there are no blossoms coming off the tree. The original is a daytime image. Hers is, she says, “around six o’clock in the evening”.
She recently asked people she knows to write honest essays about her for her 10th birthday next week. So she can know what people think of her.
Last night, her mother showed me some of the essay she has written about her daughter. It included the sentence: “I’m so pleased you’re following in the footsteps of your father and I and expressing yourself creatively.”
The following text exchange then followed:
JOHN
I am always a bit vague on this but should it be “your father and me”?
‘You’ is subject; ‘following’ is verb; ‘footsteps’ = object?
But fuck knows how your father and I/me fits in. Clearly I need remedial education.
Genuinely flummoxed.
ARIANE
I have no idea but I asked a friend who didn’t know either – and he is a linguist! 😂
ARIANE: Hi – need grammar help! I want to say that I’m pleased she’s following in my and her dad’s footsteps, but how do I word it?
“I’m so pleased that you’re following in the footsteps of myself and your father”?
or “of your father and I”?
or “of your father and me”?
FRIEND: I’m struggling too. Whichever way you say it, it sounds stiff and unidiomatic, which indicates to me that it needs rephrasing. Is it possible to mention her father and you in the previous sentence and then say: “I’m so pleased that you’re following in our footsteps”? Sorry I can’t be more helpful.
JOHN (to ARIANE)
The only person who’s going to know is your daughter and we can’t ask her!
Maybe “I’m so pleased that you’re expressing yourself creatively” – to disguise the fact that you, your friend and I are utterly illiterate!
ARIANE
Ha ha! Yes maybe 😂🤣
ME
It’s a sobering fact that you are a multi-titled broadsheet columnist with multiple books out… I was paid by Random House (the world’s biggest publisher) to edit a bestselling book… and your friend was a university lecturer possibly with academic publications to his name…
…and none of us knows how to write a basic English sentence!
ARIANE
Ha ha! To be fair, it’s a VERY difficult sentence! xxx
ME
Hah! Says you!
ARIANE
I don’t think my friend had stuff published in journals. His wife did, and she had a PhD. But he’s no slouch either!
JOHN
My excuse is that I was mostly educated in Essex.
What’s your excuse?
I bet your daughter knows. She’s already got better vocabulary than we do.
ARIANE
She is amazing. 🥰
JOHN
I’m off to bed now.
(LONG GAP)
JOHN
…talk about sleepless nights!
I was dozing off and “you’re following in the footsteps of your father and I” started swirling in my head!
The problem is it’s about the possession of the footsteps, not about subject-verb-object. So maybe both “I” AND “me” are wrong.
The actual thing being communicated is “you’re following in your father’s footsteps and in my footsteps”.
So I guess it should be “you’re following in the footsteps of your father and of mine”
But that and “you’re following in the footsteps of your father and mine” both sound ridiculous, so can’t sensibly be used.
I think it’s a balance between being grammatically correct and sounding right.
So it’s a case, as your friend said, of rephrasing … or of just tossing a coin about I and me.
ARIANE
Ha ha! Thanks for email, just read it. I think I‘ll stick with father and I… it’ll do.
JOHN
Yeah. Like I say. To hell with correct grammar. This is English. What’s right is what feels right.
I’ve just been sent a PR release plugging a touter of sports tickets and I know my readers are keen on swearing (even my devoted reader in Guatemala).
Earlier this month, my chum writer 
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 