Orin Hargraves

This book is a pleasant diversion for word nerds. Hargraves uses the Oxford English Corpus to determine the frequency of various clichés and divides them into several different types: noun clichés, adverbials, adjectival clichés, modifiers, framing devices, and so on. He distinguishes between cliché and idiom, and points out when a cliché is not actually a cliché -- in English at least, there are sometimes formulations that just work more effectively than the longer, more original equivalent would. There is some subjectivity in his assessments, but this is to be expected, and the subjectivity is acknowledged from the beginning. The examples given cover a variety of genres, although a significant amount of them are derived from journalism, blogs, and online fiction. Hargraves explains that the blogs and online fiction at least are usually not edited, so it is not surprising to see more clichés in use there. This book is probably better for flipping through than reading cover to cover, although it is very easy to say "oh go on, just one more page then" and then discover you've read about 15 pages.… (mais)

Filler Up

There are rich pickings in the land of the cliché. Our inherent laziness permits us to insert them frequently and pointlessly to make our writing appear richer, or at least longer. Orin Hargraves blames the news media for spreading them ubiquitously. He thinks that the rise of blogs and the decline of newspapers have meant the disappearance of editors. Everyone publishes without real oversight, and clichés fester and bloom in that environment, because they are easy out. Even when they don’t work or make sense. Basically, Hargraves thinks they make sentences less concise and therefore less authoritative.

Journalism boasts more clichés per unit of text than any other source. Many are the near exclusive property of the news media. He cites bone of contention, commanding lead, corridors of power, end of an era, fevered speculation, dyed in the wool, not immediately clear, deal a fatal blow, fuel speculation, grip the nation, sound the death knell, spearheading, swept to power, usher in a new era, and rich tapestry, among others, as rarely or never appearing in civil conversation.

He can make such claims because of the research tool at his disposal. Hargraves tapped the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive database of nearly everything published in English. It contains upwards of 2.5 billion instances of words in context, including radio, tv and internet. Software allowed him to search not just clichés themselves, but their environments: what words precede or follow, the syntax they represent, and their frequency, compared to others, compared to non clichés, compared to just about anything in the OEC. It showed him usage patterns, quantity, genres, and the example itself, from which he populated this book. It makes for some fascinating discoveries, such as date of first use, as well as some laughs. Elephant in the room is used more often in the OEC than there are elephants in Africa, by about 20:1, for example. I particularly enjoyed the clichés that made no sense themselves, such as meteoric rise, considering that meteors don’t rise, they fall. But we never see the phrase meteoric fall, so what good is it?

It also allows Hargraves to give 2-4 examples of the each cliché in use. He gets to examine the context, accuracy and effect of their deployment, and determine just how useless the cliché is. This is actually important, because by his definition, if the phrase has any real use at all, it’s not a cliché. His evaluation: “Clichés are the sterile offspring of a mind that is not engaged in creativity, and following the advice of an authority is surely the opposite of creativity.”

Hargraves divides clichés by their syntactic placement, as noun replacements, adjectives, adverbs or predicates. What help this is he does not say. I found his segregating of clichés this way of no practical use. Syntax is an innate function, and native speakers automatically place clichés in their sentences correctly. I think it would have been far more useful to collect them by genre or characteristic.

-There are the news media clichés, above.
-There are redundant clichés, such as each and every, various and sundry, in actual fact, over and above, close proximity, categorically deny, in and of itself, null and void, and for all intents and purposes.
-There are archaic and obsolete word clichés, such as beyond the pale, down the pike, wend your way, every nook and cranny, by and large and emblazoned on, none of which today’s speakers can define.
-There clichés that are so useless, people actually use them incorrectly, and few notice.

Isolated and collected like this, they become ever more insulting to read about. Categorizing them this way drives home their redundancy, verbosity and empty filler nature, and might help towards goal of making people of aware of them, and of avoiding them.

It’s Been Said Before is a reference work, not a dictionary. Hargraves argues that he has included only phrases he considers clichés, while some readers might consider others for membership. That there is room for disagreement opens the door to conscious-raising even wider. I have my own test. “As opposed to” turns out to be a decent test of whether or not a cliché makes any sense. If there is no other possibility (see meteoric rise, above), then the phrase is not deniable, as they say in science.

It’s not perfect, but I don’t need to check dictionaries and reference books to know if I’m barking up the wrong tree, as it were.… (mais)

More likely a good item for the reference shelf rather than a cover-to-cover page-turner, I still had fun reading this organized collection of the differences in English as it is spoken in Britain and the United States. Well organized and more than a collection of curiosities, this book is probably the most comprehensive book of its type. Furthermore, it goes beyond offering “translations” and serves as a guide to the various areas of culture where British and American readers may completely misunderstand the language of other cultures. Very interesting and very fun for geeks like me.… (mais)

When a new dictionary hits the market these days, it’s the new words that grab the headlines, so a dictionary composed entirely of neologisms which promises that all its entries “still have that new word smell” just has to be irresistible.

Lexicographer Orin Hargreaves and his editorial team scoured a variety of sources including the Oxford English dictionary, the Internet, print media, all forms of ephemeral literature, and even road signs to capture the latest neologisms. Words selected for this dictionary had to be genuinely innovative, and not merely limited to a narrow field of usage. The words were also chosen on the basis of whether or not they are likely to endure continuing currency: this is difficult to predict of course, since words fall out of fashion every bit as quickly as they enter it.

This dictionary reflects the rapid developments in science, technology and computing and tell us much about our preoccupations in the early C21st with inclusions such as Botox party, speed dating, shaken baby syndrome, reality TV and 24/7.

Although the dictionary focuses on neologisms in American English, Hargreaves also includes words from other varieties of English that he feels are likely to fill a future gap in US English and be absorbed in at a later date. (He cites the example of “the noughties” to refer to the decade 2000-2009 as an example of a useful expression which he would expect to make the leap from British to American English.) In any case, he says, the ease with which speakers of English can read newspapers and other documents from around the English speaking world online makes it desirable to have an acquaintance with other varieties of English.

Illustrative examples of many of the words are provided, all of them drawn from authentic sources. I was very happy to see sources in this part of the world cited in the dictionary: Singaporean English contributes newater a word which refers to “purified domestic wastewater that is recycled for reuse”, and kiasu meaning “a selfish grasping attitude”. Both words made their first appearance in The Straits Times in 2003. Another reference (for Klingon the language of the Klingons, an alien race from the TV series Star Trek) is taken from TechCentral page of The Star, thus proving that Malaysia boleh when it comes to coining words accepted by an Oxford dictionary!

Hargreaves makes lexicography accessible to the layman with an essay at the back of the book which explains the process by which new words are formed. In this guide to finding new words, he explains that very few new words are entirely original (one of the few exceptions being google, which originally meant “ten raised to the one hundredth power (10100),” and was invented by the nine-year-old nephew of a mathematician): most are pieced together from fragments of existing words. The dictionary gives us plenty examples of these (boy band, infodemic, multiverse, printer friendly, soccer mum, overwear), and even if we have not met this particular combination of words or word parts before, we can pretty much hazard a guess as to the meaning.

Other words are revivals of words already coined, pressed into service to describe something quite new. Spawn has become a computing term, meaning to generate a dependent or subsidiary computer programme, burn now means to produce a compact disc from an original or master copy and Teflon, which used to refer to the non-stick coating of saucepans, has now taken on the extended meaning “having an undamaged reputation in spite of involvement in scandal or evidence of misjudgment”: it is of course, most usually used to refer to politicians.

Many of the new words included in the dictionary are recent derivatives of familiar words. Thus we have dejunk (which you do by disposing of clutter or unwanted possessions), depublish (remove from official records or publication), invacuate (confine people to a safe haven within a building in an emergency), rehire (hire a former employee again).

English has always absorbed much of its new vocabulary from the languages and cultures it comes in to contact with. Thus the dictionary lists qawwali (Muslim devotional music performed by the Sufis of Pakistan), hijab and burkha from the Arabic and Falun Gong from Chinese. Fashions in food change more quickly than most and the English language has most recently absorbed jalfrezi from Bengali, gosht from Hindi, edamame and soba from Japanese, rösti from Swiss-German, and the names of several new varieties of Italian pasta.

Hargreaves notes that the appearance of a new word in a dictionary (and one would presume this is particularly true of one published by Oxford) in many ways marks the end of its freedom and it is forced to settle down and behave itself. However, he points out (and regular reader of this page would do well to note this!): “The meanings of new words are no more fixed than any other aspect of human culture, and despite well- meaning efforts by many to make them stand still, they continue to change. Spotting these new meanings takes a more sophisticated approach to language, and one that is sensitized to shades of definition instead of just knee-jerkishly categorizing a new meaning as ‘wrong’”.… (mais)