Reductio ad Godwinum

Anyone who has spent some time online, especially in forums or social media where chat and debate predominate, is likely to have come across references to Godwin’s Law, created by Mike Godwin in 1990:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

This builds upon reductio ad Hitlerum (aka argumentum ad Hitlerum or playing the Nazi/Hitler card), an association fallacy proposed by political philosopher Leo Strauss a few decades ago. Godwin says he aimed to:

build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme…and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons. (Wired, 1994)

Godwin’s counter-meme spread successfully – so much so, that references to Godwin’s Law are now common enough for me to suggest reductio ad Godwinum as a recursive corollary:

As an online discussion of online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference to Godwin’s Law approaches 1.

Have you ever invoked Godwin’s Law? And what other corollaries or fallacies might we idly invent?

The monstrous indecency of hybrid etymology

The word hybrid (from Latin hybrida, “mongrel”) commonly refers to animals and plants of mixed lineage, and more recently to vehicles with two or more power sources. In linguistic morphology it refers to a word formed by combining elements that originated in two or more languages. The process is called hybridization.

Many new words arise through compounding and affixation, and a lot of roots and affixes in English derive from Latin or Greek — sometimes indirectly, such as through French. (Classical compounds are a related source of new vocabulary, but they are of a “purer” strain than hybrids and need not concern us here.)

There is a tendency for like to join with like, but because affixes from other languages are so well-established in English, and their origins are not widely known, etymological affinity is not routinely observed when words are formed. English has always added foreign bits to native bits, and both to other foreign bits. It does this in its sleep.

Hybrids are ubiquitous: they “luxuriate in the English word-garden”, as Simeon Potter put it. A familiar example is television, which (via French) yokes Greek tele- “far” to Latin visio “seeing”. Neuroscience joins Greek neuro- “nerve” to science, from Latin scientia “knowledge”. Other hybrids include automobile, hypercorrection, lovable, merriment, monolingual, sociology, and talkative.

Frankenstein’s monster reads a hybrid word and collapses in a daze; Dr F. flees in fright and disgust.

Purists used to complain about hybrids as if it were somehow unsavoury to fuse morphemes from different languages. Maybe this attitude owed something to a fastidious temperament and a bias for classical learning. Jan Freeman, writing about these Frankenwords, said that “usage gurus who could flaunt their Greek and Latin did, and those who couldn’t copied them.”

Eric Partridge, in Usage and Abusage, said neologisms should avoid “unseemly misalliance” and pay heed to “etymological decency”. Ralcy Husted Bell called jeopardize “a monster”, which seems a bit harsh. These phrases give the impression that hybrids are malformed abominations, hideous chimeras to be shunned and disowned.

In their influential King’s English, the Fowler brothers object to amoral on the grounds that a- is Greek, moral is Latin, and it is “desirable that in making new words the two languages should not be mixed”. H. W. Fowler later compiled the following “ill-favoured list, of which all readers will condemn some, & some all”:

amoral, amusive, backwardation, bi-daily, bureaucracy, cablegram, climactic, coastal, colouration, dandiacal, floatation, funniment, gullible, impedance, pacifist, racial, sendee, speedometer

Several are so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine them bothering anyone; others never caught on. Often it seems to be the newness wherein lies the main trouble: rarely is there a problem with well-established hybrids. On this point, Robert Burchfield found that “the arguments apply only to words formed in the 19C. and 20C.”

Fowler believed that word-making,

like other manufactures, should be done by those who know how to do it; others should neither attempt it for themselves, nor assist the deplorable activities of amateurs by giving currency to fresh coinages before there has been time to test them.

But even if we were to deny ourselves the natural, playful urge to neologise, who would do the testing to which Fowler refers? An elite cadre of grammarians and grammaticasters, or the general population whose language it equally is? Again I find myself siding with Burchfield, in his New Fowler’s Modern English Usage:

Homogeneity of language origin comes low in [language users’] ranking of priorities; euphony, analogy, a sense of appropriateness, an instinctive belief that a word will settle in if there is a need for it and will disappear if there is not — these are the factors that operate when hybrids (like any other new words) are brought into the language.

This to me is a more sane and tolerant stance, free of purist dogma and control-freakery. Rejecting hybrids in English just because their parts’ ancient origins don’t match is pointless peevery. Bryan Garner, in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage, writes that nowadays “only a few Classics professors” object to them. Let us be thankful for that.

My only regret is that hybrid is not a hybrid and so does not describe itself the way portmanteau does. But it’s probably too late to do anything about that.

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Updates: Ben Zimmer has drawn my attention to a T-shirt with the text: “Polyamory is wrong! It is either multiamory or polyphilia but mixing Greek and Latin roots? Wrong!”

Ben quotes a similar joke from Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love: “Homosexuality? What barbarity! It’s half Greek and half Latin!”

This post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus.

[Frankenstein image from Wikimedia Commons]

Octopoem

On Twitter some time ago, I had a chat with Kory Stamper and Jeremy Kahn about the plural of octopus (octopuses? octopi? octopodes?)

This prompted Jeremy to write a rhyme, Plurals of the many-footed, in which he posed the question: “Would they think us all wusses / not to embrace the octopuses?”

I responded with eight hurried lines of nonsense, reproduced here for the pleasure (or more likely pain) of posterity:

Octopodes, they swim not run,
They have a beak but not a bill.
Larger things they tend to shun,
Littler things they tend ta kill.
But what an octopus might think –
Whether singular or plural –
Is hidden in a cloud of ink
Obscuring all things cephaloneural.

Jeremy’s post links to Kory’s helpful and popular video for Merriam-Webster about the various plurals of octopus, and to an excellent Stæfcræft & Vyākarana post on the same subject.

To these I will add this useful discussion at bradshaw of the future, who notes that “usage trumps etymology every time”.

I prefer the plural octopuses, except where rhyme or rhythm warrant one of the alternatives. An adequate summary of their merits would require several paragraphs, which would be pointless given the links above: all are worth a moment of your time, if the topic interests you.

Wikipedia also has a decent, well-referenced account.

Curiosities of biological nomenclature

Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature is a wonderful website you might not have come across. Its creator, Mark Isaak, introduces it as follows:

Scientific names of organisms are not usually known for their entertainment value. They are indispensable for clarity in communication, but most people skip over them with barely a glance. Here I collect those names that are worth a second look.

And what a collection it is. Virtually every page offers an eye-opening, smile-inducing specimen – often several of them – with succinct and edifying commentary. You’ll find funny facts, strange stories, verbal delights and historical oddities. The site is divided into sections such as Etymology, Puns, and Wordplay, and its many sub-pages amount to a feast of fine browsing material, which is regularly updated.

An example of its taxonomic lore: I learned that Piseinotecus divae, a nudibranch,* gained its peculiar name after an incident in which one of its discoverers “stepped on [a] dog on the way to the kitchen in the middle of the night”. Apparently, Piseinotecus means “I stepped on Teco”, Teco being the name of a dog that belonged either to a diva or to Professor Diva Corrêa.

Chimera fans will appreciate Boselaphus tragocamelus (an antelope, pictured below) whose Latin name translates as “ox-deer goat-camel”; Chaetopterus pugaporcinus (a marine worm) is a “Chaetopterid worm that looks like the rump of a pig” (judge for yourself); while Vampyroteuthis infernalis is, more B-movie-ishly, the “Vampire squid from Hell”. Pun names include Apopyllus now (a spider), Daphoenus demilo (an extinct bear dog), Heerz lukenatcha (a braconid), Pieza deresistans (a fly), and Verae peculya (another braconid).

Offensive names are officially prohibited, but insults and imprecations slip through, sometimes cryptically. Other names are inadvertently indecent. There’s the beetle Foadia (its offence is acronymic), Fukuia (a snail), and Silybum (milk thistle). They get much ruder. Under “Valid Words in Other Contexts” we encounter an insect named Alienates, a beetle named Euphoria, a sea urchin named Disaster, a spinosaur named Irritator, a snail named Provocator, and an arachnid named Oops.

Among the Long and Short Names in the Wordplay section, I met Polichinellobizarrocomicburlescomagicaraneus for the first time; unfortunately, its identity remains a mystery. One page is dedicated to Drosophila melanogaster’s noteworthy gene names, which include currant bun, faint sausage, karst, prospero, skittles, snafu and splat. There are anagrams and tautonyms, rhymes and reversals, onomatopoeia and oxymorons (e.g., Anoura caudifera, the tailed tailless bat).

Names of living things are often redundant and are subject to ongoing revision. One reason for their proliferation is that some namers are “splitters” rather than “lumpers”. All the more reason to be grateful for a website that records and aggregates some of the most interesting and entertaining names in biology.

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* Nudibranchs are sea slugs from paradise.

A minuscule matter of spelling

Minuscule’s main use is as an adjective meaning tiny or insignificant. It can also mean written in minuscule (= minuscular), referring to a small cursive mediaeval script. Minuscule as a noun can refer to this palaeographic writing or simply to a lowercase letter.* But its general use as an adjective is what we usually encounter, and it’s the variation in its spelling (minuscule or miniscule) that interests me here.

The word comes from French minuscule, from Latin minusculus, fem. minuscula, as in minuscula littera, ‘slightly smaller letter’. Minuscula is formed by adding the diminutive suffix -cule to minus, neuter of minor — ‘less, smaller’ — from Proto-Indo-European *mei-, ‘small’. The common prefix mini- has probably lent minuscule a folk etymology that influences its contemporary spelling: miniscule is a popular variant. Pronunciation might also have played a part. Here are some examples of miniscule I’ve come across in books:

There is even a miniscule dance floor for the perpendicular manifestations of horizontal intentions (Hugh Leonard, A Peculiar People)

Only in the microscopic domains of the atom, or the vast reaches of interstellar space, do miniscule discrepancies between nature according to Newton and nature according to Nature make themselves known. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos)

hiragana […] often, in miniscule writing, glosses obscure kanji to help the reader (Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Language)

Miniscule occupies a grey area of legitimacy and is likely to attract criticism. Some call it non-standard; others dismiss it as an error. Bryan Garner rejects it, MWDEU doesn’t, while The Columbia Guide to Standard American English sits on the Fence of Judgement but advises the uncontroversial spelling minuscule. The OED says miniscule is “very common but regarded as erroneous”; its associated website is less lenient still.

Unless you’re prepared to argue miniscule’s case, you’re better off avoiding it. If you want to remember the more correct form, think of its association with minus, or tell yourself that minuscule is preferred by us. Or maybe, like Mark Peters, you consider the issue nanoscule.

* Its counterparts are majuscule (n., adj.) and majuscular (adj.).

Ad nauseum ad nauseam

Ad nauseum is a very common misspelling of ad nauseam, even among careful writers. It’s a subtle enough error to slip past the copy editors of reputable publications (recently here, for example, until a commenter pointed it out). The wayward spelling ad nausea also appears, sometimes as a joke. I mentioned ad nauseam before, along with a mnemonic to commit the correct form to memory, but the prevalence of ad nauseum suggests the need for a dedicated post; some background information might help.

Ad nauseam is an adverbial phrase, clearly Latin: ad here means to; nauseam is nausea in the accusative. So ad nauseam means to (sea-)sickness, i.e., to a nauseating or sickening extent, often figurative for “to a very tiresome or boring degree”. To do anything ad nauseam is to be sick of doing it. The phrase is said to originate from argumentum ad nauseam, a term in logic similar in sense to argumentum ad infinitum. It has been used in English since the 17C.; there’s a slightly earlier form, usque ad nauseam or ad nauseam usque (all the way to nausea, i.e., to the point of nausea), which is rarely encountered nowadays.

The difficulty with spelling ad nauseam probably results partly from its Latin origin: we recognise its Latin-ness but associate the language more with -um endings. There’s also the indistinct pronunciation: though it’s correctly pronounced /ad ‘nɔːzɪam, -sɪam/, the closing /-am/ is often rendered as /-ɘm/. The unstressed vowel sound ɘ is a schwa, known in Spelling Bee circles as “the dreaded schwa” because it’s so difficult to guess which vowel lies behind it. Thus it is with ad nauseam. To remember the spelling, think of nausea. Or more elaborately, say to yourself: “I am nauseated not to know.” If you think it might be -um, consider ummm a hint that you should keep wondering about it another moment, until you think: “Ah! Now I am sure: it’s ad nauseam.”

Google search hits shouldn’t be taken literally, but they can offer a crude indication of popularity; and a comparison today shows the erroneous form topping the traditional by 530,000 to 476,000. I could say I see ad nauseum ad nauseam, but that would be an overstatement. (Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with exaggeration.) It’s possible that ad nauseum will eventually be accepted as standard — English is not Latin, after all — but for now I advise the use of the standard spelling ad nauseam.

Forums, forum, fora

Forum has three main meanings. There is the everyday sense — a place or medium for public discussion and the open exchange of ideas; the legal sense — a court of law, tribunal, or other legal assembly; and the historical sense — a marketplace or other public arena in ancient Roman cities, where civic, commercial and judicial activities were conducted.

The first sense includes online discussion forums. Several of these have featured discussions about the correct plural of forum itself — is it forums or fora? — as have some language blogs and other sites. Latin plurals are evidently a popular topic. Some of the commentary is sensible and even-handed, but some comprises simple repudiation of one plural form or the other (e.g. ‘The plural of “forum” is… FORA since it’s a Latin word. [...] Sorry to be pedantic, but that’s the English language for you’), so a little clarification seems to be in order.

Forums reflects the word’s naturalisation into English, while fora stays true to its Latin origin. Forums is much more common, outnumbering fora by a considerable margin. This is especially so in the word’s everyday sense; in its legal and historical senses, fora is less unusual. (I’ve based these assessments on personal reading and editing experience, and on searches in various corpora and search engines; I would welcome a more rigorous contextual breakdown.)

Fora in the everyday sense of forum is not incorrect, but some readers might find it fussy or pretentious, and usage commentators disagree over its suitability. Don Watson considers it “archaic”. All three editions of Fowler’s report that the plural occurs only as forums. (This, however, is demonstrably wrong.) Kenneth G. Wilson, in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, lists both forms as standard. Bryan Garner takes an intermediate position, describing forums as “preferred” and fora as “pedantic”. So it’s fair to conclude that this is a grey area.

The English language is inconsistent in its pluralisation of Latin words. Of those ending in -um, some retain the Latin endings (bacterium → bacteria; quantum → quanta; stratum → strata; ovum → ova; desideratum → desiderata); others, being more Anglicised, generally take the English -s (albums, asylums, museums, gymnasiums, crematoriums, premiums); while some commonly take either, depending on context or personal preference (atriums or atria; aquariums or aquaria; compendiums or compendia; podiums or podia).

In summary: fora is not wrong, but unless you’re writing about law or Roman history, you’re better off using forums. Foras is wrong.

See also: Data is data, or are they?

[image source]