Is the Double Genitive Overly Possessive?
British novelist Henry Fielding used the construction in A Journey From This World to the Next (1749):
At seven years old I was carried into France . . . , where I lived with a person of quality, who was an acquaintance of my father's.
A century later it showed up in Anne Brontė's second (and final) novel:
Shortly after, they both came up, and she introduced him as Mr. Huntingdon, the son of a late friend of my uncle's.American writer Stephen Crane slipped it into a short story:
(The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848)
"Oh, just a toy of the child's," explained the mother. "She's grown so fond of it, she loves it so."And contemporary author Bil Wright doubled up on the construction in a novel published just last year:
("The Stove," in Whilomville Stories, 1900)
He'd already proved he was a liar. And he had a girlfriend even though he wasn't divorced. No, not a monster. But definitely an enemy of my mother's and mine.
(When the Black Girl Sings, Simon and Schuster, 2008)
The combination of the preposition of and a possessive form (either a noun ending in -'s or a possessive pronoun) is called the double genitive. And it's been around for centuries.
But watch out. If you stare at it too long, you may convince yourself that you've found a mistake. That's what happened to one of the original language mavens, James Buchanan. Back in 1767, he tried to outlaw the double genitive:
Of being the sign of the Genitive Case, we cannot put it before a Noun with ('s) for this is making two Genitives.As we're reminded by the editors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, "The 18th-century grammarians simply had a horror of anything double, because such constructions did not occur in Latin."
(A Regular English Syntax)
Despite its apparent redundancy, the double genitive is a well-established idiom--a functional part of the language dating back to Middle English. But if the construction continues to trouble you, simply follow the example of grammarians Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum and call it something else: "The oblique genitive construction is commonly referred to as the 'double genitive.' . . . [H]owever, we do not regard of as a genitive case marker, and hence there is only one genitive here, not two" (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 2002).
More Double Troubles:
Image: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
From A to Z: A Few Facts About the Alphabet
"Writers spend years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet," novelist Richard Price once observed. "It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day." It's also a pretty good reason to assemble a few facts about one of the most significant inventions in human history.
- What is the etymology of the word alphabet?
The English word alphabet comes to us, by way of Latin, from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. These Greek words were in turn derived from the original Semitic names for the symbols: aleph ("ox") and beth ("house"). - Where did the English alphabet come from?
Here's the 30-second version of the rich history of the alphabet.
The original set of 30 signs, known as the Semitic alphabet, was used in ancient Phoenicia beginning around 1600 B.C. Most scholars believe that this alphabet, which consisted of signs for consonants only, is the ultimate ancestor of virtually all later alphabets. (The one significant exception appears to be Korea's han-gul script, created in the 15th century.)
Around 1,000 B.C., the Greeks adapted a shorter version of the Semitic alphabet, reassigning certain symbols to represent vowel sounds, and eventually the Romans developed their own version of the Greek (or Ionic) alphabet. It's generally accepted that the Roman alphabet reached England by way of the Irish sometime during the early period of Old English (5 c.- 12 c.).
Over the past millennium, the English alphabet has lost a few special letters and drawn fresh distinctions between others. But otherwise our modern English alphabet remains quite similar to the version of the Roman alphabet that we inherited from the Irish. - How many languages use the Roman alphabet?
About 100 languages rely on the Roman alphabet. Used by roughly two billion people, it's the world's most popular script. As David Sacks notes in Letter Perfect (2004), "There are variations of the Roman alphabet: For example, English employs 26 letters; Finnish, 21; Croatian, 30. But at the core are the 23 letters of ancient Rome. (The Romans lacked J, V, and W.)" - How many sounds are there in English?
There are more than 40 distinct sounds in English. Because we have just 26 letters to represent those sounds, most letters stand for more than one sound. The consonant c, for example, is pronounced differently in the three words cook, city, and (combined with h) chop. - What are Majuscules and Minuscules?
Majuscules (from Latin majusculus, rather large) are CAPITAL LETTERS. Minuscules (from Latin minusculus, rather small) are lower-case letters. The combination of majuscules and minuscules in a single system (the so-called dual alphabet) first appeared in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814), Carolingian minuscule. - What's the name for a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet?
That would be a pangram. The best known example is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." A more efficient pangram is "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." - What's the name for a text that deliberately excludes a particular letter of the alphabet?
That's a lipogram. The best known example in English is Ernest Vincent Wright's novel Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939)--a story of more than 50,000 words in which the letter e never appears. - Why is the last letter of the alphabet pronounced "zee" by Americans and "zed" by most British, Canadian, and Australian speakers?
The older pronunciation of "zed" was inherited from Old French. The American "zee," a dialect form heard in England during the 17th century (perhaps by analogy with bee, dee, etc.), was approved by Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).
The letter z, by the way, has not always been relegated to the end of the alphabet. In the Greek alphabet it came in at a quite respectable number seven. According to Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), "The Romans adopted Z later than the rest of the alphabet, since /z/ was not a native Latin sound, adding it at the end of their list of letters and using it rarely." The Irish and English simply imitated the Roman convention of placing z last.
To learn more about this wondrous invention, pick up one of these fine books: The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, by Johanna Drucker (Thames and Hudson, 1995) and Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z, by David Sacks (Broadway, 2004).
More About the Alphabet:
Never Say Never: Five Bogus Rules of Grammar
To find out why these "rules" are bogus, click on the highlighted terms.
- Never begin a sentence with the conjunction and or but.
- Never end a sentence with a preposition.
- Never split an infinitive.
- Never use the passive voice.
- Never use contractions.
More Superstitions About Writing:
Grammar Gurus and Muphry's Law
Before commenting (in sorrow or with glee) on the apparent misspelling in today's headline, please read to the end of the post.
Self-appointed guardians of the language go by various titles: grammar gurus, language mavens, usage police. What most have in common is a compulsion to point out the linguistic shortcomings of others and bemoan the sorry state of the English language--whether they know what they're talking about or not.
As Professor David Crystal demonstrates in The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (Oxford University Press, 2007), such lamentations have been heard since the days of Aelfric the Grammarian, a thousand years ago. In a spirit of "zero tolerance," these crusaders denounce the perceived foibles and infelicities of other English speakers--or "idiots" as they often prefer to call them.
Recently, a columnist for The New York Observer spotted a redundancy in the sports pages of The New York Times: "The Czechs played the way they can; the Americans reverted halfway back toward 1990 when they were drubbed, 5-1." The columnist snarled and pounced:
We all know that the verb "reverted" contains the direction "back" in it. To add "back" is thoroughly redundant. . . . To return is to turn back. Adding the word "back" may appear to solidify your meaning but it only exposes your ignorance.
To which an even more observant reader replied:
Now, we all know that the verb "contains" already contains the meaning "in it." To add "in it," as Phil does, is thoroughly redundant. Adding the phrase "in it" may appear to solidify your meaning but it only exposes your ignorance.
A perfect illustration of Muphry's Law: the principle that any criticism of the speech or writing of others will itself contain at least one error of usage or spelling.
Trust me: anyone who assumes the role of grammar guru better be prepared for nit-picking rejoinders. And now please feel free to comment.
More About Grammar and Usage:
Image: The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, by David Crystal. Oxford University Press, 2007
A Ghost Word for Halloween
Classified as a "rare" noun and attributed to the English poet Alexander Pope, phantomnation is defined in the 1864 edition of Webster's Dictionary as "Appearance as of a phantom; illusion." Well, it's an illusion all right. Phantomnation is a perfect example of a ghost word--a word that exists only in a dictionary and has never actually been used.
Most ghost words (dord and foupe, for instance) result from printing errors--but not phantomnation. The person responsible for contriving this illusion was a chap named Richard Paul Jodrell in a book innocently titled Philology on the English Language (1820). Another, less eccentric philologist (the editor of Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary) tells the story:
Mr. Jodrell evidently thought that a term made of two words, if joined at all, should be solidified into one continuous word. His work was made as supplementary to the other dictionaries of his time--to explain terms not given in them--and he gave such one-word forms as battlepainting, camelswallower, courtparasite, deepprojecting, fellowcandidate, foundlinghospital, islandempress, latelypurchased. marriagesettlement, promontoryshoulder, procurationmoney, pulpitsophistry, restlessrolling, stagegesture, tapestryhanging, and a great number of others just as odd.
This strange craze for solidifying had one curious effect well worth noting. In Pope's "Odyssey" there is a mention of "all the phantom nations of the dead." Jodrell gave as one of his words not theretofore explained phantomnation, with the definition, "A multitude of spectres." The later dictionaries have actually copied this, taking the form as if made of phantom and the suffix -ation, with -n- inserted for euphony!
(Francis Horace Teall, The Compounding of English Words, 1891)
Most of Jodrell's curious compounds left no lasting impressions on the language, but phantomnation clearly appealed to lexicographers. It can be found in a number of 19th-century dictionaries, including Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary (largely a pirated version of Noah Webster's work) and Worcester's Dictionary (produced by Webster's chief rival, Joseph Emerson Worcester).
Even decades later, long after its dubious origin had been revealed, phantomnation continued to make a spectral appearance in reputable dictionaries. In the second edition of Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary (1934), it's described as "a ghost word combining the words phantom and nation--erroneously defined as a formation with the suffix -ation."
Think about it: a ghost word defined in the dictionary as a ghost word. How's that for perpetuating an illusion--or, let's use it, a phantomnation. Why it's almost enough to make you start believing in ghosts.
More Words About Words:
Bunnies, Whelps, and Moonrakers: A Quiz on Demonyms
As well-read earthlings, you know that residents of London are called Londoners and that people who live in Los Angeles are Angelenos. You may even be familiar with Hoosiers (residents of Indiana), Liverpudlians (from Liverpool), and Arkansawyers (from Arkansas). But what you may not know is that a name commonly given to the residents of a place is a demonym (from Greek demos, the people, + -nym, name).
The term was coined by word-lover Paul Dickson, author of more than 50 books of nonfiction. Demonyms are the subject of one of those books, Labels for Locals: What to Call People From Abilene to Zimbabwe (Collins, 2004).
Can you tell the difference between a Cestrian (a resident of Chester, England) and a Cytherean (a hypothetical inhabitant of the planet Venus)? Test your familiarity with demonyms by taking this quiz: match the place names with the names and nicknames for the people who live there.
Residents of . . .
(a) the state of Delaware; (b) the state of Connecticut; (c) the city of Wiltshire, England; (d) the planet Mercury; (e) the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; (f) the state of Kansas; (g) the state of Tennessee; (h) New York City; (i) the town of East Hampton, New York; (j) the city of Schenectady, New York; (k) the city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; (l) the county of Shropshire, England
Demonyms
- Hermians
This demonym (derived from the name of the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology) was introduced by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel Rendezvous with Rama. - Salopians
From an alternative name (and for a few years in the 1970s, the official name) for the region. - Bonackers
Originally a name for local fishermen, "Bonackers" comes from Accabonac Harbor (itself an Algonquian toponym). - Gothamites
Early in the 19th century, Washington Irving borrowed this term from the name of a village in Nottinghamshire, England. Though the original Gothamites were considered "wise fools," Irving's sense of the term was closer to "self-important city slickers." - Bunnies
Dickson describes this one as a "gag" name--a play on See Der Rabbits. - Whelps
A term of uncertain origin. - Nutmegs or Nutmeggers
According to William F. Buckley, Jr., in the 17th and 18th centuries locals traders made a good living selling nutmeg. "But when they ran out of the real stuff, they sold sawdust instead, and called it nutmeg; and everyone thought this absolutely hilarious, and [the state] celebrated its miscreants by nicknaming itself after the symbol of their misdeeds." - Dorpians
This demonym was derived from the Dutch word for "village." - Moonrakers
Dickson attributes this nickname to the misadventures of some local lads who had rolled barrels of untaxed brandy into a pond to avoid detection by an excise man. When they were later caught retrieving the barrels, "the smugglers explained that they were dragging the pond for a large cheese they had spotted and pointed to the reflection of the full moon on the surface of the pond. The revenuer left convinced that these men--these moonrakers--were daft." - Jayhawkers
Named after a mythical bird, the jayhawkers were originally members of a militant abolitionist group. - Cariocas
This word, meaning "White Man's House," comes from the language of the Tupi people. - Blue Hens
A Revolutionary War commander who liked to bet on cockfights is credited with this nickname. He favored the "blue hen's" chickens.
Answers:
1. d, 2. l, 3. i; 4. h, 5. k, 6. g, 7. b, 8. j, 9. c, 10. f, 11. e, 12. a
By my count, Paul Dickson has published at least four books in just the past year: Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary (with over 3,000 synonyms for tipsy); The Unwritten Rules of Baseball: The Etiquette, Conventional Wisdom, and Axiomatic Codes of Our National Pastime; A Dictionary of the Space Age; and the third edition of the authoritative Dickson Baseball Dictionary (see The Language of Baseball). For more information about all of Paul's books, including Labels for Locals, visit the Paul Dickson website.
More Words About Names:
Image: Labels for Locals: What to Call People From Abilene to Zimbabwe, by Paul Dickson (Collins, 2004)
Ray Bradbury on the Ambition to Write
To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
You must write every single day of your life.
You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.
I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories.
Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
(Ray Bradbury, "How to Be Madder Than Captain Ahab." Quoted by William Safire and Leonard Safir in Good Advice on Writing. Simon & Schuster, 1992)
More Writers on Writing:
- Writers on Writing: The Myth of Inspiration
- Writers on Rewriting
- What Is the Secret of Good Writing?
Image: Ray Bradbury
I'm Firm, You're Obstinate . . .
On a BBC radio program in the late 1940s, philosopher Bertrand Russell playfully conjugated an "irregular verb" as "I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool."
What Russell was illustrating was the power of words to convey attitudes (connotations) as well as meanings (denotations). When readers of the New Statesman magazine were invited to submit their own connotative conjugations, they responded with enthusiasm (or, depending on your point of view, with gusto or with idiotic fervor). Here are some of the published entries:
- I am righteously indignant; you are annoyed; he is making a fuss about nothing.
- I am a creative writer; you have a journalistic flair; he is a prosperous hack.
- I am an epicure; you are a gourmand; he has both feet in the trough.
- I am sparkling; you are unusually talkative; he is drunk.
- I am beautiful; you have quite good features; she isn't bad-looking, if you like that type.
- I day dream; you are an escapist; he ought to see a psychiatrist.
- I have about me something of the subtle, haunting, mysterious fragrance of the Orient; you rather overdo it, dear; she stinks.
More About Word Meanings:
Two Thousand Pure Fools: Ifferisms
The critic Tracy B. Strong once described the aphorism as "the pure fool of discourse," presenting itself "as an answer for which we do not know the question." It's the reader's job, Strong said, to discover the question that makes the aphorism "common-sensically true."
Viewed from this perspective, Dr. Mardy Grothe's latest "word & language" book should be an exciting voyage of discovery for committed readers. In Ifferisms: An Anthology of Aphorisms That Begin With the Word "If" (HarperCollins), Grothe introduces us to nearly 2,000 nuggets of conditional wisdom--or at least of apparent wisdom.
Iffy Quotations
Aphorisms (like maxims, proverbs, gnomes, apothegms, sententiae, and epigrams) are tricky little devices. As Robert Benchley observed in a comic chiasmus (the figurative subject of one of Grothe's earlier books, Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You), "It is often difficult to tell whether a maxim means something, or something means maxim."
So why did the author decide to focus on iffy quotations? "I have come to believe that if is the biggest little word in the English language," Grothe says in his introduction. "It is an essential tool when people engage in hypothetical or counterfactual thinking and when they make conditional statements."
And as it happens, a lot of well-known (and not-so-well-known) sayings begin with the word if.
The book opens with a handful of familiar axioms (or "classic ifferisms"): "If it ain't broke . . .," "If it sounds too good to be true . . .," and--the "law" attributed to Captain Edward A. Murphy, Jr.--"If anything can go wrong, it will." (Perhaps a future edition will find room for the lesser-known Muphry's Law, coined by editor John Bangsund: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.")
Figuratively Speaking
Many of the quotations illustrate the rhetorical truism that the enduring quality of an aphorism relies more on the shape of the expression than on the sentiment expressed. In other words, memorable quotes sound good. For this reason, Ifferisms also serves as a delightful anthology of figurative devices.
For instance, an anonymous reviewer employs the step-by-step figure known as gradatio:
If the soup had been as hot as the claret,The same figure of speech, enhanced by auxesis, appears in a passage from Barack Obama's 2008 stump speech:
if the claret had been as old as the bird,
and if the bird's breasts had been as full as the waitress's,
it would have been a very good meal.
If one voice can change a room, then it can change a city.
And if it can change a city, then it can change a state.
And if it can change a state, then it can change a nation.
And if it can change a nation, then it can change the world.
From basketball coach John Wooden comes this succinct ploce (repetition of a word with a new or more specific sense): "If I am through learning, I am through." We hear Martin Luther King, Jr. employ antithesis: "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything." And humorist Don Marquis offers a pungent example of polyptoton (repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings): "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
Ifferisms contains several concise analogies, including Alfred Kazin's cynical comment on cyclical trends in education: "If we practiced medicine like we practice education, we'd look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years." And the Talmud provides one of the book's many instances of paradox: "If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."
A full chapter is devoted to metaphorical ifferisms, including this one (with a bonus tetracolon climax) from essayist Joseph Addison: "If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius." To keep us off balance, Grothe adds a mixed metaphor from Canadian politician Robert Thompson: "If this thing starts to snowball, it will catch fire right across the country."
One of the many examples of word play in the book comes from Doug Larson: "If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur." And there are some pretty good jokes as well, including Rodney Dangerfield's shtick-defining line, "If it weren't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all."
In addition to the quotations themselves, Ifferisms contains tidbits about the lives of such notable aphorists as Pascal, Meister Eckhart, Molly Ivins, Eubie Blake, and Willie Nelson. Along the way, Grothe passes along James Geary's Five Laws of Aphorisms (they must "be brief, definitive, personal, philosophical, and have a twist") and explains how Eppie and Popo Friedman became the advice columnists Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren.
For Writers and Logophiles
Not surprisingly, my favorite chapter in the book is the final one: "If You Can't Annoy Somebody, There Is Little Point in Writing." Here are a few of Grothe's ifferisms on writers and writing:
- "If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: Write it."
(Ambrose Bierce) - "If you are going to be a writer, there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer, nothing I can say will help you."
(James Baldwin) - "If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
(Lillian Hellman) - "If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces."
(Paul Fussell) - "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
(Elmore Leonard)
Grothe says on his Ifferisms page at DRMARDY.COM that the "audience for this book is the same as for my other books--it's for quotation lovers as well as for people who enjoy wordplay and ideaplay." And that it is.
More Books About Words:
Image: Ifferisms: An Anthology of Aphorisms That Begin With the Word "If" by Dr. Mardy Grothe. HarperCollins, 2009
Old Customs, Future Plans, and Other Common Redundancies
"When you revise your work," an old editor once told me, "imagine you're sending a telegram and you have to pay for every word. Do that," he said, "and you'll soon clear the deadwood from your writing."
Fine, you may be saying, but what in tarnation is a telegram?
Think of it as a retro form of tweeting, a not-quite-instant message that was transmitted over wires (so last century) and translated by telegraph operators. In any case, don't count on ever seeing one. Western Union quit delivering telegrams in 2006.
In the age of the iPhone and BlackBerry, why bother to recall the telegram? Because lost with the medium is the artfully terse prose style of the telegraphic message. After all, as my editor understood, when you have to pay for every word, you're unlikely to waste too many of them.
If we still had to pay by the word, we might be less inclined to write about old customs, new innovations, free gifts, safe havens, or future plans. Because, by definition, customs are old, innovations are new, gifts are free, havens are safe, and plans must be for the future, we'd cut the unnecessary adjective in each of these redundant expressions.
Likewise, at a dollar a word, we probably wouldn't bother to circle around, connect together, revert back, warn in advance, or vacillate back and forth. Visit our list of more than 200 Common Redundancies to learn how you can clear the deadwood out of your writing--without sending a telegram or spending a cent.