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:

Usage Peeve Bingo

If you search Google Images for “buzzword bingo”, you’ll see how popular a game (or pretend game) it is. Some examples were probably inspired by Dilbert, veteran victim of business jargon:

By comparison, bingo cards of grammar/usage peeves are surprisingly rare. On Twitter recently I described a Guardian article as “peever’s bingo” because it contained so many timeworn usage peeves, like literally and whom.

Maybe I had this comment by LanguageHat at the back of my mind. In any case, author and ex-copyeditor Scott Huler replied that an actual bingo card of pedantic peeves would be a good idea. So here it is:

Whilst, amongst, amidst — old-fashioned or normal?

Language peeves can develop when a word or phrase becomes, or seems to become, rapidly popular – ongoing, for example. You begin to notice it everywhere, and you say Enough! And then there are usages people dislike for the opposite reason: they’re no longer popular enough. They have become… old-fashioned.

Anti-anti-Americanismism

A recent article on the BBC America website features “10 Things Americans Say… and What They Really Mean”. It begins with an unpromising generalisation and a gratuitous sideswipe:

When it comes to the spoken word, Americans are a truly baffling bunch. So we’ve decoded their most irritating idioms.

Here’s an example of said “decoding” which, though it may have been intended as humour, seems to me sour and condescending:

To infinitely split with sense

Last month I wrote about the unhappy consequences of avoiding split infinitives – a silly superstition that leads writers and editors who believe in it to sometimes make a mush of otherwise lucid prose. Calling the rule a fossilised, misbegotten bogeyman of writing style, I catalogued many examples from books where split-infinitive avoidance creates unnecessary ambiguity or awkwardness.

For example: “songbirds lose the ability fully to supplement what was not acquired”, in Terrence Deacon’s Symbolic Species, may mislead: there’s a difference between fully losing an ability to supplement, and losing an ability to fully supplement. In a comment, Jonathon Owen said of another example (“Adequately to judge this girl”) that it “doesn’t even sound like real English anymore; it sounds like Yoda.”

At Lingua Franca today, Geoffrey Pullum criticises a similar example he saw in the Economist: “a bill that would force any NGO receiving cash from abroad publicly to label itself a ‘foreign agent’”. The ambiguity is, in Pullum’s words, unfortunate and unnecessary. Unnecessary from the point of view of grammar, style and common sense, that is, but necessary if the Economist‘s style guide is to be obeyed:

Happy the man who has never been told that it is wrong to split an infinitive: the ban is pointless. Unfortunately, to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it.

Lane Greene, who writes insightfully about language for the Economist and elsewhere, dislikes the rule but defends it in the context of journalism: “diverting readers with our style risks distracting them from our reporting and analysis”. I see where he’s coming from, but who’s to say the peevers’ distraction at sanely split infinitives outweighs the distraction of ordinary readers who flinch at the avoidable problems Pullum details?

Jonathon Owen, at Arrant Pedantry, puts the choice thus: “will you please the small but vocal peevers, or the more numerous reasonable people?” Some of the former can surely be persuaded by argument, evidence and good writing; the entrenched, unaccommodating views of the remainder may be better ignored.

Capitulating to the peevers and cranks sacrifices brains to the zombie rule. I’d love to see more style guides dismiss it as the obstructive irrelevance that it is.

[Previously: How awkwardly to avoid split infinitives.]

On linguistic pruning and peeving

I have two new posts on language at Macmillan Dictionary Blog.

First, Linguistic botany looks at metaphors that draw parallels between language usage and gardening, beginning with Otto Jespersen’s famous comparison of English with a park “laid out seemingly without any definite plan”:

Jespersen was not the first to draw this analogy, and he won’t be the last, but it remains a fruitful comparison. We wander the park of language at will, speaking more or less like those around us. We can stick to the established paths, or we may forge new byways and see where they take us. But despite the great scope for variation in expression, we can take idiosyncrasy and experimentation only so far before communication begins to falter.

There is some discussion in the comments about why usage attracts such intense acrimony compared to gardening. Your thoughts on this would be welcome, in either location.

The title of my next post, Many right ways, is a reference to what Arnold Zwicky has called “One Right Way”, a prescriptivist principle used to object to language change and innovation. I find such a rigid approach

out of step with what language is and how people use it – it’s like trying to impose a uniform on public clothing habits. One of the great things about language is that it gives us so many options. We swim in expressive abundance, often being able to choose from several ways to say more or less the same thing. The luxury of alternatives allows us to deliver particular connotations or nuances with a given phrase, depending on our practical and pragmatic needs.

A familiar example of One Right Way is the etymological fallacy, which I discuss in the post. Gill Francis, in a comment, suggests another: what she calls the “word-class fallacy”, e.g., insisting that impact or contact is a noun only and shouldn’t be a verb. I think it’s a handy coinage.

Lots more in my Macmillan archive.

How awkwardly to avoid split infinitives

No other grammatical issue has so divided the nation (Robert Burchfield)

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split (Raymond Chandler)

So there’s a rule in English, except it’s not a rule, but some people think it is, and others who know it’s not a rule obey it in case it bothers the people who think it is, even though it can cloud or change the meaning of their prose. Ah, split infinitives: what an unholy mess.

A split infinitive is where an element, normally an adverb or adverbial phrase, is placed between to and the plain form of a verb – to boldly go is a well-known example. The construction is six or seven hundred years old; there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it, and there never has been. Usually it’s not even a stylistic lapse.

Before we continue, I should point out that split infinitive is a misnomer, since English doesn’t really have them. But it’s a convenient and familiar term, so I’ll use it.