Language is one of the ultimate manifestations of democratic action. I can declare that the word blibbelfrigdibble means “the tendency to stop a word in the middl,” and the word takes meaning if others agree with that definition. I could spell that word as ieou7aer, and pronounce it blibbelfrigdibble, and if those I communicate with agree, then that’s how it’s spelled. Sure, arguments will ensue. “My English teacher taught me that it’s O before 7, except after a dipthong!—you descriptivist, you!” But in the history of the language, democracy wins out.
Now comes an interesting exercise both in language and in democracy, which reader Jeff Rasmussen kindly alerted me to. You see, in the formal democratic world, one places a proposed change before the public by circulating a petition. If enough people sign, then onto the ballot the proposal goes, and we vote. If people want to change the spelling of stationery (the writing paraphernalia) to stationary, they sign a petition and we vote. Well, we don’t vote, other than by our usage. But now we can sign a petition.
If you agree that stationary should become the proper spelling of both the paper goods and the adjective communicating motionlessness, then hop on over to iPetitions and support it with your John Hancock and your JohnHancock@JohnHancock.opining address. The petitioners explain:
The word “stationery” however was originally spelled with an “a” in English. It derived from the fact that such products were sold in “stationary” shops and not from travelling peddlers. Both spelling derive from the Latin stationarius defined as a place where something is located.
I know that the same folks who complain that it’s O before 7 except after a dipthong will shout that the difference in spelling communicates the difference in meaning, which is often a valid reason to discreetly retain discrete spellings. On the other hand, in this case one word is an adjective and the other a noun, so context will always clarify more quickly than spelling. And the truly technical folk will argue that stationery perhaps didn’t evolve directly from stationarious (as in the wares of a stationary store), but with lineage once removed—in that the person operating from a stationary location known as a station was a stationer, and therefore the adjective “stationery wares,” which know is known as stationery.
Doesn’t matter. One is a noun even though it was once an adjective, and the other remains an adjective. We could spell either or both as ieou7aer and still know what they mean.
Even so, on this particular ballot, I believe I shall take the reactionary stance and side with those who want to maintain the current spelling. Or would that be the reactionery stance?
With Barack Obama speaking eloquently of a promise of change, we’ll quickly hear a group of reactionaries fretting about one thing Obama said in his election night speech: enormity.
Those reactionaries are the folks I call the persnickitors, the ones whose blood pressure approaches geyser strength when they spot language use they consider wrong. Their certain target:
I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
“It’s not enormity!” they will spout. “It’s enormousness! What an egregious language error!” And indeed, enormity is regularly misused to indicate massive size when its actual meaning is “gross or monstrous offense or crime.”
But it is, after all, a time of change. I prefer that we use enormity in its most powerful meaning, yet I concede that the word’s meaning might very well be changing. Because it already has changed.
Enormous and enormity of course result from the same roots, meaning “outside the norm,” a figurative use of norm, meaning “a mason’s pattern.” The original meaning of enormity was, on the order of enormous, a less-harsh “something outside the norm.” And, by the way, one meaning of enormous in its original use was “outrageously outside the norm, monstrous, or shocking.”
So is using enormity to mean enormousness an egregious error? To many, it is. But to that many, I’ll also point out that egregious (in an ancient instance of e- prefixes having nothing to do with internet commerce or mail) comes from Latin roots meaning “outside the herd”—and it originally meant “remarkably good.”
Over at the Editrix blog, I found some discussion about which is the better word choice: “The data is stored on a computer,” or “The data is stored in a computer.” Editrix sided with on, and posted a poll for readers—with a provocative third choice: “They’re both wrong. It should be ‘data ARE,’ damn it. ‘Data ARE!’”
I voted for on myself. The results? I was on the winning side in this poll, though now I’m being subjected to the election-year game of investigating voter registration fraud—because I registered surprise at the results:
Over 31 percent? Excuse me while I pry open my computer to try to count all data there. Oh, there’s a datum. And that particular datum tells me that, like such words as couple or trio, data can function as a group noun. “The couple is” emphasizes the group; “the couple are” emphasizes the individuals in the group. “The data is” emphasizes a body of information; “the data are” implies—to me at least—a collection of individual facts, perhaps not particularly connected.
I’ve babbled about this before, of course, but let’s now move on and get back to that group noun couple: datum sounds like an activity the couple is engaged in. “We’re not serious. We’re just datum.” (And I’m not serious, either.)
One of my persistent rants in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong is that “We don’t speak Latin” (with an implied dammit! at the end). This particular grumblus is directed at persnickitors who fume that data must take a plural verb, who imply that the debauched tendency to incorrectly split (oops) an infinitive will bring Zeusian wrath because Latin doesn’t split infinitives, or who demand that Latin baseball players must shout “Vos es caecus, ump!” after called strike 3, because they’re, well, Latin. OK, maybe not the last one.
On the other hand, maybe we are about to be speaking a bit more Latin, if for no other reason than to be able to carp whiningly about having no bread at the promised American bread and circuses. Columnist Maureen Dowd is sufficiently convinced that the U.S. is on one of the many roads that don’t lead to Rome but instead to Roman collapse that she has written a column half in English and half in Latin. (By the way, a translation appears here.) Bless her heart, Dowd doesn’t once misuse the word data.
I mention this because I find Dowd’s column to be a fascinating exercise in multi-lingualistic cross-connotation Latinesium vox yaddayaddus blahblahblattus . . .
Well, I really mention it because I love the column’s title: “Are We Rome? Tu Betchus!” (With, I suspect, an implied dammitus! at the end.)
I’ve recently encountered a bit of confusion about the word personality—a subject of jealous interest of mine since I myself have no personality.
One bit of confusion I found at wilderdom.com, a site about something, though I’m not sure what:
Personality comes from the Greek word “persona”, meaning “mask”
The word ‘personality’ derives from the Latin word ‘persona’ which means ‘mask’. The study of personality can be understood as the study of ‘masks’ that people wear. These are the personas that people project and display, but also includes the inner parts of psychological experience which we collectively call our ‘self’.
Greek, Latin, Babylonian—hell, just toss out any ancient language origin. How about “Etruscan,” while we’re at it?
Turns out that yes, the origin described in nonboldfaced type is correct. The word persona is Latin. But now there’s a seed of doubt. Just as it isn’t Greek, perhaps it also doesn’t mean “mask.” Could that be true? Let’s ask some language experts: Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, who say—
The English word ‘personality’ comes from two Latin words, per and sona, “through sound.” The Romans knew that the personality comes through in the tone of voice and other vocal aspects.
Well, that sounds good and all, but the word actually comes from one Latin word—persona—meaning, yes, “mask.” Think Dramatis Personae—the theatrical cast of characters. And, no, persona likely didn’t itself result from a “sounds-like” origin, as it probably came from Etruscan (gasp!)—the word phersu, also meaning “mask.”
Still, I’m very forgiving of language experts Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, because they are actually body language experts, and they brought up the personality factor in analyzing the decipherable body language of one Sarah Palin. (At least her body language is decipherable, as her verbal language is hardly that.)
So I leave you with Kathlyn and Gay to analyze some bodyspeak from a current “personality” (read: mask-wearer) in this interesting article.
I like the goals, the coverage and the common sense over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, a blog devoted to setting folks straight regarding misconceptions and falsehoods related to history, economics, education and other topics. The name comes from the popular “fact” (promulgated by various means, but now certainly fueled by the bullshitternet) that Millard Fillmore was the first President to enjoy a bathtub in the White House, when in fact this nugget of noninformation was first mentioned in a humor piece by H.L. Mencken. Such delusions must be demystified, and if I ever get time, I’ll write a book about misconceptions about the English language and call it Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Oh, wait.
. . . the American open road is, as always, very interesting.
For example, according to the billboards, somewhere in Wisconsin there is a restaurant named Brisco’s (after Brisco County, Texas?), which claims to feature cuisine (a French word) of a “southwestern” flavor. What does that mean?
This is a wry comment on a word often associated with the phrase “French cuisine” juxtaposed against American Southwestern fare. I’ve seen observations that took the topic of non-French cuisine to extremes, by declaring that, say, the phrase “Norwegian cuisine” was nonsensical because cuisine denoted French food and French food only.
There is no such limitation. A cuisine is “a style of cooking,” and Southwestern cooking is a particular style. (You could argue that Norwegian cooking is a certain style, too, though items like lutefisk argue to the contrary. I pick on Norwegian cooking because my heritage, my surname, and the area of Wisconsin I grew up in all have strong Norsk ties.) Granted, our borrowing cuisine from French as early as around the late 15th Century (and technically, we didn’t borrow it because we still have it), and the commonness of the phrase “French cuisine,” seem to limit the word’s use, but remember that many words over time have changed—broadening, narrowing, or even inversing themselves.
What does that Wisconsin restaurant sign mean? In this instance, as I commented on Ed Darrell’s post:
I believe it means that English is a very adaptable language. In addition to being a French word, cuisine is a centuries-old English word borrowed from French. If we were to apply words to concepts only in line with those words’ language origins, we wouldn’t be able to refer to English grammar (as the word grammar is of Old French and ultimately Latin origin) or even to the English language (again, from Latin and brought to us by the French). Nor, for that matter, would we have my favorite Muppet, the Swedish chef.
Meantime, enjoy your travels through Wisconsin, my native state. Yes, I’m a natural-born fromage-head.
And, Ed, if a culturally mixed-up restaurant sign is the oddest thing you’ve seen in Wisconsin, you haven’t run into any 30-foot plastic cows yet. They’re out there.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bork bork bork:
I’ve never broken a bone (he says, taunting Demon Jinx). Neither a fracture, nor a compound fracture—in increasing order of pain, I’m sure. In the context of this language discussion, however, splitting a bone likely is, for some, perhaps less painful than splitting an infinitive.
I feel no pain in splitting infinitives. In fact, I’m among the many to vigorously ignore this “rule,” which was thrust upon the language by admirers of Latin. Their thinking went something along these lines: Latin infinitives are single words, and you can’t split a single word, can you? (Umm, you abso-frikken-lutely can split single words.)
My continuing rant about split-infinitive persnickitors was rekindled when, while skimming The Online Dictionary of Language Terminology, I came upon an entry for a term I hadn’t heard before:
compound split infinitive
Definition: A split infinitive that has been split by a multi-word phrase.
Example: Try to never ever split your infinitives.
Three reactions:
I cheer the matched form and content. In the example, the infinitive is to split and the phrase that splits it is never ever.
I suggest that “splitting an infinitive with another split infinitive” would be a cuter but increasingly stupid definition of “compound infinitive.” (Example: “Mr. Brohaugh, I dare you to, with your unwillingness to glibly follow every grammatical edict, give a damn.”)
I sigh over the fact that the entry exists in the first place. Splitting infinitives is apparently so bad that if you do it with two words, the egregious indiscretion deserves a name unto itself. (And possible jail time!)
I just hope that, now that I’ve introduced some folks to the acceptability of even compound split infinitives, some persnickitor out there hasn’t begun thinking about introducing me to a compound fracture.
Heretofore, when encountering people who insist that data should take a plural verb, I have said “I presume, then, you feel the same about agenda“; I will now add stamina to my arsenal.
My own heretofore has rarely taken such a logical route. I like to confuse such insistent people, with a response more like “So, then, why don’t you insist on a plural verb for minutia, which is the plural of minutium?” I love the moment of quiet, the eyes darting back and forth. It’s a test of mettle—or mental stamins, maybe. The response is going to be a) silence; b) “I do use plural verbs with minutia“; c) “You’re full of shit.”
Answer a) speaks to the confusion caused by such Latin words as datum/data, stadium/stadia, graffito/graffiti, and balonum/baloney (well, maybe not the last pair). Answer b) speaks to the “depth” of their knowledge of Latin words, because . . . Answer c) is correct. Minutia is indeed singular, and minutium exists only in my mind as a contender for being the singular of baloney.
A few days back, I wrote about how dilettante word historians sometimes consciously or unconsciously dissect a word and “predict” its past based on the entrails revealed in the dissection. Hack apart greyhound (the word! the word!) with Sweeney-Todd-barber precision, and you might think you find lineage tracing back to fur color, though the DNA actually traces back to an Old Norse word, griey, with a completely different meaning. A greyhound is ultimately not a gray dog, but a female hound.
Technically, divination by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals (rarely greyhounds in the real world, I might add) is known as extispicy, a word I’d not encountered until recently. The discovery allowed me to delightedly add a definition to my English Delusionary: Extispic Etymology, or “predicting a word’s history by examining its clumsy vivisection.”
On the other hand, allow me to reveal a word history based on more-precise physical vivisection, in this an entry from my book Unfortunate English:
It’s a scene worthy of Hannibal Lechter or Jeffrey Daehmer or your favorite cannibal of choice. A human being is slashed open, revealing intestines and other entrails. It’s bloody, it’s gory, it’s . . . kind of like visiting the meat counter of the grocery store, with its tasty display of neatly packaged sausages.
At the time of this image and the verbal imagery that resulted, there weren’t any grocery stores as we know them, of course. The image may very well have occurred on a field of battle, where someone inclined to odd poetry viewed the insides of the eviscerated, and saw . . . sausages. (Perhaps the poetry wasn’t that odd, in that sausages are meats stuffed into casings—and the original casings were animal intestines.) In Latin, the word for small intestine was a diminutive of the word for sausage.
We use that diminutive word today, by the way, in a couple of forms. The Latin word was botulus, which was taken into Old French as boel, and into Middle English as bouel, what you and I now spell bowel. (The other form is botulism, the medical term adapted from German, describing not an affliction of the bowel as one might be prone to guess, but instead a type of food poisoning often associated with ill-prepared processed foods—originally and specifically, sausages.)
The new science of Extispic Etymology at its finest!
When JohnnyB stuck his bloggish tongue in his cheek the other day and recommended that one of his readers check out “Brohaugh’s pedantic language stuff blog,” I commented, “Doesn’t pedantic mean ‘foot antics’?”
The source of that joke is what I call “microparsing”: dissecting a word and making assumptions about the entrails so discovered, in this case with humorous intent. This form of etymological analysis is often as reliable as extispicy (divination by examining entrails). Extispic etymology leads to assumptions and claims that the “man-” in manufacture is a male human (when it derives from a Latin root meaning “hand”) or that triage connotes “three” (when “tri-” comes from a root meaning “to cull”).
In contrast, some words post their origins right on their foreheads—no surgery needed—and those origins go unnoticed. I was surprised recently when a friend paused, then proclaimed “I didn’t know that” in something approaching wonderment after I mentioned that fabulous means “in the nature of a fable.” We see the miracle in miraculous, but apparently have lost the fable in fabulous.
Another example, in the spirit of foot-antical language stuff: It’s obvious, their youth, when you see pictures of soldiers who have died in action. It’s not so obvious, their youth, when you see the word infantry.
But it should be obvious. It’s staring you right in the face.
The word infantry arrived in English in its present meaning after a long journey (on foot, perhaps), through French, Spanish and Italian, and ultimately from Latin infant-—”youth.” The infant in the word infantry is not a literal baby, but a figurative babe. The infantry were the less trained, usually the younger. They were the ground forces, smaller than the cavalry. (They were the lads, marching off to war. And there, too, we see youth as cannon fodder: Lads, in the first use of the word before they were servant males of “low birth” and before they were young men, were footsoldiers. These lads could aspire to becoming cadets, one supposes, where they could go from being grunts to grunt-workers, toting the generals’ golf clubs on foot . . . and becoming the word we know today as caddies.)
And thus concludes today’s peripatetic pedantry.
(But before I go: Doesn’t extispicy sound like a way to order food at a road kill restaurant? “I’ll have my racoon brains spicy and my possum guts extispicy!”)
is that “We don’t speak Latin” (with an implied dammit! at the end). This particular grumblus is directed at persnickitors who fume that data must take a plural verb, who imply that the debauched tendency to incorrectly split (oops) an infinitive will bring Zeusian wrath because Latin doesn’t split infinitives, or who demand that Latin baseball players must shout “Vos es caecus, ump!” after called strike 3, because they’re, well, Latin. OK, maybe not the last one.
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