I don’t think it’s that interesting that ‘w00t’ was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. After all, it was an internet poll, and you know how those things can get freeped. And I thought their putative etymology (We owned the other team) sounded hell dubious.

No, what I liked was that Pecksniffian is an actual word with no sexual connotations whatever. I’m going to be working that one into a conversation near me.

If you want words of the year, leave it to the pros at the American Dialect Society. They’ll be meeting in January to settle the matter so we can all palliate our logovoric proclivities.

The U.S. Census Bureau has just released some data from the 2000 Census: Most frequently occurring surnames.

‘Midgley’ is ranked at 18,854, somewhere between ‘Commander’ and ‘Dummer’. That’s down from 17,653 ten years ago — falling more than a thousand points! So there aren’t a lot of us. But at least when I google my name, almost all the hits are me.

A related article from the New York Times observes that Vargas is the new Thompson.

Census data isn’t just interesting; it’s useful for language researchers. For example, I use it to plow through dialogue corpora to find first and last names, and change them all into ‘#firstname’ and ‘#lastname’. That way, my classifier can find (for example) introduction sequences more easily because it’s not trying to look for a hundred different names.

Here’s the story: Boy has brain surgery, and comes out with a posh London accent instead of his unlistenable Northern accent.

“We noticed that he had started to elongate his vowels in words like ‘bath’ which he never did before,” said Mrs McCartney-Moore, 45, a music teacher from York.

“He no longer has short vowel sounds – they are all long. It’s bizarre.”

This is reminding me of Foreign Accent Syndrome, where someone will have (say) a stroke and come out with a new accent. Here’s the current explanation for FAS:

Now researchers at Oxford University have found that patients with “foreign accent syndrome” seem to share certain characteristics which might explain the problem.

A small number of them all had tiny areas of damage in various parts of the brain.

This might explain the combination of subtle changes to vocal features such as lengthening of syllables, altered pitch or mispronounced sounds which make a patient’s pronunciation sound similar to a foreign accent.

But for this case, the surgeon has a slightly different idea: the patient had to relearn his accent after the operation, and did so according to the people around him.

Brain surgeon Paul Eldridge, who works at the specialist Walton Neurological Centre, Liverpool, said it was possible that the infection and abscess had affected the area of the brain which controls language skills, forcing William to learn how to speak again.

“It’s as if he’s re-learnt how to talk from listening to language from sources different to those that prompted his speech first time around.”

The key here is: is he really speaking with an upper-class accent (which could have been learned from someone else), or is it just the elongated vowels that makes people think he’s talking with an upper-class accent? How long does it take to acquire an accent, anyway?

I used to be a language maven before I reformed and became a linguist. Now I don’t care what anyone does, I’ll just document it. But I used to decry the incorrect usage of others.

For example, the word ‘orientate’. I used to hate it! Just say ‘orient’! You don’t need to ‘orientate’ yourself! Just orient yourself.

But now trawling through the language archives, I’ve found that some people used to do the same thing to ‘jeopardise’.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp.570f.:

jeopardize. Richard Grant White called jeopardize “a foolish and intolerable word” in 1879, and he was not the only one who thought so. A popular view among American critics in the 19th century was that the proper verb was jeopard, an older word which, according to the OED, had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1600s.

No one complains about ‘jeopardise’ anymore. And this is how it goes in language change. Would you jeopard the future of ‘orientate’? Me neither.