By David Astle
Your office mouse is broken. You waggle away, but the cursor is frozen. No question, you need a new mouse, but where’s the supply cupboard in this open-plan maze? The place where they keep the new… what? The new mouses or mice?
With vermin, it’s simple. Yet hardware is a separate headache: computer mouses or computer mice? When the reader’s query came last week, I saw the answer as intuitive. Though after years of fielding language questions, I’ve learnt it’s unwise to be definitive about definitions, or prescriptive on plurals, too.
Mouses or mice?
Naturally, I have my view – as do you. The Queen has dibs on English as much as the street cleaner who sweeps up Her Majesty’s confetti once the platinum fuss is done. Language belongs to the people, the demos of Greek fame, the vox’s populi. If a reader like Shirley Cook asks: “Is it hom-arge or hom-idge?,” then I’ll canvass the crowd. That means you. Just like the mice/mouses riddle. In the end, democracy decides.
Twitter polls are a godsend for language arbiters. Rather than adjudicate, we delegate, posing the question online to test where the bias falls. Some results might surprise you, upset you, but none is out-and-out wrong. For the record, “computer mice” and “homage” (as in fromage) were the winners on the day.
Just as “arse” gave “ass” a decent kicking last August, the British default dominating the imported booty by 90.6 per cent among 1400 non-US respondents. Likewise, “Timor-Leste” outpointed “East Timor” by a third of votes, despite the former literally meaning East-East in its own Malay-Portuguese salad. Such a quirk is dubbed a tautonym, a la Sahara Desert (literally Desert-Desert), Lake Tahoe (Lake-Lake) and dillybag (bag-bag).
Contronyms in two other polls stirred the possum. A contronym owns contradictory meanings, such as “screened” (hidden or shown?) and “clip” (fasten or detach?). Glitches in the matrix, they often demand a vote to determine which way the pendulum swings. How can society function if one person’s “lucked out” (in a bad way) is another’s happiness, attached to the same phrase?
Duty-bound, I took the enigma to the virtual village. Some 800 citizens replied, where 57 per cent of the crowd deemed “lucked out” warrants champagne, compared to the rest poised with condolences. As for “peruse”, another sneaky contronym, 74 per cent of a similar sampling viewed the action as being a casual sweep of the eye, as opposed to an intensive swot.
This result left me nonplussed. And, by that, I mean bewildered rather than unperturbed, as 58 per cent of speakers believe the word means in another straw vote. Tellingly, most dictionaries fail to reflect that semantic bias, since real-time polls operate between alehouse and publishing house, the proving grounds far from the ivory towers.
Phonetically, I put the Mac in “machination”, as do 584 speakers of the 927 votes polled. Still, that hasn’t persuaded the Macquarie’s phonetic guide offering the potato-mash preference in the database. Not yet anyway. A lexicon can only thrive if it faithfully reports the language that most of its readers use and understand the words to mean.
This is not dumbing down, but catching up. After your third Pfizer, say, your “boostered” status may seem the correct version to you, but most patients dwell in the “boosted” camp. As for our coffee date next weekend, that muddle needs sorting, since 305 people reckon that “next weekend” translates as the weekend coming, while 303 of us believe I’m referring to the weekend after that. That’s too ambiguous to call. Expect a new poll next weekend just to fathom when the hell we’re meeting.
Read more Wordplay
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- Why’s everyone hopping mad about kangaroo courts?
- In an election campaign void of eloquence, Albo’s ‘junior burger’ was a zinger
- Pick a name, any name: This playground game has stood the test of time
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