Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

I could never understand how a word like do-gooder could be pejorative. I would like to think of myself as someone who does good and find that attitude laudable rather than damnable. Only WordNet, compiled by the Princeton psychologist, George Miller, allows a positive take on this word. Here is what the best dictionaries have to say about this word:

• American Heritage: “A naive idealist who supports philanthropic or humanitarian causes or reforms.”
• Encarta: “[S]omebody who sincerely tries to help others, but whose actions may be unwelcome.”
• Merriam-Webster: “[A]n earnest often naive humanitarian or reformer.”
• Oxford English: “A well-meaning, active, but unrealistic philanthropist or reformer; one who tries to do good.”
• WordNet: “[S]omeone devoted to the promotion of human welfare and to social reforms.”

I must be missing something here. My attitude has always been that supporting philanthropic and humanitarian causes, and sincerely trying to help others, are neither naïve nor unrealistic, but are undertakings that recommend decent men and women. (I think I read this somewhere in the Holy Scriptures.)

Well, do-gooder is a contrived compound. The head of a compound (do) should be on the right, not the left. Maybe this arrangement negates the word’s meaning and a regular English compound, good-doer, antonym of the obiquitous evildoer, bears the positive meaning. 

But guess what? Although all dictionaries have room for evildoer, good-doer is found in none of them excepting only the Oxford English Dictionary. Its entry shows that this word thrived outside the United States at least up to 1887.

Maybe the US media has had a hand in the promotion of do-gooder over good-doer, given their preference for bad news events over good ones. In fact, the earliest recorded instance of the word do-gooder was in a 1927 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (January 18 14/5): “The dogooder…is all the hokum, all the blather and all the babble of the modern so-called ‘social movement’.”

So the word originated as a specific slur against progressives used by conservatives. This is interesting, knowing as we do even today, that doing the right thing is considered at best naïve among our corporate leaders, who so adamantly oppose the altruism implicit in such social programs as gun control, social security, and universal education and health care. 

We do know that language reflects cultural attitudes; racism and sexism is easy to spot in English and other languages. This connotations of do-gooder and the absence of good-doer at least suggest that the lexical and conceptual deck may be stacked against the Forces of Good in the United States.

Yesterday Martin Kirk raised this issue:

“I am trying to find out whether there is a word to describe the written linguistic situation where a word is unintentionally misspelled, resulting in another correct word which makes sense in the context but is the opposite of that intended in an ironic way, e.g. cease the opportunity instead of seize the opportunity or relive the pain instead of relieve the pain.”

“I have quries this with the Oxford Dictionary Press’s ‘question line’ and they suggest that I am describing a malapropism. I do not agreee withn this. Have you any better sugestions.”

I can think of a couple of points in this connection. First, however, remember that languages are spoken or signed. Writing is a superficial attempt at symbolizing what is spoken. Fewer than 2000 of the world’s approximately 6700 languages and dialects have functioning writing systems. While writing has some effect on language change (adding the T in the pronunciation of often), it is marginal to the point of being trivial.

The question, then, resolves to one of whether mispronunciation leads to permanent language change. The mispronunciation of courtesy led to curtsy and, if you follow our Good Word series, you know that ornery was once a mispronunciation of ordinary. These words are examples of phonological reduction, very common in language; we see it all the time in contractions.

This process is not usually referred to as malapropism, which is usually the mispronunciation of a word so that it sounds like another, e.g. a fire distinguisher or a wolf in cheap clothing. My favorite was actually written in a freshman thesis at Bucknell some years ago: a devil-make-hair attitude.

The words you mention (relive - relieve, seize - cease) are only accidentally similar and are wholly unrelated derivationally and historically. The only similar normal historical change I know of is a change in pronunciation that leads to the loss of the relationship of a derivation to its base or origin. I call them words with hidden words within them for lack of a term and they seem to have caught only my eye (or, more properly, ear).

I’m thinking now of words like disease which today is unrelated semantically to ease, the word it was derived from. No one out of the cloth associates atonement with its origin, the phrase at one. We don’t think of business as simply the activity of being busy any more.

So far as I know, I’m the only one writing about such words and I haven’t named them yet. What do you think we should call them?

Well, the book is out and available at

Amazon.com
Abe Books
Amazon.co.uk
Alibris.com
The Kindle version at Amazon.com

Sorry I didn’t get this out earlier. Watch PBS tonight (February 26, 200) for what promises to be an interesting program on dying languages.

The Linguists

Thursday, February 26, 2009 10 - 11:00 pm - PBS

This special chronicles the race of two scientists — David Harrison and Greg Anderson — to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India and Bolivia, the linguists confront head-on the very forces silencing languages: racism, humiliation and violent economic unrest. Their journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, revealing communities at risk when a language dies. (CC, Stereo, HD, 5.1)

David Ross wrote the past Thursday:

“Alas! The demise of the adverbial form is at hand:

‘NEW! False Friend Riddles. Riddles made up of English sentences that contain a foreign word spelled identical to an English word.’

Methinks “ly” will eventually disappear from English dictionaries, as its dearth is already ubiquitous in the vernacular.

David may be right; denizens of the southern US tier of states often omit this suffix: “Harley, he talks real good” is common enough down there though still considered substandard. In that region, at least, English might be moving the way of German which does not add endings to mark adverbs. Since endings are added to adjectives in that language, omitting an ending is the mark of an adverb.

However, I think something else is at work in the example David cites and I don’t think it is disappearing though, I must admit, it is poorly understood. At the time I was examining it, back in the 80s, no one had even noticed it, let alone researched it. If any work on this aspect of adverbs has been done since, I am unaware of it.

The English adverbial rule seems to be a bit more complicated than “add the suffix -ly to and qualitative adjective”. We know that adverbs are restricted to qualitative adjectives that refer to qualities (can be compared) and not to others. We can not make adverbs out of words like rural, urban, English which can not be compared. But the rule seems to be more complicated than this.

The rule in English seems to be something like this: “Add -ly to any qualitative adjective that does not have a predicate modifier”, i.e. a modifier that must come AFTER the adjective. Here are some examples.

The door shut quickly.
The door shut quick as a flash
NOT: The door shut quickly as a flash.

Bill left subsequently.
Bill left subsequent to Jill’s arrival.
NOT: Bill left subsequently to Jill’s arrival.

The jar opened easily.
The jar opened easy as pie.
NOT: The jar opened easily as pie.

Now, in choosing these examples, I have been careful not to confuse them with simple predicate adjectives like the one in this example:

Bill returned shortly (adverb)
Bill returned short of breath (predicate adjective)

The second sentence here contains an adjective modifying Bill and not the verb returned. It is in a category of predicate adjectives like Bill returned wet, sick, wounded. However, the evidence indicates that in English, if a true adverb has a predicate modifier, a modifier that must come after it, the suffix -ly is regularly, which is to day, grammatically, properly omitted.

Returning now to the example David cited from the alphaDictionary website, I must admit that the same example with the suffix -ly doesn’t sound as bad as the examples I cited above: “…a foreign word spelled identically to an English word.” However, to my ear, the version on the website still offends my grammar organ less. What do you think?

Glennis, Pat, Robert Patterson, and Rohn Rohnski are the first four subscribers to our daily Good Word to remind me that our word for today, tucker, is a slang term for “grub, food” in Australia and New Zealand (but it is only 7 AM at this point). Here are some of the examples they sent it:

• We’ll go and have some tucker now.
• The tucker the farm cook dished up was grouse, mate.
• I’m hungry, time for some tucker.

(I like the adjective grouse, too.)

Tucker, in fact, has too many meanings: someone who tucks in sewing, a frilly neckpiece dandies of the past wore (later worn in concert with a bib), and an advanced US car that came out briefly in the 40s and was quashed by the big auto manufacturers (see the movie by the same name).

When we come across such words, given the limited space we have, we choose what we think is the most interesting (and it was a close call between the verb sense we chose and the noun sense mentioned by our friends from down under since speakers in North American and the UK are generally unaware of the NZ usage).

Since the noun in this sense is a different word, we may do it some day. I’ve put it on the list. We haven’t had a good Aussie word in a long time.

I often come to words in the news long after they are in the news (the price of thinking things through before writing). Today I had a stray thought about our president’s reference to himself as a decider rather than a decision-maker. (Don’t ask why this word popped in my head while I was working out.)

Last April, almost a year ago today, Mr. Bush declared, “But I’m the decider and I decide what’s best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense” The issue here is: What is wrong with decider? Someone who rides is a rider, someone who fights is a fighter, someone who plods is a plodder. So why is someone who decides a decision-maker? And why is decider funny?

The answer—I think—is sociolinguistic. We all make decisions every day and in that sense we are all deciders. That sense is trivial, so trivial we never use the word although it is a perfectly legitimate word found in most dictionaries. The word is used mostly in sports for a play that decides the final score and the winner.

The only sense in which this word is really needed is to refer to someone who regularly decides for other people and that person is usually in such an august managerial position that a trivial word will not do. Instead of using decided to refer to such panjandra, we go to the phrase, “make decisions”, and use the nominalization of that phrase: decision-maker.

The president’s use of decider, then, was funny because it trivialized what he was talking about: his own role as a decision-maker for the nation. Maybe you already knew that. I just figured it out this morning.

Today’s Good Word, predator, contains the following line: “. . . adults who try to seduce our children on line.”

Paul Ogden, one of the daily Good Word editors, commented that the spelling online 1.7 billion hits on Google (that’s right—billion) while on line gets a mere 450 million.

My view is that on line is a slightly idiomatic prepositional phrase (PP) while online and on-line are forced adjectives from the PP. In the phrase above, “children on line” (as opposed to “online store”) we need a PP rather than an adjective, which would imply some quality the children have.

To test my sentiment, Paul searched “I am online” and “I am on line” and “I am on-line” and came up with these results: “I am on line” or “I am on-line” gets 38,000 Google hits. “I am online” gets 444,000, indicating the flow of this issue is not following my sentiments.

This issue is part of a broader one on which I wrote while still an academician with time to research it in greater depth. English is a very odd language in that it allows PPs to be converted into adjectives. Over-the-counter drugs, off-the-shoulder dress, around-the-world cruise, on-line activities are all accepted slang conversions of PPs into adjectives. We know that they are adjectives because PPs in English always follow and never precede the noun they modify while adjectives behave in just the opposite manner.

Now, I am not a prescriptive grammarian; grammar should be flexible and change over time. However, it always changes in a consistent, rule-governed manner. Moreover, the very purpose of grammar, the set of rules which governs the way we speak, is to provide consistencies that we can depend on in the interpretation of what we say and hear. In this case, “I am on line now” and “I use an on-line store” would be consistent with all the other PP adjectives out there.

I said that these hyphenated adjectives are slang even though all the examples I cited seem perfectly normal, often used in fairly formal contexts. This is explained by the difference between “grammatical” and “acceptable”. Words like stick-to-it-iveness, one-ups-manship—even talkative with its Germanic stem and Latin suffixes—are all ungrammatical in that they are inconsistent with the rules of English grammar. However, they have been accepted because they are either amusing or useful.

There are lots of idiomatic exclusions and maybe online has become a ’stick-to-it-iveness’ adjective already. The PP on line is itself slightly idiomatic since it cannot be used with the or a, so maybe nothing is at stake here. However, so long as the point of grammar is consistency in speech, the consistent way to handle on line is without a hyphen when it is clearly functioning as a PP and with a hyphen when it is functioning as an adjective in attributive (prenominal) position. The form with neither a space nor hyphen is probably the result of our adjusting to URLs that generally ignore them.

Mary Jane Stoneburg, one of our Good Word editors (along with Paul Ogden) complained about the use of the objective case with than in our rendition of aborigine for Thursday’s (December 7, 2006) Good Word. The offending passaage reads, “…Europeans generally colonize areas inhabited by nations less advanced than them.”  Now Carolyn Whitaker has written in agreement with Mary Jane, so I feel that I must place my neck publicly on the grammar-rule chopping block.  Here goes.

If you check the US and British dictionaries (including the OED) you will find that “than” is accepted as both a preposition and conjunction and, as a preposition, it requires the objective case. The OED says that it is only a conjunction but is used with the objective case of pronouns, an odd conclusion at odds with English grammar.

The earliest citation of this usage appears to be 1560 in the Geneva Bible, Proverbs xxvii:3: “A fooles wrath is heauier then them bothe”. A few years later it appeared in Agrippa Of the vanitie and uncertaintie of artes and sciences , translated by James Sandford 1569:165 “We cannot resiste them that be stronger then vs.” So this usage has been around a long time.

Nor is it uncommon. Prepositions come from a wide variety of sources: verbs (save, except), adjectives (near, nearest, like), adverbs (aboard, outside, out), participles (following, concerning), conjunctions (than, as), even prepositional phrases (instead, alongside).

The British try to keep than as a pure conjunction but the examples in the OED, drawn from various sources over the centuries, show, not even they can resist this fairly recent change. Nor do conjunctions govern cases like the objective. I see nothing wrong with using than as a preposition, given motley origins and histories of prepositions in English.

In response to Wednesday’s blog, Lydia Rivlin related this story in her e-mail this morning:

“Your item on insulting words, in which you point out that no sooner are they banned than they are replaced with new coinages, reminds me of an example from the Falklands war.  British soldiers started referring to the very unsophisticated Falklanders as “Bennies”.  Benny was a slow-witted, ill dressed character from a notoriously cheaply produced British soap opera called “Crossroads”.  When the officers heard of this, naturally they forbade any further use of the term Benny whereupon the soldiers switched to calling the locals “S.Bs” [”still Bennies”].

At least the battle for the Falkland Islands went better for the British than their battle with “Benny”.  Euphemisms have never lost a battle and never will.  They outnumber all the armies of all the countries on planet Earth.  Forget about it!

The most ridiculous aspect of taking them on in the first place is that even if they could be defeated, their defeat would have no effect on the attitude that spawns them.