Vol I, No 3
Elements of Semantic Change
R. B. Lees, Professor of Linguistics Tel-Aviv University
We seem now to have discovered all the chemical elements necessary to account for the materials of which the universe is composed and have even manufactured a dozen or so unstable ones to boot. The list comes to some 103, ranging from the most abundant and simplest of all, hydrogen, to the transuranic monsters, nobelium and lawrencium.
Each has its name, for convenience, though these names convey almost no interesting information about the elements that bear them. They are not even all internationally uniform: only the most technical and recently adopted ones are roughly the same in almost all languages. Each element also has an internationally adopted, standard symbol derived from a name; thus some of these do not correspond to the name in most languages. For example, the symbol Fe is used everywhere for iron, the 26th element in the Periodic Table, but that symbol is reminiscent of the name of this common metal only in Latin (ferrum) and languages derived from Latin (French fer). But even Spanish hierro is already becoming opaque.
It is easy to see why the names of roughly the same list of elements fail to correspond from language to language. These are by and large the elements for which there is likely to be a nonchemical, native, or old loan name. Moreover, some languages have constructed a few modern terms for others, especially when the element or its most familiar compounds are abundant or likely to be widely known.
Thus, in a variety of unrelated languages, sulfur, iron, copper, silver, tin, gold, mercury, and lead are very likely to have native names; sometimes also zinc, carbon, arsenic, and silicon. The former eight were known to some peoples prehistorically, and, except for tin and mercury, are found in the free state in nature.
Some native names are merely loan translations. Thus, Russian ugl,erod and Hebrew pahman are calques on German Kohlenstoff ‘carbon,’ derived respectively from ugol, and peham ‘coal.’ The Japanese characters for mercury are sui for ‘water’ followed by gin for ‘silver,’ a perfect calque on the Greek: hydrárgyros=hýdōr ‘water’ + árgyros ‘silver’ (giving latin hydrargyrus, hence the chemical symbol Hg).
Hebrew even has a little series, mostly loan translations, some new creations on a semantically similar pattern: zarhán ‘phosphorus’ from zeráh ‘shining’ (phōs ‘light’), sidán ‘calcium’ from sid ‘lime’ (calx ‘lime’), ešlagan ‘potassium’ from ešlág ‘potash,’ tsorán ‘silicon’ from tsur ‘rock’ (silex ‘flint’), and avnán ‘lithium’ from éven ‘stone’ (líthos ‘stone’).
Also, a few elements are named for common uses of a compound; thus, for arsenic Turkish can use (beside Persian-derived zirník) sičánotu, lit. ‘shitter-herb,’ i.e., ‘rat poison’ (a common name for the mouse and rat is sičán ‘defecator’). Similarly, Russian has myš,yak, probably derived from myš ‘mouse’ from the use of arsenicals as rodent poisons. Also, antimony is called in Turkish sürmé taši ‘smearing stone’ (also antimon) from the ancient use of stibium (mineral antimony sulfide) as an eye cosmetic. Here Russian has borrowed the Turkic verbal noun sürmé as sur,ma ‘antimony.’ (The W. Semitic name for this same Sb?\2S?\3, stibnite, a lead-gray metallic mineral, in Hebrew kohál, Arabic al-kahl, Aramaic kuhlā, etc., gave rise to a long semantic development during alchemical times from ‘stibium eye-shadow’ to ‘fine powder’ to ‘essence’ to ‘spirits of grape,’ i.e., ‘alcohol’ = al-kohl.)
Now, among the various borrowings and loan-translations for element names there are two that incorporate a kind of chemical confusion or misunderstanding, passed on from language to language, and authorized by modern language academies, whose members ought to know better.
The first is the name for nitrogen, element number 7. It was named nitrogéne in French by Jean-Antoine Chaptal in 1790 as a compound of Greek nítron ‘sodium carbonate’ and -genēs ‘born of, produced by.’ But what on earth is the connection between sodium carbonate, Na?\2CO?\3, or washing soda, and the relatively inert atmospheric gas nitrogen, N? Surely no chemical relation between soda and nitrogen accounts for Chaptal’s choice. The answer goes back to a confusion in the 16th Century between two alchemical names used, e.g., by Ramón Lull (Raymondus Lullius, c. 1235-1315). Lull called soda nitrum, and he called saltpeter sal nitri. His word nitrum (from Latin from Greek nítron) continued on, along with nitre, as names for saltpeter (from sal petrae), i.e., potassium nitrate. Another form, natron, is still used for soda, i.e., sodium carbonate. (The word nitre ‘KNO?\3’ is from French nitre from Latin nitrum from Greek nítron ‘native Na?\2CO?\3, natron’ from either Egyptian ntry or from Hebrew néter, cognate of Akkadian nitiru; the word natron is from Spanish natrón from Arabic natrūn; from Greek nítron.)
The irony here is that French later itself avoided the confusion when Lavoisier named the gas azote (from a- ‘not’ + zōē ‘life’) since he observed that nitrogen, the major component of air, will not itself support life. Other languages either borrowed the French azote (e.g., Russian azot) or calqued it (e.g., German Stickstoff ‘choke-damp,’ further calqued to Hebrew hanqán from héneq ‘suffocation’).
Finally, having straightened out French nitrogen to azote, Lavoisier himself now generated a new confusion which nearly everyone inherits today. He studied the other major atmospheric gas, oxygen, and its mate in water, hydrogen. In 1787 he named the latter hydrogéne for its origin in the decomposition of water (from hýdōr ‘water’), and that term is either borrowed into other languages (e.g., Turkish idrojen, Hungarian hidrogén, or Arabic idrūjīn), or it is calqued (e.g., Hebrew maymán from máyim ‘water’, or German Wasserstoff, or Russian vodorod, or Japanese sui-so ‘water element’).
But, when creating a modern theory of combustion to replace the fanciful phlogiston theory, Lavoisier investigated the properties of oxides and of oxygéne, as he called the life-supporting gas, constituting 21% of the air and about half of everything on the earth.
Where did he get this name in 1777? The gas had been isolated first by Joseph Priestley in 1774, who called it “dephlogisticated air,” for such was the prevailing view of combustion at that time. Priestley’s investigations no doubt stimulated Lavoisier later to continue his experiments with combustion and the calcining of metals. Since to explain his 1772 results on the increase in weight of burned sulfur, phosphorus, or lead, one would have to assign to phlogiston a negative weight (sic!), he saw that burning must be an absorption of something, and he was able to identify the burner as Priestley’s “dephlogisticated air.”
Since this substance was typically associated with metallic oxides, which in turn usually produced acids in aqueous solution (e.g., sulfur trioxide, when dissolved in water, yields sulfuric acid), Lavoisier named the gas oxy-gène (from Greek oxýs ‘sharp, acidic’).
Despite his having laid the very foundations of modern chemistry, Lavoisier lost his head in that French fracas before he could find that what is responsible for acid formation is not oxygen, but hydrogen, his water generator! (Notice, e.g., that muriatic acid is hydrogen chloride, HCI, with no oxygen at all.) This mistake was never corrected in the names, and now everyone has his oxygen named for sourness:
| language | word |
|---|---|
| Turkish | oksijen |
| Hebrew | hamtsán from hómets ‘vinegar’ |
| German | Sauerstoff |
| Russian | kislorod from kislyí ‘sour’ |
| Arabic | ūksīfīn |
| Hungarian | oxigén |
| Japanese | san-so for ‘acid-element’ |
Such was the authority of Lavoisier’s French, or, even more probably, of 19th-century German chemistry, with its Sauerstoff, that reviving languages like modern Hebrew simply took over Lavoisier’s little slip and perpetuated the chemical confusion.
INTER ALIA I.3.a
… The Director of Radcliffe’s Course in Publishing Procedures, Harvard Summer School, is Mrs. Diggory Venn. … Pat Sheehan, on “Action News” (WTNH New Haven) at 11:00 P.M. on May 27, 1974, referred to E. Howard Hunt as “the convicted Watergate bugger.” … If you like entertaining, literate comment about language, you should be reading Thomas H. Middleton’s “Light Refractions” in the (fortnightly) Saturday Review/World …. “ …For many New Yorkers, the idea of ‘country’ itself is vague. For many it means second homes, hotels, inns and relatives in such places as the Hamptons, Bucks County, the Berkshires and the Catskills. For others it is a patch of grass bordering a parking lot on the West Side Highway, or a grove with a rusty barbecue hibachi in Van Cortlandt Park. ‘Country’ is where you go on the fourth of July weekend to escape from your city responsibilities, and when country-time ends, re-entry can be traumatic….” [NY Times, 8 July 1974, Michael T. Kaufman]… The following responses appeared in the Letters column of The Sunday [London] Times, 23 June 1974, under “I am, therefore it’s me”:
□ One really must take issue with Lt.-Col. R. B. Robinson and his slander of the Latin language (Letters, last week); quite apart from the fact that learning Latin was an outlook and a discipline in itself, much of the Englishman’s inability to spell can be put down to lack of Latin knowledge.
How else should one decide whether a word ends in -ant or -ent and many other instances? Not for nothing did Benjamin Jonson talk about “Latin, queen of the tongues.” Far worse, however, is the fact that Mr. Robinson refers to “C’est moi” and calls the “moi” an accusative. This word is a disjunctive personal pronoun and is as much a nominative as “je,” merely being more stressed. If, though, Mr. Robinson would have liked to say that “It’s me” is philologically speaking perfectly correct, as the “me” is probably a disjunctive, this view is quite acceptable. —David Wendon, Lowestoft.
□ Lt.-Col. Robinson was indeed taught English badly. The fault lies not with Latin grammar but with its abuse by inept pedagogues.
Logic, not Latin, makes the verb “to be” intransitive. Nevertheless, “it’s me” is perfectly acceptable colloquial usage; it’s comfortable (as Fowler said in a different context) and your correspondent should feel free to use it, and not to blame onto Latin the results of sloppy teaching or thinking. —(Mrs.) Marion Friedmann, London NW3.
□ Lt.-Col. Robinson’s distaste for constructions such as “This was given to my wife and I as a wedding present” will be shared by many especially when the solecism is foisted in stage and TV performances upon authors who did not use it (as in the TV production of Jane Austen’s Emma, in which Emma is made to say “between Miss Fairfax and I,” where the text, chapter 24 has me). But it would be interesting to learn from some authority on historical English usage whether the thing was once a permissible colloquialism (like “was you?” now very vulgar). In Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Mrs. Hardcastle says to Tony Lumpkin: “Give your father and I some of your company”; and a character in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fayre says (V. iv 253): “Between you and I, sir, we do but make show.” Did this sort of thing go underground and reappear in modern times? —_J. F. Killeen, Galway.
□ Baffled by the usage of “I” and “me,” Colonel Robinson’s friend should fall back on the safety and modesty of “myself.” —D. M. Greenhalgh, Southampton.
An Intolerant View of Intolerance
Laurence Urdang, Editor, VERBATIM
Notwithstanding the redundancy in the title, I consider myself–as, I am sure, everyone regards himself–a tolerant human being: I try to avoid prejudice in all things. Yet I must confess to a seemingly uncorrectable, irrepressible foible: I am intolerant of intolerance, especially when it comes to language. Language, as we all know, is an uncommon denominator: not everyone uses it in the same way. In fact, it is likely that no two people use it in identical ways. When we have been taught that like is a preposition, not an adverb or conjunction substitutable for as in constructions like Do as I say, not as I do, and then encounter someone who does just that, the very fact that the other person speaks or writes in that fashion tells us something about him. It may tell us that he is trying to be “in” by being colloquial with his up-to-date slang, or it may tell us that he is an unfortunate who has not had the benefits of our (superior) education. But it cannot be denied that usage informs us about the user. If everyone spoke and wrote in exactly the same way, saying “If I were he” instead of “If I was him,” “She doesn’t love me” instead of “She don’t love me,” “Between her and me” instead of “Between she and I,” “nuclear” instead of “nucular,” and so on, not only would it be difficult to tell one speaker from another in level and expressivity, but listening to speech and reading writing would prove an unsupportable bore.
A measure of my irritation with intolerance stems from my general experience with purists who want everyone to speak the way they do (which isn’t always formally proper, either, mind you), but the precipitating catalyst of my present dyspepsia was an article by Jean Stafford, “At This Point in Time, TV Is Murdering the English Language,” which appeared in the (Sunday) New York Times, 15 September 1974. In it, this self-appointed Guardian of the English Language (I must interrupt myself here to point out that everyone who is intolerant of the way others use English is, by definition, a “Guardian of the English Language”; “self-appointed” is a truistic propagandism since such Guardians are seldom appointed by a committee; by this token, I suppose I am an appointed–by implication–Assailant of the English Language. I have a nagging suspicion that either the roles or the titles have got somehow reversed. Anyway,…) this Ste. Peter who would bar from the Elysian Fields any who violate the Rules as she sees them condemns a number of grammatical, semantic, and syntactic anomalies which, in her view, spell the doom of civilization. I am tempted to add, “…as we know it,” one of the more boring clichés of our time, but I shall restrain myself.
Here, in (mercifully) abbreviated form, is a selection from those stylistic solecisms that Miss Stafford singled out for vituperative comment:
“[Let us] declare a honeymoon.” –Walter Cronkite. Qy: How is a honeymoon declared?
diaper “has three syllables, not two.” –Various commercials.
“nucular” for nuclear. –Pres. Eisenhower.
hopefully,… –Pres. Kennedy.
“All aspirin is not alike.” –TV commercial.
“nauseous” for nauseated. –TV commercial.
gasid indigestion. –Various commercials.
“You get a lot of dirt with kids; you get a lot of clean with Tide.” –TV commercial. Qy: When did clean become a noun?
“Adhesive that will really bond the denture to the gums.” –TV commercial.
guesstimate. –prevalent.
“…a system for learning in depth…” –Britannica commercial.
opt for. –prevalent cliché.
life style. –prevalent cliché.
irregardless. –prevalent tautology.
funded. –use of noun as verb.
feedback. –semantic shift.
input. –semantic shift.
career experiences. –bureaucratic gobbledygook.
“Economy doesn’t have to be dull.” –TV commercial.
self-destruct. –nonword.
“enormity” for hugeness, enormousness, great importance.
no-commenting. –use of phrase as a verb.
stonewalling. –neologistic cliché.
specificity. –cliché.
“At this point in time,…” –wordy cliché for now, at present.
phased out. –semantic shift and cliché.
-wise. –trite suffix for making nouns into adverbs.
It would be very dull, indeed, to examine each one of these citations, but a few generalizations seem to be in order. First of all, the problems can be classified into relatively few categories:
(1) redundancies and tautologies: irregardless
(2) boredom of the cliché: guesstimate, opt for, life style, specificity, stonewalling, -wise, At this point in time, etc.
(3) intentional/unintentional and/or illogical gobbledygook: career experiences, Economy doesn’t have to be dull, etc.
(4) metaphor: declare a honeymoon, in depth, feedback, input, phased out, bond, etc.
(5) linguistic change: clean, funded, no-commenting, etc.
(6) semantic change: nauseous, bond, enormity, etc.
(7) neologisms, blends, etc.: guesstimate, self-destruct, stonewalling, gasid (indigestion), etc.
As can be seen–and I haven’t tried being exhaustive in this superficial analysis–some of the more heinous examples cited by Miss Stafford fall into more than one category. It is noteworthy that except for classifications 1, 2, and 3, which are usually so ephemeral as to have little or no effect on language (however they may affect thinking, patience, and nerves), all these categories are the stuff of which language is made. Change is one of the definitive characteristics of language, despite Miss Stafford’s unwillingness to recognize it. Critics of contemporary language have always been among us—Richard Grant White was a famous Victorian example—but the language has survived despite their quixotic failings. In fact, if, fifty years later, one examines the solecisms which they often became most excited and scornful about, it often turns out either that the same condemned usages are still the object of Guardians' censure or that they have become standard, and it is hard to understand what the fuss was all about.
Miss Stafford, self-appointed (and, I suspect, Times-supported) Defender of the Faith in the English Language, fails to recognize these elementary facts. After all, if everyone had her gifts, chances are she never would have received her Pulitzer Prize—if one could be awarded at all. If she needs evidence that language changes, let her analyze and compare with Modern English writings of which she approves the writings of Spenser, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and other English “masters of style” whose writings need varying degrees of interpretation, depending on their remove from the contemporary reader.
The problem, which seems to elude Miss Stafford, lies not with TV, which is, after all, merely the medium of expression and not the expression itself, but with the poor style, not the poor language. Yet Miss Stafford, either blinded by her contumelious zeal or hanging on for dear life as her runaway hobby horse gallops into the sunset (possibly both), deplores the povertystricken imagery that is often the result of a combination of an impoverished imagination and a hyperactive gift of gab instead of ignoring it, comforted by the knowledge that it will all soon dry up and blow away.
In short, she is playing right into the hands of those she criticizes, for all they want is to be attended to and remembered, and, through her articles, Miss Stafford is elevating them to a higher memorial than they could otherwise merit. Come to think of it. I should never have written this article.
ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: -oon
John P. Hughes, St. Peter’s College
The English language has, as a heritage from Latin, a most remarkable suffix. It is amazing how versatile it is.
The story begins in Latin, where a number of nouns that ended in -o in the nominative had a genitive ending in -onis, like leo, leonis ‘lion’, and latro, latronis ‘thief.’ Somehow, this type of ending became generalized into a suffix meaning ‘big,’ ‘strong,’ ‘dominant,’ and was added to other words to give them this meaning or coloring. The suffix appears as -one in Italian, -on in French, -ón in Spanish, and -oon in English. Thus, in Italian, libro is ‘book’ and librone is ‘big book,’ ragazzo is ‘boy’ and ragazzone is ‘big boy,’ and so on. In English (following Spanish) a doubloon was a coin worth two pesetas–the pirates' ‘piece of eight,’ because the peseta was equivalent to four reals. It is said that our dollar sign developed from the symbol for the doubloon: 8.
Some idea of the versatility of the -oon suffix will emerge if one traces the words having this ending that have lost the semantic connection with their original stems. For instance, a balloon is a big ball, a pontoon a big bridge (from Romance pont, ponte), probably in contrast with a rustic arch. From sala, ‘room,’ come French salon, with its implied elegance, and English saloon, which, itself, has split into American ‘a large room for drinking, a barroom’ and British ‘a large room’ (dining saloon) and ‘a roomy car, sedan.’ From Latin campus, ‘field of battle,’ come Spanish campear ‘to fight’ and campeón, ultimately yielding English champion, ‘big fighter.’ The suffix can also be found attached to non-Romance stems, e.g., spittoon.
It is likely that a search for words ending in -oon will lead to many more surprising discoveries!
Editor’s Note: It is with regret that we note, shortly following the receipt of the preceding, the untimely death of our friend, Professor Hughes. A specialist in Celtic languages, John Hughes led an academic life that will prove to be of lasting influence on those whom he taught so well. For those who may doubt that their work on words ending in -oon may occupy them for many m-oons to come, here is a partial list of those they might like to examine: (alphabetized from the right): baboon, racoon, cocoon, tycoon, rigadoon, buffoon, lagoon, dragoon, typhoon, pantaloon, simoon, lampoon, harpoon, macaroon, picaroon, vinegaroon, maroon, gadroon, quadroon, octoroon, patroon, poltroon, platoon, cartoon, festoon. And let the folk etymologist beware!
Reviews: THE HARVARD CONCORDANCE TO SHAKESPEARE
Marvin Spevack, Belknap Press, 1974
Professor Spevack is credited as compiler, but the computer that did all the dogwork gets nary a mention. This one-volume work, which we haven’t seen but which we are reviewing from a brochure that contains ample samples, would be useful not only to the Shakespeare scholar but to the speechwriter and to anyone who really wants a detailed reference work listing every occurrence of every word in all of the Bard’s works.
Pick a key word–say, torture–and find it immediately in the alphabetical listing. Statistical data shows that it appears 33 times, has a frequency of .0037%, that 31 of the references appear in verse and 2 in prose. There follows a complete list of all references accompanied by some brief identifying context:
i will take him, then torture my wife, pluck the
That’s pretty short, but there follows the reference “WIV 3.02.40 P” which I take to mean “from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act III, Scene 2, line 40.” What could be easier? Of course, you have to have a complete set of Shakespeare handy, but what household could be considered complete without one?
It took Professor Spevack more than nine years to complete this work—29,000 entries yielding 500,000 quotations, 1600 pages in all—and every syllable of it is worth the effort. It should be a basic work of reference for all who love Shakespeare and language.
INTER ALIA I.3.b
“Giving the English language to the Americans is like giving sex to small children: they know it’s important but they don’t know what to do with it.” [Morton Cooper, American author of The Queen, as reported in The Times (London), 1 November 1974]…“Some races are more prone to use filthy language than others, Mr. Justice Faulks said in the Family Division of the High Court yesterday. He was dealing with the divorce case of a Jamaican couple. The judge, who yesterday criticized Britain’s ‘pink knickers’ divorce laws, added: ‘But in my years on the Bench I have never given anybody a divorce because of rude language.’ ” [The Times (London), 5 October 1974]… “The Greeks do not have a word for it, and that caused all the trouble. The English word is ‘rubbish.’ When the USIS [in Athens] tried to translate it, they came up with a slangy Greek expression not generally used in polite company, let alone in official documents. The result was a diplomatic brouhaha that added to the tension between Athens and Washington. Last week several European newspapers reported that the American Sixth Fleet had stopped Greek aircraft from joining the fighting in Cyprus. A State Department spokesman, asked for a comment on the report, said: ‘It is just complete rubbish.’… No Greek word precisely conveyed the meaning of ‘rubbish’ in the sense of ‘garbage.’ But the Americans wanted something forceful, so they used the Greek word ‘bourthes.’ ‘Bourthes’ can be translated in many ways, such as hot air or baloney or a lot of bull. …a columnist…wrote that ‘bourthes’ was ‘very expressive and to the point, and now that the U.S. Embassy has honored it with its authority, it gains, I believe, special importance and may soon be very widely used.’ ” [The New York Times, 31 August 1974]
Even within English problems can crop up in the writing of lucid, unambiguous prose. The very lexicon mocks us! Here are five words with senses that are almost direct antonyms of one another:
scan–‘to examine closely’ vs. ‘to look over hurriedly’
hew–‘to cut down or away’ vs. ‘to adhere closely’
cleave–‘to split’ vs. ‘to cling closely’
impregnable–‘pregnable’ vs. ‘not pregnable’
inflammable–‘not flammable’ vs. ‘highly flammable’
clip–‘to cut off’ vs. ‘to hold together’
Admittedly, such words may be homographs–for instance, the two clips, though spelled and pronounced identically, have different etymologies; but what difference should that make? One doesn’t announce the etymology of each word he uses in speech or writing.
Mademoiselle for September 1974 published an article on Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and A Dictionary of the Underworld, British and American.
On the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times, William Safire, in an excellent essay on Webster’s birthday, notes that at the Senate hearings the word most frequently misspelled was misprision, being replaced by coverup, which “had lost its hyphen and thus its virginity,” immediately suggesting a hymen/hyphen play on words. The Times, like a dutiful parent, still maintains the hyphenated form, cover-up, rather than the copulated form, the marriage not having been consummated…. In the same (sexual) vein, The Times Book Review [27 October 1974], in a review of Peter De Vries' The Glory of the Hummingbird, included, in a “shock of recognition” tone, the phrase, “lovers' loins ‘sweetly hyphenated.’ ” (Hyphen, from Greek, meant ‘under one.') [C. J. Tamulonis, Pottsville, Pa.]
Bill, an American friend of ours with a business in Berlin, visited us in the U.S. with his fiancee, a native-born German girl with just a fair, conversational grasp of English. I had picked up a little German as a child, so I asked Berta, “Just how can you be sure when to use the polite or familiar forms in German? That ‘Sie’ and ‘du’ always puzzle me. Does it depend on age, or family, or rank in society, or what?” She started to answer, when I continued, “Now if I were all dressed up in Berlin and wanted to ask directions of a dirty, old, street-cleaner, would I use ‘Sie’ or ‘du’?” Again, before Berta could answer, her fiance interjected, “I think that you’d use ‘du’ if he’s a peon.” Berta broke up; gasping with laughter, she finally replied, “Bill, what grammatical difference does it make if he’s a-pee-in’ in the street or not?!” Whereupon we all collapsed and refilled our steins. [George J. Grieshaber, Lockland, Ohio]
Letters {Harold Orton}
I have just received a copy of VERBATIM for September. I would like to congratulate you on the very interesting production which is both scholarly and entertaining. I am glad that you have got together a team of writers who can produce such excellent articles. —Harold Orton, Professor Emeritus, University of Leeds
Letters {Ethel Strainchamps}
Edwin Newman was not “contriving an imaginary rule for English style and syntax” when he proscribed convince to [referred to in the review of Strictly Speaking, by Edwin Newman, in VERBATIM I, 2]. He was simply stating an obsolete rule.
Convince to did not surface until the 1950’s; therefore there was no reason for Fowler, Evans, and others to make judgment on it, and there were no cites for the big dictionaries to include. Follett/Barzun (1966) comes out against it, however–too late, as usual–on the grounds that it is “unidiomatic,” furnishing numerous examples from varied sources that inadvertently prove the adjective to be inapplicable.
Newman is also supported by The Random House Dictionary (also 1966). The College Edition, edited by one Laurence Urdang, refers us at convince to persuade for synonyms. There we learn that persuade and induce are followed by to, but: “Only when followed by a that-clause may CONVINCE refer to winning a person to a course of action: I convinced her that she should go.” That was rather far along in the game for such a ruling. I have 1961 and 1962 cites from Paul Pickrel (Harper’s), Harvey Shapiro (N.Y. Times Book Review), Jason Epstein (Commentary), and Joseph Wechsberg (Esquire), plus anonymous ones from Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, etc. (My first year of collecting was 1961, but the construction was already quite familiar to me by then.)
If Edwin Newman had been relying on Random House for his lexicographical information, he must be feeling betrayed. —Ethel Strainchamps, New York, N.Y.
Perhaps we didn’t express ourselves as fully as we might have in the review of Strictly Speaking. English allows for many alternative syntactic constructions that, lexically/semantically, may say the same thing, differing only in style. Thus, I regard constructions like I convinced (persuaded, urged, etc.) her to go as the lexical/semantic equivalent of I convinced (persuaded, urged, etc.) her that she should go, though they might differ in style. The usage books cited in the review are silent on the subject of convince to, and such silence must be construed as meaning that the construction is acceptable in standard English. The usage notes in The Random House Dictionaries were prepared by Theodore H. Bernstein of The New York Times, and they do not, necessarily, reflect the views of the editors of those dictionaries. –Editor.
Letters {Larry Barker}
I love words, and so far I like VERBATIM.
But the review of Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary in the second issue underlined my fears. If clyster, clonic, chrestomathy, cidevant, clerihew, and clepsydra are “known to the average literate person,” then I can only be thankful that VERBATIM is a quarterly so I’ll have time to look up all the words.
All this by way of saying that I hope, as you edit for your readership, you’ll keep the lower end of the literacy scale in mind. If you will, then I’ll dedicate myself to becoming an average literate person–which I thought I was.
Meet you half way. —Larry Barker, Louisville, Ky.