International English: Going beyond U.K. and U.S. English

Guest post by Rosevita Warda

“The status of English as an international language is long established and, for the foreseeable future, unlikely to be greatly challenged. However, I believe that to make it genuinely international, then one step in that direction could be to consider the influence of non-native speakers in a different light.

“Generally, their non-occurrent uses are labeled errors and they are encouraged to change to conform to the standard English model, even though many native speakers don’t. I’ve heard the question ‘what means’ so many times now that I have decided to accept it as correct without question. I also can’t feel too strongly about ‘depends of’ being used by so many European and other speakers.

“Allowing a greater influence from outside will probably annoy the pedants, but it would be much more of an international language if it were able to absorb more such forms and allow them to coexist alongside the forms preferred by native speakers.”

— International English: Interesting blog post by Richard Flynn of UsingEnglish.com fame

International English Is Our Reality

As the creators of the first multimedia learners’ dictionary committed to International English, we’re delighted to hear more and more people vote in favor of acknowledging International English. English has never been a restrictive or exclusive language, which is the very reason why it became the language media of choice for the people of this world.

Today, there are more Indian, Pakistani, Filipino or Nigerian English speakers than those living in the U.K. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population). Many of them are not native speakers, but contribute to the largest population of English speakers: Those who learn English as a foreign language. People who speak English as their non-native language are by far the largest English-speaking group today (http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-faq-the-english-language.htm).

Limiting the English language with traditional labels and doctrines and focusing on U.K. vs. U.S. English exclusively creates dissonance with this reality. We live in a world where English is growing into a colorful family of English variants. Since it’s the first time in history that a language spreads across the globe in such a powerful fashion and at such speed, change in our attitudes and how we perceive this language is inevitable.

Rules imposed by local traditions or doctrines broadcast from ivory towers will soon fade, and they already do.

Is International English a sign of a decline of the English language? Only, we believe, if your definition of English is narrow and retrospect.

Being the global language of choice is a compliment to the English language. It has always been a language that embraces new ideas and terminology. Instead of seeing this as a threat, it’s time to cherish International English for its colors, nuances, and flavors, and to acknowledge that language is alive. Language is in its essence shaped and advanced by the people who communicate in it.

About the Author

Rosevita Warda is president of LearnThat Foundation and manages www.LearnThatWord.org, a free online vocabulary and spelling coaching solution. Get 10 percent off premium features by entering “grammarly” into the “How did you hear about us” field.

Join Vocabulary Junction, LearnThat Foundation’s literacy campaign, by following updates on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.

A Grammar Lesson: Direct and Indirect Objects

An object is the part of a sentence that gives meaning to the subject’s action of the verb. For example: Alice caught the baseball. Subject=Alice Verb=caught Object=baseball

A direct object answers the question of who(m) or what. In the sentence above, you could determine that ‘baseball’ is a direct object by asking the question: What did Alice catch? She caught the baseball. Baseball is the direct object.

An indirect object answers the question of to whom, for whom, or for what. For example: Max pitched Alice the baseball.

Max (subject) pitched (verb) the baseball (direct object) to whom? He pitched it to Alice. Alice is the indirect object.

To learn more about sentence structure, read this blog post about verb tenses.

Grammarly is nominated for the Crunchies Awards. Click here to vote for Grammarly!

5 Books for Understanding Women’s History

Close your eyes. Can you picture the significant women in your life? The images of women whom you interacted with during your lifetime are vivid, but what about those who lived in generations past? Even when no physical traces survive, we can still envision them. How so? Notice how Emily Dickinson gave a glimpse of her physical appearance: “I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves – Would this do just as well?” Can you see her in her words? Words can reveal much about the women who lived before you. Here are five books that will allow you to look back in time.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan conducted a survey of her college classmates for a class reunion. She found that many felt dissatisfied with their careers, or lack thereof, after graduation. Moving beyond her classmates, she discovered that many women experienced discrimination based on their sex. She tried to publish her findings, but it seemed no magazine was interested in what she had to say. In the early 1960s, she compiled her research into a nonfiction book—The Feminine Mystique. History credits this book as an accelerant of the women’s movement.

African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction by Ana Nunes

How were African American women affected by historical developments? Unfortunately, textbooks haven’t always recorded the minority perspective. This volume explores history through fiction written by women during the last forty years of the twentieth century. The introduction quotes Ralph Ellison: African American culture is “expressed in a body of folklore, in the musical forms of the spirituals, the blues and jazz; . . . a cuisine; a body of dance forms.” Historical fiction can introduce you to characters who won’t appear in a history textbook—the ordinary people who lived in extraordinary times.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

How would it be to grow up in New England during the Civil War? This book offers a portrait, not of one woman, but of several sisters with distinct personalities. There is Meg, the eldest girl, nostalgic for the wealth and luxury of the old country. There’s also Jo, the tomboy, who wanted to follow her father into battle rather than fulfill the traditional roles of a lady of her time. Beth is sickly but emotionally strong. Her sweet nature bonds the family together. Amy is the youngest and the most ambitious. She wants to improve her station in life, so she journeys to Europe to find her destiny. Other strong characters, Marmee and Aunt March, reveal even more about this tumultuous period in history.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

This fictional account chronicles the life of one girl who becomes a geisha in Japan on the eve of World War II. Geishas were young women trained to entertain and please men. Chiyo, later called Sayuri, learns to play instruments, dance, and perform tea ceremonies. When she is older, she faces the mizuage ceremony, where the highest bidder wins her virginity. This book will take you into a secret world where you will learn that sometimes you must choose the lesser of two evils.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Do you remember with fondness the house where you grew up? Young latina Esperanza Cordero feels a connection to her home, family, and community. At the same time, she longs to leave her impoverished Chicago neighborhood. As did other women throughout the centuries, she faced a choice. Should she endure her circumstances or should she break free to try to find a better life?

After you read a page or two of one of these books, meditate on the descriptions the author provides. Think beyond how the characters dressed or how they talked. Think of their emotions and attitudes in the face of changing times. The books can’t take you back in time, but they can paint a vivid picture of how life was for women during different phases of history. And as Emily once asked, “Would this do just as well?”

Funner vs. More Fun

• As a noun, fun means enjoyment.
• Fun is not universally accepted as an adjective. People who do accept it as an adjective seem to prefer more fun and most fun over funner and funnest.

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Whether fun or more fun is correct seems like a simple question, but the answer isn’t exactly straightforward. To understand, you must examine the background of the word fun. Let’s get started.

Fun, the Noun

Fun is enjoyment, or something that provides amusement. If you have fun in a greater quantity, you have more fun. Some people say that fun can function only as a noun. Before we address that issue, let’s look at some examples of fun as a noun.

She has the most fun when she is dancing.

He had more fun dancing than he anticipated.

Fun, the Adjective

As early as the 1900s, people were using fun as an adjective in speech and informal writing. People use it to describe things or people relating to fun. Sometimes, it describes things that are whimsical. Many people, perhaps most people, strongly prefer more fun and most fun as the comparative and superlative forms of fun. Still, plenty of others label things funner and funnest. Many dictionaries acknowledge this use, but still label the adjective form as informal. Here are some examples of fun used as an adjective.

Morris is a fun guy.

Keith is more fun than Bjorn.

Keith is funner than Bjorn.

Gregory is the most fun man I ever met.

Gregory is the funnest man I ever met.

If you’re not sure which way to go, remember that more fun and most fun will raise fewer eyebrows than funner and funnest.

Examples

For Ben Mendelsohn, playing a villain on-screen in the new Star Wars film was a career highlight. “They’re pretty fun,” the actor said today on ‘GMA.’ “Bad guys have more fun.”

ABC News

“Scheduling a fun event for your leisure time ruins it, removing the enjoyment from the activity as surely as if you had to be at the office instead,” says Sorrel, citing research by Ohio State University professor Selin Malkoc.

Successful Meetings

“If you have a guy wide open, he has to get the ball. It builds guys’ confidence, it makes the game funner. If we’re not playing the right way, it’s frustrating.”

NBA.COM

It takes an entire community and a whole state to make this all turn into one of the funnest events of the year,” said Jim Balamaci, the president and CEO of Special Olympics Alaska.

KTVA.com

If you think fun belongs only in the noun category, then “more fun” is the only choice for you. Do you accept fun as an adjective? If you do, you can also embrace funner and funnest in informal writing. If enough people do so, it will probably become accepted as standard before long. Speaking of fun, why not learn whether you are using some other English expressions correctly?

“What’s Wite-Out?” And Other Products You’ll Have to Explain to Your Kids

By Laura Wallis for The Stir by CafeMom

What’s Wite-Out?

And other things your kids will ask to make you feel old

A friend recently mentioned that her child, upon picking up a landline phone, asked, “Mom, what is that sound?” It was a dial tone. The speed at which technology is advancing means that many once-basic details of everyday life are quickly going the way of the dinosaur. Here are just a few examples of things you probably grew up with, but for better or worse, your kids may never know about.

Wite-Out: What? You paint over typos? Why not just backspace?

Carbon paper: Our kids will cc plenty of people on email in their time, but real carbon copies—once the only way to make a second copy of a document you were working on—are ancient history. (Outside of our checkbooks. Wait…what’s a checkbook?)

Two spaces after a period: If you took a high school typing class in the ’80s, maybe even the ’90s, this was probably drilled into your head. Turns out, it was a relic even then of a time when typeset letters were all spaced the same distance apart and that extra space after a period was a necessary visual break between sentences. Modern typography fixed that problem long ago, and those two spaces now just look awkward and annoy editors everywhere. Your kids won’t do it. You should stop.

Paper maps: When we were kids, road trips usually meant one parent driving and the other navigating, with a huge map unfolded in his or her lap. It was a recipe for carsickness and occasionally getting lost and stopping at gas stations for directions, but it also made for some fun opportunities for exploration. Today, GPS and Google Maps and Waze have done away with all of that.

TV without a “pause” button: Remember running to the bathroom or to grab a snack during the commercial break? For kids today, their shows wait for them.

Fax machines: Outside of the occasional doctor’s office that still, inexplicably, wants documents faxed, this tech is a thing of the past. And good riddance! Faxes don’t do anything that emails and PDF documents can’t do (and without the awful sound).

Floppy disks: Like cassettes and VHS tapes, these once-essential data storage devices are mostly just hunks of useless plastic now. They might still contain information, but no one has the machines to access it anymore! Even CDs are starting to fall by the wayside, but at least they’re pretty—I recently saw a local preschool class making Christmas tree ornaments out of them.

Laura Wallis is a freelance writer and editor specializing in all things family, home, food, and health. She currently lives in New Jersey with her husband, two children, and dog—none of whom take grammar as seriously as they should. She writes for The Stir by CafeMom.

Two-minute Grammar: The Bare-bones Basics of Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives are descriptive words that modify (describe) nouns (persons, places, things, or ideas). They often tell you how many, which, and what kind. For example:

“He baked a delicious, beautiful cake.” (What kind of cake is it? It is delicious and beautiful.) “Nine members of our group signed up for the yoga class.” (How many members signed up? Nine.) “Hand me the broken radio so I can try to fix it.” (Which radio? The broken one.)

Adverbs are descriptive words that mostly modify verbs but can also modify adjectives and other adverbs. Adverbs most often tell you how, but they can also tell you where or when. Adverbs often end in -ly. For example:

“She walked slowly through the parking lot.” (How did she walk? She walked slowly.) “Lately, I have felt like I need to make a change.” (When have I been feeling this? Lately.) “I’m happy to go anywhere for lunch.” (Where can I go? Anywhere.)

There are several adverbs that do not follow the regular -ly formation. The most common of these include: well, late, and straight.  Similarly there are other irregular adverbs that have evolved from adjectives. These are considered less correct, so be careful using them in formal situations. These include: fast/slow (increasingly used instead of quickly and slowly), hard (increasingly used instead of forcibly or powerfully), wrong (increasingly used instead of incorrectly).

 

Essential History and Guide for Modern Acronym Use (Part 2 of 2)

Guest post from Scott Yates

Abbreviations and acronyms have embedded themselves in English as somewhat of an auxiliary language. If you thought Latin was a dead language, it isn’t. It lives somewhat zombie-like in some very common abbreviations like, e.g., i.e., etc.

(Notice how the “etc.” in that last sentence did double-duty there? No extra charge for that. ��

(Same goes for the double-duty parenthesis at the end of the last parenthetical winky-face.)

You could, if you like, read this list of Latin Abbreviations. Perhaps the next time someone quotes your writing and inserts “(sic),” you’ll be less confused, and definitely not flattered.

Then there are acronyms turned into words formed from the first letters of a multi-word name. (Remember “M.A.S.H.”?) When an acronym is widely used, it often becomes a word itself, and we forget its original meaning. You can look these up, but the laser, scuba and countless others, are actually acronyms formed from the first letters of word phrases. (If you’re into the more obscure military acronyms, check out the meaning of FUBAR — and its suffix BUNDY — as well as the somewhat surly FIGMO.)

The New York Times differs from the AP and others in turning acronymous words into words that are lower case, so U.S. Navy SEALs become “Seals.” Why? Because the Times says so. No other journalistic organization has hopped on that bandwagon.

In journalism it’s usually easier to spell out an abbreviation in the first paragraph of a piece and then sprinkle it with generic references like “that agency,” or “the association.”

Likewise, the Chicago Style Manual encourages students and teachers to “use abbreviations sparingly in text because they can make your writing seem either too informal or too technical.”

In blogging, too informal could also include current texting abbreviations like OMG, BRB, LOL, ROFLMAO, each of which should be taken out and shot. IMHO, anyway.

As regards the too technical caveat, there are clients out there who want their blogs laced with the heady brew of technology’s exciting acronyms and cliquish abbreviations. It floats their boat, and they’re willing to pay the freight, so I tell my writers to give them what they want.

Then there’s the common practice described in Albert Joseph’s Put It In Writing! (p.193):

“Always spell out the full term the first time it appears in any piece of writing, then follow it immediately by the acronym in parentheses, almost as if saying “…hereinafter referred to as…”

With due respect to Mr. Albert, I would disagree with his use of the adverb “always” and replace it with “never.” Should bloggers say, for example, “The National Football League (NFL) is…”?

No.

Instead, I think we should declare a Grammarly-BlogMutt Acronym Rule that a writer never follows a name with an acronym in parenthesis. According to this new rule, writers should spell out anything that needs it, and then just use an acronym in following references, but only if that acronym will be completely clear to every potential reader of what is written.

That’s the rub, however. For some readers, the NFL refers to the National Forensic League, which is an organization that arranges debating contests. (Maybe we can get them to organize a debate between those who would force us to make acronyms parenthetical, and those enlightened writers who follow the Grammarly-BlogMutt Acronym Rule.)

So, at the end of it all, what’s the rule for acronyms in modern usage? It’s the same rule that should be in the front of any writer’s mind before fingers get close to a keyboard: Consider the reader.

If you are quite sure that every single reader of what you are writing will be totally familiar with an acronym, then use it. But because so much of what we write today goes online, we don’t really know that much about the reader. What if it’s someone who is not a native speaker of the language? What if it’s someone new to an industry?

With those things in mind, we suggest that you just AAA — Avoid All Acronyms.

Missed Part 1 of this two-part series? Check it out here.

About the Author

Scott Yates was a writer for 20 years before he started a company where anyone can hire a blogger: BlogMutt. He had help in writing this post from one of the more than 3,000 active writers who have earned BlogMutt writing privileges.