Love of Language Lost?

I am impressed by Stephen Fry's delightful discussion about language. I encourage you all to click the link and listen to it.

Fry's monologue discusses the idea of prescriptivism--that there is only one correct way to speak. He indicates that "Context, convention, and circumstance is all." He abhors apostrophe police and people who write letters to broadcasters and newspapers that fret about a misused word or improper punctuation. He takes a more organic approach to language--that language spoken at home doesn't have to follow the "rules," and encourages us to delight in the music of language.

Stephen Fry, you are a god.

Our Oxymoronic Language

I have a special 24/7 Phone Policy with friends, family, colleagues, students; that is, they may call me any time, day or night, for any reason. Maybe they have a question about an assignment. Maybe they just want to talk. Maybe they need a ride home from a local bar because they've had too much to drink. Maybe they need a shoulder to cry on. Regardless of the reason, I'll pick up the phone and talk as long as they want or need to. People think I'm crazy, but hey, it works for me.

In fact, my friend Phil likes to call at odd hours to discuss deeply philosophical issues or lesser ones, depending upon his mood. He and I are both night owls by nature, and I always look forward to finding out what his question will be. We've had many interesting discussions, and he challenges me to stretch myself, to think about issues deeply that I might never otherwise consider. No question is too silly to discuss. (He even puts up with questions from me such as "Why, when birds land on a telephone wire, are they all facing the same way?)

The typical call goes something like this: after greeting me, he'll ask a question like "How would you define intelligence?" or "Do you think today's students have a sense of entitlement?" or today's question, "Have you heard of the word asyndetically? Do you know what it means?"

Today's question threw me. I assumed (always dangerous, of course) that the word was an adverb derivative of the noun asyndeton. I seemed to recall that asyndeton was a figure of speech, but darned if I could pull a definition out of my head on such short notice. Since I was sitting at my computer, I headed to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary to refresh my memory.

The first thing that struck me about this word was not the definition, however, but its etymology (word origin). According to M-W, asyndeton derives from "Late Latin, from Greek, from neuter of asyndetos unconnected," but also "from a- + syndetos bound together, from syndein to bind together, from syn- + dein to bind." Dictionary gobbledygook aside, what we have here is an oxymoronic word--a word that means both "unconnected" and "bound together"--a seeming paradox!

Can you see why I love language so?

When I looked at the dictionary definition for asyndeton, though, the oxymoronic family tree for this word began to make sense. M-W defines the word as an "omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses." When conjunctions like and, but, and or are omitted but still implied (usually replaced by a comma), that's an example of asyndeton. M-W provides the following example:

• I came, I saw, I conquered.

In this example, the conjunction and is missing (read: I came [and] I saw [and] I conquered.) Dictionary.com provided me with another example:

• He has provided the poor with jobs, with opportunity, with self-respect.

Again, the conjunction and is missing at each comma.

Connecting the etymology--asyndeton meaning both "unconnected" and "bound together"--and the definition, the word makes sense, even though it seems to contradict itself. The clauses are "unconnected" because the expected conjunction is missing, but because the ideas are parallel in importance and expressed in parallel form, connected by the commas in place of the conjunctions, the ideas are "bound together."

Cool, huh?

Our language is filled with seeming paradoxes, or oxymorons. Jumbo shrimp, for example--how can they be big (jumbo) while also small (shrimp)? A girlfriend of mine once described me as "calmly aggressive." How can one be calm but aggressive at the same time? (I like to think of it as being assertive rather than aggressive.)

So...what are your favorite oxymorons?

Pet Peeve: Definitely Defiant (or is that Defiantly Definite) about "Definitely"

It's pet peeve time again, folks. I recently finished grading papers for the summer session, and I am amazed at the number of students who use the word defiantly when they mean definitely. I'm not sure whether they think defiantly is the actual word they want, or whether they just really messed up the spelling and spell check suggested defiantly as the best course of action and the student thankfully accepted the correction. Argh!

So, let's do a quick review. If you are doing something defiantly, you are being bold, impudent, or rebellious. If you are planning to definitely do something, then you are certain you will be doing it. Here are a few examples to set the record straight:

Defiantly

• She pouted defiantly when her mother grounded her.
• "Don't you dare do that," said her father. In response, she defiantly broke the plate by dashing it to the floor.

Definitely

• I definitely want to see Peter Jackson produce The Hobbit.
• I definitely hate it when students use defiantly when they mean definitely.

Feel free to share your pet peeves. What language abuses fan the flame of your ire?

Who is Winning the War of the Words: PC or Non-PC?

My friend and colleague, Michelle, was over this evening and we were talking about jargon and euphemisms. One of the euphemisms she mentioned was the politically correct term differently abled, which she and I both agreed about: we hate the term. It's an ugly, too-general phrase that attempts to disguise the fact that the person it refers to has a physical, emotional, or intellectual disability of some sort. The intention behind the term is good, of course: using this term instead of, say, handicapped is an attempt to be kind, an attempt to minimize the disability and maximize the humanity of the person being described.

But to paraphrase Shakespeare, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions--and so is the PC movement. The plan was to use carefully selected words to eliminate discrimination, build self-esteem, and create a new, more empathetic awareness for one another. But rather than providing solid solutions, the movement raises more questions than it answers. Emily Tsao, in "Thoughts of an Oriental Girl," poses this query: "Minority groups want new labels to give themselves a more positive image, but unless the stereotypes disappear as well, is it really going to help very much?" One can talk up a PC storm, but if the speaker's thoughts or actions are discriminatory, what good will a change in language do? Will we treat one another better because we are calling each other by a different name?

Whether such changes to the language effect a change in our behavior or the way we view others is really not the focus of this blog entry; rather, I want to take a look at how the movement changes our language, even diminishes it, makes it, well, unlovely.

Eloquence has been a mover and shaker of the English language since the Renaissance. During this period of artistic rebirth, scholars turned to Greek and Latin classical literature as examples of beautifully expressed, persuasive language. In an attempt to make English more eloquent, many Latinate words were borrowed, and thousands of words were coined. Like the Renaissance, the PC movement has created a need for new words and phrases. But the question is whether they increase the eloquence of the language. The consensus seems to be best expressed by Bill Bryson in Made in America: that these "verbal creations are burdening us with ludicrously sanitized neologisms [word creations] that are an embarrassment to civilized discourse." His argument is that we have taken perfectly good, specific, descriptive words and generalized them, stripping meaning and color from the English language. And I agree. Often, several words replace one, making politically correct language verbose and cumbersome.

Let's take a look at the way in which politically correct words are actually coined. The Oxford Companion to the English Language categorizes word coinages, or neologisms, into seven categories, and I'll explain how the Companion defines those categories and then provide some examples of PC coinages for each.

1. Compounding. Compounding is forming a word or phrase from two or more different words. It seems to be used in the PC movement most commonly to classify races of people, as in African-American and Native American (instead of the previous Black and Indian).
   
   
2. Derivation. Derivation makes more complex words out of simpler words, usually by adding one or more prefixes and/or suffixes. This category is probably the largest for PC coinages. Favorite suffixes of the movement include
• -ism as in Ableism
• -ist (one who promotes -isms), as in Ageist (one who promotes age discrimination)
• -free, as in charm-free (boring).
• Other examples of derivations include autoeuthanasia (suicide) and disempowered (powerless).
  
  
3. Shifting meaning. Dog warden (for dog catcher) is a good example of shifting meaning. A warden is one who guards something; generally, we think of a guard in a jail. In this case, a "warden" actually catches dogs instead of guarding them, giving a new spin to the word.
   
   
4. Extension in grammatical function. Extension in grammatical function occurs when one part of speech is used as another, as in verbing nouns. :-) An example would be the term unwaged (fired), as in "Mary's employer unwaged her." Here, unwaged (a derivation of un + the noun wage + ed) is used as a verb.
   
   
5. Abbreviation. Abbreviation uses a shortened version of a word or creates an acronym for a given phrase. Several abbreviations have entered the English language including, of course, PC (Politically Correct); BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Current Era), replacing BC and AD, abbreviations which demonstrate a preference for Christianity; DWEM (Dead White European Males), e.g., Shakespeare, and PWA (Person with AIDS). Of these examples, BCE and CE have gained serious acceptance, perhaps because scholars of that most serious of books, the Bible, use them in scholarship. So many of the other examples have become jokes.
   
   
6. Back-formation. Back-formation occurs when suffixes are removed from a word. Chair for Chairman or Chairperson can be considered an example of back-formation; however, it is less a neologism than it is a revival of an older term.
   
   
7. Blending. Blending is a mixing of two words by attaching part of one word to part of another. Amerindian (Native American) is a classic example, combining American with Indian.
   
   
8. Borrowing. Borrowing occurs when words from another language are used. Surprisingly, this neologism type does not often occur in PC language, and I am still searching for an example (please e-mail me if you find one). It is curious to me that a movement associated with multiculturalism should be so rigidly English.
   
   
9. Root-creation. Root-creation, which is also rare in PC word coinages, is the genesis of a completely new word with no known root. I could only find one example, although there may well be others (again, please e-mail me if you find one): Kwanzaa. The December 29, 1991 issue of The Observer indicates that "Three years ago, the Smithsonian in Washington added 'Kwanzaa' (a complete invention by a black studies professor at California State University) to Hanukkah and Christmas exhibitions" (qtd. in Rees, 84).

In addition to being neologisms, most of the movement's terms are also euphemisms, or words that replace other words that might be considered too negative or direct. Often, euphemisms are used to replace job names that sound demeaning; for example, rodent operator instead of rat catcher, sanitation assistant for garbage collector, and street orderly for road sweeper. Others are used to relive the unpleasantness of uncomfortable topics: family planning for birth control, pro-choice for abortion, survivor for victim. But although we have switched the words we use for these situations, the euphemism doesn't change the situation: the sanitation assistant still picks up garbage. The woman who exercises her pro-choice right still has an abortion. The rape survivor is still a victim. It just sounds more pleasant than it really is and allows us, for a moment, to say the words without feeling squeamish about it.

Sexist language has also been affected by the movement. Feminists are trying to purge sexist references from the English language, which tends to be gender biased in favor of males. Among the attempted coinages are womyn or wimmin for women, utility access hole or femhole for manhole, herstory for history, and femstruate for menstruate. Some of the more successful attempts have renamed employment positions that were male-oriented in tone: firefighter for fireman, council member for alderman, company representative for spokesman, and flight attendant for steward/stewardess. What makes this purging process problematic, however, is that many of the words feminists are attempting to get rid of--he, his, man, and men--may have no etymological link to maleness. For example, in words like manufacture and manual labor, the word man means hand. This sweeping attempt has caused a fervent backlash among the male population and even among some women, who dismiss the need to change sexist language and instead chalk the attempt up to the foolishness of feminist extremists. This dismissal of the language results in a dismissal of the problem; thus, arguing about language becomes an avoidance technique.

Political correctness primarily influences vocabulary; however, in some instances, the movement has also affected our grammar. For instance, it used to be proper to say colored people. That term is no longer in vogue; it has since changed to Negroes, then Blacks, and now African-Americans. But now we are seeing a revival of the term, this time as people of color. Humorists have turned Frosty the Snowman into Frosty, the Person of Snow. We may see more of this grammatical juxtaposition in the future. Unfortunately, the wordiness that results from the extensive use of prepositional phrases only makes PC language more unwieldy.

It is abundantly clear that the political correctness movement has profoundly affected the English language, both its grammar and vocabulary. These changes were instituted in an effort to emphasize the positive qualities in people and situations, downplaying the negative. The intent was to change the English language by removing words that hurt and replacing them with words that build up and encourage. Unfortunately, the effects do not always turn out as intended, often resulting in ridicule of an admirable cause. What started out as a serious attempt to help humanity through language has become silly, and humorists who have coined terms like Vehicularly Compressed Maladapted Life Form for road kill and Mortgage-free living for homelessness ("Glossary of Politically Correct Terms") have exacerbated the problem.

Changing the language ultimately fails in its attempt at solving what is really not so much a language problem but a much larger problem: humanity's penchant for prejudice and discrimination. The next step must go beyond language.

What are your most despised PC phrases? What do you think about the PC movement?

Pet Peeve: An Everyday Rant, Every Day

English instructors are usually blessed with a love of language, which can also be a curse. If I had $1 for every time I have been told, "Wow, you're an English professor? I guess I better watch what I say around you!" I could retire now (but I wouldn't, because I love what I do). My response is to smile and say something along the lines of "Well, I'm off the clock now, so I promise not to correct your grammar unless you ask me to or pay me to." That statement usually puts people a little more at ease--but not fully. For those of you who feel the same way around English faculty, let me reassure you: we are not listening to what you say to tick off grammatical mistakes; rather, we are paying attention to what you are actually saying. Because English students often struggle with writing, English instructors become very good at deciphering what people really mean, whether they are able to clearly articulate their meaning or not.

That being said, when it comes to writing, it's a completely different story. I find that signs and printed materials with misspellings or inappropriate apostrophes get my dander up. For example, please note that if you have your family's name engraved on a rock for your garden or emblazoned on a varnished piece of wood for your house, please do NOT add an apostrophe! In other words, if your last name is Smith, then your sign should read "The Smiths," not "The Smith's."

Occasionally in my blog, I'll point out one of my professorial pet peeves. In this blog, I'm dealing with the difference between everyday and every day. Nearly every day, for instance, I find my students writing everyday when they really mean every day. What's the difference? It's quite simple, really: when you mean an individual day, as in each and every day, use every day. When you use an adjective to describe a common, ordinary object that is used every day, you use everyday. Clear as mud, right? Here are some examples:

• I would eventually like to be disciplined enough to write a blog posting every day.
  
• Every day during the summer, I enjoy playing in the dirt. (I love to garden.)
• My everyday clothing is very casual.
• It is an everyday thing for me to feel tired.

Do you have a grammatical pet peeve that irritates you? Share, please!

Quizzes Are No Joking Matter...Or Are They?

Students hate quizzes; as an instructor who frequently gives quizzes to test students' knowledge of a subject, determine whether they're reading the material, or just focus them on important information, I've come to accept that fact. But how often do students think about where the word quiz came from in the first place? A study of the word reveals two different ideas--a quiz as either entertainment or interrogation.

The origin of the word appears to be unknown or obscure. However, the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins provides an anecdotal discussion of the word's origin:

"It seems that late in the eighteenth century one James Daly, the manager of a theater in Dublin . . . made a very rash wager. He bet that he could introduce a word into the language overnight. . . . He hired all the urchins in Dublintown, equipped them with pieces of chalk, and sent them out into the night with instructions to chalk a single word on every wall and billboard in the city. The word was quiz. And, as a result of Daly's enterprise, it was on the lips of all Dublin in the morning."

What makes this anecdote plausible is that it coincides with one of the earliest meanings of quiz--that of a practical joke. However, since there is no written evidence at the time this event supposedly occurred, it is unlikely that it is anything more than a tall tale told over a pint of ale.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the first use of quiz to 1782: "He's a droll quiz, and I rather like him." At that time, the word mean an "eccentric person," (but by 1798, the term had expanded its meaning to include "an odd-looking thing," as in "[w]here did you get that quiz of a hat?" (OED). Both meanings are considered obsolete today.

The OED then notes a reference in 1833 to an obscure meaning of quiz--a toy, called a bandalore in French and a quiz in English. The toy may have been odd-looking--hence the name quiz, but this idea is purely conjecture. This is, however, the first time we get a sense of quiz as a game or form of entertainment. The word later comes to mean "a practical joke; a hoax, a piece of humbug, banter or ridicule; a jest or witticism" (OED). In the United States, a quiz becomes "an act of quizzing or questioning; specifically an oral exam of a student or class by a teacher. . . . A set of questions to be answered as entertainment (my emphasis)" (OED). The latter definition reminds us more of the entertaining quizzes in poular magazines that ask readers to rate their "love quotient" or some such nonsense than it reminds us of the more traditional quizzes given to assess a students' knowledge of a subject.

So where does quiz as a kind of knowledge test come into play? John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that the verb quiz "later came to be used for 'look at mockingly or questioningly through a monocle,' and it may be that this led on (perhaps helped by associations with inquisitive or Latin quis? 'who?, what?') to the sense 'interrogate.'" The American Heritage Dictionary reinforces this theory, indicating that quiz might be associated with question, inquisitive, or the English dialect verb quiset, "to question." However, when we think of an interrogation, we think of a formal questioning, like police questioning a suspect, or a cruel questioning, like a war enemy extracting information through torture. (Much like my crotchety-but-beloved high school government teacher, Mr. Agosta, who called our class Q&A sessions interrogation. If we replied "I don't know" in answer to one of his inquiries, we were reprimanded for not reading or studying the materials. If we replied "I forgot," his response was always "Senility is not indigenous to youth.") What's ironic here is that the questioning--the quiz--started off in fun, if we go back to the earlier definitions of quiz. And students, of course, do not seem to see quizzes as fun!

So it is through the idea of questioning in fun that we get to quiz as an examination, the definition we are most familiar with today. Of course, using today's connotation of an impromptu test, many students might agree that, hearkening back to one of the original meanings of the word, today's quizzes are indeed practical jokes, or rather are no joking matter!