Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.
Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊
This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary
teacher they had.
His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”
Back when I was a student in Aberystwyth, I used to receive a lot of bilingual emails from the University and its departments1.
I was reminded of this when I received an email this week from CACert, delivered in both English and German.
Simply putting one language after the other isn’t terribly exciting. Although to be fair, the content of this email wasn’t terribly exciting either.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were some kind of standard for multilingual emails? Your email client or device would maintain an “order of preference” of the languages that you
speak, and you’d automatically be shown the content in those languages, starting with the one you’re most-fluent in and working down.
It turns out that this is a (theoretically) solved problem. RFC8255 defines a mechanism for breaking an email into multiple
different languages in a way that a machine can understand and that ought to be backwards-compatible (so people whose email software doesn’t support it yet can still “get by”).
Here’s how it works:
You add a Content-Type: multipart/multilingual header with a defined boundary marker, just like you would for any other email with multiple “parts” (e.g. with a HTML
and a plain text version, or with text content and an attachment).
The first section is just a text/plain (or similar) part, containing e.g. some text to explain that this is a multilingual email, and if you’re seeing this
then your email client probably doesn’t support them, but you should just be able to scroll down (or else look at the attachments) to find content in the language you read.
Subsequent sections have:
Content-Disposition: inline, so that for most people using non-compliant email software they can just scroll down until they find a language they can read,
Content-Type: message/rfc822, so that an entire message can be embedded (which allows other headers, like the Subject:, to be translated too),
a Content-Language: header, specifying the ISO code of the language represented in that section, and
optionally, a Content-Translation-Type: header, specifying either original (this is the original text), human (this was translated by a
human), or automated (this was the result of machine translation) – this could be used to let a user say e.g. that they’d prefer a human translation to an automated
one, given the choice between two second languages.
Let’s see a sample email:
Content-Type: multipart/multilingual;
boundary=10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
To: <b24571@danq.me>
From: <rfc8255test-noreply@danq.link>
Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255?
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:06:56 +0000
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
This is a multipart message in multiple languages. Each part says the
same thing but in a different language. If your email client supports
RFC8255, you will see this message in your preferred language out of
those available. Otherwise, you will probably see each language after
one another or else each language in a separate attachment.
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Language: en
Content-Translation-Type: original
Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0
RFC8255 is a standard for sending email in multiple languages. This
is the original email in English. It is embedded alongside the same
content in a number of other languages.
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Language: fr
Content-Translation-Type: automated
Subject: Votre client de messagerie prend-il en charge la norme RFC8255?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0
RFC8255 est une norme permettant d'envoyer des courriers
électroniques dans plusieurs langues. Le présent est le courriel
traduit en français. Il est intégré à côté du même contenu contenu
dans un certain nombre d'autres langues.
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664--
Why not copy-paste this into a raw email and see how your favourite email client handles it! That’ll be fun, right?
Can I use it?
That proposed standard turns seven years old next month. Sooo… can we start using it?4
Turns out… not so much. I discovered that NeoMutt supports it:
NeoMutt’s implementation is basic, but it works: you can specify a preference order for languages and it respects it, and if you don’t then it shows all of the languages as a series
of attachments. It can apparently even be used to author compliant multilingual emails, although I didn’t get around to trying that.
Support in other clients is… variable.
A reasonable number of them don’t understand the multilingual directives but still show the email in a way that doesn’t suck:
Mozilla Thunderbird does a respectable job of showing each language’s subject and content, one after another.
Some shoot for the stars but blow up on the launch pad:
GMail displays all the content, but it pretends that the alternate versions are forwarded messages and adds a stack of meaningless blank headers to each. And then offers to
translate the result for you, even though the content is already right there in English.
Others still seem to be actively trying to make life harder for you:
ProtonMail’s Web interface shows only the fallback content, putting the remainder into .eml attachments… which is then won’t display, forcing you to download them and
find some other email client to look at them in!5
And still others just shit the bed at the idea that you might read an email like this one:
Outlook 365 does appallingly badly, showing the subject in the title bar, then the words “(No subject)”, then the message “This message might have been removed or deleted”. Just
great.
That’s just the clients I’ve tested, but I can’t imagine that others are much different. If you give it a go yourself with something I’ve not tried, then let me know!
I guess this means that standardised multilingual emails might be forever resigned to the “nice to have but it never took off so we went in a different direction” corner of the
Internet, along with the <keygen> HTML element and the concept of privacy.
Footnotes
1 I didn’t receive quite as much bilingual email as you might expect, given that the
University committed to delivering most of its correspondence in both English and Welsh. But I received a lot more than I do nowadays, for example
2 Although you might not guess it, given how many websites completely ignore your
Accept-Language header, even where it’s provided, and simply try to “guess” what language you want using IP geolocation or something, and then require that you find
whatever shitty bit of UI they’ve hidden their language selector behind if you want to change it, storing the result in a cookie so it inevitably gets lost and has to be set again the
next time you visit.
3 I suppose that if you were sending HTML emails then you might use the lang="..." attribute to mark up different parts of the message as being in different
languages. But that doesn’t solve all of the problems, and introduces a couple of fresh ones.
4 If it were a cool new CSS feature, you can guarantee that it’d be supported by every
major browser (except probably Safari) by now. But email doesn’t get so much love as the Web, sadly.
5 Worse yet, if you’re using ProtonMail with a third-party client, ProtonMail screws up
RFC8255 emails so badly that they don’t even work properly in e.g. NeoMutt any more! ProtonMail swaps the multipart/multilingual content type for
multipart/mixed and strips the Content-Language: headers, making the entire email objectively less-useful.
Note that there are differences in how they are described in some cases:
“grinning face” is also “beaming face”
“beaming face” is also a “smiling face”
“open mouth” is described by JAWS/Narrator but not by NVDA/VoiceOver
“big eyes” are described by NVDA/VoiceOver but not by JAWS/Narrator
“cold sweat” is “sweat” and also “sweat drop”
…
The differences don’t matter to me (but I am just one and not the intended consumer), as I usually experience just the symbol. Reading the text descriptions is useful though as
quite often I have no idea what the symbols are meant to represent. It is also true that emoji’s take on different meanings in different contexts and to different people. For
example I thought 🤙 meant “no worries” but its description is “call me hand”, what do I know 🤷
What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are
that when people use them for their figurative meaning, there’s a chance that they have a different interpretation than others (this is, of course, a risk with any communication,
although the effect is perhaps more-pronounced when abbreviating1),
and
when people use them for the literal image they show, it can appear differently: consider the inevitable confusion that arises from the fact that Twitter earlier this year
changed the “gun” emoji, which everybody changed to look like a water pistol
to the extent that the Emoji Consortium changed its official description, which is likely to be used by screen readers, to “water pistol”, back to looking like a firearm. 🤦
But the thing Steve’s post really left me thinking about was a moment from Season 13, Episode 1 of Would I Lie To
You? (still available on iPlayer!), during which blind comedian Chris McCausland described how the screen reader on his phone processes emoji:
My phone talks, so it reads everything out. And just to give you an insight, even the emojis… if you use an emoji it tells you what the emoji is… and the smiley face – the main
smiley face – specifically for blind people… that one is called “smiling face with normal eyes”. I don’t know if I’m expected to use the smiling face with sunglasses?
I don’t know if it’s true that Chris’s phone actually describes the generic smileys as having “normal eyes”, but it certainly makes for a fantastic gag.
Footnotes
1 I remember an occasion where a generational divide resulted in a hilarious difference of
interpretation of a common acronym, for example. My friend Ash, like most people of their generation, understood “LOL” to mean “laughing out loud”, i.e. an expression of humour. Their
dad still used it in the previous sense of “lots of love”. And so there was a moment of shock and confusion when Ash’s dad,
fondly recalling their recently-deceased mother, sent Ash a text message saying something like: “Thought of your mum today. I miss her. LOL.”.
For World Book Day (which here in the UK is marked a month earlier than the rest of the world) the kids’ school invited people to come
“dressed as a word”.
As usual, the kids and teachers participated along with only around two other adults. But of course I was one of them.
One for joy, two for joy, three for joy, four for joy… basically any natural number of magpies brings me joy.
They’re smart (among the smartest corvids, who are already among the smartest birds).
They’re curious. They’re sociable. And they’re ever so pretty.
They’re common enough that you can see them pretty-much anywhere.
They steal things. They solve puzzles. They’re just awesome.
This is photo of a magpie riding a pig through the snow, which is objectively fantastic. No further explanation is required, nor given.
Also, did you know where their name comes from? It’s really cool:
In Medieval Latin, they’re called pica. It probably comes from Greek kitta, meaning “false appetite” and possibly related to the birds’ propensity for theft,
and/or from a presumed PIE1 root meaning “pointed” and referring to its beak shape.
In Old French, this became pie. They’re still called la pie in French today. Old English took this and also used pie.
By the 17th century, there came a fashion in English slang to give birds common names.
Sometimes the common name died out, such as with Old English wrenna which became wren and was extended to Jenny wren, which you’ll still hear nowadays
but mostly people just say wren.
Sometimes the original name disappeared, like with Old English ruddock2 which became
redbreast and was extended to Robin redbreast from which we get the modern name robin (although again, you’ll still sometimes hear robin
reabreast).
Magpie, though, retains both parts!3Mag in this case is short for
Margaret, a name historically associated with idle chatter4.
So we get pica > pie > Maggie pie > Mag pie > magpie! Amazing!
This magpie’s looking pretty chill. Also pretty. Also chill.
I probably have a soft spot for animals with distinct black-and-white colouration – other favourite animals might include the plains zebra, European badger, black-and-white ruffed
lemur, Malayan tapir, Holstein cattle, Atlantic puffin… – but the magpie’s the best of them. It hits the sweet spot in all those characteristics listed above, and it’s just a wonderful
year-around presence in my part of the world.
Footnotes
1 It’s somewhat confusing writing about the PIE roots of the word pie…
2Ruddock shares a root with “ruddy”, which is frankly a better description of
the colour of a robin’s breast than “red”.
3 Another example of a bird which gained a common name and retained both that and its
previous name is the jackdaw.
4 Reflective, perhaps, of the long bursts of “kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-” chattering sounds
magpies make to assert themselves. The RSPB
have a great recording if you don’t know what I’m talking about – you’ll recognise the sound when you hear it! – but they also make a load of other vocalisations in the wild and can even learn to imitate human speech!
The other night, Ruth and I were talking about collective nouns (y’know, like a herd of cows or a flock of sheep) and came
up with the somewhat batty idea of solitary nouns. Like collective nouns, but for a singular subject (one cow, sheep, or whatever).
Then, we tried to derive what the words could be. Some of the results write themselves.1
Mooving right on…
I’d be lion if I said I wasn’t proud of this one.
I’m pollen out all the collective nouns now!
Some of them involve removing one or more letters from the collective noun to invent a shorter word to be the solitary noun.
They stay healthy by working out and getting vaccinated, both of which give them tough anty bodies.
The sound of an oven is a cackling: “When shall I one meet again?”
Eventually it grows up into a star, which are a lot louder.2For others, we really had to stretch the concept by mutating words in ways that “felt right”, using phoenetic spellings, or even inventing collective nouns so that we
could singularise them:
For more goose-related wordplay, take a gander at this blog post from a few years back.
Getting smashed doesn’t have to end with bumps and boozers.3
Blast but not least.
Did I miss any obvious ones?
Footnotes
1 Also consider “parliament of owls” ➔ “politician of owl”, “troop of monkeys” ➔ “soldier
of monkey”, “band of gorillas” ➔ “musician of gorilla”. Hey… is that where that band‘s name come from?
2 Is “cluster of stars” ➔ “luster of star” anything?
3 Ruth enjoyed the singularised “a low of old bollock”, too.
A few months ago, people were posting a lot about the Netherlands on Chinese social media platform Weibo. “Wake up, sleeping people of the Netherlands!” said one post. Others lamented
that the people of Amsterdam wanted their tulips back.
These Chinese social media users aren’t expressing a nascent interest in all things Dutch. They’re talking about recent protests over frozen bank deposits in the province of Henan. Ordinarily, discussions about a
controversial topic like this would be censored on Chinese social media, and posts containing the word “Henan” could be blocked or deleted. But “Henan” (河南) sounds a lot like “Helan”
(荷兰), the Mandarin word for the Netherlands. By swapping the names around, people were able to get past the censors and keep the conversation going.
…
I love this article. The use of homonyms and puns to work around online censorship by Chinese citizens is as innovative and heartwarming as its necessity is horrifying and tragic. If
you’re wondering exactly how similar 河南 (“Henan”, the name of the Chinese province in which authorities
abused social distancing laws and used violence to prevent rural bank customers from withdrawing their own money) and 荷兰 (“Helan”, The Netherlands) sound, have a listen for
yourself:
Unless you speak Mandarin already, you’ll might struggle to even pinpoint which is which in that recording.
This clever and imaginative use of language to try to sidestep surviellance feels like a modern adaptation of cryptolects like Polari or rhyming slang as used in the UK for the same
purpose. But writing in Han characters online seems to provide an amazingly diverse way to encode meaning that an in-the-know human can parse, but an automated machine or an uninformed
human censor can not. The story about the use of the word for “paratrooper” on Chinese social media, touched upon in the article linked above and expanded elsewhere, is particularly enjoyable.
Anyway, after you’ve read the article and you’re ready for a whole new rabbit whole to explore, I’d like to kickstart you by introducing you to Totoiana, a Pig Latin-like (second-syllable onwards, then first syllable) dialect
spoken with fluency exclusively in a single Romanian village, and nobody knows why.
Take a look at the map below. I’m the pink pin here in Oxfordshire. The green pins are my immediate team – the people I work with on a
day-to-day basis – and the blue pins are people outside of my immediate team but in its parent team (Automattic’s org chart is a bit like a fractal).
I’m the pink pin; my immediate team are the green pins. People elsewhere in our parent team are the blue pins. Some pins represent multiple people.
Thinking about timezones, there are two big benefits to being where I am:
I’m in the median timezone, which makes times that are suitable-for-everybody pretty convenient for me (I have a lot of lunchtime/early-afternoon meetings where I get to
watch the sun rise and set, simultaneously, through my teammates’ windows).
I’m West of the mean timezone, which means that most of my immediate coworkers start their day before me so I’m unlikely to start my day blocked by anything I’m waiting on.
(Of course, this privilege is in itself a side-effect of living close to the meridian, whose arbitrary location owes a lot to British naval and political clout in the 19th century: had
France and Latin American countries gotten their way the prime median would have probably cut through the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.)
2. Language Privilege
English is Automattic’s first language (followed perhaps by PHP and Javascript!), not one of the 120 other languages spoken
by Automatticians. That’s somewhat a consequence of the first language of its founders and the language in which the keywords of most programming languages occur.
It’s also a side-effect of how widely English is spoken, which in comes from (a) British colonialism and (b) the USA using
Hollywood etc. to try to score a cultural victory.
Languages self-reportedly spoken by Automatticians, sized proportional to the number of speakers. No interpretation/filtering has been done, so you’ll see multiple dialects of the
same root language.
I’ve long been a fan of the concept of an international axillary language but I appreciate that’s an idealistic dream whose war
has probably already been lost.
For now, then, I benefit from being able to think, speak, and write in my first language all day, every day, and not have the experience of e.g. my two Indonesian colleagues who
routinely speak English to one another rather than their shared tongue, just for the benefit of the rest of us in the room!
3. Passport Privilege
Despite the efforts of my government these last few years to isolate us from the world stage, a British passport holds an incredible amount of power, ranking fifth or sixth in the world depending on whose passport index you
follow. Compared to many of my colleagues, I can enjoy visa-free and/or low-effort travel to a wider diversity of destinations.
Normally I might show you a map here, but everything’s a bit screwed by COVID-19, which still bars me from travelling to many
places around the globe, but as restrictions start to lift my team have begun talking about our next in-person meetup, something we haven’t done since I first started when I met up with my colleagues in Cape Town and got
assaulted by a penguin.
But even looking back to that trip, I recall the difficulties faced by colleagues who e.g. had to travel to a different country in order tom find an embassy just to apply for the visa
they’d eventually need to travel to the meetup destination. If you’re not a holder of a privileged passport, international travel can be a lot harder, and I’ve definitely taken that for
granted in the past.
I’m going to try to be more conscious of these privileges in my industry.
Prior to 2018, Three Rings had a relatively simple approach to how it would use pronouns when referring to volunteers.
If the volunteer’s gender was specified as a “masculine” gender (which particular options are available depends on the volunteer’s organisation, but might include “male”, “man”, “cis
man”, and “trans man”), the system would use traditional masculine pronouns like “he”, “his”, “him” etc.
If the gender was specified as a “feminine” gender (e.g .”female”, “woman”, “cis women”, “trans woman”) the system would use traditional feminine pronouns like “she”, “hers”, “her” etc.
For any other answer, no specified answer, or an organisation that doesn’t track gender, we’d use singular “they” pronouns. Simple!
This selection was reflected
throughout the system. Three Rings might say:
They have done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was hers.
Would you like to sign him up to this shift?
Unfortunately, this approach didn’t reflect the diversity of personal pronouns nor how they’re applied. It didn’t support volunteer whose gender and pronouns are not
conventionally-connected (“I am a woman and I use ‘them/they’ pronouns”), nor did it respect volunteers whose pronouns are not in one of these three sets (“I use ze/zir pronouns”)… a
position it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully comprehend.
So we took a new approach:
The New Way
From 2018 we allowed organisations to add a “Pronouns” property, allowing volunteers to select from 13 different pronoun sets. If they did so, we’d use it; failing that we’d continue to
assume based on gender if it was available, or else use the singular “they”.
The process has some further complexities to cover the fact that we say “they are” but “he is“, but this broadly covers it.
Let’s take a quick linguistics break
Three Rings‘ pronoun field always shows five personal pronouns, separated by slashes, because you can’t necessarily derive one from another. That’s one for each of
five types:
the subject, used when the person you’re talking about is primary argument to a verb (“he called”),
object, for when the person you’re talking about is the secondary argument to a transitive verb (“he called her“),
dependent possessive, for talking about a noun that belongs to a person (“this is their shift”),
independent possessive, for talking about something that belongs to a person potentially would an explicit noun (“this is theirs“), and the
reflexive (and intensive), two types which are generally the same in English, used mostly in Three Rings when a person is both the subject
and indeirect of a verb (“she signed herself up to a shift”).
Let’s see what those look like – here are the 13 pronoun sets supported by Three Rings at the time of writing:
Subject
Object
Possessive
Reflexive/intensive
Dependent
Independent
he
him
his
himself
she
her
hers
herself
they
them
their
theirs
themselves
e
em
eir
eirs
emself
ey
eirself
hou
hee
hy
hine
hyself
hu
hum
hus
humself
ne
nem
nir
nirs
nemself
per
pers
perself
thon
thons
thonself
ve
ver
vis
verself
xe
xem
xyr
xyrs
xemself
ze
zir
zirs
zemself
That’s all data-driven rather than hard-coded, by the way, so adding additional pronoun sets is very easy for our developers. In fact, it’s even possible for us to apply an additional
“override” on an individual, case-by-case basis: all we need to do is specify the five requisite personal pronouns, separated by slashes, and Three Rings understands how to use
them.
Writing code that respects pronouns
Behind the scenes, the developers use a (binary-gendered, for simplicity) convenience function to produce output, and the system corrects for the pronouns appropriate to the volunteer
in question:
<%=@volunteer.his_her.capitalize %>
account has been created for
<%=@volunteer.him_her %>
so
<%=@volunteer.he_she %>
can now log in.
The code above will, dependent on the pronouns specified for the volunteer @volunteer, output something like:
His account has been created for him so he can now log in.
Her account has been created for her so she can now log in.
Their account has been created for them so they can now log in.
Eir account has been created for em so ey can now log in.
Etc.
We’ve got extended functions to automatically detect cases where the use of second person pronouns might be required (“Your account has been created for
you so you can now log in.”) as well as to help us handle the fact that we say “they are” but
“he/she/ey/ze/etc. is“.
It’s all pretty magical and “just works” from a developer’s perspective. I’m sure most of our volunteer developers don’t think about the impact of pronouns at all when they code; they
just get on with it.
Is that a complete solution?
Does this go far enough? Possibly not. This week, one of our customers contacted us to ask:
Is there any way to give the option to input your own pronouns? I ask as some people go by she/them or he/them and this option is not included…
You can probably see what’s happened here: some organisations have taken our pronouns property – which exists primarily to teach the system itself how to talk about volunteers – and are
using it to facilitate their volunteers telling one another what their pronouns are.
What’s the difference? Well:
When a human discloses that their pronouns are “she/they” to another human, they’re saying “You can refer to me using either traditional feminine pronouns (she/her/hers etc.)
or the epicene singular ‘they’ (they/their/theirs etc.)”.
But if you told Three Rings your pronouns were “she/her/their/theirs/themselves”, it would end up using a mixture of the two, even in the same sentence! Consider:
She has done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was theirs.
That’s some pretty clunky English right there! Mixing pronoun sets for the same person within a sentence is especially ugly, but even mixing them within the same page can cause
confusion. We can’t trivially meet this customer’s request simply by adding new pronoun sets which mix things up a bit! We need to get smarter.
A Newer Way?
Ultimately, we’re probably going to need to differentiate between a more-rigid “what pronouns should Three Rings use when talking about you” and a more-flexible, perhaps
optional “what pronouns should other humans use for you”? Alternatively, maybe we could allow people to select multiple pronoun sets to display but Three Rings would
only use one of them (at least, one of them at a time!): “which of the following sets of pronouns do you use: select as many as apply”?
Even after this, there’ll always be more work to do.
For instance: I’ve met at least one person who uses no pronouns! By this, they actually
mean they use no third-person personal pronouns (if they actually used no pronouns they wouldn’t say “I”, “me”, “my”, “mine” or “myself” and wouldn’t
want others to say “you”, “your”, “yours” and “yourself” to them)! Semantics aside… for these people Three Ringsshould use the person’s name rather than a
pronoun.
Maybe we can get there one day.
Three Rings is already capable of supporting people who use no pronouns, but we don’t yet have a user interface to help them specify this! Maybe it’d look like this?
But so long as Three Rings continues to remain ahead of the curve in its respect for and understanding of pronoun use then I’ll be happy.
Our mission is to focus on volunteers and make volunteering easier. At the heart of that mission is treating volunteers with
respect. Making sure our system embraces the diversity of the 65,000+ volunteers who use it by using pronouns correctly might be a small part of that, but it’s a part of it, and I for
one am glad we make the effort.
My favourite thing about geese… is the etymologies of all the phrases relating to geese. There’s so many, and they’re all amazing. I started reading about one, then –
silly goose that I am – found another, and another, and another…
Have a gander at this photo.
For example:
Barnacle geese are so-called because medieval
Europeans believed that they grew out of a kind of barnacle called a goose barnacle, whose shell pattern… kinda, sorta
looks like barnacle goose feathers? Barnacle geese breed on remote Arctic islands and so people never saw their chicks, which – coupled with the fact that migration wasn’t understood
– lead to a crazy myth that lives on in the species name to this day. Incidentally, this strange belief led to these geese being classified as a fish for the purpose of
fasting during Lent, and so permitted. (This from the time period that brought us the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, of course. I’ve written about both previously.)
Gooseberries may have a similar etymology. Folks have tried to connect it to old Dutch or Germanic words, but inconclusively: given that they appear at the opposite
end of the year to some of the migratory birds goose, the same kind of thinking that gave us “barnacle geese” could be seen as an explanation for gooseberries’ name, too. But really:
nobody has a clue about this one. Fun fact: the French name for the fruit is groseille à maquereau, literally “mackerel currant”!
A gaggle is the collective noun for geese, seemingly derived from the sound they make. It’s also been used to describe groups of humans, especially if they’re
gossiping (and disproportionately directed towards women). “Gaggle” is only correct when the geese are on the ground, by the way: the collective noun for a group of airborne geese is
skein or plump depending on whether they’re in a delta shape or not, respectively. What a fascinating and confusing language we have!
John Stephen Farmer helps us with a variety of goose-related sexual slang though, because, well, that was his jam. He observes that a goose’s neck was a penis and
gooseberries were testicles, goose-grease is vaginal juices. Related: did you ever hear the euphemism for where babies come from “under a
gooseberry bush“? It makes a lot more sense when you realise that gooseberry bush was slang for pubic hair.
Hey there, you big honker.
An actor whose performance wasn’t up to scratch might describe the experience of being goosed; that is – hissed at by the crowd. Alternatively,
goosing can refer to a a pinch on the buttocks possibly in reference to geese pecking humans at about that same height.
If you have a gander at something you take a good look at
it. Some have claimed that this is rhyming slang – “have a look” coming from “gander and duck” – but I don’t buy it. Firstly, why wouldn’t it be “goose and duck” (or “gander and
drake“, which doesn’t rhyme with “look” at all). And fake, retroactively-described rhyming roots are very common: so-called mockney rhyming slang! I suspect
it’s inspired by the way a goose cranes its neck to peer at something that interests it! (“Crane” as a verb is of course also a bird-inspired word!)
Goosebumps might appear on your skin when you’re cold or scared, and the name alludes to the appearance of plucked poultry. Many languages use geese, but some use
chickens (e.g. French chair de poule, “chicken flesh”). Fun fact: Slavic languages often use anthills as the metaphor for goosebumps, such as Russian мурашки по коже (“anthill skin”). Recently, people talk of tapping into goosebumps if they’re using their fear as a motivator.
The childrens game of duck duck goose is played by declaring somebody to be a “goose” and then running away before they catch you. Chasing – or at risk of being
chased by! – geese is common in metaphors: if somebody wouldn’t say boo to a goosethey’re
timid. A wild goose chase (yet another of the many phrases for which we
can possibly thank Shakespeare, although he probably only popularised this one) begins without consideration of where it might end up.
If humans tell children they were found under a gooseberry bush, where do geese tell their chicks they came from?
If those children are like their parents, you might observe that a wild goose never laid a tame egg: that traits are inherited and predetermined.
Until 1889, the area between Blackfriars and Tower Bridge in London – basically everything around Borough tube
station up to the river – was considered to be outside the jurisdiction of both London and Surrey, and fell under the authority of the Bishop of Winchester. For a few hundred years it
was the go-to place to find a prostitute South of the Thames, because the Bishop would license them to be able to trade there. These prostitutes were known as Winchester geese. As a result, to be
bitten by a Winchestergoose was to contract a venereal disease, and goosebumps became a slang term for the symptoms of some such
diseases.
Perennial achillea ptarmica is known, among other names, as goose tongue,
and I don’t know why. The shape of the plant isn’t particularly similar to that of a goose’s tongue, so I think it might instead relate to the effect of chewing the leaves, which
release a spicy oil that might make your tongue feel “pecked”? Goose tongue can also refer to plantago
maritima, whose dense rosettes do look a little like goose tongues, I guess. Honestly, I’ve no clue about this one.
If you’re sailing directly downwind, you might goose-wing your
sails, putting the mainsail away from the wind and the jib towards it, for balance and to easily maintain your direction. Of course, a modern triangular-sailed boat usually goes
faster broad reach (i.e. at an angle of about 45º to the wind) by enough that it’s faster to zig-zag downwind rather than go directly downwind, but I can see how one might sometimes
want to try this anatidaetian maneuver.
I feel like the “Cross Bones Graveyard” ought to have been where pirates were buried, but prostitutes is pretty good too.
Geese make their way all over our vocabulary. If it’s snowing, the old woman is plucking her
goose. If it’s fair to give two people the same thing (and especially if one might consider not doing so on account of their sex), you might say that what’s good
for the goose is good for the gander, which apparentlyused to use
the word “sauce” instead of “good”. I’ve no idea where the idea of cooking someone’s goose comes from, nor why anybody thinks that a goose step
march might look anything like the way a goose walks waddles.
Following the success of our last game of Dialect the previous month and once again in a one-week hiatus of our usual Friday
Dungeons & Dragons game, I hosted a second remote game of this strange “soft” RPG with linguistics and improv drama elements.
Thieves’ Cant
Our backdrop to this story was Portsmouth in 1834, where we were part of a group – the Gunwharf Ants – who worked as stevedores and made our living (on top of the abysmal wages for
manual handling) through the criminal pursuit of “skimming a little off the top” of the bulk-break cargo we moved between ships and onto and off the canal. These stolen goods would be
hidden in the basement of nearby pub The Duke of Wellington until they could be safely fenced, and this often-lucrative enterprise made us the envy of many of the docklands’ other
criminal gangs.
I played Katie – “Kegs” to her friends – the proprietor of the Duke (since her husband’s death) and matriarch of the group. I was joined by Nuek (Alec), a Scandinavian friend with a wealth of criminal experience, John “Tuck” Crawford (Matt), adoptee of the gang and our aspiring quartermaster, and
“Yellow” Mathias Hammond (Simon), a navy deserter who consistently delivers better than he expects to.
Our second tableau was somehow more-chaotic than the first, even after I accidentally removed several cards before taking this picture!
While each of us had our stories and some beautiful and hilarious moments, I felt that we all quickly converged on the idea that the principal storyline in our isolation was that of
young Tuck. The first act was dominated by his efforts to proof himself to the gang, and – with a little snuff – shake off his reputation as the “kid” of the group and
gain acceptance amongst his peers. His chance to prove himself with a caper aboard the Queen Anne went proper merry though after she turned up tin-ful and he found
himself kept in a second-place position for years longer. Tuck – and Yellow – got proofed eventually, but the extra time spent living hand-to-mouth might have been what first
planted the seed of charity in the young man’s head, and kept most of his numbers out of his pocket and into those of the families he supported in the St. Stevens area.
The second act turned political, as Spiky Dave, leader of the competing gang The Barbados Boys, based over Gosport way, offered a truce between the two rivals in exchange for sharing
the manpower – and profits – of a big job against a ship from South Africa… with a case of diamonds aboard. Disagreements over the deal undermined Kegs’ authority over the Ants, but
despite their March it went ahead anyway and the job was a success. Except… Spiky Dave kept more than his share of the loot, and agreed to share what was promised only in
exchange for the surrender of the Ants and their territory to his gang’s rulership.
We returned to interpersonal drama in the third act as Katie – tired of the gang wars and feeling her age – took perhaps more than her fair share of the barrel (the gang’s
shared social care fund) and bought herself clearance to leave aboard a ship to a beachside retirement in Jamaica. She gave up her stake in the future of the gang and
shrugged off their challenges in exchange for a quiet life, leaving Nuek as the senior remaining leader of the group… but Tuck the owner of the Duke of Wellington. The gang split into
those that integrated with their rivals and those that went their separate ways… and their curious pidgin dissolved with them. Well, except for a few terms which hung on in dockside
gang chatter, screeched amongst the gulls of Portsmouth without knowing their significance, for years to come.
Playing Out
Despite being fundamentally the same game and a similar setting to when we played The Outpost the previous month, this game felt very different. Dialect is
versatile enough that it can be used to write… adventures, coming-of-age tales, rags-to-riches stories, a comedies, horror, romance… and unless the tone is explicitly set out at the
start then it’ll (hopefully) settle somewhere mutually-acceptable to all of the players. But with a new game, new setting, and new players, it’s inevitable that a different kind of
story will be told.
But more than that, the backdrop itself impacted on the tale we wove. On Mars, we were physically isolated from the rest of humankind and living in an environment in which the
necessities of a new lifestyle and society necessitates new language. But the isolation of criminal gangs in Portsmouth docklands in the late Georgian era is a very different
kind: it’s a partial isolation, imposed (where it is) by its members and to a lesser extent by the society around them. Which meant that while their language was still a defining aspect
of their isolation, it also felt more-artificial; deliberately so, because those who developed it did so specifically in order to communicate surreptitiously… and, we
discovered, to encode their group’s identity into their pidgin.
While our first game of Dialect felt like the language lead the story, this second game felt more like the language and the story co-evolved but were mostly unrelated. That’s
not necessarily a problem, and I think we all had fun, but it wasn’t what we expected. I’m glad this wasn’t our first experience of Dialect, because if it were I think
it might have tainted our understanding of what the game can be.
As with The Outpost, we found that some of the concepts we came up with didn’t see much use: on Mars, the concept of fibs was rooted in a history of of how our medical
records were linked to one another (for e.g. transplant compatibility), but aside from our shared understanding of the background of the word this storyline didn’t really come up.
Similarly, in Thieves Cant’ we developed a background about the (vegan!) roots of our gang’s ethics, but it barely got used as more than conversational flavour. In both cases
I’ve wondered, after the fact, whether a “flashback” scene framed from one of our prompts might have helped solidify the concept. But I’m also not sure whether or not such a thing would
be necessary. We seemed to collectively latch onto a story hook – this time around, centred around Matt’s character John Crawford’s life and our influences on it – and it played out
fine.
And hey; nobody died before the epilogue, this time!
I’m looking forward to another game next time we’re on a D&D break, or perhaps some other time.
Dr. Doe’s latest Sexplanations vlog is on polyamorous language, and despite being – or, perhaps, because I’m – a bit of a long-toothed polyamorist these days, fully a quarter
or more of the terms she introduced were new to me! Fascinating!
Enfys published an article this week to their personal blog: How to use gender-inclusive language. It spun out from a post that they co-authored on an internal Automattic blog, and while the while thing is pretty awesome as a primer for anybody you need to show it to, it introduced a new word to my lexicon for
which I’m really grateful.
The Need for a New Word
I’ve long bemoaned the lack of a gender-neutral term encompassing “aunts and uncles” (and, indeed, anybody else in the same category: your parents’ siblings and their spouses). Words
like sibling have been well-established for a century or more; nibling has gained a lot of
ground over the last few decades and appears in many dictionaries… but we don’t have a good opposite to nibling!
Why do we need such a word?
As a convenient collective noun: “I have 5 aunts and uncles” is clumsier than it needs to be.
Where gender is irrelevant: “Do you have and aunts and/or uncles” is clumsier still.
Where gender is unknown: “My grandfather has two children: my father and Jo.” “Oh; so you have an Aunt or Uncle Jo?” Ick.
Where gender is nonbinary: “My Uncle Chris’s spouse uses ‘they/them’ pronouns. They’re my… oh fuck I don’t even remotely have a word for this.”
New Words I Don’t Like
I’m not the first to notice this gap in the English language, and others have tried to fill it.
I’ve heard pibling used, but I don’t like it. I can see what its proponents are trying to do: combine
“parent” and “sibling” (although that in itself feels ambiguous: is this about my parents’ siblings or my siblings’ parents, which aren’t necessarily the same thing). Moreover, the
-ling suffix feels like a diminutive, even if that’s not its etymological root in this particular case, and it feels backwards to use a diminutive to describe somebody
typically in an older generation than yourself.
I’ve heard that some folks use nuncle, and I hate that word even more. Nuncle already has a meaning, albeit an archaic
one: it means “uncle”. Read your Shakespeare! Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for resurrecting useful archaic words: I’m
on a personal campaign to increase use eyeyesterday and, especially, overmorrow (German has übermorgen, Afrikaans has
oormôre, Romanian has poimâine: I want a word for “the day
after tomorrow” too)! If you bring back a word only to try to define it as almost-the-opposite of what you want it to mean, you’re in for trouble.
Auntle is another candidate – a simple fusion of “aunt” and “uncle”… but it still feels a bit connected to the gendered terms it comes from, plus if you look around enough you
find it being used for everything from an affectionate mutation of “aunt” to a term to refer to your uncle’s husband. We can do better.
A New Word I Do!
But Enfys’ post gave me a new word, and I love it:
…
Here are some gender-neutral options for gendered words we hear a lot. They’re especially handy if you’re not sure of the gender of the person you’re addressing:
Mx.: An honorific, alternative to Mr./Mrs./Ms.
Sibling: instead of brother/sister
Spouse: instead of husband/wife
Partner, datefriend, sweetheart, significant other: instead of boyfriend/girlfriend
Parent: instead of mother/father
Nibling: instead of niece/nephew
Pibling, Entle, Nuncle: instead of aunt/uncle
…
Entle! Possibly invented here, this is the best gender-neutral term for “the sibling of your
parents, or the spouse of the sibling of your parents, or another family member who fulfils a similar role” that I’ve ever seen. It brings “ent” from “parent” which, while
etymologically the wrong part of the word for referring to blood relatives (that comes from a PIE root pere- meaning “to produce or bring forth”), feels similar to the contemporary slang root rent (clipped form of “parent”).
It feels new and fresh enough to not be “auntle”, but it’s similar enough to the words “aunt” and “uncle” that it’s easy to pick up and start using without that “what’s that new word I
need to use here?” moment.
I’m totally going to start using entle. I’m not sure I’ll find a use for it today or even tomorrow. But overmorrow? You never know.
This selection was reflected
throughout the system. Three Rings might say:
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube