Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 15
February 20, 2019
What does inchoate really mean? (if you are not a lawyer)
Massed yellow vests on the move.
7-minute read, and worth every second out of your time-starved day.
Overview
inchoate has two meanings (and a third, legal one)
its original meaning
its newer meaning
how it developed
spelling
its legal meaning
choate (probably best avoided outside U.S. legal circles)
An ‘inchoate group’ is how the British constitutional guru Vernon Bogdanor recently referred to the revolting French yellow vests (les gilets jaunes) in the BBC Sunday news and views programme Broadcasting House.
As this is one of the headwords in Fowler I substantially updated, I was already primed to ask myself what he meant. Did he mean ‘incipient, beginning, nascent’ or did he mean ‘disorganized’, ‘chaotic’, or something similar? Given that these highly visible protesters have been causing havoc for quite a while now, the second interpretation seemed to fit the gilets pretty well (laborious pun intended), even if it did not fit the original meaning of inchoate. (There is a third, legal meaning which I’ll touch on briefly at the end.)
And the original meaning is?
Inchoate derives from Latin inchoātus, the past participle of inchoāre ‘to begin’. (The h and o can also swap places – incohātus.) It originally meant ‘just begun, at an early or initial stage’. The OED first records it from 1534, making it part of that tsunami of Latin-derived words entering English in the Renaissance.
Appropriately, the first OED citation is from a translation of Cicero.
No paynter..shulde fynysshe that parte of Venus, whiche inchoat and begon Apelles left of imperfyte.
R. Whittington tr. Cicero Thre Bks. Tullyes Offycesiii. sig. P.7
(No painter…should finish that part of Venus, which inchoate and begun Apelles left off imperfect.)
(By fluke, I found the original is in Lewis & Short: … ut nemo pictor esset inventus, qui Coae Veneris eam partem, quam Appeles incohatam reliquisset, absolveret …)
The next OED citations are both from religious contexts.
It was a Church inchoate, beginning, not perfect.
1583 A. Nowell et al. True Rep. Disput. E. Campion sig. H4
His heavenly grace, which is glory inchoate, He imparteth to His Saints.
a1626 L. Andrewes Serm. (1856) I. 109
How it developed
And so it might have gone on forever, undemonstratively, even retiringly, learnèd. However, words have a pesky habit of changing meaning, and inchoate is no exception. There are two possible strands to its development. First, things that are only just starting up – for instance, a small start-up company – are likely to lack structure, and can therefore be free-flowing, disorganized, shambolic even. So, to flit from meaning ‘incipient, initial’ and hence ‘elementary, imperfect, undeveloped, immature’ to ‘disorganized, chaotic’ is a short semantic leap.
And second, that hop, skip and jump could well have been supercharged, as the OED sagely suggests (‘often regarded as unetymologically developed through confusion with chaotic adj. 1’), by subconscious association with chaotic, of which inchoate is a sort of failed anagram.
The earliest OED citation of the ‘new’ meaning is from 1922, from the U.S. playwright Eugene O’Neill:
The room is crowded with men, shouting, cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning.
Hairy Ape i. 1
As the relevant OED entry has not yet been updated, one wonders whether it could really have taken almost four centuries (1534–1922) for the meaning shift to happen. (The OED will tell us eventually, but don’t hold your breath.)
But meanwhile, the Merriam-Webster Concise Guide to English Usage antedates the OED with this, from 1916, expressing a point of view that could have been written by a twenty-first-century feminist:
… all the world of men seemed inchoate, purposeless, like the swarming, slimy, minute life in stagnant water.
Mary Webb, The Golden Arrow
[image error]
If you ‘re wondering what a tadpole is doing here, remember, it is an inchoate **** (4 letters).
Inchoate + what?
In Google Ngrams the ten most common combinations with inchoate do not include any nouns that particularly suggest confusion: inchoate form/state/mass/condition.
However, modern corpus data shows a clear link between inchoate and ‘emotion’ words: inchoate anger/rage/fury on the one hand, discontent/longing/feelings/desire on the other. An analysis of how the meaning of inchoate anger develops over gives some indication, I believe, of inchoate’s broader development.
In the earliest, 1918, Ngrams citation, the meaning seems to be ‘incipient’, but with the idea that the emotion is also turbulent, which is what the broader co-text leads one to suspect (‘Orme’ is the father of a woman with whom ‘Steve’ seems to be smitten.)
Orme turned to look at Steve, who grew conscious, in the oddest way, of a stirring of revolt, of inchoate anger.
Everybody’s Magazine, vol. 38
But even here one cannot be sure, short of a Ouija-board 
session with the unnamed author. (How one would summon his/her spirit without a name, I leave the reader to ponder; and no, Grammarly, it should not be corrected to ‘an Ouija…’; even though it begins with a ‘vowel’ letter, it is pronounced as a ‘consonant’ w.)
Next in time comes the 1922 O’Neill quote mentioned earlier, where inchoate follows confused and seems to reinforce if not repeat the latter’s meaning.
And then we have to wait almost another two decades to get to Thomas Wolfe’s 1943 Of Time and the River:
And again Eugene was filled with the old, choking, baffled, and inchoate anger, the sense of irretrievable and certain defeat: …
If it’s ‘choking’ and ‘baffled’ it seems a sure bet that that anger will be incoherent if not chaotic. Which also seems to apply to this next trouvaille (1958) from Ngrams:
And there were traitors just everywhere trying to take America away from the Americans, right under their noses, just like Senator McCarthy said. All these things were clear now, and the dim inchoate anger that had smoldered so …
Mary Mannes, More in Anger
But then again, this seems to me a classic case of ‘it could be meaning a or it could be meaning b, who knows?’ In other words, it has elements of both, as do so many examples, including the Thomas Wolfe one.
The next (in time) OED citation, though, is clearly the ‘disorganized’ meaning:
Out of the inchoate welter of recent published poetry, in magazines and books, emerges an organized body of 344 poems by 102 poets who have become known since 1945.
1962 Times Lit. Suppl. 16 Mar. 186/1
And while many later examples in Ngrams seem to be of the second meaning, e.g:
Amlie was raised on a farm in east central North Dakota where the meaness [sic] of his family’s life inculcated a fierce but inchoate anger …
1977
as are many more up-to-date ones, e.g:
… disgruntlement with politics may not express itself as a question of class, but it is the job of politicians to articulate people’s strong if inchoate feelings, to crystallise ideas and describe society as it is …
2008
the original sense of ‘only just begun, still to be formulated’ is still in use:
The first edition … contained two sections that were in finished form, but much of the rest was tangled and inchoate.
R. Ellmann, 1986
The second [sc. a modern piece of music] draws out an inchoate thought into an obsessive hour of cloudy atmospherics.
New York Magazine, 2011
Does anybody object?
Well, meaning shifts or blurring do often irritate people, contradicting the observation that word meanings are not ‘autonomous and fossilized, like flies caught in amber’. Some usage commentators, including Gowers in his 1965 Fowler, disliked it, but it has been accepted by the OED since 1993, and is accepted by Merriam-Webster, although M-W does rather adroitly hedge its bets with that weasel ‘especially’.
Don’t let spelling trip you up
Under the influence of incoherent there could be a danger of misspelling the word incohate: the heated exchanges of those who have made the year of culture in 2008 an incohate, ill-thought vista—weblog, 2006. (10,000ish Google hits). Despite Latin, this spelling is regarded as wrong.
The legal meaning
The phrase inchoate offence covers an illegal act still to be committed, for example encouraging or assisting a crime, or conspiracy to commit a crime:
In England and Wales, it is an inchoate crime to agree with others to commit a crime.
Jrnl of Intern. Crim. Justice, 2014
choate: the ‘misbegotten’ back-formation
The prefix in– of inchoate is not, etymologically speaking, a negative implying the existence of an antonym choate. But, clearly, someone long ago said ‘A fig for etymology!’; there is a legal term choate, meaning ‘complete’ or ‘valid’, which has been in use in legal circles in the U.S. for many decades and dates back to at least 1829.
According to Garner’s authoritative Dictionary of Legal Usage, it has been hotly disputed by Supreme Court Judge Scalia and is practically unknown in British English.
My trawls in the Oxford corpus and GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English) seem to confirm that: there are only two examples of choate being used to mean ‘coherent’ in British sources: A walk around the camp reveals the difficulties they must have had in presenting a united, choate vision.
Daily Tel., 2012
My attitude isn’t disrespectful of Martin’s readers — as if they were a choate entity to be criticised en masse.
May, 2011, from the blog The Speculative Scotsman.
Personally, I would recommend not using it for three reasons: first, anyone used to the legal meaning might interpret it that way; second, everybody else could well have not a scooby what you are trying to convey; and third, they might mentally pronounce the ch as in chicken, which would fox them still further.
The following can be considered malapropisms for ‘incoherent with, incandescent with’: Syria and Iraq have proved almost inchoate with rage at the fearful imagery of their biggest single source of water being stemmed for a solid month— Observer, 1990; Most of the time I have been nearly inchoate with rage at the blind stupidity of what I am seeing. Dr A. Curran, 2011.
1 Incidentally, and confusingly, the word can be pronounced in many possible ways, at least according to the OED: With stress on the second syllable, and giving full value to the –ate part: in-KOH-ate
or pronouncing it as a schwa: in-KOH-ut
and with stress on the first syllable, with the same variation: IN-koh-ate, IN-koh-ut.)
February 13, 2019
Shrinkflation: what is it? The incredible shrinking Easter egg.
A combination of shrink + (in)flation, shrinkflation refers to a kind of closet inflation: manufacturers don’t put the price of a good up, which would constitute real price inflation, but instead reduce the size of the good.
Have you noticed it with anything you regularly buy? I bet you have.
I’m sure it happens with several makes of biscuit: there are fewer in the packet than there used to be.
My eye was caught by an article-ette about it in the Indy on Saturday 9 February. The article reported that Easter eggs are the latest ‘victims’: Cadbury’s Crunchie and Crème eggs will shrink by 7 per cent while the price will go down by only 2.5 per cent.
[image error]
His head is roughly egg-shaped. More to the point, he coined ‘stagflation’.
Other -flations
Shrinkflation is only the latest of inflation’s spawns. Best known is probably stagflation (1965) which is, according to the OED, ‘A state of the economy in which stagnant demand is accompanied by severe inflation’.
The first citation it gives is by the Conservative politician, Shadow Chancellor and very briefly Chancellor Iain Macleod, who is indeed credited with having coined the term:
‘We now have the worst of both worlds — not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of “stagflation” situation. And history, in modern terms, is indeed being made.’
slumpflation
Less familiar, at least to me, is slumpflation: ‘A state of economic depression in which decreasing output and employment in industry are accompanied by increasing inflation’.
The first OED citation is by the journalist and quondam1 editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg (yes, the pater of our very own Jacob Rees-Mogg) from his 1974 book The Reigning Error: The Crisis of World Inflation. Whether that means he coined the word, I do not know.
[image error]
‘…in sickness or health, inflation or deflation, marriage tax credit or debit…’
deflation
The opposite of inflation is deflation, which in economic terms means, so the OED tells me, ‘The action or process of deflating currency; an economic situation characterized by a rise in the value of money and a fall in prices, wages, and credit, usually accompanied by a rise in unemployment’.
Wikipedia explains it further as follows, which helps me, as an economic illiterate, understand it a bit better:
‘In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0% (a negative inflation rate). Inflation reduces the value of currency over time, but deflation increases it. This allows one to buy more goods and services than before with the same amount of currency. Deflation is distinct from disinflation, a slow-down in the inflation rate, i.e. when inflation declines to a lower rate but is still positive.’
The Great Depression of the 1930s was preceded by a period of deflation, and the more recent economic crisis (2008) also featured a certain amount of it.
What is the -flation of inflation, stagflation?
The –ation part is the normal Latinate way of deriving nouns from verbs in English. As it happens, inflation directly mirrors Latin inflātiō-nem in form if not in meaning.2 Inflate comes from Latin inflāre ‘to blow into’. Now, often English takes one part of a word to create others, e.g. telethon from marathon, and the part used has no etymological validity as a meaningful part of the original word – and it doesn’t matter that it hasn’t. The Latin parent of inflate consists of in + flāre, to ‘blow into’, and while the verb flāre exists there is no related noun flātiō-nem in Latin. Had it existed, it would have meant ‘a blowing’, I suppose, whereas the English-flation does not have that meaning at all but bequeaths to the words that it helps form a clear signal that they are related conceptually to inflation.
And what about the word inflation?
It’s been in English since the fourteenth century. Not in the meaning we’re looking at here, but as ‘The condition of being inflated with air or gas, or of being distended or swollen as if with air’, e.g.
It purges þe longes of inflacioun. (the lungs)
Rolle, Psalter, before 1340.
Charles Darwin used it similarly almost exactly five centuries later in 1839:
By the inflation of its body, the papillæ, with which the skin is covered, become erect and pointed.
Darwin in R. Fitzroy & C. Darwin Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s ships Adventure and Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836 III. i. 14
Among its several other meanings, inflation can also signify ‘The quality of language or style when it is swollen with big or pompous words; turgidity, bombast’:
A style which to an English reader will appear to border on inflation and bombast.
Beaumont tr. Barthelemi Travels of Anacharsis in Greece (1796) I. p. vi, 1791
Only in 1838 did the meaning we are concerned with appear: ‘An undue increase in the quantity of money in relation to the goods available for purchase; (in lay use) an inordinate rise in prices’:
The property pledge can have no tendency whatever to prevent an inflation of the currency.
D. Barnard Speeches & Rep.195, 1838
And just as we know who ‘invented’ stagflation (Iain Macleod) so the British economist Pippa Malmgren is credited with coining shrinkflation in 2015, at least in the meaning discussed in this blog.
1 I don’t often get the chance to use quondam, meaning ‘former’ or ‘one-time’. But then it raises the question: does the person so described have to be alive to qualify?
2 In Latin it seems that inflātĭo referred to a literal swelling. Cicero writes habet inflationem magnam is cibus (faba) Literally, ‘This food has a great swelling’, the food in question being faba, i.e. broad beans or faba beans, eschewed historically by Pythagoreans and currently by anyone who wishes not to alienate old friends.
February 5, 2019
Antidisestablishmentarianism: is it the longest word in English?
7-minute read
1 The longest word?
“Everyone knows” that with its gargantuan 28 letters antidisestablishmentarianism is “the longest word in English”. Actually, it isn’t. The “longest word in any dictionary” depends on the dictionary you happen to be consulting: in the Oxford Dictionary Online it is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which weighs in at 45 letters and was invented as a sort of parody of long medical terms. It is not in Merriam-Webster Online (though it is in their Unabridged), and nor is antidisestablishmentarianism.
Curiously, electroencephalographically, with its mere 27 characters, is in M-W, but floccinaucinihilipilification with its 29 characters isn’t – though it is in the Oxford Online along with our hero word.
[image error]
Phew! Thank heavens this tattoist spelled it right. One is tempted to wonder, however, if the bearer knows the meaning of the word.
Actually, “the longest word” is not really a “word” in any meaningful sense of the word “word”; rather it is a string of 189,819 letters for the chemical formula of the protein Titin. If you have 90 minutes or so to spare, you can watch someone reading it out here.
2 Who cares?
Quite a few people, it seems. After all, many of us are perennially fascinated by the quirkier facets of our language (e.g. is there a word in which all the vowel letters appear once and only once, but in alphabetical order?). Our curiosity is piqued by the cryptophallic (as some would suggest) biggest/richest/longest/smallest pretty much anything –est, as the appeal of the Guinness Book of Records shows (what is the greatest number of gerbils eaten by one person in one sitting?) Those two factors combine, it seems to me, to produce what I can only describe as sesquipedalianophilous indagaciousness (37 letters, but, sadly, two words), “the inquisitiveness associated with the love of long words”.
3 Has it always been “the longest word”?
I can’t say for sure when antidisestablishmentarianism acquired its mythical status (but see 4 below for some clues).
However, a search of Google Ngrams shows that in 1901, in an issue of the Writer, A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers, founded by two Boston Globe journalists, it was the four-letters-shorter disestablishmentarianism that was cited as the longest word in English. (The magazine is still going strong). And in Current Advertising of the same year, there is the following quote: “If anybody really wants to know, it may be authoritatively stated that the longest legitimate word is disestablishmentarianism. Don’t let the fact that it isn’t in the dictionary worry you. The word was coined and used by the late Mr. Gladstone…” (that attribution is probably apocryphal).
[image error]
Gladstone, looking not very happy about that ‘barbarous’ word.
If you enjoy this blog, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog (semi-ir)regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips.
4 Is it a “real” word?
4.1 If by that we mean “Is it a word that is used in real discourse, rather than a word that is exclusively cited as an example of a long word?”, then the answer is “yes”, as I think this blog will demonstrate. However, a bit like that running machine that sits, rarely or never switched on, in some people’s homes, it is more exciting as an idea than in reality: it is rather more talked about and discussed qua longest word than ever actively used. Merriam-Webster goes so far as to say that “Merriam-Webster doesn’t enter antidisestablishmentarianism in any of its dictionaries because the evidence indicates that the word is almost never used anymore.”
(And for discussion of anymore vs. any more, you’ve come to the right place.)
What Merriam-Webster says is true, but only up to a point. In some ways, the word is a treasured fossil, a linguistic curiosity, possibly even deserving the title “English language national treasure.” Discussion about the disestablishment of the Church, which gave rise to it, is not as topical as it was at times in the 19th century. However, such discussion can occur. The Church of England is “established”, making it the “state” religion or church: in other words, among other things, it is used on state occasions and the monarch is its supreme governor. There are those who feel that this link between Church and State should be sundered, and the Church disestablished: such people can be said to be of a disestablishmentarianist disposition
4.2 The earliest OED citation and earlier still citations
Interestingly, the first OED entry for antidisestablishmentarianism is from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable of 1923, at the entry for long words. However, the Bulletin of the Grosvenor Library, Buffalo (Volumes 1-4, p. 168), has this from 1918: “I can go this one better, with a word which I have been told, ever since childhood, was the longest in the English language, it is antidisestablishmentarianism, containing 28 letters, and meaning, of course, the doctrine of those who did not wish…” The “this” apparently refers to an earlier claim in the same publication that anthropomorphologically (23 letters) was the longest.
4.3 [image error]And a 1919 edition of Everyland: A Magazine of World Friendship for Girls and Boys has this: “Dorothy Knudson says it is “antitransubstantiationalistically” : Alison Bryant, Rose Gibson, Lucretia Ilsley, and Isabel Weedon say it is antidisestablishmentarianism.” (Vol 10, Issues 7-12, p. 336.)
From which it is clear that by that date several readers of the magazine took anti…ism to be the longest. As regards the even longer, 33-letter contender, antitransubstantiationalistically, that it was ever actually used looks extremely dubious.
(Although a correspondent adds a letter s and professes to be “antitranssubstantiationalistically inclined.” Transubstantiation is the doctrine that at the moment of consecration the wine and the host become the blood and body of Christ.)
5 Why is it known (by many) as the longest word?
Partly, I suggest, because it consists of familiar individual parts that make it possible to remember, unlike, say, the monster mentioned at 4.3 above. Then, it has longevity: as mentioned earlier, it was first mentioned as the champ a century and a year ago.
It also has, to my mind at least, a distinct and winning personality.
I must have found out about it as a child. Its eleven (or twelve, depending) syllables with their repeated i and s sounds seemed to have an amazing dynamism, like a choo-choo building up steam towards the main stress on the eighth. And its two negative prefixes, anti- and dis-, seemed bafflingly at loggerheads with one another, creating a strange double negative. It had all the magical, talismanic power that words can have for young children. Once encountered, it can never be unremembered.
6 What do all the different bits mean?
It is also a remarkable example of how prefixes and suffixes can be coupled together, a bit like railway carriages. If you uncouple them, what do you get? anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism. In other words, the locomotive of this word is the verb establish. Why is that?
7 It’s all to do with politics and religion
In England (and here England means England, not Scotland or Wales) the Church of England is “established”. This means it is the official Church, and has several links with the State. For instance, the monarch is its head, and any measures passed by the Church’s governing body have to be approved by Parliament. (In the US, in contrast, no Church has this constitutionally privileged role).
Historically, this dominance of the Church of England has been disputed—and in some circles still is. Those in favour of maintaining it as the established Church were called establishmentarians…
7.1 Establishmentarian
The OED records this word as a noun from 1846, and as an adjective from 1847: “Those who, like myself, are called High Churchmen, have little or no sympathy with mere Establishmentarians.”—Hook, 1846.
It seems that Gladstone did not much care for the word: in the Contemporary Review of June 1875 he wrote “The prosecutors…are strongly (to use a barbarous word) establishmentarian.”
(It is worth remembering that Gladstone was a considerable classical scholar, and will no doubt have had firm views on what were barbarous—that is questionably formed from an etymological point of view—words).
7.2 Establishmentarianism
And the philosophy upheld by establishmentarians is of course…establishmentarianism. In 1873 the noted philologist Fitzedward Hall wrote of Richard Chenevix Trench [image error](the admirer of female rowing crews and original inspiration for the creation of the OED) that “Establishmentarianism was wont to roll over the prelatial [Abp. Trench’s] tongue“. Chenevix Trench was in fact Archbishop of Dublin when the C of E was disestablished in Ireland, in 1871.
7.3 A secondary, more modern meaning
The adjective cum noun establishmentarian also has a more modern meaning, as the OED defines it: “Pertaining to or characteristic of the establishment; supportive of or favouring the establishment and its values; establishment-minded, conservative”. First recorded, it seems, in the economist J.K. Galbraith’s journal in early 1962. A more recent example is: In 1976, he left the abortion rights league, in part because he believed it was becoming too establishmentarian” (NYT, 2006).
7.4 Disestablishmentarian
Those in favour of disestablishing the Church were, naturally, disestablishmentarians, first recorded from 1885 in the unrevised OED entry, but traceable in Google Ngrams at least as far back as The Church Herald of 1874: “…no public event has done more mischief as regards turning men’s minds into a Disestablishmentarian channel than the recent policy of the Bishops’ Bench as expounded by the two Primates.”
And their philosophy is disestablishmentarianism (OED, 1897).
7.5 Antidisestablishmentarian(ism)
Those opposed to disestablishment are, inevitably, antidisestablishmentarians. If you knocked off the first two prefixes, you would get back to establishmentarian, which would not, however, mean exactly the same thing. The first OED entry for antidisestablishmentarian is from the journal Notes and Queries of 1900. And for antidisestablishmentarianism from 1923, as previously mentioned, which takes us full circle.
NB: This is an updated version of a post first published four years ago, re-posted because I’m short of time.
December 26, 2018
Merry Twixmas! But what is Twixmas?
What is Twixmas?
In response to the routine question ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’, I’ve been telling people we’re at home but then going away between Christmas and Hogmanay. To some, I’ve said we’re going away for Twixmas, and they have mostly understood straightaway that I meant the period from the twenty-seventh onwards (because Boxing Day presumably still comes under the heading of ‘Christmas’ in commercial terms).
I hadn’t come across Twixmas until, I think, the year before last (2016). The delightful hotel where we used to hole up for three or four days over Christmas later stopped doing Christmas packages due to lack of demand. (We had been the youngest couple there, which was gratifying from a narcissistic point of view; sadly, we think some of the auld yins might have moved on to a better place, hence the lack of demand.)
Anyway, the last time we were there enjoying our Christmas ‘tucker’, the hotel also offered a ‘Twixmas’ break.
Now, in context, sandwiched as it was between Xmas and New Year packages, it was blindingly obvious that Twixmas referred to the period between Crimbles and New Year.
But with less context is it so clear?
This Beeb vid from last year suggests possibly not.
(Context is all. It is clear from what the presenter says at the beginning and people’s responses that they were asked ‘Have you heard of Twixmas?’ In other words, there was no genuine linguistic context.)
It is not yet defined in any of the major dictionaries, as far as I can see.
English has a rather restricted repertoire of ways to make new words. One often-used way is to splice existing words together in the way an unscrupulous car dealer might weld two cars together in a ‘cut and shut’. Such combinations of two (or more) words are extremely common.
With cars, the join is intended to be invisible. With words, however, speakers need to sense where that join lies so they can deduce the meaning. Let’s take Brexit (sorry to mention it, you must be as sick to death of hearing about it as everyone else), which is a combination of British/Britain and Exit. The name for such hybrids is ‘portmanteau’1 or ‘blend’.
Alice and portmanteaus
The portmanteau we’re talking about now is Twixmas. It has its pros and cons.
On the con side:
Twix is a kind of sweet widely known in Britain. As the video (December 2017) shows, some people thought Twixmas might be a confection (figuratively, and almost literally).
Only one person in that video knew what it meant.
The suffix –mas is not widely known or highly productive these (post-Christian) days.
(While historically it appears in a handful of religious feast days, as the OED shows [e.g. Candlemas, Lammas, Martinmas], the one that more people might have heard of is Michaelmas, as it is used to refer to the autumn term at some schools and universities. Not to mention Michaelmas daisies.)
It is a made-up word, invented by the advertising and marketing industry to make us part with our money. (Or, as the top definition in Urban Dictionary rather bitterly puts it, ‘capitalist pigs [sic] idea to squeeze more profit from christianity [sic] and abusing the poor minimum wagers to slave away there [sic] holiday season.’)
On the plus side:
It expresses in one word what otherwise would take at least seven, thereby embodying the principle of economy, which is often a driver of language change.
It rhymes with Christmas, which makes it – or should make it – easy to remember.
Other ‘invented’ words have stood the test of time, such as blurb.
It is arguably ingenious, taking the twix– element from betwixt, a word which possibly conjures up the set phrase betwixt and between. (Note in the video how the two older ladies get this immediately.)
Will it last?
Only time will tell.
But whatever you are doing for Twixmas, I hope you have fun.
And here’s wishing you a successful and prosperous 2019!
NB: According to the video, it’s only 27-29 December. I suppose 30 December is subsumed under New Year celebrations.
I don’t know about you, but the final ‘Merry Twixmas’ really doesn’t work.
1Pormanteau is not an ‘invented’ word itself, but its linguistic meaning was ‘invented’ by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.
To understand the appropriateness of the word, it is necessary to realise the kind of luggage it denotes in its literal meaning. As the OED defines it (emboldening mine): A case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when travelling; (originally) one of a form suitable for carrying on horseback; (now esp.) one in the form of a stiff leather case hinged at the back to open into two equal parts.
[image error]
Not just any old portmanteau, but a Luis Vuitton one.
Humpty Dumpty is explaining the meaning of some of the words in the ‘Jabberwocky’ poem, the first couplet of which runs ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves | did gyre and gimble in the wabe’.
‘That’s enough to begin with,’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted : ‘there are plenty of hard words there. “Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.’
‘That’ll do very well,’ said Alice : ‘and “slithy”?’
‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”. “Lithe” is the same as “active”. You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.’
‘I see it now,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully : ‘and what are “toves”?’
‘Well, “toves” are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.’
‘They must be very curious creatures.’
‘They are that,’ said Humpty Dumpty : ‘also they make their nests under sun-dials—also they live on cheese.’
(The space before the colons above is deliberate, echoing the original printing convention, which is still followed in French.)
December 19, 2018
Champ at the bit or chomp at the bit? Which is correct?
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Summary
Chomp at the bit appears more often in most modern written sources than champ…;
Dictionaries make no comment about chomp’s correctness;
A small survey suggests that most people would edit chomp to champ;
I comment on it in my Fowler, but only one other usage guide does;
Insisting that champ is the only correct form seems to be a ‘thing’.
On one of my posts a reader commented how much it annoyed them when people said chomp at the bit rather than champ at the bit and suggested I should blog about it. So here goes.
To quote verbatim, my correspondent (there must, surely, be a more up-to-date word for someone who comments on a blog post) wrote: ‘I hear a lot of people who say “chomping at the bit” rather than “champing at the bit” which whether or not it has come into common use is wrong and smacks of a poor education and a poor vocabulary.’
That raises two obvious major questions.
Q1: Has chomp … in fact come into common use?
In other words, how common is it vs champ?
(And, might there be ‘regional’ variation?)
Q2: Who decides whether it is ‘wrong’? What do they say?
It also raised in my mind…
Q3: What do editors and others who care, think?
And, of course,
Q4: What do these words mean, and what is the history of and relation between the two forms – and any others, such as chafing.
I’ll answer the first three each in two parts, a short answer and then a longer one for anyone who wants more information. For the sake of (relative) brevity in this post, Q4 requires a separate post.
Q1: Has chomp come into common use?
Short answer:
Yes. And in most varieties of English it is more often used than champ.
Longer answer:
It depends where in the English-speaking world you’re talking about, and also what kind of writing.
I consulted six sets of data: The Oxford English Corpus February 2014, Oxford Monitor Corpus April 2018, the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), the Corpus of Historical American (COHA) and the Hansard corpus.
According to the Oxford English Corpus data consulted, while in February 2014 chomp.* at the bit was more frequent than champ.*, (414:310) the picture varied by region.
(The .* means all forms of the verb, although 88 per cent are continuous tenses in any case, i.e. with the form champing/champing.)
In BrE chomp.* was less frequent (97:121) but in U.S. English the opposite was true (201/102). Canadian usage was in line with U.S., while Australian was closer to British (chomp.* 15: champ.* 25).
However, by the time of the April 2018 Monitor Corpus, things had changed for BrE: chomp.* was now commoner (224:174). Whether this is an indication of increasing U.S. influence it is impossible to say. For the U.S., the difference between the two forms had increased (876: 336), but for Australia the difference had stayed almost exactly the same in percentage terms (chomp.* 40: champ.* 68). Overall, the ratio was 2,245:1,143.
[image error]
Just to confuse matters, there is another idiom, which is “get the bit between one’s teeth”, as this cartoon illustrates. That’s when the horse moves the bit away from where it normally sits and takes control. That’s why Trump’s “riders” are pulling so hard: he’s outa control.
The three other data sources consulted are from the Brigham Young University corpora. The Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), which covers 20 different country varieties of English, showed chomp.* to be more than twice as frequent (377:152) and to be more frequent in every country except Australia. But even there, the gap had narrowed (chomp 24: champ 32).
The NOW corpus showed chomp.* to be about 57 per cent or so commoner than champ, that is, by a smaller margin than the GloWbE data (1415:901). My hunch is that because this material is written by journalists of various kinds, who are more likely to have an idea of what is considered to be correct, they are more likely to ‘correct’ themselves, in contrast to the GloWbE writers, who can be anyone anywhere.
Then, to see what a historical corpus showed, I looked at COHA, which is the largest such corpus available. It showed chomp.* at six occurrences, and first appearing as late as the 1980s, and champ.* at 20 and first appearing in 1880.
Finally, the Hansard corpus, i.e. a corpus of British parliamentary proceedings 1802–2005, produces an intriguing result. A search for verbs preceding the string at the bit produces 49 examples of champ from the 1930s onwards, seven of chafing, and one each of straining and pulling but absolutely none of chomp. Does this mean that the honourable members to a person believe it is the correct and only version?
Q2: Who decides whether it is ‘wrong’? What do they say?
Short answer:
Well, each of us can (and often does in practice) decide if we think a particular use of a word, phrase, etc., is wrong, but it is generally dictionaries and usage guides that are taken as objective judges of such matters.
The OED, the Oxford Online Dictionary, Collins and Merriam-Webster make no comment about the correctness or otherwise of chomp.
Longer answer:
It is not listed in either the Cambridge Guide to English Usage or the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage. I added it to my edition of Fowler and noted there that chomp is more frequent than champ in the corpus I consulted at the time and sententiously ended the note with ‘some purists will see it as an egregious mistake, even though it is recorded in dictionaries’.
It is also mentioned in Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage.
The dictionaries consulted deal with it as follows:
Oxford Dictionary Online: just gives the phrase chomp at the bit under chomp.
OED: In a 2007 draft addition, notes ‘Chiefly Amer. to chomp at the bit : = to champ at the bit’. In other words, it says it is the equivalent of champ, but refrains from judgement.
Collins: the dictionary for learners, Cobuild, lists chomp at the bit without comment.
However, the dictionary for mother-tongue speakers for British English does not list it under chomp, but the dictionary for U.S. English does.
Merriam-Webster Unabridged shows both versions without comment.
However, the online version cross-refers the relevant meaning of chomp to the entry for the verb champ while specifying that chomp in that meaning is usually in the phrase chomping at the bit. This could either be an example of lexicographers being economical, or a subtle implication that champ is preferable.
Q3: What do editors, and others who care and are presumably vocabulary-rich, think?
Who knows?
A simple way would be to ask them whether they would leave it or emend it when editing.
I tried that.
In a tiny survey on Twitter, 9 out of 12 people said they would change it.
17% I’m not U.S. & wld leave
42% I’m not U.S. & wld change
08% I’m U.S. & wld leave it
33% I’m U.S. & wld change it
There is also the poll at the head of the blog. Please take part.
I’ll blog separately about the history and meaning of the two words.
Merry Christmas, btw!
November 14, 2018
You say underarm, I say armpit. Or oxter. Or…?
7-minute read
A recent article in the i (Independent) reported that 40 per cent of men aged 16 to 24 removed the hair from their underarms. (Yuck! To the shaving, I mean, not the hair.)
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have underarms. I have armpits. And if I spoke Scots, I might well use the word oxter for “The hollow under the arm where it is attached to the trunk, below the shoulder; the axilla”.
“So what?” you might well ask.
Well, there are three reasons for my interest. Two of them are linguistic. First, underarm for me still carries a hygienic and sanitised whiff of advertising-speak. (It is also tagged in my mental lexicon as an adjective, as in under-arm deodorant.) And second, on investigating I find a surprising number of words – ten, actually – have been used for this generally unloved and unregarded little anatomical dingle.
Those words also show some of the sources from which English has hoovered up words over the centuries. They are the usual suspects of French (at various stages of development), Latin, Dutch (at various stages…), Old English, Nordic.
The third reason could, at a pinch (U.S. in a pinch), be called sociological.
That the 16–24-year-olds lawn-mower their oxters puzzles me (as someone almost three times that age). Why? I find it enough of a bind having to shave one’s fizzog regularly, without resorting to a form of cosmetic self-punishment that until not so long ago was the exclusive bane of women.
This body-hairlessness thang was called the “Love Island” effect in the article. (I can’t say I’ve ever watched that programme and have no intention of doing so now.) However, so it seems, the young chaps appearing on it are invariably never hirsute; and therefore, apparently, any braw young tup in the so-called “real world” has to be similarly hairless if he is to have any hope of finding his ewe-mate.
Beats me. Call me reactionary, call me a fuddy-duddy, call me a dinosaur, call me a dodo, call me granddad, call me a Piers Morgan (no, please, anything but that) – I just find it somehow unmanly.
I’ve digressed bigly.
Going back to matters of language, underarm first appeared in 1933. That’s right, rather less than a century ago.
Q: You mean, it was taboo to talk about them before that, like Victorian piano legs, and all that?
A: Er, no. I don’t.
I mean that there’s a long and quirky history of talking about axillae (as the anatomists would have it) that goes something like what follows. I list below the OED dates for the different words; choose a juicy citation or two for each; and mention the etymology.
A armhole – before 1325 (Edward II sits on the English throne; David II on the Scottish throne)
1535 Bible (Coverdale) Jer. xxxviii. 12 Put these ragges and cloutes vnder thine arme holes.
(AV Put now these old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords.)
arm + hole.
[image error]
Clearly, shaving your armpits can make you as epicene as this Perseus. By Eugène Romain Thirion (French, 1839–1910).
B armpit – before 1333 (Edward II’s son Edward III on the throne of England; David II on the throne of Scotland)
?c1450 in G. Müller Aus Mittelengl. Medizintexten (1929) 32 (MED) Þe stynkynge breth of mannys armpittis.
(Note that breth here has its old meaning of “odour, smell”.)
<arm + pit.
C oxter c. 1420 – (James I on Scottish throne; Henry V on English throne)
1914 J. Joyce Dubliners 206 Many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter.
ōxta, ōhsta, perhaps influenced by Nordic words.
D assel(e) ?c. 1450) – (Henry VI, endower of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge; James II, Scotland)
Merlin 116 The speres on their asseles, theire sheldes be-fore her bristes. [Cf. Joinv. in Littré ‘le glaive dessous s’essele et l’escu devant li’.]
OED marks “obsolete, rare”.
essele (modern aisselle) < Latin axilla armpit; or, for earlier English axle, eaxle, exle, shoulder, between which and the Old French there was an early confusion.”
E okselle 1489 – marked “rare” in the OED, so where else it occurs, I don’t know.
(Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, on English throne; his son-in-law to be, James IV, rex scottorum)
1489 Caxton tr. C. de Pisan Bk. Fayttes of Armes ii. xxxv. 150 He dide putte two grete boteylles vndre his okselles and swymed..in the see.
OED marks “obsolete, rare”. This is a bit of an oddity. The OED says it comes from
“Apparently ocsele, oxel, oxele (Dutch oksel , Dutch regional (West Flemish) oksele )” but also points out that in the citation shown above it translates Middle French esselles , plural of esselle, i.e. the French at the time for “armpits”.
F wings 1586 – (Elizabeth I on English throne, Shakespeare 22 years old; James VI on Scottish throne)
1586 T. Bowes tr. P. de la Primaudaye French Acad. I. 499 He tooke hir with both his armes by the wings [Fr. les aisselles].
This is what is known as a “nonce” use, which means it was specially “created” for the context shown.
wing, which is Middle English, first in plural forms wenge, wengen, wenges; Old Norse vængir”
Since the Latin ala means both “wing” and “armpit”, I wonder if the 1586 writer was also influenced by that fact.
G axilla 1616 – (James VI now also on English throne as James I)
This is the first appearance of what is now the standard medical/anatomical term, from Latin, and part of the huge seventeenth-century influx into English of Latinisms.
A. Read Εωματογραϕία Ανθρωπίη 152 The backe part of the shoulder top, called axilla
*axula, whence āla: compare axle n.1 Common in late Latin in form ascella.”
H enmontery – 1655 (No monarch was on the throne; the interregnum)
Fuller Church-hist. Brit.x. 87 He was shot through the Enmontery of the left Arm.
The OED says this word = emunctory, which means “of or pertaining to blowing of the nose.” Quite how that relates to armpits I really don’t know, and am afraid to surmise.
émonctoire, < modern Latin ēmunctōrius.
And penultimately, this newcomer or upstart:
I underarm – 1933 (George V King of Great Britain and Emperor of India)
1933 Southwestern Reporter 331 427/1 An extensive scar remained upon her right breast, underarm and back.
1966 in G. N. Leech Eng. in Advertising xv. 138 Veet ‘O’ leaves skin satin-soft, makes underarms immaculate, arms and legs fuzz-free.
1981 M. Angelou Heart of Woman viii. 111 I had to get away from the man’s electricity… My underarms tingled and my stomach contents fell to my groin.
[image error]
Mmm. Perhaps male body-shaving is not such a bad idea after all. I feel faintly queasy, I confess.
However, as English has a habit of castrating words, we next get to…
J pit – 1955 (Queenie, as she is affectionately known by some, on the throne)
1955 J. P. Donleavy Ginger Man xvii. 205 No fuss. No excuses. Fine person. Am I smelling? Sniff a pit. Little musty. Can’t have everything.
1973 M. Amis Rachel Papers 71 Complete body-service..pits clipped, toes manicured, pubic hair permed and styled, each tooth brushed, tongue scraped, nose pruned.
This is slangy and is a clipping (ouch) of armpit to pit.
pit Is described by the OED as from “common Germanic”, and the OED points to similar words in Dutch, German (Pfütze), Old Icelandic, Swedish and Danish, < a Germanic base, apparently < classical Latin puteus well, pit, shaft, of unknown origin.
Ten “synonyms” in all.
Now, I can see that talking about a bit of your body and including the word pit might put the squeamish off. (The modern cosmetics industry has loadza dosh to gain by deterring people from accepting their own humble corporeality.) Perhaps there are too many negative connotations attaching to pit, such as “it’s the pits” and “the armpit of the universe”, both originally U.S. Perhaps that explains the progression towards underarms. If you take a word like armpit and make it unsavoury not only literally but metaphorically, then you have to find a euphemism to replace it. Enter underarm.
In support of that contention, your honour, I submit that if you look at contemporary citations for the armpit vs underarm you will find that the words associated with them are generally not the same.
From looking at vast amounts of 2014 data, the following patterns struck me.
Adjective + noun: Only armpits are sweaty, unshaven or unshaved, smelly, stinking or rancid.
(Because, you see, to become an underarm you have to be clean and odourless!)
Both armpits and underarms can be hairy, but the first outnumber the second almost 10 to 1, and hairy underarms only afflict non-British speakers.
Verb + noun, noun + verb: armpits are the object or subject of many verbs, such as sniff, nuzzle, scratch, and smell. For shave, armpits again outnumber underarms 10 to 1, suggesting that underarms are mainly already shaved. And wash only applies to armpits. Which implies, well, you know…
Need I go on?
At this point, I’ll sign off wondering how long the phrase “That will put hairs on your chest” will survive if this trend continues.
And I’ll note one version of an old Spanish proverbial ditty that is at variance with the “Love Island effect.”
El hombre y el oso,
cuanto más peludo, más hermoso.
Men and bears,
The hairier they are, the more beautiful they are.
(The “canonical” version runs, El hombre y el oso,
cuanto más feo, más hermoso,
…the uglier they are, the more beautiful)
[image error]
Even Andromeda managed to shave her pits, despite being chained to a rock. Amazing the lengths some women will go to to look good. I suppose she didn’t want to put Perseus off. Judging by his position, he’ll stop at nothing to double-check. Titian, 1554-1556.
November 7, 2018
Comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, Chameleon. How to use commas (2). Pompeo and commas and CMOS.
3-minute read
In the wake of Secretary Pompeo’s edicts about punctuation, which hit the U.S. headlines in late September this year, I blogged about the conflict between commas as what I will call “syntactic boundary markers” and as pauses in speech. I suggested that commas are art, not science. By which I mean that there are several circumstances in which most authorities agree they are optional. Inserting or omitting them thus becomes a matter of personal style, not of blind rulebook-following .
The State Department circulated emails with examples of good and bad comma use. An extract from these Pompean edicts illustrates my contention perfectly. The Chicago Manual of Style (henceforth CMOS) 6.26 gives the example below and the State Department emails lifted it verbatim – except that they added the comma after and, suggesting it be removed.
Burton examined the documents for over an hour, and, if Smedley had not intervened, the forgery would have been revealed.
First, it’s worth noting that CMOS itself says this: “When a dependent clause intervenes between two other clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction, causing the coordinating and subordinating conjunctions to appear next to each other (e.g., and if, but if), the conjunctions need not be separated by a comma.” [Underlining and emboldening mine].
“Need not” does not mean “must not” or “should not”.
Second, at the end of 6.26 CMOS says, “Strictly speaking, it would not be wrong to add a comma between the conjunctions in any of the examples above.”
CMOS is thus indulging in a sort of now-you-see it, now-you-don’t disclaimer.
Moreover, I suspect that to understand the reasoning behind the veto on commas in those circumstances could strain even the most nitpicky State Department staff because of the terminology involved. But, in case it helps you, gentle reader, here goes. (There are links to Englicious’s helpful glossary for each term.)
A: Burton examined the documents for over an hour, = MAIN CLAUSE
B: and[,] = COORDINATING CONJUNCTION
C: if = SUBORDINATING CONJUNCTION
D: Smedley had not intervened, = DEPENDENT (or SUBORDINATE) CLAUSE
d: the forgery would have been revealed. = SECOND MAIN CLAUSE
Whether you insert that comma or not, IMHO, depends on how comma-friendly or comma-averse you are.
I would retain it but accept that others will consider it fussy.
My argument would be that writing the sentence comma-less thus
Burton examined the documents for over an hour, and if Smedley had not intervened, the forgery would have been revealed.
seems to me incomplete. And it seems so for a reason that CMOS also admits: “Such usage, which would extend the logic of commas in pairs, (see 6.17) may be preferred in certain cases for emphasis or clarity.”
A subtle argument could be made that that comma is dispensable in the sentence as it currently stands but would become necessary if the dependent clause were extended, for example like this:
Burton examined the documents for over an hour, and if Smedley had not intervened, the forgery would have been revealed.
Burton examined the documents for over an hour, and, if Smedley had not intervened so excitedly that he seemed to be on the point of blowing a gasket, the forgery would have been revealed.
In academic writing, where long sentences are the order of the day and the authors themselves often get trapped in the maze of their own verbiage, I tend to insert such commas to break up the flow and provide balance to sentences. But the length of that dependent clause can have an impact, as also might the weight and balance of the surrounding clauses, as I hope the comma-laden example above suggests.
In contrast, the following example is from a work whose prose style has been described as “needlessly obscure.” That said, and despite what I say in the previous paragraph, I would not insert a comma after the highlighted if.
If, indeed, as Fallon, Quilligan, and Franke argue, Milton’s Paradise Lost eschews the sacramental innocence of the sign that has been miraculously transformed into a sacred object, and if the poem’s central epistemological claim is to the internal processes of interpretatively spiritual (that is subjective) truth, then the poem’s uniformity of vision and tactile materiality lend these processes real, indeed tangible, substance.
(It’s only 62 words long but feels wearisomely longer to me.)
And the reason I wouldn’t is that that if follows on clearly and logically from the If that introduces the whole sentence. It is a discoursal if being used to construct an argument, in that way that connotes “let us suppose this proposition to be true, and I too am doing so for the sake of my argument”. It is not the hypothetical if of the CMOS examples, in which something might or might not have happened.
Over such minutiae – now there’s a word I can never quite decide how to pronounce, but the link shows I am not alone – do we editors cavil. Perhaps it really is time to get out more.
But before I put on my coat, here’s a question for any editors “out there”. Would you leave the emboldened comma in this (authentic) sentence or remove it?
The upregulation of myocardial beta-1 receptors has been shown to re-sensitize the myocardium to adrenergic stimulation with dobutamine and, if a similar upregulation of sinoatrial beta-1 receptors took place, may partially or fully restore chronotropic competence.
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October 31, 2018
Seamlessly or seemlessly? No contest. It’s seamlessly.
3-minute read
This month’s comedy club show was seemlessly held together by Liverpudlian compere Silky (by name, not by nature),
notes a British English website.
…calls for Mr Molloy to explain, changed seemlessly to calls for him to resign once his explanation of a simple, honest error became public,
an Irish newspaper recounts.
Dear authors and writers all, it’s SEAMLESSLY: e.g.
to integrate users’ disparate supply-chain systems, so that buyers and sellers can communicate seamlessly with each other.
Any decent spellchecker ought to spot the mistake.
That said, you are far from alone in your mistake, although it’s very much a minority trend. (The News on the Web corpus has 75 vs. 27,018 examples, a minuscule percentage. But that’s as it should be, since that corpus contains journalism. The iWeb corpus of general language has 777 vs. 98,078.)
What does seamlessly mean?
According to the Oxford Online Dictionary’s elegantly eloquent definition: “Smoothly and continuously, with no apparent gaps or spaces between one part and the next.” That entry contains plentiful examples, such as:
Each song is seamlessly integrated into the film.
The conversation flowed seamlessly.
History has a way of ignoring such insolent details, of weaving them seamlessly into its larger narrative fabric.
And here’s another apposite example, this time fromCollins:
The story flits between the two different eras that seamlessly link together as it progresses.
Sun, 2016
Seamlessly‘s a metaphor. A seamless garment, for instance, is one which consists of a single piece of material, with no seams.
(The seamless garment metaphor was common in 17 C, is enshrined in a certain trend in current religious ethics and refers to a biblical quotation.1)
[image error]
Note the soldiers, bottom right, casting lots for Christ’s raiment. Fresco from Stavronikita Monastery, by Theophanes the Cretan, 1545-1546
According to the un-updated OED entry, none other than Emily Dickinson was the first to use it figuratively, metaphorically, in 1862:
As if some Caravan of Sound Had parted Rank, Then knit, and swept—In Seamless Company.
Then the metaphor became more widespread, especially in describing history as a seamless web (1898), a phrase I seem to remember first encountering at university. That phrase gives a new twist to the metaphor and still seems to be in current use:
Such is the unity of all history that any one [sic] who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.
F. Pollock & F. W. Maitland History of English Law (ed. 2) I. i. i. 1
In place of these dogmas, Quine proposes a metaphor that our system of beliefs is a seamless web. (2000)
And Auden used it in Under Sirius (1949):
And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,
The hawthorn hedges in bloom,
When, serene in their ivory vessels,
The three wise Maries come,
Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in
By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:
[To soss is defined by the OED as “to splash in mud or dirt”.]
And, finally, seamlessly the adverb premieres in 1906:
The whole web is woven seamlessly and without break.
G. Saintsbury, History of English Prosody
Now, seemlessly wants to mean the same thing. Or rather, its exponents want it to. And I think it’s easy to see why this eggcorn exists – though it is not yet recorded in the eggcorn database.
If you asked someone to explain why seemlessly should mean “without a break”, I guess they’d say, “Well, you use it when one thing blends into another so smoothly that it doesn’t even seem to be changing, and so you don’t notice it. Nothing seems to be happening. The process is “seemless.”
Something like that, anyway.
The only problem is it’s not a “word.” That is, no dictionary recognizes it.
But hang on! “There IS an adjective seemless”, someone cries. (First used in The Faerie Queene.)
The only problem is it means “unseemly; shameful; unfitting”. Well, not the only problem. It’s also “archaic”, which is dictionary-speak for “Nobody uses it any more”. But if they did, seemlessly would mean “shamefully”.
Not really the meaning people want.
When I told my partner my version of the explanation for seamlessly, they suggested – being much cannier than me – seenlessly. Sure enough, it exists, but with a piffling 96 hits on Google is very much under the radar at the moment. From a review on Amazon:
I love how the author seenlessly incorporates “big words” into sentences that students can identify the meaning through context clues.
But here seenlessly means “invisibly”, I suspect.
1 John, 19:23-24
23 Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.
24 They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did.
October 4, 2018
Pompeo and commas and CMOS. How to use commas (1).
5-minute read
(Less for you speed-readers out there: well done, you!)
James Thurber was once asked why there was a comma in the sentence “After dinner, the men went into the living room.” He replied that it had been added by Harold Ross, the New Yorker editor, and that the comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
A stickler for commas
A fortnight or so ago, Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State (for Brits, sort of the equivalent of the Foreign Secretary) was in the news because of emails circulating in his bailiwick urging, at his behest, careful use of commas: “The Secretary has underscored the need for appropriate use of commas…”
The hacks pounced on it gleefully, like flies round you know what; here was another golden opportunity to mock a member of an administration most of them detest.
Besides, his pedantry was piquant grist to their mill of slagging a President who rides roughshod over basic spelling and punctuation rules. [I’m not terribly keen on “piquant grist”, but if you must, you must; nor on the rest of the sentence, really. Sigh. Ed.]
They claimed to find it baffling, if not downright ridiculous, or[,] at the very least[,] highly suspect, that a man concerned with weighty matters of state could be bothered about a piddling little convention. The patronizing tone of mock-incredulity abounded, as displayed here.
But hang on a moment.
Let’s leave the toxic politics1 of all this aside for a while… [note, two words, a while].
Journalists are (allegedly) literate. Those Americans who write (rather than pontificate orally) have their very own style guide, the AP Stylebook. Most serious printed media similarly have their individual style guides (e.g., in Britain, The Times, The Telegraph, The Economist, The Guardian/Observer).
Such style guides don’t provide comprehensive guidance on how to use commas – presumably because any competent journalist is presumed to already know (a dangerous presumption these days, when much online news seems to be written by novices or interns whose grasp of the finer points of English can be hazy). Journalists who belittle attempts to help State Department officials punctuate “better” could be considered a mite disingenuous.
What’s wrong with good, old-fashioned rules?
What could be wrong with proffering advice to drafters struggling with the minutiae of comma use?
In the punctuation pecking order, commas are the most underrated and overlooked mark; yet[,] they are the most versatile and useful – and, surely, the most frequent.
Being the most versatile, they are also the most complex. As illustration, for example, the excellent Penguin How to Punctate devotes a generous 54 pages to them[,] compared with the 15 it devotes to the full stop[,] and the 16 to the colon.
However, it’s easier to give simple rules than to say, “Well in some cases do this, but in others do that, it’s all a matter of editorial judgement”[,] as the Penguin book does. Otherwise, who knows where we might end up? And simple rules is what the emails circulating in the State Department enjoin.
Or are they simple?
Hardly a science
The problem is, wielding commas is an art, not a science.
The emails cite the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) as their bible[,] and refer to specific rules. [I put a comma there, and Grammarly and CMOS don’t like it, but I do. But then, I have been accused of over-commaing.]
The following type of comma was approved:
CMOS 22 states: “When independent clauses are joined by and, but, or, so, yet, or any other coordinating conjunction, a comma usually precedes the conjunction.”
So far, so good, but it then goes on to say, “If the clauses are very short and closely connected, the comma may be omitted (as in the last two examples) unless the clauses are part of a series.”
Rules within rules and wheels within wheels
So, we have Rule A, with exception B, which has its own exception C.
Simples, egh?
The State Department example, lifted straight from CMOS and showing appropriate use, was: a) We activated the alarm, but the intruder was already inside.
Is that first clause “very short”, at a mere four words?
Seemingly not, in this instance.
Yet the examples given by CMOS for exception B have comma-less first clauses with that exact same number of words.
b) Electra played the guitar and Tambora sang.
c) Raise your right hand and repeat after me.
Both have four words, like that clause which is closed off by a comma We activated the alarm.
Which raises the question, what is “very short”?
Perhaps we should [,] therefore [,] resort to the clauses being “closely connected”. But how does one define, let alone measure, that “connectedness”?
I repeat, commas are an art, not a science, and this would-be rule only highlights that fact.
Pause (possibly for thought)
I think most people (editors) would happily accept the need for a comma in example a) (We activated the alarm, but the intruder was already inside).
Similarly, a comma in b) (Electra played the guitar and Tambora sang) might seem OTT to many. But could one, hand on heart, say it was plain wrong?
And the same applies to c) (Raise your right hand and repeat after me).
If you base where to put commas purely on grammatical function/syntax, you ignore one of their key functions, namely, to indicate pauses, that is, treating what was written as if it is to be spoken; and [,] to provide emphasis.
For example, if spoken, Raise your right hand and repeat after me would sound perfunctory and formulaic, whereas Raise your right hand, and repeat after me arguably matches the gravity of the occasion.
The Penguin guide suggests several tests to decide where to insert a comma. One of them is “If in doubt about a comma, apply the ‘pause test’. Say the sentence to yourself, and if you hear a pause, put in a comma …”
Fine, as far as it goes, but I might “hear” a pause [,] and you might not, or vice versa.
And it seems that in the past [,] writers “heard” pauses more often than we do.
The twelve years, continued Mrs Dean, following that dismal period,1 were the happiest of my life: my greatest troubles in their passage rose from our little lady’s trifling illnesses, which she had to experience in common with all children, rich and poor. For the rest, after the first six months,2 she grew like a larch,3and could walk and talk in her own way,4 before the heath blossomed a second time over.
Cap. 18, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
The first marked comma separates its subject – The twelve years – from its verb – were – in a way not nowadays allowed (although it is, in my experience, quite common in academic writing, mainly due to long-windedness).
The second, separating a prepositional phrase saying “when” from the main clause, could nowadays easily be left out.
The third clearly contravenes CMOS 6.23: “A comma is not normally used to separate a two-part compound predicate joined by a coordinating conjunction (A compound predicate occurs when a subject that is shared by two or more clauses is not repeated after the first clause.)” [Emphasis mine].
And the fourth, separating a following subordinate clause from its main clause, is not nowadays generally considered necessary.
Could anyone say they are wrong? Outmoded, possibly, but effective.
“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad” (in my case, my friends say[,] that boat sailed long ago) is a quotation doing the rounds, possibly uttered by a frustrated lexicographer.
The thought applies equally to commas.
1 In a comment on one of the reports about Pompeo’s punctiliousness, someone said: ”It’s so comforting that a person suffering from OCD is one of the adults in the room with the person with malignant narcissistic personality disorder.”
Pompeo and Commagate. How to use commas (1).
5-minute read
(Less for you speed-readers out there: well done, you!)
James Thurber was once asked why there was a comma in the sentence “After dinner, the men went into the living room.” He replied that it had been added by Harold Ross, the New Yorker editor, and that the comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
A stickler for commas
A fortnight or so ago, Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State (for Brits, sort of the equivalent of the Foreign Secretary) was in the news because of emails circulating in his bailiwick urging, at his behest, careful use of commas: “The Secretary has underscored the need for appropriate use of commas…”
The hacks pounced on it gleefully, like flies round you know what; here was another golden opportunity to mock a member of an administration most of them detest.
Besides, his pedantry was piquant grist to their mill of slagging a President who rides roughshod over basic spelling and punctuation rules. [I’m not terribly keen on “piquant grist”, but if you must, you must; nor on the rest of the sentence, really. Sigh. Ed.]
They claimed to find it baffling, if not downright ridiculous, or[,] at the very least[,] highly suspect, that a man concerned with weighty matters of state could be bothered about a piddling little convention. The patronizing tone of mock-incredulity abounded, as displayed here.
But hang on a moment.
Let’s leave the toxic politics1 of all this aside for a while… [note, two words, a while].
Journalists are (allegedly) literate. Those Americans who write (rather than pontificate orally) have their very own style guide, the AP Stylebook. Most serious printed media similarly have their individual style guides (e.g., in Britain, The Times, The Telegraph, The Economist, The Guardian/Observer).
Such style guides don’t provide comprehensive guidance on how to use commas – presumably because any competent journalist is presumed to already know (a dangerous presumption these days, when much online news seems to be written by novices or interns whose grasp of the finer points of English can be hazy). Journalists who belittle attempts to help State Department officials punctuate “better” could be considered a mite disingenuous.
What’s wrong with good, old-fashioned rules?
What could be wrong with proffering advice to drafters struggling with the minutiae of comma use?
In the punctuation pecking order, commas are the most underrated and overlooked mark; yet[,] they are the most versatile and useful – and, surely, the most frequent.
Being the most versatile, they are also the most complex. As illustration, for example, the excellent Penguin How to Punctate devotes a generous 54 pages to them[,] compared with the 15 it devotes to the full stop[,] and the 16 to the colon.
However, it’s easier to give simple rules than to say, “Well in some cases do this, but in others do that, it’s all a matter of editorial judgement”[,] as the Penguin book does. Otherwise, who knows where we might end up? And simple rules is what the emails circulating in the State Department enjoin.
Or are they simple?
Hardly a science
The problem is, wielding commas is an art, not a science.
The emails cite the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) as their bible[,] and refer to specific rules. [I put a comma there, and Grammarly and CMOS don’t like it, but I do. But then, I have been accused of over-commaing.]
The following type of comma was approved:
CMOS 22 states: “When independent clauses are joined by and, but, or, so, yet, or any other coordinating conjunction, a comma usually precedes the conjunction.”
So far, so good, but it then goes on to say, “If the clauses are very short and closely connected, the comma may be omitted (as in the last two examples) unless the clauses are part of a series.”
Rules within rules and wheels within wheels
So, we have Rule A, with exception B, which has its own exception C.
Simples, egh?
The State Department example, lifted straight from CMOS and showing appropriate use, was: a) We activated the alarm, but the intruder was already inside.
Is that first clause “very short”, at a mere four words?
Seemingly not, in this instance.
Yet the examples given by CMOS for exception B have comma-less first clauses with that exact same number of words.
b) Electra played the guitar and Tambora sang.
c) Raise your right hand and repeat after me.
Both have four words, like that clause which is closed off by a comma We activated the alarm.
Which raises the question, what is “very short”?
Perhaps we should [,] therefore [,] resort to the clauses being “closely connected”. But how does one define, let alone measure, that “connectedness”?
I repeat, commas are an art, not a science, and this would-be rule only highlights that fact.
Pause (possibly for thought)
I think most people (editors) would happily accept the need for a comma in example a) (We activated the alarm, but the intruder was already inside).
Similarly, a comma in b) (Electra played the guitar and Tambora sang)might seem OTT to many. But could one, hand on heart, say it was plain wrong?
And the same applies to c) (Raise your right hand and repeat after me).
If you base where to put commas purely on grammatical function/syntax, you ignore one of their key functions, namely, to indicate pauses, that is, treating what was written as if it is to be spoken; and [,] to provide emphasis.
For example, if spoken, Raise your right hand and repeat after me would sound perfunctory and formulaic, whereas Raise your right hand, and repeat after me arguably matches the gravity of the occasion.
The Penguin guide suggests several tests to decide where to insert a comma. One of them is “If in doubt about a comma, apply the ‘pause test’. Say the sentence to yourself, and if you hear a pause, put in a comma …”
Fine, as far as it goes, but I might “hear” a pause [,] and you might not, or vice versa.
And it seems that in the past [,] writers “heard” pauses more often than we do.
The twelve years, continued Mrs Dean, following that dismal period,1 were the happiest of my life: my greatest troubles in their passage rose from our little lady’s trifling illnesses, which she had to experience in common with all children, rich and poor. For the rest, after the first six months,2 she grew like a larch,3and could walk and talk in her own way,4 before the heath blossomed a second time over.
Cap. 18, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
The first marked comma separates its subject – The twelve years – from its verb – were – in a way not nowadays allowed (although it is, in my experience, quite common in academic writing, mainly due to long-windedness).
The second, separating a prepositional phrase saying “when” from the main clause, could nowadays easily be left out.
The third clearly contravenes CMOS 6.23: “A comma is not normally used to separate a two-part compound predicate joined by a coordinating conjunction (A compound predicate occurs when a subject that is shared by two or more clauses is not repeated after the first clause.)” [Emphasis mine].
And the fourth, separating a following subordinate clause from its main clause, is not nowadays generally considered necessary.
Could anyone say they are wrong? Outmoded, possibly, but effective.
“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad” (in my case, my friends say[,] that boat sailed long ago) is a quotation doing the rounds, possibly uttered by a frustrated lexicographer.
The thought applies equally to commas.
1 In a comment on one of the reports about Pompeo’s punctiliousness, someone said: ”It’s so comforting that a person suffering from OCD is one of the adults in the room with the person with malignant narcissistic personality disorder.”
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