Accidental spelling at Google; Mary Matalin speaks unfortuitously
Searching on Google a few days ago for
unfortuitously -- more below on why
I was doing this -- I was startled to get (along with ca. 213 webhits)
a query from Google asking if I meant
unfortuantely.
Yes,
unfortuantely. My
interest piqued, I googled on
unfortuantely
(I can't tell you how hard it is to type this word) and got, wow, ca.
486,000 hits.
AND NO QUERY if I meant
unfortunately. All I can say
is that this is an unfortuante situation, especially the lack of
querying on
unfortuantely. (
Unfortunately, by the way, gets
hundreds of millions of hits, and, whew, no query.)
Why was I googling on
unfortuitously,
you ask. Because Johannes Fabian had pointed out to me that Mary
Matalin had used the word in an NBC morning news interview on 4/20/06
and he couldn't figure out what she meant by it. Here's the
exchange, as retrieved by John Baker on ADS-L on 4/21/06:
COURIC: And this shift, Mary, can--can
people conclude from this shift that--that the White House is very
worried about the upcoming midterm elections and about the Republicans
losing control?
Ms. MATALIN: Well, the White House and the Hill is conscious of their
reality. This is a very polarized country right now. There are a number
of seats that are unfortuitously competitive because of
retirements. There's--the Democrats have--have done a good job in
recruiting. They have not done a good job in preparing any sort of
policies or an agenda. They don't have any vision. So what this comes
down to in the fall, as in all elections, are a choice--and we have to
make our--the choice of voting for us very clear and the catastrophic
consequences of voting for a Democrat.
(Try not to focus on the glitches in the speech of someone speaking
both passionately and off the cuff. Focus on "unfortuitously
competitive".)
MWDEU has a fairly long
article on
fortuitous and its
development from the meaning 'by accident, by chance' to 'by fortunate
accident, by lucky chance' (the meaning that Baker reports as his own)
all the way to 'fortunate, lucky' (a usage that people have been
complaining about from Fowler's time on, possibly because it is so
widespread). Also a shorter article on
fortuitously. Given this
background,
unfortuitous
ought to mean either 'not by accident' (this would be the historically
defensible usage), 'not by fortunate accident' (which Baker suggests
would refer to something that is both unfortunate and not by chance),
or simply 'unfortunate'. And
unfortuitously
would be the adverbial version of this.
Unfortuantely, by the time we get to
unfortuitously,
the historical meaning seems to have vanished from the web; not one of
the Google webhits has the word clearly being used to mean 'not by
accident'. In fact, they can all be seen as merely conveying
'unfortunately'. As for Mary Matalin's use, that's my best guess
now, though she might be understood as saying that the Democrats'
success at recruiting candidates for the seats vacated by retirements
is what makes those contests competitive, so that the competitiveness
results not from the accident of retirements but from the intentional
acts of the Democrats. If so, then I'd take her to be conveying
the 'both unfortunately and not by chance' meaning.
But you see how hard it can be to tease the meanings apart. And
Matalin herself is unlikely to be able to reconstruct what she intended
to convey in the heat of the interview moment.
Meanwhile, Fabian (whose native language is not English, a fact that
causes him to think more about the details of the language than your
average anthropologist would) observed to me that he would have
expected the negated version of
fortuitously
to be
nonfortuitously, not
unfortuitously. As it
happens, there's only one legitimate example of
nonfortuitously on the web (in a
legal decision, where it does, however, mean 'not by chance'), so his
expectation is not borne out on the web. There is a possibly
subtle point here, though: my first impulse would be to read
nonfortuitously as 'not in a manner
that is fortuitous' and
unfortuitously
as 'in a manner that is not fortuitous', though I find the two scopings
remarkably hard to distinguish in the real world, and in any case the
more I think about it, the more I think that if there is a distinction
in semantics here, both words can convey both meanings.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at April 26, 2006 11:16 AM