Category: Linguistics

A really exciting new digital initiative in linguistics journalism is on the horizon: Schwa Fire.    It’s the brainchild of Michael Erard, a Ph.D. in linguistics and a superlative science writer.  Erard is seeking to fill the gap between the language blogs (of which you’re currently reading one), where content is relatively short and the authors unpaid, and the literary and intellectual magazines like the New Yorker, where there are occasionally linguistic essays of some importance, but not nearly often enough or in enough detail.  Schwa Fire will be a low-cost ($1.99) ad-free digital magazine available on the web and for mobile devices featuring important ideas from people from across the linguistic sciences.

Erard is currently running a major Kickstarter initiative to get his project off the ground, and is over halfway to his $25,000 goal.  I supported it today and I would encourage others with an interest in seeing high-quality, long-form, language-related on-line non-fiction (perhaps with not so many hyphens) to do so as well.

I got a note last week from a correspondent asking me about the word hithertofore, and whether or not it was a ‘proper word’.  I have to admit that at first glance I was very surprised, because of course it was a perfectly good word, and one whose meaning I knew well.   But when the correspondent said that she’d looked around and hadn’t found it, I looked at it again and realized that of course it wasn’t a word.  Or was it?

English has two words with a distinctly archaic flavour that mean ‘up to the present time’, hitherto and heretofore.    These synonyms also start with the same letter, are compounds containing to, and to top it all off, hither and here are also synonyms, so it’s not even semantically odd.   Neither word is especially common, and as you can see from this Ngram, hitherto and heretofore are really quite rare and becoming rarer.    It’s hardly surprising, then, that some speakers and readers might blend these two. Whether we think of it as adding -fore to hitherto, or substituting hither for here in heretofore, doesn’t much matter, as the result is the same, hithertofore.

What should perhaps be more surprising is that hithertofore hasn’t hithertofore been included in any dictionary, not even with a usage note.   It’s not hard to find in use in printed books; Google Books claims 67,500 works containing it (although that number is probably inaccurate) in lots of different genres.  There are plenty of words in big unabridged dictionaries that are far less common than that.   I’ve found it going back at least as far as 1708, and I didn’t have to look very hard. While it seems at a glance that a higher than average proportion of these works are authored by non-native English speakers, I also would argue that one has to be relatively fluent to even make such an error, conflating two already-unusual words.

Note, though, that its Ngram, rather than slowly declining from the 19th century until today like those of its two constituents, shows it to be largely a product of the mid-20th century, peaking around 1970.  This suggests, firstly, that perhaps it was at its most popular when its two constituents had declined enough in frequency that they had fallen out of regular use (and were thus prone to confusion), but were still common enough to be intermixed.   It hit its sweet spot half a century ago, but now the two well-accepted words themselves are falling out of use in favour of previously  or other terms, so hithertofore may actually have lost its chance to become another widely used variant (even at its most popular, it was less than 1% as frequent as heretofore).    I still think it’s a neat example of the way that memory, meaning, and phonology can lead to the appearance of nearly-invisible blends, and given that it is a relatively common error, it could probably use some lexicographical attention.

Last week in my class, we were discussing loanwords as well as semantic change.    You couldn’t ask for a more perfect (although bothersome) news story incorporating these two aspects of linguistic change than this story about a  bilingual promotional campaign in Canada for Vitaminwater, in which random English and French words were paired on the bottom of drink caps.  But it all went horribly wrong when under one cap, the English word ‘you’ was combined with the French word ‘retard’ for ‘late’, as detailed in this article in the Province , and was then found by an Alberta family.   Another cap had the perfectly ordinary French word douche ‘shower’.  Coca-Cola (the parent company) has apologized profusely and cancelled the promotion (to its credit), and has said it was all a coincidence gone awry, although I still wonder whether it could be a rogue employee’s doing.

Learners of second languages are often warned to beware of ‘false friends’ – words that look like English words but in fact, in the other language, have a radically different meaning.  Obviously ‘retard’ has a very specific and highly offensive meaning for most English speakers.   But I’m a little surprised that, in the coverage of this story, there hasn’t been really any mention of the fact that ‘retard’ (with second-syllable stress) is not just a French word meaning ‘late’, but an English verb that, until recently at least, was in common use as a synonym for ‘delay’.     Of course, these days the offensive connotation means that the verb ‘to retard’ is becoming increasingly rare, although it’s not hard to find plenty of examples from recent news articles.     There is not a massive protest every time someone uses this verb in the customary way.   This leads me to conclude that in fact, the real troublemaking word on the bottlecap is not ‘retard’ at all, but rather, ‘you’, which immediately turns the following word from … whatever it was, in English or French … into an insult.  If the English word had been ‘kumquat’, I do not know whether we’d even have heard about this.