Dwarf planets and California lilacs
Ben Zimmer
tackles
the new technical term dwarf
planet (denoting Pluto, Ceres, Xena, and others on the way),
noting that some astronomers -- Owen Gingerich, in particular -- are
offended that, with the new definitions, dwarf planets are not planets,
which runs against our expectation that an English compound of the form
A+B is a hyponym of
B (so that, in this case dwarf
planets
WOULD be planets). Ben considers, and
dismisses, one class of compounds where hyponymy doesn't hold
(ironyms). But in fact ironyms are a special case of a more
general phenomenon. Is there a place for
dwarf planet there?
What Ben wrote:
So the fact that the IAU would like us
to think of dwarf planets as distinct from "real" planets lumps the
lexical item dwarf planet in
with such oddities as Welsh rabbit
(not really rabbit) and Rocky
Mountain oysters (not really oysters). In a 2004 article in American Speech, Larry Horn dubbed
such formations ironyms,
since they "represent lexical irony."
Should we think of dwarf planet as the latest ironym, then? I doubt the
astronomers in Prague really had lexical irony in mind...
In the larger class of compounds to which ironyms belong, the
denotation of
A+B doesn't involve
B´ (the denotation of
B) directly, but rather picks out a
class of things r(
B´)
that
RESEMBLE the things in
B´ in some specific way; (
A+B)
´
is then a subset of r(
B´)
-- rather than of
B´ --
related in some way to
A´. Let's get concrete:
look at
daylily,
rockrose, and
California lilac (three types of
plants that are all over the place here in northern California).
A daylily (genus Hemerocallis) is not a lily (genus Lilium), but it
looks pretty much like one. A rockrose (genus Cistus) is not a
rose (genus Rosa), but its flowers are very rose-like. A
California lilac (genus Ceanothus) is not a lilac (genus Syringa), but
it's a shrubby plant with lilac-colored flowers in clusters; that is, a
California lilac is a lilac-like plant that's connected in some way to
California.
There's no irony here, just the conveying of some resemblance, and
there are huge numbers of examples. (Ironyms have the component
of resemblance,
PLUS an ironic overtone.)
So, is
dwarf planet like
California lilac? It could
have been, except for the fact that
dwarf
is one of a small set of nouns --
giant
and
monster are two others --
that have developed conventional, and productive, uses as size
modifiers of nouns: unfortunately,
dwarf
X is already specialized with the meaning '(very) small X', to
the extent that modifying
dwarf
is starting to push into the syntactic territory of adjectives (and is
so classified in some dictionaries). At least in horticultural
usage, it can conjoin with clear adjectives:
Unusual dwarf, bushy, tufted habit and
spectacular foliage! The leaves of 'Shaina' are the same dark red all
summer... (
link)
and occur predicatively:
Nothing is dwarf if the spot you put it
in is too small. (
link)
and be compared:
Compact & slow growing, it is more
dwarf than Okushimo. (
link)
In fact,
dwarf is already
used in astronomy as a size modifier, in the technical term
dwarf star. Dwarf stars
ARE
stars, stars that are (among other things) small.
Given all this,
dwarf planet
was a really bad choice of terminology, pretty much guaranteed to sow
confusion. But would the astronomers consult a linguist?
Noooo.
[It would please me to write no more on this topic. Every single
time I tried to type "dwarf", I typed "drawf" first. Ack.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at August 25, 2006 05:12 PM