hopefully

Posted on March 4, 2010 | 4 comments

Ah! You see this word, controversial in the past century, and look hopefully. Will the dispute that has brought such despair to an ostensibly bright-eyed word be resolved, or at least addressed enlighteningly? I write this note hopefully; hopefully, it will sort out some key points. The word and its uses will be fully examined, and, I hope, fully tasted.

Let us start with a morphological decomposition: hope+ful+ly.

The ly comes from a Germanic root meaning “appearance, form” that is also the root of like (all forms of the word like are related and have this origin). In this case it makes the word an adverb, but there is an identical and cognate suffix that makes adjectives: kingly, early, leisurely, etc.

The ful is just full written with one l instead of two. And the hope is, of course, hope. Both hope and full come from Germanic roots and have always meant what they mean now (though their forms have modified over time – full is cognate with forms throughout the Indo-European languages, all having a labial and a liquid, as in plenum in Latin and plérés and pléthos in Greek).

So this word is, like, full of hope! It was assembled in stages, historically: though its parts date back into the mists of time, hopeful is first cited by the Oxford English Dictionary from 1594 (in Shakespeare’s Richard III, not the most hopeful play in the canon), and hopefully from 1639.

Say it now, slowly: hope – your mouth is in a shape to swallow something, a gulp of liquid perhaps; you sure hope it’s good! – ful – now your mouth is full with your tongue, as it arches like a stretching cat, tip and tail high – ly – the tongue is now pressing its mid part forward and up, as the tip and tail drop back. The motion your tongue makes is a little reminiscent of the sun salutation, a common yoga routine. Ah, greet the morning hopefully! Hopefully it will be a nice day.

But there it is: the bitter twinge, the fly in the ointment. Can you say hopefully like that, setting the tone of a sentence without modifying the main verb? Ignoring for a moment how long people have been doing so, isn’t it illogical?

Ah, logic, logic, logic. In the sciences, you see how something works, and you make a hypothesis. If it is further confirmed, it is a theory. But if you find data that contradict your theory, you need to revise or discard it; it’s considered rather bad form to simply declare the data wrong. Not that it’s never been done, but when it’s done it doesn’t generally last. Biologists refused to believe that a platypus could lay eggs and yet be a mammal. It simply didn’t fit within their tidy taxonomies. It really was a hopeless case. But in the end the physical fact was indisputable.

But in language, because we do have the opportunity to influence its use, and it is a form of behaviour susceptible to having “correct” and “incorrect” forms, platypus denial can persist for a long, long time. Failure to analyze grammatical functions correctly is presented not as a defect, which it is, but as a virtue: you have logic on your side, so all those people who are saying things in a way that does not match your analysis must be wrong, wrong, wrong! Well, garbage in, garbage out: if your assumptions are wrong or your logic is incomplete, your conclusions will be rubbish.

And the usage always comes first. Natural languages are not constructed; they arise spontaneously and are analyzed after the fact. They can be influenced, but one does well to consider what sort of influence to exert and why. That’s the pragmatic side of the question – does a given usage enhance or detract from the expressive potential of the language? Well, let us examine the one at hand. Frankly, I don’t see what the fuss is about. But, sadly, there is a fuss, so, clearly, I need to address it.

The “logical” analysis that leads to rejection goes as follows: “Hopefully is an adverb meaning ‘with hope,’ so it must apply to the verb. If you say ‘Hopefully, I am going,’ it means ‘I am going hopefully.’ To use it otherwise is wrong.” The problem is that it is used that way, is used that way clearly and effectively, and thereby adds to the expressive potential of English. But that’s not the only problem with that analysis.

You see, the contested use of hopefully is as a sentence adverb, i.e., an adverb that sets the mood for a sentence, and it’s far from being the only word we use in that way. It’s an established and well-understood usage. If I say “frankly, I don’t see what the fuss is about,” it’s not the seeing that’s frank; if I say “sadly, there is a fuss, so, clearly, I need to address it,” I’m not saying that the fuss occurs sadly or that the address is what will be clear – although I hope the address is reasonably clear.

Seriously, sentence adverbs have been around at least since the 17th century – “seriously” was used as one in 1644. The animus towards them has only been around since the 20th century, and only really caught on in the 1960s, and has been focused mostly on hopefully, which is a bit of a latecomer to the sentence adverb game, showing up in the early 20th century – but well before many usages that are now commonly accepted.

So, really, why should there be any question about it? It’s obviously a perfectly viable usage. And I certainly do hope that the eyes of the grammaticasters will open fully; if they can learn to like it, I will be full of hope for the language.

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doldrums

Posted on March 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

Do life and work in late winter seem especially sluggish? As though, if life were an orchestra, you were not the concertmaster or even the oboe but merely the second timpanist, stuck back in the corner beating dull drums slowly? This incessant tedium… it’s enough to make one throw a tantrum if one weren’t so listless. It’s like being a sailor on a becalmed boat.

Or, more to the point, being a sailor on a becalmed boat is like it. You know how we tend to get words for internal states – mental and emotional dispositions – from words for concrete physical things? Well, guess what. Here’s one that goes the other way. Doldrums referred first to mental dullness, drowsiness, and depression; it was later transferred to the areas of the ocean where one could be becalmed (and thus in the doldrums as far as mood and activity went, too).

Doldrum comes in turn from dull plus an ending imitative of tantrum (a kind of deliberate opposite formation, like craptacular formed from spectacular). And guess what about dull (drum roll, please)… It’s also a word that referred to mental state first and then later to physical nature! Yes, that’s right; it comes from and old Germanic root meaning “foolish” or “stupid”. From there it extended to sluggish spirits and blunted moods. And only from there, and a half a millennium after the first instance we have recorded of it in English (but still before Shakespeare), do we see it used to refer to knives, light, etc.

So doldrums, with its echo of ho-hum, really is a perfect word for the late winter blues, when the superintendent of your spirits is become slumlord, and perhaps, like a bored and stagnating sailor, you get into the rums and just plop upside-down (plop upside-down? dold… just lie on your back in your state of stupefaction and look at it).

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting doldrums.

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pschent

Posted on March 3, 2010 | 1 comment

In case you were wondering whether we have any words in English that can’t be pronounced according to English phonotactics, well, yes, of course we do. English is rapacious and will take words from anywhere if it sees them as suitable and desirable.

Take, for example, pschent. This is not a typo for Paschen or psyche or anything else, not even James Joyce’s pftjschute. It is also not pronounced like pshaw but with an ent in place of the aw. No, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it begins with a voiceless bilabial stop, which is followed by a voiceless alveolar fricative – /ps/, already a forbidden onset in English, even though we have tons of words starting with the letters ps thanks to /ps/ being so common in Greek as to have its own letter – and that in turn is followed by a voiceless velar fricative, as in German ach (and written [x] in the International Phonetic Alphabet), a sound we no longer even have in English, officially. And then, then, then, finally then, you get to say the same sounds as the end of went. It seems like some pop-bottle explosion: “Man, someone musta shook that Coke, cuz it just pschent!” No wonder some other dictionaries allow this word an onset of just /sk/.

So, ah, what is it really, this pschent? Well, Torontonians have lately had a chance to see plenty of pictures and sculptures of it, if they’ve visited the King Tut exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. You probably thought of it as a double crown (which sounds like a coin or a brand of beer). The pharaoh of unified Egypt was a man who wore two hats, you see. At the same time. One was the milk-bottle-shaped white crown of Upper (southern) Egypt; the other was the more rakish red crown of Lower (northern) Egypt, which just so happened to fit around the white crown like a zarf (or one of those jugs one puts ones milk bags into, if one drinks milk from bags). The pschent was, in its way, Egypt’s answer to the Union Jack. Only worn on the king’s head.

This word was one of the ones on the Rosetta Stone, that parallel text that first allowed the hieroglyphs to be deciphered. Pschent was in the Greek and in the Egyptian demotic script; it comes from p “the” and skhnt “sekhemti”. Oh, I should say that sekhemti was the hieroglyph for this crown; it meant “two powerful ones”. But we couldn’t borrow that word! Where would be the fun in that? Be happy at least that we took the Greek version, with the e in it; skhnt can only be said when one is sound asleep. Not that one has many occasions to speak of pschents in daily life, of course.

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aplomb

Posted on March 2, 2010 | 1 comment

What picture do you get when you see or hear this word? Perhaps a cool customer, one with chin up and chest out but as calm as Jeeves, someone who, when pitted against a problem, does not take things lying down but does not throw his (or her) weight around, someone who surveys the situation, senses the gravity of the circumstance but always keeps head on shoulders, takes the lead, and gives a measured response? And perhaps someone with a plummy accent?

The look and sound of the word seem to go well with the sense. The pl is seen in calm, measured words such as please, pleasant, plan, and plush, as well as weighty words such as plot, plop, plug, and plough, along with an assortment of other kinds of words such as pluck, plural, and plight. The calm /m/ of the end with its thoughtful nasal hum can also be seen to be leaving something unsaid – that b there. Ah, that b. Look: first you see it hanging upside down p, then it is right side up but in two pieces lo, and with the calm hand of intervention m it ends up as it should be, but tamed. Yes, this word gets from a to b so calmly you don’t even notice you’re at b.

And where did that b come from? Originally from Latin plumbum, which is the reason the chemical symbol for lead is Pb. If, like a surveyor, you take a properly shaped piece of plumbum and dangle it from a string as a weight, you will find it will find gravity for you quite nicely and tell you exactly which way is up. We may call such a device a plumb bob (sounds like a Hallowe’en game) or a plummet. If you happen to be French, however, “lead” is plomb and if you follow the lead of the lead – not throwing it around, but just being as upright as it is – you are à plomb. So this French prepositional phrase meaning “in vertical position” is now a noun in English meaning, roughly, “as cool as a cucumber”.

This noun, incidentally, is found most of the time with the word with usually two or three words before it: with grace and aplomb, with equal aplomb, with as much aplomb, with considerable aplomb, with characteristic aplomb, with the same bleary-eyed aplomb, et cetera. This is not so surprising, since it expresses a manner of doing things (and doing things with manners). It could have been an adjective (like adroit) or an adverb, but somehow it ended up a noun. Perhaps because it expresses such stability. And perhaps because a plum is, after all, a noun.

Thanks to Jens Wiechers for asking for aplomb.

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thwack

Posted on March 1, 2010 | 1 comment

“So it comes to him,” Daryl said, gesturing, “and THWACK!, he just nails it.”

I emitted a descending whistle of appreciation in response.

Raoul, interested though he may sometimes be in sports tales, was as usual more interested in the sport of words. “What part of speech is that?”

“What,” Daryl asked. “Nails?”

“No, thwack,” Raoul said.

“Well, a thwack can be a noun, and thwack can be a verb…”

“Yes,” Raoul said, “‘He thwacked it a good thwack.’ But this wasn’t either of those, was it? More of an interjection, I think.”

“You can interject nouns and verbs,” Daryl said. “Nuts!” He paused for a split second and then, having thought of it, grabbed some nuts from the bowl on the table. Then he pulled out his iPhone and started typing on it.

“But saying that when you encounter catastrophe is not like saying it when you encounter cashews,” Raoul objected. “It’s not like saying ‘Bees!’ or ‘Incoming!’ or ‘Run!’ or ‘Help!’ It’s not indexical; it doesn’t indicate the presence of, or need for, nuts. Nor do I think thwack is like nuts – one says nuts where one could equally say drat or rats or any of several less polite things. Thwack indicates something more specific. Perhaps one could say smack or whack, depending on the impression of the sound…”

“Well,” Daryl said, flicking through screens on his iPhone, “it’s onomatopoeia, and has been with us at least since about 1530, first as a verb and then as a noun. Shakespeare used it in Coriolanus. I find no listing for it as an interjection.”

“Ah,” I said, deciding my time to dive in had come, “the insistent neglect of ideophones. Even in African languages, some of which have hundreds of them and use them fairly often, they were a long time in being recognized and studied. For some reason many linguists don’t find them interesting enough to study, which I find truly strange. Things that break the expected patterns and categories are the most fascinating!”

“Ideophones?” said Daryl. Tap tap tap he went on his iPhone.

“A particularly performative set of words. Not per se a lexical category; they can be any other word class. But they add an element of performance, and often have unusual sounds and grammatical aspects.”

“Onomatopoeia,” said Raoul. “Straightforward imitation.”

“Standardized, lexicalized, and not always imitative,” I said. “In some languages, for instance, there are ideophones to emphasize intensity of colour – different ones for different colours. Some also use gestures and non-speech sounds. For instance,” I increased my level of performative involvement, “‘Was he in trouble?'” Onto the end of this, as answer, I tacked a low whistle with eyes wide open and right hand fanning head. Then I added, “And that’s culturally standardized.”

“But thwack is plain imitation,” Raoul insisted.

“Why not thap or thwap or swapt or…” I said.

“I notice you use voiceless fricatives on all of them,” Raoul pointed out.

“Well, yes,” I said, “that makes the difference between thwack and whack – the clearer sense of something whistling through the air before impact. That is imitative, but why not fwack?”

“Sounds vulgar, doesn’t it,” Raoul said, and reached for the bowl of nuts.

I tried saying thwack and fwack a few times. “Thwack allows a better pucker and release, a kind of oral gesture imitative of an impact.”

Daryl had found something more with his web searching. “They’re most likely to be used in fairly active, lively, informal narratives, aren’t they?”

“That seems obvious enough,” Raoul said.

“And often in the narrative present,” Daryl continued.

“Is that what you’re finding?” I asked. “That seems reasonable. Just as you used it.”

“And,” Daryl said, scrolling some more, “frequently with exclamation marks, sometimes all caps or italics, and repetition.”

“Well,” I said, “voilà! There you have it.”

“Voilà,” Raoul said. “And what part of speech would that be here?” And so it began again.

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discobolus

Posted on February 28, 2010 | 1 comment

Imagine stepping onto the dance floor at a club and seeing a discobolus. How would you like that? I would not, even if the discobolus were covered with little mirrors. A discobolus is not a disco ball, you see, nor even a bolus in a disco. The stress is on the second syllable, rather like discover us: “Let’s hid behind the turntables; he won’t discobolus.”

The disco, to be sure, is the same disco as elsewhere, referring to discs – including the discus, and quoits (rings tossed like horseshoes). It comes from Greek diskos. The bolus is from Greek bolos, “thrower”, from ballein, “throw” (as in ballistic). The us ending tells us it’s come by way of Latin, as the equivalent Greek ending is os.

So a discobolus is a discus thrower. The c, o, and o are reminiscent of discs, anyway. The word starts on the tip of the tongue, swings back at /k/ to the velum, up to the lips at /b/, and then back to the tip (tip tip back lips tip tip – same rhythm as a popular hockey chant: “Let’s go, [two-syllable team name], let’s go!”). The movement is only vaguely reminiscent of the wind-up of a discus thrower.

So if there were a discobolus in the middle of the dance floor, he would truly be a diabolus in musica (and might be that way due to a diminished fifth – of Scotch, say). And if we were there dancing and he chose to hurl his discus or quoit, it would just clobber us. And would we be discombobulated? Quite.

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deliquium

Posted on February 27, 2010 | 3 comments

I was at one of the Order of Logogustation’s weekly word tastings and had just been served up deliquium when I heard a sound that caused a ripple of horripilation down my spine. It was the unmistakeable creak of matching his-and-hers black leather pants and jackets, and it was right… behind me… looking… over… my… shoulder…

“Mmm, what have we here?” purred Marilyn Frack, 32 millimetres from my ear. “Deliquium! Look, Edgar!” Her other half, Edgar Frick, appeared on my other side, peering at the word I held in my hand.

“Well, now, there’s a liquid-looking word,” declared Edgar.

“In spite of the fact that there’s only one liquid in it,” I said, meaning the /l/.

“But you see,” Marilyn said, “it has two cups, u u.”

“And two candles, i i,” Edgar added.

“Well, then,” Marilyn said, turning towards Edgar, “it’s just you and I, with two cups and two candles! Let us drink deeply!”

“And perhaps,” I said, “you’ll drink so much you’ll pass out. That is, you will suffer deliquium.”

“Pass out!” Marilyn said. “Become as liquid and flow to the floor?”

“It’s a trick word,” I said. “Although there is an obsolete word deliquium that means ‘deliquescence,’ which is melting or becoming liquid by absorbing moisture from the air –”

Marilyn broke into her impression of Katarina Witt in Battle of the Blades: “I’m melting in my seat, and I don’t mean my armpits!” She smiled and licked her lips.

“I don’t think she meant absorption, either,” I said. “But while that deliquium and the sound of liquid have affected the interpretation and use of this word, the sense of swooning or syncope – actually through hypotension rather than intoxication – comes from a Latin homonym meaning ‘failure’ which is formed from a past tense form of the same Latin root that gives us delinquent.”

“One of my favourite words,” Edgar said, “to embody.”

“Then you will commit many a delict,” I said, “which is an offence against the law, coming to us from the same root by way of delictum, which means ‘fault’, ‘offence’, ‘crime’.”

Marilyn’s left eyebrow arched archly. “As in in flagrante delicto! Oo, now I could swoon!”

“We really must thank James for introducing us to this delectable lexeme,” Edgar said, leering heavy-lidded past me at his lover.

“Deliquium?” Marilyn said, leaning close in on me. “Let’s. Do we lick ‘im?”

At which point I believe I lost consciousness.

My thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting deliquium.

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“Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide”

Posted on February 25, 2010 | 1 comment

In today’s New York Times, my eye was caught by the following headline:

Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide

It caught my eye because I couldn’t figure out what they meant by it. There were multiple options, none of them certain. It wasn’t until I read the third and fourth paragraphs that I got the gist:

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

The short of it is that the banks helped to hide the debts, and now they’re betting Greece will default on them.

There are a few problems with the headline the way they have it:

  • First, “bet” is temporally ambiguous – I wasn’t sure if they were talking past or present.
  • Second, “defaults” could be a plural noun or a present-tense verb.
  • Third, the present tense is confusing for “defaults” here because it’s referring to the future – something we do in English, use present for the future (since we have no inflecting future tense, just an auxiliary-based one with “will”), but it might be better to be clearer by saying “will default”.
  • Add to this the increasingly common practice of using attributive nouns rather than adjectives, which allows “Greece defaults” to be read as “Greek defaults” or “defaults of/by/from Greece”, and the standard dropping of the relative “that”, and you have something really a bit unclear.

Now, of course, “Banks Bet that Greece Will Default on Debt They Helped Hide” is noticeably longer, which is a problem in newspaper headlines, especially since the NYT still has a print edition with actual column inches to fit within. Likewise “Banks Helped Greece Hide Debt, Now Bet It Will Default”. “Banks Set Greece Up to Fail” might seem harder to defend as a statement, but is probably a better headline all around. (The ambiguity of “set” is OK here because it happened in the past and is still happening in the present.)

But, then, is it really a bad headline? It did get me to read the article, just as the most egregious website I’ve ever seen – yvettesbridalformal.com — has gotten me (and my friends) showing it to everyone, making for excellent advertising.

Incidentally, the title on the web page of the news article (not the headline but the title you see at the top of your browser) is “Trades in Greek Debt Add to Country’s Financing Burden” – clearer but, yes, less catching.

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egregious

Posted on February 25, 2010 | 2 comments

I’ve seen more than usual of this word recently thanks to discussions on points of grammar. In general, those who use it – to label, for instance, a use of you and I where you and me is technically correct – mean by it something like “grievously cringeworthy” (or, more to the point, “yuck yuck yuck I hate it I hate it I hateithateithateit!”).

And certainly that’s the flavour of it, isn’t it? It has a feel of grievous – with that growling /gr/ that bespeaks vigour, aggression, anger, or emphasis, from mad dogs to Tony the Tiger, descending to gross and grim and ascending to great and grand – but the extra /i/ at the beginning gives it even more energy, forcing the sound at high pressure past a tense tongue (I remember as a kid saying jee creeps when I was frustrated). And the affricate /dZ/ in place of the fricative /v/ gives it a bit more chewiness and perhaps an echo of cringe.

So it’s hardly surprising that it is commonly followed by violation(s), error(s), abuse(s), and offense(s), along with example(s), case(s), conduct, and behaviour. The word it’s most commonly seen with is most – if one is going to be emphatic, why not go all the way? The world may be crowded with egregious things, but the one you have your eye on is the most egregious of its sort!

And well that an egregious thing should stand out from a crowd – but a crowd of egregious things seems odd indeed. Why? Because the greg in egregious is a Latin root meaning “crowd” or, more accurately, “flock”. We see it in congregation and gregarious. The e is the same as in e pluribus unum: it means “out of”. So something that’s egregious is a standout – in a bad way.

But it wasn’t always a bad way. The Latin etymon, egregius, meant “excellent, eminent, outstanding” – outstanding in the good way. And that is how it entered English in the middle of the 16th century: to mean “preeminent, distinguished, outstanding”, all those good things. Uses of it in this sense can be found in works as late as the mid-19th century, for instance by Thackeray in The Newcomes: “When he wanted to draw… some one splendid and egregious, it was Clive he took for a model.”

But a mere third of a century after it had shown up in English in the positive sense, it was already being used in the negative sense we know now – the photo negative of the original sense. Shakespeare used it in the negative sense: “Egregious murtherer,” in Cymbeline. But Shakespeare also used it in a more positive sense: “Except… thou do give to me egregious ransom.” Which suggests that its use at the time was more in the line of exceptional: capable of being strongly negative or strongly positive, but either way strong.

Well, not now; now the tone does not need to be specified. The positive sense is obsolete and forgotten. In fact, the tone is eclipsing the remainder of the sense; the idea of exceptionality or salience is being drowned out by the basic point-and-scream response it evinces. (Come to think of it, it rather does sound like he screeches, doesn’t it?) And so a very common error of usage comes to be described as egregious. So what term is left for truly outstandingly bad instances like, say, Thou may giveth it to I?

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lede

Posted on February 23, 2010 | 1 comment

This word is an obsolete word for “people, nation, race”; it’s cognate with the German Leute. Fittingly, it’s also the reverse of edel, which is German for “noble”. And it’s the name of a municipality in Belgium, known for a statue called Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-van-Zeven-Smarten, “Our Lady of Seven Sorrows”, which is a local pilgrimage destination due to its purported miraculous powers.

It’s also a newspaper term for the introduction of a news story (the first sentence or so). So, for instance, when the levee breaks, you want to bring it on home with the right lede: “The levee broke this morning, just a few hours after a young man sat on it all night and moaned. ‘The levee has broken, and I have no place to stay,’ complained Bob Plant, 24.” You don’t bury the lead below the lede, for instance by sticking the main topic in the second paragraph after covering less pertinent facts in the opening paragraph.

That’s bury the lead as in /li:d/, “leed”, not as in /lEd/, “led”. It’s the same pronunciation as lede, which is, in fact, the same word. Dazed and confused? It’s that word lead that causes the problem. Printers used to use lead (the metal) in setting type, so they wanted a distinctive spelling of the other lead for clarity. (Another group who wanted a distinctive spelling were the group Led Zeppelin, who figured – probably quite rightly – that Lead Zeppelin would often be read and said with the wrong lead.) And it does look old-school journalistic – the stereotyped grizzled hack with a cigarette l next to his heavy-lidded eyes (it is late in the evening, after all) and bulbous (rhinophymic?) nose, ede.

Journalistic terminology has a whole set of these respelled terms, all the way they are for distinctiveness (so as not to be confused with content actually to go into the story, for instance). Others include dek (for deck, itself a jargony term for a subhead or highlighted first sentence above the main story), hed (for head, as in headline), graf (for paragraph, with the advantage of brevity), and tk (for to come, of course – What do you mean it should be tc? Get with the program!). They may aid clarity and efficiency for printers and journalists (perhaps less now than formerly), but they also put a nice little electrified fence of in-group jargon around the biz, and help those who are “in” to feel “in.” But why should it be different for journalists and printers than for any other groups? (Say, have you noticed how lede is similar to leet, a.k.a. l33t or 1337 – see teh?)

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