I Plead the FIF: A Few Notes on English
Bookish since boyhood, I’ve long considered myself a few steps above semiliterate. That is, until I read “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” a 1,000-plus page behemoth of a book, penned by lawyer and lexicographer Bryan A. Garner. (David Foster Wallace called the man a “genius.”) The work brought to light many errors and lapses in thought I’d been unknowingly perpetrating, making what was once familiar seem fresh and new.
Essentially a dictionary, it’s not exactly beach reading. If you’re a word nerd of the highest order, a professional writer or editor, or you’re just dying to know the difference between “exegesis, epexegesis and eisegesis,” then this just may be the book for you. Otherwise, you’ll have to make do with the takeaways (which all made me say who knew?) that I present—A to Z—below.
Alzheimers. The first syllable, alz, is anything but phonetic: It’s pronounced /ahlts/.
blame. Properly construed, we blame a person for a thing; we don’t blame it on them. It’s unclear if this advice also applies to inanimate objects, but if it does, T-Pain’s command to “blame it on the alcohol” is a grammatical blunder.
caramel is best pronounced /keh·ruh·muhl/, and worst pronounced /kar·muhl/, which is how it’s commonly heard. (But other sources beg to differ.)
cyclone; hurricane; typhoon. Ever wondered why we don’t have cyclones or typhoons in the good ole US of A? Well, we do . . . sorta. It turns out that these three meteorological phenomena describe the very same thing—“massively destructive storms that form over oceans and generate high winds.” Weathermen have come up with distinct terms to describe the same thing, depending on region: Hurricanes happen here, in the Caribbean, Hawaii and the northeastern Pacific Ocean; typhoons happen in Asia; and cyclones happen in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.
Down syndrome. Named after British physician J.R.H. Down, the disorder was called mongolism prior to 1961, because it was thought that those afflicted with it resembled natives of Mongolia. Down wrote a paper called “The Ethnic Classification of Idiots” in 1868, likening various conditions to various (nonwhite) ethnicities. And somewhere along the way, scientists decided to name the syndrome after the man.
deadline. A Civil War era coinage, the term originally denoted the line over which prisoners could not cross, lest they be considered escapees and accordingly shot dead.
doggy; doggie. What’s the difference? Doggy is used in all cases except one: the name for the sack that you take your food away in, which is called a doggie bag.
draconian. The term is named after the Greek legislator Draco, prominent in the 7th century B.C. He prescribed the death penalty for nearly all crimes, including stealing a cabbage.
eat your cake and have it too is how the saying actually goes, not “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” The phrase is a colloquialism stretching back to the Elizabethan era, but since about 1940, the original eat—have has been replaced by have—eat.
fifth. When it comes to the Fifth Amendment, the idiom is take the Fifth, not plead the Fifth. Shame on you, Chappelle.
flaccid is pronounced /flak·sid/.
fluid, liquid. These terms are not synonyms. A liquid, such as water or oil, is a fluid that has a fixed volume. But a fluid is “any substance that is capable of flowing and that changes pressure.” Thus gases are, scientifically speaking, fluids also.
government has two audible N’s, thus not goverment. Pronunciation expert Charles Elster says, “How you say it is an indication of whether you are an average educated speaker or a cultivated one.”
Halley’s comet is pronounced pretty true to the way it’s spelled: /hal·ees/. Haley’s is a common misspelling (it occurs at least 17 times in the corpus of the NYTimes) and thus common mispronunciation.
hummus, an Anglicization of the Arabic word for chickpea, can be spelled some 20 different ways. Hummus is by far the most popular, with hommos a distant second, and humus being the modern Turkish spelling.
immaculate conception does not refer to the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary. It refers to the conception of Mary herself, who was (supposedly) purified by God, who “sanctified her by removing ‘all stain of original sin.’ ”
inmate. The term doesn’t only refer to the incarcerated. “Strictly speaking, anyone who shares a dwelling with others, whether involuntary or not, is an inmate of that dwelling.”
Jr. This suffix, which we tack on to the names of boys and men who have the same name as their father, is traditionally supposed to be dropped upon the death of that father.
kindergarten. Not garden. (The misspelling occurs at least 129 times in the NYTimes.) However, because things can never be simple when it comes to English, it’s kindergartner not kindergartener.
kudos is “best pronounced /kyoo·dahs/ or /kyoo·dohs/.” The y sound intrudes because the word derives from kydos, the Greek word for glory.
lay low; lie low. Lay and lie are two of the most blundered-over words in the language. The correct phrase lie low occurs about three times as often in printed material as the incorrect lay low.
length is (supposedly) pronounced /lengkth/ (not a typo) or /leengkth/ (also not a typo) but not /lenth/.
lustrum is a word that should be more common than it is. It refers to a half-decade, a period of five years. In case you decide to incorporate this into your vocabulary, the plural is lustra not lustrums.
ma’am is a contraction for madam.
Michiganite is what us Michiganders are officially called by the U.S. Government Publishing Office, the agency of the legislative branch responsible for issuing passports and official publications for the Supreme Court, Congress and the Executive Office of the President.
minimum: What’s more than one minimum? It’s not minimums but minima.
no: What’s more than one no? (A question I’m sure you ask yourself daily.) It’s noes.
Nutmegger is “the standard name for someone who hails from or lives in Connecticut.” The more intuitive Connecticuter is a less common equivalent.
occurred has two c’s and two r’s. Often misspelled as occured; indeed, this misspelling occurs some 2,190 times in the corpus of the NYTimes.
pants, pant: both words are abbreviations for pantaloons.
penitentiary, for prison, is an Americanism coined by the Quakers, who called their prisons “penitentiaries” and instituted solitary confinement because they thought “isolation with a Bible would lead to repentance and rehabilitation.”
plantain, unlike contain and maintain, is pronounced “plan-tin” (like mountain and fountain).
Qatar, the country, is pronounced /cutter/.
redundancies are what the following phrases qualify as: apple cider (cider is typically made with apples); expensive prices (“because the word expensive means high-priced”); shrimp scampi (the Merriam Webster definition for scampi is “large shrimp, especially when prepared or cooked”); time period (“the word period is almost always sufficient”).
repeat. “Whether as an adjective, noun or verb, is best pronounced /ri·peet/ not /ree·peat/.”
shat, as in the past tense of shit, is actually a word. Shitted is nonstandard.
shrunk, as in “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” is improper. According to the website 11 points, “Honey, I Shrank the Kids or Honey, I've Shrunk the Kids would both be correct.”
snuck, as a past tense of sneak, is nonstandard. The proper word is sneaked.
troubleshot is the past tense of troubleshoot. Troubleshooted is a nonword.
unisex was coined in a 1968 article by “Life” magazine: “With-it young couples … are finding that looking alike is good fashion as well as good fun. The unisex trend was launched by … teenagers.”
very unique is a nonsensical phrase because what is unique is one of a kind. “Something is either unique or not unique; there can be no degrees of uniqueness.”
whisky v. whiskey. What’s the difference? “If the liquor originated in Scotland, it’s whisky. If it originated in the United States, it’s whiskey.”
Xmas. The X here is not the one from our alphabet, but is the Greek letter chi, the first letter in Christ.
ye, as in such restaurant names as Ye Olde Pub “is simply a variant spelling of the.”
zoology. There’s a book called “There Is No Zoo in Zoology,” and for good reason: The word is pronounced /zoh·ol·uh·jee/.