Numbers and amounts

This morning, I was listening to the news on Radio Scotland, and in particular an item about potholes. Reporting from the side of a pothole in Perthshire, the journalist was talking about the amount of potholes. This is a very relevant topic, following the hardest winter since 1962/63, with snow on the ground for nearly 3 months in some parts of the Highlands. I remarked to a friend that talking about amounts of potholes is grammatically incorrect. You talk about numbers of potholes. Because you can count them. Of course, I would not expect anyone to go on a drive of all the roads in Highland Scotland and tot up the number of time their suspension gets wrecked. However, what could be a relevant statistic is the amount of tar required to fill in all those potholes. Or the number of men needed to put in all that tar.

You can talk about one tonne of tar needed to repair a stretch of road. That's an amount, you can weigh it or measure it; you describe it with a unit (e.g. of length, weight etc). You can't talk about one tar, unless you are watching a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

You can talk about one lorry, needed to carry all that tar, because you can count the number of vehicles. Talking about an amount of lorries does not make sense.

Check Out Deb's New Blog!

I'd like to invite you to visit a new blog by a former AOL Journaler. Thankfully she and I have stayed in touch since AOL Journals went under. She had a word usage journal for some time, but has only now decided to jump back into blog waters -- on Wordpress, not Blogger, but we won't hold that against her. ; )

Her name is Deb, and her blog is Everyday Language, Every Day. Please drop by to visit and let her know what you think. I am so jealous of the subject she chose for her first post. I wish I'd thought of it first!

A Few Shout-Outs

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

James D. Nicoll

This quote opens one of my favorite web sites, Word Connections, run by John Dierdorf. I first made Dierdorf's acquaintance by using one of his other sites, You Can't Say That! Both are chock full of interesting etymological treasures, and Dierdorf himself is humorous in his presentations. If you write historical fiction (or even if you don't) "You Can't Say That!" is a must-have as far as reference sources go, in my opinion. I like to read both sites just for fun, but I'm funny like that.

Another favored site, and one you may be familiar with, is The Word Detective, "Words and Language in a Humorous Vein Since 1996". I believe I may have run across this guy from a recommendation of another AOL Journaler. I do know that it has been in my bookmarked sites for several years. The Word Detective is newspaper columnist and author Evan Morris, and, again, I like reading his web site just for the fun of it.

One other site that I enjoy reading is EnglishClub.com. It has a little bit of everything for "learners and teachers of English", including a very interesting History of the English Language.

I hope you get the chance to check these out and make use of them.

Punctuation

Last Wednesday, I came across a public notice in an outlying district of the Isle of Lewis, where I reside. There was one comma missing in the first paragraph of the message from the Grazings Clerk, which threatened to render it unintelligible.

I read the first paragraph as:

ANY SHAREHOLDER WHO WISHES TO CAN PUT THERE SHEEP INTO THE AIRD PARK FROM NOW UNTIL END FEBRUARY/BEGINNING MARCH 2010. 

which should of course contain a comma after TO.

A better phrase would have run: 
"Any shareholder who wishes to put their sheep into the Aird Park can do so from now ... "

And yes, "there" should of course have been spelled "their", but that did not prompt me to take the photograph.

A Soupy Entry

I had planned to write about pronouns today, but I read something a few minutes ago that changed my plans. I was reading a blog entry about The Sir John Soane's Museum in London (on my list of "places to visit" when I go to London) and the phrase hotch-potch was used to describe the sculpture in the basement of the home. It struck me that I had never wondered before what the difference is, if any, between hotch-potch and hodge-podge, so assuming you would be just as interested as I am, I decided to write about that instead.

I had a feeling that hodge-podge is what we Americans are more familiar with and that I would find that hotch-potch is older and probably used more by the English.

I first checked my trusty OED to see what it says about hotch-potch. The word is not there. The word hotch-pot is there, and I found that the earliest use of this word in print was by Chaucer in the 14th century with a meaning of "mixture" or "medley", specifically in cookery by the 15th century. In the 16th century it became a legal term meaning "collation of properties to secure equality of division." It is of Anglo-Norman origin, from Old French hochepot, from the French words hocher (shake) and pot (pot). Shaking the pot -- I like that. I'm imagining a stew of whatever I have in the refrigerator all shaken and cooked together. By steady progression the word evolved into hotchpotch, altered by "rhyming assimilation" in the 15th century, and finally hodge-podge sometime in the 17th century. When I looked up hodge-podge the OED told me to "see hotch-pot". So that is that.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary gives as the first definition of hotch-potch "a thick soup or stew of vegetables, potatoes, and usually meat", and as "hodgepodge {one word}, a noun meaning 'a heterogeneous mixture', synoymous with jumble". The second definition given is "hotchpot", a word in English law, with the legal meaning given in the above paragraph. Merriam-Webster lists the word's origin as dating from 1538 (16th century), which is in disagreement with the OED of Etymology.

I just thought this was rather interesting and that I would share. Hope you enjoyed it!

A Brief Review of LIE and LAY

It seems like the distinction between the two verbs "lie" and "lay" is disappearing in common usage. I have seen and heard so many examples lately where the writer or speaker uses the wrong one, and these are people who should know better. It has even been suggested {gasp} that someday soon the distinction may be done away with entirely in common usage. However, the distinction is still observed by enough potential employers (or clients) that it would be well to try to get the usage right before using one or the other incorrectly in a professional setting (or in a job interview!).

I believe we've covered these words before, but I thought it might be time for a quick review.

Very simply "to lay" means "to put" or "to place", and "to lie" means "to repose".

"Lay" is a transitive verb, meaning that it is an action word, expressing a doable action, and requiring at least one object; it will always be followed by a noun or pronoun. Its principal forms are lay, laid, have laid, and laying. For example: I lay my keys on the counter as soon as I get home. I know I laid my keys on the counter when I got home today. I have laid my keys on the counter since I learned to drive. Laying my keys in the same place every time helps me keep up with them. If you are saying that something has been put or placed somewhere, then use a form of "lay". In these examples, "keys" is the direct object. What did we lay? We laid "keys".

"Lie" is an intransitive verb, a word that has no object. The action stays with the subject, as it were. (The confusion between "lie" and "lay" usually comes about because the past tense of "lie" is spelled the same way as the present tense of "lay".) The principal forms of "lie" are lie, lay, have lain, and lying. For example: Today I lie in bed until noon. Yesterday I lay in bed until noon. In fact, I have lain in bed until noon all this week. Actually I am still lying in bed right now! There is no object for which the action was performed, so there is no direct object. The subject "I" performs the action, and the action goes nowhere; it stays with the subject.

So really, knowing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is probably the key to knowing whether to use "lie" or "lay" in a sentence. If you are going to be describing an action that is doable, with a noun or pronoun that receives the action of the verb, then use one of the forms of the transitive verb "lay". If the action you are describing is being done by the subject and "stays" with the subject, then you would use one of the forms of the intransitive verb "lie".

The etymology of the two words is also different. The word "lay" comes from an Old English word that means "to place on the ground" or "to put down". (This is also the origin of the verb "lay", meaning "to produce an egg.") The word "lie" comes from a different Old English word that means "to rest horizontally." (Yet another Old English word is the origin of the verb "lie", meaning to tell a falsehood.)

If anyone has a specific question about the usage of "lie" and "lay", please feel free to ask in the comment section.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It . . .

How would you like to go on a sort of etymological treasure hunt with me? Hmm???

My sister Barbara, who is very much a logophile, uses a bookmarker with nothing on the back whenever she is reading. When she comes upon a word that is unfamiliar to her or one that she wants to learn the origin of, she will write it on the back of the bookmark. When she has learned it, she will cross it off.

A few days ago she asked if I could help her find the origins and meanings of two words, cypocraphy and palitant. It had been a while since she'd written them down and couldn't remember in what context they were used, but I know for sure that "palitant" had nothing to do with an avatar on an online game (which is what I found when I googled it.). I've barely scratched the surface of research, so I thought I'd throw them out there to see if anyone else had any ideas or would like to join in the hunt.

My OED has been no help. The most I could find there was the word "Pali", with a capital "P" (long "A" sound), meaning a language used in Buddhist canonical books and short for "line or canon".

I'm hoping someone out there has perhaps come across one of these words or has a reference source that I don't have that may prove useful.

So please join in if you can. It'll give you something to do in 2010.

And yes, these are the sorts of things that keep me awake at night!