An Irish friend of mine is constantly giving me a hard time about my English prepositions; and she’s quite correct: choosing between on and at and in is something I do rather haphazardly most of the time. I can’t even blame it on the fact that I speak American English (a weird mix of West Coast and New England pronounciations with some Swedish/Finnish intonations here and there) and try to write British English – my prepositions aren’t correct in either version.

Speaking of prepositions, I just read an article about Swedish prepositions, in conjunction with the election we’re about to have soon. The article in question notes that we vote “on” a party but vote “for” a specific issue or an inclination. This is, it is argued, because voting “on” something indicates a longer time period and a deeper commitment; a firmer conviction that will have deeper repercussions. This makes perfect sense (although it sounds like an after-construction), but it would be impossible to reason one’s way to using the correct preposition if one hadn’t lived here and had heard the different versions in action. Just like on a plane but in a bus in English makes no sense to me.

Using prepositions correctly is quite possibly the most difficult aspect of a new language. Different tenses? No problem. Different genders? Paah, piece of cake. But prepositions are weird. One reason for my inability to grasp prepositions could be that there are no simple rules for them. Grammar comes naturally to me, but prepositions are just a bunch of exceptions stacked onto each other.

Another issue I have with foreign languages is vocabulary. Sure, it’s easy enough to read books to correct this, but it takes time; learning a grammatical system is pretty fast in comparison. This Irish friend of mine has taken upon herself to speed me along to a broader English vocabulary - she sent me a set of excellent books: The Superior Person’s Book of Words one to three. I’ve only browsed the first book a bit so far, but it rocks (like a big stone)! Soon I’ll have learned magnificent words like parisology (“The deliberate pursuit of ambiguity in one’s language”) and other obscure terms, all intended to give oneself a sense of superiority in discussions.

Of course, it’s quite tongue-in-cheek and not indended seriously at all. Something that a certain “therealdoctordee” who left a comment on Amazon seems to have missed. Just take a look at this comment he left:

How can one take seriously a book which suggests that ‘Infrastrucuture’ has “no discernable useful meaning”, and that the word ‘paradigm’ is “pretentious and unnecessary”? I full expected this book to be both fascinating and entertaining. In reality it is neither, even to a dedicated philologist. The Superior Person’s Book of Words fails to give consistently derivations, didactic tid-bits or guides to pronunciation.

The book rails against perfectly good modern words while dredging up hideously anachronistic ones, which have fallen into desuetude for perfectly good reason.

Equally, the author feels the need to identify and define words as commonplace as ‘amiable’, ‘impeccable’ and ‘pragmatism’, which even the most ineloquent of potential readers will already have in their lexica.

Meanwhile, the writing exudes the dissmissive attitude of the ineffable bore. The usage examples attempt to be witty, yet while failing to be so they also fail to illustrate well the correct context of the word at hand. Despite this, the book claims to give “practical guidance on how best to use these words in real-life”. It does this by prepending the phrase “Herr Doktor” to a number of ostensibly meaningless sentences, apparently in an attempt to render them humorous or, at least, sardonic.

To assimilate the words in this book (and its companion volume) into one’s vocabulary would be a lucubration resulting in incomprehensibility.

This book is not without any merit – dedicated word-lovers will find something of interest here. But those looking to achieve lexical superiority and grammatical excellence would be far better advised (and far greater entertained) to seek out Bill Bryson’s “Troublesome Words”.

Oh my. I may agree that everyone ought to know what amiable, impeccable and pragmatism mean, but this guy seems to have gotten a cactus shoved up where no man has gone before. Can you spell pretentious and humourless asshole? And this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle nigrous: I have some humour at least.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 10:23 am and is filed under Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.