Kirk Mahoney . com

I heard one of these adjectives the other day and immediately thought of the other one.

Problem:
These two adjectives appear to be antonyms but are not antonyms in today’s usage.

Explanation:
The core definition of the adjective “helpful” is rendering or giving assistance or aid.

An example of the correct use of this adjective is “The helpful teller made all bank patrons feel good about the bank’s services.”

In other words, someone who is helpful is someone who is of service.

There are four basic definitions of the adjective “helpless”:

1. dependent or weak, as in “He is helpless without his wife.”;
2. incompetent or powerless, as in “The employee is helpless without her supervisor.”;
3. involuntary or impossible to control, as in “They suffered from helpless crying upon seeing the effects of the tornado.”;
4. unable to provide help, as in “The helpless waiters discouraged diners from returning to the restaurant.”

The fourth definition of “helpless” is obsolete, so “helpless” in today’s language is not an antonym of “helpful”.

Solution:
Remember that “helpless” can mean the opposite of “helpful” in older books but is not the antonym of “helpful” today.

I once had a job assignment to monitor customers’ calls to troubleshooting agents.

The agents had to help customers with questions and problems with a combination of communication and entertainment services.

The goals of the call monitoring were to determine how well customers were being served, to identify agents who should be coached on their techniques, and to identify possible improvements to support applications and processes.

The native language of most of the customers, all of whom were in the United States of America, was English.

Spanish, however, clearly was the native language of some customers. These customers had limited or less-than-fluent skills with English, which they spoke with their native accent — for example, from Mexico.

One of my peers had visited a call center in Wisconsin, where none of the agents spoke Spanish.

Listening to calls and watching agents in action, she observed how they handled calls from customers whose first language was Spanish.

What she learned was a bit surprising but also made sense.

The agents who established the best rapport and communication with Spanish-as-first-language customers changed their accents to those of their customers.

Some might call this patronizing — or matronizing — but it makes sense to me.

Because the callers were hearing English spoken in the way that they spoke it, they understood the agents better.

What is your favorite story about changing one’s accent? Let me know!

When I was in graduate school in Los Angeles, California, I met a young man who worked as an administrative assistant in my graduate department.

His name was Angus, and he had a Scottish accent.

I finally asked the department’s secretary about his accent, and she said that Angus was from the Valley — as in the San Fernando Valley, north of L.A.

I asked whether Angus originally was from Scotland. The response: “Oh, no. He simply decided to adopt a Scottish accent.”

And, as far as I know, he never broke his Scottish accent for what is called “Valley Talk”, which is a manner of speaking that is characteristic of those from the Valley.

That ability — to change one’s accent permanently — continues to fascinate me today.

To me, it is akin to changing one’s signature, which is difficult but can be done (I know because I did it.), or changing one’s handwriting style, which must be very difficult.

Put simply, changing one’s accent permanently must take a lot of practice, self-awareness, and effort.

What is your favorite story about changing one’s accent? Let me know!

In my opinion, one of the best ways to learn a new language is to connect it to the language(s) that you already know.

I refer to this as “making a linguistic connection”.

For example, yesterday I was discussing someone with my wife, and I realized that the best way to describe that person was to use the adjective “pensive” because one of the definitions of this adjective is expressing thoughtfulness.

Almost immediately, I recognized that the word “thought” in the definition and the letters P-E-N-S in the adjective were connected to verbs in two other languages:

• “pensar”, which in Spanish means to think;
• “pensare”, which in Italian means to think.

I could list many other linguistic connections that I have made over the past few years, but that is unnecessary here.

You can also make linguistic connections within your native language (such as English), too. You do not have to be learning another language to make them.

What linguistic connections have you made, either within English or between English and another language? Contact me!

The verb “get” is amazingly diverse in its definitions.

“You can get a ticket.” means “You can receive a ticket.”

“You get to go.” means “You are allowed to go.”

“You get up at 8 o’clock?” means “You wake up at 8 o’clock?”

“Do you get it?” means “Do you understand it?”

“Get out of my way!” means “Move out of my way!”

“Could you get that for me?” means “Could you procure and bring that for me?”

“When do you get your hair cut?” means “When do you cause your hair to become cut?”

“Get her before she reaches the prison fence!” means “Seize her before she reaches the prison fence!”

“When do you get home?” means “When do you arrive home?”

And these are only some of the definitions of the verb “get”!

I believe that this diversity is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say or write “get” than to say or write the verbs that it replaces.

From an outsider’s perspective, though, the diversity of “get” must be challenging to master.

I saw this in a message from a corporation to its employees yesterday.

Problems:
1. Two exclamation marks appear where only one should appear.
2. Common nouns are capitalized even though they should not be.
3. An apostrophe appears where it does not belong.

Explanation:
The corporate message encouraged readers to nominate others for recognition.

The full sentence was “Please be sure to recognize your Employee’s and Peers!!”

One problem with this sentence is the second exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, as if the first exclamation mark were insufficient.

Can you imagine putting two periods at the end of a sentence? That would be nonsensical, right? Putting two exclamation marks at the end of a sentence is just as nonsensical.

Unfortunately, this seems to be an increasingly common blunder in American English.

Another problem is the capitalization of the two common nouns. There is nothing special about an “employee” or a “peer” that requires capitalization in this sentence.

Unfortunately, this also seems to be an increasingly common blunder in American English, as if a huge contingency of Germans had moved to the U.S. and started to misapply the German approach to capitalization to all nouns in English.

The third problem is the most glaring. An apostrophe was inserted with the pluralization of “employee”, which is incorrect.

Solution:
“… recognize your employees and peers!”

I saw this in an Ars Technica article published today about the Nintendo DSi.

I like the creativity of “eleventy billion”.

I searched for “eleventy” (with the quotation marks) on Google, and I got about 304,000 matches.

According to Wikipedia, the word “eleventy” was coined by linguist and author J. R. R. Tolkien and refers to the number 110.

I can imagine that some non-native speakers of English must be puzzled when they see this word, but it also makes sense when one compares it to the rhyming word “seventy”.

I heard someone say “messier” the other day, and it made me wonder about the various versions of the adjective “messy”.

We can say that X is “messy”.

We can compare X to something else and say that X is “messier” than the other.

We can compare X to everything else and say that X is “messiest”.

However, there are no modifiers of the adjective “messy” when going in the other direction.

Instead, we have:

• X is “less messy” than something else.
• X is the “least messy” of them all.

I find it interesting that modifiers of adjectives in English do not have this bidirectional symmetry.

I suspect that this asymmetry must give some native speakers of other languages difficulty when they are learning English.

I was thinking about this over the last few days, so I had to review a dictionary for the definitions of the word “one”.

A definition of “one” as a pronoun is an indefinite person of a kind understood by the context.

British English says that the pronoun “one” can replace the singular pronoun “I”, but American English extends this to replacing the singular pronoun “you” as well as the singular pronouns “he”, “she”, or “it”.

For example:

1. “Mum was acting strangely, and one should have noticed it.” can mean “Mum was acting strangely, and I should have noticed it.”
2. “It was as delicious as one would expect.” can mean “It was as delicious as you would expect.”
3. “After the husband and wife had driven the Ferrari, each said that it was as fast as one could desire.” can mean “After the husband and wife had driven the Ferrari, each said that it was as fast as he or she could desire.”

There you have it — a pronoun that can be a first-person pronoun, a second-person pronoun, or a third-person pronoun. No wonder English can be so difficult to learn as a second language!

This post is not about a problem, explanation, and solution.

Instead, it’s about an interesting word whose use is designated as Chiefly Southern Louisiana and Southeast Texas.

I first saw this word when I moved to Houston, Texas. It was on the sign of a popular restaurant and was written with an apostrophe and ’s’ as “Lagniappe’s”.

I don’t know whether this apostrophe-’s’ form on the sign was meant to be a possessive or was supposed to be a plural noun but was a blunder by a sign maker who is part of the crowd of sign makers who insert apostrophes where they don’t belong.

Leaving aside the possessive-apostrophe/plural issue and focusing on the singular noun, a “lagniappe” is something that is added to a purchase as a gift by a merchant, to say “Thank you!” for doing business with the merchant.

A commercial, mass-marketing version of a “lagniappe” could be a cosmetics bag given with a purchase of Lancôme perfume. However, the noun “lagniappe” is traditionally reserved for what an individual merchant adds, such as a small bag of fertilizer when the customer buys several flower bulbs.

The noun originally was “yapa” — Quechuan for that which is added.

Spanish speakers in Mexico turned this into “la ñapa”.

I don’t know where the French speakers from Louisiana first heard “la ñapa” and converted it into the French spelling — “lagniappe” — for the same pronunciation.

But I imagine that the greater Houston area could have been that location, given its mingling of people from Mexico and people from New Orleans and other French-speaking parts of southern Louisiana.

So there you have it: an American English word tied to Houston at the intersection of Spanish and French speakers.