Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

We are watching the rise of a new suffix in US English which we should head off by all means possible. The suffix -ie seems to have begun its life as a misguided backformation of a plural. This backformation took place in words like cookies, the plural of cooky or cookey, a word whose final Y become IE before the plural suffix -s. If you remove the final S, as you do to recover the singular from other plural words, the result is a word ending on IE if you don’t know the ie-rule.

At first -ie was just a variant spelling of the old suffix -y, but now it seems to be taking off on its own. This spelling, where erstwhile stood -y, is now widely accepted and even preferable in many words such as cookie, brownie, and nightie.  Semantically, it is just  a variation on the spelling on -y in these cases.

However, in such words as cutie, druggie, meanie, and yuppie, there is a pejorative connotation which may be infecting the suffix itself. A little may even lie in hippie, which carries with it a sense of “rule-breaker, maverick, renegade”.

The reason I think this pejorative connotation may be infecting the suffix is the recent rise of two new words. A year or two ago, we began hearing the word foodie referring to someone who enjoys well-prepared if not excellent cuisine. If foodie does not carry a pejorative connotation, it certainly is a low-brow alternate to epicure, connoisseur, and gourmet.

No exact meaning has yet settled on this word but my take is that it refers to people who watch the Food Channel and follow such low-brow cooks as Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, and Martha Stewart. Foodies are less connoisseurs of food than food dilettantes, cooking show  personality groupies (groupie—there is another one).

Big deal. I don’t hang with foodies, so they don’t bother me. The latest word in this trend hits home, though—wordie! Wordies have their own website, wordie.org, where the idea is to play with words without actually learning anything about them.

Wordies are quite different from logophiles in their misconstrual of the importance of words and the role they play in our lives. Knowledge of words seems unimportant to wordies; words are just another topic of chit-chat to identify with. If not, they would have come up with a clerver name for themselves.

What will be next? Drinkies? Swimmies? Sunnies? Bungie-jumpies? Almost anything is possible so long as the meanings of these words evade capture. The important point to keep in mind is that these words lead at best questionable lives in our vocabulary as demonstrated by the reputation of their suffix.

In an article entitled “Sarah Palin: A Big Gamble for Religious Conservatives” that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 2, 2008, 11:00 pm, Steven Waldman, the former national editor of U.S. News & World Report wrote: “After a year’s worth of stories about whether the religious right was ‘dead,’ they now seem to be flexing great muscle, helping to bring about the most antiabortion ticket running on the most antiabortion platform - ever.”

The most antiabortion platform is a grating phrase because a relational adjective is used here as a qualitative adjective. Relational? Qualitative? “You mean there are different kinds of adjectives?” I hear someone asking. In fact, there are about a half dozen different kinds of adjectives which most of us have little difficulty distinguishing and using properly.

A qualitative adjecive is sometimes called a “real” adjective because it has all the possible qualities of an adjective: it can be used in both predicate (the platform is antiabortionist) and attributive position (the antiabortionist platform), we can derive a noun from it (antiabortionism), and we can compare it: (more, most antiabortionist).

A relational adjective is at the other end of the spectrum: it can only be used attributively (an antiabortion platform). We can’t use relational adjectives in predicate position (the platform is antiabortion), compare them (more, most antiabortion platform) or create nouns from them (antiabortionness). Relational adjectives are derived from nouns and verbs without suffixes in English, which makes them relatively easy to spot.

English does have lots of filters for the misuse of vocabulary which make errors like this one comprehensible. We understand that more antiabortion doesn’t make sense, so our minds supply the missing semantic pieces, giving us “the strongest antiabortion platform”. So, what’s the big deal? If we can figure out the meaning of the phrases, what is wrong with them?

Well, assuming that we should write as clearly as possible, if we mean the strongest antiabortion platform or the most antiabortionist platform, why not use one of these phrases rather than making the reader do the work for the writer? That way, no rules of grammar are broken, either.

We have to commend Waldman for avoiding the marketing term, Pro-life (itself a relational adjective), but we also need to encourage the avoidance of all relational adjectives when the comparative or superlative degree is called for.

My definition of the verb to swiftboat as “To powerfully blindside and undermine someone with false or misleading attacks on their character or background” resulted in an unusually heavy load of complaints. Some accused me of political bias, others simply pointed out that the basis of the swift boat ads against Senator Kerry in 2004 were either true or were not proven false. Since it is always interesting to watch new words find their way into our vocabulary, I thought I would share my response with everyone.

After reviewing my research, I couldn’t find anything gravely at fault in the definition (though I have ameneded it slightly). Many apparently thought I was defining the swift boat incident of the 2004 election itself. I wasn’t. I was defining the verb (not even the noun) to swiftboat and even chose to close the gap between the two words to make that clear. Nothing in my defintion bears on the truthfulness of the swift boat ads of the 2004 presidential campaign. I only wrote about the meaning of the verb to swiftboat today, 2008.

Since only the very unreliable Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary had even ventured a definition for this word, I did most of my research on the uses of the word on the Web. I searched the word swiftboated to make sure I had only verbs in my sample. I tried to determine what the writers of sentences like these had in mind using the verb:

• How McCain will be Swiftboated.
• They swiftboated the Gold Star mom on the news by questioning her credibility when she refused to back off with her antiwar protest….
• Stéphane Dion gets swiftboated by an oily Peter Puck.
• Fox suggests swiftboat author being swiftboated himself.
• Science swiftboated in ‘Expelled’.

I could not find room to believe these and hundreds of other authors meant “had the truth told about them” in using this term.

In all the related articles the word was being used negatively—whether truthfully or not. The authors of all these web texts intended that something bad was done to whomever was swiftboated. Regardless of whether the statements are true or not, the intent of the writer is to denote that truth was subverted, not exposed. I don’t see any other interpretation.

The meanings of words begin changing as soon as they are used. Disease is no longer semantically related to ease, business no longer has any business with busy, atonement is unrelated today to one. I think the meaning of the verb to swiftboat may still be in a state of flux but I only did this word because it seems to be stabilizing and gaining great popularity. For sure it’s meaning now is independent of the meaning of its origin.

Four months ago, Kate Gladstone wrote me an interesting letter that deserved a better fate than falling between the cracks of everything else we do around here—but it did. Fortunately, it resurfaced recently and here is the dialogue between Kate and me thus far:

“As you know (and have ably demonstrated to the public), the pronunciation of the English language has dramatically changed over the centuries of the language’s documented existence, creating much of the present bad fit between English spelling and English pronunciation” (see The Chaos).

Since English spelling will foreseeably stay the same while English pronunciation will continue its long history of change, after several more centuries or millennia will there ever come a day when the sounds of English have changed far enough to destroy all useful remnants of a fit between spelling and sound?

In other words, could it ever happen that the English language would eventually get so far out of step with the writing system that hardly any words (or no words at all) had a phonemically transparent spelling, and reading had to rely 99+% (or even100%) on the memorization of words as wholes, even though the alphabet still existed and still putatively represented sounds?“

“After all, imagine what we would face if present-day English had standardized its spelling 1000+ years ago instead of only a few centuries ago: so that the word daily, pronounced /DEY-lee/, still required the ancient spelling “gedaeghwamlice”, and so on because nobody wanted to change the traditional spelling that showed how the word USED to sound a long, long time ago).“

Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair and the World Handwriting Contest

Even though this letter fits neatly in the “as-if-we-didn’t-have-enough-to-worry-about” category, it raises an important issue that goes to the very heart of alphaDictionary’s existence, an isssue that was very close to the heart of Bernard Shaw and other literary notables. So, I have to respond.

When I taught writing at Bucknell, I assured all my students that the spelling errors in their writing was not their fault: it was the fault of the English spelling system (orthography) itself and the publishing houses that oppose reform. I still think that is generally a true representation of facts even though I realize opposition to reform lurks in other quarters, too.

I don’t think Kate’s scenario will play out, though, for several reasons. First, the relation  between orthography and pronunciation works both ways. Not only does the writing system (mal)adapt to speech, speech adapts itself to the spelling system (cf. the pronunciation of the T in “often”). Once a writing system is in place, phonological change slows down since language change is dependent on speakers never seeing images of words and having no concept of “correct spelling” (= ortho-graphy).

Second, the Web will eventually break the publishers’ control over what we read. In fact, we are probably undergoing spelling change now. If you watch the Web, you will see adaptations galore. Thru already appears over 100 million times on the current web (through 2 billion). Lite is a respectable spelling of light in some contexts. We can only pray that Imglish does not replace the current spelling system (LOL) and that we are not guided by pure frivolity in making changes.

If worse comes to worst, we really don’t need a close correlation between sound and meaning. In Chinese the relation is far looser than in English. Chinese uses pictures that represent meanings more often than sounds and Chinese society is burgeoning. So we can work around even a total disconnect betweeen sound and letter.

I would be much more frenetic in my activities at alphaDictionary.com if I thought my grandchildren would face greater challenges in spelling than I face. Until this problem at least reaches the level of global warming or the war addiction of our federal government, our efforts would best be directed to trying to bring our children’s spelling abilities up to the level of ours, maybe push them a bit beyond. To help in that task is the reason I founded alphaDictionary.com.

Google alerted me this morning to a blog article entitled “Addiction: The Most Overused Word in our Language” by a Fox News commentator named Greg Gutfeld. Since word usage is one of my interests I looked it up to discover, well, not much. Gutfeld concludes that addictions are simply diseases easily cured by disposing of the focus of he addiction: throwing the offending computer out the window, throwing all the booze out the window, throwing all the drugs out the window, and so on.

The point should have been that the media has long used addiction as a pejorative metaphor for obsession. This leads to the more interesting question of why the US news media has developed its current passion emphasize the negative in all it reports, most of which are about as well thought through as Gutman’s blog.

An addiction is a physical dependency on some chemical: narcotics, alcohol, nicotine—all sinful within the Puritan code of ethic. The pejorativity of this term comes from this ethic, which has inevitably worked its way into the laws of the land. Alcohol and smoking is controlled, narcotics are mostly illegal. This is because addictions do measurable physical and psychological damage to the addict.

An obsession, on the other hand, is an emotional dependency at worst, a passionate focus on one particular thing at best. We may become obsessed with the Web, a person, a job, items in a collection. You must be obsessed with your work to become a star: actors who devote themselves body and soul to acting, baseball players who can do nothing but play baseball, singers who obsessively sing night after night. Their obsessions clear their focus and makes them better than others who divide their time over a variety of interests.

Now, I’m obsessed with the Internet myself. I spend most of each day working on my website, arranging translations via the Internet, and creating glossaries and word lists from materials gathered on the Web. Like professional baseball players, singers, actors, I do it because I love it, because I am totally in awe of it—not because I am physically dependent on it. It does no physical or psychological harm to me that I am aware of and I have learned immensely from the community of logophiles around the world it connects me with.

Of course, I am also the last person on Earth who would disparage the use of metaphors (figurative usage). However, the reason we have a separate scientific vocabulary for lawyers, doctors, and researchers, a vocabulary of superprecise terms that are never used metaphorically, is that metaphor undermines objectivity like nothing else. Calling pig a pig is as objective as we can get but  calling a friend a pig metaphorically is about as subjective as we can get. Metaphor is everywhere in general speech, where it often leads to misunderstanding.

Using addiction as a pejorative metaphor for obsession, then, is simply one of the more subtler methods the US Press (among others) uses to skew public opinion toward fear and hatred. It is easily overlooked among the sledge-hammer methods we are more familiar with.

David Ross wrote the past Thursday:

“Alas! The demise of the adverbial form is at hand:

‘NEW! False Friend Riddles. Riddles made up of English sentences that contain a foreign word spelled identical to an English word.’

Methinks “ly” will eventually disappear from English dictionaries, as its dearth is already ubiquitous in the vernacular.

David may be right; denizens of the southern US tier of states often omit this suffix: “Harley, he talks real good” is common enough down there though still considered substandard. In that region, at least, English might be moving the way of German which does not add endings to mark adverbs. Since endings are added to adjectives in that language, omitting an ending is the mark of an adverb.

However, I think something else is at work in the example David cites and I don’t think it is disappearing though, I must admit, it is poorly understood. At the time I was examining it, back in the 80s, no one had even noticed it, let alone researched it. If any work on this aspect of adverbs has been done since, I am unaware of it.

The English adverbial rule seems to be a bit more complicated than “add the suffix -ly to and qualitative adjective”. We know that adverbs are restricted to qualitative adjectives that refer to qualities (can be compared) and not to others. We can not make adverbs out of words like rural, urban, English which can not be compared. But the rule seems to be more complicated than this.

The rule in English seems to be something like this: “Add -ly to any qualitative adjective that does not have a predicate modifier”, i.e. a modifier that must come AFTER the adjective. Here are some examples.

The door shut quickly.
The door shut quick as a flash
NOT: The door shut quickly as a flash.

Bill left subsequently.
Bill left subsequent to Jill’s arrival.
NOT: Bill left subsequently to Jill’s arrival.

The jar opened easily.
The jar opened easy as pie.
NOT: The jar opened easily as pie.

Now, in choosing these examples, I have been careful not to confuse them with simple predicate adjectives like the one in this example:

Bill returned shortly (adverb)
Bill returned short of breath (predicate adjective)

The second sentence here contains an adjective modifying Bill and not the verb returned. It is in a category of predicate adjectives like Bill returned wet, sick, wounded. However, the evidence indicates that in English, if a true adverb has a predicate modifier, a modifier that must come after it, the suffix -ly is regularly, which is to day, grammatically, properly omitted.

Returning now to the example David cited from the alphaDictionary website, I must admit that the same example with the suffix -ly doesn’t sound as bad as the examples I cited above: “…a foreign word spelled identically to an English word.” However, to my ear, the version on the website still offends my grammar organ less. What do you think?

George Paul dropped a line today with a request for information on a word that has stumped us completely. Maybe someone reading this has encountered it. I rather doubt that since I think my response is probably correct. Here is what George asked:

“For decades, my Italian-American family has used the word ‘cashabung’ to describe something that is worthless, good-for-nothing, no-account, no-good, manky, rubbishy, trashy, etc. I can’t find any reference to that word. Can you help?”

Here is the response:

George, you have stumped us. We’ve never encountered it and it doesn’t even occur on the Web, according to Google. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have anything bearing even the slightest resemblance to it.

My best guess would be this. In addition to dialects, language is also marked by idiolects. An idiolect is the dialect of a family or even an individual. You have probably heard one person and only one person use a word or a word that is used only in one family. I suspect cashabung is from an idiolect, probably a blend of two words from an Italian dialect or simply an Italian word slightly mispronounced (you don’t find the combination NG at the end of many Italian words).

The only word that comes to my mind is cowabunga, an exclamation of surprise introduced in the ‘Howdy Doody Show’ back in the 1950s.  I notice that it still survives in the Internet community with a variety of meanings. None of them, however, approaches the sense of cashabung that you mention.

More Life in the Slow Lane
Not much crime has happened in Central Pennsylvania since my last report on the one-man riot. Last Thursday, however, the local police arrested a man for driving under the influence of alcohol—a man driving a horse and buggy.

Yes, we still have horses and buggies in Central Pennsylvania. We still have hitching posts on Market Street in downtown Lewisburg. The Amish do all their vehicular travel in buggies; in fact, the next town over, Mifflinburg, PA, was once the buggy capital of the US and today has the museum to prove it. When Henry Ford began manufacturing cars in Detroit, he purchased his first bodies from a Milton buggy shop but soon changed to buggy shops nearer to his factory.

Up to the time our Amish and Mennonite neighbors swept into Lewisburg in 1971 to help dig us out of the remains of the 50-year flood brought upon us by hurricane Agnes, there was no record of any Amish or Mennonite arrested in Union County. However, the incident in question did not occur in Lewisburg (our Amish are quite sober people), but in neighboring Milton, PA.

The arresting officer, of course, was astonished to see a horse and buggy being driven recklessly along a Milton road without even the required lighting. When he asked the arrestee if he were Amish, here is what the driver replied according to the Sunbury Daily Item: “Well, sort of. I left and sort of came back. I’m a bad Amish.” I’ll say. His blood alcohol was 0.165, a bit above the legal limit of .08.

The Amish lad had attended a nearby fair and, on the way home, stopped at a local tavern where he inhaled about 12 drafts. When asked why he decided to drive home in such a state, he frankly responded that he thought the police would leave him alone because he was Amish. “They always get away with things,” the arrestee opined. Hmmm. That may tarnish the record I mentioned above.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested to know that crime is still occurring in and around Lewisburg.

Victoria Leonard responded to my claim that dork is a “concocted” word in my essaylet on the word slang with the following comment:

“Hi. In today’s Good Word, you say that “dork” is completely concocted. Not so. It comes from Science Fiction fandom. A good fannish dictionary will tell you that it is short for “doorknob,” and refers to a person having the personality of one.“

First, let me say that I love Victoria’s creative vocabulary: fandom, fannish, etc. These are perfectly good, unconcocted derivations. We will have to do dork in the Good Word series someday to compensate for these usages alone. I am also impressed with the creativity of the etymological explanation.

However, that said, I remained convinced that dork is a concted word. In fact, Victoria’s explanation describes a perfect process of “concoction”. Taking a word more or less at random, removing random letters from it, and assigning a more or less random meaning to it is not what we would call a “derived” word. Word-formation rules are fairly rigid, involve prefixes and suffixes, and leave speakers with little if any latitude in applying them. Keep in mind that in the 60s dork referred to the male, well, you know, whachamacallit. Only in the 70s did its meaning slide over to “dolt”, so it was concocted well before the meaning necessary to Victoria’s hypothesis came along.

This explanation reminds me of the urban myth that posh originated as an acronym for “port out starboard home” when our British ancestors were sailing to India. Rarely are words created by playing with letters since only a minority of languages even have writing systems. Those words that are created this way seldom survive. Only recently have words like sonar, radar, laser stuck and the reason they succeeded is because they sound like regular nouns made from verbs. In fact, some people are beginning to say “to lase” rather than “to laser”, showing the powerful influence of regular rules on irregularly created words.

Mary Cooke recently raised the following question:

“My great aunt fractured her hip and some ligaments. I advised her that it would require patience on her part, since this will take a long while to heal, before she can return to her usual active lifestyle.”

“My question is this: Was the term patient (the one for whom a physician is caring) coined because that virtue is needed by those injured or ill until the body recovers?”

My answer is: We have to go back farther than Modern English to find the connection between these homonyms. Both the adjective and noun patient trace their ancestry back to Latin pati “to undergo (some action), endure, suffer”.

The English words came from patiens, patientis “undergoing, enduring”, the present participle of this verb. So, a patient was originally and, I suppose, still is to some extent, someone who undergoes some action, who suffers it in the sense of tolerating and surviving it. The adjective has a very similar meaning, for a patient person is someone who tolerates and survives what is done to them.

A side note: the past participle of pati is passus “suffered”, from which the noun passio(n) “suffering” is derived. English originally borrowed this word in its Latin sense. This explains the phrase “The Passion of Christ”, referring to Christ’s suffering on the cross and the title of Mel Gibson’s remarkable motion picture about Christ. Passion is also a grand example of how much the meanings of words change with the passage of time.