Thursday 11 October 2007 @17:09
Grammar maven Patricia T. O’Conner responded via email to my query about suffix orthogonality. I don’t think she will mind my reprinting it here.
Hi, Chris,
You’ve done a lot more thinking about this suffix business than I have. Most of the shades of difference with adjectives ending in “-ic” and “-ical” seem to have developed idiomatically and there are no general rules governing them.
Suffixes in general can be quite mysterious. For example, two opposite suffixes (”-less” and “-ful”) give similar meanings the case of “shameless” and “shameful.” But I may be able to come up with some rough guidelines for certain kinds of suffixes.
In the case of agent nouns formed by adding “-er” and “-or,” there’s a generality to be made. Often the “-er” ones come from Old English (like “singer,” with roots in ancient Germanic), while the “-or” ones are derived from Latin (like “editor,” from the Latin edere*, “edit”). Even here, though, there are exceptions. When an English word has both endings (like “adviser”/”advisor”), the “-er” ending is often the older one. In the case of some legal terms, it appears that lawyers historically have been fonder of more pompous-looking Latinate endings than of simple Germanic ones. (Historically, English academics, jurists, and churchmen always respected Latin more than Old English, which explains much of the confusion about English grammar.)
Then there’s the “-ible”-vs.”-able” ending. If there’s a generality to be made, it’s this: Often a word derived from Old English or another Germanic source (like Old Dutch, Old Icelandic, Old Norse and so on) will end in “able” (“forgivable,” “lovable,” “readable”). But a word derived directly from Latin will end in “ible” (“terrible,” “audible,” “legible”). Again, this is only a rough generality, since there are exceptions. And oddities too: “eatable” is from the Old English etan (”eat”) while “edible” is from the Latin edere* (”eat”).
I can understand how a mathematician might be frustrated by all these generalities. As the grammarian Otto Jespersen once said, this isn’t Euclidean geometry.
Pat O’Conner
*The Latin edere can mean to eat, to publish, to edit, to give forth.
Thanks!
Saturday 22 September 2007 @10:31
Dear Grammar Mavens,
In English, the suffixes ‘-ic’ and ‘-ical’ both form adjectives from nouns. An object exhibiting symmetry is ‘symmetric’, and the aims of a devil are ‘diabolical’.
My question is about how we use each suffix. For some roots, they seem interchangeable (diabolic vs. diabolical). For others they produce distinct shades of meaning (mythic vs. mythical). In some cases, one conceivable variant is absent from the dictionary and never used (chaotic vs. *chaotical, or *chemic vs. chemical). And in other cases, one variant seems to be preferred but the other can be found in the dictionary and is often heard (cyclic vs. cyclical).
To me personally, words like ‘cyclical’, ‘symmetrical’, and ‘fantastical’ clearly have redundant suffixes, because ‘cyclic’, ‘symmetric’, and ‘fantastic’ are already perfectly good adjectives. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to apply my own rule consistently, because I would use ‘parenthetical’ over ‘parenthetic’.
Nouns ending in ‘-ic’ confuse things too: ‘magic’ is both a noun and an adjective, but we also have ‘magical’ to make slight semantic distinctions. A “magic journey” is supernatural (perhaps enabled by a magic carpet or enchanted broomstick), whereas a “magical journey” is merely extraordinary.
‘Logic’ is strictly a noun (we need -al to form the adjective), but mysteriously, both ‘gynecologic’ and ‘gynecological’ are listed in my dictionary as adjectives. Similarly, ‘graphic’ and ‘graphical’ are both adjectives, as is ‘cryptographic’, but not *‘cryptographical’. In the former case, there might again be different shades of meaning: is a graphic depiction the same as a graphical depiction?
Is there any pattern or method to this madness? As a borderline mathematician, I would prefer orthogonal grammatical characteristics (orthogonalistical grammatic characterisms); as a language user, perhaps I must submit to its haphazardly evolved nature.
Tuesday 14 November 2006 @0:38
Our paper is just about ready for Wednesday’s conference deadline. This might be the earliest I’ve ever ‘finished’ a paper — is it ever really finished? — nearly 36 hours before the deadline. 
Of course, 5 hours ago it was a page and a half too long, so I started applying my time-tested ‘paper compression’ techniques:
- reduce the vertical space taken up by figures containing code and examples, even if that means abandoning customary line-breaking and indentation,
- look for paragraphs with just one or two words on the last line, and rewrite them to make them a line shorter,
- hunt down bibliographic entries that go on too long, and shorten Transactions to Trans., November to Nov., etc.
It’s amazing how much mileage you can get out of these silly tricks. Now it’s at the point where if certain key paragraphs need one more word inserted, the whole thing spills onto page 11.
This is a new field for me. I’ve read a fair bit, but still it’s strange and scary to be submitting somewhere that I don’t recognize any of the names on the program committee. (No offense folks, if any referees look me up and read this!) I had an idea that was vaguely related to compiler implementation, but actually could be generalized to a different field, and that seemed the best place for it. Plus this work was far more accessible to my M.S. students — one of them is my co-author — than any of my work on type theory. There’s something to be said for that. I don’t think I’ll post any version of the paper here until I hear whether it is accepted, but for the curious I put a poster online some time ago — with very preliminary data — that describes much of the result.
Saturday 11 November 2006 @11:25
I had to see what all the fuss was about. I have been visiting ‘productivity porn’ sites like 43folders and lifehacker (and their associated flickr groups) off and on for a year. And last weekend I finally swung by a Barnes & Noble and picked up a Moleskine grid-lined notebook.
When I first opened it up, the experience was a bit deflating. I caressed the cover. I sniffed the binding. I investigated the pocket in the back. I don’t know what I was expecting… a shining beacon? A choir of angels? I guess it’s impossible not to be a little underwhelmed after the way these things are hyped on the Internets.
So I tried it for a week, sitting aside my usual cheap black-marbled composition book, half full. I carried the Moleskine notebook to meetings and seminars. I did some course planning and sketched some project ideas. I’m just up to page 12, and I have to admit it has grown on me already.
Having grid-lined pages comes in handy. It allows you to write landscape or portrait equally well. It supports very neatly-drawn ad-hoc tables. (I’m tracking meeting-time preferences for members of my committee on one such table.)
But more important is the size: 13 x 21 cm, which is a lot narrower than my old composition books, and a more extreme aspect ratio than even ISO 216 A-series paper. A narrow page is useful for typographical reasons, of course, but even for note-taking it seems to work out well. It’s hard to use my composition books on my lap or otherwise in the absence of a desk… but I guess that’s also partly because of the soft cover.
Anyway, I’d like to write more on my quest (and misadventures) to find suitable tools for project planning and task tracking. LifeBalance was fun for a while, but it doesn’t run on Linux, and the interface is too ‘widgetized’ for my taste. I set myself up on Backpack a few weeks ago; I like its interface and concept but there are certainly drawbacks for realizing the cross-cutting concerns of GTD (project view vs. context view). This morning I’m checking out org-mode for Emacs, and for now I’m amazed, but I’m still reading the manual. I guess once I manage to settle into something truly workable, I’ll write about it here. I’m sure to David Allen it’s a travesty to spend so long chasing down the perfect system rather than just getting things done. But to me it feels like a legitimate (but, so far, unending) meta-project to sharpen my tools.
Sunday 17 September 2006 @11:18
This TV show advert — plastered all around New York lately — is making me angry. Why?
That curly thing is not an apostrophe! And you don’t have to be a font freak or typography wonk to know the difference. In grade school — before I could distinguish Garamond from Gill Sans, before Adobe Systems was founded — I knew that an apostrophe curved down and to the left.
So how did this happen? Considering that computer keyboards have no ‘left curly single quote’ key — and that probably 98% of all computer users wouldn’t know how to type that character if their lives depended on it — how could this gaffe occur when the apostrophe key is right there on your keyboard?
Yes, you know where I’m going with this: SmartQuotes.™
This is the feature on many word processors and desktop publishers that automatically converts typewriter-style straight quotes into curly ones. Unfortunately, it does a poor job of it, and that’s often worse than not doing the job at all.
Now, I’m not one to ridicule or be offended by home-made garage sale fliers and grocery store signage with their superfluous quotation marks. Er, well, I don’t extensively ridicule them.
But here is a case of a major broadcasting firm with professional graphic artists plastering their large full-color ads across a major city in which you can’t swing a cat without hitting a designer. There’s just no excuse.
P.S., it’s even wrong in the HTML on the web site:
Tuesday 30 May 2006 @23:01
Am I tired of politicians and bureaucrats recasting questions directed to them in interviews? Yes, definitely. Does the technique lead to a dreadful rhetorical style? It is certain. Does it remind me of using the Magic 8-ball as a kid? Without a doubt.
I heard an interview on NPR this morning — I was too groggy to catch who it was — but when the interviewer asked a question, the interviewee ‘responded’ by asking a sequence of his own questions, to which he then gave abrupt answers (2–3 words each). I’m not sure whether this technique started with Donald Rumsfeld, or whether he just popularized it, but please stop already!
I can conjecture a few reasons why this style evolved. (1) Asking your own questions is a novel way to evade entirely the reporter’s questions. (2) It limits the scope of the reporter’s question. In this case, the speaker seems to say, “your question is not nuanced enough, so here are five narrow instances that I will address.” (3) The speaker is incapable of constructing complex sentences with multiple dependent clauses, so to communicate a complex viewpoint he must rely on a long sequence of curt answers to narrow questions. (4) The speaker believes the listener or reporter incapable of comprehending complex sentences with multiple dependent clauses.
At any rate, this style makes the speaker seem either simple-minded or arrogant (usually both), and it demonstrates contempt for both interviewer and audience.
Is this something I unwittingly do when fielding questions in a class or seminar? Better not tell you now. Will my interlocutors please call it to my attention if they catch me doing this? Reply hazy, try again.
Friday 19 May 2006 @17:39
My last post contained some technical details about my laptop and its memory configuration. If that post is still accessible on the web years from now—as is my intent—I have to assume it will sound absolutely ridiculous.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s revisit an old email message. I have archives of email dating back to 1991, and I occasionally browse them for grins and nostalgia. Here is a message my friend sent me in 1994:
From: mbp@…
To: league@…
Subject: Argh.
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 18:19:50 -0400 (EDT)
[person] just showed me his new toy. A notebook, with active matrix color VGA screen 500 MB hard disk, internal 14.4K FAX/modem, and… get this… 486DX4/75 CPU. Puppy weighs less than 7 lbs. And is literally the size of a notebook. Amazing color, etc., etc.
He said something about $6000, and I’m pinching pennies to even CONSIDER a $150 modem. (or a $150 or $250 CPU)
Ah, those halcyon days when we were impressed by a 7 pound laptop for 6 grand. Progress, eh?
Wednesday 10 May 2006 @11:26
Last week, when I posted to disparage Microsoft PowerPoint, I used the word ‘amateur’, as in “PowerPoint makes you look like a total amateur.” I already regret that word choice; I did not mean to denigrate amateurs!
The word, of course, comes from the Latin amator (lover), so originally it meant someone who pursues something for the love of it, rather than for monetary compensation. My dictionary (New Oxford American, 2e) lists two definitions:
- a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid basis
- a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity
These meanings are at odds with one another, and I hate that. I have to imagine that the second meaning was promoted by professionals trying to discredit the work of those that were not members of the trade guild.
Today, in many fields, one can find extremely talented amateurs and grossly incompetent professionals. Indeed, I am an amateur photographer and pianist, so I have an interest in protecting the positive definition of the word. People do seek to publish my photographs: just yesterday an English professor from Utah asked to use one of my (fairly abstract) photos for the cover of a book he is editing. (I’ll post something about it in the future.) I usually agree to these things, with little or no pay, because I just don’t take pictures for money. I’m more interested in improving my skills and having my work appreciated and used.
Amateurs and professionals sometimes take on different roles. I’d never agree to be the sole photographer at someone’s wedding. That’s too much pressure; leave that stuff to a professional!
Something similar happens in software development; amateurs (in the first sense) are the basis of the free software movement and the hacker culture. In this case, I’d personally be more likely to hire someone who programs on her own time just because she loves it, rather than someone who pursued a pile of certifications and acronyms (CCNA, MCSE, etc.) Like the trade guilds, certification programs (particularly expensive ones) aim to delegitimize amateurs.
Some of my thinking on this topic is probably thanks to Paul Graham. In his essay What Business Can Learn from Open Source, he writes:
There’s a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it’s staring us in the face. “Amateur” was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.
That’s why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money.
Anyway, I’m not going to edit the PowerPoint post to redact the word ‘amateur’. Sometimes I think we have to accept the fact that words have different, even conflicting, meanings. I feel this way when hackers (enthusiastic and skillful computer programmers or users) fume about mentions of hackers (people who use computers to gain unauthorized access to data) in the media. [Definitions from New Oxford American 2e, again.]
Get over it, it means both things now. Rely on the context. (Although I guess I do get upset when people don’t know there is a ‘good’ definition…)
I just read Copywriting 101, on how to “tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people.” The first tip is about having a ‘hook’… the purpose of the title is to get people to read the first sentence. The purpose of that sentence is to get people to read the second sentence, and so on.
Sure, drawing people in is important, but it can seriously backfire if the hook has little to do with the actual point of the piece. Your goal should be not just for your reader to get to the end, but for him/her not to regret having read it. I come across many articles that start with some compelling ploy, but then switch gears once it appears you have ‘committed’ to reading. I guess this is a marketer’s perspective: once the traveling salesman has his foot in the door, his mission is all but accomplished: the message will be delivered.
But I think this perspective is not ideal for writing on the web. There is no commitment: it’s far easier to hit the back button or close the window than to slam the door on a salesman’s foot. If I feel betrayed by a lead-in, I’m probably less likely to read other articles or subscribe. Journalistic style dictates that the first sentence should not just draw you in, but should give you some idea what the piece is about. Then, even if your reader gets interrupted or decides to go elsewhere, you were able to deliver a few sentences’ worth of your message in a short time.
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