posted
you sure it wasn't something like fractur (sp?) script (from older, pre WWII german)? Its s form for inside of a word looks a bit like an f. Though I don't know if it was ever used in english.
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No, I know what that is. When you read really old newspapers, the s's are long and tall and look like an f with a matching curve at the bottom, like a very long s with a dash in the center.
Jon Boy, can't you pluralize a letter of the alphabet with 's ?
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However, it doesn't always do this. So I guess my question is, why was the s distended (where it was) and when was this abandoned. In British newspapers from 1785, it is ALWAYS extended.
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quote:The borders between them is fuzzy, but it's generally divided into 450–1100, 1100–1500, and 1500 on (or 1500–1800 for early modern English, and then 1800 on for modern English).
It's interesting how short lived languages generally are. It's strange to think, isn't it, that at some point in the relatively near future, the language with which we're communicating right now will be a dead language. Of course, I'm sure that our media and our possession of a technologically sophisticated society slows down the evolution of our language, so barring some catastrophy I expect that what we speak right now will be understandable for an unusually long time, but still.
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My own recollection of that "s looking like an f" thing is that the more modern-looking s was always used at the end of words, but the one that looked like an f was used for basically all other appearances of the letter.
I think it was not completely abandoned until relatively recently, perhaps around the middle of the nineteenth century, or even later?
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I think he meant it in more of a connotation sense. Like, if he used it to mean the second, would that be understood, or would the reader assume he meant the first.
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I've always been fascinated with consonant mutation. Well, not always, but ever since I've known about it. In Russian there are several standard mutations that occur in different forms of verbs: for example "d", "z", and "g" can become "zh"; "t" and "k" become "ch"; etc. In English there seem to be fewer mutations, but some are the same as the Russian ones: divide -> division is like videt' -> vizhu. Some, however, are different: submit -> submission, but pryatat' -> pryachu. Linky for more details.
So, my question is, how/when did these mutations come about in English, and why are they different from the Russian ones?
And what's the story about this great vowel shift?
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One thing Jon Boy didn't say about apostrophes:
When making a plural noun possessive, only the apostrophe is needed. For example, "the horses' hooves" and "The Joneses' boat."
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Are you SURE you don't use an apostrophe to pluralize a letter? I could have sworn you did. And if not, how do you plaralize them? As? Bs?
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quote:I may be wrong, but neither would be correct. "I'm past all that" is a vernacular phrase, but not technically acceptable. The technically correct way of expressing that idea would be "I've passed all that." If you say it that way, though, people will think you're talking about last night's dinner.
There is nothing technically wrong with "I'm past all that." Here, "past" is an adjective used in a metaphorical sense: grammatically speaking, in the same way that a runner is past (as in "on the far side of", or "beyond") the finish line at the end of a race, the speaker ("I") is past "that" on a time line. In fact, "I've passed all that" has somewhat different connotations, even leaving aside the variations in the meaning of "to pass" alluded to above.
OK, the runner analogy isn't perfect, but the fact remains that there's nothing wrong with the initial sentence.
posted
PSI: I think both forms are correct, though when there would be ambiguity the apostrophe is preferred: "Xs" or "X's", but not "Is" or "As". To keep things consistent, I would prefer to always use the apostrophe (or possibly spell out the letter instead).
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Oh, and apropos "prefer to always use", what's the history behind the injunction against splitting infinitives? Is it really just an attempt by English teachers to make the language more like Latin?
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quote:Passed and past. I know that passed is a verb and past is a time, but my major problem concerns a sentence like this: "I'm past all that."
Is that right, or would it be passed?
It would be past. Passed is the past tense and past participle of the verb pass. Past is everything else. Thus, since it describes what state you are in, you use the adjective past. Despite what other may say, it is not incorrect.
quote:From curiosity, and this is more of an alphabet question than a grammar one, but when did the letter f become the letter s.
The letter f has never been the letter s, though in some older scripts, they often look very similar. The elongated s was used everywhere except at the end of a word. Why, though? That's just how they wrote them. The shapes of letters have changed considerably over the last thousand years. I don't have exact dates for when the elongated s was used (I'll have to check when I get home), but I believe it was mostly an early modern English thing.
quote:Why did all my teachers tell me that I could never start a sentence with "because", only to change their tunes around fifth or sixth grade?
Because they're a bunch of fascist pigs. Technically, if you just add because onto the beginning of an otherwise complete sentence, it makes it incomplete because then all you have is a subordinate clause with nothing to subordinate to. This may have been what they were trying to teach you to avoid. It's still stupid advice, though, because it's absolutely normal in speech and common enough in writing.
quote: Can we hurt them?
For liability reasons, Guru Jon prefers not to advocate violence. However, if said teachers were to be hurt, Guru Jon would not necessarily object.
quote:Jon Boy, can't you pluralize a letter of the alphabet with 's ?
Okay, fine, I lied. Letters of the alphabet are the only things that should ever be pluralized with 's, but this is only because it's usually not recognizable as a plural otherwise.
quote:So, my question is, how/when did these mutations come about in English, and why are they different from the Russian ones?
And what's the story about this great vowel shift?
I'll tackle Old and Middle English, the Great Vowel Shift, and other sound changes when I get home from work. I hope the anticipation doesn't kill anyone.
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quote:Because they're a bunch of fascist pigs. Technically, if you just add because onto the beginning of an otherwise complete sentence, it makes it incomplete because then all you have is a subordinate clause with nothing to subordinate to. This may have been what they were trying to teach you to avoid. It's still stupid advice, though, because it's absolutely normal in speech and common enough in writing.
Illustration: Right - "I am happy." Wrong - "Because I am happy." Right - "Because I am happy, I am going to sing."
Of course, even the middle example is extremely common in conversation.
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Now to the question of the differences between Old, Middle, and Modern English.
Old English was a heavily inflected language, much like Latin. There were four cases (and the faint remnants of a fifth case) and a wider system of verb inflections. Even the word the declined for gender, number, and person. Case endings allowed for a freer sentence structure, so the order wasn't always subject-verb-object (though that was always the default). There were only two true tenses in Old English: present and past. Auxiliary verbs and modals didn't exist as such; rather, they were still complete verbs that conjugated just like anything else. Oh, and Old English had really cool alliterative poetry like Beowulf.
In Middle English, lots of stuff changed. French became the language of government and learning, so English lost its prestige and became unregulated. Gender became totally lost (except in the third person pronouns). Case endings reduced to a schwa, so they became useless. As a result, sentence order started to become more fixed. Auxiliaries and modals also became fixed, allowing for more tenses and diminishing the role of the subjunctive, respectively. Lots of words were borrowed from Norse and French. Some of the most common words in English today, including pronouns like she and they, are not native to English. But slowly, English became prestigious again and began to stabilize.
In Modern English, the decayed case endings from Middle English finally dropped away altogether (though they were still often spelled with a silent e). Many new words from Latin and Greek were added during this time. Sentence structure continued to settle down, and several new grammatical features were added, like using do for negative statements and questions. The pronoun thou dropped out of usage, and its was added, replacing the old genitive form his, which had became awkward and unfavorable because it sounded like it gave gender to objects.
One of the great distinguishing features of Modern English is the Great Vowel Shift. Old and Middle English distinguished between long and short vowels, but it's not the notions of long and short that you were taught in elementary school; here, "long" means that vowels were actually drawn out longer. In Middle English, they were still distinct, but some long vowels shortened, and some short vowels lengthened. Towards the end of Middle English, the distinction disappeared completely as all long vowels raised (meaning that they came to be pronounced closer to the roof of the mouth). The two highest (i and u) became the diphthongs (like in I and ow). The shift took several generations to complete (which is quite fast for such a huge change), and some argue that it never quite ended. Unfortunately, the cause of the shift is still one of the great mysteries of historical linguistics.
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Is the A/O inversion related to the Great Vowel Shift?
(A/O inversion is the name I was taught for the way certain English dialects switch A and O sounds, like in Cache County, Utah, where my grandmother grew up. Thus, the famous "Were you barn in a born?" and "Garge ate the carn with a fark in the born." I had an English professor who claimed that it wasn't just hick pronunciation -- and that it might show what part of the British Isles the locals originally immigrated from.)
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quote:My own recollection of that "s looking like an f" thing is that the more modern-looking s was always used at the end of words, but the one that looked like an f was used for basically all other appearances of the letter.
I think it was not completely abandoned until relatively recently, perhaps around the middle of the nineteenth century, or even later?
Okay, it looks like it started in Middle English (not quite sure on the exact date) and continued until sometime in the eighteenth century, though it was slowly giving way to the regular s before that.
quote:I've always been fascinated with consonant mutation. Well, not always, but ever since I've known about it. In Russian there are several standard mutations that occur in different forms of verbs: for example "d", "z", and "g" can become "zh"; "t" and "k" become "ch"; etc. In English there seem to be fewer mutations, but some are the same as the Russian ones: divide -> division is like videt' -> vizhu. Some, however, are different: submit -> submission, but pryatat' -> pryachu. Linky for more details.
So, my question is, how/when did these mutations come about in English, and why are they different from the Russian ones?
Palatalization occurs when certain vowels occur near certain consonants. The consonant gets pulled to a different part of the mouth and turned into either a fricative (like sh) or an affricate (like ch). For example, in Old English, a hard c in proximity to a high front vowel (like an i or e) would cause it to palatalize by pulling it forward from the vellum to the palate. Thus we have the word child in English but Kind in German. The same vowels pull a t back from the alveolar ridge to the palate and turn it into a sh sound. Your last example is a little flawed because the vowels are different, thus resulting in different sounds; in the word habitually, the t is often pronounced like a ch.
Unfortunately, there aren't any clear rules for what changes will happen (at least none that I know of). They're inconsistent from language to language. In Spanish and Old English, a hard g would palatalize to a y, but in French, it turned into a zh sound. So when did the changes take place? Well, it depends on the word. In the English words you used, the changes happened in Old French and were then borrowed into English. Other changes, like the Old English c -> ch, happened after Old English separated from other West Germanic languages. Sorry if that's not as clear an answer as you wanted.
quote:Oh, and apropos "prefer to always use", what's the history behind the injunction against splitting infinitives? Is it really just an attempt by English teachers to make the language more like Latin?
Concern about the "split infinitive" arose in the mid-eighteen hundreds, not too long after the construction began to become more common. And yes, it appears that one of the primary objections is based on the fact that Latin and Greek did not have splittable infinitives. However, the to is not really a part of the infinitive in English; it's simply a particle that often attaches to it. Splitting infinitives is 100 percent grammatically correct; if there's any reason to object, it's that sometimes it sounds better to put the adverb elsewhere. And interestingly enough, it's use is mostly confined to speakers of standard English, so you can't even claim that it's a vernacular or vulgar construction.
quote:Jon Boy, when is it appropriate to use "towards" instead of "toward," or vice versa (or is there no distinction)?
Thanks! This has been bugging me since my fourth grade essay on owls.
There is absolutely no difference in meaning. From what I've read, towards is strongly favored in Britain, while Americans tend to use toward. However, in my experience, towards is very common in America, so there's no reason to discount it as a Briticism. I suggest using whichever one you like best, but try to be consistent.
quote:And what about "further" and "farther"?
Farther refers to physical distances; further towards abstract distances. However, further is commonly used where farther "should" be used, and it appears to be gaining ground. At some point in the future, farther may disappear entirely.
But now it's dinner time. I'll get to the rest later.
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Further can refer to physical things if it's question of degree instead of distance. It is also the only word of the pair that can be used as a verb.
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As far as I know, there is no difference, even though some pairs like this are used differently (like magic and magical). They mean the same thing, and if there's a usage preference, I don't know what it is. In my opinion, ironical sounds stupid, but unfortunately, that's all I can say about it.
quote:And why do I have such trouble spelling words that end in -ance/-ence or -ant/-ent and the like?
Because they sound alike. As I understand, one set came from Latin verbs ending with -ar, and one set came from Latin verbs ending in -er. Unfortunately, a lot of these words were borrowed from Old French, not Latin, and French often changed the spelling. And then even more of them changed once they had been adopted into English. So, sadly, there is no rule to tell you when to use a and when to use e. You pretty much just have to memorize them.
quote:Which type is this sentence:
If he doesn't like apples, I don't think he should eat them.
That's just weird. It seems more conditional (type 1) than statement-of-fact. It doesn't seem to be an accurate way of presenting the thought, though, because thinking that he shouldn't eat them isn't predicated upon whether or not he likes them. That is, A->B, not A | A or B. I think that more properly, it would be "I think that if he doesn't like apples, he shouldn't eat them."
quote:Is the A/O inversion related to the Great Vowel Shift?
(A/O inversion is the name I was taught for the way certain English dialects switch A and O sounds, like in Cache County, Utah, where my grandmother grew up. Thus, the famous "Were you barn in a born?" and "Garge ate the carn with a fark in the born." I had an English professor who claimed that it wasn't just hick pronunciation -- and that it might show what part of the British Isles the locals originally immigrated from.)
It's related in the sense that it's a vowel shift. The Great Vowel Shift was simply a shift in long vowels roughly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Other vowel shifts have been occurring throughout the history of the language all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. English vowels (actually, all Germanic vowels) have historically been unstable, occasionally shifting, merging, forming diphthongs, or switching places.
Some accents definitely do show which part of Britain certain groups emigrated from, but I don't know if the rural Utah accent corresponds to anything in particular.
quote:Further can refer to physical things if it's question of degree instead of distance. It is also the only word of the pair that can be used as a verb.
Thanks for mentioning the verb bit. That one slipped my mind.
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quote:It seems more conditional (type 1) than statement-of-fact.
I think it's definitely declarative, once you throw away the word order and remember that it's common to omit "that" in conversational English. I really hate that practice, by the way, since as we've seen here the alternative ways we have of flagging subordinate clauses often suck.
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"Declarative" and "conditional" aren't mutually exclusive, and changing word order when you have a conditional clause can seriously change the meaning. But I'm going to bed now, so I'll have to think about it more tomorrow.
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posted
Jon Boy, that was absolutely fascinating! I've read about this before, but it was long enough ago that I really didn't remember any of it. Could you illustrate the evolution of English by showing us some examples of words that have their roots in old English, and then showing us how they've developed throughout the history of the language?
Also, you mentioned that in Old English there was the faint remnant of a fifth case, which got me thinking--what language immediately proceeded Old English. Something Germanic, I'm sure, but what? Where was it spoken? Also, what exactly were the geographic regions in which Old English was spoken?
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One of my professor's favorite words with Old English roots: fellowship. Fellow in Old English was féolaga (where the g was sort of soft, somewhat like in the Spanish diego). This in turn came from feoh, meaning money or property (whence the modern word fee) and lag, from lecgan, meaning "to lay." Thus, a fellow is someone who lays down his money in an undertaking with others, and a fellowship is the abstract entity created.
The word feoh traces back to the Proto-Germanic fehu, which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European peku, meaning cattle. The same word in Latin gives us words like pecuniary and peculiar. Every time he explained this etymology, he ended by saying that if he were to be disfellowshipped, he'd be deflocked. Ah, etymological puns.
Another interesting set is the words lord and lady. The Old English words were hlaford and hlafdig (pronounced roughly like "hlavord" and "hlavdy"). Hlaford came from hlaf ("loaf") plus weard ("ward"). Thus, a lord is a bread-guard, or someone who protects the people who eat his bread. Hlafdig comes from hlaf plus dig ("to knead"). Thus, the lady was the one making the bread (or in charge of those who made the bread). The initial h was dropped in early Middle English, followed later by the v.
quote:Also, you mentioned that in Old English there was the faint remnant of a fifth case, which got me thinking--what language immediately proceeded Old English. Something Germanic, I'm sure, but what? Where was it spoken? Also, what exactly were the geographic regions in which Old English was spoken?
The evolution was probably Proto-Indo-European -> Proto-Germanic -> West Germanic (which includes German, Swiss, Dutch, Frisian, and English) -> Low Germanic (which includes Dutch, Frisian, English, and modern Low German) -> Old English. There's no clear transition between Low Germanic and Old English (especially since there are no records), but Old English is considered to have started when the island was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons (and they pretty much had control by about 450 AD). The historical extent of Old English is pretty much what is considered England today: Great Britain excluding Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall.
[ April 28, 2004, 11:25 AM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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posted
Thanks, guys. I'm glad to know someone else is enjoying all this.
Just for fun, here's a site that shows the progression of the Great Vowel Shift. There are example pronunciations from Middle English, early Modern English, and Present Day English so you can hear the change firsthand.
And this site has a chart showing the actual movement of the vowels. If you're not familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, there's a link that explains it. The chart is shown as a rough representation of a mouth as seen from the side, so that the i in the upper left is right behind where the upper teeth would be (I hope that makes sense).
_____
Have I missed any questions? I feel like I've probably inadvertently skipped over something.
[ April 28, 2004, 07:56 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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You're probably sick of this type of question, but it wasn't on the common mistakes site. What's the difference between grey and gray? Why does my Word spell checker only hate one of them?
posted
Unfortunately, Storm, I don't think there's any way of figuring out when the phrase "saucy wench" was first used. All I can tell you is that wench comes from the Middle or Old English wenchel (or wencel), which originally meant a child, a servant or slave, or a common woman. By the 1300s it had acquired the senses of a serving maid and of a wanton woman. Saucy was used in the sense of "impertinent, rude, or lascivious" by the 1500s. Interestingly enough, the word sauce is related to the word salad; both ultimately come from the Latin word for salt.
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posted
There is no real difference between gray and grey. The British definitely prefer grey, while Americans lean towards gray. Both spellings are correct. The only problem is that Microsoft Word's spell checker is an utter piece of crap.
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posted
Jon Boy, I asked if you'd seen anything else interesting in Tolkien's use of the English language, and if you'd give us the technical breakdown of it, as you did for Pippen's vow. Was that too broad a question? I'm reading Tolkien's letters right now and he totally rocks.
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Aha! I knew I'd missed something. It is a pretty broad question, and I haven't really studied the feature of his writing, but here are a few things I noticed last time I read The Lord of the Rings:
He uses participial phrases a lot. Where other writers would say something like "They passed through the gate and came into the courtyard," Tolkien says things like "Passing through the gate they came into the courtyard." I don't know if this is a conscious choice or if he just liked the phrasing.
He loves old stuff. He throws in some pretty random old words just for the sheer joy of it. Fell seems to be one of his favorites (as an adjective meaning fierce, cruel, or terrible. Someone (Treebeard, I think) calls Saruman "dwimmercrafty," which is a modern spelling of an Old English word referring to illusion and sorcery. Similarly, Eowyn calls the Witch-King a "foul dwimmerlaik," meaning a practitioner of magic arts. One of the things I love most about Tolkien is that he knows his English inside and out, especially the cool old stuff. Many passages sound practically biblical. When he waxes archaic, he gets it right.
His word choice seems very careful at times. Some passages sound rather poetic, with lines like "and all the stems were green or grey with moss and slimy, shaggy growths" (from chapter 6 in Fellowship). This line seriously needs to be read out loud. It is often said that Tolkien is too verbose and that he spends too much time with long descriptions, but I feel that he's not just doing it to hear himself talk (or read himself write?), like so many modern fantasy authors seem to do; and when one understand his inspirations, it becomes clear that he was merely emulating an older style, where long sidetracks were often taken for the sheer joy of storytelling.
It would be fun to do a study of Tolkien's syntax and word choice, but alas, I have not done such a study.
[ April 28, 2004, 09:41 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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posted
And just in case anyone was wondering, this thread doesn't have to be limited to English. If you have more general questions about linguistics, I may be able to answer them (especially if they're questions about historical linguistics, since that's one of the things I'm especially interested in).
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What do you think will be considered the standard 3rd-person indeterminate-gender pronoun in 100 years?
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First, great links Jon Boy! I can't wait to explore them in depth.
Second, I absolutely love the word "dwimmerlaik". My god I love Tolkein's use of language.
It's funny that he uses participial phrases so much--I use them a lot in my fiction too (much to the dismay of my college fiction writing teacher). I wonder if I was influenced in that by my love of Tolkein, or if part of the reason his writing appeals to me is that it uses kind of unusual patterns like that that I appreciate. Chicken and the egg, I suppose.
And now--my latest questions:
Am I right in thinking that the adjective forming suffix -en is something of a living fossil left over from Old English? There are only a few words that use it--golden, dwarven, elven, and a few others. If it isn't from Old English, what is is from?
Thai and Korean are completely different languages, of completely different linguistic heritage. They are not members of the same language family. And yet, the number 13 is pronounced identically in both of them. What's up with that?
The Greek lowercase lambda is quite similar in shape to the Thai letter that represents the "L" sound (in the link, it's in the third row of characters, sixth from the left).
The Thai script was developed from Mon and Khmer scripts, which were in turn developed from an Indic script called Brahmi. I'm nearly certain that Brahmi script is evolved from Sarasvati script, the script used for writing Sanscrit (I'm fairly sure).
The Greek script was developed from the Phoenician script in the 8th century BCE, which was in turn developed from Ugaritic script (or maybe not--it's possible that Ugaritic was a cousin of Phoenician, rather than a direct descendant, with both of them being descended from Proto-Canaanite script).
So my question is this: What is the relationship between the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and the Sarasvati alphabet? Also, are Sarasvati and Devanagari synonymous terms?
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quote:What do you think will be considered the standard 3rd-person indeterminate-gender pronoun in 100 years?
Since this is a problem that has plagued English for hundreds of years, I don't see it changing anytime soon. The English language isn't in a position right now to adopt a new pronoun from somewhere else, and all the other options have problems. I think they will increasingly become more accepted, but I think there will be a stigma attached to it for quite some time. How long? I honestly have no idea.
quote:Am I right in thinking that the adjective forming suffix -en is something of a living fossil left over from Old English? There are only a few words that use it--golden, dwarven, elven, and a few others. If it isn't from Old English, what is is from?
It's definitely Old English, and it has parallels in other Germanic languages and in Latin and Greek. I'll just quote the entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, because it's rather interesting.
quote:(reduced to -n after r in unstressed syllables), corresponds to OS. -in, OHG. -în (Ger. -en), ON. -in, Goth. -eina-:OTeut -īno-, = Gr. -īno-, L. -īno- (see -INE), added to noun-stems to form adjs. with sense ‘pertaining to, of the nature of’. In Teut. the adjs. so formed chiefly indicate the material of which a thing is composed. Of the many words of this formation which existed in OE. scarcely any survive in mod. use; but the suffix was extensively applied in ME. to form new derivatives. Some of these took the place of OE. words, from which they formally differ only by the absence of umlaut; compare OE. gylden with mod.Eng. golden, OE. stǽnen (early ME. stenen) with ME. and dial. stonen, made of stone. From 16th c. onwards there has been in literary English a growing tendency to discard these adjs. for the attrib. use of the n., as in ‘a gold watch’; hence many of them have become wholly obs., and others (as golden, silvern) are seldom used except metaphorically, or with rhetorical emphasis. It is only in a few cases (e.g. wooden, woollen, earthen, wheaten) that these words are still familiarly used in their lit. sense. In s.w. dialects, however, the suffix is of common occurrence, being added without restriction to all ns. denoting the material of which anything is composed, as in glassen, steelen, tinnen, papern, etc.
I like papern.
And here's something else random and interesting. While searching for that suffix, I came across the diminutive -en suffix (as in kitten) and discovered that chicken is the diminutive of chick. Stew that one over for a while.
quote:Thai and Korean are completely different languages, of completely different linguistic heritage. They are not members of the same language family. And yet, the number 13 is pronounced identically in both of them. What's up with that?
Probably nothing more than mere coincidence. The numbers one, two, and three sound alike in most Indo-European languages. However, four and five often don't. Consider the differences between four, quatre, pedwar, and tetra, or between five, cinq, pump, and penta. No striking resemblances that link each set of words together, and yet they're related.
If Thai and Korean were originally related and later diverged, one would expect a greater difference between the words for thirteen (especially given the fact that the two languages don't appear related in the first place). Some would-be historical linguists will try to create lists of similar words in vastly different languages (like, say, Quechua and Hebrew) in an effort to show relation, but they ignore just about every rule of historical linguistics.
quote:So my question is this: What is the relationship between the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and the Sarasvati alphabet? Also, are Sarasvati and Devanagari synonymous terms?
I'm really not sure if Sarasvati and Devangari are synonymous, though it seems like they are from what little I've read. At any rate, the Devangari alphabet traces back to the Brahmi alphabet, which in turn comes from the eastern Aramaic alphabet (and thus back to Proto-Canaanite). It's mind-boggling to think that most of the writings systems of the world today (as dissimilar as they are) trace back to a common origin.
[ April 29, 2004, 11:23 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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posted
OK, this has been bothering me for a while. In the last couple of years "ouster" has become a popular word in the news media. I originally assumed it meant "one who ousts", and when a notorious figure called for another notorious figure's ouster, the former was metaphorically calling for the person who would rise up and take the place of the latter to step forward. But I have since heard it used in ways that call that interpretation into question, so at one point I decided to look it up. Indeed, according to Webster, "ouster" means
1 a : a wrongful dispossession b : a judgment removing an officer or depriving a corporation of a franchise
2 : EXPULSION
My question is this: how did the word come to mean the act of dispossession itself, rather than the person who dispossesses? Why do "ouster" and "usurper" have such different (if somewhat related) meanings when they are formed in the same way from near-synonyms?
Plus, I think it's a silly word.
Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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posted
Well, it isn't unheard of for -er to mean "the event of." I agree that it would be better to make the synonym of expulsion be "oustage" or something.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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