Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Chris Stewart of South Africa has been thinking long and deep about words this week and the result has been short e-mail essays that raise interesting issues that should be shared. Here is another comment from Chris:

“Over the weekend I was in an idle moment pondering two unrelated yet somehow connected things. The first was how different words are adopted in different countries to denote the same thing (e.g. you would say hood and trunk to describe parts of your car, whereas I would call them the bonnet and boot). The second is how sometimes the shortest words have the widest variety of usages.”

“The word tap sprang to mind as being a rich example, though I guess you would call it a faucet [up North but spigot down South–RB]. It is marvellous how English has adopted myriad words in order to be able on the one hand to precisely describe exquisite nuances, obfuscate, aggrandise or wax poetic, and on the other to be terse, concise and to the point. Plus, it is impressively economical in being able to reuse words to such an extent.”

The linguistic phenomenon is that the most commonly used words tend to change more slowly than infrequently used words. The most frequently used words tend to be short, like come, have, go, and all have several meanings as well as several irregular forms, e.g. go: go, goes, went, gone. Tap has a pretty straightforward set of forms but a wide range of meanings as a noun and a verb.

English once had a rich set of prefixes and suffixes which helped create new words out of old. Most of those have, for reasons we have yet to fathom, been lost. English is becoming more and more like Chinese, which has not prefixes or suffixes. This means that we simply add new senses to old words, senses that are only discernable in context.

The part of the computer that stores data is simply called memory since we no longer use the location suffix -ery (otherwise it would be a datary or informationery). The electronic connection between two web pages is called a link, even though it bears no resemblance to a chain. Highly complex systems of transistors are called chips because the originally were small.

You would think that we would reach a point of overload when we could barely understand each other because each word has so many meanings. But we seem to do OK because, when a problem emerges, we simply to go another language and copy a word from its lexicon. As I have said many times before in the histories of the Good Words, English is a swashbuckling pirate on the high seas of world languages, hauling in any word it needs, often “borrowing” the same word several times over the course of its development, giving each variant a distinct meaning. 

So maybe the accumulation of meanings on words without prefixes and suffixes to distinguish those meanings, forces us onto the bounding lexical main.

Brian Thornton wants to know if I can explain the use or misuse of the adverb off: should we use it alone or with the preposition of. Should we say, ”The cat jumped off the table” or “off of the table”?

Well, maybe I can at least define the problem. The adverb off is in the process of becoming a preposition. As an adverb, its object requires the preposition of: “The button flew off [of my shirt].” As this word becomes more and more a preposition itself, the additional preposition of becomes redundant: “The button flew [off my shirt]”. (I used square brackets here to set of the prepositional phrases.)

I am speaking only of the adverb off. Like many words in English, this word has several functions. It is also a prefix (an off-white dress), and adjective (the lights are off), and a verbal particle (Lenny took his hat off). It started out as an adverb, though it apparently was never happy in that function and hence is currently changing careers. While it is in the process of change, we should use whichever form those around us are using; both forms are correct.

This historical shift is not unusual. Out is another example of an adverb becoming a preposition. Out, too, is still used mostly with a preposition to mark its objects: “Melvin came out [of the house]”, “Lucinda Head is out [of her mind]”. It has picked up a new meaning, however, “out through”, and in that sense, of cannot be used: “The dog sniffed his food once and flew [out the door]”. Out is lagging materially behind off in its career shift but it seems to have begun the journey.

Many other adverbs are prepositions and conjunctions: after and before may be all three:

     • I’ve never seen him before. (Adverb)
     • I saw him before he grew the beard. (Conjunction)
     • I knew her before the war. (Preposition)

I’m sure you can think of others. Nothing amiss here: multifunctional words that belong to several categories are commonplace in all languages.

Language is not stagnant. It is changing all the time. Language change is not simply the coming and going of words; that is the least interesting change in language. Words are shifting from one category to another, the categories themselves are changing, syntactic structure is changing, juggling words as it goes along. All this is taking place now right under our noses, where tongues and lips are constantly churning out grammar and vocabulary, producing nuances that eventually add up to new dialects and even languages.

Lewisburg now has a new diner, replete with waitresses that call eveyone “hon.” Like true diners, where the cuisine never exceeds the flavor of the meatloaf, its menu is traditional diner food cooked in traditional diner ways by two recent immigrees from Mexico (no, not Mexico, PA—the original one). Since Lewisburg is a cultural center of Central Pennsylvania, however, our diner has been experimenting with some new creations.

You wouldn’t want to miss the meatloaf cordon bleu: meatloaf with several slices of chopped ham slatered with Cheez Whiz. It could also be called a Philly chopped steak. I tried it and was surprised to discover that it tastes like—last week’s meatloaf. I guess Cheez Whiz doesn’t cover up as much flavor as it once did.

Next time I want to try the Monte Crisco sandwich. They don’t use mayonaise on this one, so it shouldn’t break my diet. And guess what they warm up the meatloaf in.

I thought I would just drop this brief note to let everyone know that life in the slow lane isn’t speeding up.

The latest Beltway clichés are beginning to irritate me and I can no longer resist the inclination to complain about them. “Put some skin in (the game)” brings up memories of falling and scraping knees, elbows, heads, and the like. 

This cliché replaces “ante up”, which replaced “cough up”, whose demises please no one more than me. ”Put some skin in” is milder than “give a pound of flesh”, donated by Shakespeare but still it is pretty raw. “Ante up” comes from poker; it means literally to put more money in the game and hence is more fitting for the financial crisis than “putting in more skin” (unless, of course, you’ve been skinned by Bernie Madoff).

OK, the image is bad, so what is better? Let’s try “give/get a haircut”, as to give GM employees or AIG managers a haircut. Well, that isn’t a graphic image of an injury but then it doesn’t really imply a contribution to the cost of resurrecting our economic institutions. Hair cuts are something we all get on a regular basis and implies willingly giving up something we consider superfluous. It implies no kind of sacrifice at all which is the very point of these metaphors.

This is what comes of ignoring our poets and listening to the faces on radio and TV that talk faster than they think. Clichés, of course, are simply metaphors that catch on and are repeated ad nauseum by those who cannot come up with their own. I’m sure at least one poet in our midst has dreamed up a better metaphor than the ones that are morphing into clichés even as I click away now.

Donnella dropped a note yesterday, writing: “I’m hearing “guaranteed bonus” in the news a lot, referring to the AIG situation. It seems to me an oxymoron. I understand there are legal concerns but the word bonus must have a different meaning in a contract. I’d like to see your take on this.”

It would seem that money-addicts have invaded and taken control of most large US corporations. The compensation packages they have been giving themselves became more and more obscene as the years lumbered by.

Typical large corporation heads started with outlandish salaries plus stock warranties or options but no amount could satisfy the money addicts, so “(guaranteed) bonuses” were added outside salaries, probably to becloud the issue of total compensation. The term “guaranteed bonus” is not an oxymoron like “jumbo shrimp” or “pretty ugly”, but simply a contradiction of terms.

We all know what a bonus is: it is additional compensation given for outstanding performance, finishing a project ahead of schedule or overfulfilling a contract. So we can’t know ahead of time that a bonus will be due. However, people whose sole measure of worth and accomplishment is income, need money beyond what stock holders might be willing to endure if their compensation were reported as a lump-sum salary. So, “bonuses” were built into contracts, that is, guaranteed.

The current euphemism for them is retention bonuses, under the assumption that without them, an executive would move on to another company. A retention bonus actually sounds more like a bribe. Now, the absurdity of bribing the total failures at AIG to stay and continue undoing the company seems to escape those who tender this argument.

The argument goes on: only those who led AIG into its mess have the skills and knowledge to lead it out of its mess. It strikes me that these people are far more likely to make mistakes of the same magnitude leading the company back toward solvency that they made leading it flatly into insolvency. Maybe logic has changed since I was an undergraduate.

In all probability, if bonuses returned to what the word means, stock options were curtailed, and salaries were reasonable, large corporations would fare much better. Why? Because fewer money addicts and more people with a long-term commitment to the company would apply for executive positions. People who are as smart and experienced as the current executives of AIG are not hard to find—many are sitting right there in the company now.

Building a net worth of $100 million would still be possible, but only as a result of continuing excellence in management over a significant period. A $50 million per year compensation package and $150 severance payment regardless of performance discourages any commitment to a company beyond the first year.

The newly defined bonuses in the obscenely high compensation packages for corporate executives are therefore bad capitalism. They play to only the basest motivation toward excellence, the one that attracts money addicts. Moreover, without complex compensation packages, we would need far fewer absurd euphemisms like “retention bonus” to becloud the discussion of corporate leadership.

Bob Meinig raised a question yesterday that comes up now and then. It concerns the placement of quotation marks vis-a-vis periods and commas in our Good Words and on the website.

At yourDictionary.com I decided to use the US style of placing commas and periods inside quotations marks no matter what. This bothered me because the US system leads to confusion. The US punctuation style would look like this: …the meaning of the word is “to dance.” This is illogical because the period is not part of the meaning of the word which the quotation marks set off. When I give entire sentences, where the period is a part of the sentence, the period goes inside the quotation marks: “The dog began to dance.”

This is the style of punctuation used throughout the non-US English-speaking world and also the style of most scientific journals in the US, certainly those intended for a world-wide audience. Since I am an unrepentant scholar widely published in such journals, this style comes most naturally to me and—it’s logical!

So, when I started up alphaDictionary.com, where I often argue a point of grammar on the basis of consistency, I decided to go with the logical style. I honestly expected to change my mind and do a simple search and replace to change back to the US style. I knew that many visitors, particularly those who consider the entire planet the US, would think me ignorant of the rules of punctuation.

But I never did. I don’t know why. It would be a problematic job going through the entire website now to make a correction. I did decide to use the US style in my new book, “The 100 Funniest Words in English”, just to avoid the hassle this side the Atlantic and Pacific. Hmmm. I guess someone could take that as inconsistent, couldn’t they?

David McReynolds today became the third person to call into question our claim that forte meaning “strong point” should be pronounced [fort] rather than [fortay]. He writes:

“Concerning your 100 most mispronounced words: Forte pronounced [for-tay] is a musical term meaning “loud”; it is Italian. Forte meaning strength is pronounced [fort]; it is French.”

“Modern dictionaries allow for both pronunciations of forte meaning “strong”, but the original and more correct remains [fort].”

It is difficult to determine when a language change has taken place definitively. Finding a word in print or even in a dictionary does not mean that it is a part of the language. However, in this case, I think the change has taken place and it is time to admit it. Here is what the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), which we consider the best US English dictionary, has to say about the issue:

“The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôr’-ta), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the pronunciation as “fo:ti, fo:te, formerly fo:t,” omitting, as the Britons are wont to do, the R. The point is, this shift is not limited to the US but has occurred throughout the English-speaking world.

The origin of a word is irrelevant to its pronunciation in English. Those words from French, pronounced in the French way, cannot be convincingly be considered English words: if an word used by English-speakers has the same sound and meaning as a French word, what claim does it have of being English? It is possible to use foreign words in conversations if both coconversationalist are familiar with the language in question.

I would disagree with the inconsistency of AHD in claiming that [fort] is the “proper” usage. If 74% of the educated population and the editors of the OED think that the ENGLISH pronunciation is [fortay], then we would seem constrained to using that pronunciation or run the risk, as the AHD note warns, of puzzling our listeners. (Our Mispronounced Words glossary is aimed at promoting clearer speech.)

In fact, all the dictionaries may be in error in claiming that English forte was borrowed from French fort and not Italian forte: both words have the same meaning (among others) in their respective languages. Where did that final E come from? The OED claims that, “As in many other adoptions of Fr[ench] adj[ective]s used as n[oun]s, the fem[inine] form has been ignorantly substituted for the masc[uline].” My impression is, however, that those who use the term at all are far from ignorant people and, moreover, include knowledgeable speakers of French and Italian.

Hence I see no reason impeding the pronunciation of this word [fortay] and much speaking in its favor.

Carol Hood wrote just the other day with a cry for lexical help:

“I have recently been quietly informed that I used a racial slur in casual conversation. Needless to say I was appalled! PLEASE explain to me how the word rube when used to denote a rustic or unsophisticated person is a slur! We were with some Jewish friends and my helpful friend said I had used an ethnic slur…something about the origin of this word and the usually Jewish name, Reuben. She then alluded to the gradeschool song ‘Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking’ as a racially charged song in the same vein as rube. HELP!!”
—Carol

There is no doubt that rube comes from Reuben for the word Reuben itself was used at the beginning of the 19th century to refer to yokels. Reuben is a Jewish name. However, Jews were never farmers in American and this term clearly originated as a derogatory reference to sod-busters (there’s a sure slur for you) in the US and Canada. No semantic connection.

It did not come from the circus term rube used in the circus May-day cry, “Hey, Rube!” referring to local yokels,  either. Reuben was used in this sense at least 80 years before the circus term appeared. The circus seems to have gotten its term from the same source.

I thought it might have originally been applied to the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers since Reuben is also sort of a German name However, it is not a common name among the PA Germans.

If all words implying that a person is ignorant, true or false, are slurs, this word is a slur. But if no one—including Jewish etymologists—can show that this word is related to a Hebrew name for sure, and some people deserving of the epithet do in fact exist, how can it be taken as an anti-Semitic slur?

In an article entitled “Sarah Palin: A Big Gamble for Religious Conservatives” that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 2, 2008, 11:00 pm, Steven Waldman, the former national editor of U.S. News & World Report wrote: “After a year’s worth of stories about whether the religious right was ‘dead,’ they now seem to be flexing great muscle, helping to bring about the most antiabortion ticket running on the most antiabortion platform - ever.”

The most antiabortion platform is a grating phrase because a relational adjective is used here as a qualitative adjective. Relational? Qualitative? “You mean there are different kinds of adjectives?” I hear someone asking. In fact, there are about a half dozen different kinds of adjectives which most of us have little difficulty distinguishing and using properly.

A qualitative adjecive is sometimes called a “real” adjective because it has all the possible qualities of an adjective: it can be used in both predicate (the platform is simple) and attributive position (the simple platform), we can derive a noun and an adverb from it (simplicity, simply), and we can compare it (simpler, simplest or more simple, most simple).

A relational adjective is at the other end of the spectrum: it can only be used as an attribute (a naval maneuver). We can’t use relational adjectives in predicate position felicitously (the maneuver is naval), compare them (more, most naval maneuver). This type of adjective is most often derived from nouns without suffixes in English (a city regulation), which makes them relatively easy to spot.

English does have lots of filters for the misuse of vocabulary which make errors like the one mentioned above comprehensible. We understand that more antiabortion doesn’t make sense, so our minds supply the missing semantic pieces, giving us “the strongest antiabortion platform”. So, what’s the big deal? If we can figure out the meaning of the phrases, what is wrong with them?

Well, assuming that we should write as clearly as possible, if we mean the strongest antiabortion platform or the most antiabortionist platform, why not use one of these phrases rather than making the reader do the work for the writer? That way, no rules of grammar are broken, either.

We have to commend Waldman for avoiding the marketing term, pro-life (itself a relational adjective), but we also need to encourage the avoidance of all relational adjectives in the comparative or superlative degree.

Google alerted me this morning to a blog article entitled “Addiction: The Most Overused Word in our Language” by a Fox News commentator named Greg Gutfeld. Since word usage is one of my interests I looked it up to discover, well, not much. Gutfeld concludes that addictions are simply diseases easily cured by disposing of the focus of he addiction: throwing the offending computer out the window, throwing all the booze out the window, throwing all the drugs out the window, and so on.

The point should have been that the media has long used addiction as a pejorative metaphor for obsession. This leads to the more interesting question of why the US news media has developed its current passion emphasize the negative in all it reports, most of which are about as well thought through as Gutman’s blog.

An addiction is a physical dependency on some chemical: narcotics, alcohol, nicotine—all sinful within the Puritan code of ethic. The pejorativity of this term comes from this ethic, which has inevitably worked its way into the laws of the land. Alcohol and smoking is controlled, narcotics are mostly illegal. This is because addictions do measurable physical and psychological damage to the addict.

An obsession, on the other hand, is an emotional dependency at worst, a passionate focus on one particular thing at best. We may become obsessed with the Web, a person, a job, items in a collection. You must be obsessed with your work to become a star: actors who devote themselves body and soul to acting, baseball players who can do nothing but play baseball, singers who obsessively sing night after night. Their obsessions clear their focus and make them better at their obsession than others who divide their time over a variety of interests.

Now, I’m obsessed with the Internet myself. I spend most of each day working on my website, arranging translations via the Internet, and creating glossaries and word lists from materials gathered on the Web. Like professional baseball players, singers, actors, I do it because I love it, because I am totally in awe of it—not because I am physically dependent on it. It does no physical or psychological harm to me that I am aware of and I have learned immensely from the community of logophiles around the world it connects me with.

Of course, I am also the last person on Earth who would disparage the use of metaphors (figurative usage). However, the reason we have a separate scientific vocabulary for lawyers, doctors, and researchers, a vocabulary of superprecise terms that are never used metaphorically, is that metaphor undermines objectivity like nothing else. Calling pig a pig is as objective as we can get but  calling a friend a pig metaphorically is about as subjective as we can get. Metaphor is everywhere in general speech, where it often leads to misunderstanding.

Using addiction as a pejorative metaphor for obsession, then, is simply one of the more subtler methods the US Press (among others) uses to skew public opinion toward fear and hatred. It is easily overlooked among the sledge-hammer methods we are more familiar with.