Tag: wordnerd

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Let’s Split the Difference and Call Ourselves Gerds

Important Note: The original sense – and several later senses – of geek related to people being “crazy” or “foolish,” and this blog will discuss those in their cultural context. I’m aware that the term “crazy,” especially, does real harm to people with mental health issues, and stress that terms like this are never acceptable to describe people living with them.

Word up.

So one persistent bit of word-nerdery is, if you will, nerdery itself. Specifically, the definitions of and distinction between geek and nerd. Let’s tackle this today.

xkcd

The Difference (According to Kids Today)

When dealing with slang terms, formal dictionaries are great for etymologies but sometimes miss out on nuance, or struggle with currency. Erratic and unreliable as it may be, the notorious Urban Dictionary can be the best way to pick up on what’s going on with new internet acronyms and rising slangdom (And some of the definitions are on fleek. Top bants!).

Here’s what UD has to say:

Nerds are smart, people who lack much of a social life. They […] don’t have the social skills to go out and meet new friends.

Geeks […] have social lives, [which] are often spent pursuing some passion that the geek is obsessed with. […] Geeks are usually only friends with other geeks.

The extraordinarily thorough (I once looked up how to boost a car once… asking for a friend, of course) WikiHow offers a similar spotter’s guide:

A geek has normal social skills, though they can be prone to being pretentious and long-winded… on their particular passion.

A nerd is generally more introverted. They may know… exactly the same things [as a geek], but getting them to talk about it can take some doing.

And this seems to be the general consensus, which doesn’t stop people debating and parsing the definitions with increasingly fine detail (a Google search for “geek nerd” yields over fourteen million hits, including an amazing number of Venn diagrams), sometimes further splitting the categories into dweebs and dorks and other headings. It’s genuinely exhausting the effort some people have gone to, to determine exactly which derogatory (or celebratory, or ironically self-denigrating, or all three) label applies to them and/or other people.

Of course, these are fairly current definitions – as I and anyone who grew up in the ’80s will tell you, until well into the late ’90s the two terms were exactly synonymous – but what’s interesting is how well the more current, distinct meanings match up with their etymological roots.

Back in the day

With any slang term, it’s hard to pin down a specific root. Slang – especially teen slang – spreads quickly, and historically usually independently of printed media, so when it first starts to appear in writing, it usually seems to pop everywhere at once, with a dozen explanations as to its origin.*

GEEK

That said, geek does pretty well. It has a respectable Germanic root – geck, meaning “a fool” or “a crazy person” – and shows up in Low German Geck, Dutch gekkie, and modern German Jeck. It never entered Standard English until the nineteenth or twentieth century, but seems to have been found in various British dialects. At any rate, it entered mainstream English in recent years as a reference to a carnival performer, specifically to a type of performer who specialises in terrifying or unsettling acts: typically eating live animals, piercing his own flesh or displaying extensive or grotesque body modification. In short, a geek was someone even the other carnies thought was crazy, whose success as a performer depended on being crazy for the audience.

Its eventual association with smart, socially-awkward people seems to have been a gradual thing, around about the ’60s, as an extention of “freak” or “weirdo.”

NERD

Nerd’s another kettle of socially-awkward fish. The term first arose in 1951, and appears to have always had its current meaning: in the parlance of the time, a “drip” or “square,” someone boring and obedient. Simon Pegg says it’s short for ne’er-do-well, with no recorded evidence supporting that at all, while a popular if stupid folk etymology has it as based on knurd (i.e. drunk, backwards), since nerds clearly don’t do fun things like drink (former Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students are hugely insistent on this, in spite of the fact it didn’t appear until at least 1965, because the spelling nurd used to appear in their Bulletin). There’s even a backronym!‡ Supposedly, Canadian telecoms giant Northern Electric’s Research and Development division had pocket protectors with the name NER&D proudly blazoned across the lip, and a photo of a bespectacled engineer in a buttoned-up shirt with the pocket protector inspired the term.  Of course, this photograph has never surfaced…

No-one’s sure. There’s a line from Doctor Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo (1950), in which, among other things, the narrator will “sail to Kra-Too,/ And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP and a PROO;/ a NERKLE, a NERD and a SEERSUCKER, too!” which would seem persuasive except for the fact it apparently took less than a year to become a widespread teen slang. There’s an old ’30s and ’40s slang term nerts, used as a more polite version of “nuts”** – there’s that suggestion of insanity again – which may have drifted in spelling and sense over time, but there’s not much evidence for it. To my mind, these last two are the best candidates, but who knows?

The Rise of Geek Chic

By my youth in the ’eighties both words meant someone academically accomplished and socially misfit,¶ but as computers took over the world and Quentin Tarantino somehow became cool, the words were put back under scrutiny. Geek, the one that was originally used, way back in the day, to describe someone who was unsettlingly crazy, now meant someone who was fannishly,§ kind-of endearingly obsessed with a particular hobby or interest. The “crazy” was still in there, ultimately; but it was crazy about something, rather than just, you know, crazy.

Nerd, of course, still meant dull. Dull, dull, dweeby, boring, square, drippy, lame, dull. Nerds are allowed, even expected to be smart, but by definition they’re not cool.

Nerds, Geeks, Status and Snobbery

And therein, I think, the problem, and the real reason behind all the Venn diagrams. Because the difference between geek and nerd, when you boil it down and tease it out, isn’t obsessive hobbies, or long-windedness, or Apple vs PC or any of that guff. Remember that WikiHow definition of a nerd? Let me pull some quotes our for you, and mix up the order a bit to emphasise my point:

A geek has normal social skills… a nerd is generally more introverted.

A geek can be long-winded on their particular passion… [A nerd] may know exactly the same things.

See that? So geeks are defined by their obsessive fannishness, but nerds may know just as much about a topic (i.e. they can be just as obsessive)? What does that tell you? The difference is that geeks are cool and nerds aren’t. That’s it.

And here’s why. Still, even now in the twenty-first century, we live in a world where people like us – imaginative, clever, bookish, hobbyish, nonconformist – are punished throughout our youth. We don’t fit in, we’re not interested in the right things, we don’t try and compete for popularity or acceptance (and therein our ultimate sin: not that we fail, but that it doesn’t even occur to us to try), and so our peers ostracise us and coin terms of abuse for us. But when we grow up – when we study and start our careers – we’re now, in the age of the internet, kings and queens of the world. “Geek chic” is still a thing, twenty years after Tarantino’s first gangly, scruffily-dressed appearance on a red carpet; people want to be us.

But we’re carrying the baggage of that childhood with us, and so we scramble to distance ourselves from it. I mean, sure, nerds, yeah – pshah, huh, t’yeah – but not me; I’m a geek! Look at my iPod and ironic Che Guevara t-shirt! I have a boy/girlfriend! I have loads of friends! I go to this one cool nightclub! Yeah, I’m smart and love Star Trek, but that’s ’cause I’m a geek! Not a nerd.

It’s punching down, and I hate it. You know that kid? The one with greasy hair and no friends outside her D&D group? She’s me, and she’s you. And maybe in five years she’ll stretch outside her box a bit and get into the goth thing, or become a bit of a hipster, or who knows what; or maybe she’s happy in that box and will remain so, and that’s cool too. But whether she does or not, she’s me, and if I say, “geeks are, like, smart and into shit, but wear cool shirts and can make friends, and nerds are the same but they don’t wear cool shirts and are totally lame, and btw I’m a geek and don’t you forget it,” I’m slapping her down. I’m building a ladder over her head and greasing some of the rungs.

I’m not gonna do that. I’m a nerd, and a geek, and whatever else you want to call me, and by the way my shirts are fucking off the chain, and I’m married and have a two-year-old baby girl who’s already more awesome than any of you, and none of those things make more or less of a nerd, geek, dweeb, dork, or whatever label I’m expected to use. You are all still my people.

In fact, if it means that much to you (and I hope it doesn’t, after reading this), go ahead and sort out your own hierarchy or Venn diagram or whatever and put me on the bottom rung, ’cause that’s where I want to be.

*mic drop*

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*Fun Shakespeare fact: those 1700 words the Bard invented in the English language? A popular theory is that, in at least some cases, he wasn’t inventing anything; he was just willing to use words popular with the speaker on the street that his contemporaries – classically taught and middle-class – avoided as vulgar or incorrect.  Not provable one way or the other, of course, but I’m damn well going to champion it, since that’s basically my jam.†

†Misusing the phrase “…is my jam” is also my jam.

‡There’s always one…

**Yes, well, these were the people who invented the terms rooster and steer because they didn’t want to say the words cockerel and bullock in mixed company.

¶The 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds confusingly threw a pot-smoking loser and a gay black kid into the mix, mostly I suspect because the producers didn’t actually understand the word “nerd.”

Also, you remember the hero, Lewis? The one that tricked the football captain’s girlfriend into having sex with him (and side note: okay, she falls in love with him and whatever, but that was rape, however you spin it)? Did you know that actor was David Carradine’s younger brother? Weird.

§From fanatic. Apparently, there’s no way to make this sound good.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Hold the (Homo)phone!

Hey all,

So time for a little pro-pedantry.

Well. Not exactly pro-pedantry, because I’ll never exactly celebrate the mania for small-minded semantic corrections, but as I’ve shared my pet peeves before, suggesting ways in which, as a writer, you may put off editors and agents (or certainly me), I thought it might be time to share some common errors you might be making as a writer (or at least, I certainly find some of the writers I work with make them all the time). Specifically, errors of word substitution; and more specifically, errors of homophone substitution.

Watts a Homer phone subs tit you shone?

Well, I’ll tell you. Okay, I doubt any of you don’t actually know this – it’s pretty much school-level stuff – but to cover the bases, homophones are pairs (or groups) words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like beech (a tree noted for its straight, pale timber) and beach (a sandy strip of shoreline). Homophones aren’t, of course, to be confused with homonyms, which are words that are actually spelled the same, like skate (bladed or wheeled footwear) and skate (a type of flat fish).*

Homophone substitution is a common error in which, as you can probably figure out, a homophone is substituted for the intended word. Some of them get people up in arms on the internet all day long, like there, their and they’re, or whose and who’s, and people love to sneer at other people for using them wrong on Facebook, because obviously people tapping out a quick message about tomorrow’s barbecue or sharing a picture of their cat are going to take the time to spellcheck their fucking post.

Above: Being smug on the internet.

But those? They don’t bother me so much. Mostly because, when I’m on the internet, I want to read about people being angry at the government, that really cool sandwich you just made wrapped in bacon or the adorable thing someone’s toddler just did,‡ and I can’t bring myself to care that much when I’m not being paid to. But also because, in my actual job, those errors rarely come up. You guys are writers; you write professionally, and that’s pretty entry-level stuff.

Which doesn’t mean that writers never stumble on homophones; just that the homophones writers stumble on are generally at a higher, more interesting level. And I’m going to take a moment now to share six of the homophone substitutions I come across most often in my work.

Cannes wee sea sum eggs arm pulls, PLEAS?†

Well, gladly!

  • Discreet/Discrete: This one comes up more than any other, so watch out for it. Both derived from the Old French discret for “different,” discreet means “subtle” while discrete means “separate.” My theory is that discrete looks smarter, with its handsome split digraph, which makes people think it must be the correct one.
  • Phase/Faze: Not an every day one, but remarkably consistent. Phase, from the Latin phasus, is a cycle or state, so a plan may have many phases or the Flash might phase through a brick wall; while faze, from Kentish English feaze, means to scare or cause to hesitate. Again, I suspect aesthetics. The f and quite unusual z may lead people to assume this is a modern misspelling of the older, classical word rather than a completely different word.
  • Breech/Breach: I get this one all the time. A breach – related to the word break – is a gap or tear, as in a violation of a contract or a collapsed fortification; a breech – related to breeches – has a number of related meanings to do with buttocks. Possibly mostly confused due to sheer inattentiveness, but not helped, I suspect, by the breech of a cannon or rifle, which is named for being at the back of the chamber rather than for the opening where you insert the next round.**
  • Lead/Led: So in the calm light of day I probably don’t need to tell you that (where the two rhyme) lead is a dull, heavy metal and led is the past tense of the verb to lead. When caught up in writing, though, I suspect the brain – in its unending search for exploitable patterns – decides that since the past tense of read is read and the past tense of feed is fed, then clearly lead must follow read rather than feed. Or something. Either way, look out for it.
  • Bait/Bate: Comes up pretty often, I suspect mostly from people not knowing the origin of phrase “bated breath” (which is where it usually comes up). So for your benefit, bait means to attract fish or game with a morsel (or alternatively to taunt), and bate means to reduce or contain. Bated breath, then, is held breath; baited breath, if anything, is breath that smells of chowder.
  • Reign/Rein: Another of those confusions I suspect mostly come from being caught up in the writing. To reign, of course, is to rule (it helps to think of the Latin regina, for “queen”), while to rein is to control (usually a horse) with reins, leather or rope straps.§ This error comes up most often in the phrase rein it in, which of course refers to slowing or stopping a horse by gently pulling on the reins. What makes this one particularly dangerous is how similar those two meanings (which come from completely different Old French roots, regner and resne) seem. After all, between “the reins of power” and “a reign of terror” there’s a degree of overlap.

There are others, if perhaps less pervasive – formerly and formally, passed and past – but these are possibly the six I encounter most often. Memorise them, and you’ll make your editor’s life a tiny, tiny bit better.

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*”Hang on,” I hear you cry, “if it’s the same spelling, surely it’s just the same fucking word?”

But no! Bad word nerd! Of course, homonyms sometimes drift out of shared roots, like canon (an approved body of work, or – increasingly – the “official” history of a fictional world) and canon (a type of senior priest), which are derived from a common root meaning more or less “a reliable standard,” but consider the two skates, which come from the Dutch schaats (footwear) and the Norse skata (fish). Clearly you can’t consider them the same word, by any means.

At any rate, wherever they came from, the grammarian world settled some years ago, by and large, on considering any two words with noticeably different meanings (rather than just being used in different parts of speech, or extending the meaning, or figuratively) wholly different words.

†eggs am pulls, for our American or Northern English readers.

‡Just as well, because that’s what I’m getting like it or not.

**Or breech birth, with refers to the baby’s bottom rather than, as many assume, the damage it can do to the mother. Which is kind of a negative assumption, really.

§And, of course, reindeer are so named because they’re big enough to ride, or pull a sleigh. Literally “rein deer.” Which is pretty cool.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: This is Literally the Only Blog About the Word “Literally” You Will Ever Need to Read

Note: A post on this topic was published ‘singular they’ got literally hundreds of hits in just a few hours,” I can assure you I’m not lying, but that’s not why I’m using the word literally; I’m just playing with that sense to drive home how big a deal it is to get that degree of response.

Using it with a figurative statement is extending that, being playful with the language. Like, “No, really, my dad’s actually going to explode right here in front of me, showering me with bone fragments and viscera! Haha, it’s funny because I’m asserting an obvious untruth for effect!” Far from contradicting the primary sense, it actually depends on it, and we use, for example, actually and really the same way (without any complaint, oddly).

And – and regular readers of this column will find this familiar – it’s not even all that modern! Dryden used it as an intensifier of a true statement in 1687 (his “daily bread is litt’rally implor’d”), as did Pope in 1708 (“Euery day with me is literally another yesterday). The first recorded use with a metaphor is in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, way back in 1769: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” And it didn’t end there. Jane Austen was “literally rocked in bed” in a stormy night; Mark Twain was “literally rolling in wealth,” and Louisa May Alcott’s land “literally flowed with milk and honey.” Dickens “literally feasted his eyes,” and in 1863, the actress Fanny Kemble “literally coined money.” This is an old, respected usage.

Basically, every schoolchild knows dick. That’s why they’re at school, obvs. And unfortunately, while they’re there, they’re learning formal Standard English (which is a useful thing to learn, of course, in moderation and in context), which of course means they’re in the grip of our old friends, the prescriptive grammarians. Hell, this one’s not even eighteenth century; the first condemnations of the practice appear just over a hundred years ago, such as in American journalist and editorialist Ambrose Bierce’s Write it Right in 1909: “It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”§ Even in terms of the modern prescriptive grammar rules I love to pick apart, this one’s frankly a Johnny-come-lately.

…And You’re Literally Wrong About the Primary Meaning (Sorry)

And of course, the “primary” meaning isn’t the original sense. Literally first meant “letter by letter.” It referred to actual written text, as in, “This is a literal copy of the manuscript,” or “I’ve written down literally what he said.”

And I’m not done. The sense you think of as the “correct” sense of the word exists because of the way most of us learn language, picking it up from hearing other people use words and inferring their meaning from context. People heard the word in use and interpreted literally to mean “exactly, truthfully,” and a new sense – one that would eventually totally eclipse the original – was born. Which is great! That’s how language evolves and changes. But it presents a terrible, wonderful irony.

Because while the pedants trying to shoot down the newer (ie. merely 250-year-old) usage generally declaim along the lines of, “it’s wrong to allow the language to be changed just because people get things wrong,” the fact is that’s exactly how the older, “correct” use of the word came about. The newer, more populist sense is a deliberate, playful distortion; the older sense favoured by the authorities is artless error become fact.

And that’s literally that.

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*Because of course.

†Or hate with a seething passion that keeps dragging them back to the blog to stare at the face of the enemy, which is pretty much the same thing.

‡Strictly speaking, the usage had been in there since 1903: “Now often improperly used to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense.” The change in 2013 was to call it “informal” rather than “improper.” World shaking.

**Which is ridiculous on the face of it. Language changes over time; I have a very good Old English dictionary at home, but I wouldn’t use it for the  crossword.

§So, you know, his argument is basically that he doesn’t like it.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: A Most Singular “They”

Grr… someone just totally used they as a singular at a Facebook post: If I saw someone with their hands in their pockets I’d shout at them. What an idiot! You should say he; or if you’re trying to be all PC about it, you should say he or she! Don’t bring me this grammatically inaccurate shit, just because you’re trying to avoid “offending” people! What’s this world coming to?

Ha-hah, I’m fucking with you. Of course I’m going to shoot that shit down.

On Inflection

So let’s talk about inflection. Most of you know this stuff, but it’s good to cover the basics.

Inflection (sometimes also spelled inflexion) is the process whereby a basic word is changed – usually by adding prefixes or suffixes, sometimes by changing a vowel or straight-up changing the whole goddamn word like a hero* – to do different jobs. Most words are subject to inflection; the few exceptions (or “invariants”), like must, are mostly words that don’t fit neatly into categories like “verb” or “adjective” and do odd jobs the English language needs them to do. Inflection of a verb is also called conjugation, while the inflection of a noun or other word is called declension.†

So a number of things can inform an inflection. Odds are, if you’ve ever studied another language, you’ve looked at a “noun table,” with number and gender along the top and case down the left; you’ve certainly used a “verb table,” with number along the top and tense down the side. Some languages are elaborately inflected, like German,‡ while others, like Mandarin, are essentially uninflected, creating meaning through context and by adding words. English is less inflected than most languages; as a rule, we have to remember at most four or five versions of a verb, three versions of a noun and one version of an adjective, and we basically never use case.

On Old English and Ubiquitous Gender

But ’tweren’t always like this. Old English was richly inflected; we had the full spectrum of cases, no less than three numbers (singular I, plural we and dual wit, or “we two”), and, of course, gender. Like French – in which (formally, at least) a dog is always un chien even if it’s a bitch, and a table is always une table even if it’s whatever a boy table is – every word in OE was feminine, masculine or neuter. As such, the pronouns he, heo and hit (he, she and it) didn’t necessarily have anything to do with someone’s gender as an individual, but with grammatical gender: a frosc (frog) was a he, while a hand (hand, obv) was always a heo, and a dor (door) was definitely a hit.

So the Anglo-Saxons never had to trouble themselves about what pronoun to use for someone whose gender they didn’t know. It all depended on the pronoun’s antecedent! Mann (person) was a masculine noun, so most of the time, he would suffice, but if you’d used a feminine or neuter noun, you’d use the appropriate pronoun when the time came. It’s not so much that they had a clear policy for dealing with this notoriously thorny problem, it’s that the problem didn’t exist in the language they spoke.

On Middle English and a New Problem

Enter Middle English. Obviously what happens when a country with a fully gendered language is invaded and culturally colonised by a country with another fully gendered language is that their languages combine to form a largely ungendered one, because reasons. Suddenly, the English had two pronouns – he and she – that were really only ever used for people (and animals you liked a bunch and knew the sex of, and some other animals like hares, and ships), and one pronoun – it – that you used all the rest of the time for everything else. Which got us thinking about these words, and it became clear in pretty much zero time that you couldn’t call people it, because people are hes and shes and things are its and people who talk about other people like they’re things aren’t usually very nice people.

And so we had a new problem! What’s the correct pronoun for someone whose gender you don’t know? The dude at the shop today was clearly a he, but it might be his daughter tomorrow, and I have to tell someone what to ask one of them!

There were a number of possible solutions – in Northern England and Scotland, ha and hoo appeared as substitute pronouns in the late Middle Ages – but the enduring answer, it turned out, was the plural they. As Chaucer wrote in The Pardoner’s Prologue, “And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,/ They wol come up…” Caxton’s Sonnes of Aymon, in 1499, gives us “Eche of theym sholde… make theymselfe redy.” In 1531, Wynkyn de Worde wrote, in The Pilgrim of Perfection, “Yf… a psalme scape ony persone, or a lesson, or else yt. they omyt one verse or twayne.” Entering the modern age, Shakespeare even used it where the gender was obvious, as in A Comedy of Errors: “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me/ As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” Even the Bible got in on the act! According to Tyndale’s (1526) rendering of Matthew 18:35, “Forgeve with youre hertes eache one to his brother their treaspases,” and any number of English Bibles right up to the modern day use the same form. There are examples in Thackeray, Austen, Eliot, Walt Whitman and Lewis Carroll, to name but a few.

Enter the Grammarians

So where does the rule against the singular they come from? Who first said that we should use he when we don’t know someone’s gender? I’m sure you’ve seen this coming, but here are our old friends the eighteenth-century prescriptive grammarians.

Ironically enough, the injunction to use he for everyone comes from a woman: the writer, publisher and school proprietor Ann Fisher, whose A New Grammar (1745) states, “The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, any Person who knows what he says.” Fisher’s grammar, the first published by a woman,** proved hugely successful and influential – it was the fourth-most-printed of its century – which no doubt played a part when, in 1850, Parliament passed an Act enshrining the new usage of he in all laws.§

The Lesser of Two Evils

My main point, as always, is that the “right, traditional” approach is actually wholly modern and arbitrary, and the “wrong, new” approach is actually ancient and ubiquitous. Until one of the many proposed gender-neutral pronouns¶ finally takes off, we don’t have a true genderless singular plural other than it, and it’s out of the question. So your choice – unless you fancy championing one of the aforementioned new pronouns, and good luck to you – isn’t to break the rules or not, but to break the rule of agreement of number or to break the rule of agreement of gender. We’ve spent, as a culture, about seven hundred years cheerfully doing the former, while a small subset has spent a little over a third of that doing the latter (while the rest of us continued doing the former), and shouting at each other that everyone else is doing it wrong.

And is it any better? Yes, the singular they ends up demanding a plural verb as well as a plural pronoun, and sentences can end up getting kinda tangly, but you actually already do it more than you think. Consider singular nouns that describe groups of people. Should I say, “I’m meeting my girlfriend’s family today; I hope it’s nice,” or “I’m meeting my girlfriend’s family today; I hope they’re nice”? We’re pretty adept at jumping around number and tense if need be. It’s a playful, flexible language.

Meanwhile, it’s certainly possible for the neuter he to cause problems too. Consider Joseph P. Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin (1971), in which the author observes “She and Louis had a game – who could find the ugliest photograph of himself,” which hardly seems fair on Louis; or Albert Bleumenthal’s patently ridiculous address to the NY State Assembly in 1984, in which he asserted that “everyone will be able to decide for himself whether or not to have an abortion.” You know, much appreciated, but kinda confusing, there.

And, in the end, the authorities have come round. Fowler allows it (while cautioning that it’s still an ongoing debate, because Fowler); Oxford embraces it; Cambridge allows it; the Chicago Manual of Style loves it. The only real heavyweight in grammar circles still pushing back is the revered Strunk & White, and they can’t hold out for long.

So basically, make up your mind whether you want to use he, they, he or she or he/she, or any modern alternative; but if you use they and anyone tells you you’re doing it wrong, tell them to fuck off.

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*Like how went is the past-tense of go. That’s an odd, quirky one: English used to have the two verbs go (meaning “walk” or “travel”) and wend (“wander” or “turn”), with the past tenses yode and went; around the fifteenth century, the past tense yode fell out of use and the whole verb wend became less popular, and the past tense went hopped the fence and became part of go. Wend never totally disappeared – although chances are the only time you use it is in the phrase “wend my weary way” – so we invented the new past tense wended to stop it getting lonely. The only real insight we can take away from this is that English is really weird.

†These terms also work as verbs, so you conjugate a verb and decline a noun. Which means, yes, that conjugate and decline can be conjugated and conjugation and declension can be declined and oh god I need to lie down.

‡In which the possessive pronoun – which, by definition, is already in the genitive case – is further declined to agree with its head noun for case and number. Because fuck you, that’s why.

**Elizabeth Elstob published a grammar for Anglo-Saxon in 1715, but Fisher gets dibs on contemporary English.

§This is after the start of the feminist movement, mind you, so basically fuck you, Victorian politicians.

¶To my knowledge, zhe, se, ze, shhe, the and yo at least, although I’m sure there are many others.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Simplified Spelling

Ah, English. Famously one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. Devoid of the rules that neatly structure other languages, like case (nominative, accusative, dative and so on; Latin scholars will be nodding painfully here), it’s clung on to scraps and bits of rules from history (like the plural -en, which applies to a sum total of five modern words: oxen, children, brethren, sistren* and – obscurely – swine) and promiscuously borrowed, adopted or outright stolen words and rules from languages around the world.

More than anything, it’s the spellings that get you. Where do the k, g or h in knight come from? What do they do? Why are the first and last s in schism pronounced differently, and just what the fuck is that h doing there? Explain lyre, friar, higher, buyer, choir, prior, spire and hierarchy? Wherefore deign, but disdain, especially since they come from the same root? Why in the name of Samuel Johnson’s left teat† don’t we just spell things properly?

The answer’s actually pretty straightforward. Or, perhaps, the answers; it’s a bit of a mix of things. Partly it’s those different linguistic roots of course; partly it’s Doctor Johnson’s legacy, where he collected words from any number of different researchers and didn’t always register that their spellings were inconsistent with each other. Much of the time, though, it’s because those spellings were totes phonetic at the time they were coined, and it’s just the pronunciation that changed.

Knight? Ker-NEECHT, I think you’ll find, circa the fourteenth century and before. That silent e at the ends of words, that changes the vowel in the stem? Yeah, that wasn’t always silent, and it didn’t always change the stem. Welcome to the Great Vowel Shift, a grandly-titled shift in the English language that no-one can satisfactorily explain, that mutated huge swathes of our vocabulary between 1350 and 1500, just as the printing press was starting to pin spellings down once at for all. Almost every one of those nonsensical and inconsistent spellings used to make perfect sense, and one way or another we had the linguistic rug pulled from under our feet.

But so what, right? So you have to go to the trouble of learning some odd spellings. It’s all part of English’s quirky charms. We’ve all pretty much accepted this as the case, but the thing is, there’s no real reason we should have to. Seriously; give me one reason. I love this odd, bastard little language as much as the next nerd, but I’m the first to admit there’s no actual compelling reason for it to be preserved in this state. If the governments, media outlets and educational establishments of the English-speaking world all teamed up and agreed to a new, simple, consistent and wholly phonetic spelling and grammar for the English language, life would be immeasurably improved for all. Learning it would be easier, both for our kids and for foreigners seeking to communicate with us; spelling would be easier; the Anglophone world would be brought until beautiful harmony; in all likelihood, meanings themselves would be clearer.

Enter Carnegie

And a number of attempts, with varying degrees of determination and success, have been made to this very end, probably most memorably – to say nothing of most expensively, most enthusiastically and most successfully – by Scots-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.‡

Founded in 1906 and running until 1920, shortly after its benefactor’s death, the Simplified Spelling Board is one of the most delightful, gloriously quixotic entities in the history of language (with the possible exception of l’Académie française, on which more, perhaps, in a later blog). Far from simply desiring a slenderer dictionary, Carnegie was firmly convince that spelling reform was the key to world peace itself, as a sexier, more streamlined English drew the recalcitrant nations of the world under its umbrella.

The SSB was evidently a believer in the principle of “Go big or go home,” following its announcement, within a few weeks, with its first list of no fewer than three hundred corrected words, from abridgment (losing the e after the g) to wrapt (swapping the -pped for a -pt). They sought to drop the u in colour, the b in dumb, and the e in foe, and offered up burlesk, delite and frend.

And they had extraordinary weight behind them. The SSB’s membership included university professors, dictionary publishers, supreme court judges and the US Commissioner of Education. Mark Twain was a member as was Melvin Dewey.** President Roosevelt§ was so impressed he ordered his office to deliver all his paperwork in the new spellings.

And they even had some success. Certainly the removal of the redundant u in the -our ending has stuck, and the SSB did much to bolster Webster’s preferred -ize ending (as mentioned in a previous blog). And you can even find odd examples of thru and nite here and there in the States. But ultimately people like to stick with what they know. Carnegie wrote often in frustration that he was getting too little outcome for his investment (he particularly noted how few newspapers were taking up the call), and chose not to include a legacy for them in his will, and the Board folded within a year of his death, its mission still far from complete. Arguably, in fact, it was worse than ineffective, as it introduced differences between US and UK spellings, only adding to the confusion of foreign speakers learning the language for the first time.

Farewell, Simplified Spelling Board, you mad, beautiful bastards.

Postscript

Interestingly, given the SSB’s American emphasis and its greater impact over the pond, its sister organisation, the English Spelling Society, has far outlived it, at 107 years old and going strong. And they don’t let 107 years of achieving precisely fuck-all get to them, although all they really have to show for it is a newsletter and some academic papers. They do have a pretty website, though.

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*Honestly not sure if sistren’s a modern word. Or if I can count brethren and sistren as separate words. Or whether sistren sounds like part of a toilet or not.

†That got away from me, there.

‡Whose Hall one notoriously enters through practice, son; practice.

**Of the Decimal System, natch.

§Teddy. I don’t know how FDR felt about spelling; my impression was always that if you couldn’t shoot it, shag it or drink it, he wasn’t interested, but maybe he felt more strongly about spelling than I know. If so, he was never associated with the SSB.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Backronyms

Hey there,

Did you know that posh is from the acronym Port outward, starboard home? Or that the Australian slang pom is from Prisoner of Her Majesty? Or – possibly my favourite – that fuck is short for Fornication under consent of the King?

Yeah, no.

Backronyms Aren’t Canon Knowledge

An acronym is, of course, a pronounceable word formed from the first letters of the words of a phrase,* like AIDS, LASER or ASBO. In today’s largely literate world, there are fucking thousands of the things. It’s understandable; we read and write from infancy, we think in the written word.

A backronym† is sort of the other way around; it’s where you start with an existing word and reverse-engineer an acronym around it, choosing words to fit the spelling. It’s sometimes done for comic effect, like Fix or repair daily from Ford, and sometimes to be evocative, like a certain notorious act in US law being named PATRIOT.

But sometimes a backronym can get confused with the origin of a word, or even be deliberately invented and presented as an origin. In that form it becomes – yes – it’s a form of folk etymology, a thing I’ve mentioned once or twice on this blog.

You’ll hear these all the time, presented as solid fact, often by the same buggers that insist the moon landing was faked. And often, it’s for the words with hard-to-trace etymologies, so it’s hard to say with certainty that they’re not true.

They’re not, though.

Straight up: if anyone gives you an etymology for a word that involves it being an acronym, it’s almost certainly complete balls. Because, frankly, English speakers just didn’t think in acronyms until recent years. They’re a product of ubiquitous literacy, and before the advent of public education in the late nineteenth century, they just weren’t a thing. Like, okay, some acronyms have respectable history – the Calvinist TULIP dates back to about 1905, and the Catholic INRI may date back to ancient times – but generally they’re a very modern phenomenon.

Utter Some Examples, Dave

So here are some of my favourites.

  • Fuck. As above, often presented as Fornication under consent of the King, or Forced unlawful carnal knowledge. In fact, fuck has existed in English since about 1500, and has always had its current meaning. There’s a similar-sounding German word (fich) that dates back further, and a couple of other theories going all the way back to the Indo-European language.
  • Chav. Popularly Council-housed and violent, which goes to show that the backronym’s just as classist as the term’s popular use, but the best bet is the Romani chavva, meaning a young boy.
  • Pom. My own country’s charming slang for English folk, sometimes suggested (by English people) as coming from Prisoner of Her Majesty, which supposedly emblazoned the uniforms of penal colonists, the joke being – Hahahahaha! – that it originally referred to Australians themselves! But, of course, there were no uniforms. There are a number of possible real candidates for this one, but the most likely is a childish play on the similar-sounding words immigrant and pomegranate.
  • Posh. As mentioned before, supposedly from Port outward, starboard home, from the cooler and more comfortable cabins on sailing ships. Except no. Very likely it comes from the Romani posh-koorana, for “half a crown,” because that was the general yardstick for “more money than a poor person would ever be carrying.”
  • Wog. Actually kind of uncomfortable even typing this term, which supposedly derived from Westernised oriental gentleman (again, emblazoned on workman’s uniforms, which, again, didn’t actually exist). Actually, most likely derived from the golliwog doll (which surprised me, as I thought the doll was named after the slang).
  • Naff. A lovely low-key English slur meaning basically “a little bit crap,” this is sometimes said to have originated in a Polari (the slang of, among other things, mid-Twentieth-century London gay subculture) acronym meaning Not available for fucking. But while the term’s origins are uncertain, the Polari use is definitely a backronym; it’s most likely that naff, in the form naff off, is just a very slightly bowdlerised eff off (ie. “F” off), suggesting “fuck off.”

Those are the examples that come to mind, but if you want any other backronyms scrutinised, send ’em in!

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*If it’s unpronounceable, as in NASUWT or DHCP, it’s technically an initialism, as I recently discovered. Although it’s common, of course, to use the term acronym in both cases, it’s apparently incorrect. The things you learn, huh? Newspapers, generally, set initialisms in all-caps and acronyms with only an initial capital, but I prefer to always use all-caps unless the acronym’s so well-used it’s not really an acronym anymore.

†As coined in 1983 in the Washington Post. I love that fucking word.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Pet Peeves

Hola,

As I’m sure you know, editors are a kind of blessed people. Our knowledge of language is eternally flawless, like a beautiful diamond, and we touch the world but lightly like a butterfly, making everything better by our passing. Meanwhile we owe our preternaturally long lives to the tears of authors, which we drink every day, and our laser-vision power arises naturally as a consequence of inhaling the fumes from a red Biro (but only from a red one).

…is what I’d probably tell you if you asked me while I was drinking, or about to sing Karaoke.* In fact, editors are just as human as you,† and while they should know English lexis, grammar and punctuation pretty well,‡ they won’t all give you the same answers.

Part of the reason, as I’m at pains to point out in this column, is that grammar and meaning and punctuation and all that are all actually pretty arbitrary and subjective, and what you may think of as the “right” usage may not be only, oldest or even best usage; and, frankly, as long as it reads well and pleasingly, it doesn’t matter too much if it is or not. But the other part of the reason is that we don’t have all the same tastes.

I’m talking about pet peeves. Editing is as much a matter of style and aesthetics as anything else, and what “looks wrong” or even “sounds wrong” to me might be fine to another editor, for no other reason than that’s how we feel about it.

All this is preamble to the fact that, while this blog is mostly about not telling you what’s right or wrong, I am – right now – going to share three of my pet peeves as an editor; three writing habits that I hate and which instantly turn me off a manuscript. And I want you to know that, if you are given to any of these habits, it’s not you, it’s me.**

A Series of Things

  • They walked past a series of trees.
  • A series of soldiers were scattered around the courtyard.
  • The country’s been led by a series of incompetent misanthropes.
  • He noticed a series of holes in the wall.

Okay, look, I get that usage has shifted and now no-one seems to be too bothered by a series being used to mean a bunch, but I kinda want my serieses to be… serial? There should be some sense that the things described are in some way linear and related, that there is an obvious order and progression (e.g. a series of events is fine; a series of articles is great). Otherwise it’s just some stuff sort of close to each other.

And there are so many other ways of conveying this idea! A cluster of huts; a succession of Prime Ministers; a row of holes; a line of trees; a crowd of journalists; a sequence of events; a string of murders; it goes on and on. There’s no need to drag out a series of every couple pages.

Which is sort of the problem, and you’ll be hearing this again: I probably wouldn’t even notice it if it didn’t appear so damned often. It’s a crutch, and you don’t need no damn crutches.

Telling Me How Many Eyes People Have

  • His eyes were two pools of terrible flame
  • Her ears were two yawning chasms, hungry for my words
  • His eyes, two glittering lights in the gloom, danced as he laughed.

Unless the character has one eye or ear – or three! – I can probably make an informed guess as to how many eyes they have. Just cut the two and lo! His eyes were pools of terrible flame. See how much more elegant that is? Also, less stupid?

And again, I’d probably skip cheerfully past this except that I’ve seen it so often that it now fills me with an ungovernable rage that rivals the heat of the Sun. I know how many eyes people have, cheers.

Shooting Glances

  • She shot her a glance
  • He sent her a look
  • She cast him an expression

Okay, so she shot him a glance is such a ubiquitous figure of speech that it isn’t even seen as figurative anymore; it’s what’s called a dead metaphor. And that’s fine; I’m perfectly happy with it. But I find some authors use it so often – and become aware that they’re using it too often – that they start to substitute words to avoid repetition. So I get characters shooting, sending and casting looks, glances, glimpses and God-knows-what-else, sometimes several times on a page.

Here’s a general writing tip that works for all situations anywhere, ever: if you’ve encountered a problem, rewrite; don’t fix. If you’re using a phrase too much, don’t replace a word, find a different phrase! There’ll be a blog about this idea sometime. A straight word substitution, an excision, a patch, are not only likely to result in a clunky, ugly sentence, they’re also going to be obvious to anyone with an ounce of experience with this stuff. Go back, think of a different way to say what you’re saying, rewrite the whole sentence. If that means losing a phrase you really want in there, so be it. Murder your darlings.

Same goes here. Try she met her eyes, or he looked at her and grimaced, or she gave him a wink. Change it up; find a different way to say it. Or just move past; do we need to know they looked at each other? Do we lose any information by cutting it?

And the first writer who sends me she broadcast him a regard gets a Mars bar.§

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*i.e. Most of the time.

†I’m assuming you’re human; wave a hand – or whatever it is you’re equipped with for waving purposes – if not.

‡Or else something has gone terribly wrong at HR.

**But I’m not going to publish you.

§But I’m still not going to publish you.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma, (Oxford) Comma Chameleon

Ho there!

Of all the many sources of debate and eye-rolling in the notorious world of punctuation and grammar, perhaps nothing is more contentious than the humble comma. Endless words have been spilled in the pursuit of commaeic* rectitude; grammatical friendships that have lasted decades have fractured and split. It is the Rorke’s Drift of punctuation; the Waterloo of the English sentence.

Where’s, the problem?

Part of it is due to the sheer bewildering complexity of the thing. The comma organises lists, precedes conjunctions, and follows gerunds and interjections; it stands in for repeated words and introduces speech; it brackets parenthetical terms. Out of sheer confusion, people transpose it from one rule to another (for example, by placing a comma before any use of and, whatever the context) or use it simply to draw breath, with no grammatical reason whatsoever. People feel lost with commas. A co-worker of mine, many years ago, sent me an email to check, and I chiefly corrected the commas; she asked me what the rules for commas were and I said, breezily, “give me a minute and I’ll put them in an email,” and then I realised it was an hour later and I was still typing.

And so many of those rules are contingent. Newspaper style guides put commas every old place, and have a rule for every situation; it makes it easier, goes the thinking, to make everything nice and consistent. Most prose style guides barely touch on the things, and prefer to leave them in the hands of the individual writer. America’s got one set of common rules, and Britain another, and neither of them are wholly consistent.

And who can blame them? It’s not like a lot of lexical issues, where at least you have a millennium of usage to pick over and debate; commas didn’t even exist in English until the sixteenth century, and most of the rules surrounding them weren’t firmed up until the twentieth. It was Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker in the 1930s, who founded most of the rules we now consider serious comma business.

So what, should I, do?

So, okay, here’s my advice. Pick up a good style guide and read through the rules for commas. Get to know them. Then throw away your style guide† and play it by ear. Literally, in fact; what sounds good? What makes the reader pause in the right places?

If you want hard and fast rules, here are my entirely arbitrary and subjective suggestions. Try them on for size:

Essential
  • Listing. Failing to encomma‡ a list (more on this in a moment) is probably a cardinal sin.
  • Preceding speech. Yeah, some people treat this as a bit more arbitrary, but I’ve got used to this. I doubt you can get away with not doing it.
Recommended
  • Parenthetical text. A parenthetical passage is an aside, as in My car, once I’d filled the tank, ran perfectly. The basic rule is, if you could neatly excise the phrase and not break the sentence, it’s a parenthesis. Surprisingly often, you can get away without any punctuation at all; other times, en-dashes around the parenthesis works. But if you do use commas, you always have to use two commas, beginning and end. Embrace embracing your words.
  • Preceding a conjunction. When joining two clauses together, I would suggest you need commas. They go before the conjunction (but, so, because, and, etc.) and create a natural brief pause.
  • Following a modifier or gerund. So this refers to a bit at the beginning of the sentence that modifies the sentence, but isn’t otherwise part of it. I like commas here, but I’ve read convincing prose that did away with it.
Genuinely unimportant
  • Every other use. Just go with it; find your voice. Me, I like commas. If I’m editing your work, I’ll probably slip a load of the feckers in. But it’s a matter of style, and of taste. Be bold in your choices.

So what’s with, the Oxford comma?

Ah, yes; the point of this article. The Oxford comma, serial comma or Harvard comma. So, for the sake of the theoretically-possible-but-who-are-we-kidding-here intersection of “people who read grammar blogs” and “people who don’t know what an Oxford comma is,” here’s the skinny.

  • If you list two objects, you just use a conjunction: There’s pizza or chicken for dinner.
  • If you list more than two objects, you could just keep using conjunctions: My mistake; there’s pizza or chicken or burgers for dinner.
  • But that’s considered poor form. Rather, you cut all conjunctions bar the last one, and substitute commas for the others: Come to think of it, we have take-out menus as well, so there’s pizza, chicken, burgers –
  • But what to do with the conjunction? There’s never been agreement on this. Some hold that the comma serves in place of a conjunction, and so the comma itself is unnecessary when you reach the conjunction: – pizza, chicken, burgers or Indian.
  • While some hold that every item in the list needs a comma, conjunction be damned: – pizza, chicken, burgers, or Indian.

And that last comma there? That’s the Oxford comma.

And here’s the thing. In spite of (or just possibly because of) the fact that neither use has ever had clear precedence, and neither has anything to recommend it over the other, this is far and away the most contentious, the most hotly-argued rule in punctuation. Blood has been shed over this shit, man.

Most bizarre, both sides give as their main argument that their use is less ambiguous than the other! Let’s crack out the examples. So the classic example is this one, proposed by Teresa Nielsen Hayden in her work Making Book:

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Clear problem, right? Obviously this sentence could be referring to four different people, or it could be referring to just two (and the author has an extraordinarily unlikely ancestry). The Oxford comma here would do a world of good.

But consider a slight variation:

To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.

Here, the addition of a comma would create confusion, making us wonder whether the author is the offspring of a libertarian icon. Obviously best to do without.

So what should, we do David? TELL, US.

Well, here’s the thing. I don’t think you can make a ruling on it without crippling yourself. The usual advice is to pick a stance – always Oxford or never Oxford – and apply it consistently either way, and that’s fine. My only suggestion, if you do take this approach? Be prepared to rewrite. Make the sentence work for the rule you’ve made and don’t let yourself get into trouble.

But for my money? Fuck it, life’s too short. Your prose is your voice; you decided what to say, and you had a reason for it. It’s unworthy to be rewriting to fit an arbitrary rule that has no justification for existing in the first place. When you hit a list, decide then and there what creates clarity and what reads better, and everyone can fuck off out the window.

But more than anything, ignore the shit out of anyone who insists either rule is self-evidently better than the other. Balls to them.

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*It’s a word if I say it is, dammit.

†A good style guide makes acceptable toilet paper and outstanding firelighters.

‡Like I told you: my blog, my words.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: Buckling Your Swash

Ever described a book as swashbuckling? Ever seen that kids’ TV show Swashbuckle, or advised someone to buckle your swash?

Well, I’m about to make you feel very slightly silly, because it isn’t a damn verb.

(Okay, I realise I usually attack pedantry, and to be honest I’m not particularly invested in the wrongness of swashbuckling; but this is a little bit of English history that tickles me. Buckle up. Er, as it were.)

So for this one we gots to refer back to a couple concepts I brought up in the Burgle or Burglarize column a ways back: backformation and agent nouns.

Agent nouns, you’ll recall, were nouns formed from verbs to create a noun meaning “someone who [verbs].” This is generally achieved by adding an -er or -or ending, the way writer is derived from write, and insurance claims assessor is derived from insurance claims assess. And it’s totes true that swashbuckler is an agent noun, but it wasn’t formed by adding a suffix.

To get to the root of the problem here, we need to visit a fairly obscure form of agent noun that was popular in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and has gone out of favour since: specifically, a form of more narrowly-constructed agent nouns, to denote not just the verb, but the object of that verb as well. Today, we add the -er as usual, then prefix the agent noun with the object to make a compound word, as in firefighter (ie. someone who fights fires) or winetaster (someone who tastes wine, natch). But we used to create these compound agent nouns very differently, putting the verb in front of the object and leaving off the -er suffix altogether. A few terms have survived today, like cutpurse (so, someone who cuts purses, a type of thief) and turnkey (someone who turns keys, ie. a prison guard); if we coined these words right now, we’d probably call them pursecutter and keyturner, but we’ve held onto the archaic constructions because, basically, they sound way cooler.*

Which brings us back around to swashbuckler. The term comes from a fighting style popular at the time, “sword and buckler play,” in which fighters were armed with a kind of short, heavy Italian rapier and a small centre-grip shield called a buckler. The style involved a lot of feinting and bluff, and swashing (loudly striking) your buckler to startle or unbalance your opponent was a particularly well-known move. Hence, in the same vein as cutpurse and turnkey, sword-and-buckler men were known as swashbucklers. From there, the term kind of extended to stories about sword-fighting and adventure, and drifted away from its roots.

And then came the backformation. Now, like those early modern English speakers unravelling burglar hundreds of years ago, we tend to look at the -er ending of swashbuckler, which has never been a suffix (buckler comes, ultimately, from the Latin buccula, referring to the boss of the shield), and assume it’s a new-style agent noun, and that the term’s got something to do with “buckling swashes.”† Thus the verb swashbuckle was born.

Now, when you hear someone talking about “buckling your swash,” you can say, “Oh-ho! I think you mean ‘swashing your buckler.’ Mhm-hm,” and take a sip of self-congratulatory brandy.

Only don’t, because no-one really likes people who do that sort of thing.

Least of all me.

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*This happens a lot more often in language than you might think.

†Maybe the “swash” is that really wide belt they all wear? Yeah, bet that’s it.

Posted on by

Word Nerd: The Look In Your -ize

Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2

Ah, look at the beautiful British words: apologise, realise, sanitise, extemporise. That simple s, so elegant and neat. And here’s the ugly Americanese: randomize, burglarize, contextualize, hypothesize. That hateful z! What’s with that?

Well, as usual, the popular conception is slightly flawed. In fact the -ize ending isn’t some sort of inexplicable Americanism, but the original(ish) British spelling; and the -ise ending wasn’t British originally, but a French invasion. And the story that brings us to our current usage has a bit to do with politics, a bit to do with human laziness, and a whole heap to do with the awesome might of dictionary-publishers.*

Hungry -ize

The origins of this most troublesome suffix lie (as a surprising number of things in English do) in Ancient Greek. The original form was -ίζειν  (-izein), meaning more or less what it does today: it’s added as a suffix to a noun or adjective, turning it into a verb which means “to make into [thing].” Hence, for instance, the modern English realize, which means “to make real.” The Greek suffix entered Latin as -izare, and thence romped across Europe, getting up in people’s faces and moving stems around different parts of speech.

In English, this became -ize, and was applied to any new words constructed this way from Latin or Greek roots, whether directly or via other languages (usually, obviously, French).

Bedroom -ise

But not all words that end with this sound came this route! Despise comes from the Latin despicio; advise takes the Latin suffix -iser for the “frequentative” case; in incise and revise, the -ise is part of the stem! No-one’s really sure, but there are at least a few dozen English words that happened on -ise for reasons entirely unrelated to the -izare ending, and they should always be spelled with an s wherever you’re from.

Behind Blue -ise

Enter French! Most European languages always pronounce s with a hard “ss” sound, but French (as I’m sure you’re aware) generally only uses that sound if the letter falls at the start of a word, softening it to a “zz” sound in the middle and end of most words (the Normans brought this pronunciation to England, and it’s now more or less standard for us as well). Hence, while -izare was busily intruding on English as -ize, it entered French phonetically as -iser.

What does this have to do with us? Well, English had two lots of endings: -ize for words like realize and emphasize, and -ise for words like despise or advise. And while the rule – basically, “if the word means ‘to make [noun or adjective],’ use a z” – is simple enough, most people are kinda dumb, and tried to remember the full list of -ise words rather than the nice, easy -ize rule. And here was this French spelling kicking around (most literate people were familiar with French, being basically middle-class), and it became fashionable (“easier”), over the nineteenth century, to use -ise for everything.

Bette Davis -ize

Now to America. Once the French -ise became entrenched in Britain, it started to enter American usage, where it came across opposition from various sources, including academic purists and Anglophobes. But the oddest enemy of -ise – and ultimately the deciding one – was Noah Webster, creator of one of the first American dictionaries. Webster preferred the z as more intuitive to pronunciation, and simply refused to print the French -ise endings in his dictionary. Since his dictionary (now the Merriam-Webster) quickly became the authority on American usage, it’s stuck ever since.†

I Only Have -ize For You

Just to confuse the matter, Oxford University Press keep all the original -ize spellings as a matter of house style – purely because ew, French – so that the single most distinguished authority on British English actually disagrees with everyone else in Britain.‡ For most of the mid-twentieth century, in fact, more high-brow speakers** assumed that the -ise ending was American, in spite of it being far more common over here…

It’s In Your -ise

So the short answer is, if the verb means to “to make into [noun],” then it’s up to you; Americans and Oxford University Press believe you should use -ize, because they’re a) being precious about Greek and/or b) worried about phonetic spellings, while most British and the French we learned it from think you should use -ise. But if it doesn’t, then odds are that pesky little z never belonged there, and you should stick to -ise whatever happens.

Clear? Clear as mud.

Cheers,

David

As always, if you want to argue with me, or to chat about this shit, or to propose a topic for a future blog, let me know! Tweet us; Facebook us; let’s have an argument/chat.

—

*Seriously, these guys have more power than you realise.

†A few years later, the Webster usage enjoyed reinforcement from an absolutely wonderful quirk of American history called the Simplified Spelling Board, which a future blog will discuss. The SSB, as well as taking out the extraneous u from color and honor and shortening tonite and thru, tried to turn every use of the soft (“zz”) s to z, so we’d have had rize and thouzand. Like most of the SSB’s missions, they had mixed success.

‡Silly old dons.

**In this case, defined as “people who only ever read things published by the OUP.”