Even More Words About Words

Issue 250

Panama, 2019

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I.

You’ve most likely been disgruntled, though I doubt that you’ve ever been gruntled. Or, more specifically, I doubt that you’ve ever described yourself as gruntled. I’m also confident that you’ve described a situation as underwhelming—although I’m absolutely certain that you’ve never described a situation as whelming. Have you ever felt implacable? What about placable? We live in a world where you can be incorrigible but nobody is ever corrigible, just as people are unruly but never ruly, and composed but never discomposed.

You can still find many of these lonely, unused words in the dictionary, even though you’ll rarely hear them in the wild. Sometimes, however, there’s no paired word to match the commonplace word, and those are orphaned words—so that you might be disheveled but you won’t, unfortunately, ever be heveled. And if you start looking for more examples, you’ll wonder why so many words either don’t have a mirror, or have a mirror that isn’t used: there’s recalcitrant but no calcitrant, misconstrue but no construe, innocuous but no nocuous.

When you take a step further, it is worth noting that nearly all words have a natural, seamless pairing: right goes with left, up goes with down, and smart goes with, well, stupid. These pairings, though opposites, might be better viewed as relationships, associations, the way in which every word has a cousin. And this is intuitive once you think about it: language is based on context, because it is the combination of words rather than the individual word that gives us meaning. Paper with pen, coffee with cup, night with day—with the most creative among us stretching these pairings, linking words in ways that seem both novel and somehow correct.

It is that linkage that gives meaning to language. You can’t really imagine a single word without its pair—we think in chunks of language, in discrete units, and each word gives rise to complementary and opposing concepts. I don’t exactly know how long it took humanity to speak its first word—hundreds of thousands of years is a reasonable assumption—but I am confident that the second word appeared the same week. If I know anything about humanity, I know that the first comprehensible word was a claim, or warning, perhaps a threat, and the second word was a rebuttal or perhaps an insult. Social media, so to speak, started a very long time ago. Just minutes after we get some partially-coherent grunts, we’ve got personal criticisms, and we’ve been refining the quality and sophistication of those attacks since that day. In some cases, it seems, we’re stuck with just one side of a word, leaving some thoughts in the peculiar position of being unpaired. It might even seem feckless—which is a feeling that you’ve experienced even though you’ve certainly never felt feck.

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II.

Occasionally, I overrule the dictionary. I look through the case law and reach a verdict: a word that’s not a word becomes a word. For me, this linguistic Bolshevism requires two elements. First, the word must be essential to the sentence. Either there’s no suitable alternative that I can wedge into its place, or the revolutionary, invented word is necessary for the scansion that I want for a line. The second test is comprehensibility. Will the reader understand my new word and, most likely, sail through the rest of the sentence? I don’t believe in calling attention to new words—I won’t use quotes, or parentheses, I’m not providing an explanation or footnote—so the meaning must be obvious. A new word should, harmoniously, match the language that we’ve all, more or less, agreed to use. And, in recent months, I’ve written inarticulable, underappreciated, underslept, innovatively, midsentence, and unrelatable—words not yet in dictionaries but that I believe are still easily understood.

Two words on my radical list—underappreciated and underslept—will, eventually, be standard in English dictionaries. Perhaps that’s a tad boastful, but I’m confident that I’m ahead of the trend, because there’s a common development pattern for many new English words: there’s the birth of a new word when two separate concepts, such as week and end, or break and fast, start to fuse in speech; very soon, in the teenage years, those words grow hyphens, such as the old terms of week-end and break-fast; and, finally, when those words reach maturity, they jettison the hyphen as evolutionary scaffolding that’s no longer needed.

Numerous words fit this pattern in English—bookshop, football, notebook, toothbrush, and, in the most notable example from recent decades, email. Most people alive today watched this word take its first steps and then eventually enter the world on its own. At first, the term that people used was electronic mail; very quickly, for about a day, you would see e mail; predictably, that soon became e-mail, which some people still use—although email is the natural and expected maturity for this word.

Interestingly, the pronunciation also changes when one of these compound words grows up. For book shop as two words, you stress the second word, shop, while the single word bookshop has a stress—as in all these compound words—on the first part, bookshop. You’ll hear the difference if you say these two words aloud: Foot Ball and football. Or you can remember how electronic mail stressed the mail, while email stresses the e.

This subtle pronunciation change—which occurs, relentlessly, throughout the language—is one reason why classic films sound so odd to our ear; we can hear the words, understand the sentences, but find the accents, stress, and tone, utterly peculiar. But pronunciation, like the language itself, is always moving, and we, too, will eventually sound very strange to people in the future—if they happen to be listening.