Ode to Ellipses

Oh, dear ellipses with your three evenly spaced points, you finisher of unfinished thoughts, you beautiful little . . .

Kudos

In trivia I recently explored the word kudos to discern whether it could exist in the singular. My M-W posse didn't fail me, giving a lengthy explanation on the back formation of the singular version, kudo. In that lovely little treatise, they alluded to the fact that the words cherry and pea are singular backformations of Greek words that look plural in English. Unfortunately, neither of their definitions yielded any hearty etymological fruit. So I had to search elsewhere for the full scoop.

I imagine other people might have dissimilar reactions (or none at all), but I love this about the English language. We just make up stuff, but we do it so brazenly, yet artfully. So-called grammar Nazis will protest at the slightest departure from the so-called standards, but a true linguist will exploit the tiniest loophole to cook up new verbal recipes in this melting pot of a language. Yesterday's grammatical affront becomes tomorrow's literary haute cuisine. Yummy. (Which, I just learned, finds its etymological roots in yum-yum.)

Say, Say, Say

Why is it, I wondered, that naysayers say "nay," but soothsayers don't say "sooth"? If either of the two were going to be contrary, I would expect it to be the naysayer, wouldn't you?

So I decided to search. As it turns out, soothe actually comes from the Middle English word for verify, which comes from the Old English word for truth. So, according to their marketing, soothsayers at least claim to be truth tellers, presumably being people who tell the truth about the future. Be that as it may . . . or as it may be in the future, this left me more confused about the word soothe. I mean, come on, do people who soothe really tell the truth?

I would expect a soothsayer to be just as reliable (if not more) in matters of fact as someone who just plain soothes. When you see someone in need of soothing, is your first thought, "Hey, just tell them the truth"? No. Because you know there's nothing soothing about "Yes, you are a loser," or "No, it's not the jeans' fault that you look fat," or "I don't know why she broke up with you. There are so very many reasons, all of which I assume would have been obvious to her when she first met you." Sure, you can use truth to soothe, because lies are so often the reason behind our distress . . . but the act of soothing is usually more strongly associated with telling people what they want to hear than with telling them the plain-faced truth.

I've never gone to one, but perhaps that is the secret of a successful soothsaying business: tell the people the future they want to hear. And maybe that is the mystery behind this strange etymology. Naysayers will claim to tell you the truth about soothsayers and those soothed by them: it is not the etymology of soothe that is in question, it is our understanding of truth.

In summary, soothsayers say what soothlisteners want to hear, while naysayers say nay to the idea that soothsayers tell the truth, because all a naysayer really wants to hear is that the truth that soothes is not truth at all, and in that dark corner of skepticism, the naysayer is in fact soothed by saying nay to the soothsayers who soothe with what could not be truth, thus completing the ironic circle of the soothing nays and the naying soothe.

Cheesy

I had a theory; actually, more of an invention. I wanted to explain the history of the word cheesy. I wondered if it could have originated from the smile-inducing practice of portrait photographers who ask their subjects to say, "Cheese!" in the absence of genuine happiness. So cheesy grew to become synonymous with fabricated emotion, questionable quality, artificially manufactured moments.

Unfortunately, the real meaning is just shabby or cheap, inferior in quality. It pretty much undermines the whole motivation behind the etymology search. M-W gave me no explanation of the history, but I think I'm giving up. If you discover something more, please let me know.

Gress?

This is a close relative of the last post, but it's one root that spawns all sorts of words. The root itself, however, didn't quite make it into the English language.

You can regress. You can digress. You can progress. You can even aggress. So if there is any justice in the lexical world, you should be able to gress. But according to Merriam-Webster, I gress not.

The root is in the Latin gradir, which means to go or to step. It's where we get the word grade. So why can't you get gressing instead of getting going? Why can't you gress in something instead of stepping in it? It just wasn't meant to be.

So the root of aggressive turned out to be passive? Typical.

Advertent Is a Word, Too

What's with the love for inadvertently, people? Advertently is a word, too, you know. You know a word doesn't get used much when the first couple pages of Google results are online dictionaries. That's the type of neglect advertently has to live with, day in and day out . . . only 83,000 results all told. Heck, the blogger spellcheck function doesn't even recognize it (I'm really giving the thing a workout with this post, by the way).

I wonder if we expect it to be one of those false roots. There's no such word as sidious to describe people with good intentions (which are neither the opposite of tentions nor inner tentions). Whelmed really just means "so overwhelmed, you temporarily lack the strength to add the over." Exhausted people aren't formerly hausted. And if you're not distraught, you aren't traught, you're just . . . fine. Advertently means what you'd expect it to mean. So why not use it?

From now on, I will advertently use advertently at least once a day. Perhaps someday you will join me, and the world will be as one. Just agine the possibilities.

Musical Double Prepositions

I love it (and by "love it," I mean I kinda hate it a little bit) when people try too hard to be grammatically correct by introducing a grammar mistake that sounds snooty even though it's wrong. The classic is the personal pronoun subjective instead of the objective in a compound situation (She opened up a can on Rufus and I). But there's one that shows up, for some reason, in song. To avoid ending their sentence (or the lyrical phrase) with a preposition, they introduce the preposition earlier . . . but they still use it at the end anyway. Here are two that bug me:

John Mellencamp, "Small Town"

"Now I cannot forget from where it is that I come from." Most lyrics sheets will deny the song actually says that, but I've listened to it over and over . . . he definitely sings "from" twice. The preposition is so nice, he said it twice. He doesn't even say it in a snooty way, but it's still a bit silly. Then there's a better musician, even if he's not a superior grammarian . . .

Paul McCartney, "Live and Let Die"

"But in this ever changing world in which we live in . . . " Now that preposition is so nice, he said it thrice. But only one of them is extraneous. I guess you could say poetic license allows for the occasional scenario in which it's okay to use a double preposition in.