February 2008
Trends: Healthy (or Healthful) and Otherwise
by Robert C. Cumbow
Languages evolve; vocabularies grow; the senses and meanings of words change. Many of these changes enrich the language. Some grammarians rail against new usages as “incorrect,” as if to maintain that any variance is bad for a language. Others recognize that changes to the language are often beneficial, and in any case most are unstoppable. It is educational to recognize how dramatically mainstream English changed during the 200 years between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. More than twice that time has passed since Hamlet; yet we can still read it with ease (and joy), but most of us need a glossary to read Chaucer.
Changes to our language can work both benefit and loss. The best we can do is to try to guide those changes to avoid the ones that most harm the language. People who write and speak about language are often accused of taking a “schoolmarm” approach, adhering to traditional correctness for its own sake. A lot of the classic “Mrs. Grundy” rules of usage are unnecessary now, and probably always were. Principles such as “don’t split an infinitive” and “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “don’t start a sentence with a conjunction” have no basis in the logic or the expressiveness of our language, and don’t do anything to foster clearer writing or a broader arsenal of articulated meaning.
But two kinds of popular usage should be attacked as incorrect. The first kind consists of usages that, if they become part of the language by popular adoption, impoverish our language by blurring the distinction between words whose different meanings enable to us to express ideas with clarity and precision. English is extraordinarily rich in having a vocabulary built of words from many other languages — Greek, Latin, Romance, Germanic, Asian. Extremely subtle distinctions can be made in English by simple word choices. But when popular misunderstanding of these distinctions brings people to use words interchangeably when their meanings in fact differ, the language is under threat of having its working vocabulary and its ability to articulate with precision reduced rather than increased. Consider, for example, the advantages our language offers by enabling us to distinguish between prone and supine, between a lectern and a podium, among a wharf, a dock, and a pier. Then consider what we lose when sloppy usage regards those terms as if there were no differences among them. You can see why devoted users of our language criticize such uses as “incorrect.”
The second type of popular usage that, if left unchecked, harms our language consists of uses that work against the logic of the language itself. Every language has its own internal logic that — at the risk of going all Chomsky on you — its speakers grow to understand and perceive unconsciously as they learn the language. This is why in English a double negative makes a positive, while in French it simply further emphasizes the negative. It’s also why — to use an example from Chomsky’s own observations — we refer to a “big red balloon” and never to a “red big balloon.”
I tell you all of this to suggest why certain usage trends trouble me, and therefore seem worth writing about, while others do not. I tell you this also to stress that I don’t attack usages that are merely non-traditional, but I do attack those that threaten to impoverish our language and our ability to use it effectively.
End of ponderous introduction. The topic for this column is trends I have observed that are not necessarily healthful for our language, because they either blur distinctions that are worth preserving or violate the inherent logic of our language’s structure.
For example, people used to have a clear idea of the difference between “loath” and “loathe.” It’s not a hard distinction to make, after all: “loath” is an adjective meaning “reluctant” or “hesitant,” and it’s pronounced with an unvoiced “th,” rhyming with “oath.” “Loathe,” by contrast, is a verb meaning to hate or abhor, is spelled with a terminal “e,” and is therefore pronounced with a voiced “th,” rhyming with “clothe.” But these days you hear or see people saying or writing “loathe” when they mean “loath”; and you rarely hear “loath” at all. Unless some consciousness-raising is done quickly, the word “loath” will disappear from our language altogether, and the word “loathe” will come to have two different meanings, which will make it a more ambiguous and less effective word.
Mea Culpa
Lest I should sound too self-righteous, let me point out that my own usage comes in for the most intense criticism — from myself as well as others. It was my wife who pointed out to me — after I had been writing professionally (meaning “for pay,” not “for a living”) for some years — that I didn’t know the difference between “which” and “that.” Recently I had a similar — though not quite as dramatic — awakening. In my last column, I wrote:
Another legal word that spell-checkers have never heard of is “tortious,” so be very careful when you run your spell-checker over that complaint for tortious interference with contractual relations, or you’ll end up puzzling the court with multiple references to “tortuous” interference — which may be agonizing, but isn’t illegal.
I am grateful to have received an e-mail from a distinguished reader — Judge Ronald Gould of the Ninth Circuit bench — pointing out that my attempted witticism confused the word “tortuous” (which means “winding and curving”) with the word “torturous” (which indeed means “agonizing”). These are distinctions worth preserving. I learn from my own misuses as much as from those of others.
On the other hand, I have also tended to develop certain personal distinctions in my own use of words that aren’t necessarily reflected in dictionaries or popular usage. I’m frequently asked, for example, the difference among “insure,” “ensure,” and “assure.” Notwithstanding the annoying tendency of some insurance companies to refer to themselves as being in the “assurance” business, I think the following distinction makes practical sense, even if it doesn’t have dictionary support: “Insure” means to provide a financial guarantee against loss; “ensure” means to “make sure” that something will or will not happen; and “assure” means to provide encouraging information or support. My cars are insured by State Farm, which ensures that, in the event of damage, I can rest assured that my costs will be covered. That’s a purely personal distinction, but it makes sense to me, and it seems to help rather than hurt my ability to express ideas in English.
Healthy (Healthful?) Trends
A trend that sometimes enriches and sometimes abuses our language is the increasingly imaginative use of the suffix “-ful.” Recently, within the space of a single day, I heard “planful” and “Zenful.” The first was used apparently because the writer wanted a single word to indicate “good planning” and couldn’t call up “prudent” or “circumspect” or “foresighted” or “anticipatory” or any of a number of other words that might have fit the occasion. I thought “planful” sounded stilted, forced, artificial. On the other hand, I thought “Zenful” was delightful, since we don’t already have a ready adjective that means “of or pertaining to Zen,” and in the context “Zen-like” just wouldn’t have done the job. “Zenful” is what H.W. Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, might have termed a “jocularity”— less effective in a serious or scholarly situation, but in conversational writing, colorful.
While I’m on “-ful,” I should mention another error, one of continuing rather than recent usage. “Healthy” means “in good health,” while “healthful” means “promoting health” or “contributing to health.” This is not a difficult distinction, though a lot of people fail to make it. It doesn’t help that “healthy” also has the metaphoric meaning of “large” or “generous,” as in the seemingly contradictory “a healthy serving of potato chips.” The “healthy” business becomes more problematic when one ventures into adverb-land, with “healthily” and “healthfully” getting about equal attention and equal misuse.
Another troubling trend is the confusion of cash, cache, and cachet. We all know what “cash” means, both as a noun and as a verb. The word “cache,” pronounced the same way as “cash,” means a hiding place, and comes from the French word “caché,” meaning “hidden.” The word “cachet,” pronounced “kashay,” refers to a distinguishing mark or feature, such as a stamp or seal on a document, and has come to mean a sign or expression of approval: The “Louis Vuitton” label has a certain cachet. People today are increasingly getting “cache” and “cachet” confused, and pronouncing the former like the latter. No one seems to make any mistakes, however, when it comes to “cash.”
In the last couple of months I have several times observed people using “ironic” when they mean simply “coincidental.” The word “ironic” refers specifically to something not merely coincidental or unexpected, but with a deeper reverse implication. The fact that, while on a trip to Chicago, I ran into someone from Seattle was coincidental, not ironic. If I had gone to Chicago specifically to avoid a meeting with that person, my running into him in Chicago would have been ironic.
Lapses in Linguistic Logic
Here’s one that is harmless enough, but is really illogical and unnecessary, and I’m seeing it with increasing frequency, so I think I should mention it (and do what I can to squelch it before it gets too far): the use of the abbreviation “con’t” for “continued.” This is just plain weird, and wouldn’t be worth comment except for the fact that I’ve seen it three times just this week, and it appears to be spreading. The abbreviation of “continued” is “cont.” or “cont’d” but definitely not “con’t.” One simple reason for that is the fact that an apostrophe is used to indicate deleted material. Thus, in “cont’d,” the apostrophe tells us that the string “inue” has been dropped from the word “continued” for brevity’s sake. But in “con’t,” what has been dropped between the “n” and the “t”? Nothing at all. The apostrophe doesn’t belong there. This increasingly common misuse seems to arise from the writer’s faulty memory of “cont’d.”
I’ve also started seeing and hearing “couldn’t help but” a lot. This is one of those phrases that cut against the logic of the language by actually meaning the opposite of what the speaker thinks it means. The construction “could not help but” is actually a conflation of two other phrases that do mean what the speaker intends: “could not but” and “could not help.” The word “but” is a negative, so the double negative “could not but” means the same thing as “could only” or “had to.” As an illustration, recall the Ogden Nash poem about Professor Twist, the conscientious scientist who never bungled and always got everything precisely correct. One day, on expedition, he missed his wife.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”
“Could not but smile” means “could do nothing but smile” or “could only smile.” The same thing could have been expressed as “could not help smiling,” though that would have spoiled the rhyme. Anyway, the point is that “could not but smile” and “could not help smiling” mean the same thing; but “could not help but smile” adds another negative, causing the phrase to mean the opposite of what the speaker intended. However, this construction is increasingly common, the negative sense of “but” is lost to modern ears, and attacking “couldn’t help but” may not be a battle worth fighting. Still, those who value precision in language will choose one of the two more correct constructions.
Another recent tendency is to confuse the preposition “into” with the phrase “in to,” which creates some laughable images. “He drove down the street and turned into a Starbucks” may look all right to you, or it may suggest to you that the driver of the automobile was suddenly transformed into a coffee shop. The driver actually turned in to a coffee shop, he didn’t turn into one. And the student didn’t turn her paper into the teacher; she turned it in to the teacher. But when she kissed the frog, it definitely turned into a prince.
Telling Time
On a point that could have consequences more serious than laughable, I am increasingly concerned about the use of the term “p.m.” Calendar features in Microsoft Outlook and on Blackberry, as well as other time-keeping software, have begun to identify the hour of noon as “12 p.m.” This not only is linguistically inaccurate but also risks creating an ambiguity that could result in the utter misidentification of time of day, with potentially significant consequences in, for example, contract and criminal cases.
The abbreviation “p.m.” stands for “post meridiem,” which means “after midday”— that is, “after noon.” Obviously, 12:00 noon cannot be both “noon” and “after noon,” so the term “12 p.m.” is a misnomer. For greatest clarity, all times before noon should be identified as “a.m.” (“ante meridiem” = “before noon”) and all times after noon should be “p.m.” Noon itself is by definition neither before nor after noon, and should be identified as noon, not “12 p.m.”
This also creates an interesting question with respect to midnight. Since 12:00 midnight is both before noon of the next day and after noon of the previous day, it could be either “12 a.m.” or “12 p.m.” Neither is more correct than the other; yet, by convention, midnight is referred to as “12 a.m.” The clearer and more precise approach is to refer to 12:00 noon as “noon,” 12:00 midnight as “midnight,” all times after midnight and before noon as “a.m.,” and all times after noon and before midnight as “p.m.”
But even that doesn’t avoid all problems. Noon is the middle of the day, so when we say “noon, February 27,” there is no question of what specific moment we are talking about. But when we say “midnight, February 27,” do we mean the last minute of that day or the first minute of that day? Using “a.m.” or “p.m.” doesn’t solve the problem. So when writing contracts, rules, or regulations that require an expression of time, I recommend avoiding midnight, and choosing a time that, however weird, is at least unambiguous. “12:03 a.m. Pacific Time February 27” is an odd time to have your contest end, but at least it is unmistakable.
Parting Shot
One last thought to keep your mind busy until the next time this column appears: If you had it drummed into your head in grade school, as I did, that “the earth rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun,” did you ever wonder why those doors in the fronts of big buildings, which rotate about a stationary vertical axis and don’t go anywhere at all, are called “revolving doors”?
Robert C. Cumbow is a shareholder at the Seattle firm of Graham & Dunn PC. He teaches at Seattle University School of Law and writes on law, language, and movies.
