Number 10
A reader sent this story: “Many years ago, when I was sharing hall duty at school with a young language arts teacher, I commented to her about the strange gait of a student who had just passed us, and speculated as to whether he had severe jock itch or just poor articulation. She thought a moment, then replied, ‘He talks okay, so it must be jock itch.’ AARGH, on several levels!”
“Articulation,” of course, can mean the connections between bones, or it can mean the utterance of sounds. Not surprisingly, the young language arts teacher was familiar with the latter meaning. Also not surprisingly, but unfortunately, she didn’t follow the line of thought that connected the word “articulation” with awkward physical movement. If she’d been swifter, she might have thought, “How could his strange walk be caused by poor speaking? Maybe articulation means something else ~ making sounds ~ connecting sounds to words ~ ideas ~ connecting . . . body parts . . . aha . . . “ She can’t be blamed for not knowing all the meanings of the word, but she can be blamed for not noticing that her reply didn’t make sense.
Before we learned to speak as infants, presumably we didn’t know any words. We brilliantly extrapolated an entire language from unintelligible noises, facial expressions, gestures, objects, and events, and later from books. It’s a long trip from learning that “cat” means the smaller, hairier creature when Mom or Dad points to Fluffy every day while saying “cat,” to figuring out “articulation” on the fly. A language arts teacher ought to have a better sense of the language, but not everyone is quick in that way, and the poor thing needed a job.
On the other hand, logic can take us down the wrong path, as when a child says “I seed the cat” instead of “I saw the cat.” The child has learned how to construct the past tense of a common English verb, and logically came up with “seed,” not having learned the irregular verb form yet. This is how “actionable” (I’m getting a lot of mileage out of that one) in its incorrect usage was spawned. From what we know about “action” and the suffix “able,” why shouldn’t it mean something like “practicable”? A person who is not widely read may not have encountered the word before in its natural habitat, and therefore wouldn’t know it means “affording grounds for legal action.” But in this case, the writer might ask herself, “Why don’t I hear or read ‘actionable’ used this way more often? Why is it just showing up now, in an unfamiliar context?” This should be the tip-off to look up the word.
People argue that English changes all the time, and we may invent new derivative words using the tools of English word formation, like prefixes and suffixes. This is true, but you can’t ignore both the connotation and denotation of a word. Those who ignore the history of a word are doomed to confuse it, us, and themselves.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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