spelling

Dancing with the czars

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A few days ago, an Australian news website stated that Trump’s border tsar was going to Minneapolis. Another stated that Trump’s ‘border czar’ was going to Minneapolis.

I am far more familiar with the spelling tsar, and would only ever use either to refer to eastern European monarchs (tsar for Russian and czar for south Slavic), not people holding positions of power in US politics or public life. 

Czar is the earlier spelling (from Latin caesar (classically pronounced with a /k/, compare German kaiser)) and was more used until about 1900. The two spellings traded usage for most of the 20th century, then tsar has been the most common since about 1990. If anything tsar refers to Russian monarchs (compare Russian Царь) and czar refers those people in US politics or public life. With the resources I have access to, I can’t find when when czar was first used in that way. US industrial magnates and the Russian monarchy overlapped by several decades (compare also ‘barons of industry’).

I have never knowingly encounteredczar in reference to Australia or any other country. (Wikipedia says US and UK.) The second website saw fit to use inverted commas around the phrase. I can’t immediately think what term we would use in Australia to refer to a person of equivalent power. Maybe, fortunately, we don’t have (m)any, as the Australian prime minister has less power to make such appointments. Intriguingly, most similar words come from other languages: boss (Dutch), supremo (Italian or Spanish), honcho (Japanese) and mogul (Persian or Arabic). ‘White House Border Czar’ seems to be Tom Homan’s actual title (Wikipedia, citing the Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, 1 July 2025). The first news source has a further article in which the commentator writes “The ‘White House Border Tsar’ (yes, that is his actual title)”. 

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Reknown

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An article on a major open-source site included two references to either “a renown actor” or “a reknown actor” (or some other artistic occupation). I didn’t save the quotation or URL, and have forgotten the exact article, but that doesn’t stop me investigating and speculating. If I have encountered this before, I haven’t noticed it. I also haven’t used renowned in any of my posts here.

Both are wrong. Renown is a noun. A noun can modify another noun. We talk about a movie actor or a stage actor, but not about a fame actor (it’s got to be a famous actor). Reknown isn’t a word, but if is was, it would be an adjective; compare “a known actor”. (Pages for Mac and WordPress both red-underline it.)

Renown isn’t about being known, well-known or re-known. It comes from Old French renom (noun) and renomer (verb) to make famous, and Latin re- + nōmināre to name. Renowned people are re-named, not re-known.

Not surprisingly, there are examples around. Dictionary.com has five example sentences for renown, one of which uses it as an adjective: “Even amid Welsh rugby’s renown tribalism, this news will not have been celebrated by regional rivals” (the BBC, no fewer). Google Ngrams shows reknown expert, scientists, artist, experts, although at lower usage than renowned scholar, author, artists, city, warrior, men, general, hero, name, knight. Its results for “renown_ADJ *_NOUN” are garbled; the first result is renown hath, which is clearly noun + verb. A general Google search shows widespread results for “renown actor”, including major sites and enough results for “reknown actor” to say that it’s out there. 

So will either renown actor or reknown actor become standard, alongside or instead of renowned actor? I doubt it. The word just doesn’t have enough usage, alongside renowned,  famous and other synonyms. I can see why people would use either or both, though.

I’m also puzzled by how renown (noun) became renowned (adj) without renown (verb) in between (renowned is, at face value a past-participle verb). There’s also famed, but the verb to fame did exist (and famed is less common than famous). If the verb to renown existed, I can’t find any reference to it. Maybe the fact that there’s a Latin and French verb in the history is enough.

Κιμπερλυ

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A man in a train had a large tattoo on the outside of his forearm reading Κιμπερλυ. I could decipher Kimperly and assumed that was meant to be the name most often spelled Kimberley (more often a female name and less often male). Greek has both π (p) and β (b), so I would spell it Κιμβερλυ (or Κιμβερλι). Google’s first result for Κιμβερλυ is Ελληνική Βικιπαίδεια (Greek Wikipedia)’s page for Κίμπερλι Γκίλφοϊλ (Kimberley Guilfoyle, the US Ambassador to Greece) (spelled with π). Elsewhere there are occurrences of Κιμπερλυ, Κιμβερλυ, Κιμπερλι and Κιμβερλι, so there is no settled transliteration and this man’s Κιμπερλυ is not immediately a mistake. (Chinese character tattoo fails are well-attested, but I even less knowledge of Chinese characters and couldn’t decipher them on a train.)

IGIN, gin and Jin

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In Seoul, I saw many advertisements for the products of a company called IGIN, including fruit tonics and fruit gins. So is IGIN pronounced as in ‘gin’ or as in ‘begin’? In English, it’s impossible to say (see also the debate about ‘gif’). But the hangeul text underneath clearly shows that it is as in ‘begin’, being spelled 아이긴 (a-i-gin). In hangeul there is no ambiguity – either it’s ㄱ (g) or ㅈ (j) and there’s no way that ㄱ is ever pronounced ㅈ (though sometimes it’s pronounced closer to k).

Another ad has Jin from BTS (the only way I knew that was that his name appears under his photo) spruiking Jin Ramen, with the text saying something like (in Korean) “Does Jin like Jin Ramen?” “진짜!”

Further research shows that there is a connection: Jin is the co-founder of IGIN. Calling it 아이진 would have been a double pun on his name and the product.

Kangaroo powder

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I noticed a packet of 콩가루 (kong-ga-ru) on the kitchen table. For all the world that looked like it should be kangaroo, but obviously wasn’t. I asked my wife, who told me that it is soybean powder (Wikipedia’s article about the Japanese equivalent). Kangaroo is 캥거루 (kaeng-geo-ru). (I would spell it 캥가루, kaeng-ga-roo). The first recorded spelling is kanguru (Sir Joseph Banks, 12 July 1770) and the reconstructed Guugu Yimithirr spelling is gangurru, referring to eastern grey kangaroos.

Adapting a recent comment on another post: If we don’t know the Guugu Yimithirr rules of pronunciation, we shouldn’t try to use Guugu Yimithirr words.

A military coupe

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A document referred to a “military coupe”, which is either a classic car used by the generalissimo or a typo. Coup (koo), coupe and coupé are ultimately related, meaning “strike, cut” from French coup, couper, colp, Late Latin colpus, Latin colaphus, and Ancient Greek κόλαφος, kólaphos. A coupé (which was a carriage before it was a car) is “cut off” compared to a sedan of the same make  and a coup d’état (now more often simply a coup) is a strike against the state. 

I would pronounce coupé as koo-pay, but would be genuinely uncertain how to pronounce coupe with no further context. While coupe cars aren’t part of my personal experience, I am familiar enough with the koop pronunciation via The Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel (first)/Chuck Berry (later). (Tangentially, I once knew someone with the surname Coupe, pronounced kowp.)

A Google search for “military coupe” (in quotation marks for an exact match) first asks if I mean “military coup” (not right now), then shows a scattering of results from semi-official news sources, referring on the first page to Myanmar, Ivory Coast,  Papua New Guinea and Burkina Faso.

any thing, any where, any time

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A removalist’s van promises to move “any thing, any where, any time”. 

There are intriguing similarities and differences between any thing, any where and any time, and anything, anywhere and anytime. They each began as two words, but anything and anywhere are now much more common (and any where is very uncommon), but any time is still moderately more common than anytime. (In many contexts, there is a strong progression from two words to hyphenated, to one word.)

Each can be used as a pronoun or adverb, but there are constraints on each. Test yourself with these (some of which are ungrammatical and some questionable):

Any thing/Anything you read on this blog is interesting.
You can read any thing/anything on this blog.
You can read this blog anything. 
Is this blog any thing/anything like Language Log?
Any where/anywhere you read this blog is interesting.
You can read any where/anywhere on this blog.
You can read this blog any where/anywhere.
Is this blog any where/anywhere near as good as Language Log?
Any time/Anytime you read this blog is interesting.
You can read any time/anytime on this blog.
You can read this blog any time/anytime. 
Is this blog any time/anytime like Language Log?

Thing and time are both nouns, but while any thing/anything is more likely to be used as a (pro)noun, any time/anytime is more likely to be used as an adverb. Where is an adverb, and anywhere is, not surprisingly, more likely to be used as an adverb. 

I searched my blog post draft document and found 179 instances of anything (including those in this post), and one of any thing, a quotation from the King James/Authorised version of the Bible: “If ye shall ask any thing in my name”; and 45 of anywhere and none of any where apart from this post. My usage of any time and anytime is less common, and mixed, tending towards any time: 

I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon
a book about whaling at any time up to the mid-20th century 
A captain can switch the bowlers around at any time. [This was actually for a Facebook comment after an American friend expressed her perplexity about cricket (despite her mother having been Australian, and her spending some time in Australia in her youth).]
it sounds remarkably optimistic of Koreans to say so at any time
[it’s] presumably not going to go away any time soon
One [Greek student] especially said “Oooh, is Greek word” any time we encountered a Greek word
I can now usually find almost any song from almost any time
I won’t be taking a flight to Sydney any time soon.
A real enlightened teacher is intense and they could care less what you think about anything at any time since you are lost in illusions. Frederick Lenz [A quotation]
So, could care less is out there, and isn’t going away any time soon.

and, conversely:

Not that I’m likely to be in a position to call her anything anytime soon.

Clearly, anything and anywhere are now standard, and any time/anytime is still in a state of flux (though at any time is a fixed expression). I can’t give you any definitive advice between any time and anytime without more research and thought.

Another removalist’s van promises “MOVE YOUR FURNITURE IN VERY AFFORDABLE PRICE”.

It’s its or its it’s

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Late last year Language Log had a post about about a movie titled Rebel with a Clause, about a linguaphile named Ellen Jovin who sets up a “grammar table” in public places, at which passerbys ask questions, tell stories and voice their complaints about “grammar”. I use quotations marks because at least some of the questions aren’t about grammar (but are about language). The first pair in the trailer ask about “the proper way to use y’all … does the apostrophe go before or after the a?”. It goes before; it is a contraction of you all and the apostrophe replaces the ou. But this question is about punctuation, which of course intersects with grammar, especially in written language, but we could expunge our written language of all punctuation and still have grammar, and spoken language doesn’t have punctuation at all.

I was surprised that y’all v ya’ll is a question at all, but there are various discussions of it on the internet. Y’all isn’t used much in Australian English, and certainly not by the people I interact with.* Perhaps people are getting misled by ’ll as the contraction of will. Ya’ll = you will???? I don’t think anyone uses that. (Yall have a good time = You all have a good time or You will have a good time????) (*During my first stay in Korea a young American woman colleague came into the staff room, saw a box of donuts and said “Who all’s been to Dunkin’ Donuts?”. I asked whether that was standard ussage for her, and she said yes. Possible answer: “We all (w’all) have been to Dunkin’ Donuts”?)

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éclaircissement and other English words

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Earlier this week Faizan Zaki from Dallas won the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee, correctly spelling éclaircissement (the clearing up of something obscure: enlightenment). 

My first thought was “congratulations”. My second thought was “That’s not an English word …”. But there’s nothing on the Scripps website or in the official rules which specifies that the words in the competition will or must be “English”. The pool of words is drawn from Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, which simply shifts the selection of “English” words to MW rather than Scripps. MWUD doesn’t specify “English” it is title, but is billed as “the largest, richest dictionary of American English”. 

What is an “English” word? Simply mentioning or even using (once) a foreign word in an otherwise English sentence doesn’t make it English. There must be some pattern of use as an English word. Some thoughts I have are: if a word is written with foreign spelling or diacritics, is pronounced in a foreign way, is only used in foreign contexts, either takes foreign morphology (noun plurals, verb tenses or adjective comparatives or superlatives) or doesn’t take English morphology, and is used with the same meaning as in a foreign language and has a perfectly good English equivalent, then it’s a foreign word. If it is written with English spelling (with no diacritics, obviously), pronounced in an English way, used in English(-speaking  country) contexts, takes English morphology and has a (if only slightly) different meaning, then it’s probably an English word. Obviously there’s a sliding scale, because some of those may apply but not others.

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