Every landmark, or rather spacemark, of this final two-week shuttle mission is being savored.
In saying "spacemark," probably the writer of that was just being cute. We don't normally open up and look inside a compound word like landmark and don't even think about the meanings of its component elements, like land and mark in this case.
In fact, to do so is incorrect and fallacious. Landmark is one "lexical unit" (as one linguist called it) or one meme (in more modern terminology), and is not (or is no longer) the sum of its parts. (In fact, spelling reflects this: once a compound word becomes a single unit rather than the sum of its parts, then it comes to be spelled "solid"--that is, with no internal space.)
But I've seen this same mistaken and misguided practice of "looking inside" (as I put it) a compound word and saying, "Hey, we can't call it this. . . ."
My examples (collected over some years):
- We used to have a term butterfat, which meant the fat component in milk. Then the federal government (probably the FDA, I'd guess) said to its collective self, "Hey, it's not just found in butter, and it ultimately comes from milk, so we're going to decree that it should be called milkfat."
- The City of Chicago (or its parks, to be more exact) had a structure we all knew as a bandshell. Fine old word. Then someone said, "Hey, we have orchestral concerts there, not bands, so we can't call it a bandshell." Thus they started calling it by the nonexistent word "music shell." I am sure anybody encountering that word says to him/her self, "Oh, they mean bandshell," and quite possibly they figure out why the new word was felt to be necessary.
- The most recent—again with dubious thanks to a governmental agency in the Chicago area—is "rush period." That, to mere mortals, is rush hour, but presumably they said to their wise and collective selves, "Well, it lasts longer than an hour these days, so we can't call it rush hour anymore."
Updates:
Another example of the what I call, above, misguided tampering with the language: My bank's web site uses a "passcode." Once I stopped to think about that term, I realized, it's a password but they didn't want to call it that because it doesn't have to be a word--so, a perfect example, just like the three above.
On the other hand--examples of how lexical units should work: Perhaps strangely, considering how the powers-that-be in Chicago have usually handled these things, Chicago's "Grant Park Concerts" are no longer held in Grant Park and yet they're still called the Grant Park Concerts.
And, today I heard on TV mention, in the narrative script, of "cutting-edge surgical techniques." Shows that the writer of that comment had no thought at all of the original or literal meaning of "cutting edge," and only used it in its "lexical unit" meaning of 'very new' or 'up-to-date'." Otherwise it might be redundant!
An example of this I've recently thought about: No one
thinks it odd to talk about "old New York."
I think that shows that we are definitely not thinking about the constituent
elements of "New York,"
so we don't see any contradiction between old and new.
I was working for a publishing company where a guy who was
in a supervisory capacity very often used the expression "to be on the
same page." He never thought about the literal meaning of the individual
words as opposed to the meaning of the lexical unit, and clearly was not
thinking of any physical page of any of the books we were working on; he was treating it as a lexical unit, which is correct.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
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