The C word

When you need to smack down idiots, go to the best for help. Some commenters on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog were giving him trouble for defending the word conversate. One even argued that until a word is in the OED it shouldn't be said.^†

How did TNC settle the argument?

Well, I had nothing better to do today, so I decided to call up the OED people and see if I could get an editor to talk to me.

They couldn't spare one of their toadie interns so he had to settle for Jesse Sheidlower. Coates gets right to the point, asking: So is conversate a word? As usual Sheidlower responds with a lovely display of knowledge and reason. And he offers up some pretty good lines.

They're all words, but it behooves us to be serious and ask, is it acceptable in this context? If you're delivering the State of the Union address, maybe "fuck" is not acceptable. If you're having sex with your girlfriend, maybe it is acceptable.

Maybe.

The comments are surprisingly well-balanced. Sheidlower made a good case and it shows. Only a few people are standing firm in their backwards view of language. And even some of the prescriptivist views are reasonably supported. Consider the view of laborlibert who writes:

Unfortunately the opinions of others do matter and as long as the consensus is that conversate is not a word and that aks or "mines" are improper, than these should be used sparingly in certain circles.

Alot of people in my office say "mines" and I advise them to knock it off. I'm not a language Nazi, I just think its for their own good.

This is close. It's true that usage determines the language. And usage is in many ways a product of opinion. But the consensus is obviously not that conversate is not a word. There is no clear consensus on this. And the circles in which the consensus is clearly intolerant are often unable to enforce their pet constraints. So they often don't matter. And If you're willing to use a word sparingly I say go ahead and use it confidently.

If you really care about the good of your peers, don't bother with changing their dialect. Stand up for dialectal equality and roll your eyes at ignorant disdain.

My favorite comment comes from KevDog who writes:

Also, since spell check flagged conversate, I just added it to my dictionary. So there.

Perfect. Choose your lexicon. Own your words. I love the spellcheck "ADD" option. That's how it works.

---

† And until I've eaten I have no right to get hungry.

No one is born unfranchised

In a recent post John McIntyre writes

I came across a sentence in James McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief that referred to disfranchised African-Americans. To enfranchise is to give someone the franchise, the vote. To deny someone the vote is to disfranchise. The more common term in use is disenfranchise — which would suggest taking the vote away after it had been given. I’m not going to grow red in the face and pound my fist on the desk over this one — it’s not worth it. But it gladdens the heart to see a writer use a word in a precise sense.

Oh that he could move just a little farther away from his lightest of censures. I disagree with this good-natured judgment regarding these forms on several grounds.

I disagree with his judgment of precision. Praising the precise use implicates the use of disenfranchise as less precise. It is of course not so. The precision lies within the nuanced intention of the writer/speaker and the understanding of the reader/listener. A change in meaning dulls not the edge of meaning.

But the morphological premise of his argument is shaky anyway. To franchise is just as much to grant rights as is to enfranchise. So disenfranchise no more means to take away a previously held right than does disfranchise. And if we want to look at the history of the words (which is relevant by the agreed terms of a discussion of language change) disfranchise has meant, and still often means, to deprive of rights held prior.

The prefix en- doesn't give enfranchise any further derived meaning. It's probably from the Old French enfranchiss- and not simply formed from the addition of en- to the English verb franchise. Enfranchise means the same thing as franchise and has historically meant the same thing.

What Mr McIntyre seems to want is a morphology that compositionally derives a sense of deprivation or keeping from. Something that could be accomplished by a prefix like un- which would indicated the state of not having been affected in the way indicated by the verb. Unfranchised and Unenfranchised are both attested by the OED with only a few citations.

The prefix dis- on either word could be considered equally problematic if we read the derived meanings as an undoing of a previous state. The 6th definition given in the OED is having the sense of undoing or reversing the action or effect of the simple verb. In these words the state would be having certain officially recognized rights. And as Mr McIntyre says, this would suggest taking the vote away after it had been given.

But I suggest that those un- forms are not only superfluous, they are incorrect. The dis- prefix is not merely acceptable despite it's compositional meaning, it is in fact more accurate. The sense of reversing is important in the use of the the terms. As I hear and try to use the words, they indicate that certain inalienable and inherent rights and freedoms have been taken away by institutions that don't respect all people equally.

To put it most simply: disfranchisement and disenfranchisement is precisely what happened to the slaves who used to have freedom and rights. These were taken away from them. If we believe the words of our founding documents then we also believe in G-d given rights.

The one that got away

I wish I could go back and re-edit one of the major papers from my M.A.

Just the other day I was thinking about 'real' words (no doubt because of some recent posts on LL) and I remembered a comment by a fine professor in the margin of my paper in which I investigated Virginia Woolf's commentary on ostracization and her use of Greek as a tool of inclusion intrusion and transcendence to the unobtainable.

Dr J-G wrote "I don't find enamoration in the dictionary" and suggested a word like enamourment instead.

And I just rolled over. I guess I wanted her to stamp her OK on the paper and send me on my way.

But enamoration was so much better! And in a paper that's all about daring to speak in ways that aren't expected or common and to say things that are not approved by existing systems I was supposed to say 'I don't want to pick a word that that meets your approval to indicate a state of rapture. I can't help but resist you.'

But I could have even used her argument against her. Enamoration is in the OED. And it falls under a headword with that gorgeous † and the lovely Obs. rare tag. And it is defined simply as ecstacy of love. Oh I wish I had stuck with it. It was a paper that began with And as the first word of an interrogative sentence. I began with a presumptuous demand for an eely answer.

And yet I was unwilling to take either approach: to argue that the word was sanctioned by the OED; or (more romantically) stick with my word because I wanted to use it and it worked.

Plus those four nasals in enamourment are so klutzy.

Just peruse this. No. Peruse it instead.

I think it was in high school when a friend told me that peruse doesn't really mean to read through quickly. But I don't think it was until after I met Buffy -- and we were playing one of those nerdy-wordy games coming up with as many autoantonyms as possible -- that I threw away the idea of such right and wrong meanings.

What is the right meaning of peruse? Of cleave? Of bound Of let? Of sanction? Of overlook? Of dust? Of enjoin?* (Keep playing on your own time).

Not all these pairs of are explained in the same way. Some are a coincidental similarity of once-distinct words. Some are due to semantic bifurcation from a single meaning.

Both processes occur naturally. But semantic sentinels pick on them unequally. Of all the words I listed I've only heard complaints about peruse.

Most recent is this admonition from the Minnesota mavens at Grammar Grater.

It turns out the word peruse means something different than browse.

(Follow the above link to read the copy or listen to the show below. It's a bit cheesy but at least it's short.)


Our well-meaning counselor Luke Taylor cites the Oxford Dictionary of Current English and the Random House Unabridged Dictionary to claim that peruse denotes a careful reading. But by taking the sense of careful back to the 1500s Mr Taylor doesn't explain why the other meaning (to read quickly) that emerged in the 1500s isn't equally valid. (The episode is actually written by Jennifer H.)

The show eventually rests on advice based on Fowler's vague reminder of the obvious: the suitability[...]is a matter of discreet (and often delicate) contextual choice.

Some citations can't make clear the distinction between a quick reading and a deliberate reading by mere context. Who knows what each of the following means? There's no way of knowing.

'Peruse this.'
'Did you peruse it?'
'He perused the book.'

But some sentences make it clear by context.

'I don't have time to peruse it so I'll just skim it.'
'If you're too busy you can just peruse it and that'll be enough.'

The OED provides this 1589 citation of George Puttenham's use of 'peruse' with an illumination:

An Epitaph is..pithie, quicke and sententious for the passer by to peruse, and iudge vpon without any long tariaunce (Arte Eng. Poesie I. xxviii. 45).

That's clear enough.

The argument that peruse means 'read carefully' and that 'read quickly' is a later use not yet ratified by the gods of English is another example of the recency illusion. Both meanings are well established since roughly the same time. A usage note in the OED explains that peruse has been a broad synonym for read since the 16th cent., encompassing both careful and cursory reading.

I don't have a copy of Fowler's nearby but Taylor claims that the advice on suitability is from clarification on the use of formal words.

I don't know if I've previously heard the argument that a polysemous word should always mean one thing in a formal setting and another thing in a less formal setting. That might not be Taylor's actual point but he's approaching something like it. Why is there the specific mention that in formal settings unambiguous usage is important? Isn't ambiguity an issue wherever it comes up? Is this the old lie about formal language being more rule driven and careful than informal language?

This looks a lot like a wink and a nudge to an elitist shibboleth. I guess if you want to prove that you belong in a formal setting just make sure that you always use peruse the 'proper' way. Only those curs down in the galley use it as a synonym of browse. Because they don't care about language as much as we do.

-----

*Buffy came up with enjoin.

On deck: wheelhouse

A while back I wrote that I disagreed with a professor's argument. I didn't make all my points as clearly as I could. However a friend was kind enough to suggest that the professor's point was doomed from the beginning because he had picked a topic that was in my "wheelhouse."

I hadn't heard the phrase "in your wheelhouse" before that. The context and our shared knowledge made it clear that my friend meant that the topic was a favourite or a familiar one -- and I was therefore adept at arguing my point.

I looked in several dictionaries to find out more about this word/phrase.

Random House: PILOTHOUSE

American Heritage: See pilothouse.

Merriam-Webster: pilothouse

WordNet (Princeton): an enclosed compartment from which a vessel can be navigated [syn: pilothouse]

Websters New World: PILOTHOUSE [also tags the entry as an Americanism.]

Webster's Deluxe Unabridged: a shelter built over the steering wheel of a ship; a pilothouse.

Funk and Wagnall's: 1 A small house on the deck of a vessel in which the steering wheel is located; a pilothouse. 2 A paddle box.

Thank goodness the OED doesn't worry about saving space and giving only the essentials. So the entry there is predictably more informative than the rest.

OED: 1. A structure enclosing a large wheel, e.g. a water-wheel; spec. a house or superstructure containing the steering-wheel, a pilot-house; also, the paddle-box of a steam-boat.

2. a. A building in which cart-wheels are stored.
b. = ROUND-HOUSE

3. Archæol. A circular stone dwelling of the late Iron Age of a type widespread in northern and western Scotland, having partition walls radiating from the centre..

The various definitions of pilothouse are not so various. All indicate a room housing the wheel used to steer a ship or boat.

And none of these gives me a good answer regarding my friend's use of the term. So I search for wheelhouse on Google™ and the first hit is an entry at the The Phrase Finder. Telling me that this is used in baseball to indicate that area (usually in the strike zone) that makes a pitch easy to hit. The page includes a citation from James Carville with Jeff Nussbaum's Had Enough: A Handbook for Fighting Back: "[W]e're going to take it into this administration's supposed wheelhouse."

It also provides an address to a baseball jargon page but that link has changed and is now a useless matrix of circular advertising.

So we go elsewhere. Over to the Urban Dictionary where we get an entry for wheelhouse with several definitions. The first is provided by Reimer Cunningham who defines the word as an "area of expertise, a particular skill". An illustrative quote is included: as an alcoholic, a beer drinking contest is right in my wheelhouse. This definition has received 62 positive votes and 3 negative.

The second definition gives a little more information claiming the term refers to that area within a batter's range to makes good contact easiest. This definition also provides two examples of use. There is an ambiguous attribution on each use but it's not clear if these are actual quotes. This definition has received 49 positive votes and 2 negative.

Democracy.

The Wiktionary entry for wheelhouse is simple -- but it gives 3 definitions:
1. (nautical) An enclosed compartment, on the deck of a vessel such as a fishing boat, from which it may be navigated; on a larger vessel it is the bridge or pilothouse
2. (nautical) The enclosed structure around side paddlewheels on a steamboat.
3. (baseball) A batter's power zone

The reach of wheelhouse has extended from its use in sports to the more general sense of skill. Much like to hit it out of the park can mean to have any success or to perform an impressive display of ability.

But I'm still curious about the move from the nautical into the baseball.

A third definition in the Urban Dictionary makes the following guess:
Anything that can be acted on with confident success.
I'm guessing it originates from the fact that a wheelhouse is the room on the bridge of a ship where you steer from, providing you with clear view & control to steer the situation.

I'll disagree. It makes sense to look past the pilothouse meaning. Consider instead the paddlewheel enclosure extending into the baseball sense. As a wheel swings easily on a point or axle any object that enters that box is in danger of being smacked silly. Imagine the damage done to any object that gets caught in that wheelhouse. It only had to happen a few times before the wheelhouse was known as a dangerous spot.

* * *

As often as Jesse, Graeme, Erin, Ben et al decide to include a new definition in their impressive tomes the words and meanings pop up and shift too quickly. They're playing catch-up because it's impossible not to. The best dictionary editors can't predict which word will come into the language. And new definitions are tried and tested by the churning cultures of the roiling masses. Good luck with that forecast.

The best dictionaries are not too slow to reflect language change. They're just careful. And every metaphorical use isn't worth mentioning. No matter how beautiful or effective or striking. Should a dictionary tell us that a poem out there defines Petals (on a wet, black bough) as human faces on a Paris Subway? It's not a dictionary's job to tell us everything that has been done with a word. So this is a good reminder that a dictionary is a still shot of a moving object. And not every twitch and flutter needs to be documented.

This is less and less troubling these days because of our ongoing self-documenting language technology. Google™ is an impressive lexical tool. Type in your term and you can find millions of of instances of its use which give a good image of how a word is understood. And sometimes Google™ anticipates well that you're looking for just that information. The first hit is often a definition.

And Sites like Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers and The Phrase Finder are more likely to report recent development. The compromise of such responsiveness is well discussed.

The greatest strength of a carefully compiled dictionary is the depth that a work like the OED obviously values. Few of the contributors to UrbanWiktionAnswers will stick with a word long enough for a full investigation. Even when the work is carefully done and attested these lexicographical dilettantes tend to move on to the next word before a full history has been uncovered. Those who snort around a word like a truffle pig are precious. And they tend to devote their work to the service of those dictionaries that value accuracy and depth more than quickness and breadth.

But this wheelhouse phrase isn't too obscure is it? It's not hard to find the meaning and especially in baseball jargon it must be pretty well known. How does this it fare on number of Google™ hits?

in my wheelhouse    - 6,640
in his wheelhouse   - 5,020
in your wheelhouse  - 2,500
in their wheelhouse - 1,280
in our wheelhouse   - 1,200
in her wheelhouse   - 1,020

Searching for 'in the wheelhouse' brings up mostly boat references. Going with the pronouns weeds out a lot of those. Tho using "her" pulls up a lot that refer to the earlier meanings - "she" being the boat/ship.

It's not huge. But open it up with a wildcard and narrow it back down by adding "right in" and we find that "right in * wheelhouse" gives us 20,300 hits. A few of the hits on the first page are references to the phrase. The rest look like a relevant use. Three of them refer to baseball. The following pages show a good mix of relevant uses regarding sports, music, dancing, automotive engineering, comedy, politics...

All evidence that the phrase has a firm footing.

And there's this post by someone else who wonders about the phrase. A commenter (going by emetic sage)suggests that the phrase works because of the central location of the wheelhouse on a boat. But wheelhouses aren't characterized by their central location nor are they a paragon of a centrality. I still like my paddle box idea.

_

Erin McKean's gone fishin'

Erin McKean is editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary. On the side she holds a position as editor of Verbatim. On the other side she has written several books. But most impressive is that she runs two blogs at the same time: A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist.

McKean says "Deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy and it's not very fun." In this presentation she offers an image of lexicographers gathering--not regulating; fishing--not directing traffic.* Watch this just to be smothered in analogies.



Polyglot and Mr have commented (over at Mr's blog) on the new trend of PR announcements going out to "lowly linguablogs." Receiving such an email announcement is a little flattering. Just a little. But I too considered letting it slide. I thought Why should I put this up? Surely once Ben Zimmer mentions it on Language Log my contribution is effectively null.

Well nearing null maybe. Almost null. But not null. No. ('nuff nasals?)

So watch the video.

*I was going to write "fishing, not policing" but the parallel structure of that contrast makes for a distracting joke along the lines of "talcum powder is to talc as baby powder is to...?"

OK is just okay

A few days ago Buffy tried to convince me that writing out 'okay' is preferable to using the capitalized letters OK. Not more correct. Not preferred by style guides. Just better. She even enlisted the support of her professor Chris Blake who dedicated a chapter in his most recent book to the issue.

In his short chapter "KO @ the Okay Corral" Blake offers the following argument:

We should change our current aberrant house style whereby we capitalize the word okay. Okay does not deserve to be uppercased. OK stands out and up, heralded on a page of print, yet it is the epitome of mediocrity. All lower-class words such as okay deserve lower-case status.

The chapter is full of enough corny jokes and cutesy orthographic games to deflect any serious contention. It's a satirical transcript of a meeting about publishing and style issues. He's having fun here so the occasional blasts of prescriptivism work best with a nudge-nudge tone. I'll look beyond his warning "--- it all, let's / these flaws before we cave in completely." By using "---" for "dash" and "/" for "slash" (I think that's what he intends) this line says DON'T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY. And Blake does like to advise that quite often. He's dedicated to self-deprecation. How else could he dare to suggest (as he does in the chapter) that relaxed orthography is "Barbarism!" crying out that "These are the last gasps of civilization."

Now--Consider how you knew that one of the lines in that last paragraph implies a loud voice. Not the exclamation mark. The all caps. As Blake himself suggests--capital letters get attention and demand power.

And that is the core of Buffy's preference for okay and her dislike for OK. OK looks too eager. It yells. It's not understated or humble as the word should be. OK is only okay. It's not great or fabulous or amazing so it deserves no all-caps spelling. She has always thought so.

But it's an initialism isn't it? And we overlook the 'all-caps=loud' convention in most other initialisms. I've noticed several other initialisms in blogposts and email messages lately that are almost always written with all caps. I've mentioned them before. Putting them in all caps is a good way of calling enough attention to them and perhaps even assuring the reader that there is no typo. "This is really what I intended. Now figure it out."

But some take more effort than others. And some take very little effort at all. When I was a child I would ask my mother if it was OK for me to turn on the TV. And FWIW IIRC she usually told me WRT the TV to leave it off. OTOH she sometimes said it would be fine. IOW OK.

AFAIK none of you readers had to scream out those initialisms. But OK is so common it doesn't need the signal to attention. We know what it means immediately. And we have okay as an alternative. We have emcee for MC and deejay for DJ. They're all fine.

When Buffy told me how brash and aggressive OK looks to her I suggested a new way of reading a few phrases.

• House MD! is on tonight.


• The UN! is in NY!


• I was born near Washington DC!


• Do you use a MAC! or a PC!? (I know I know. It's Mac and it's not an initialism.)


• I graduated from the U! of M!

----------------
Etymology Epilogue
In the chapter Blake has one character explaining that some people trace OK back to oll korrect. The character named "Chris Blake" counters this etymology and claims that it's more likely an abbreviation of "Old Kinderhook" the birthplace of Martin Van Buren because the US(!) president liked to sign off his notes with O.K.

The OED gives more credence to the Oll Korrect origin, relying on the "detailed evidence provided by A. W. Read" in American Speech. In its list of citations an 1839 source provides the gloss "all correct" alongside an uncapitalised o.k.. Old Kinderhook is only listed under O.K. as it refers to Van Buren his campaign or his supporters.

The source for all correct (C.G. Greene--Boston Morning Post) is also listed in Webster's New World 3rd edition as the earliest known use. John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins agrees with the oll (or orl) korrect origin claiming reinforcement from the Van Buren campaign cry.

WNW also suggests the possibility of an alteration of Scottish och aye 'oh yes'. This is harder to connect because of no clear trail like the 1839-40 explosion in the US.

Funk&Wagnalls (1960) and Webster's New Twentieth Century (1979) both recognize "Old Kinderhook" as the likely origin. Because of the available evidence and the clearer semantic connection I'm siding with Ayto WNW and OED. In any case there's no reason to think it's more likely to have originated with Van Buren. It makes more sense that Van Buren supporters fell upon an initialism identical to theirs that was tied to a sense of approval so they appropriated that connotation for their own use of O.K.

Semantic tectonics

The commentary from a recent post alights on some very basic (but always interesting) historical linguistics topics.

Textbooks are always sure to provide a list of traditional semantic changes including amelioration and pejoration, and common examples such as knave churl hussy nice...etc. The following list gives some loose examples of amelioration but it's not exactly the type of elevating shift that is intended by the term.

bad sick fierce mad wicked ridiculous crazy insane terrific awesome

Rather than having shifted meaning by undergoing simple amelioration the first eight of these are a type of contranym (or autoantonym, or "janus word" or several other rarely necessary words that few dictionaries list). But those labels usually indicate a word like cleave or peruse that is equally likely to have contradictory meanings without consideration of style or register while the first eight words above typically have clear meanings based on the context. Consider the following pairs of uses:

She is a bad mother.
She's one bad mother!

Trying that stunt was ridiculous.
Dude that 360 nac-nac was ridiculous!

In formal speech the 2nd meaning would be very odd for each word. Like ridiculous in slang usage crazy and insane don't simply mean extremely good. They have a connotation of impressiveness and "hard-to-believability" (that was awkward).

Terrific and awesome are good examples of a complete semantic shift, having abandoned an earlier meaning. Awesome has the interesting tie to awful which has kept its negative meaning. We can trace awe back to OE ege and its cognate in ON agi: fear and terror.

Amelioration and elevation don't quite capture the force on these words. There is an inversion that isn't explained by simple lenition of the semantic force. In fact there is no lenition at all, but an equally forced reversal; there is no significant loss or gain of neutrality in these words.

The common theory that a word must go through polysemy in order to acquire new meanings is probably quite relevant here. For a word like terrific there was clearly a time when the more specific meaning "causing fear" generalized to include other emotions before moving over and settling on "worthy of praise." But what generalization and polysemy was there with bad? In some of these words like insane and mad there is that space where they are used to concurrently indicate positive attributes like bravery and daring while also indicating a lack of good judgment.

How about "that's sick"? Maybe something like "It's sick that anyone should be so talented. I'm jealous of your skill." Wicked? Perhaps an intention like "You must have connections to darker powers to be so successful." Both of these jocular in use. But there always a little truth in any good jest no?

And bad might follow right along with that but with a more basic sense of the fascination we have for those people who break rules and show no fear or remorse. In fact the OED suggests in its very recent draft addition the meaning of "dangerous, menacing, or imposing to a degree which inspires awe or admiration; impressively tough, uncompromising, or combative."

Considering all this we go back to a word like comprise, which when considered alongside a word like apprise is evidence that the mental representation of a word's semantics is much more broad than just to include the intention. Somewhere in that encyclopedic matrix of 'what this word means' is an awareness of what the word does not mean and a sense of the word's opposites and even complements. So when called up, a word like start brings with it a role of opposite of stop. That's pretty clear. What I find fascinating is that the understanding and use of a word like gather comprises not only disperse but also be gathered. And a word like learn travels with be taught and forget and teach in its pocket. These words must have such pockets. Otherwise it'd be hard to understand why we are always finding new meanings in there.

That'll learn ya

Buffy just finished reading a book that her former professor and now friend Chris Blake wrote. Along with the occasional bursts of laughter (because he's quite funny) and the frequent pauses to discuss and investigate his claims (because he's quite provocative) she also pointed out a few mistakes (because he's quite human). There were very few -- such editing oversights as giving a character two different names and giving a quote two different speakers.

Buffy is a close reader. I flinch every time she looks at my writing. She follows arguments well and she catches all inconsistencies. And she remembers from several years ago Blake enlightening his students by informing them that nauseous (causing nausea) is commonly misused when the speaker means nauseated (feeling nausea); and that comprised of is misused when the speaker means composed of.

So there on page 82 of his book Buffy found that her mentor wrote

and the human sanctuaries that comprise the church are free to wonder and probe without fear

A stumble she figured. Surely he remembers his old rule. Then on page 92:

It was a test comprised of one hundred problems

Blake is a fine writer and editor. He uses words knowingly and he expresses himself clearly. And I'm not going to say anything critical about his use of the word comprise in these sentences. When Buffy shook her head on reading them I asked her to temper her distaste. There were certainly other instances of Blake's writing that deserved a some teasing.¹

I will however take issue with his lesson to the students. Perhaps he will temper the very advice he has shown he doesn't always heed.

Here's the usual argument regarding this word: To comprise means to bring together or collect. So a house comprises thousands of bricks. A mall comprises many smaller stores. And a university comprises several schools/colleges. Ergo! (those pedants like to say as much as they can in Latin) it is incorrect to say that a burrito is comprised of lettuce tomatoes beans cheese etc. It is incorrect to say that 88 keys comprise a full piano keyboard. And it is doubly incorrect to say that this nation is comprised of 48 states.

Before I address the fluidity of language I should note that the etymology of the word does go back to a meaning of collecting and gathering. And if we look carefully we find that the word merges with comprehend. According to the OED the -prise ending was probably formed by analogy with several other English words such as enterprise -- the verb derived from the formally identical noun.

To put it simply: nouns that ended in -prendre showed a pattern of becoming verbs ending in -prise. Some verbs ending in -prendre followed suit.

Now some will wail and moan and argue still that comprised of meaning made up of is a recent misunderstanding and misappropriation of the word. That it's a flat mistake: the wrong meaning. This argument will often go to such horrific worst case scenarios as "what if up starts to mean down?" They argue that words so arbitrarily linked to meanings will eventually become meaningless.

Point 1) The very fact that they know a word is being used incorrectly means that the intended meaning is clear. If I say "Two cups comprise a pint" or "I listened to a choir comprised of 32 singers" the meaning of the word is clear. Not arbitrary. We are allowed to use context.

Second point) It's not a recent trend. The OED entry includes the meaning "To constitute, make up, compose" and provides citations as early as 1794. Nine citations are included for this meaning: more quotations than are given for any other use. The passive use meaning "To be composed of, to consist of" gets four citations of its own. The earliest included is from 1874.

Meanings change. And it's mere convention that determines which meanings connect to which forms. This is not to say that those conventions don't serve a purpose. My point is simply that when the currents of language create the occasional polysemy and the occasional complete shift it is not a deterioration. It is merely evidence that language is of the people for the people and yes by the people.

And scoff as you might I'll bet you are okay with this (I now address the skeptics). Let's take a look at the history of apprise. The -prise ending is also derived (by analogy) from a form ending in -prendre. That early form of the word (from the French) had the meaning to grasp or understand. We still have that meaning preserved in the familiar form apprehend. And apprise once had the same meaning. But it went through a very reasonable shift and came to mean inform teach or enlighten.

Where's all the complaining about that shift in meaning?

-----------------------

Take a look at his Union College profile page (link above) and note his use of aerobie as a mass noun. It's like he thinks it's a real sport or something. (This may be related to the aggrandizing effect of mass nouns that I've mentioned before.) Now I agree that "throwing aerobies" sounds like a juggling act. Couldn't he just say "throwing around the ol' aerobie"? Yeah. That sounds more like fun and less like a sanctioned and organized activity.

Language Maven gets a strike again

William Safire's On Language column yesterday decided to pay a tiny bit of attention to language. In the midst of a rambling and uninteresting survey of the use of tier regarding presidential candidates he decided to look at the etymology of the word.

Having asked "What’s a tier, anyway, and who arranged its rendezvous with this generation of Americans?" he tries to answer his own question.

Here goes: Tier, from tire, is of Old French origin, the noun meaning “rank, order,” surfacing first in 1569, leading to the verb tirer, “to draw, drag, elongate, pull” (maybe that’s where “to pull rank” comes from).

Then he jumps to its use in ranking those who aspire to political office.

He has obviously referenced the OED for much of this information. Except for that "pull rank" conjecture. Where did that come from? Just because tier might have origins meaning both words? How do we get from tire to pull rank? Other than that, Safire's information is very close to the entry, which reads in part

tier - [Orig. tire, a. F. tire, in OF. (c1210 in Godef.) ‘suite, sequence, range, rank, order’: cf. tire à tire in succession, one after another, f. tirer to draw, elongate.]

And as he has done before the pundit mistakes the OED early entry of 1569 for the date the word surfaced. OED early entries are not to be taken as earliest known usages of a word. It's not just common sense tells us that the words were around before the citations: it's documentation. The OED entries are often just early notable and exemplary usages.

*The noun tire is found in ME meaning a row of fur (1437) or gems ("Ye Ruby suld be ye fyrst in ye secund tir of ye xij stones": Lapidary in Bodleian MS Add. A.106 a1500). And Safire's claim that the noun (which we know surfaced and even made it into print at least 100 years before 1569) led to the verb tirer is hard to understand. The very OED entry that he has mistakenly trusted to provide an earliest date, claims that tire à tire came from the verb tirer.

And the ME verb tiren (f OF tirer) that most closely matches the meaning “to draw, drag, elongate, pull” is usually found in relation to a bird of prey tugging and tearing flesh. A similar verb (of identical form) tiren is a shortened form of atiren from OF atirier meaning to outfit, furnish, equip, prepare or adorn, and has many connections to martial and ceremonial contexts. This second verb seems a likely source of modern tier meaning "A row, rank, range, course" or "A row of guns or gun-ports in a man-of-war or...in a fort." Either ME verb can be found as early as the fourteenth century. They certainly did not come from (or after) the 1569 "surfacing" of the noun.

Of course this much searching would have led Safire to make a connection with attire which certainly would have confused the surety of his findings and forced him to talk about an interesting tho unclear etymology. And Safire seems to enjoy stopping short of good (or any) scholarship, and ignoring it when he finds it.
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*ME dates and citations from the excellent Middle English Dictionary.

What's in dossier's dossier?

Nancy Friedman (at Away With Words) has posted some observations about Perrier's new campaign that plays with the water's familiar logo. Comparing the ads to an older (for Napier jewelry) ad she notes that while the jewelry slogan "Napier is Snakier" was a clue to pronunciation (they obviously rhyme right?) the Perrier ads probably don't intend the same. She writes (regarding the word 'manlier' incorporated into the logo): "I'm not certain Perrier actually wants us to say man-lee-AY, but maybe we can start something."

This reminded me of the recent Gallicism topic (scroll down or click here). For the record: If people start pronouncing common words like easier, funnier hungrier manlier angrier etc with the "-eeAY" ending I'll definitely agree with Mr Urdangs "pretentious crap" claim. "Oh...this brie is a little cheesi-ay than I like. I don't usually try foreign foods but I'm feeling a little risky-ay than usual."

So I started thinking about the -ier ending on words that are likely to be pronounced in English with the Gallic "ee-ay" ending. I came up with a list of several words and started comparing all listed pronunciations in all my dictionaries. Of course the etymology of the words is relevant so I started paying attention to those too. And I found a fun little disagreement. As etymologies will often reveal. The word in question: dossier

Sources consulted: OED, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Webster's New World, Webster's New Twentieth Century, Funk & Wagnalls, John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins, Online Etymology Dictionary

All sources agree that the word is French in origin, meaning a bundle or collection of papers, and those who push it further agree that the root goes back to dos: back < Latin dorsum.

The connection to back as identified by MW AHD WNW and Ayto is that the bundle of papers was labeled on the back (probably spine?).

The OED says of the bundles: "from their bulging [they] are likened to a back."

A nice online site, the Online Etymology Dictionary, is the only source I found that claims both possibilities, saying that the connection is "supposedly" to the label on the back, but "possibly" from the resemblance to a curved back.

Will we find conclusive answer to this?

Jaded on Safire

Barry Popik has an unapologetic agenda against William Safire. It's only partly personal. It's mostly decent scholarship. On the ADS-L he has identified the amateur linguist's most recent lapse.

Safire in his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine this week makes the following observation:

The warm old phrase you’re welcome is rapidly disappearing from the language of civility. Though the word welcome first appeared in “Beowulf,” the O.E.D. notes that the whole phrase surfaced in print in 1907. We have now come to the 100th anniversary of the birth of our acknowledgment of someone’s expression of gratitude.

I was driven to send the following message to him. He'll ignore it I'm sure.

...Beowulf may be the first documentation of the word. To argue otherwise would take more time and effort than a simple missive should require.

But I must take issue with your claim that 1907 was the earliest that the entire phrase "you're welcome" was cited. The OED does cite the line "You're quite welcome" in W W Jacobs work, Short Cruises. And that phrase does include the entire lexical bank of "you're welcome" though the extra quite interrupts the continuity of the phrase. No matter. We will accept this as an example of the entire phrase plus one word. This does however move us to acknowledge those citations (in the same OED entry) that predate the 1907 example. 300 years before Jacobs, Shakespeare wrote "O Apermantus, you are welcome" in Timon of Athens. About 600 years before that Caedmon's Satan contained the line you "sind wilcuman" which is perhaps too early to be easily recognizable. But clearly the phrase was around well before 1907.

I do understand that you then intend to identify the phrase as a salient (if waning) response to that most common expression of gratitude: "thank you." In that case a quick look at only the OED supports your claim. But you should not be so hasty to trust even such a lofty tome to be your only source. It is not a regularly updated work. You need not lower your sights to find an example that predates the OED's 1907 citation. Look to the Bard good sir. In Othello you will find the following exchange between Lodovico and Desdemona:

Lod. Madam, good night; I humbly thank your ladyship.
Des. Your honour is most welcome.

Use this information as you wish.

I'll let Mr Popik's comments sum up the judgment.

So what Safire is really saying here is that this is not the "100th anniversary of 'you're welcome,'" but that this is a poor researcher relaying obviously outdated information to an uninformed general public. This is a joke.
...
Doesn't The New York Times have any journalistic standards?

[Update:
Mr. Verb is also fed up. Read some of his thoughts on Safire over at his space.
]

Neither time nor place

I shall dignify Daniel's good remarks with yet another dedicated post. Tho I repeat, this is not an argument.

In response to his comments on my last post:

It seems to me that a "nonce" word can be expressely suited to a purpose while "rare" simply means "seldom found." Reading an OED entry we might show judicious skepticism regarding the continuation of the "nonce" status. What is likely a note on the origin of a word becomes a curious fact only about the past when a word enters general use.

That said -- neither of these words is flying around wantonly, tho by his searching Daniel has found that anachorism is twice as common (a statistic that my search does not support--as I search, anatopism leads with a ratio of 2270:535).

If we step away from the OED and consult the Oxford Companion to the English Language we find that anatopism is completely left out while anachorism gets its own entry as an accepted term in "rhetoric, literature, and drama" And though it is called "a rare term" it merits a cross-reference under foreignism.

I hardly think it fair to deem anachorism the step-brother--thus giving it the bastard status. Let's call them peers. We'll likely never know which will end up with the inheriting the wealth. Though I would bet on anatopism given given how transparent topos is as a root meaning place.

How many gigawatts would it take...

Daniel often plays around with words over at his non-etymologically-dedicated web log. Choosing to fashion a word for one occasion he writes

I think I collected Praveen because that seems like an anatopism (anachronism for a place?) for Bow, New Hampshire.

So of course I piped in with a chiding tone and offered the following jab.

anachorism already works for that.

Daniel always responds well to any discussion of words and can always contribute as much as he is willing to learn. He writes

Even though there are twice as many occurrences of anachorism as there are anatopism (4,400 to 2,200), I'm gonna stick with anatopism for a couple reasons. First, I "created" (though it previously existed) it for myself, and second, the Shorter OED has anatopism and not anachorism. And while it isn't worth anything Wikipedia has an entry for anatopism too. What does "chor" mean in Greek?

I don't really like the close spelling of anachorism and anachronism either, and it seems like anachorism has more connotation of error or mistake, while I'm looking for "out of place." Thank you for providing some options though, I do appreciate it.

I will not argue against his decision to stick with it.

Some observations:
A) Anachorism and anatopism were both probably coined specifically to serve as companions to anachronism. To deem the former suspect because of its similarity is a valid aesthetic stance.

2) The use of ana- as a prefix for the "out of time" word is a stretch as the prefix means back or backwards. It is perhaps appropriate in anachronism which etymologically means something closer to "too early a time" than "in the wrong time." Etymologically anachorism and anatopism don't make much sense. Does "behind or after the place" really capture the intention?

For the sense of "outside the correct time (or place)" the para- prefix works well. In fact parachronism is listed by the OED with a citation about 5 years earlier than anachronism. But an even earlier citation than that (by almost 25 years) is given for metachronism in 1617. The meta- prefix is slippery and can mean with or above or beyond or behind or between or resulting from or occurring after or it can denote a process of change. So at least one of those can work well for the typical meaning of anachronism. I like para- because with its own varied uses it retains the idea of beyond. Even when used to mean with it has a strong connotation of separateness.

Next) To answer Daniel's question: χωρίον can be read as country or place. It would be fun to make a well navigated journey between anachorism and anchor. The connection between a word about being out of place and a word about being in only one place could support quite the fun little etymoscopy. A quick and unexamined glance shows me that it's not as simple as this post could handle; though for a second I thought it might be.

4th) The Shorter OED is an excellent desk reference that goes deeply into its hoard. In exchange for this depth the tome sacrifices breadth. The ambition of the full OED cannot be well met on a desktop. Of course we can trust that the editorial decisions account for something of course; but shall I start trying to use "bootylicious" just because it's listed?

Immaterial conceptions

A curious friend has been hounding me for an answer about semantic development and dating. Regarding the verb conceive he's been wondering about the original meaning. Specifically, which meaning came first: "become pregnant" or "get and idea." We see Shakespeare using the word as a pun in The Taming of the Shrew --

Widow: Thus I conceive by him.
Petruchio: Conceives by me! How likes Hortensio that?
(V.ii)

And in Hamlet --
Hamlet: ...Have you a daughter?
Polonious: I have, my lord.
Ham.: Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to't.¹
(II.ii)

And elsewhere. Many of Shakespeare's uses of the word don't lend themselves so easily to a pun. He leans heavily towards the verb meaning to understand, perceive or consider.

The office desktop Webster's doesn't provide much help, telling us only that it came from Old French then giving the OF form without a gloss. One rule of thumb for dictionary etymologies might be that when the etymon is provided without definition the meaning is the same as the last one mentioned. The word has been borrowed as is.

But his Webster's doesn't give root words and morphemes thorough attention. So we can go to the OED for that. Surely there we will find out what the early roots meant and what the word first meant: we'll get a look at the entire dossier of to conceive.

According to the OED the Latin word was concipĕre, comprising con- altogether and capĕre to take.

We also find that "Nearly all the senses found in Fr. and Eng. were already developed in L., where the primary notion was app. ‘to take effectively, take to oneself, take in and hold’."

This isn't either of the definitions in question. We have here a more concrete meaning from which two other narrowings developed in French and English as well as in the original Latin. So which meaning branched first?

Of the two meanings (become pregnant and understand) the OED cites Cursor Mundi a pre-1300 northern text that refers to Mary's conception, through the holy spirit, of "þat blisful child." This transitive form is accompanied by an intransitive form in the same text which asks "Womman þat neuer neghed man, Conceiue hu sal sco?" ("A woman that never knew man: how shall she conceive?")

The OED cites John Gower's Confessio amantis in 1393 possibly using the word as a "conscious reference" to a passive sense (to be conceived) and the intransitive mentioned above.

This same text is cited as using a sense as we currently use "catch" in the phrase "catch a cold," without the necessary connotation of illness. The citations demonstrate this usage with such conceptions as sickness (Gower 1393) and putrefaction (Bonet 1684), but in one example a plant blooms after conceiving water (Golding 1587), and flax and tinder are described as being "apt to conceiue fire" (Hakewill 1621).

That's just the first branch of the word. Branch II "To take into, or form in, the mind" gives Richard Rolle of Hampole's Psalter vii, pre-1340 as its earliest citation: "He hais consayued sorow."

"To form and entertain (an opinion)" is an obselete usage first cited in John Wyclif's Selected Works c1380: "We wolen seie opinli þe sentence þat we conseyven." And its contemporary meaning "To form (a purpose, design, etc.) in the mind; to plan devise, formulate in idea" is cited as well, even as early as 1340.

Other very closely related uses are cited from c1340 in Hampole and c1330 in Robert Manning of Brunne's Chronicle.

To speak more of the origins before or outside English, the third branch is identified by the OED as being variegated and "mostly after Latin." Having previously seen that Latin saw pretty much all the meanings that we find in French and English, this looks like our catch-all category. Many of these uses are cited with later sources. We didn't expect to find the influence of Latin ending without a fight did we?

Many of these forms are very similar to those we've already considered. There are some specific uses such as the executing a legal action, formulating or uttering a prayer or other speech, or taking an oath.

Another very early citation is of King Alisaunder c1300. "How hent the gentil knyghtis, How they conceyved heom in fyghtis." This is a reflexive verb meaning "to comport oneself."

The answer to your question Casey? Though we're dealing with citations and approximate dates (note all those c's and a's before dates) I like the clarity offered by the Latin etymon. A verb meaning "to take together" might prudently be considered the general verb that eventually narrowed. Because English conceive reflects the semantic spectrum of concipĕre in Latin we should not be surprised to see no clear precedence of one meaning over the other in English. Whether an idea or a fact or some water or fire or a zygote was "taken in" first doesn't look to be a salient detail of the word's English time line.

I'm sure somewhere the bifurcation in Latin might be more clearly placed temporally. But not in the OED.

The OED does not give much attention to IE roots. For those I like to consult Webster's New World. Following the word back to the IE root we find the base *kap- meaning "to grasp." Following this forward then leads us to the Latin capĕre which Webster's claims had the primary sense "to hold, have in hand."

The hand is about equidistant from the belly and the mind.

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_{1. The line in F1 reads "but not as your daughter..." This changes the pun slightly. It directs the meaning more clearly towards become pregnant. I like the editions excluding "not" and focusing on Hamlet mocking Polonious' desire to keep Ophelia innocent/naive. Because the old man has previously warned Ophelia about tendering him a fool the semantic ambivalence is nicely preserved.}