It is usually found in blog post comments, generally on the kind of blog post that consists of lists, the top ten this or that, screenshots of the top ten minimal websites for example, you’ve seen the kind of thing I mean. There is nearly almost always one comment that says:

Awesome round up, thanks guys.

Is it really? Does it inspire awe? According to the Random House Dictionary definition at dictionary.com, the word awe means:

an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like: in awe of God; in awe of great political figures.

Seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time or watching a baby being born would surely inspire awe. But the top ten websites for Photoshop tutorials? I don’t think so.

Jonathan believes that despite gender, age, race, religious and other differences, we humans have one thing in common,

a deep need to express ourselves.

However, he points out that

traditionally there is an imbalance between the desire we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen.

Enter the Internet. Now everyone has the opportunity to indulge in their moment of self expression.

His project ‘We feel fine’ scans blog websites for occurrences of the phrases: ‘I feel‘ or ‘I am feeling’ and grabs the sentence in which the phrase occurs. Collecting about 20,000 instances a day,  totalling roughly 7 and a half million feelings to date, it can work out the geographic location, age and gender of the author and from the location and time, can also figure out what the weather was doing when the person wrote the sentence.

The results are represented visually on his website by a series of swarming coloured dots and montage of images presented in a grid. You can click on a dot or image to read the emotion and also visit the website of the originator of the sentence.

You can search by feeling, gender, age, weather and location.  I did a search and found that there were no feelings at all displayed by Irish men in any age group this month, so no surprise there!

Read about the ‘we feel fine’ methodology, movements and click on the ‘Open Applet’ at the top of the page to see the world’s emotions in action.

Let him explain it to you himself in this video from TED.com:

So the next time you discuss your feelings on your blog, you will know that at least someone is listening.

Ah sher…

A likely scenario would be: two or more people meeting in a casual setting, such as in the street, or a shop. After the usual pleasantries have been exchanged,  someone will inevitably  mention the  recession or the weather or some other really depressing subject. The audience appear to be listening intently and agreeing with everything that’s being said, but they are more likely to be trying to a work out how to get away and as soon as the speaker pauses for breath, someone will save the day by saying:

Ah sher, you know yourself..

And that’s it. End of conversation. It’s a handy little one and allows everyone to continue on their way.

Why do they do it? I wanted to find out for once and for all. So, I trawled around for a while, read a few articles about phonetics and this is my take on it:

Remember learning about that thing in your throat that makes sounds as air passes across them, the vocal chords,  not those.. the other thing that opens and closes to makes the sound of consonants – the glottis? This is known as the glottis stop. Well, the glottis stays open  when you make a vowel sound which evidently causes a bit of a strain on the vocal chords so the ‘r’ sound is inserted to avoid this overload. Also, the pronunciation of two vowel sounds one after the other is apparently a bit of a no no in the English language because of the danger of the words not sounding as they should thereby, risking misinterpretation.

Now that I understand why they do it, I’m wondering why other English speaking nations don’t.
Are the English, as the originators of the language, the only nation to have learned how to preserve their vocal chords whilst speaking it? Or perhaps the rest of us are still subliminally rebelling against having to speak the language at all.

My suggestion is that it has evolved out of laziness, after all, it is easier to add the ‘r’ onto a word ending in a vowel. This might also explain why they drop the ‘r’ from words that end in ‘r’, say ’sikth’ instead of ’sixth’ ,  ‘ff’ in place of ‘th’ and use the unaspirated ‘h’.

I’m grand

..can have many hidden meanings. What it may mean to the speaker is,

Well, there’s a lot going on but nothing I want to discuss right now.

Whereas the recipient might infer,

Ask no more questions unless you have half a day to listen to me.

Or, it could simply mean that the person is, in fact, grand and the recipient will interpret this correctly if it is delivered with just the right amount of cheer.

Another common use of the word, and it is usually offered after the speaker has turned down the offer of assistance. For instance, a shop keeper might ask you if you need help selecting items from the shop. If your reply is that you’re OK and can select the items yourself, his response might be:

Ah, grand so

It is usually delivered with an air of nonchalance and it probably means that although he is relieved that you don’t need his help he is also slightly insulted that you haven’t accepted his offer.  It pretty-much closes off any further offers of help, unless it is requested,  in which case, the help will delivered in a slightly less friendly manner and you will never gain the full benefit of his expertise that you would have had you allowed him to help you in the first place.

However, if, in the above scenario, you had answered the shop keeper’s initial question with

Ah no thanks, I’m grand

…that would have been that, except in the case of the shop keeper not being Irish and only in the process of learning English. He may have wondered what you meant, and, with all that time he has on his hands not having to help you, gone straight to his English Dictionary to look up the definition of this word ‘grand’.  So the next time someone asks him how he is, he will be able to reply with confidence that he is:

large or impressive in size, extent or consequence, characterized by and attended with magnificence or display,  sumptuous, of great distinction and pretension,  dignified and haughty, designed to impress, very good, wonderful, comprehensive, complete, worthy of respect, fine, large and impressive in conception and execution, most important, chief.

It is out of the question

What exactly is outside the question? What was the question?..

Dad, can I borrow your car to go to the pub with my mates

…might be the type of question that could evoke a response like that, meaning

No with a capital N.

So if that is the question, what is outside it? We sent our team out to investigate.

It would appear that ‘question’ here is not the original one but it being ‘out of ..’  means that the subject is not open to futher discussion so no more questions will be considered.

Of course that’s what it is, bleedin’ obvious in’it.

According to Christine Ammer of The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms the phrase dates back the the 1700’s.

He was beside himself with excitement

This conjures up amusing images of something physically impossible. It must really confuse foreigners trying to learn English.

I decided to look for the origins to see if they ever made any sense and this is what I found:

In ancient times people believed that when people were under emotional stress, their soul would leave their body. The phrase appeared in the New Testament (Acts 26:24):

Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning makes thee mad.

Sources:

Dictionary of Word Origins” by Jordan Almond (Carol Publishing Group, Secaucus, N.J., 1998)

The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.