Pretentious, moi?

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A Wordlady fan inquired recently about the word "pretentious", and I was surprised to learn that it is much younger than I would have suspected.  Here's the OED's earliest quotation

1832   T. Carlyle in Fraser's Mag. May 382/2   [He] lived no day of his life without doing and saying more than one pretentious ineptitude.

But surely there were pretentious people and things before 1832? What did we call them?

There are many words in this semantic field that are still in common use today: 

affected
artificial 
overblown
ostentatious 
pompous

But there are others that in my opinion deserve a revival for this sense:

flatulent
1863   Notes & Queries 3rd Ser. 4 284   Much of the poetry is little more than very flatulent declamation.

hi cockalorum ("cockalorum" was a magician's incantation like "abracadabra" or "hocus pocus" and thus came to stand for meaningless speech)
1887   Hardwicke's Sci.-gossip Apr. 83/2   The dogmatic hi-cockalorum style of men absolutely certain of their own correctness.

The Scots and Irish apparently have at their disposal

long nebbed (literally, having a long beak; figuratively, inquisitive; of language, polysyllabic)

But I think my favourite is 

coxcombic(al),

(roosters being notorious for being full of themselves).

Consider this fabulous stream of insults and see if you can think of anyone you would like to apply it to currently:

1879   Reynolds's Newspaper 21 Sept. 3/1   That feeble-minded, self-opinionated, coxcombic mixture of imbecility, assurance and inordinate self-esteem.

SPELLING

"Pretentious" and "pretension" constitute possibly one of the most annoying pairs of words in English. Why is "pretentious" spelled with a "t" whereas "pretension" is spelled with an "s"? 

As we have seen, "pretentious" is a fairly recent addition to English. We borrowed it from French prétentieux which in 1789 or thereabouts had acquired the meaning "making an exaggerated outward display, ostentatious, showy"

"Pretension" is much older in English; we borrowed it from Latin in the 1400s. The classical Latin form was   praetention (the act of pretending) but a post-classical form praetension had cropped up. In the early days we merrily spelled the word with a -tion ending, an -sion ending, or even a -cion ending. Quite frankly, I don't know why the -sion ending won out, but by the 1700s it was firmly established, and it is the only spelling listed in Samuel Johnson's dictionary.

So by the time "pretentious" came along, imitating the French spelling, it couldn't win against the entrenched spelling of "pretension".

If I were Queen of English, I would definitely do something about this. Since there are no current (and very few obsolete) words in English ending in -sious, I would decree that instead of changing pretentious to pretensious,  pretension should be changed to pretention. 

It is true that the following verbs ending in -d  form their derivative in -sion:

ascend ascension
apprehend apprehension
comprehend comprehension
extend extension
condescend condescension
suspend suspension

But on the other hand (God forbid that English should be consistent) we have

intend intention 
contend contention

French lives quite happily with prétention and prétentieux. Why do we have to make our lives complicated? 

Warning: I am not (alas) Queen of English, so you'll have to keep spelling pretension with an s.

Fun with spelling

After my post  a couple of weeks ago about spelling and homophones, I am very grateful to a Wordlady reader for acquainting me with the following brilliant poem by the American publisher Bennett Cerf (1898-1971).

The wind was rough
And cold and blough.
She kept her hands within her mough.
It chilled her through,
Her nose turned blough,
And still the squall the faster flough
And yet, although
There was no snough,
The weather was a cruel fough.
It made her cough,
Please do not scough,
She coughed until her hat blough ough.

Photo by Isaac Viglione on Unsplash

Where there is hatred let me sow love(red)

Photo by T. Chick McClure on Unsplash

The other day, a friend of mine asked rhetorically:

"When did the word "hatred" disappear from the English language?"

She felt that "hatred" is a much better word than its synonym "hate". 

Of course, "hatred" has not disappeared from English (neither the word, nor, alas, the thing). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "hatred" occurs between 10 and 100 times per million words in typical modern English usage, in the same category as words like dog, horse, ship, machine, mile, assessment, army, career, stress, gas, explosion, desert, parish, envelope, and headache. 

But my friend is on to something. "Hatred" does seem to be waning.  

If you look at Google Books (admittedly a rather rough tool), the word has been experiencing a downward trend since 1800 (here's the link if you can't see the graph 
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hatred&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chatred%3B%2Cc0 ):

This trend is confirmed by other corpora.

It is not really surprising if "hatred" is on the wane, if not exactly in its death throes yet, since it has to contend with its exact synonym "hate" (the noun). 

Is "hate" some newfangled verb-noun conversion that is muscling out its venerable forebear "hatred"?

Far from it. The noun "hate" and its Anglo-Saxon ancestor hete are in fact older than "hatred", the earliest evidence for which dates from 1225.

Another phenomenon that is not in favour of "hatred" is that it is one of only two words current in English that maintain the Old English suffix -red (meaning "condition, state"), the other being "kindred". We don't have "love" and "lovered", though we used to have the latter, along with "brothered", "friendred", "gossipred", "neighboured", and a few others. So without a major semantic distinction between "hatred" and "hate", a distinction that I don't detect, the form with the old-fashioned suffix may well eventually die.

There are syntactic differences though. "Hate", rather than "hatred", is almost always used to form compounds, e.g. "hate crime", "hate speech", "hate campaign", "hate mail", "hate-filled". We don't say "hatred crime". 

On the other hand, "hatred" is much more likely than "hate" to be used when followed by a preposition: although it's possible to say "his hate of the enemy", it's much more common to say "his hatred of the enemy". "His hate of the enemy" even sounds a bit odd to me; how about you?

What do you think about "hate" and "hatred"? Is "hatred" a better word, and if so, why? Do you feel there is a semantic distinction between the two?

While we're on the topic, who's in favour of changing the spelling to a more logical "hatered"?? Ah, English spelling, how we love to hate you.

If only we could get rid of hatred by banning the word!

Silent letters in English: The Series

One of the numerous things that bedevil English spelling are the many silent letters we have in our words. 

I have already addressed a number of them in other posts:

the p in ptarmigan

the h in heir, honest, honour, hour and (for some people) herb

the b in crumb

the b in lamb, comb, and dumb

the (for some people) first r in February

the g in reign

the t in hustle, castle, bustle, bristle

the c in muscle

the (for most people) first d in Wednesday 

the l in almond, calm, psalm, and palm

the l in salmon

the p in psalm 

the s in island and isle 

 
Clearly, there are so many I can't deal with them all in one post, and there are still more, so we should now consider this a series.

The latest installment is inspired by a kindergarten teacher neighbour of mine who relayed a question from her students (out of the mouths of babes, as they say): Why is there an "l" in "could"?

As irregular verbs go, this one takes the cake. Quick, what's the infinitive of "can"? 

"To be able to".  

Sheesh. It's from a different language altogether, "able" being a word of French origin, and "can" being Anglo-Saxon. 

Of course, in Anglo-Saxon, there was an infinitive, cunnan, whose relationship with "can" was much more obvious. Cunnan, however,  meant "to know" (it is the source of our word "cunning").  It was only by the 1300s that its meaning had slid from "to know" through "know how to do something" to "be able to do something".

The past tense of cunnan was cuth, spelled couth by the French scribes who meddled with English spelling after the Norman conquest. You will have guessed that it is the source of our word "uncouth", which slid from "unknown, unfamiliar" to "strange" to "distasteful, unpleasant" to "clumsy, awkward", finally landing in "uncultured" by the 1700s.

"Couth", meanwhile, as the past tense of "can", gradually saw its -th ending replaced in both speech and spelling by a -d, so that by the 1500s it was spelled "coud". Unfortunately for it, this meant that it now rhymed with a couple of other auxiliaries, "should", and "would".  These came by the "l" in their spelling honestly, "should" being a form of "shall" and "would" being a form of "will". But by the 1500s their "l" was no longer pronounced. 

Instead of doing the sensible thing and dropping the "l" out of "would" and "should", we did the English thing and, by analogy, inserted a perfectly unjustified one into "coud".

Good luck to the kindergarten teacher in explaining this one. No wonder teachers have to resort to "just because" so much! 

Crumbs!

This coming Monday is Canada Day, traditionally a time for outdoor eating, much to the enjoyment of ants and sparrows who can scarf down the attendant crumbs.

"Crumb" has meant a small piece of bread since Anglo-Saxon times, but the interesting question is, why is it spelled with a silent b?

Until the 1500s, in fact, there was no b; the word was just "crum" or "cromme". Even Samuel Johnson gives "crum" as the first spelling in his 1755 dictionary.

What happened was that "crum" created a  derivative, "crummel", which then began to be pronounced "crumble" by analogy with words like "humble". This was a very common phonetic transformation; it happened also with "bramble" and "mumble", among others. Then the derivative influenced the root word, at least in spelling, though never in pronunciation.  Helped along by similar words like "lamb" (for the explanation of its silent "b", see this post), "comb", and "dumb", whose history was different, "crumb" actually beat out "crum", its final victory happening in the 19th century.

An interesting semantic development of the word "crumb" is "crumby" (also spelled "crummy", reflecting the earlier spelling of the root word). Why does "crummy" mean "of poor quality"?

In the 19th century, "crumb" started being used to mean "louse", and "crumby" meant "louse-infested". Just as we also use "lousy" to mean "inferior", "crumby" also took on this extended meaning.

To B or not to B

English spelling? Baa!

This coming Sunday is Easter for Greeks, and others of the Orthodox Church. Traditionally, lamb is eaten.

Why is there a silent "b" in "lamb"?

In Old English, this "b" was pronounced, but by the end of the Middle Ages, people had stopped pronouncing it.  Quite sensibly, a few people tried spelling the word "lam" or "lamm", but English spelling has never been sensible, so we stuck with a spelling reflecting a long-dead pronunciation. The same thing happened with "comb" and "dumb", but for the word "crumb", where the explanation is different, tune in to a Wordlady post in June.

We were, however, a little more sensible with the plural form of "lamb". In Old English, this had been lomberu. In the Middle Ages, people reformed it along the lines of other irregular plurals like "children" and "brethren". So for a while we had singular lamb and plural "lambren". This, thank goodness, did not survive, as we decided to make it a regular plural ending in s.

We use the word "lamb" whether the lamb is gambolling in the fields or sitting as a chop on our plates. This is unusual in English, where for most animals we distinguish between the live and cooked versions:
Cow  - beef
Sheep - mutton
Calf - veal
Pig/swine - pork
In all these cases the first word is of English origin and the second of French origin. This is a remnant of the Norman Conquest in 1066, after which French cooking terms flooded the language. The usual explanation is that the Anglo-Saxon (English) speakers would have been tending the animals in the fields while the French speakers were roasting them in the aristocratic kitchens.

Thank you to a Wordlady reader for asking about the silent b in "lamb". If you have questions or suggestions for Wordlady, please feel free to send them to me!

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