they

Posted on September 26, 2010 | 13 comments

English has a fair few basic functional words that begin with a dental fricative, usually voiced: the, this, that, these, those, there; thou and thee are not commonly used, and when used at all are usually misused now; and, most controversial, they and them.

They is controversial? Sure – in fact, I’m tempted to suggest that it comes from +hey – it seems so likely to provoke an addition of “hey!” in some contexts. It doesn’t come from that, of course; in fact, it was originally spelled with a thorn (þ) where we now have th – fair enough for such a thorny word. But, beyond that, it’s not originally an English word.

Now, that little statement may surprise people who could hardly imagine importing a word so basic from another language. But have a look at the third-person plural pronouns from Old English (see http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/courses/handouts/magic.pdf for as much information on Old English inflection as you could want):

nominative (subject): hie
accusative (direct object): hie
genitive (possessive): hira
dative (indirect object): him

Old English was, in its inflections, much more formally complex than modern English. The fact that the dative third person plural was the same as its masculine singular equivalent was not exceptionally problematic – German gets by with potential confusions between identical forms representing different persons and numbers, and we use you for singular and plural now in English. But during the Middle English period, all those inflections got simplified considerably, and so did some of the details of pronunciation. Meanwhile, in northern England, there was strong Old Norse influence (because of strong Scandinavian presence in the population!). The Old Norse third person plural pronoun þei, with its more distinctive sound, came into use, and by the end of the 1400s it had spread pretty much throughout England, displacing the older English form entirely – except for one survival: in unstressed, informal use, the him, reduced to ’em, is still often used in place of them, which requires more articulation. (Did you think this was just a simple deletion of the opening consonant? Ask yourself where else we drop that consonant at the beginning of a word. Answer: almost nowhere – it often gets lost in than after an /r/, as in “more’n” for more than, but that’s a specific conditioning environment.)

But that’s not the controversial part. The controversy actually comes from an issue with the singular pronouns. While in Old English all nouns had gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and so did the singular third person pronouns, by the end of the Middle English period only those pronouns retained gender, and gender had become linked directly to the physical human-male/human-female/non-human distinction (in German, which still has the genders, the linkage is not so absolute; for instance, a young unmarried woman is fräulein, which is neuter). But one runs into a problem when the sex of a person referred to is indeterminate. What does one do then? Well, you would think it wouldn’t be so difficult to swap in another related pronoun. And you’d be right: we do it readily enough with you in place of one, for instance, but also, for centuries, English speakers used they for gender-indeterminate third person singular, and no one complained.

For centuries? Oh yes – pretty much until about 1800, in fact. You can find it in the King James version of the Bible: “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves” (Philippians 2:3). You can find it in Shakespeare: “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend” (Comedy of Errors IV:iii). It was common and unexceptional.

And then came the age of prescriptivism. Starting in the 1700s and gradually gathering steam and influence, there was a scholastic movement to impose rules and reason on English – of course those making this move failed to notice that English already had rules that worked just fine, and that the logic of languages is not inevitable mathematical. I won’t go into depth here on all the deleterious effects of their confected rules; you can read “When an ‘error’ isn’t,” “An appreciation of English: a language in motion,” and “What’s up with English spelling” for some more details on all this. But one thing their logical processes led them to was the idea that a plural pronoun couldn’t be used to signify a singular. (By this time you was accepted as a singular, so they evaded that issue.) And what singular pronoun could be used? Well, they thought he or she was inelegant, so of course, since – as people, particularly male ones, had been averring for some time – the male was the superior, the master of the female, etc. etc., it stood to reason the masculine pronoun should be the default.

And guess what. People bought it (along with a lot of other prescriptivist tut-tutting rubbish these cretins frankly invented). Oh, they didn’t swallow it hook, line, and sinker, not exactly. Fowler, referring to use of they and them and their for indeterminate distributive singulars (e.g., everyone took their book), noted “Archbishop Whately used to say that women were more liable than men to fall into this error, as they objected to identifying ‘everybody’ with ‘him’.” Gosh, those sensitive females! Tsk! But among their number we ought also to count such apparent males as Walt Whitman (“everyone shall delight us, and we them”), Lawrence Durrell (“You do not have to understand someone in order to love them”), C.S. Lewis (“She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes”), and Oscar Wilde (“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”).

And of course people still do it. People still do plenty of things that those benighted prescriptivists said are wrong. But many or even most of those same people who do them nonetheless believe them to be errors (everybody drives over the speed limit, even as they know it’s illegal, so why not use “wrong” language if it’s comfortable, eh?). And so we are faced with this battle. When, in the 1970s, women started getting people to listen to them (and by “people” I don’t just mean “men”; many or even most women before then didn’t listen to women on many important matters), they pointed out that use of man to mean human and he to mean a third person of possibly either sex embodied sexist assumptions.

And of course the response was that they were being oversensitive and making things up, and this was the way we had always done it and no had ever had a problem with it before. (When I was a youth, I certainly thought so; I couldn’t see why it was an issue that he was the neutral as well as the masculine, and at one point I may even have believed that it was a particular noble sacrifice on the part of males to forgo distinctiveness in lending their pronoun to generality. But I wasn’t female, so of course I didn’t see why it would be a problem – the have-mores very often think the have-lesses are whiners.) All of this was of course utterly false. But if a lie can be well enough established for long enough, people in general will assume it’s not just truth but time-honoured truth. So even today it remains a struggle to use they in many written contexts for gender-indeterminate third person singular. This in spite of the fact that few people admire the Victorians and their ideas of propriety generally.

Of course, the issue moves farther now, as in this egalitarian society we often question the need for gender distinction in third person singulars in any context. Many other languages do without such distinction, and we do without it everywhere but this one instance. When people wonder what pronoun we could use in place of he and she, various inventions are suggested, but the one already in use is they. Now, you may ask whether we could really manage with no singular/plural distinction. But you know, most of the time it works pretty well with you. I’m interested to see where this goes…

For much of the information above, I am indebted to two articles worth reading in entirety: Joan Taber’s 2006 “Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold” and Ann Bodine’s 1975 “Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular ‘they’, sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she” (Language in Society 4: 129–146), and to Gael Spivak, who brought them to my attention.

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premiss

Posted on September 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

The first time I saw this spelling of the word premise, I thought, Oh, my, how prissy. Who are they trying to impress? Must be one of those special British things.

Of course, I was proceeding on the premise that premiss was a deviant spelling of premise. But, now, why would I assume that? After all, premiss is a more phonetically appropriate spelling. But I had seen premise all over the place, in various places and premises, and besides, who makes it even to the beginning of elementary school without knowing the word promise? And aren’t promise and premise related?

Indeed they are related. And not just because a premise is a sort of promise (if you present reasoning based on a given premise, you are saying to your addressee “I promise you this much is true”). The mise is the same mise, and the pre and pro are the “before” and “for” Latinate suffixes we know and use in so many places. But where does that mise come from?

From Latin mittere, that’s where, and more specifically from its past participle missa: “sent” or “put” – or, sometimes, “dismiss”. Oh, but hey, how about that dismiss? Isn’t that the same little miss again? Oh, yes, that miss is a hit, no mistaking.

So, then, why promise and premise with the mise? The answer to the second question is that premise is a spelling likely influenced by promise, or by the same source that gave promise its spelling. And what was that source? Why, the language more responsible than any other for the weirdness of English spelling: French. Even in modern French the past tense feminine of mettre “put” is mise, though of course it’s pronounced like “me’s”. (There is some indication of pronunciation of English promise with [z] at some times in past centuries, too.)

So, in fact, premiss is more in accord with the initially given conditions. But now even British spelling has left the premises – or I should say the premiss. The exception is in speaking of logical propositions (the original sense; the physical sense followed on the abstract sense, in a reversal of the usual order), where – rather more among the British – premiss is often used still.

But, you know, I can’t look at premiss without seeing it as having an extra hiss at the end. Of course it’s said just the same, but the look of it has the escaping-steam hiss of press; one might even have the sense that it simpers a little. And if you pluralize it, premisses, it looks like it might mean “misses in advance” – perhaps as in “I miss you already”? But that’s all seen though the prism of unfamiliarity, of course, which has its own logic.

Thanks to Roberto De Vido for suggesting premiss.

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starling

Posted on September 23, 2010 | 5 comments

“Well,” said Montgomery Starling-Byrd. “That’s startling.”

“A startling?” I said. “Would that be from start plus ling, meaning a little start? Perhaps a rough start?” (I knew perfectly well that startling is from start plus the suffix le plus the suffix ing and that, at any rate, what he was looking at was not the word startling.)

We were four at a table – Montgomery, Philip McCarr (of Scotland), Albert Denton (of Yorkshire), and I – at the Order of Logogustation’s autumn international meeting. For this session, words were pre-set at tables in envelopes, and the participants chose spots freely, then had to taste whatever word had been set at the place they chose.

“More to the point,” Montgomery said, holding up the slip of paper from his envelope, “that’s starling.”

“Weel, man,” said Philip, “you should have a bird, then.”

“I think I see a pattern,” I said, holding up my slip of paper. “Mine’s starlet.”

“That’s a little bird!” declared Albert. “In fact, a little darling,” he said, producing his slip of paper, on which darling was written.

“Oh dear,” said Montgomery, knowing that we all knew that darling comes from dear plus ling – the same ling as in starling, which may be a diminutive (as in gosling) or an indicator of membership or relation (as in earthling).

“Your little dear,” said Philip, “may earn a scarlet letter.” He held up his slip of paper: scarlet.

“She will if we pass ‘er in,” said Albert. (Starlings are passerine birds – built for perching like sparrows.)

“Aren’t you the cunning linguist,” I said to Albert.

“He’ll go wherever you let him,” Montgomery remarked.

“There’s room to let,” I replied. “Or room for two lets, anyway.”

“Not that they’re the same let,” Montgomery pointed out. True: the let in starlet is a diminutive suffix, but the let in scarlet is not a suffix at all; scarlet appears to come originally from a Persian word for rich cloth.

“Just as your stars aren’t the same,” I said. “You’re star-crossed.”

“I certainly know that,” Montgomery said. “I had it drilled into me quite sternly that our star is related to Latin sturnus, which refers to the same kind of bird.”

“You had it drilled intae yer sternum?” Philip said. “That would produce a scarlet! Or a full-sized scar!”

“Nothing to sneeze at,” said Albert, leaving it to all of us to connect sneeze with its Latin translation sternutare, seen in English sternutatory and sternutation.

“Look, man,” declared Philip, “it isnae quite fair that ye’re tasting yer own name.”

“I think you’re just stalling,” quipped Albert to Philip.

“Better that than Stalin,” Montgomery said. “But enough larking about; the bird’s the word. Like it or not –” he held up the slip admonitorily – “it’s myna.”

A lark is not a kind of starling, by the way – but a myna is.

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gainsay

Posted on September 22, 2010 | 2 comments

What? What do you mean by that? Say it again! Really! What do you have against me? What do you hope to gain by contradicting me like that? To gainsay me thus? Thou knave!

Hmmm… gainsay seems to have switched it onto a different track. Well, it will do that, and none may gainsay this observation: it’s a strongly literary, in fact archaic, word now. Funny, though – we may think of Latin and Greek as the source of flowery language, but this word – and it’s far from the only one such – is a purely Anglo-Saxon word that is considered high-flown while its Latinate counterpart, contradict, is now quite ordinary, the sort of word one may use with a small child. (Try this: next time you want to say to some three-year-old in your charge “Don’t contradict me,” say instead “Don’t gainsay me,” and see what that gets.)

So where is the gain in this word? Apart from before the say, I mean. Well, it’s not the gain of getting things; that’s a different word from a different source – it’s related to French gagner “win”. No, the gain in gainsay is related to German gegen “towards” and is the same gain as you see in against. Its Latin equivalent is contra. And since you know that dict is a Latin root relating to saying, you can see that contradict really is Latin for gainsay (although gainsay can also mean “deny”, “refuse”, or “oppose”).

But of course it can’t escape the flavour of increase and advantage that one gets from gain. There may be a feeling of the act of saying being like an act of snatching something from another person for oneself: when you gainsay, you gain the upper hand by saying.

The voiced velar onset /g/ may also seem to give it more richness than its unvoiced counterpart /k/ that starts contradict. In fact, while contradict is a hard, clicky word of “short” vowels that is said with a skip (that unstressed middle syllable), gainsay has two even syllables, each with the same “long” stressed vowel, and an overall smoother feel: a word fit for a proud character from Shakespeare or some Regency novel. Mind you, it also makes me think of Pig Latin (which you may know as Igpay Atinlay).

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launder

Posted on September 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

I used to read Ann Landers. But I didn’t like seeing people air their dirty linen. Oh la la – you do not publish la underwear in le newspaper; you launder wear such as lingerie in the laundry. You do not want to moon Landers! Better to keep your short subject sweet and clean and smelling of lavender.

Have you ever noticed, by the way, how much lingerie sounds like laundry? Since it’s from linge, French for “linen”, and is related to fair la linge, “do the laundry” (literally “do the linen”), it would seem reasonable for laundry to be a modification of lingerie and for launder to be a backformation from it.

Reasonable, but false! In fact, launder is the older word, though laundry comes not so much directly from launder as from an earlier word that was derived from the earlier word that launder evolved from. And what did launder evolve from? As it happens, lavender.

But wait – there’s more. The lavender that launder comes from is not the lavender of fresh bathroom scents or Estée Lauder. No, this lavender comes from French lavandier, which comes from Latin lavandarius. The Latin meant “thing to be washed”, but by the time it hit English it meant “person who washes things”. Yes, launder was first a noun for someone who washes clothes. Then, after that, it was converted to a verb meaning “wash clothes” (yup, it was verbed – linguistic reactionaries, commence shuddering). And the derived lavendry became laundry.

Meanwhile, that lavender you smell was for a long time thought to be related to the Latin word for washing – after all, it is a fresh and clean scent, n’est-ce pas? But its source, Latin lavendula, appears to have come from livendula, not a lav- washing-related root. Its later form was quite likely influenced by the washing word, though.

My, the things that come out in the wash! But what, by the way, do we launder nowadays? Well, to look at the most common collocation of launder, it would seem to be money – specifically drug money or drug profits. Hm! I guess it’s true what they say about filthy lucre. Maybe all those drug kingpins should just come clean.

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griot

Posted on September 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

The first thing to know about this word is that it does not rhyme with riot. And, though g is sometimes an email abbreviation for grin or grinning, and the act of saying this word might bring to mind a grin (or Tony the Tiger’s grrrreat), it is not a word for a grin riot, which would be like a quiet laugh riot. And speaking of Quiet Riot, it’s also not a word for a musical group.

Well, or, in fact, in a way, it is. And while a griot may not be a grin riot, he may cause one.

But let me turn back to the word itself first. It’s pronounced as French; it rhymes with rio, or, for that matter, with Krio, which is more to the point, since Krio is a creole language spoken in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and its name comes from creole, and griot for its part also comes from creole – I don’t mean it’s derived from the word creole, though it does sound like it; I just mean that as far as we can tell it comes from Portuguese criado “servant” by way of West African creoles. And then through French guiriot. That is not an etymology on which everyone will agree – oh, no; but one does need a story, you know.

Yes, every woman needs her story and every man needs his story, and history is one thing griots specialize in. Political commentary is another. Poetry and praise-songs also come into it. They need to know many long history songs, and they also need to be able to extemporize to suit the situation. You know those wandering minstrels and court jesters that one sees in depictions of medieval towns and courts? Griots are that sort of thing. Except that they’re in West Africa, they still exist, and they are in the main a separate endogamous caste – griots marry other members of their griot clan, and so on, and so on, and they are the only ones in their societies who do what they do (I mean sing history and praise-songs and political satire and so on).

In our current European-based societies, with electronic communication and large cities and so on, the roles a griot would play are filled by many different parties variously well – TV shows with satire and commentary, musicians on the radio and on CD, and so on. But griots can tailor to specific situations, and they come with specific local knowledge.

Which is why Alex Haley found griot accounts so useful when he was tracing his own ancestry for his book Roots. Living memory of history! And of his own particular ancestor, or so at least he thought. It turns out that tailoring to the situation may have come into it as well, though; while the stories he heard of Kunta Kinte no doubt gave a good view of life in that time and place, the specifics were not necessarily literally reliable for that specific individual.

Ah, but how is that any worse than the “history” presented for us by movies today? I think of Bottle Shock, a movie about the 1976 wine tasting in Paris in which California wines prevailed. One of the central subjects of the movie, Stephen Spurrier, has said “There is hardly a word that is true in the script and many, many pure inventions as far as I am concerned.” And even our accepted histories may have some filling in – I am put in mind of the words of the father of modern historical writing, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War: “With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”

The word griot may put one in mind of a couple of others – perhaps French rigote or rigolo, “funny” or “joker”, which a griot may be at times, or Goriot, the name of a character by Honoré de Balzac, who in his role as depictor of his society with all its flaws served one of the roles of a griot. But in truth griot is not the word griots will necessarily use to name themselves. It’s not from a West African language, after all (of which, by the way, there are many, and quite diverse at that – some effectively unrelated to one another). If you wish to use a word they use for themselves, jali or jeli is what is used in languages of the Mande family, guewel in Wolof, gawlo in Fula, and igiiw in Hassaniyya Arabic. Now enjoy tasting those words too!

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nuisance

Posted on September 19, 2010 | 1 comment

Say you’re driving along a word – sorry, I mean a road – and all of a sudden there’s a stop sign or a stop light you didn’t expect. “Hm!” You say. “That’s new since I was last through here! …What a nuisance!”

Well, now, driving through this word, nuisance, there’s also a stop sign in the middle, though it’s not a new one: right after the u, which you pronounce, there’s this i which you sail right through (without getting a ticket). For many speakers of English, it may seem that the i and u are reversed, because there’s a glide into the vowel ([nju]); for Canadian speakers generally, it’s just [nu] and the vowel is tout nu without any glide on or off. Quel nuisance!

So why’s the i there? I’m tempted to say it just seems to suit it. But that line would not be fruitful. In fact, we have a small suite of words that have this ui, and they’re not like that just to keep the i off U.I. In fact, they all come from French. But, ah, it would be too easy if it were just a French [wi] being reinterpreted as an [u] or [ju] in English without changing the spelling.

Fruit comes from Latin fructus by way of Old French fruit, but the English spelling originally tended to leave out the i; it might equally keep the c instead. The i seems to have been reintroduced.

Suit, for its part, traces back originally to popular Latin sequita, and showed up in English in the 13th century as siwte and then by the 15th century generally as sute. But we also see soyt and soyte in 16th-century use. Our modern suite was originally the same word and split off only about four centuries ago. In all this there was doubtlessly also cross-influence from French; when French came to have it as suite, hey presto, guess what we had in English.

But then we come to nuisance. It seems straightforward by comparison. Its source is Anglo-Norman French: nuisance. It showed up in 15th-century English as nusance, indicating a loss already of the glide; but then within a century we see nuysance. And newsance also appears. It reverted to the spelling nuisance probably with an eye to etymology (there was a vogue for a time in English for etymological respellings, so people could see where their words come from – this gave us assorted silent letters, such as in doubt and debt and falcon – well, the l is no longer silent).  But here’s the good part: In French, the word nuisance fell out of general use between the 17th and mid-20th centuries; the modern French use is most likely influenced by the English usage. Turnabout is fair play, eh!

But of course we say it one way and the French say it another. To English ears, the French [nwizãs] may almost seem charming (because it sounds so French), and it has that “yes”-sounding [wi] (as in oui) in the middle and a [z] to balance the [s]. The English version [nusIns], by contrast, reminds us of noose, while [njusIns] and [nIwsIns] might have a taste of no use, and the consonants are [n], [s], [n], [s], all noses and hisses. We may note a similar difference in sound between the cognate pair French ennuyer and English annoy – and the English word is irritated, while the French one is simply bored.

Well, etymology and spelling can be a nuisance. But a fascinating one.

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whimsy

Posted on September 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Jess had just come into the kitchen at Domus Logogustationis, where Daryl, Margot, and I were lolling about. “It looks like something’s moving in your jacket,” Daryl said, eyeing Jess’s windbreaker. He looked again, blinked. “Wow, that was weird. Gave me the whim-whams.”

“More likely the fantods, you mean,” Margot remarked. “A whim-wham is more like a fantastic notion.”

“Or a fantastical object,” I said. “Or an ornament of dress. Like, say, a little pair of cat ears on a brooch.” I gestured to Jess’s neckline, where just such an ornament was apparent.

Then the ornament turned its head and mewed.

“Gentlemen,” Jess said, “and lady, meet Whimsy.”

We reacted as you might expect, kittens being the cutest things in all of creation: “Awww!” We clustered around.

“What gave you the notion to name it Whimsy?” Daryl asked. Jess responded with a don’t-feed-me-straight-lines raised-eyebrow look.

“Is this a he or a she?” Margot asked.

“A him,” Jess said. “There is, after all, a him in Whimsy.”

“What made you decide to get a kitten?” I asked.

Jess gave me the same kind of look she had given Daryl. But then she decided to answer anyway. “Well, it wasn’t whimsy or some whim. It’s always unwise to get a pet on a notion – they’re a commitment. No, I had decided that I needed a touch of whimsy in my life. And here – ow!” The kitten was climbing up her shirt and onto her shoulder.

“Was that a whimper?” I asked.

“Not that I’m a wimp or anything,” she said. She stroked Whimsy. “Well, listen up and you’ll hear a Whimsy purr.” Pause. “Speaking of purr, I came in here to find some milk. And a saucer. Now where, how, what…” She looked around.

“Don’t forget whom, when, and why,” Margot observed dryly.

“Ah, well,” Jess said, striding towards the cupboards, “my favourite wh word is definitely whimsy. Once you’ve done with the details you still need flights of fancy.”

“As long as your whims don’t carry you with the winds,” Margot said.

“Why don’t you have a cat?” Daryl asked Margot.

“If I did, I’d more likely have quinsy. Tonsillitis. I’m allergic.”

“So am I,” I sighed. “One of the great tragedies of my life.” Margot opened her mouth to issue another correction; I pre-empted it. “Yes, I know that it’s not technically a tragedy: there is no hubris, no hamartia, no climax, no crisis… let it go.”

“Speaking of ‘let it go,'” Jess said, attempting to lift the kitten off her shoulder, “Whimsy has developed a whimsical attachment to my shirt.” She shrugged off her jacket and tried again to get the kitten delicately off her shirt, which appeared to be made of silk. “Oww.”

Daryl lent a hand and lifted the kitten off. Unfortunately, the result was a noticeable tear in the shirt.

“Huh,” Jess said, poking her finger into the hole. “Flimsy.”

Thanks to Marie-Lynn Hammond for saying Whimsy would be a good name for a kitten.

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kneck

Posted on September 16, 2010 | 10 comments

One of the disadvantages of a weird language like English, with its multifarious exceptions and irregularities and a spelling system so divergent from pure phonological representation as to border on the ideographic, is a reflexive preference for the marked.

I am here using marked in the linguistic sense, meaning “exceptional, unusual, distinct from the normative pattern”. When confronted with a choice between a form that seems simple and logical and one that defies common sense, and in the absence of any clear or authoritative sense of which to choose, we will typically choose the weird one on the assumption that it must be the right one or why would it be there? And the more simple and logical one will tend to be taken as informal or simply incorrect.

One may greet such observations with a wry smile, but admit it: it’s a twisted state of affairs. In the world of linguistic intercourse, English is among the kinkiest. And its users are like people who have lived in a madhouse so long they’ve forgotten what sane is (sort of like people who think it’s somehow normal to need two tons of metal to move a hundred fifty pounds of person a couple of miles… but I digress). Why else would I ever have heard a person evince the assumption that the name Waugh is to be pronounced like “way”? Why else would so many people firmly (though erroneously) believe that one of the most consistent and inflexible rules in English – that we use an before a vowel sound and a before a consonant sound, as shown by examples such as an hour, a use, a house, an umbrella – would have one exception, to be defended to the death: an historic? And why else would we see, in more places than you might think, the word neck spelled kneck?

Well, now, I’ll be fair: nobody is spelling it, say, pneck or neach (although it occurs to me that the first time I heard someone speak of the town of Teaneck in New Jersey, I assumed it was spelled Tionech – I was a teen at the time, by the way). There is a second force at work here: analogy. We have, after all, a word knock, another one knack, and a body part called knee and another called knuckle. And neck is a short word and not a fancy one. So the weirdness here is at least a consistent weirdness. But still, neck is a common word. A person will have seen it thousands of times by the age of 20. And yet enough of these people nevertheless spell it kneck to produce more than 400,000 hits on Google.

But wait, you say. Are all those Google hits really for the misspelling of neck? Well, no, not all; certainly not all for the unintentional spelling – I suspect the founders of a company called Knife In Ya Kneck Records may know better – but also there are a few places where another word kneck is defined: it means “the twisting of a rope or cable as it is running or being put out”.

So there! It’s a real word! Ha! Well, except that is rare and obsolete, and appears in the first place to have been a variant on kink. Incidentally, kink for its part originally meant “bend” and is related to an Icelandic word kikna meaning “bend at the knee”. But one may have a kink in the neck, too, after all (and we may wonder whether some faint notion of this comes to play in the spelling kneck, with its extra angularity and knockiness).

In fact, there’s even a medical condition in which the neck has a chronic kink due to muscle spasms: it’s called wry neck. I may note wryly that I have in various places seen people write this Rye neck, apparently assuming that it’s a toponym like Lyme disease, or perhaps just that it comes from excessive consumption of Canadian whisky. Well, either way, I understand – for those interested in traditional herbals – that one may treat it with kinnikinnik. (With what? Oh, it’s also called bearberry. But frankly, I would sooner recommend physical therapy, and perhaps muscle relaxants or anticholinergics.) I’m not sure, though, what the treatment would be for getting one’s neck – or perhaps one’s knose – out of joint at a misspelling.

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Why the second comma?

Posted on September 16, 2010 | 1 comment

The Editors’ Association of Canada email list has lately had a discussion on the topic of sentences such as “Victoria, BC is a pretty place” – or should that be “Victoria, BC, is a pretty place”?

It’s quite common not to use the second comma. And in fact in most cases one is not too likely to misunderstand the sentence without it. But does it belong there, strictly speaking? And if so, why? Continue reading →

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