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Archive for June, 2010

Whomever? Whatever!

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Two stalwart Good Word subscribers, Stan Davis and Jere Mitchum, wrote a day or two ago about my use of whomever in my writeup of kudos. Stan wrote, “In your e-mail featuring kudos, you wrote: “Kudos [ku-dahs] is due whomever repaired the faucet in the ladies restroom.”

“Shame, shame!! The correct form in this sentence would be whoever. The choice between whoever and whomever is governed by the use of the word IN ITS OWN CLAUSE, not by how the whole clause is used. Thus whoever is the subject of repaired and requires the nominative case, while the whole clause acts as the indirect object of due.”

I actually had written whoever in my original version of the Good Word but one of my editors chided my cowardice in giving up on whom forms and I couldn’t refuse the inherent dare in his comment. When I asked him about the rule Stan and Jere raised, his response was, “…I’ve just consulted the Oxford Fowler’s Modern English Usage Dictionary and after a quick scan of the five pages devoted to who, whom and their cousins, have concluded he [Fowler] agrees with your correspondent.”

The point, therefore, must be conceded with apologies and one brief note: this sort of confusion probably contributes to the loss of whom those of my generation are currently suffering: the simplest way to avoid breaking this rule is to simply use who everywhere.

Noise about ‘Noisome’

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Rob Nollan wrote today:

“First, let me tell you that I love your Dr. Goodword’s daily e-mail. Even when I’m too busy to read it, if I click on the mail and begin reading, I get sucked in and can’t escape. Your writing and wit make lexical discovery so much fun!”

“So…you state that noisome should not be confused with noise. But it isn’t too much of a stretch to recognize that noise comes from the Latin nausea which has nothing to do with sound, either.”

“Tracking the actual origin of words through historical usage is beyond my ability, but it seems to me that noise and noisome share identical meanings, other than the fact that one usually refers to sound and the other is an adjective.”

“Therefore, my question is this: how do you trace these words to know that noise and noisome really aren’t related? Just curious. Thanks for the great work!”

Here is, in a nutshell, how we do it. We follow the spelling of the word in historical documents as far as they go. Some languages have been preserved in many documents over long periods of time, some in few over only short periods, and yet others, in none. So that process is often limited.

Greek survives today, as does Latin (in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The same is true of the languages that developed from Sanskrit (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.) So, it is fairly easy to trace words back to these languages.

Doing that, we find that noisome unquestionably goes back to ‘in odium’ in Latin. Noise may come from nausea. Nausea is a Latin word based on the Greek word naus “ship” that we see in nautical and navigate. However, it may just as well originate in noxia “harm, damage”; we just aren’t sure. Either way, noise and noisome are probably two different words that are coincidentally  spelled similarly today.

Why aren’t we sure of the origin of noise? Even if there are written documents available, when talking about a span of 2000 years, there will be gaps of hundreds of years in which no written evidence has survived but the spoken language continued to change.

For those gaps etymologists apply rules learned from examining thousands of similar words without gaps over the same time period. That usually works, but not always. What we can’t predict are changes caused by the influence of other languages, people playing with their language, confusion of one word with another, and similar accidental phenomena.

It is fun, as you have discovered, but it is also revealing. I devote so much space in the daily Good Words to their histories  because words express us as surely as we express them. They express our ideas and attitudes. Their histories often provide insights into our cultures and especially the changes in our attitudes and thought over the centuries.