The great divide

A Wordlady correspondent has asked about the pronunciation of "divisive". He pronounces it "di VICE iv", and the "di VISS iv" pronunciation "drives him nuts".

Apparently he is not alone in this, as there is much chatter on the web (negative, naturally, because Lord knows we need to find more things to criticize him about) about Barack Obama using the latter pronunciation. 

First off, please don't let different pronunciations than your own drive you nuts. There are many different ways to pronounce many of the words in English, and getting upset about them is not worth the effort. Just as the other person's pronunciation is driving you nuts, yours is driving them nuts too, and that makes two of you getting upset for no good reason.

In this case, if you live in Canada and say "di VICE iv", and are driven nuts by "di VISS iv", you're going to spend a lot of time tearing your hair out. At the Canadian Oxford Dictionary we found that "di VISS iv" is in fact the most common pronunciation in Canada for this word.

This preference for "di VISS iv" seems to be unique to Canada. Dictionaries from other countries give their pronunciations of the middle syllable in order of frequency:

Britain: VICE
NZ and Australia: VICE , VIZZ

US: VICE, VISS, VIZE, VIZZ
Canada: VISS, VICE, VIZZ, VIZE

So you might wonder where these pronunciations come from. "Well, of course it should be di VICE iv, because after all it comes from di VIDE," you might say. Well, so do "division" and "divisible", don't they? Sigh, I wish English were like French, where the middle syllables of the words "diviser", "divisible", and "division" are all pronounced the same way.  

Actually none of these English words are derivatives of "divide"; they were borrowed separately from Latin.

"Divide" came first, in the 1300s, with "divisor" a little later. They would have been pronounced "diveed" and "diveezor" back then. But they arrived in English just in time to be subject to the Great Vowel Shift which happened not long afterwards, eventually causing them to be pronounced as they are today, with what we call a "long i". "Division" arrived at the same time as "divide" but, because many multisyllable words escaped the Great Vowel Shift, its "veez" became "viz" rather than "vize".

By the time "divisible" arrived in the 1550s and "divisive" in the early 1600s, we therefore had two pronunciation patterns for "divide" words in English.  "Divisible" went one way, "divisive" the other. I do not know why (if anyone does, I'd be fascinated to hear the explanation). We see the same pattern with "decide, decision, decisive" (unfortunately we have no word "decisible").  But obviously we COULD have chosen to pronounce "divisive" like "division" and "divisible". I do not know how long the "di VISS/VIZZ iv" pronunciation has been in the language, but perhaps it was kicking around when settlers moved from Britain to North America and Australia, and has survived since then. 

Having lamented that our pronunciations are not consistent as in French ("pronunciation" is in fact another example of this phenomenon), I should in fairness point out that there is no word "divisif" in French. To translate the idea, bilingual dictionaries have to resort to periphrasis like  
‹of a policy› qui sème la discorde; qui entraîne la division
to be socially divisive = créer des inégalités sociales
Maybe we should send French speakers "divisive" with our compliments. At least they wouldn't argue over its pronunciation.

How do YOU pronounce "divisive"? 

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Eavesdropping about eavestroughs

A Wordlady correspondent has inquired about the word "eavesdrop", which has a quite entertaining history.

The eavesdrop (originally called an eavesdrip) was the area onto which water would run off the eaves, or overhang, of a house's roof. In Anglo-Saxon times, the law required that buildings be situated at least two feet from the property line so that rainwater running off the eaves would not damage the neighbour's yard. With my house in Toronto, the wall of which is 4 inches from the property line, I'd be in big trouble. 

The medieval English must have been an inquisitive lot, because by the 1400s we see reference to "eavesdroppers", i.e. people who lurk about in the eavesdrop so as to listen in on others' conversations. By the 1600s, this had been back-formed to a verb, "eavesdrop".

Now the question is, would that lurking person be standing under the eaves or, more logically, under one eave?

Unfortunately, we can't have a single eave in English. At least not any more. Originally, the Anglo-Saxon word efes WAS a singular noun. It just happened to end in -s (the plural was efesen). But, as we have seen before with skate, cherry, biceps and hero, apparently the English-speaking brain just cannot wrap itself around singulars ending in -s. So "eaves" came to be interpreted as a plural for which there is no corresponding singular.  

Now, here's an eavesdropping situation (related by my correspondent) that could only happen in Canada:
"On the weekend, a friend was telling me about her next-door neighbour eavesdropping on a conversation between my friend and an eavestrough installer, which I thought was a funny "eaves" coincidence."

"Eavestrough" is the word we Canadians use for what other English speakers call a (rain) gutter. It's one of those words that Canadians are usually astounded to learn are unique to us. It seems to be of American origin (below is the earliest Canadian and American evidence I could find of it), but whereas Americans seem to have stopped using it, it is going strong in Canada, and has even produced the derivatives "eavestrougher" and "eavestroughing".

1876 Toronto Globe 22 July p. 8

At about one p.m. to-day, during a thunder storm, one of the lightning rod spires on the house of H. Watson, of Clearville, was struck and melted. A portion of the fluid passed from the conductor and followed the eaves-trough into a rain barrel.

1845 The Farmer's Magazine p. 516
Similar tanks should be made to receive the water from the eavestroughs of all the buildings in the farm-yard.

If any of my non-Canadian readers use "eavestrough", I would be happy to hear about it.

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Can you buckle a swash?

English National Ballet has just premiered a new production of Le Corsaire, a rip-roaring 19th-century classic featuring pirates, slave traders, abductions, opium-smoking, women in bare-midriffed tutus, lots of leaping about, and much derring-do. Inevitably, the word "swashbuckling" is much in evidence in publicity and reviews.

But what is swashbuckling exactly?

The word, which dates from the late 1600s, is not, as you might think, a combination of a noun "swash" (whatever that might be!) and the progressive form of the verb "buckle". Rather, the word was created by a phenomenon called "back-formation", derived from the century-older "swashbuckler", defined delightfully in the OED as "A swaggering bravo or ruffian; a noisy braggadocio". But swashbucklers were not buckling swashes (as the creators of "swashbuckling" apparently thought); they were swashing bucklers. 

The verb "swash" arose in the Renaissance, imitating the sound made when something is thrown or moved with great energy, like "swish" but more forceful. In particular, swords were swashed about, and often what they were swashed against was a buckler, not someone who buckles, but a small round shield with a knob-like protuberance in the middle.



Although we already had the Germanic word "shield" since Anglo-Saxon times, we English have always liked a synonym, so we borrowed "buckler" from the French boucler in the Middle Ages (in Modern French the word for "shield" is still bouclier). The French had got it from the Latin adjective bucculārius, describing objects having a boss like the knob in the centre of this shield. This in turn came from buccula (a diminutive of bucca cheek) which designated either the cheek strap of a helmet or the boss of a shield. 

You will have guessed that the word "buckle" is from the same source. In French, the boucle was first the boss in the centre of the boucler, and then the loop or ring serving as a handle, which was affixed behind it, before finally settling down as the device used for fastening such a strap.  Interestingly, whereas in English "buckle" focuses on the metal fastening, French has also retained the "loop" sense.  So a loop-like itinerary is a boucle and so are earrings and big round curls in the hair.

For other examples of back-formation, see my posts about "mentee" and "peddle".



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If I'm your mentor, are you my mentee?

 

An alert friend of mine just pointed out that she had come across the word "mentee" in a University of Toronto publication. That would be a person who is being mentored. 

I find this word fascinating, on several fronts. First of all, it's older than you would think: the OED's first quotation is from 1965:

1965 Amer. Econ. Rev. 55 862 What is the typical economics class but a contact between the conservative teacher and his mentees?

Although that one may have been jocular (are economists ever jocular, one wonders), by 1978 it seems less so:

1978 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. 72 423 The effects of the mentor on the mentee can be profound.

But what is really interesting is the process of word formation. Interpreting the -or ending of "mentor" as what is called an agent suffix (as in "actor", "mortgagor", etc.), someone has created by back-formation a notional verb "to ment" and then added an "-ee" suffix. 

There is nothing wrong with back-formation; in fact it's the source of such common words as "kidnap" and "manipulate". However, this is an odd case, because the origin of "mentor" is a personal name. 

The original Mentor was a character in Homer's Odyssey (actually Athena the goddess of wisdom in disguise), who acted as a guide and advisor to Telemachus. In 1699 the French author Fénelon published a book called Les Aventures de Télémaque including the character (or should one say "authee"?) Mentor in a starring role as a counsellor. The book was such a hot seller both in French and in translation that by 1750 "mentor" had come to mean "advisor" in many European languages. 

As is so often the case with nouns in English, someone started using "mentor" (but not "ment") as a verb, apparently in sporting circles, about the time of the First World War (that one is probably older than you thought, too). The practice of mentoring employees became popular in the 80s, probably creating a need for a word to designate the beneficiary of the mentoring, and "mentee" was just waiting to fill that need. Although not hugely frequent yet, it looks as though the word has staying power. 

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http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/p/history-of-english-language-courses.html 

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