[lit-ideas] Childern's
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 20:28:13 EDT
In a message dated 10/29/2004 8:14:04 PM Eastern Standard Time, Jlsperanza
writes:
JLS can give us some thoughts on the oddness of the word.
Well, yes. Technically, if the singular is 'child', the plural should be
'childs'. (as in Childs, the collecter [sic] of balladry.
More below.
Cheers,
JL
---
From Rory Ewins, "Stand Up", chapter 9:
"I like reading about where words come from, how the language has changed,
all of that stuff. Plurals are interestingâ??the way most of them end with 's',
but there are some that don't, like 'children'. Apparently, way, way back,
before about, oh, Tuesday, most plurals used to end in '-en'. People would say,
'You see those housen? With all the treen around them? Well, take the
children over there and let them play with the oxen.'
"But then people started using 's' instead. And they did some strange things.
Like they started using 'chicken' to mean one bird instead of two. It used
to be a plural. So you can imagine how confusing it must have been for people:
"'You see that chicken over there?'
"'Chicken? There's only one of them. There's one chick.'
"'No, there's one chicken.'
"'One... chicken.'
"'Yes. Well, I want you take it over there and put it with the other
chickens.'
"'Chickenen?'
"Totally confusing for the poor old buggeren. It's as if we suddenly started
talking about dogses and catses. Or hippopotamuseses."
"And then there are the plurals like 'mice' and 'geese' and 'feet', where the
actual form of the word is changed to show that it's plural. There used to
be a lot more of those. My favourite is 'goat'â??if they hadn't started using
esses for that one back in the Middle Ages, we'd be talking about flocks of
geat.
"You'd have little kids making the same kinds of mistakes they make with
'sheep'â??'look at the sheeps, Daddy!'â??but they'd be going 'look at the
goats,
Daddy! Look at the goats!' And their dads would be saying, 'Not goats, son,
it's geatâ??look at the geat.'
"What I want to know is, how do these things change? How do you go from one
chick, two chicken, to one chicken, two chickens? How do you go from geat to
goats? Who decides these things? I mean, if we started talking about
hippopotamuseses in serious conversation, people would think we were insane. So
that's why I've got this theory that language change is actually driven by mad
people. Once upon a time these crazy village idiot types went around saying,
'Hello, chickens; hello, goats,' and everyone laughed at them and said, 'What a
bunch of dickheaden.' But it was like those really annoying songs on the radio
that you can't get out of your headâ??they couldn't forget it. And so they
started saying 'chickens' just as a joke, just trying to laugh it off.
'"Chickens"â??heh heh heh.' And then they forgot that it was a joke, and
before long
they were using it all the time.
"And you see this even today. Like, normal human beings say that something
will 'have an impact on' something else: 'This tax will have an impact on our
lifestyle.' Or, at a pinch, 'This tax will impact upon our lifestyle.' But
now, some strange, abnormal human beings are starting to say, 'This tax will
impact our lifestyle.' Which makes me think of those big machines in junkyards
which impact the cars by squashing them flat. This tax will press our
lifestyle into a flat sheet of metal.
"Well, if, like me, you find this annoying, just remember that it's mad
people who are saying this. They're completely nuts. So you don't have to be
polite to them when you hear them say it. Don't smile and nod and act as if
you
understand exactly what they mean. Just go up to them and yell, 'Stop being so
abstruse, you great bunch of geat!'"
(http://www.speedysnail.com/standup/ch9.html#3)
I loved it. The audience didn't. Alan had been met by polite, uncomfortable
laughter throughout, and went off to a modest round of applause.
We met him at the bar afterwards.
"I dunno," he said, "it's so dispiriting. They won't take any risks."
(Meaning the audience.) "I thought these were uni students. They don't want me,
they want Rodney Rude."
"It wasn't that bad," said Kath, doing her best to give him a boost. "You got
a few laughs."
"Oh, sure. When I handed them the most obvious lines on a plate, and mugged
like a lunatic. I want a better reaction than that. A bit of sophistication; a
bit of willingness to be taken by surprise. Unless I can go onstage and get
a laugh by spontaneously saying 'Burma!', I'm not happy."
I interrupted him. "Isn't that a bit Python?"
Alan's whole expression moved from one of despair to one of exasperation.
"Jesus, Sean, don't you start! Monty Python, Monty Python... if a comedian does
anything even vaguely surreal, it's called 'Pythonesque', like some put-down,
as if being compared to the greats is an insult."
"I didn't mean it like that."
"Yeah, but can't you see how boring it gets? It used to drive us mad in
Footlights. Even there, it was all you'd hear. We had to make jokes about it in
self-defence. People don't have any other standard of comparison for comedy, so
everything becomes 'a bit Python'. But for Chrissakes, they don't go calling
every five-hundred-page novel 'Dickensian' or every three-act play 'a bit
Shakespeare'!"
Alan sat there seething for a moment. I ventured an apology. "Sorry, Alanâ??I
didn't mean to set you off..."
"Ahh, that's okay. Pet peeve of mine. Forget it."
"Okay... but what I was starting to say was, didn't Graham Chapman say
'Burma!' in one of the Python sketches?"
Alan sat back and smiled sheepishly.
"Fuck off."
(http://www.speedysnail.com/standup/ch9.html#4)
"Sometimes I wonder why you do it," I said, as I finished off my beer.
"Do what?" asked Alan.
"This. Comedy. Sometimes I wonder why you bother."
"What do you mean? Are you saying I'm no good?"
"No, no, that's not it. Just thatâ??well, you're obviously smart. You've been
to Cambridge and all. You could probably do lots of things; serious things.
Things that could probably make you lots of money, too."
"Yes, Alan," chuckled Kath, "why don't you make lots of money? That sounds
like a good idea."
Alan laughed, and started to sing, "I don't care tooâ??much for money..."
"Seriously," I said. "Why not become an academic or something? When, like you
said, it's so hard to find sophisticated audiences for comedy?"
Alan sighed. "Yeah," he said, "there's some truth to that. Sometimes I think
I really would like to try and be an academic or whatever, writing about
serious subjects, solving big problems, making a difference in the world. Be
the
next John Locke or Thomas Paine."
"So why not?"
"Well, it's not that easy. It's not easy getting an academic job these days,
for one thing. But it's also like I'm torn. It's like I have this big
struggle going on inside me, these two forces pulling in opposite directions.
Be
serious, be a good academic, do something worthwhile. And then, be unserious,
be
a comedian, make people laugh."
"That's worthwhile," said Kath. "Making people laugh is a serious business."
"That's what I tell myself," Alan said. "I just wish everyone else saw it
that way. It's not like you can't address serious issues through comedy. Lots
of
people do."
"What," I asked, "like Ben Elton?"
"Yeah, well, Ben Elton, sure. I don't necessarily mean those kinds of
clear-cut political issues, though; although that's fine, that's good. I mean
more
that if you analyse any comedy you'll find that it's addressing some issue or
other, even if it's just, I don't know, the role of the mother-in-law in
Western society. I mean, comedy is about putting ordinary things together in
extraordinary ways; combining subjects that on their own make sense but
together
make nonsense; which makes you laugh, hopefully. But then the way you
combine them has its own sense, its own logic. It says something."
I pondered on this. "I can see your point," I said. "But can't that be
rather limiting? You have to strip away all of the context of the original
subjects before you put them together. So people can't see it when they're
laughing
at the joke... If I draw a cartoon about a man on a desert island I don't
figure I'm saying anything special; I'm just making a joke."
----
OED on 'children'
The OE. plural was normally cild; but in late OE. the word was partly
assimilated to the neuter -os stems, making nom. pl. cildru, -ra, and esp.
gen. pl.
cildra. Ã?lfric, Grammar 23, gives nom. cild, gen. cildra, dat. cildum; but
he also has nom. cildru (e.g. Hom. II. 324). No r forms occur in the earlier
Vesp. Psalter nor in Northumbrian. The latter had cild and cildo; and
sometimes made the word masc. with pl. cildas. In ME. there are rare instances
of
chyld, childe as plural; but the surviving type was OE. cildru, cildra, which
gave ME. childre, childer: this was the regular northern and north midland
form, and is still used in the dialects as far south as Shropsh., Leicester,
and Lincolnsh. But in the south this was made childer-en, childre-n by
conformation to the -en plurals: cf. brethre, brether, brethren, plurals of
_BROTHER_
(http://0-dictionary.oed.com.csulib.ctstateu.edu/cgi/crossref?query_type=word&;
queryword=child&edition=2e&first=1&max_to_show=10&xref=1&sort_type=alpha&searc
h_id=wM8F-XaLVVI-454&result_place=1&xrefed=OED&xrefword=brother) . This has
become the standard and literary form. The Old Northumbrian cildas is
paralleled by childes in 15th c., which is exceptional; but the Sc.
differentiated
word _CHIELD_
(http://0-dictionary.oed.com.csulib.ctstateu.edu/cgi/crossref?query_type=word&queryword=child&edition=2e&first=1&max_to_show=10&xref=1&sort_type
=alpha&search_id=wM8F-XaLVVI-454&result_place=1&xrefed=OED&xrefword=chield)
has always chields in plural.]
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