Top 100 Language Blogs 2010: we’ve been nominated!

We’ve been nominated as one of the Top 100 Language Blogs 2010 competition organised by LexioPhiles. As you can imagine, we’re well chuffed!

Nominations are open until 11 May (23:59 hours German time). Voting will then take place from 12-24 May 2010.

If you’d like to nominate Words to good effect (and we hope you will!), please send an e-mail with our URL <http://wordstogoodeffect.wordpress.com> to priscila (at) bab (dot) la. Alternatively, you can nominate us by leaving a comment on the LexioPhiles competition page.

Thank you!

By Marian Dougan

…and the words the world just can’t abide

The British Council’s 75th anniversary poll of its students’ English language preferences also surveyed their least favoured words. The 10 most disliked English words were:

  1. Cancer
  2. Racism
  3. Corruption
  4. Terrorism
  5. Slavery
  6. Flatulence
  7. Killing
  8. Study
  9. Herringbone
  10. Fail

Pretty understandable choices, although flatulence seems a far lesser evil compared with others on the list.

But you can’t help but wonder why herringbone was included. Sartorial considerations? Memories of itchy tweed jackets? Or of almost choking to death on an actual bone of an actual herring?

Hotel, the 21st least favoured word, is equally puzzling to me, as is scissors, at 73. Any thoughts?

By Marian Dougan

 

English words the world likes…

My last post was about words we don’t like. This one’s about words we do.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2009, the British Council conducted a poll to find out its students’ favourite English words. The top ten were:

  1. Love
  2. God
  3. Peace
  4. Awesome
  5. Hello
  6. Freedom
  7. Gorgeous
  8. Sunshine
  9. Health
  10. Happiness

In another poll, carried out (I think) in 2004, the Council’s students judged the following to be the most beautiful English words:

  1. Mother
  2. Passion
  3. Smile
  4. Love
  5. Eternity
  6. Fantastic
  7. Destiny
  8. Freedom
  9. Liberty
  10. Tranquillity

In both surveys, people appear to have based their choice on the aspirations or ideals the words stand for, rather than their aesthetic qualities. Love and freedom, present in both lists, seem to be our most cherished ideals.

On a less lofty level, chocolate, at no. 12, almost made it into the top ten in last year’s poll, so the world’s English-language students have clearly got their gastronomic priorities right. Other favourite food words are cucumber (27), cheesecake (43), mushroom (51), peach (54), ice-cream (70), pizza (71) and coconut, in 73rd place. I suspect, though, that cucumber at least was chosen for considerations other than flavour.

My own favourite words (ideals and aspirations aside) are almond, glamour and scent. I also like foible, not for its beauty but for its quirky sound – such a good match for its meaning.

I love almond for its long, smooth syllables, soft consonants and for the mental image it always brings to mind of an almond tree in full blossom. And I adore salted almonds (hard to find in Glasgow!), especially at aperitivo time.

Glamour I love for its sense of bewitching allure, and for its old Scots meaning of magical spell or enchantment. And aren’t allure, bewitching and enchantment wonderful words too?

Scent (no. 66 in the British Council poll) conjures up the scent of roses and of exotic foods scented with spices or with rose or orange water. And what could be more glamorous than the image of a beautifully chic woman sitting at her dressing table and dabbing scent (one of the classics: Arpège, Guerlain, Caron…) behind her ears?

Favourite words welcome in the comments!

By Marian Dougan

Words that set our teeth on edge

I had a Twitter conversation recently with Ashleigh Grange of Plush Text Communications and Janine Libbey of P & L Translations about words we dislike. Ashleigh’s language bugbear of the day was incentivise, Janine’s prioritise and mine diarise. My current handbag-book for the train and doctors’/dentists’ waiting rooms is “The English Language” by David Crystal. I was surprised to find there that diarise has been setting people’s teeth on edge since 1954. The first edition of Sir Ernest Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words” listed it then, along with publicize, hospitalize, finalize and casualize (employ casual labour), as words to avoid. By the time the third edition came out in 1986,

the objections to publicize and the others are no longer cited. Instead, new -ize words are mentioned as currently attracting opposition, such as prioritize and routinize.

Confession: I find incentivise quite useful in certain contexts. In sentences, for instance, like “The Italian Government has passed a new law incentivising energy-saving and the use of renewables” (referring to specific incentives such as tax breaks).

And prioritising seems like a valuable and much-needed skill when I contemplate my lengthening to-do list.

We all have words we love or loathe, not necessarily for any rational reason. If I find incentivise and prioritise useful in their concision, why do I dislike the equally concise diarise so much? Anyway, I’d love to hear your pet hates, rational or not, in the comments.

By Marian Dougan

The UK’s sexiest accent? Parliamo Glasgow

In a survey by the Travelodge hotel group, 5000 Brits voted the Geordie accent (Newcastle and the north-east) the nation’s sexiest. They clearly don’t appreciate the finer tones in life:

“Bahookie”, by the way, is a Scottish word for your bottom, behind, backside, or “rearward contours”. One look at the Glaswegians thronging the city streets on a Saturday afternoon and you can see how apt a word it is. Parisiennes have “derrières”, Glaswegians have “bahookies”. Such is life.

The sketch is from the wonderful Stanley Baxter’s “Parliamo Glasgow”.

By Marian Dougan

Shake out your web site’s welcome mat

The best way to make your web site welcoming to visitors isn’t a big “Welcome” mat on the home page. The trick is to put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and make your site easy and enjoyable to use. Simplicity, ease of navigation and consistency are the key words here.

I recently visited the Herald Scotland site (The Herald and Sunday Herald newspapers) because I wanted to contact the paper. Nowhere on the home page could I find the “Contact Us” link. I’m interested in web usability, and fairly persistent, so I clicked away until I found that contact form. You access it through three different tabs/links, none of which says “Contact Us”. They are:

"Go Away" welcome mat

More casual users would have given up and left.

Why does Herald Scotland make it so difficult for visitors to get in touch? Why are they so unwelcoming? User interaction is surely a key asset to newspapers in these straitened times.

Web users usually want to carry out a task (book a flight, buy a book), find information or, we hope, read interesting content. They don’t want to waste time looking for standard features that web designers have decided to hide away under misleading headings.

It ain’t rocket science.

Make your site easy to use. Label your pages clearly. Put things where users expect to find them, with the names they expect (Contact Us, FAQ, About Us). Follow standard practice – don’t be so clever and innovative that nobody can find their way around the site. Be consistent. If the main menu is on the left-hand side on the home page, make sure it stays there on every other page of the site. Take the needs of less abled users into account. And take a step back from the site and try to view it through a user’s eyes (better still, bring in an outsider and ask them to carry out key tasks. Watch them and take note of how easy/difficult they find those tasks).

Keep it simple, not fancy – that’s how to make your web site welcoming.

Photo courtesy of LexnGer / Alexa Clark

By Marian Dougan

Cut printing costs: use Century Gothic

Century Gothic T-shirts

A test conducted by Printer.com compared ink consumption for different fonts. Century Gothic was found to use 30% less ink than Arial, used as a benchmark, and less even than Ecofont, designed with low consumption in mind.

I use Century Gothic a lot as I like fonts with open “a” counters. For my old logo, my designer chose Avant Garde, which I installed on my Mac to keep my business documents consistent with the logo. However, I found Avant Garde hard on the eye for large bodies of text. Century Gothic is similar in appearance but in my view more readable. So for a time Century Gothic was (and still is, for some texts) my font of choice for business and marketing letters.

Ink consumption by a given font depends mainly on the thickness of its lines. Century Gothic, its slender lines notwithstanding, is a wide font, so takes up more space and could consume more paper. The simple solution is to reduce your character size (10 is comfortable).

As Dinesh Ramde reports for Associated Press, some font experts give Century Gothic a lower readability score than Times New Roman or Arial. It’s intended for limited blocks (titles and headlines, for example) rather than extended bodies of text. In my experience it may be less readable but is by no means unreadable. I much prefer it to Arial. All things being equal, my favourite working font is Verdana, which comes 5th in Printer.com’s consumption/cost table, shown below:

The following tips could help you save on printing and paper costs:

  • print in draft mode when you can
  • use both sides of the page
  • if you can’t/don’t print on both sides, keep any printouts you don’t need and re-use for future drafts
  • use the “print preview” function. If some of your pages have unnecessary text or just 1 or 2 lines, edit or adjust the line-spacing/font size accordingly.
  • “go to” the last page of your document. Again, if it’s only got 2 or 3 lines of text, tweak or edit. Reducing font size by half a point, from 11 to 10.5, for example, may be enough to reduce your page count
  • make sure you’re not printing pages with useless text such as a copyright line or lengthy footer/header text
  • don’t print unless you need to – especially emails.

But. If you’re a writer, editor or translator, then the most reliable quality-check is to print out and read your text on paper before finalising and delivering to your publisher or client or posting on your web site. It’s the best way to pick up typos, clunky structure, spelling errors, repetitions and simple bad writing.

Keep your environmental conscience clear by choosing a suitable font and character size and reprinting on/recycling your paper.

Photo courtesy of Andreas Brændhaugen.

By Marian Dougan

Ouch! Stung by my own spelling bee

Legally Blonde ModelsI knew this would happen – the minute I blog about spelling, I make a spelling mistake on Twitter.

The tweet was about creative and tech-savvy CV ideas, as featured in the Huffington Post. An area, I commented, where Elle Woods of Legally Blond Blonde led the way with her Harvard application on video. That’ll teach me to pontificate!

Photo of Legally Blonde Models courtesy of Jeffrey Bary

By Marian Dougan

Spelling bees in my bonnet (1)

I work with language, so it goes without saying (I hope) that I care about spelling.

Cartoon Bees

That said, I don’t think texting heralds the death of the English language and I don’t fall from my chair with horror if an email or text arrives with minor spelling mistakes. Indeed, I think texting and Twitterese are new skills that I haven’t really mastered yet.

I hate making spelling mistakes myself, though – that’ll be the Virgo in me.

It also bugs me to see “official” writing – business letters, newsletters, reports, web content, books, marketing material – with spelling errors. And don’t get me started on CVs. You don’t need to know all the difficult words by heart – we’ve all got spell-checkers and should use them, and dictionaries, albeit with due care. Printing out your material before you finalise it is another – for me essential – way to check for spelling and other errors.

Some people say spelling accuracy isn’t that important, as long as the meaning is clear – communication is all. I take their point, for people who haven’t been taught properly, who have dyslexia or some other language disorder, or who just can’t get to grips with spelling.

For the rest of us, and especially for language workers, correct spelling is a sign of professionalism and enhances our credibility. Bad spelling indicates a lack of care and a disregard for our readers.

All of that said, we’ve probably all got our spelling bugbears. Mine are gauge, manoeuvre and Libya (which I use week in, week out in my translation work but always stumble over). Yesterday I got stuck with “intriguing”.

I’d love to hear your comments on spelling – have you got your own bugbear? Are there any words that non-native English-speakers find particularly hard or annoying? (I won’t say “illogical” as that probably encompasses most of the language!)

Beez courtesy of Jelene Morris

By Marian Dougan

Spelling “speling”

This morning’s “Call Kaye” programme on BBC Radio Scotland featured an interview with Richard Lawrence Wade, whose “Free Speling” campaign aims to help English “break out of the cage [of spelling] that’s been holding us all prisoners for over 250 years”. Richard isn’t proposing a spelling free-for-all: his goal is to modernise English and create a new set of standard spellings for difficult words. This, he says, would benefit the 11% of British people technically termed illiterate, and learners of English struggling with its idiosyncratic spelling. (I’m not sure, by the way, that Richard’s “Guydlines” is that much easier to suss out than “Guidelines”).

The question of spelling raises lots of issues, which merit deeper exploration in later posts. In the meantime: as a language professional, and a Virgo to boot, an issue that riles me more than spelling in itself is the way we’re failing our kids by not teaching them how to use their own language properly.

We expect them to go out into the world of work and somehow know the basic rules of good writing. But if we don’t give them the instruments to do so – a decent grounding in spelling and grammar – then that’s simply not fair.

As Kaye Adams suggested in this morning’s programme, “we should put more effort into teaching [schoolchildren who are struggling with English] properly so that they can communicate on the same level as everybody else”. There will always be kids who have difficulties or are bored with, or don’t see the relevance of, studying English. We need to find ways to spark their imaginations and open their eyes to the importance of language and their sheer luck in having such a marvellous language as English – with all its weird and wacky spelling.

By Marian Dougan