Friday, April 11: Bandersnatches
LOVE OF WORDS
by Steve Steinbock
I have a deep and abiding love for words. They, together with their partner syntax, form the most profoundly unique human invention: language. Without words, not only would we have nothing to talk about on this forum, but we quite literally (pun not intended) wouldn’t have the words to do so.
There’s a name for the love of words: philology. Not surprisingly, philology means love of words. These days, the scientific discipline of philology is considered passé in academic, linguistic circles. Real theoretical linguists are more concerned with neo-Chomskian linguistics and research on innate versus cultural origins of syntactic rules. But I’m just in it for the fun.
I contend that all language is metaphor. In fact, both language (from the Latin “measure of tongue”) and metaphor (from Greek meaning “to carry after”) are metaphors.
I try to be conservative in my word usage. I’m not comfortable using “effect” as a verb, and the word “orientate” gives me the willies. However, I recognize that language changes, and without that change, there would be no language.
Just as our bodies need constant inhalation and exhalation in order to thrive, language needs to breathe. And just as our lungs breathe by expanding and contracting, so does language. Language expands when we come up with new, expressive ways of saying something that’s never been said before. Contraction happens when out of laziness or economy, we abbreviate our words.
Yup, language owes a lot to laziness. I have a theory about the common use of the word “gross.” Originally the word simply meant “large.” But today it’s usually used as a synonym for “disgusting.” Occasionally you find “gross” meaning “coarse.” This is probably from lazy pronunciation of “crass” from the Latin “crassus.” My theory as to how, in 1958, American youth began using “gross” to mean “yucky” is that is a weird contraction of “grotesque.”
Words do weird things. The word forte (meaning a person’s strength) is supposed to be pronounced “fort,” but most people, myself included most of the time, pronounce the “e” at the end, confusing it with the Italian musical notation. Conversely, the word for a two-door car, coupé is usually spelled with an accented “e” at the end, and if you listen to old radio programs, you’ll sometimes hear it pronounced so that it rhymes with toupee. Blame it on the Beach Boys.
Yesterday I was struck by the use of the slang “pissed.” To piss, of course, is slang for urinating. So why is it that when an American gets angry, he gets pissed off, and why an Englishman, when wanting to unwind, will go into a pub to get pissed? I don’t understand why we use so many body parts and body functions to express metaphors. Nor do I know why the same bodily function can mean two very different things.
I’m always amused at how anally (how’s that for a metaphor?) the French try to preserve their language, protecting it from change and foreign influence. For several centuries, the Académie Française has governed proper usage and issued rulings against the use of foreign (non-French) words. I’d like to tell you more about it, but their website is only in French. Perhaps the most pervasive French word that we non-French speakers encounter is monsieur. This important French word illustrates just how language changes, how we expand and contract our words to make new ones. Monsieur evolved from the Latin meus senior, which roughly means “my elder.” Somewhere along the line, meus became mon, and senior was condensed into sieur. In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, mon and sieur were smooshed together (that’s a technical term) into monsieur, which, out of further economy (read “laziness”), half of it’s letters aren’t even pronounced.
As a final show of linguistic evolution, there’s a story about Sir Christopher Wren and the redesign of St. Paul’s Cathedral in that late 1600s. I’ve probably told it before, so forgive me. It’s also likely apocryphal (i.e. it may never have actually happened, that’s another metaphor), but the linguistic details are correct. One version of the story has Queen Anne commenting on Wren’s design by telling him that it is “pompous, artificial, and awful!”
Wren was pleased by these words, for in his time, “pompous” implied “elegant,” “articifial” meant “made artistically,” and “awful” meant “full of awe.”
Happy Weekend, everyone. And hoping that you didn’t find this column too awful, artificial, or pompous, however defined.