Affect and Effect

This is supposed to be a blog about my life in New Zealand as if life here is inherently different from life in Scotland.  Now that I have lived here for six months every year since 2005 it's become apparent to me that life is life wherever you are.  This blog is really just my notebook on the half of of my life which happens here in New Zealand.  It's not peculiarly Kiwi it's just life.

Did you know (of course you didn't, why would you?) that affect is one of the most searched-for words in Oxford Dictionaries Online.  That is probably because a lot of people are confused about the difference between affect and effect, two words which have almost the same spelling, but very different meanings.

I seem to have lived for 69 year without being confused but recently I have had to stop and think which is which.

 

The key thing to remember is that affect is typically used as a verb:

• His time at school had affected his outlook on life.

On the other hand, effect is most commonly used as a noun:

• What were the effects of your schooling on your outlook on life.

Hopefully my natural instinct as to which is which will now return.  I hope that I haven't suddenly confused you.

XMAS

Do you dislike the term 'Xmas'?  Do you know why you dislike it?

I disliked it because I thought it was a lazy abbreviation which avoided the reason for the term Christmas with the emphasis on Christ and popularly associated with a trend towards materialism and non-observance of the particular cultural and religious ritual.

As I have come to realise in life I was, once again, wrong.

The history of the word “Xmas” is actually more respectable — and fascinating — than you might suspect.  Apparently it was first used in the mid 1500s. X is the Greek letter “chi” the initial letter in the word Χριστός which, much to my surprise, means “Christ.” X has been an acceptable representation of the word “Christ” for hundreds of years. This device is known as a Christogram (symbol of Christ). The mas in Xmas is the Old English word for “mass.”  

 

I think I still prefer Christmas though.

Sarchasm and Other Words

Anyone who has read my blogs for any length of time probably also knows my brother Scriptor's blogs too and also knows that words are important to us both.  Recently shabby girl had a wonderful post entitled Funny... .  One of the many words quoted was  "Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it."  I think it's one of the cleverest and funniest sets of words I've read for a long time - perhaps that I've ever read.

Fresh Eggs

I don't know how many times I have driven past a farm and seen the sign "Fresh Eggs".  The 'for sale' is generally assumed.  It's always seemed to me rather a silly sign because no one is actually going to advertise stale eggs for sale.  I had to buy sliced bread the other day because I was making sandwiches for me and the children when we were going to Splash Planet for the day.  When I read the packaging it struck me as being even sillier than the eggs:

After all you cannot actually bake stale bread.

Trundlers by any Other Name

They is funny things is words.

Here a shopping trolley or a shopping cart is a trundler. In North America it's a buggy. In France it's a chariot but you would expect it to be something different in France. Actually in France the latest ones (which I've never seen anywhere else) are vastly superior to the universal wire version.

Of course as languages develop in separate countries differences appear. As CJ learned from his American colleague 'waste paper basket' which is used in the UK is the modern form and 'trash can' is not a modern Americanism but the old English which, for once, the Americans have not altered.

After all, when speaking of England and America ‘Two nations separated by a common language.’ sometimes the inquirer asks, ‘Was it Wilde or Shaw?’ The answer appears to be: both. In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source. The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest (November 1942). And that's just a few of the attributions.

But, hey, I was really just talking of New Zealand and trundlers. So if you ever want to park your shopping trolley in this country (a long way if you are in the Coop in Stornoway) you just look for the Trundler Park.