The trouble with ‘fulsome’

The word fulsome is used quite regularly by public figures in Ireland, often politicians promising or demanding apologies. Whenever this happens, it is criticised as an “incorrect” usage: see for example this letter to the Irish Times, which supports its point by reference to the AP Stylebook.

This is not a new complaint, but it is a debatable one. The trouble isn’t that fulsome is being used incorrectly, but that it has more than one common and legitimate meaning in modern English. Compounding this is the awkward fact that some of its meanings are contradictory and used in similar contexts, so the speaker’s intent isn’t always obvious.

The disputed meaning of fulsome – “abundant, copious, full” – is the earliest sense of the word, dating to Middle English and described by Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage (MWCDEU) as “the etymologically purest sense”. It fell out of favour but returned in the 20th century, attracting criticism. Though often considered a less than proper usage, it is popular, and broadly applied:

Howling ambiguities

As a lazy Sunday offering, a selection of entries from Denys Parsons’ entertaining book It Must Be True: Classic Newspaper Howlers, Bloomers, and Misprints.

They’re not referenced in detail, unfortunately, but I’m willing to believe they’re all genuine instances of accidental ambiguity. Some can be found elsewhere online.

1. After using your ointment my face started to clear up at once, and after using two jars it was gone altogether. (Ad in Bristol paper)
2. Dyke stated in his complaint that the defendant owned a large dog that walked the floor most of the night, held noisy midnight parties, and played the radio so that sleep was impossible. (Australian paper)
3. Wrap poison bottles in sandpaper and fasten with scotch tape or a rubber band. If there are children in the house, lock them in a small metal box. (Philadelphia Record)
4. Its lone peal summons the faithful to worship while the others are dismantled and repaired. (Bucks Advertiser)
5. Mrs. Oscar Maddox is able to be up after being confined to bed for several weeks with malaria fever, to the delight of her friends. (Thomasville (Georgia) Times-Enterprise)
6. The Nilotic race is remarkable for the disproportionately long legs of its men and women. They extend on the eastern side of the Nile right down into the Ugandan Protectorate. (From a book by Sir Harry H. Johnston)
7. …and a few moments after the Countess had broken the traditional bottle of champagne on the bows of the noble ship, she slid slowly and gracefully down the slipway, entering the water with scarcely a splash. (Essex paper)
8. LOST Antique cameo ring, depicting Adam and Eve in Market Square Saturday night. (Ad in Essex paper)
9. The thing that first caught my eye was a large silver cup that Charles had won for skating on the mantelpiece. (short story)
10. The native inhabitants produce all manner of curios, the great majority of which appear to command a ready sale among the visitors, crude and commonplace as they frequently are. (Bulawayo Chronicle)
11. When the baby is done drinking it must be unscrewed and laid in a cool place under a tap. If the baby does not thrive on fresh milk it should be boiled. (Women’s magazine)
12. Discovered at 5.06 a.m. the flames starting on the third floor of the Midwest Salvage Co., spread so rapidly that the first firemen on the scene were driven back to safety and leaped across three streets to ignite other buildings. (Cincinnati Times Star)
13. Princess B__ wore a white and gold lace gown which she’d saved for the occasion. To give you an idea how elaborate it was, the centre-piece was a mirror 13½ feet long with elaborate matching candelabra of fruit-baskets. (Los Angeles Mirror)
14. From Llandrindod you proceed along the lovely valley of the Ithon, growing more beautiful as you proceed. (Motor Cycle)

Many of these ambiguities are anaphoric. Anaphora is something everyone’s familiar with, though they mightn’t know the term. It’s the use of a word or phrase to substitute for an earlier element – the antecedent.

So in #1′s it was gone altogether, it is an anaphor referring back to an unidentified blemish, but technically it could also refer to my face, hence the ambiguity. Here, the absurdist interpretation comes more naturally.

In A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, David Crystal says anaphoric reference is a way of “marking the identity between what is being expressed and what has already been expressed”. See the lyrics of Christine Collins’s ‘Linguistics Love Song‘ for a play on it. Cataphora is similar but involves forward reference, e.g., Consider the following.

Grammatical jargon aside, which is your favourite ambiguity here, or do you remember other examples?

A grisly crash blossom

What would you do to escape prosecution?

Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking.

Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

Subjected to unreasonable laughter

From the Sligo Times, date unknown:

In many parts of Co. Sligo hares are now practically unknown because of the unreasonable laughter to which they have been subjected in recent years.

The Sligo Times was published from 1909–1914. I haven’t seen this superb typo in its original context, but I’d like to think it’s genuine. It appears in A Steroid Hit the Earth, an amusing misprint-o-rama by Martin Toseland.

Who’d have guessed hares were so sensitive to mockery?

Fashionable ambiguity

For a few years in the 1950s, independent publishing company André Deutsch rented the top two-thirds of a doctor’s house in London. Diana Athill, then an editor at the company, describes them as “happy years, but still a touch amateurish: did proper publishers have to put a board over a bath to make a packing-bench?” (Stet: An Editor’s Life*).

During its time in that location, however, the company did well enough to buy Derek Verschoyle’s firm and to move into its premises in Soho. Athill recalls one consequence of the deal:

One of the more burdensome books we inherited from him was a pointless compilation called Memorable Balls, a title so much tittered over that we thought of leaving it out when we were arranging our stand at The Sunday Times’s first book fair. Finally one copy was shoved into an inconspicuous corner – where the Queen Mother, who had opened the fair, instantly noticed it. Picking it up, she exclaimed with delight: ‘Oh, what a tempting title!’ André insisted that it was his confusion over this that made him drop her a deep curtsey instead of a bow.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, Memorable Balls has nothing to do with sport or anatomy but concerns formal dances. It was edited by James Laver, an author and fashion historian who came up with a system he called Laver’s Law (Taste and Fashion, 1937) to describe popular attitudes to fashion:

Was the author’s tongue partly in cheek when he composed this table? I don’t have a copy of Taste and Fashion, or any of Laver’s other books, so I can’t infer his tone from context.

It is in any case a revealing list of adjectives, some of which I often see applied to language usages. “Language is like dress,” wrote Simeon Potter in Our Language. “We vary our dress to suit the occasion.”

In honour of Laver’s Memorable Balls, I propose Balls’ Law: Bawdy double entendres never fall fully out of fashion.

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* For another anecdote from Athill’s marvellous memoir, see this earlier post.

It is Cork

Once, when Frank O’Connor was visiting James Joyce in Paris, he asked him about a picture that was hanging in the hallway.

Joyce said it was Cork.

O’Connor replied that he recognised his home city, and that it was the frame he was wondering about.

Joyce said it was cork.