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:

A radical awareness of language’s mutability

I recently read Henry Hitchings’s Defining the world: The extraordinary story of Dr Johnson’s dictionary, and I recommend it heartily to those of you who enjoy its principal fields of interest: words, history, literature, biography, and lexicography.

As well as recreating the history of Johnson’s Dictionary, which was first published in 1755, Hitchings’s book serves as a frank and affectionate portrait of Samuel Johnson himself, and as a vivid profile of 18th-century England. It’s an elegant and enthralling account that includes a keen analysis of Johnson’s linguistic attitudes and shows how these developed over the course of creating his mighty work.

Before beginning the Dictionary in earnest, Johnson wrote a lengthy Plan of an English Dictionary, in which he presented his ambitions for the book and his suitability for the task. It was addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield in order to win his patronage. Chesterfield, we read, was “obsessed with propriety of usage . . . and with embalming or even bettering the language”. Johnson said the dictionary’s chief intent would be “to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom”.

The order of these aspirations is no accident. Johnson’s characterisation of English as “licentious” and “inconstant” has what Hitchings refers to as “a distinctly moral cast”. But although the emphasis on stability was “consistent with [Johnson's] own political instincts”, Hitchings suggests that it was probably exaggerated for Chesterfield’s sake: years later the Dictionary’s preface would contain a sober and eloquent acknowledgement of the irresistibility of linguistic change.

From Defining the world:

Linguistic conservatives like Chesterfield were afraid that unchecked changes in general usage would cause the English of the eighteenth century to become as bewildering to its inheritors as the language of Chaucer was to them. They were correct, of course, in seeing that their language was in flux. Then and now, the engines of this change include international commerce and travel, which involve contact with other languages; shifts in political doctrine or consensus; translations, which frequently preserve the idiom of their originals; fashion (in Johnson’s age, the nascent cult of sensibility), whose adherents require a special figurative language to articulate their refined and rarefied perspectives; and advertising, which uses foreign terms to connote mystique. These transfusions are what keep a language alive, but this is a modern view. Chesterfield could not begin to see that change was a force for the good. With time, Johnson’s conservatism — the desire to ‘fix’ the language — gave way to a radical awareness of language’s mutability. But from the outset the impulse to standardize and straighten English out was in competition with the belief that one should chronicle what’s there, and not just what one would like to see.

250 years later, Johnson’s Dictionary remains “not merely readable, but vital”, Hitchings writes, its every page brimming with philological lore and choice quotation. It is not just a landmark in lexicography but a great work of literature, described by Robert Burchfield as “the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank”.*

The sixth edition of the Dictionary (1785) is available in multiple formats from the Internet Archive: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

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* My Tumblr blog has a short passage by Burchfield on semantic drift.

Academy of English? Ain’t no sense in it.

This post is in three parts: the first comments on the Queen’s English Society (QES) and the Academy of Contemporary English formed under its auspices; the second introduces two groups set up to oppose them; the third makes some general remarks. It’s a long post, but not as long (or cranky) as my earlier “The Queen’s English Society deplores your impurities“, which you might like to read first, for context.

Wikipedia has a few basic facts about the QES and its Academy. You probably know that Wikipedia is a portmanteau word created by blending wiki with encyclopedia. If you didn’t, I don’t recommend asking the people at the Academy what portmanteau words are, because they do not know:

And this, we are told, “is where the Academy is in its element”. Even if it hadn’t confused portmanteau words with auto-antonyms, its point would be just as senseless: neither construction is a “[reason] why English is being debased”. Though you could, if you were so inclined, make the case that English is debased by hopelessly muddled definitions.

Behind the QES’s dubious claims to authority and good judgement in English usage lies an ignorance of how language works and an ignoble attitude to non-standard expression. My earlier post has many examples. This one has some more.

The enormity of Webster’s Third

“I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.” – Lionel Trilling

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, first published in 1961, was among the most contentious reference books of its time. It signalled a clear editorial shift from its 1934 predecessor, most controversially in that it empirically described conventional English usage more than it prescribed ‘correct’ usage (as Webster’s Second had done). Where W2 had liberally applied labels like erroneous, incorrect, improper, vulgar, and ludicrous, W3 preferred to label words as substandard and nonstandard, and did so only infrequently.

The response to its publication was mixed, to put it mildly. Some luminaries accused Webster’s of abandoning its authority; others denounced the book’s permissiveness (unlike W2, it included many taboo words; this remains a sticky subject). Wilson Follett described its makers as “patient and dedicated saboteurs”, declaring their work “a scandal and a disaster” and fulminating that it had “thrust upon us a dismaying assortment of the questionable, the perverse, the unworthy, and the downright outrageous”. Jacques Barzun said that he didn’t read it all, but that he laughed at least once on every page he read.

So much for the sobriety of Merriam-Webster’s cardinal virtues of dictionary making: accuracy, clearness, and comprehensiveness.

The New York Times advised its staff to keep referring to W2, feeling that its successor could “only accelerate the deterioration of the mother tongue”. The National Review found W3 “big, expensive and ugly” and said it had “only one standard – inclusiveness”. The Journal of the American Bar Association called it “a flagrant example of lexicographic irresponsibility”, while the Richmond News Leader said that no school or library was compelled to buy it,* and that “no English teacher need respect its corruptions” [via]. Dwight Macdonald, in an influential savaging in the New Yorker, called it a “massacre” and wondered “where completeness ends and madness begins”. He said it had “made a sop of the solid structure of English, and encouraged the language to eat up himself”.

Solid structure? Himself?! At this point I need to remind myself that yes, he was writing about the English language.

A few critics were less caustic and appreciated W3’s non-judgemental approach and modern linguistic sense. (Though they generally had reservations too.) Mario Pei noted its “many commendable features”, predicting that it would “enjoy a healthy life, even if not too prolonged”, while Robert Burchfield described it as “a bold landmark fashioned to meet the needs of the present”. Ethel Strainchamps praised the dictionary in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch review, then wrote a follow-up article that addressed the shortcomings of some of the criticism. She believed the attacks suggested a “cultural lag”, about which more below.

Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism: War is over (if you want it)

Language is an ever-changing and developing expression of human personality, and does not grow well under rigorous direction. — C. L. Wrenn, The English Language

What grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize; usage evolves itself little disturbed by their likes & dislikes. And yet the temptation to show how better use might have been made of the material to hand is sometimes irresistible. — H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

This rather long post was prompted by an entry on the Oxford University Press blog, in which Alexandra D’Arcy writes about her interest in language usage and how it was shaped by, but contrasts with, her grandmother’s prescriptivist approach. Although Ms. D’Arcy did not inherit her relative’s severity towards language, she acknowledges the love of words and their application that lay behind it, and that influenced her own career choice (sociolinguistics) and feelings about language.

Prescriptivism and descriptivism are contrasting approaches to grammar and usage, particularly to how they are taught. Both are concerned with the state of a language — descriptivism with how it’s used, prescriptivism with how it should be used. Descriptivists describe, systematically recording and analysing the endlessly changing ways people speak and write. Descriptive advice is, as Jesse Sheidlower put it, almost an oxymoron. Prescriptivists prescribe and sometimes proscribe, emphasising rules and guidelines based on the conservation of customs (and sometimes a mythical ideal of correctness), and on judging what is or isn’t acceptable — which poses, among other questions: acceptable to whom, when, and why?

In praise of a reference book: MWDEU

My enthusiasm for The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU), which I hereby declare, will make immediate sense to those who refer to it in their own investigations of English usage. To the majority, who are more likely never to have heard of it, or then only in passing, such enthusiasm may seem idiosyncratic or downright nerdy. So be it.

The uninitiated can, if it helps, think of MWDEU as a classic of its kind, though its profile is much lower than that of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style or Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which are often iconically shortened to Strunk & White and Fowler, respectively. To summarise what MWDEU offers I can do no better than its editor E. Ward Gilman, whose preface says it:

examines and evaluates common problems of confused or disputed usage from two perspectives: that of historical background, especially as shown in the great historical dictionaries, and that of present-day usage, chiefly as shown by evidence in the Merriam-Webster files.

That it does this in such a thorough and unbiased way is what elevates MWDEU so far above the ordinary. Each entry is presented in a much broader context than is typically the case in books that advise on English usage and style. Take for example its short entry on insightful:

This relatively new adjective (first recorded in 1907) has lately become something of a minor irritant to a few usage commentators, who have described it variously as ‘journalese’ (Zinsser 1976), ‘a suspicious overstatement for “perceptive”’ (Strunk & White 1979) and ‘jargon’ (Janis 1984). Dictionaries, on the other hand, routinely treat it as an ordinary, inoffensive word. Its use is common and has been for several decades. Here is a representative sampling of the ways in which it is used…

All language reference books have their blind spots, prejudices and unconscious axioms, and MWDEU has been criticised for being too liberal, too prevaricating, too descriptivist. These criticisms are fair, but they pale in comparison to what the book supplies: great and balanced content in abundance, and no dogmatic prohibitions or intolerant admonishments. Alongside each word and phrase we get a historical overview of its usage, interpretation and application; clear and astute analysis; and repeated advice to judge for oneself.

The lasting impression is of being treated without condescension as a person with the good sense to assess the evidence and arguments and to make up one’s own mind. MWDEU does not hector its readers with shoulds, oughts, musts and don’t-even-think-about-its. There are neither emotional outbursts nor emotive appeals. Since English usage is, has been and is likely to remain a hotbed of contention, MWDEU’s polite and level tone is as refreshing as its broadminded counsel is constructive.

To paraphrase Thomas Aquinas, beware the grammarian of one reference book – especially if that book is The Elements of Style. In any edition, EoS is an eminently useful book: it is short, direct and efficient, and it has plenty of good advice. It is also rather simplistic and occasionally self-contradictory. It positively quivers with imperious finger wagging, which has helped fuel decades of ill-judged fussiness. Its tight, parsimonious rules, useful in their way, have unfortunately been adopted by some readers as universal commandments.

In a sense it is unfair to compare EoS, a short style guide, with MWDEU, a hefty usage dictionary. But the former remains so popular, and the latter so comparatively unknown, that I wanted to do my bit to redress the balance; and I find their antithetical attitudes interesting and worthy of examination.

If in writing something you are racing the clock, consulting MWDEU might not be in your best interest, since it doesn’t provide yes/no answers but rather opens one can of worms after another. For this reason it is less likely to be favoured by journalists, or anyone who prefers a short, definitive answer even at the expense of context. Those with more time on their hands, and indeed anyone with an interest in the history of the English language, could not fail to appreciate its contents, which are lucid, informative and entertaining.

To appeal to authority I’ll cite Geoffrey K. Pullum, a linguistics professor at the University of Edinburgh and contributor to the Language Log blog, who described MWDEU as “the finest work of scholarship on English grammar and usage I have ever seen, in thirty years of doing research on English grammar”. The book also comes in concise and pocket editions, which are shorter but newer; i.e., they are not just abridged editions. Best of all, at least for those of you persuaded by my zeal, MWDEU is now online. Should you prefer a physical book, you are likely to find it excellent value. Happy reading!

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Less or fewer?

The BBC reports that Tesco is to change its checkout signs to read Up to 10 items, thereby sidestepping the problem of whether it should be 10 items or less or 10 items or fewer. Traditionally I was inclined to mentally amend the former to the latter, but I’ve learned that this ‘correction’ is controvertible.

Generally speaking the difference between fewer and less is like the difference between many and much: one is for stuff you can count, the other is for stuff you can’t or don’t count, e.g. many jobs but much work, fewer jobs but less work. In technical terms, fewer is used with “count nouns“, less with “mass nouns”. So one has fewer banknotes but less money, fewer troubles but less trouble (some nouns have a foot in both count and mass categories). Fewer refers to numbers of things; less refers to measurements or degrees of something.

That’s the general rule, but actual usage is not so simple. Some standard phrases go against the guideline (Write your answer in 100 words or less; He made one less mistake this time), while less is also used with mass nouns when the noun is measured in increments or fractions. Time, distance, money, statistical figures and mathematical amounts can be segmented this way, so one writes:

less than six months
five kilometres or less
less than €100
10 is less than 12½

An exception is when the noun is used in a way that emphasises its distinct units, rather than its fractional nature. One writes “fewer days’ maternity leave” because in this example the days are treated as indivisible blocks.

Merriam-Webster shows how Robert Baker’s mild preference for using fewer with count nouns, which he expressed in 1770, seems to have been subsequently set in stone as an absolute injunction against using less with count nouns. This injunction seems more arbitrary than sound. There are instances when fewer is preferred, but less is often fine when received wisdom says it’s anathema. Less has been used with count nouns for over a thousand years, so it’s about as standard as it gets. The ‘rule’ is a relative upstart.

If in doubt, try them both out – the human ear can be a good guide to usage. If you’re still not sure, there’s a fair chance that either usage is acceptable. Writing less where fewer would be more elegant – or more formal, where so desired – is not going to get you sent you to hell, and if you get sent to Tesco, you’ll be spared the dilemma at the checkout.

Update: If you remain unconvinced: Bill Walsh, Motivated Grammar, Mark Liberman, Bradshaw of the Future and Arrant Pedantry have written interesting posts on this strangely contentious subject.