Tag: Language and usage

0.000001 greetings = 1 microwave

0.5 one-eyed naval heroes = 1 half-Nelson

0.1 Southern beauties = 1 decibelle

0.1 spouse = 1 decimate

1,000,000,000,000 carpal joints = 1 terrorist

Did you know that the ratio of an igloo’s circumferance to its diameter is Eskimo Pi?

Neither did I, until Eugene Volokh sent me off to this table of non-standard conversion factors.

[But shouldn’t it be a trillion microphones to the megaphone?]

Eugene has his own selections from the Wilkinson list, and one delicious addition:

1.5 dollops = 1 trollop

“Maliciousness” for malice

“Ubiquitousness” for ubiquity

This one from William Saletan, whose prose I generally admire: “presumptuousness” for “presumption.”

A reader offers the following, all from internet sites:

“frivolousness” for “frivolity”

“tediousness” for “tedium”

“audaciousness” for “audacity”

and — my favorite ever, I think:

“zealousness” for “zeal.”

Keep those emails coming. I’d like to try for a comprehensive list.

Iron Lung, a poster on Slate’s Fray, in the course of this extremely rude piece about Mickey Kaus, uses “vapidness” for “vapidity.”

One of Kevin Drum’s commenters asks whether “meme” isn’t just an unnecessarily fancy way of saying “idea.” Kevin responds, more or less, that memes are “ideas that filter into a community rapidly, spread like a virus, and then just as rapidly die away. A meme that survives becomes something else: a concept, or an idea, or a principle.”

That may be one usage of the word, but it’s not the original one from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. To call an idea or other cultural unit (e.g., habit, practice, phrase, genre, value, norm, joke, style) a “meme” isn’t to evaluate it as transient, or to evaluate it at all; it’s to consider it as a self-replicating unit and think about how it does, or doesn’t, survive and expand in the face of competition from other cultural units.

Dawkins was trying to invent a form of cultural analysis analogous to population genetics, in which the focus is not on the validity or other intrinsic characteristics of the cultural unit in question but rather on its “fitness” for its cultural environment.

The best recent example I’ve seen of this form of analysis was Matthew Yglesias’s insight that consequentialism, while in many ways an attractive form of moral analysis, has difficulty flourishing within the enviornment of professional philosophy because it downplays the importance of the sort of thinking philosophers do, as opposed to the sort of thinking economists, engineers, scientists, and administrators do. Therefore, a philosopher who talks himself into consequentialism is going to have a hard time publishing philosophy papers about it, and will either cease to be a philosopher or work on topics other than ethics. Like a mutation that kills its host, an idea that incapacitates the person who has it from communicating it isn’t likely to spread.

So in calling an idea, or a style of painting, or a phrase, or a social practice such as negative campaign advertising a “meme” I’m announcing that I intend to consider it, not on its merits, but strictly as a competitor. I can reasonably say, “That’s a dumb idea [or “an awful thing to do” or “a silly way to paint”] but an extremely powerful meme.”

To evaluate whether Dawkins’s proposal tends to be fruitful, or to say how close the analogy with genetic competition turns out to be, would be beyond my competence. But “meme” at least expresses a coherent idea. If we need a word for an idea or other cultural pattern that is spreading merely on momentum and that we predict will soon fade away, how about “fad”?

A headline in today’s Baltimore Sun notes that an official caught in controversy is being praised for her “candidness.” Whatever happened to “candor”? I’ve also seen “valorousness” for “valor,” “confusedness” for confusion, “cowardliness” for “cowardice,” “maliciousness” for “malice,” “recursiveness” for “recursion” and (more than once) “novitiate” for “novice” (the “novitiate” properly designates the status or the period of time, not the person).

Anyone who spots additional examples of unnecessary suffixization is encouraged to send them in; I’ll try to post a comprehensive list. (Note: “prideful” for “proud’ isn’t a mistake; “prideful” always refers to sinful pride, while “proud” is usually used with a positive connotation, even by those with a Sunday belief that pride is sinful.)

Update Some wonderful additional nominees: “piousness” for “piety,” “pretension” for “pretense” (“pretension” is a perfectly good word, but it means a claim of right or status, as for example the claim made by a pretender to a throne, not merely pretending that something is true), and “admonishment” for “admonition.”