Johnson

ON THE pavement just outside The Economist's New York offices, I spied a small pile of books for the taking, and it happened to have a little treasure on top: "More Language that Needs Watching" by Theodore Bernstein, published in 1962. I grabbed it.

Mr Bernstein was a long-time editor for the New York Times, and a respected usage writer in his day. His first popular book, 1958's "Watch Your Language", was his best-known (and helps explain the title of the follow-up that I had found on the ground). Much of the book could be used as-is today. But "More Language that Needs Watching" is also a fun introduction to what has changed in a half-century of writing advice.

IN HIS 1991 book "Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World," David Rieff writes of the trembling racial sensibilities of the city's rich whites:

So sensitive were liberal Angelenos to the possibility of appearing xenophobic that they almost invariably used the term "undocumented worker" rather than "illegal alien," which made contravention of the immigration law sound like some trivial problem of paperwork rather than, for better or worse, a breach of the laws of the United States.

A couple of decades later the linguistic tastes of LA's Westside have conquered swathes of America's media.

TRANSLATION and interpretation in matters of diplomacy is tricky. Language enthusiasts particularly enjoy the story of the Treaty of Wuchale, signed between Ethiopia and Italy in 1889. The text didn’t read the same in Amharic and Italian. The former guaranteed Ethiopia’s king Menelik II a good measure of autonomy in conducting foreign affairs. The latter established an Italian protectorate with no flexibility. The culprit: one verb, forming a permissive clause in Amharic and a mandatory one in Italian. Six years later, the differing interpretations led to war. Ethiopia won.

If only the Ethiopians and Italians had modern translators at their side. Treaty translation is big business today.

ENJAMBMENT rarely makes the news. It may have reams of academic essays devoted to it, but less recondite publications have, understandably, steered clear of the poetic device, by which one line of verse is broken into several.

Until now, that is. First, Tesco, a British supermarket chain, took out advertisements in national newspapers apologising for the discovery of horsemeat in their processed food. These looked like they had been written in lines of free verse, with statements wound down over separate lines:

This starts
with us

Or:

Seriously.
This is it.
We are changing.

Then, a couple of weeks later, Twitter made it possible to include line-breaks in tweets.

MID DEVON District Council, which governs local affairs in a small bit of southwestern England, recently took Britain by storm. How?

Outrage at local authority plans to abolish apostrophe [Guardian]

Council 'murders' apostrophe in street-sign row [Scotsman. "Move condemned as 'appalling, disgusting and pointless'"]

End of the road for the misunderstood apostrophe [Times]

Residents' fury as council bans APOSTROPHES from street signs 'to avoid confusion' [Mail]

Outrage! Murder! Disgusting! Fury! End of the road! What fresh hell is this?

YESTERDAY the world's attention was focused on the selection of the new pope, Francis. Johnson's attention, of course, was on the linguistic aspects of his elevation.

It was particularly striking that he chose a new name. My colleagues and I were going over the list of old names, taking bets on common names like Gregory and Leo, and wondering if we'd get a symbolic or resonant name like Innocent or Clement. A few were hoping that Pope Lando II would emerge from behind the curtains. (Yes, there really was a Pope Lando.) Instead, Jorge Bergoglio became the first pope since Pope Lando himself to choose an entirely new name.

It has not been a good couple of weeks for the Office québécois de la langue française, the Quebec government body charged with ensuring that French remains the dominant language in the largely French-speaking Canadian province. Over-zealous application of the law by its inspectors, known in English as the language police, subjected the office to so much international ridicule that on March 8th its head was forced to step down.

It began, as do many things these days, with a tweet.