Earlier versions of the following entries were originally posted to Distracted Academic on Tumbler in 2016.
Universal Words
There are more than 6,000 human languages and educated persons have a vocabulary of about 20,000 words. Despite this massive vocabulary, surprisingly few words have an equivalent in every language; in fact, there are fewer than a hundred words believed to have this distinction.
Jennifer Nagel provides the following list of Universals: I, you, good, bad, know, think, want, see, hear, say, before, after, live, die, not, maybe, because, if, and true. Equally surprising are some words that are NOT universal. For example, eat and drink are not universal, as some languages (such as aboriginal dialects in Papua New Guinea and Australia) use only a single word for ingest.
Gendered pronouns are not universal either, as some languages use words that translate to ‘present person' and ‘absent person’ instead. Other non-universals include happy, sad, stop, go, plant, animal, tree, bird, hot, and cold.
So what is it about these particular words that accounts for their universality? Are they vital to the way human language or thought operates? Do they express some universal aspects of human experience? Do they correspond to innate concepts selected into human biopsychology?
Whatever the reason, it's certainly strange to imagine what life would be like if we were unable to communicate the concepts represented by the universals. Can you think of any more words that you would expect to be universals?
Fossil Words
Every year, thousands of new words emerge and thousands expire in common usage. Somewhere in this language change, a curious phenomenon keeps otherwise obsolete words in circulation: fossilization.
'Fossil words' are words (or parts of words) that have fallen out of common usage except in particular idioms or phrases.
Some are fossilized in binomials with partners that are still in use, such as beck ("beck and call"), fro ("to and fro"), lo ("lo and behold"), or kith ("kith and kin"), although pairs can also become fossilized together ("spick and span"). Others stand alone in their fossilized usage, such as wit ("to wit"), bumper ("bumper crop"), and pale ("beyond the pale").
Fossilization affects all parts of speech. For example, in addition to nouns (out of "wedlock;" just "deserts;" further "ado"), fossil words readily include verbs ("champing the bit;" "eke out"), adjectives ("bated breath"), or both ("bandy about" and "bandy-legged").
As for morphemes—linguistic units smaller than words—Merriam-Webster highlights several fossilized examples, including nap ("kidnap"), shod ("slipshod"), nill ("willy-nilly"), and pink ("pinking sheers").
In rarer cases, words can be 'born' fossilized, never achieving common usage outside of a particular phrase. Consider the re-spliced "nother" ("a whole nother"), the minced oath "tarnation" ("what in tarnation"), the Dutch borrowed caboodle ("kit and caboodle"), or the elision druthers ("if I had my druthers").
Can you think of any fossil words?
Contronyms
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself." This famous passage by Walt Whitman could describe the word oversight. After all, oversight refers to both watching closely and not watching closely enough: "Employers hope that careful oversight will prevent any oversight by employees." Make up your mind, oversight!
This is a clear example of a contronym: a term with multiple meanings that directly contradict one another. Let's peruse (i.e., attend carefully OR cursorily to) a few more examples.
Depending on context, fast means speedy or still ("get there fast, then hold fast until I arrive"). Similarly, sanction means permit or penalize ("government-sanctioned sanctions"). Clip means detach or attach ("clip out those coupons then clip them together"). As a verb, dust means either to add or remove dust ("if you dust the cake with powdered sugar, be sure to dust the countertop when cleaning up").
Some contronyms result from different etymologies taking the same form, such as cleave, which came from different Old English words clēofan (to separate) and clifian (to adhere). Others only self-contradict across dialects, such as table, which means to submit for debate or remove from debate in British and American Legal English, respectively.
Others result from drifting and branching of denotations (literal meaning) and connotations (cultural or emotional associations) over time. In some cases, the new meaning replaces the old one (e.g., awful meaning bad instead of awe-inspiring). But many coexist, as in the case of literally when used as an intensifier for figurative claims.
Words can indeed contradict themselves. After all, language contains multitudes.
Snowclones
Snowclones are clichéd phrasal templates that remain recognizable across variations. For example, even though the operative words have been replaced, you might recognize "to brunch or not to brunch" as a play on the most famous line from Hamlet.
That said, you don't necessarily need to know the origin of a phrase to recognize it as a snowclone. Whether or not you're familiar with the original (albeit misquoted) line from a 1960s fashion column, you might still recognize the phrasal template x is the new y in the book and TV series Orange is the New Black, the album Quiet Is the New Loud by Kings of Convenience, or Radiohead's song "Down Is the New Up." Other classic examples of snowclones include:
- the mother of all X
- X-ing while X
- have X, will travel
- X is my middle name
- the X to end all Xs
Though first used to describe adaptable clichés in journalism, snowclones now propagate and thrive in image macro memes, which pair an image (usually a still from TV or film) with overlaid text:
- one does not simply X (from The Fellowship of the Ring)
- stop trying to make X happen (from Mean Girls)
- I don't always X, but when I do, Y (from Dos Equis ads)
Some feel that friends don't let friends use such phrasal templates, but I, for one, welcome our new snowclone overlords. What do you think?
legal doublets
Since 1990, the TV series Law and Order has punctuated its episodes with two percussive sounds reminiscent of gavel strikes. But what would the sound effect be if the show were merely titled Law?
The phrase "law and order" is a legal doublet: a standardized phrase of two terms usually connected by "and." In Legal English, such pairings are myriad and numerous.
While some pairs unite related but distinct concepts (e.g., ways and means; breaking and entering), others are synonymous, including aid and abet; assault and battery; cease and desist; null and void; part and parcel; terms and conditions; and will and testament.
Notably, because of their standardization, legal doublets are also irreversible binomials, meaning they can't be rearranged without sounding a little... odd and unusual. It'd be strange, after all, if someone ordered you to "desist and cease," prompted you to sign their "conditions and terms," or titled a TV series Order and Law.
So, why say things twice? Roman rule of Britain (43–410 CE) infused Latin terms in courtrooms, then the Norman conquest in 1066 CE added French terms into the mix. Legal doublets reflect this history of navigating and transitioning between multiple languages in legal settings.
Now if you'll excuse me (with respect to Jimmy Two Times), I'm gonna go get the papers, get the papers.
performatives
When asked what types of things we use language for, common answers include informing, describing, persuading, and questioning. But have you ever noticed that language can be used to do things?
A performative is a statement that neither describes anything nor posits a claim with a truth value (i.e., true or false); rather, a performative phrase actually accomplishes something in the world, at least symbolically.
The most apparent of these phrases can be found in formal ceremonies, such as when someone in a wedding says, “I do” (a convenient example for "how to do things with words," to quote J.L. Austin). Or when a bottle is broken against a vessel to the words “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” Or when someone agrees to a wager with “I bet you five bucks.”
By speaking a performative word or phrase, an action—if only a symbolic one—is performed. A marriage is officiated, a ship is named, a wager is placed, a vote is cast, a nomination is made, a contract is bound.
It’s important to mention that such actions are limited to appropriate speakers in appropriate circumstances; a judge in a courtroom can perform a sentencing, but the same words from me won’t have the same effect.
Here’s where it gets tricky: some phrases may sound performative, but are really just expressive. For example, "I agree" can be performative in some contexts where one's word is legally binding, but in other contexts, it merely expresses agreement felt by the speaker.
Performatives are a fascinating facet of language, but since the actions are symbolic, perhaps the true "action" (as the word is commonly used) is society adhering to the consequences.
Silent Reading
Unless you are reading this post aloud, you are participating in what is a surprisingly recent activity in the West: silent reading.
Since written language originates in oral tradition, it makes sense that ancients read aloud and typically in public settings. More surprising, however, is that most literate elites could not read silently, and it wasn’t until the 1700s that silent reading became commonplace!
In his Confessions, Augustine describes with awe a man named Ambrose who was remarkable for reading in silence: “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”
Paul Saenger points to the introduction of word separation—spaces between words—as a revolution in written language that led to silent reading. According to Saenger, separating words, once a function performed in the reader’s mind and voice, became a labor of professional readers and scribes in the nine centuries following the fall of Rome.
The difficulty and time-consuming nature of reading continuous text (without word separation) was not considered a disadvantage by elites, as they had no reason to make reading easier or more accessible to other classes in the ancient Western world.
Search the web for “ancient writing Greek” and see it for yourself!