Nathaniel Handy

Writer

Natural blonde, 6’0”, surprisingly intelligent, winning smile, GSOH (why fly in the face of public opinion?)

Currently writing propaganda, journalism, novels, screenplays and old fashioned letters. Hell, I might even try poetry

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language

  • AI stole my em dash

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    I don’t mean to be bitter or anything, but up until a few years ago, the em dash was my secret weapon. Now everything’s changed. Like a magician who blows up the Magic Circle, AI has taken to copywriting like an iconoclast without shame.

    No one taught us to use em dashes in school. I went through an entire education, including university, writing essays that never had a whiff of an em dash. That just wasn’t how you wrote. You used commas, dammit.

    So fresh and so clean

    The em dash was, before the advent of AI, the special preserve of the copywriter. Since ordinary people were never taught, and wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to use an em dash in their writing, it was the writer’s magic trick.

    “Wow”, they would say, “you’re copy is so punchy. So immediate. We can really feel the energy here.” Yes, I am using other tricks right here, in this sentence, that are slightly less obvious, but AI is intent on blowing the whole game.

    Now that a solid career built on the edifice of the em dash is being torn up by the Large Language Models’ insistence on using it willy-nilly, to the extent that AI speak and the em dash are now synonymous, the humanoid has to rethink its strategy.

    Desperate times call for the en dash

    If we are all iconoclasts now, then it’s time to play dirty. Dashes are obviously a more immediate and engaged way to write than the comma, the colon or, god forbid, the semi-colon. The solution is to get experimental.

    What I always liked about the em dash was that it also hinted that you were more aesthetically minded than the average writer. It looks good on the page. Alas, such subtle shorthand for creative brilliance is gone forever.

    I have for some time begun employing the en dash as my new em dash. Sure, it’s a corruption, but it performs the same function, and it doesn’t look AI since AI hasn’t thought of it ye…… oh damn.

    Want more words – try out my blog on the history of zeds and zees

  • Zeds and zees

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    Photo by Zyanya BMO

    English and American English have their differences. Tomato, tomato. Sidewalk, pavement. Trunk, boot. Thank God they managed to keep the alphabet the same. Almost.

    They must have been kicking themselves when they managed a perfect match, only to come unstuck not on the last letter, but the last sound in the last letter.

    It’s a telling example of the importance of paying attention right the way to the end of something, even when you think you already know the answer. How America must be kicking itself now. 

    Because for all the perfect alignment of the previous 25 letters, when they were delivering ‘Z’ it’s like they went to sleep on the job.

    Zzzzeeeeeeeeeee

    As we all know, it’s zed, not zee. So, what went wrong, America? Let’s find out. 

    It turns out there weren’t simply two options in the running. As with all the best stories, there was a rogue third element, and its name was izzard.

    That’s right, go back into the yokel dialects of England (and apparently to some far-flung corners of Wyoming or Idaho in more recent times) and you may have heard the final letter of the alphabet pronounced ‘izzard’.

    That clears up the derivation of stalwart UK comedian Eddie Izzard’s surname, but it doesn’t untangle the zeds versus zees debate any further.

    Zed’s long lineage

    We have to go back to the Phoenicians for the semitic letter ‘zayin’, which was later borrowed by the Greeks for their letter ‘zeta’. The link between ‘zeta’ and ‘zed’ is immediately obvious.

    But it wasn’t that simple. Zed came to the English via the Romans. But wait! Latin had no zed in its alphabet, just as it had no zero in its number system (another story, for another post).

    Nevertheless, the Romans borrowed ‘Z’ and applied it to their ‘ts’ and ‘dz’ sounds. The ‘dz’ sound being the derivation of the French ‘j’ that came to English before the zed did. Most European languages take their word for the letter ‘Z’ from the Greek root ‘zeta’.

    And finally, we meander back to 19th century America, where dictionaries began cementing ‘zee’ as the preferred option over ‘zed’, apparently as an alignment of the pronunciation with other letters, such as ‘bee’, ‘cee’, ‘dee’, ‘ee’, ‘pee’ and ‘tee’. As with so many American linguistic treasure hunts, it all comes down to simplicity in the end.  

    More treasure hunts? How about all the Swedish words in English?

  • Pardon my Swedish!

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    Globe with European countries named in Swedish
    (Photo by Calvin Hanson)

    Whenever I heard my grandmother – who was from the North of England – say something was ‘dear’ (i.e. expensive), I assumed nothing could be more English than this classic colloquial word. 

    Then I was on Blocket – a Swedish eBay – and it had a little indicator on each sale item, telling you if Blocket thought the item’s sale price was expensive (or ‘dyr’ in Swedish). Hang on, I thought… dyr? 

    So, it turns out the English of the Danelaw regions have never stopped saying ‘dyr’. You can bring in your Latin expens, but when it comes to the price of bread, we’ll keep our own words, thank you very much!

    How come?

    Here’s another English colloquialism. Rather than asking ‘Why is that?’ we often ask ‘How come?’ What could be more English? Well, then I saw this sentence in my last Swedish class: Hur kommer det sig att en boxare inte får lov att tävla med skägg? (How come a boxer is not allowed to compete with a beard?) Hur kommer? How come?

    The more you look, the more you see. ‘Hoppa’ means ‘jump’. ‘Springa’ means ‘run’. ‘Pratar’ means talk, or prattle, as we sometimes say. ‘Barn’ means child, as any Geordie or Scot could tell you. And ‘kvinna’ – which sounds very like ‘queen’ – means ‘woman’. 

    English is a mongrel language

    It may have stalked the globe, but we all know English is a mishmash of Nordic, Germanic and French, with a solid spicing of other lingos from around the world. Living in Sweden, the debt to the Norse tongue is obvious. 

    Loads of Swedish words sound very like English equivalents. Even when it looks strange written down, when spoken the link often becomes clear. 

    When you see ‘Näste station’ on the screen in trains, you can make an educated guess that ‘näste’ must mean ‘next’, but when you hear the conductor pronounce it, it becomes basically the same word. 

    Language is always being made and unmade, as my son showed me with Lost and Found Words

  • Lost and Found Words

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    The Lost Words A Spell Book by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris

    This Christmas, I read my 3-year-old son The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris — a ‘spell book’ of poems and illustrations with the neat hook of celebrating nature words that have vanished from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in recent years. 

    Unprompted, he simply started naming the birds whose names he didn’t know. Here’s the result…

    Camilo’s new words

    • Canderlop — Heron
    • Gaiun — Raven
    • Kindercorn — Buzzard
    • Cheep — Wood Pigeon
    • Arandadoe — Sparrow
    • Lockantanj — Lark

    (The kingfisher and the magpie, which he already recognises, he simply called by their known names. Making up a name would be stupid, obviously.) 

    Living language

    The Lost Words has gone as viral as a large illustrated hardback can. It has spawned campaigns to get a copy into every primary school in Scotland, Herefordshire and no doubt elsewhere by now. It has touched a nerve. 

    The book makes the point that such things as the kingfisher or the dandelion have had other names that have fallen out of use. Kingfishers have been known as halcyon, evening angler and rainbow bird; dandelions as lion’s tooth, windblow and milkwitch.

    They also make up new names: colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker and river’s quiver for the kingfisher. Bane of lawn perfectionists, fallen star of the football pitch and scatterseed for dandelion.

    I expected The Lost Words to teach my son natural words we are losing. Instead, it led to him creating brand new words for birds he had never seen before. It turns out we’ll never stop speaking. It’s what we see that shapes our language.