More Announcementese

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Amtrak, announcementese

On an Amtrak train returning to Virginia from New York, I saw the following sign:

Sign on an Amtrak train

This is a fine example of announcementese, the strange dialect that calls trash cans receptacles. Note the strange capitalization, and that there are only two punctuation marks, both exclamation points. What are “materials”? Are they worried that people will store pig-iron or concrete in the wheelchair space? Of course, the whole last line could be left off without changing the meaning of the sign: it really means, “Keep this area clear, period.” Why not just put up a sign that says “Wheelchairs Only”? People might obey it, whereas this sign is routinely ignored. Why not just put up a “Disabled Only” sign like this:

People almost always leave spaces vacant when they’re marked with that.

Meanwhile, has anybody else noticed the change in “Disabled Only” signs?

The guy on the left is a good citizen. The guy on the right will run you over, Jack!

“Awhile”

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Etymonline.com

I got a message this morning from a web site to which I haven’t logged in for a while. It said,

Hello James,

It’s been awhile since you’ve logged into your ***** account and it will expire in 5 days.

I’ve mentioned (in a Comment) that I can figure out a logical rule for distinguishing between “awhile” and “a while”, but that I’m not sure anybody follows it. That’s still true, but I might as well take this occasion to say what I think the rule is, or should be.

Etymonline.com, always our first stop in understanding a word (because I’m too lazy to use a resource that’s not on the internet), says that awhile is an adverb, derived “from contraction of Old English ane hwile ‘(for) a while’ (see while (n.)).” It does not treat of the adverb while (as in “He hit me while I wasn’t looking”) at all, considering while only as a noun (“space of time”), and a verb (“‘to cause (time) to pass (without dullness),'”).

Be that as it may, I think Modern English has two adverbs based on O. E. hwile: while (during a specific period of time, event, or action), and awhile, (for an unspecified period of time); and a noun, while (a period of time) and a verb to while (usually with “away”, to pass [time]).

If it’s correct that awhile is a contraction of O. E. ane hwile, I suspect that the adverb awhile (as in, “Sit by me awhile”) has developed out of the noun while by the omission of the preposition, for (as in “Sit by me for a while”). That has happened in other cases, too. For example, “We lived there two years.” We’ve dropped other prepositions, as well: “Chicago is the noisiest place I’ve ever been.”

It seems possible to me, on the other hand, that awhile is a contraction, not of “a while”, but of “on while” (cf. afire = on fire, alive = on [?in] life, afoot = on foot). (One could probably search the Anglo-Saxon corpus for examples of “on while”, and there may or may not be any. I don’t have time.) That would strengthen my sense that Modern English awhile carries an implicit preposition, while a while does not.

Anyway, it seems clear to me that the e-mail message I got means to use the noun while, a space of time, and not the adverb awhile.

“Seven-month anniversary”

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Guardian

Speaking a day before the seven-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, Erik Mose, the head of the investigation team, told the council that, based on the evidence gathered by the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, “it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine”.

Lorenzo Tondo, “Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine, say UN investigators”, Guardian, 23 September 2022

Sigh.

“Surveil”

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New York Times, paid praters

Roskomnadzor has also worked to unmask and surveil people behind anti-government accounts and provided detailed information on critics’ online activities to security agencies, according to the documents. That has supplemented real-world actions, with those surveilled coming under attack for speaking out online.

Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Aaron Krolik, Aliza Aufrichtig, “‘They Are Watching’: Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State“, New York Times 22 September 2022,

The verb to surveil has apparently become an English word. It began as military jargon, derived from the French surveillance, meaning supervision or observation, which turned into the English word, surveillance. Etymonline.com says it started with the French Terror, when “‘surveillance committees’ were formed in every French municipality in March 1793 by order of the Convention to monitor the actions and movements of suspect persons, outsiders, and dissidents.”. It also says that “surveil” is probably a back-formation from surveillance, and dates it to 1903. It was primarily military jargon, I think, until the Paid Praters got ahold of it.

Be that as it may, it’s an ugly innovation and completely unnecessary, since we’ve already got to survey, as in “master of all he surveys”, a verb derived long before 1903 from the French verb surveiller, which is where surveillance came from in the first place. In ordinary English, we also used to say “keep under surveillance” or even “watch“. Oh well.

“We May Never Know How Vast the Cosmos Really Are”

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The Atlantic

Somebody wrote that headline.

On Google News today, the above headline appears, attributed to the Atlantic magazine. The actual article has a different headline today, and I don’t know whether the above was the original headline, and somebody got to the Atlantic after Google News had reproduced its headline; or somebody connected with Google News came up with it—probably the former. But does anybody really think that “cosmos” is a plural noun? I’ve seen kudos treated as a plural noun several times, but that’s not a very common word, and one can imagine that lots of people have encountered it only in writing, and have no idea that it’s a singular Greek noun. But cosmos is a fairly common word. It’s been the title of at least two books and at least two TV series. There’s really no excuse.

“Six-month anniversary”

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BBC

Driving to work this morning, I heard somebody on the BBC say that Ukrainians were observing both independence day and the “six-month anniversary” of the Russian invasion. As I pointed out some time ago, anniversary means, literally, “of the turning of a year”. You can’t have an anniversary without a year. There is no English word for a day marking the passage of six months. I guess you could say, “half-anniversary” or “semi-anniversary”, but why not just say, “half a year” or “the six-month point” or “the passage of six months since” whatever happened six months ago?

“Singular”

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augmentation disease, CNN, paid praters

The new lawsuit marks the first legal filing by Trump’s team after FBI agents carried out their search on August 8 and underscores how his legal team has struggled to coalesce around a singular strategy.

Katelyn Polantz, Kaitlan Collins, Tierney Sneed, CNN, “Trump’s legal team asks for ‘special master’ to go through Mar-a-Lago evidence and determine if some should be returned“, 22 August 2022

I would expect any legal strategy by Trump or his lawyers to be singular, but the writers probably mean single here.

What is singular is that two of the writers are named Caitlin, and neither spells it the conventional (i.e., Irish) way. Novelty for the sake of novelty, but within the context of slavish conformity to fashion.