Both Flesh and Not: Essays

TWENTY-FOUR WORD NOTES

Utilize A noxious puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter; rather, using utilize makes you seem either like a pompous twit or like someone so insecure that she’ll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look sophisticated. The same is true for the noun utilization, for vehicle as used for car, for residence as used for house, for presently, at present, at this time, and at the present time as used for now, and so on. What’s worth remembering about puff-words is something that good writing teachers spend a lot of time drumming into undergrads: “formal writing” does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.

If Most dictionaries’ usage notes for if are long and involved; it might be English’s hardest conjunction. From experience born of personal humiliation, I inform you that there are two main ways to mess up with if and make your writing look weak. The first is to use if for whether. They are not synonyms—if is used to express a conditional, whether to introduce alternative possibilities. True, abstract grammatical distinctions are hard to keep straight in the heat of composition, but in this case there’s a wonderfully simple test you can use: If you can coherently insert an “[or not]” after either the conjunction or the clause it introduces, you need whether. Examples: “He didn’t know whether [or not] it would rain”; “She asked me straight out whether I was a fetishist [or not]”; “We told him to call if [or not? no] he needed a ride [or not? no].” The second kind of snafu involves a basic rule for using commas with subordinating conjunctions (which are what if is one of). A subordinating conjunction signals the reader that the clause it’s part of is dependent — common sub. conjunctions include before, after, while, unless, if, as, and because. The relevant rule is easy and well worth remembering: Use a comma after the subordinating conjunction’s clause only if that clause comes before the independent clause that completes the thought; if the sub. conj.’s clause comes after the independent clause, there’s no comma. Example: “If I were you, I’d put down that hatchet” vs. “I’d put down that hatchet if I were you.”

Pulchritude A paradoxical noun because it refers to a kind of beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adj. form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adj.), classy, colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for real things and real things themselves.

Mucous An adjective, not synonymous with the noun mucus. It’s worth noting this not only because the two words are fun but because so many people don’t know the difference. Mucus means the unmentionable stuff itself. Mucous refers to (1) something that makes or secretes mucus, as in “The next morning, his mucous membranes were in rocky shape indeed,” or (2) something that consists of or resembles mucus, as in “The mucous consistency of its eggs kept the diner’s breakfast trade minimal.”

Toward It might seem pedantic to point out that toward is the correct U.S. spelling and towards is British. On the other hand, so many writers at all levels seem ignorant of the difference that using toward becomes a costless, unpretentious way to signal your fluency in American English. It’s the same with gray (U.S.) and grey (Brit.), though so many Americans have been using them interchangeably for so long that some U.S. dictionaries now list grey as a passable variant. This is not likely to happen with toward/towards, though — at least not in our lifetimes. Nor will it happen with using as to mean since or because, which a lot of U.S. students like to do because they think it makes their prose look classier (“As Dostoevsky is so firmly opposed to nihilism, it should come as no surprise that he so often presents his novels’ protagonists with moral dilemmas”). As of 2003, the causal as is acceptable only in British English, and even there it’s OK only if the dependent as-clause comes at the start of the sentence, since if it comes in the middle the as can look temporal and cause confusion (“I declined her offer as I was on my way to the bank already”).

That There is widespread ignorance about how to use that as a relative pronoun, and two common that-errors are so severe that teachers, editors, and other high-end readers will make unkind judgments about you if you commit them. The first is to use which when you need that. Writers who do this usually think the two relative pronouns are interchangeable but that which makes you look smarter. They aren’t, and it doesn’t. For writers, the abstract rule that that introduces restrictive elements and which introduces nonrestrictive elements is probably less helpful than the following simple test: If there needs to be a comma before the rel. pron., you need which; otherwise, you need that.¹ Examples: “We have a massive SUV that we purchased on credit last month”; “The massive SUV, which we purchased on credit last month, seats us ten feet above any other driver on the road.” The second error, even more common, is way worse. It’s using that when you need who or whom. (Examples: “She is the girl that he’s always dreamed of”; “Daddy promised the air rifle to the first one of us that cleaned out the hog pen.”) There’s a very basic rule: Who and whom are the relative pronouns for people; that and which are the rel. pronouns for everything else. It’s true that there’s a progressive-type linguistic argument to be made for the thesis that the “error” of using that with people is in fact the first phase of our language evolving past the who/that distinction, that a universal that is simpler and will allow English to dispense with the archaic incommodious subject-who-vs.-object-whom thing. This sort of argument is interesting in theory; ignore it in practice. As of 2003, misusing that for who or whom, whether in writing or speech, functions as a kind of class-marker — it’s the grammatical equivalent of wearing NASCAR paraphernalia or liking pro wrestling. If you think that last assertion is snooty or extreme, please keep in mind that the hideous PTL Club’s initials actually stood for “People That Love.”

Effete Here’s a word on which some dictionaries and usage authorities haven’t quite caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is “depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted”—and in a college paper for an older prof. you’d probably want to use it in only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminacy, over-refinement, pretension, and/or decadence; and in this writer’s opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see the extended definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew’s characterization of some liberal group or other as an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” but there are deeper reasons for the extension, such as that effete derives from the Latin efftus, which meant “worn out from bearing children” and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that historically effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art’s exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement or foppery or decadence.

Dialogue Noun-wise, the interesting thing about dialogue is that it means “a conversation or exchange between two or more people,” so it’s not wrong to say something like “The council engaged in a long dialogue about the proposal.” Avoid modifying it with certain adjectives, though—constructive dialogue and meaningful dialogue have, thanks mainly to political cant, become clichés that will make readers’ eyes glaze over. Please also avoid using dialogue as a verb — ever. This is despite the facts that (1) Shakespeare used it as a verb, and (2) There are all sorts of other accepted verbalizations of nouns in English that work the same way; e.g., to diet is reduced from “to go on a diet,” to trap from “to catch in a trap,” and so on. Maybe in thirty years, to dialogue will be just as standard, but as of now it strikes most literate readers as affected and jargonish. Same with to transition; same with to parent.

Privilege Even though some dictionaries OK it, to privilege is currently used only in a particular English subdialect that might be called academese. Example: “The patriarchal Western canon privileges univocal discourse situated within established contexts over the polyphonic free play of decentered utterance.” The contemporary form of this subdialect originated in literary and social theory but has now metastasized throughout much of the humanities. There is exactly one situation in which you’d want to use to privilege, to situate, to interrogate + some abstract noun phrase, or pretty much any construction that’s three times longer than it needs to be — this is in a university course taught by a prof. so thoroughly cloistered, insecure, or stupid as to believe that academese is good intelligent writing. A required course, one that you can’t switch out of. In any other situation, run very fast the other way.

Myriad As an adj., myriad means (1) an indefinitely large number of something (“The Local Group comprises myriad galaxies”) or (2) made up of a great many diverse elements (“the myriad plant life of Amazonia”). As a noun, it’s used with an article and of to mean a large number (“The new CFO faced a myriad of cash-flow problems.”) What’s odd is that some authorities consider only the adjective usage correct — there’s about a 50–50 chance that a given copyeditor will query a myriad of—even though the noun usage has a much longer history. It was only in nineteenth-century poetry that myriad started being used as an adj. So it’s a bit of a stumper. It’s tempting to recommend avoiding the noun usage so that no readers will be bugged, but at the same time it’s true that any reader who’s bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety and wrong — and you can usually rebut snooty teachers, copyeditors, et al. by directing them to Coleridge’s “Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth.”

Dysphesia This is a medical noun with timely non-medical applications. We often use aphasia to refer to a brain-centered inability to use language, which is close but not identical to the medical meaning. Dysphesia can be similarly extended from its technical definition to mean really severe difficulties in forming coherent sentences. As anyone who’s listened to our current president knows, there are speakers whose lack of facility goes way beyond the range of clumsy or inarticulate. What G. W. Bush’s public English really is is dysphesiac.

Unique This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called “uncomparables,” that can be a little tricky. Among other uncomparables are precise, exact, correct, entire, accurate, preferable, inevitable, possible, false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not. Many writers get careless and try to modify uncomparables with comparatives like more and less or intensives like very. But if you really think about them, the core assertions in sentences like “War is becoming increasingly inevitable as Middle East tensions rise,” “Their cost estimate was more accurate than the other firms’,” and “As a mortician, he has a very unique attitude” are nonsense. If something is inevitable, it is bound to happen; it cannot be bound to happen and then somehow even more bound to happen. Unique already means one-of-a-kind, so the adj. phrase very unique is at best redundant and at worst stupid, like “audible to the ear” or “rectangular in shape.” Uncomparable-type boners can be easily fixed—“War is looking increasingly inevitable”; “Their cost estimate was more nearly accurate”; “he has a unique attitude”—but for writers the hard part is noticing such errors in the first place. You can blame the culture of marketing for some of this difficulty. As the number and rhetorical volume of U.S. ads increase, we become inured to hyperbolic language, which then forces marketers to load superlatives and uncomparables with high-octane modifiers (special → very special → Super-special! → Mega-Special!!), and so on. A deeper issue implicit in the problem of uncomparables is the dissimilarities between Standard Written English and the language of advertising. Advertising English, which probably deserves to be studied as its own dialect, operates under different syntactic rules than SWE, mainly because AE’s goals and assumptions are different. Sentences like “We offer a totally unique dining experience,” “Come on down and receive your free gift,” and “Save up to 50 percent… and more!” are perfectly OK in Advertising English — but this is because Advertising English is aimed at people who are not paying close attention. If your audience is by definition involuntary, distracted, and numbed, then free gift and totally unique stand a better chance of penetrating — and simple penetration is what AE is all about. The goals and assumptions of Standard Written English are obviously way more complex, but one SWE axiom is that your reader is paying close attention and expects you to have done the same.

Beg In its main function, to beg serves as an improved modern synonym for the old crave, which now sounds very affected. Both verbs mean to request earnestly and from a kind of subordinate position — one begs a favor but demands a right. Beseech and implore are close to beg, but both imply a little extra anxiety and/or urgency. The only really egregious way you can screw up with this word is to misuse the phrase beg the question. This phrase does not — repeat, not — mean “invite the following obvious question,” and sentences like “This begs the question, why are our elected leaders silent on this issue?” are both increasingly common and deeply wrong. The idiom beg the question is the compressed Anglicization of the Latin petitio principii, which is the name of a particular kind of logical fallacy in which one bases a conclusion on a premise that turns out to be just as debatable as the conclusion. Genuine examples of begging the question are “The death penalty is the proper punishment for murder because those who kill forfeit their own right to life” and “True wisdom is speaking and acting judiciously.” Because of its extremely specific origin and meaning, beg the question will never mean “invite the question” no matter how widespread the usage becomes. Nor, strictly speaking, will it mean “avoid or ignore the real issue,” even though a subsidiary def. of beg is “to dodge or evade.” If you want to accuse someone of missing the point, you can say “You’re begging the real issue” or something, but it’s not right to use even this sense of beg with question unless you are sure that you’re talking about a case of petitio principii.

Critique I went to college in the mid-1980s, and there I was taught that there’s no such verb as to critique. The profs. who hammered this into me (both over fifty) explained that to criticize meant “to judge the merits and defects of, to analyze, to evaluate” and that critique (n.) was the noun for “a specific critical commentary or review.” Now, though, the dictionary’s primary def. of to criticize is usually “to find fault with”; i.e., the verb has taken on increasingly negative connotations. Thus some usage authorities now consider to critique to be OK; they argue that it can minimize confusion by denoting the neutral, scholarly-type assessment that used to be what criticize meant. Here’s the thing, though: it’s still only some usage experts who accept to critique. Dictionaries’ usage panels are usually now split about 50–50 on sentences like “After a run-through, the playwright and director both critiqued the actor’s delivery.” And it’s not just authorities. A fair percentage of educated people still find to critique either wrong or irksome. Why alienate smart readers unnecessarily? If you’re worried that criticize will seem deprecatory, you can say evaluate, explicate, analyze, judge… or you can always use the old bury-the-main-verb trick and do offer a critique of, submit a critique of, etc.

Focus Focus is now the noun of choice for expressing what people used to mean by concentration (“Sampras’s on-court focus was phenomenal”) and priority (“Our focus is on serving the needs of our customers”). As an adj., it seems often to serve as an approving synonym for driven or monomaniacal: “He’s the most focused warehouse manager we’ve ever had.” As a verb, it seems isomorphic with the older to concentrate: “Focus, people!”; “The Democrats hope that the campaign will focus on the economy”; “We need to focus on finding solutions instead of blaming each other,” etc. W/r/t those last two sample sentences, notice how the verb to focus on can take as its object either a thing-noun (“economy”) or a gerund (“finding”), and how its meaning and grammatical structure are slightly different in the two cases. With a noun, to focus on means “to concentrate attention or effort on,” i.e., the direct object is built right into the verb phrase; but with a gerund it means “to direct toward a particular goal”—there’s always a direct object like “attention/efforts/energies” that’s suppressed but understood, and the gerund actually functions as an indirect object. Given the speed with which to focus has supplanted to concentrate, it’s a little surprising that nobody objects to its somewhat jargony New Age feel — but nobody seems to. Maybe it’s because the word is only one of many film and drama terms that have entered mainstream usage in the last decade, e.g., to foreground (= to feature, to give top priority to); to background (= to downplay, to relegate to the back burner); scenario (= an outline of some hypothetical sequence of events), and so on.

Impossibly This is one of those adverbs that’s formed from an adjective and can modify only adjectives, never verbs. Modifying adjectives with these sorts of adverbs—impossibly fast, extraordinarily yummy, irreducibly complex, unbelievably obnoxious—is a hypereducated speech tic that translates well to writing. Not only can the adverbs be as colorful/funny/snarky as you like, but the device is a quick way to up the formality of your prose without sacrificing personality — it makes whoever’s narrating sound like an actual person, albeit a classy one. The big caveat is that you can’t use these special-adv.-with-adj. constructions more than once every few sentences or your prose starts to look like it’s trying too hard.

Individual As a noun, this word has one legitimate use, which is to distinguish a single person from some larger group: “One of the enduring oppositions of British literature is that between the individual and society”; “She’s a real individual.” It is not a synonym for person despite the fact that much legal, bureaucratic, and public-statement prose uses it that way — which is to say that it looms large in turgid crap like “Law-enforcement personnel apprehended the individual as he was attempting to exit the premises.” Individual for person and an individual for someone are pretentious, deadening puff-words. (For more on puff-words, please see the note at utilize.)

Fervent A beautiful and expressive word that combines the phonological charms of verve and fever. Lots of writers, though, think fervent is synonymous with fervid, and most dictionary defs. don’t do much to disabuse them. The truth is that there’s a hierarchical trio of zeal-type adjectives, all with roots in the Latin verb fervre (= to boil). Even though fervent can also mean extremely hot, glowing (as in “Fingering his ascot, Aubrey gazed abstractedly at the brazier’s fervent coals”), it’s actually just the baseline term; fervent is basically synonymous with ardent. Fervid is the next level up; it connotes even more passion/devotion/eagerness than fervent. At the top is perfervid, which means extravagantly, rabidly, uncontrollably zealous or impassioned. Perfervid deserves to be used more, not only for its internal alliteration and metrical pizzazz but because its deployment usually shows that the writer knows the differences between the three fervre words.

Loan If you use loan as a verb in anything other than ultra-informal speech, you’re marking yourself as ignorant or careless. As of 2004, the verb to lend never comes off as fussy or pretentious, merely as correct.

Feckless A totally great adjective. One reason that slippage in the meaning of effete is OK is that we can use feckless to express what effete used to mean. Feckless primarily means deficient in efficacy, i.e., lacking vigor or determination, feeble; but it can also mean careless, profligate, irresponsible. It appears most often now in connection with wastoid youths, bloated bureaucracies — anyone who’s culpable for his own haplessness. The great thing about using feckless is that it lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean; you just sound witty and classy. The word’s also fun to read because of the soft-e assonance and the k sound — the triply assonant noun form is even more fun.

All of Other than as an ironic idiom for “no more than” (e.g., “Sex with Edgar lasted all of a minute”), does all of have any legit uses? The answer is both complicated and personally humbling. An irksome habit of many student writers is automatically to stick an of between the adjective all and any noun that follows—“All of the firemen slid down the pole,” “She sent cards to all of her friends”—and I have spent a decade telling undergrads to abjure this habit, for two reasons. The first is that an excess of of’s is one of the surest signs of flabby or maladroit writing, and the second is that the usage is often wrong. I have promulgated the following rule: Except for the ironic-idiom case, the only time it’s correct to use all of is when the adj. phrase is followed by a pronoun—“All of them got cards”; “I wanted Edgar to have all of me”—unless, however, the relevant pronoun is possessive, in which case you must again omit the of, as in “All my friends despise Edgar.” Only a few weeks ago did I learn (from a bright student who got annoyed enough at my hectoring to start poring over usage guides in the hopes of finding something I’d been wrong about that she could raise her hand at just the right moment in class and embarrass me with [which she did, and I was, and deserved it — there’s nothing more ridiculous than a pedant who’s wrong]), however, that there’s actually one more complication to the first part of the rule. With all plus a noun, it turns out that the medial of is required if that noun is possessive, as in “All of Edgar’s problems stem from his childhood,” “All of Dave’s bombast came back to haunt him that day.” I doubt I will ever forget this.

Bland Here’s an adj. that the dictionaries are behind on. Bland was originally used of people to mean “suave, smooth, unperturbed, soothingly pleasing” (cf. blandish, blandishment), and of things to mean “soft, mild, pleasantly soothing, etc.” Only incidentally did it mean “dull, insipid, flavorless.” As of 2004, though, bland nearly always has a pejorative tinge. Outside of one special semi-medical idiom (“The ulcerous CEO was placed on a bland diet”), bland now tends to imply that whatever’s described was trying to be more interesting, piquant, stirring, forceful, magnetic, or engaging than it actually ended up being.

Noma This medical noun signifies an especially icky ulcerous infection of the mouth or genitals. Because the condition most commonly strikes children living in abject poverty/squalor, it’s a bit like scrofula. And just as the adj. scrofulous has gradually extended its sense to mean “corrupt, degenerate, gnarly,” so nomal seems ripe for similar extension; it could serve as a slightly obscure or erudite synonym for “scrofulous, repulsive, pathetically gross, grossly pathetic”… you get the idea.

Hairy There are maybe more descriptors for various kinds of hair and hairiness than any other word-set in English, and some of them are extremely strange and fun. The more pedestrian terms like shaggy, unshorn, bushy, coiffed, and so on we’ll figure you already know. The adj. barbigerous is an extremely uptown synonym for bearded. Cirrose and cirrous, from the Latin cirrus meaning “curl” or “fringe” (as in cirrus clouds), can both be used to refer to somebody’s curly or tufty or wispy/feathery hair — Nicolas Cage’s hair in Adaptation is cirrose. Crinite means “hairy or possessed of a hair-like appendage,” though it’s mainly a botanical term and would be a bit eccentric applied to a person. Crinose, though, is a people-adj. that means “having a lot of hair,” especially in the sense of one’s hair being really long. The related noun crinosity is antiquated but not obsolete and can be used to refer to somebody’s hair in an amusingly donnish way, as in Madonna’s normally platinum crinosity is now a maternal brown. Glabrous, which is the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that glabrous means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his glabrous dome or something. Hirsute is probably the most familiar upmarket synonym for hairy, totally at home in any kind of formal writing. Like that of many hair-related adjectives, hirsute’s original use was in botany (where it means “covered with coarse or bristly hairs”), but in regular usage its definition is much more general. Not so with the noun hirsutism, though, which is still semi-medical and means having a truly pathological amount of hair and/or hair that’s unusually or unevenly distributed — the point is that the noun’s not really a synonym for hairiness. Hispid means “covered with stiff or rough little hairs” and could apply to a military pate or unshaved jaw. Hispidulous is mainly just a puffed-up form of hispid and should be avoided. Lanate and lanated mean “having or being composed of woolly hairs.” A prettier and slightly more familiar way to describe woolly hair is with the adjective flocculent. (There’s also floccose, but this is used mainly of odd little hairy fruits like kiwi and quince.) Then there are the pil-based words, all derived from the Latin pilus (=hair). Pilose, another fairly common adj., means “covered with fine soft hair.” Deceptively similar-looking is pilous, which is a more hardcore-science adj. that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “characterized by or abounding in hair, hairy,” citing as an example the following (unexplained, thus kind of troubling) sentence: It is covered with a rough pilous epidermis. Pilous’s own similarity to pileous is not deceptive, since the latter, a medical adjective, means “consisting of or pertaining to hair”; e.g., certain hair-intensive cancerous growths are classified as pileous tumors. On the other hand, pileous tumors are sometimes also called piliferous tumors, wherein the latter adj. means “having or producing hair” (in botany, piliferous means “tipped with a hair,” as in certain weird leaves). There’s also piligerous, which means “covered or clothed in hair” and is used primarily of animals, and piliated, which comes from the plural of pilus and is used to describe certain kinds of hairy or fringe-intensive bacteria. Last but not least is the noun pilimiction, which names a hopefully very rare medical disorder “in which piliform or hair-like bodies are passed in the urine.” Outside of maybe describing some kind of terribly excruciated facial expression as pilimictive, however, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream use for pilimiction. (One pil-word N.B.: It so happens that the adjective pubescent literally means “covered with soft downy hairs,” so technically it qualifies as a synonym for pilose; but as of 2004 almost no reader will take pubescent this way, so I’d stick with pilose.) Tomentose means “covered with dense little matted hairs”—baby chimps, hobbits’ feet, and Robin Williams are all tomentose. Ulotrichous, which is properly classed with lannate and flocculent, is an old and extremely fancy term for “crisply woolly hair.” Be advised that it is also, if not exactly a racist adj., certainly a racial one — A. C. Haddon’s Races of Man, from the early 1900s, famously classified races according to three basic hair types: leiotrichous (straight), cymotrichous (wavy), and ulotrichous.

Now go do the right thing.

N.B. If you’re thinking of using any of the more esoteric adjectives here, you’d be well advised to keep an OED close at hand. This is not simply a gratuitous plug of another Oxford U. Press product. The fact is that some of these hair-related terms aren’t in other dictionaries; plus, the terms are often specialized enough that you’re going to want not just an abstract definition but a couple sample sentences so that you can see how the words are actually used. Only the OED has both defs. and in-context samples for just about every significant word in the language. Actually, why not screw appearances and just state the obvious: No really serious writer should be without an OED, whether it’s bought or stolen or hacked into the online version of or whatever you need to do. Nothing else comes close.

— 2004