How good?

During a lull in the dissertation action -- Vinko emailed that he is sending more pages soon -- I was upgrading my homepage. Google has all sorts of gadgets to add, some helpful like local weather reports and others just games and so on. In looking through the list, I saw one called Typing Test. That's it in the corner there. The blurb: Play Typing Test and see how good you can type.

Okay, maybe it is because I have been spending a lot of time helping someone get his English-language dissertation in shape, but "how good you can type"? Maybe what we really need is Grammar Test.

Vinko makes many minor errors in usage, but English, after all, is not his first language. In fact, since he is Croatian, the odds are English is his third or fourth language. Goodness knows his footnotes are in English, French, German and Italian. Since he is writing about the New Testament, huge chunks of the text are in koine Greek, which is the language in which the New Testament books as we now have them were written. (Koine Greek was the Greek spoken by the common people in everyday use. It is less formal than the so-called classical literary Greek, with simpler grammar and so on. Think of it as the way people spoke English in Shakespeare's day when they weren't on stage.)

On the other hand, for all I know the person who wrote the blurb for Google may not be a native English speaker. It is so easy to assume ...

It reminds me, too, of an argument Steve Yarbrough, Bonnie and I had many years ago when I was studying in Washington and they were doctoral students at Penn State. The topic was the correct use of hopefully. Bonnie, an English literature student, and I argued that it was an abomination for people to say hopefully when they meant I hope. For example, "Hopefully we will get there on time." Hopefully is an adverb. Proper usage would be "I looked at her hopefully." The barbaric use of the word to replace "I/we hope" is a favorite bugaboo of English usage purists. Steve agreed that hopefully is an adverb, but he contended that English is a living language. Since, therefore, hopefully is now almost universally used to mean I/we hope, that is in fact what it means. Bonnie and I were not convinced, linguistic reactionaries that we were, but I think I knew in my heart of hearts that Steve was right. Language is not controlled by the grammar books or academy -- at least not the English language -- but by the people who speak it. This means words can change meaning dramatically.

My favorite example of this is the word doubt. We all know that to doubt something means to be uncertain about it. A few centuries back, however, to doubt something meant to be apprehensive about it -- that is, "I doubt John/Joan Doe will become president" did not mean "I do not believe John/Joan Doe will become president," butrather "I am afraid that John/Joan Doe will become president." It implied the expectation that something (undesirable, perhaps) would happen, not uncertainty about it happening.

This makes reading good old books well very confusing.

If that seems too esoteric to you, think of how the meaning of the word gay has changed in such a short time. Back in the late 1970s, Sr. Josephine Koppel was visiting the monastery of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Cologne to look over the archives concerning St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) who had died at Auschwitz. Josephine was in the process of translating the autobiographical writings of the not-yet-canonized Edith. (It was her canonization I attended in Rome back in 1998.) The nuns had a lot of booklets in various langauges, all translated from a German original. The English version said that Edith "had a gay novitiate." Sr. Josephine had to inform the innocent nuns tactfully that the word no longer meant merry in ordinary English usage. They were much perplexed, but I suspect that now, some thirty years later, they know very well what the word means.