Will American English Become the Internet's Lingua Franca?

It started as a simple question on IRC; "is the correct spelling anonymizer or anonymiser"? A simple question, but one that set me a-pondering.

Conventional wisdom, of course, dictates that if you're in the States or its hegemony, you use the z; if you're not, you use the s. But it's not really that simple. The OED, for example, has long championed the use of '-ize', much to the chagrin of many (your humble servant included). I'm not entirely clear on the reason for this antipathy towards the US' preferred spelling, even my own. It's tempting to put it down to a latent anti-Americanism, but for an Irish lad such as I there are 800 years' worth of reasons to be more anti-British than anti-American. Actually, I have my own thoughts on this matter, but to go into them here would be to drive this tract, already off-course, veering off the edge of the Cliffs of On-Topic.

Smithers, Release the Teenagers

breakingnews.ie tends to be fairly sloppy as a rule with their attention to detail; at least once a week they come up with a particularly inelegant phrase that soon disappears when someone who knows the English language reads it. This, though, will probably stick around, but in case it doesn't, the headline is

Teenagers freed in hunt for Polish man's killer

 The confusion -- if confusion there is for anyone except me -- revolves around the word 'in' and its relation to the word 'hunt'. It suggests a level of causation... but why am I explaining this? It's obvious.

Anyway, I suspect 'confusion' is too strong a word; while the sentence can be interpreted in two ways, there's really no doubt as to what the headline writer meant. Even so, it made me titter.

Death of the Late Mr. Jones

I picked Mr. Jones totally at random. Don't worry about it. If you're at all concerned about the Mr. Jones who lives in the flat upstairs, I'm not talking about him.

I was reading a news item about the esteemed leader of the opposition here in Ireland, and in between bouts of fist shaking and random imprecations, I wandered over to the party web site to see what manner of spin they put on Mr. Kenny's words. There was no mention of it. However, something did catch my eye in his biography; "he was first elected in a by-election following the death of his late father Henry Kenny".

Oops. Or, Rather, Hooray!

Boy, is my face red.

Barely a day has passed since I revelled in the arbitrary nature of the English language, and I find out that my example was nonsense. The possessive-before-gerund rule, which I thought perhaps to be the work of some drug-addled, charismatic loon, exists for a reason. My fevered fancies were of this wild-eyed, bedraggled prophet convincing his fellows of a way of speaking that he received from a chorus of trees, but instead it's there for the ultimate raison d'etre for any rule of grammar: to clarify.

Thoughts on My Using the Genitive Before Gerunds

A short while ago I hinted elsewhere about my uncertainty with regard to the legitimacy of the grammatical rule about pronouns preceding gerunds. Thanks to Language Log, the situation for me has become a little more complicated.

For a start, it seems that the rule — if rule it be — is a little more all-encompassing than I realised. It's not just pronouns that must take the possessive; it's nouns, too. This is news to me. I've no idea where I first encountered the rule, but since that happy day I've been in no doubt that it was only pronouns that it applied to.

Sesquipedalians of the World, Interosculate!

Those who've been following such things recently will be aware that the Baltimore Sun recently got some flak from one of its readers about using the word 'limn' in one of its headlines. The latest to mention this is  The Boston Globe, and in their piece Erin McKean suggests that an

element of showoffishness is present in many uses of rare words. It would be peculiar if the all-too-human desire for status — the motivation behind name-dropping, wearing luxury brands, listening to obscure bands, or checking in to velvet-rope places on Foursquare — didn’t manifest itself in word choice, as well

 I'm not saying that this is unfair but it isn't, I think, the whole story.