Another reversal
Following up on my
posting
about problems with converses and directionality, Chris Lance
wrote this morning to ask about
substitute
'replace', as in this
Bizarro
cartoon from a couple of years ago:
I've written about this case at some length on the American Dialect
Society mailing list, over several years, but now see that it hasn't
turned up on Language Log. So here's a very brief account of the
phenomenon.
For details of the various uses of
substitute
and their history, I refer you to a paper by David Denison, still in
press but
available
in .pdf format on his website.
According to Denison, the development comes in three stages. In a
nutshell:
1. standard substitute:
substitute NEW for OLD (i.e., substitute a fried chunk of your left
buttock for the pork chop) -- vs. replace OLD with/by NEW (i.e., replace the pork chop with/by a fried
chunk of your left buttock). Note: the prepositions are
important.
2. encroached substitute: substitute OLD with/by NEW (i.e., substitute the pork chop with/by a fried
chunk of your left buttock). The verb substitute encroaches on replace by taking on its argument
structure (with the result
that the order of the two arguments mirrors the sequence of the two
denotata in time and their information status, in both cases old before
new). But standard substitute
continues in use; the two meanings are usually distinguished by
preposition choice -- though to judge from comments in my e-mail, this
is a subtlety that escapes many people. Encroached substitute has been around since
the 17th century, and as MWDEU
notes, despite having been condemned by many commentators, it's been
appearing in standard writing on both sides of the Atlantic for a long
time (and has been recognized as a standard variant in Merriam-Webster
dictionaries since WNI2 in
1934).
3. reversed substitute: substitute OLD for NEW (i.e., substitute the pork chop for a fried chunk
of your left buttock, as in the Bizarro cartoon). This one
-- a blend of standard and encroached substitute
-- is genuinely recent, apparently becoming widespread in the U.K. only
about twenty years ago, though now spreading to the U.S., as in the
cartoon (the cartoonist Dan Piraro is American). Denison argues
that the vector for its spread in the U.K. was the language of sport,
in particular football/soccer: the spread of reversed substitute beginning in the mid-80s
follows the institution of tactical substitution in soccer in the
1966-67 season. As Chris Lance put it in e-mail to me:
If a manager makes a substitution
during the course of a game, then the player taken off is said to have
been substituted. From there, it's a small step to say that the player
taken off has been substituted for the player who replaced him. This
usage now seems to have spread to other contexts.
Understandably, many speakers have
trouble interpreting reversed substitute,
which functions as the converse of the standard verb. You have to
rely on context to figure out which meaning is intended.
Plenty of detail, documentation, and discussion in Denison's
paper.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 24, 2007 06:35 PM