Scanting out
scanting
Some forty years ago Haj Ross coined the term
scanting out for the paralytic
bafflement that afflicts many people when they try to say how they use
some relatively infrequent expression. It happened to me
yesterday.
Scanting out goes like this:
You're asked how you use the word
scant,
and immediately you supply some instance of
a scant MEASURE
of
SUBSTANCE, say
a scant cup of sugar.
You go on to observe that, though
scant
certainly appears to be an adjective, it can't be used predicatively: *
This cup of sugar is scant.
Now you've got it boxed in, between a context in which it's clearly
acceptable and one in which it's clearly unacceptable. But at
this point things can get nasty, there in the middle.
If it's an adjective, maybe it can be compared: ?
This is an even scanter cup of sugar.
?
This is a more scant cup of sugar
than I've ever seen. ?
This
is the scantest cup of sugar I've ever seen. Or otherwise
modified: ?
This is a really/pretty
scant cup of coffee. Though it can't occur in ordinary
predicatives, maybe it can occur in fronted ones: ?
Scant though the cup of sugar was, it was
enough for the cake.
At this point, other expressions crowd into your consciousness and
interfere with your judgments:
scanty,
skimpy,
sparse,
not quite a,
nearly/almost a. One moment
nearly everything seems not too bad, the next moment hardly anything
seems fully ok. You have scanted out. The mechanism that
allows you to make acceptability judgments has shorted out on
scant, its circuits overloaded.
That's the scanting-out experience. Yesterday it happened to me,
after I read this sentence:
You seem proud of your ignorance, inventing words as
they seem fit.
(I was being berated for my defense of
trepidatious, but that's not
what's at issue here.) My eye and ear were caught by
as they seem fit, which didn't seem
quite felicitous to me. So I started to think about how I use
seem fit. ?
I sent a small gift, as seems/seemed fit.
?
It seems fit to close the meeting at
this point. And so on. Maybe it should have been
as you [not
they]
see [not
seem]
fit. Or maybe
as they seem fitting [not
fit] (
to you). Maybe the original
sentence was a blend of these. On the other hand, it didn't seem
THAT
bad; maybe it was really ok.
In any case, within seconds I no longer had any feel for how
seem fit works for me. I
googled on "seem fit" and "seems fit", but that merely produced a
blizzard of examples, none of which seemed entirely acceptable or
entirely unacceptable to me. I began to wonder if I actually used
seem fit at all. I'm
sure I use
seem fitting/
appropriate and
see fit to, but maybe I don't use
seem fit myself, except with
fit in other senses:
physically and mentally fit,
fit
for the job,
fit to go to war,
fit to be tied, and so on. Maybe I
just recognize it when other people use it. My head hurts.
No doubt some other people are clearer about how things work for
them. But that won't help
ME. Maybe
if I had a large enough searchable sample of my own speaking and
writing, I could figure out what I do with
seem fit (if anything).
Meanwhile, my
seem fit
circuit is out.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 1, 2005 09:00 PM