GETTING USED TO NEW ENGLISH COINAGE

The perils of using back-formations 
By Jose A. Carillo 

I’ll admit that I am rather finicky in my choice of words, rarely giving in to the temptation of using nice-sounding words of doubtful meaning or origin. In fact, when the time came for me to put together my early English-usage newspaper columns into my first book, I became literally obsessive with my vocabulary. I was therefore supremely confident—“smug” is perhaps the better word—that when my first book, English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, finally went to press, I had tied up whatever vocabulary loose ends I might have overlooked in my original column pieces due to the pressures of newspaper deadlines. 

A few weeks after the book came out, however, I got very upset when someone took issue with my use of the word “enthused” in this sentence: “In time, distracted and enthused by English-language stylists with comparable if not greater facility with prose, I gave up my search for both the writer and the book.” (“Rediscovering John Galsworthy,” chapter 39, page 116). The comment, which was part of an incisive post-publication critique by an extremely discerning reader, was this: “Enthused is a back-formation, one disapproved of by some careful writers/smug pedants.”

 

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Using back-formations can be perilous because as words coined from previously existing words, many of them have yet to prove themselves as valid and genuinely useful additions to the language.

True enough, I discovered to my consternation that “enthuse,” which means “to show or express enthusiasm,” is not a well-accepted word. According to The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, this back-formation from the word “enthusiasm” has continued to be looked upon with distaste despite its having entered the English lexicon as far back as 1827. Apparently, the guidebook observed, this distaste for “enthuse” stems from people’s “dislike for the external emotional display and manipulation” conveyed by the word itself.

The Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, on the other hand, while similarly noting disapproval for “enthuse,” qualifies that “current evidence shows it to be flourishing nonetheless on both sides of the Atlantic especially in journalistic prose.” Even so, had I known that “enthuse” was still far from widely respectable, I would have avoided using it rather than risk being labeled as a less-than-careful writer.

Indeed, using back-formations can be perilous because as words coined from previously existing words, many of them have yet to prove themselves as valid and genuinely useful additions to the language. After all, a back-formation typically results from extracting what is wrongly supposed to be the root word from an existing longer word, when in fact that longer word is the root word itself. This often happens in the case of words ending in “-er,” “-ar,” “-or,” or “-ion,” not a few of which are thought to be verbs-turned-“doer”-nouns because their endings look like suffixes.

For instance, the verb “peddler” is presumed to be the root word “peddle” with “r” added to it, but “peddler” is, in fact, the root word itself and “peddle” is simply a back-formation created by dropping “r” from “peddler.” The verb “donate,” on the other hand, results when “-ion” from “donation” is replaced with the ending “-e” to form the back-formation “donate.” The noun “donation,” however, is actually the root word here, even if “donate” sounds and structurally looks more like the root word itself.

The same back-formation process has produced such words as “edit” (from the root word “editor”), “emote” (from “emotion”), “accrete” (from “accretion”), “aesthete” (from “aesthetics”), “burgle” (from “burglar”), and “televise” (from “television”). The difference is that through continuing usage that has whittled down opposition by vocabulary gatekeepers, these back-formations have become generally accepted English words.

Of course, it’s probably only a matter of time before “enthuse”—along with such dreadful back-formations as “liaise” (from “liaison”), “surveil” (from “surveillance”), “elocute” (from “elocution”), “incent” (from “incentive”), and “aggress” (from “aggression”)—similarly gains respectability. Until then, however, I think it would be prudent to put the usage of “enthuse” on hold, as I have done by discarding it in my revision for the succeeding printings of my book.

This is not to say, however, that we should eliminate back-formations altogether from our vocabulary. What would have happened to English if people simply hadn’t come up with such catchy words as “scavenge” (from “scavenger”), “diagnose” (from “diagnosis”), “escalate” (from “escalator”), “tweeze” (from “tweezers”), “jell” (from “jelly”), and “sleaze” (from “sleazy”)? Even the most exacting pedants have already given up their resistance to these words, for along with scores of other back-formations, they have already proven their semantic mettle as concise and forceful expressions of new ideas for which no single words had existed before.

The perils of using still unacceptable back-formations will always be there, of course, but no matter. We can easily deal with them by simply checking with a good dictionary each time we encounter words that just don’t seem to look or sound right.

This essay, which forms Chapter 103 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times,©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

LOOKING BACK TO THE ORIGINS OF THE DAY OF HEARTS

 The Real Score About Valentine’s Day     
 By Jose A. Carillo

“If you must write about Valentine’s Day,” my wife Leonor admonished me, “don’t be a spoilsport. By all means take a break from your grammar columns, but don’t try to take away the romance from Valentine’s.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Leonor,” I said, “I won’t be a spoilsport. Why would I want to do that? On the contrary, I want to tell lovers all over the world that they are right on target in doing the things they do on Valentine’s Day. I mean, you know, exchanging love tokens, whispering sweet nothings, having dinner by candlelight—good, old romance the way it should be.”

“Then you’ve got nothing really new to say,” she said. “You’ll just recycle the same old story that everybody recycles this time of year.”

“Not with this one, Leonor. I have a new thesis: that people should thank their lucky stars they can celebrate Valentine’s Day not so different from how the ancient Romans did it. As you know, those people started it all almost a thousand years before the Christian evangelists came to Europe. They had this much-awaited love festival on February 14, precisely the same day as today’s Valentine’s Day. It went by another name, of course. They called it the Lupercalia.”

“Umm...interesting,” Leonor said. “Tell me more about it.”

“The Lupercalia, in plain English, was the ‘Feast of the Wolf-God.’ It was an ancient fertility rite in honor of a god who protected sheep from the wolves. Its high point was a mating game, a lottery for young, unmarried men and women. The organizers would write the names of qualified, interested women on small pieces of parchment, then drop them into a big vase. Each qualified male drew one piece from the vase, and the woman whose name was on that piece became his date or ‘steady’ for one whole year.”

“That simple? Unacquainted couples were paired with no courtship, no legal and religious mumbo-jumbo?”

“Yes, Leonor, and they had a whole year to find out if they were temperamentally and sexually compatible. If they were, of course, they married and raised a family.”

“How wonderfully uncomplicated, but how unromantic! And my heart bleeds for the young couples that had an eye for each other beforehand. With, say, 1,000 women’s names in that lottery, the probability of a woman getting picked by a man she already liked would be next to zilch; so were the chances of a young man picking the woman he really liked. And the chances of a mutually attracted pair being mated? That’s 1/1,000 multiplied by 1/1,000 or one in a million, right?”

“Right, Leonor! A priori romances simply couldn’t bloom unless the partners decided to mutually violate the rules. But there was one good thing going for that lottery, I think: it leveled the playing field for love and procreation. It must have exquisitely churned and enriched the gene pool of the ancient Romans.”

“Maybe so, but don’t you think their ritual was so elemental, so...shall we say, ‘uncivilized’?”

“That’s saying it mildly, Leonor. It scandalized the early Christian missionaries. They found it decadent, immoral, and, of course, unchristian. So they tried to change it by frying it with its own fat, so to speak.”

“How?”

“Well, the clerics simply revoked the practice of writing the names of young, unmarried women on the pieces of parchment. They wrote on them the names of the Christian saints instead. And you know what they offered to the young, unmarried man who picked the name of a particular saint?”

“What?”

“The privilege of emulating the virtues of that saint for one whole year.”

“What spoilsports, those clerics! Why would any sensible lover whether male or female want to play that sort of game? For Pete’s sake, that lottery was for love and romance and chance encounters, not for sainthood!”

Valentine was imprisoned by the Romans circa 270 A.D. for violating

a ban on performing marriages during wartime, then was stoned to

death on February 14, Lupercalia Day.

“That’s right, so the Romans resisted the new mechanics and stuck to the old. It was two centuries before the evangelists again tried to stamp out the Lupercalia in a big way. In 490 A.D., Pope Gelasius canonized a Roman by the name of Valentine. He was, by tradition, a priest martyred 220 years before for violating a ban on performing marriages during wartime. Valentine was stoned to death on a February 14, Lupercalia Day, so his feast day was conveniently made to coincide with it. In a sense, the clerics finally succeeded in Christianizing the ancient rites, but only in name and only edgewise, in a manner of speaking. As history would prove, no power on earth could stamp out its earthly and earthy attractions.”

‘You’ve got a lovely story there,” Leonor said, “and you kept your promise of not being a spoilsport. So Happy Valentine’s Day, my love!”

“For you, Leonor, Happy Lupercle’s Day just this once, OK?” (2004)

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This essay in conversation form first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004 and subsequently formed Chapter 142 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge.

THE GRAMMAR OF NEGATION IN ENGLISH

Mastering the fine art of negation in English 
By Jose A. Carillo

We know that to affirm something to be true is much easier and more pleasant to do than to declare it to be untrue. This is because doing the latter often involves negating what somebody else holds to be true—a situation that could cause bad feelings, wounded pride, acrimonious exchange, or even vicious and protracted debate. It is therefore important for us to develop negation to a fine art, the better to diffuse the pain and unpleasantness to the one being refused, rebutted, contradicted, denied, lied upon, or denigrated.

The staple negation adverbs in English are, of course, “no,” “not,” “never,” and “without.” In addition to them, however, the language uses a remarkably wide range of devices for lexical negation (words with negative connotations) and affixal negation (positive words negated by affixes). I surveyed these negation devices in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in the early 2000s, and I am now reposting it in this week’s edition of the Jose Carillo's English Blogspot for the benefit of Forum members and nonnative English speakers who may need a refresher on how to say “no” without causing offense.

Forming negative sentences correctly

Without any doubt, the adverb “no”—abetted by its semantic cousins “not,” “never,” “without,” and several others with a negative bent—is the most subversive word in the English language. Look how “no” undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” “No, go away; my life will be much better without you.” And if you look back at the adverbial phrase “without any doubt” that begins the first sentence above, you would see how the word “without” totally reverses the sense of “doubt” to “certainty.” Overwhelmingly powerful, “no” and its cohorts can quickly and very efficiently demolish every declarative or affirmative statement that we can think up in the English language.

 IMAGE CREDIT: ENGLISHHINTS.COM

We can see that to negate entire statements, “no” takes a commanding position at the very beginning of sentences. It does so with brutal efficiency: “No swerving.” “No entry.” “No, sir, minors aren’t allowed here.” On the other hand, when “no” has to do the negating within a sentence, it often assigns “not” to take its place, commanders an auxiliary verb, and positions “not” right after it: “The woman drove.” “The woman did not drive.” “The woman will not drive.” Of course, we already know that when “not” does this, the main verb relinquishes the tense to the auxiliary verb. In the example given above, in particular, the auxiliary verb “do” takes either the past or future tense, and the main verb takes the verb stem “drive.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, with the main verb remaining in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” The important thing to remember is that “not” always positions itself between the helping verb and the main verb; for it to do otherwise would be grammatically and awfully fatal: “The woman not has driven.” “The visitors not have eaten.”

In contrast, “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Watch: “The woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.” “Never” is negation in its emphatic form—demolishing an idea to the extreme.

The adverb “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” “The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are no more.” “Have you no conscience?” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in sentences that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “All of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” This sentence is semantically problematic; it could mean that “some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate”, or that “none of the women voted for the lone female candidate.” Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not one of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”

The same caveat should also be observed when using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations” or “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation as well as affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

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When using these negative affixes, however, we must always remember to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

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From the book Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by the author, © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.