A Million Word and Counting
by Paul Payack
Citadel Press, 2008
There have been innumerable books and articles on the notion that English has become the global language, the international language of business and the chosen medium of cross-cultural communication. Much has been made of how globalizing forces has cemented English's status as the lingua franca (perhaps lingua anglia?) - the majority of web pages and blogs are published in English, hundreds of millions of people around the globe want to learn it and it is the only feasible medium of exchange either in the corridors of power in Brussels or when a Chinese investor attempts to seal a deal in Africa (and vice versa).
Paul Payack, a self-styled word maven has shown a penchant for self-promotion when his site, the Global Language Monitor claimed to have found the millionth word in English. As many linguistic scholars have already pointed out, such as David Crystal, the doyen of word popularizers, the very exercise was a "load of rubbish". It became more so when the millionth word turned out to be the completely insipid choice of "Web 2.0", a selection made more out of self-interest and one that hardly fulfills the goals of highlighting the "diversity and dynamic growth of English" that was the supposed aim of the whole exercise.
This book turns out to be a prelude to all the needless hoopla. Payack claims himself not merely to be a word maven but a trivia fiend, and these qualities are on display here. He gives us numerous lists and groups of facts, no doubt culled from the archives of the Global Language Monitor. What he is forgotten is the basic principle that lists (and reams of trivia) are never interesting in themselves, but only hold value if they are relevant, and are fascinating only when they are out of the ordinary and not completely mundane.
What this book primarily consists of is groups and lists of English words organized according to various topics such as 'the silver screen', television' and 'celebrities' (including a random list of weird celebrity children names), most of which are pointless and mundane. A list of Top 25 'Bushisms' is hardly original though at least randomly funny. I hardly need a book like his to tell me that the top phrases associated with Hurricane Katrina were "disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse and end of the world" among others; nor was his Katrina word explainer really illuminating: explaining what cajun is was interesting, but do I really need a defintion of 'search and rescue', or 'superdome' or 'recovery' or 'sandbag'? Similarly, I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise and shock when he listed the frequently used tech words of 2007 as 'iPod, nano, cookie, megahertz, plasma, and blu-ray', among others.
The biggest disappointment is that when Payack veers away from the mundane, which is rare enough, he fails to go beyond listing various words and phrases to explaining how they might come about. So as an example, it was interesting to me that in Finnish English a "noobie" is a slang word for a rookie, or in Polish English "thanks for the mountain" roughly means thank you in advance. The problem is, Payack never does explain in any kind of detail how these terms might have come about, something that was supremely unsatisfying.
Worse is when Payack inundates us with completey pointless lists of facts, often without ever revealing their significance. So he gives us a list of the Top 25 Fashion Cities based on his company's predictive quantities indicator, saying that it is "surprising" but failing to reveal how he came by this list at all. More pointless are lists of every country and its capital city, or the names of powers of ten up to a googolplex and other reams of random information that anyone could probably find in an almanac. Within the random lists there are some nuggets that I found of genuine interest, such as a list of countries without a national language (now that is certainly something that never crossed my mind), but it was rather tiring sorting through all the chaff.
In sum, Payack's book is a disappointment in a field already chock full of books celebrating the rise of English as a global language. With such a broad and fascinating subject area, what is truly is amazing is that Payack has produced a book that contains so much that is insipid. Rather like Web 2.0 if you ask me. Global English, in all its varied diversity certainly deserves better.
22 June 2010
15 June 2010
World Quizzing Championships 2010
As my friends will know, I am a huge fan of all things trivia and quiz related, so one of the highlights of my year is the World Quizzing Championships. This year marked the second time that I officially took part in the competition - I had previously been a competitor in 2006 while studying in England, deciding to make the trip to Cardiff (where it was held) despite the fact that my final PPE exam was just two days later. That experience, as well as trying out the 2008 and 2009 sets of questions underlined that the World Quizzing Championships provides high quality but extremely challenging questions.
I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.
A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.
What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.
I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.
Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.
In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.
As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.
Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.
This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!
I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.
A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.
What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.
I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.
Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.
In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.
As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.
Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.
This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!
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