Author: Kirk

“… not affluent in that language …”

Foreign Languages, Outsider's Perspective

I heard this the other day while watching an instructional video.

Problem:
The speaker used the wrong adjective.

Explanation:
The instructional video was about Keyword Elite, a tool for generating keywords and optimizing the placement of advertisements on search engines.

I believe that the narrator of the video is Brad Callen, a genius when it comes to Internet marketing.

Brad was discussing how a non-native-English speaker very easily can misspell a keyword when searching for something.

He then picked on himself and said that he likely would misspell a keyword, too, if he were “not affluent in that language”.

I strongly suspect that Brad’s use of the adjective “affluent” where the adjective “fluent” was required was simply a slip of the tongue.

So I am not picking on Brad, who seems to be a native speaker of American English or perhaps Canadian English. I could not quite pinpoint the accent.

Instead, I believe that his gaffe teaches us two lessons:

  1. It teaches us to lighten up when it comes to language mistakes. Anyone can make them — even geniuses. And you have to admit that being “affluent in that language” is a humorous phrase!
  2. It teaches us to have patience with non-native speakers of our language. After all, if someone as smart as Brad can slip up with his own language, then imagine how easy it is for a non-native speaker to use the wrong word.

Solution:
“… not fluent in that language …”

“chilblain”

Nouns

My wife mentioned this a week ago to friends at dinner.

She asked our friends, who are from Texas, whether they had ever heard the word.

They said that they had not.

I was sure that I had heard the word. I cannot say whether I first heard it from her, but I probably did.

She said that she learned the noun when she lived in England.

I like the sound of the word, so I had to learn more about it.

The word dates back to the mid-1500s, is usually pluralized, and means an inflammation of the feet and hands due to exposure to moisture and cold.

My wife told us that it was a very common condition in England, where it is often cold and damp, and that the condition is extremely painful.

This noun comes from the combination of the noun “chill” and the noun “blain”.

The word “blain” — which confuses the spelling checker that I am using while I type this — comes from the Old English word blegen, which apparently originated before the year 1000. Now THAT is old!

The noun “blain” means an inflammatory sore or swelling, which makes it easy to remember what a “chilblain” is.

My wife remembers chilblains as the pain and blistering caused by rewarming oneself too quickly in front of a fire after being out in the cold and dampness of London, which describes the condition well.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “Tissue damage is less severe with chilblains than with frostbite, where the skin is actually frozen. Red, itching papules and patches of eroded tissue appear on the skin, which is cold and clammy to the touch; severe chilblains may blister and swell. The condition is aggravated by warmth, and sudden rewarming is not recommended. The preferred treatment is to elevate the affected part and allow it to warm gradually at room temperature.”

It is much more common in the U.S. to hear about frostbite than to hear about chilblains.

But now that you know — or have been reminded — about chilblains, consider yourself warned about them, too!

Happy thawing!

“where we’re at”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Prepositions

I hear this a lot, often from supposedly educated people.

Problem:
The preposition should not appear in this expression.

Explanation:
The full sentence goes something along the lines of “Let’s see where we’re at in this project.”

Whoever says or writes “where we’re at” is making the common English blunder of applying “where at” — a mistaken way to use “where” — to a location (physical or virtual).

I believe that this expression when spoken is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say “where we’re at” than to say “where we are”.

Try saying each expression. You will hear and feel what I mean. The words “we’re” and “at” blur together in speech to become a one-and-a-half-syllable “whurrat”. In contrast, the words “we” and “are” must be spoken distinctly.

Given a choice, most speakers will choose 1.5 syllables over two syllables almost any day, especially in informal speech.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “where we are” — 17,400,000 matches
  • “where we’re at” — 479,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “where we are” versus the incorrect “where we’re at” by a ratio of 36.3-to-1, which is good but not wonderful, especially considering nearly half of a million instances of the incorrect expression.

Solution:
“where we are”