Tolerating variation, or not
An interviewee on
Fresh Air
(heard on KALW, 2/22/07) referred to "people who are inimicable
to our interests", and my ears perked up at "inimicable" (where I would
have used "inimical"). So I started looking around in
dictionaries and found that they either didn't list
inimicable at all (
AHD4,
NOAD2) or treated it as a synonym
of
inimical (Dictionary.com,
Wiktionary), in one case (
Columbia
Guide to Standard American English, 1993) noting that
inimical was much more commonly
used. The
OED had it,
marked as "rare", with only two cites (from 1805 and 1833).
MWDEU said it was a "less often
encountered" synonym of
inimical.
A Google web search got 25,400 raw webhits, which isn't trivial -- but
then
inimical gets 1,240,000,
over 30 times as many.
Now, when there are apparent synonyms, usage advisers either look for
some subtle semantic difference between them (the usual tactic for
"content words") or else recommend against one of them, as being
unsuitable in formal contexts or as being generally unacceptable (the
usual tactic for grammatical markers and "little words"). Advice
writers are especially hostile to relatively rare alternatives and to
more recent items. Given the rarity of
inimicable and its recency relative
to
inimical (which the
OED has cites for from 1643), I
expected
inimicable to be the
object of scorn in the usage manuals. At first, I found no
mention of the word at all, but then I struck paydirt in a few of the
most recent usage dictionaries, Garner (1998), Garner (2003), and Fiske
(2006, but not 2005). How had
inimicable
escaped censure for so long?
I began with a sampling of usage advice (ranging from the excoriating
to the scholarly) over the past hundred years.
Inimicable was not in Ayres,
Bierce, Bryson, Dowling, any of the three versions of Fowler (original
Fowler, Gowers's Fowler, Burchfield's Fowler), Peters, Shaw, or
Trask. Then I turned to more recent things, Bryan Garner's
Dictionary of Modern American Usage
(1998), its revised edition (
Garner's
Modern American Usage, 2003), Robert Hartwell Fiske's
Dictionary of Disagreeable English: A
Curmudgeon's Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar
(2004), and its "deluxe edition" of 2006, and got hits in three of the
four volumes.
Garner (1998:374) tells us that
Inimicable
for inimical is a fairly
common error. The OED
records inimicable as a
"rare" adjective, but it should be even rarer than it is. [with
examples from the Atlanta Journal
& Constitution and the San
Diego Union-Tribune]
Garner (2003:454) hardens the judgment, now saying "but it should be
extinct", and adds a third example, from the Memphis
Commercial Appeal.
Fiske (2006:202-3) proclaims, in his usual scornful way, that it's
not
a word at all:
...inimicable,
a nonword, not a nonce word, is mistaken for inimical by some... [with the
example] In general, however, anti-Semitism refers to the denouncement
in speech or writing of Jewish culture, traditions and attitudes as
being inimicable to a nation's
welfare. USE inimical.
My guess is that Garner and Fiske, noting the rarity and recency of
inimicable, are taking it to be a
kind of reshaping of
inimical,
along the lines of
reshapings
like overature, perculate,
pectorials, and
fellatiate. These are all
non-standard variants. But there is a very close parallel to
inimical/inimicable, namely
unseasonal/unseasonable, and here
both variants are standard. I wrote about this pair on ADS-L back
on 9/26/04, starting with:
... the seasonable/seasonal
competition. These two adjectives now have clearly different (but
somewhat overlapping) meanings. According to NSOED, they appeared at different
times: seasonable and seasonably in Middle English, seasonal and seasonally not until M19.
Nevertheless, seasonal and seasonally have it all over seasonable and seasonably, presumably as a
consequence of the frequency with which people want to convey one
meaning vs. the other:
seasonal:
8,440,000
seasonally: 785,000
seasonable:
44,900
seasonably: 23,600
(In fact, if you do a Google web search for seasonable, you're asked if you
meant seasonal, and similarly
for seasonably/seasonally. Google takes its
numbers seriously.)
But now consider their negative versions. MWDEU points out that unseasonal and unseasonable are essentially
synonymous (ditto, I add, for unseasonally
and unseasonably), and that unseasonal "is a very rare
word". Well, unseasonal
(which I had thought, for years, was the ONLY
acceptable word, until I realized that unseasonable was all over the
place) definitely lags behind unseasonable,
and unseasonally is HUGELY
behind unseasonably:
unseasonal: 13,300
unseasonally: 2,380
unseasonable: 42,000
unseasonably: 67,900
So here, where the meaning difference is leveled, we see history
mirrored: the earlier word continues to outnumber the later synonym.
(Garner (2003) differentiates
seasonal
and
seasonable in meaning,
but doesn't treat
unseasonal/unseasonably.)
Ordinary people will tolerate synonyms, if they can see the variants as
matters of personal style or as having different virtues.
Unseasonable and
inimicable have the virtue of being
longer than their alternatives, a difference in phonological weight
that can translate into metaphorical weightiness -- greater seriousness
and formality (cf.
partially
vs.
partly, and British usage
of prepositional vs. premodifying
university
names, as in vs.
The University
of Sussex vs.
Sussex
University). Usage sticklers are generally less tolerant,
tending to take the position that there should be Only One Right
Way. They strive, mightily and ingeniously, to find semantic
differences between
partially
and
partly, and they remind
us that the prepositional versions of British university names are (in
most cases) the official ones and maintain that the premodifying
versions are casual and colloquial and should not be used in formal
contexts (though I see no evidence that British speakers avoid the
premodifying versions in formal contexts; the prepositional versions
can be used to convey seriousness and formality, but the premodifying
versions are still available in formal contexts).
Two things determine what appears in usage manuals. One is how
much of a stickler the author is; Garner is on the high end, and Fiske
is extreme. The other is what is fashionable in the world of
usage advice. This world is a kind of loose community, in which
people influence one another. As
I
said a while back:
... you develop your sense of style
from the models around you.
You also develop your sense of style from explicit teaching and
advice. Once a proscription against sentence-initial however was articulated, it had a
life of its own and could be passed from one generation of writers and
teachers, in communities of stylistic practice, to the next. Like
other fashions in taste, it diffuses.
Apparently, no one had articulated a proscription against
inimicable until recently, when
usage advisers like Garner and Fiske got hold of the word and decided
it must be an error. Now the proscription is out there in the
marketplace of taste and will probably be picked up by others.
I'm often puzzled why some usages get such opprobrium (in the face of
the actual practice of good writers) while others go unnoticed and
uncommented on. Recently, I've been looking at preposition +
of (
out/outside/inside/alongside/off of)
versus plain preposition (I intend to post on this eventually); many
usage advisers are hostile to the versions with
of: the
of is said to be "superfluous"
(Omit Needless Words!); the usage is (in most cases, incorrectly)
labeled "colloquial", or even "non-standard"; it's believed to be more
recent than the alternative (the
of
has been, inexplicably, added); and it's less frequent than the
alternative. Meanwhile, nobody seems to pay any attention to
except for vs. plain
except ("Nobody talked, except
(for) Kim"), though you could try to mount a case against this
for similar to the case against
of.
Once a proscription -- even a silly one, like Dryden's Rule, banning
stranded prepositions -- is in the marketplace, it tends to
persist. But where do the proscriptions come from? Here,
there's an enormous amount of randomness: somebody in the usage
community happens to notice something that offends him (it's almost
always a man) in some way -- often because he views it as colloquial or
innovative or regional or used by the wrong sort of people,
occasionally because that's not the way you do things in Latin -- and
writes or teaches about it. We then end up with a collection of
personal quirks and accidents of history, a big grab-bag of assorted
stuff. Speaker-oriented
hopefully
gets excoriated, while speaker-oriented
frankly and so on get a free
pass. Sentence-initial linking
however
is judged to be poor style, while sentence-initial linking
consequently and so on escape the
red pencil. I could go on like this for quite some time.
It looks like
inimicable got
by uncensured until recently simply because no one was particularly
offended by it. Not any more.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 24, 2007 02:19 PM