Funny Things We Do with (English) Words

There has been a tendency in English to drop the noun from a phrase consisting of a noun-plus adjective, and then the adjective becomes a noun.

Some examples: a transistor radio came to be called a transistor. (We don't hear that term anymore because any radio is going to be transistorized, or solid-state; plus, not many people carry radios in this age of the iPod.)

A microwave oven is now universally called a microwave, and we don't even think anything about it—although a microwave ought to be a kind of wave and not a kind of oven.

A pickup truck is a pickup. Laminate flooring becomes laminate—particularly if you're a flooring dealer. I've even heard Venetian blinds called venetians and I think I've seen real-estate listings in which the kitchens are described as having stainless steel and granite.

On the other hand, there's what seems to me a directly opposite trend, to add a word which is in some sense redundant. Examples: pita bread (pita is a kind of bread so you could just say pita); similarly challah bread. Garbanzo beans; bouillabaise stew; London broil steak. I have even heard salsa sauce, but that could only come from someone unaware that salsa is Spanish for 'sauce'. I have even seen, on a restaurant menu, "with au jus gravy"—never mind that au jus is French for 'with juice' (or gravy). So both with and gravy are redundant.

Not just foods: you hear panda bear and koala bear. Now, there's been argument among zoologists as to whether pandas really are or are not bears, but koalas are definitely not bears.

Here in Chicago, you often hear the word Chicagoland. Supposedly this word was coined to designate the Chicago area--the city and its suburbs. Yet I hear "the Chicagoland area," "Chicagoland and suburbs," and even "the greater Chicagoland area"!

I recently heard the US Attorney for Northern Illinois talk about a "sting" operation used to entrap suspected corrupt politicians, and he talked about "an undercover." Well, it's a strength of English that words can change their part of speech and thus an adjective becomes a noun.

Updates, May 26, 2012, June 22, 2012, June 29, 2012, July 29, 2012. More examples added.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Linguistic Stupidity

I just read, in an online article about the space shuttle Atlantis docking with the International Space Station for its final time:

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."

As I said, these changes are totally wrong-headed. You just don't "open up" these words and look inside--except that we might do so in humor, to make a joke. (People will realize that they don't usually look inside and consider the meaning of the phrase's constituents.)  They are understood as single units. Get your stupid, meddling, bureaucratic hands off the language.

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

Some New Words Needed in English

The English language certainly has lots of words. No one knows exactly how many—there are reasons you can't really count, such as uncertainty over what is to be counted as a word. But one estimate is one million words.

Still, new words enter the language continually. New words are coined, supposedly in response to a felt need--although often a perfectly good word for the meaning already exists.

So, in response to some gaps in our vocabulary that I have noticed, I want to suggest some new words.

First, healthierize, meaning to make more healthy. Example: I healthierized this recipe by cutting the fat and salt.

Second, operate (in a new sense, namely to make an opera out of). Example: Mozart operated Beaumarchais' play The Marriage of Figaro.

Third: middle classify and middle classification. Example: Egg McMuffin is a middle classification of Eggs Benedict.

Fourth: cattlectomy, meaning to stop eating beef. Example: Since I underwent my cattlectomy, I have not been in McDonald's at all.

Fifth: Did you know that there is no word for a person who plays the horn (such as the French horn in a symphony orchestra)? A person who plays the violin is a violinist. Someone who plays the piano is a pianist. But there is no word hornist. I propose--again simply creating a new sense for an existing word, as I did with operate—that someone who plays the horn be called a horny.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein