Continual vs continuous – what’s the difference?

Introduction and origins

What’s the difference between continual and continuous? There’s a short answer, but it’s misleading, so – surprise! – I’m going with the long and complicated one.

Some people make a firm distinction between the two adjectives, but others don’t or only sometimes do. The distinction has merit, but it’s not categorical, more the codification of a general but lopsided pattern.

Because the words are so close in sense and use, they’re often used interchangeably (the adverbs continually and continuously even more so). This seldom leads to confusion or difficulty, but it’s also true that each word has domains it specializes in and others it’s less suited to.

Both words come from Latin continuus ‘hanging together, uninterrupted’, continual arriving via Old French continuel. Their endings, ­–al and –ous, are common adjective-forming suffixes. The words’ more recent history sheds light on their use, but first let’s look at how they’re defined, since this reflects how they’re used and gets to the centre of the problem.

Irish words in English and the OED

Dozens of Irish English words and phrases were added to the OED in March 2022, including Irish words used in Irish English. I’ve written about some of these before (hames, notions, plámás, ráiméis, ruaille buaille); others include a chara, blow-in, bockety, ceol, ciotóg, cúpla focal, delph, ghost estate, grá, guard, sean nós, segotia, and shift.

OED editor Danica Salazar writes:

The words and phrases featured in the OED’s March update provide a small yet vivid snapshot of Irish English usage in the past and present. We will continue our efforts in enriching the dictionary’s coverage of Irish English and feature even more new words and senses in future updates.

This will be welcomed by scholars who feel that Celtic words – and word-origins – in the English lexicon have traditionally been under-acknowledged by linguistic authorities. Loreto Todd, in Green English: Ireland’s Influence on the English Language, says there has been ‘a long-standing reluctance to recognise the presence of Celtic words in the English language’.*

Yet for all the richness and strength of Irish English dialects in Ireland and of Irish literature internationally, the influence of Irish and Irish English on the broader English language has been modest. You might wonder why, given Ireland and Great Britain’s geographical, social, and political (though fraught, i.e., colonialist) closeness.

Wordable awareness

I came across an interesting word in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (Picador, 2007). It appears in the middle of a conversation between an estranged couple, here discussing their son:

‘We talked about it,’ Keith said. ‘But only once.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much. And neither did I.’
‘They’re searching the skies.’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
She knew there was something she’d wanted to say all along and it finally seeped into wordable awareness.
‘Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?
‘Just once. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.’
‘Their mother mentioned this name. I keep forgetting to tell you. First I forget the name. I forget the easy names. Then, when I remember, you’re never around to tell.’

Seeped into wordable awareness is a lovely phrase, and wordable is a curiously rare word, given its straightforward morphology and transparent meaning. It has virtually no presence in large language corpora:

We ourself can use this pronoun

On a recent rewatch of the 1979 film The Warriors, I noticed an unusual pronoun spoken by Cleon, played by Dorsey Wright:*

Ourself, once in regular use, is now scarce outside of certain dialects, and many (maybe most) people would question its validity. I’ve seen it followed by a cautious editorial [sic] even in linguistic contexts. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), describing it as the reflexive form of singular we – ‘an honorific pronoun used by monarchs, popes, and the like’ – says it is ‘hardly current’ in present-day English.

But that’s not the whole story, and it belies the word’s surprising versatility and stubborn survival outside of mainstream Englishes, which this post will outline. There are graphs and data further down, but let’s start with usage.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

Anyone who’s into both word lore and science fiction will have a fine time exploring the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Call it cyberspacefaring.* Launched in early 2021, the HD/SF was once an official project of the OED but is now run independently by lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower. A work in progress, it aims to:

illustrate the core vocabulary of science fiction; it also aims to cover several related fields, such as critical terms relating to science fiction (and other genres of imaginative fiction such as fantasy and horror), and the vocabulary of science-fiction fandom.

Definitions are ‘comprehensive but brief’ and are supplemented by ample literary quotations, aka citations. These, ‘the most important part of this dictionary’, show each word or phrase in use, from the earliest detected case to more recent examples. Some entries also have etymologies, usage labels, historical notes, and so on.

This beautiful retrofuturist typeface is Sagittarius by Hoefler&Co. –
see the link for an account of its inspiration and development.

The strange absence of ‘ambiguate’

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech.

I mean, sure, I can say ‘makes the sense ambiguous’. But there’s no reason not to have a one-word verb. After all, we have its antonym, disambiguate: to make something unambiguous. More on that later.

Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense.

Words in your personal dictionary

A recent highlight of my reading life – which unlike my blogging life has not been overly affected by the pandemic ­– is Eley Williams’s The Liar’s Dictionary (William Heinemann, 2020). It’s a novel that does several things at once, weaving them successfully into a satisfying whole. It’s a story about love: love of people, of life, of words; it’s a mystery that straddles two eras; and it’s a fun, thoughtful exploration of lexicology.

Design by Suzanne Dean

Most notably for my purposes here, the book is a word lover’s delight. Williams, who studied mountweazels as part of her PhD, has a deep interest in the nature and business not only of words – their emergence, development, and complex interaction with our minds and expressive apparatus – but also of word collection and definition: the creation and maintenance of dictionaries, and the semantic murk waded through routinely by lexicographers (and occasionally, less systematically, by the rest of us).

In The Liar’s Dictionary, the paraphernalia of writing might be overlaid on anything at all, to sometimes striking effect: