Awfuller and awfuller

Andrew Malcolm, Los Angeles Times: "The bad political news is his awful poll numbers are getting awfuller, which isn't a word but should be in this case."

You know this blog's default position: Every word is real, just as every person is special. But "awfuller" is a good test of how real real is.

First things first. It is really "real." Mark Twain thought so; John Keats did; Charles Dickens did; Margaret Atwood did; Elizabeth Barrett Browning did; Gertrude Stein did. The OED thinks so, too, listing it as an occasional comparative for "awful."

The problem is that "occasional." Language Log has been having a good recurring conversation on inflected adjectives and the difference between wrong and unusual, and that gets at the problem here. Comparative forms, like all words, have their vogue, and there are winners and losers. In 2010, awfuller is a loser. If you check Google News' historical archive, its use is pretty damn scarce, and when it does surface, you'll see it in a lot of jokey escalations of awfulness like Andrew Malcolm's. Malcolm made a case for awfuller right there in his copy and even he hung it out to dry.

It's probably not even as common as "awfullest," you know that? By two very rough and unscientific measures of published English, the Google News archive and the New York Times archive, awfuller gets smoked. And people will say awfullest and mean it. They'll use it in hardship. Why is this? We can speculate ... when you go for a comparative form of awful, you're probably trying to express an extreme, not putting this new awfulness on a continuum. Plus, awfuller -- I'm sorry -- just sounds like gagging.

Will there be another day for awfuller? Well, people are going to have to start using it unapologetically. Who's first?

I've seen those English dramas too

From a recent Guardian piece on Vampire Weekend, describing a song from their new album: "In a way, it's their two fingers up to the tired idea of being a two-fingers-up band."

They'd only use one finger, is my guess. They may be cosmopolitan, but they're still American.

But I'm snarking. It strikes me a little weird, but I don't think the writer did wrong, exactly -- he's a Brit writing for Brits, how else would he put it?

As for the larger issue, there's got to be a word for relating someone's thoughts in argot that's foreign to them. I've been keeping an eye out for this kind of thing since reading this passage on Blanche Lincoln in the Economist a few months ago: "She first won a seat in the House ... after ousting a sitting congressman in a Democratic primary. He had 487 overdrafts at the House bank. She campaigned on the promise that 'I can sure enough balance my chequebook.'"

Again, what are they going to do, change their spellings just because she's from Arkansas? All the same -- take a minute and savor.

Conflictual

My new word of the day is "conflictual."

I didn't give it a chance when I first saw it, but that was just bigotry against a familiar word with a new suffix. Just because Washington is full of those Frankenstein creations doesn't mean they're all monsters. If you can reduce a lengthy or involved or bulky concept to a single word that might fit in conversation outside its original context (for conflictual, that seems to be psychology), that's a useful thing.

It's no "incentivize," or, God forbid, "incent." That's a prejudice I don't think anyone can turn me around on.

This is not bigoted: I like -ual at least as much as -mania or -teria.

Brilliant deduction

I was at the post office this afternoon trying to track down the mail I asked to be held while I was on vacation. Two others were in the same boat when I was there, and when I spoke to the manager, it was clear he'd had a lot of practice getting his rap down.

His best guess: With so many people in my building asking for vacation stops, and with the post office always so busy during the Christmas rush, "I deduct that it was probably human error."

How wonderful if he could deduct human error. I'm sick of blaming bureaucracy and bad luck -- I want a villain! But I kid. He meant "deduce," not "deduct."

Didn't he?

Well, yes, but it's not that simple. At the beginning, those words used to be fairly synonymous.

As you might guess, "deduce" and "deduct" both derive from the same Latin ancestor (deducere, to lead down or draw away). They also entered English at about the same time (early 15th century), and it was a while before people felt like they needed to differentiate. It makes sense in light of that Latin definition: You can take away an inference from facts, and you can take away a part from a whole. Not precisely the same idea, but our language has always been as creative as it is accommodating.

It's hard for modern ears to accept "deduce" for "deduct," but you'd think we would see the other mix-up all the time. (Especially since the noun "deduction" inconsiderately matches up with both verbs: "Sherlock Holmes had awesome powers of deduction, and maybe after this blog post I can use my movie ticket as a tax deduction.") Indeed, even though the modern distinction between "deduce" and "deduct" has been in place for ages, the usage of "deduct" for "deduce" is recognized in both the American Heritage Dictionary and Princeton's WordNet.

But in the latest edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, Bryan A. Garner calls "deduct" creep a Stage 1 language change, the lowest on his five-stage scale. If Stage 1 were a car, it would have three wheels.

That's a long way for a word to fall in 600 years.

Banishment

It's always fun to read Lake Superior State University's annual list of "banished words." Right, all the usual caveats apply -- it's an unscientific list of pet peeves; every word has its uses; and if someone really could banish words from English, then English would be no better than French.

Still, I like to imagine the LSSU folks keeping a sense of humor about the whole project. For instance, the first contributor they quote in their criticism of "shovel-ready" uses "implement," a word from the very first "banished" list.

Mostly I like to see where new concepts are challenging our old perspectives on the world. New terms that seem silly at first can reveal tiny nuances that either didn't exist before or just didn't have a name. A good example is this comment on why we shouldn't use "friend" as a verb:

"'Befriend' is much more pleasant to the human ear and a perfectly useful word in the dictionary." – Kevin K., Morris, Okla.

Making this change would obliterate one of the casual social dynamics that define life on the Internet. You can "friend" a random co-worker, a networking contact, the cute girl from the bar, the funny dude from an Internet forum you read, or maybe even a celebrity you've never met. How many of them have you actually "befriended"?

Honestly, this does show the limits of the noun "friend" in the social media context, an issue that, of course, long predates social media. At the same time, torturing "friend" into a verb seems to reflect the ad hoc nature of these new* Internet-enabled relationships. Maybe there's a better word waiting to be invented. Maybe it's good that we're discomforted. Is that a bug or a feature?

Here's one more, on "sexting."

"Any dangerous new trend that also happens to have a clever mash-up of words, involves teens, and gets television talk show hosts interested must be banished." – Ishmael Daro, Saskatoon, Sask., Canada.

Dude, seriously? Never mind what you think of "sexting," that sounds like how a lot of perfectly acceptable new words are born. Replace "teens" and "television talk show hosts" if you must.

* Is this actually new anymore? There are thirtysomethings who have done this half their lives. I'm probably biased since there's no word we all agree on. Name it and I'll let it be.

2010, Zero Zero

Ten years ago, it seemed like you couldn't say the words "2000" or "millennium" without somebody rushing to tell you that the millennium didn't really start until 2001, because there was no year 0. Fine. I mean, what people were celebrating was the dawn of the two-thousands, and "the millennium" was just a shorthand for that, so those corrections always had a whiff of fussiness. But a word is a word, there was no year 0, and the correctors were absolutely correct.

Now I'm hearing -- not a lot, just here and there -- that we shouldn't be talking about "the end of the decade" this month. It's the logical extension of that "no year 0" argument: There have been 200 successive decades since the beginning of the Christian era, and No. 201 doesn't end until Dec. 31, 2010.

Well, the 201st decade A.D. does end on Dec. 31, 2010.

But this is still just wrong.

(1) First of all, it's wrong because if you followed this logically, you'd have to claim that 1990 wasn't part of the 1990s, but the 1980s.

(2) It's wrong because while you may say we're in the year of the Lord 2009, nobody says we're in the decade of the Lord 201. We just don't measure time that way. Again -- the "no year 0" argument only makes sense for ordinals, like "third millennium" or "21st century," where you really do have to account for what that first year was called. This leads into my final point.

(3) It's wrong because marking off time this way -- Aughts, Nineties, Eighties -- isn't math, it's cultural shorthand, and therefore subject to pop culture's rules. And pop culture is not on the side of fussy math. For example: When did the Sixties end? Altamont? Nixon's resignation? The fall of Saigon? Dec. 31, 1969? You don't have to look too hard to find someone making each of these points. But Dec. 31, 1970? Good luck.

Hey, who's seen Richie?

Transaction of the day: The St. Louis Rams release guard Richie Incognito.