Patricia T. OConner - Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language

Two people wrote this book, but its been our experience that two people cant talk at the same timeat least not on the page. So weve chosen to write Origins of the Specious in one voice and from Pats point of view.

My family was the first on our block to get a television seta mahogany Philco console with rabbit ears protruding at odd angles from somewhere in the back. It was an imposing piece of furniture that occupied a place of honor in the living room. This was the early 1950s, and I was about two years old.

My TV watching was rationed, more out of necessity than principle, since it required an adult to turn on the set, fiddle with the knobs, and adjust the rabbit ears for maximum reception. To a toddler, the whole undertaking seemed very grown-uplike reading, or driving a carand was invested with a certain solemnity.

Over time, a few programs became weekly events: Our Miss Brooks, Your Hit Parade, and Whats My Line? Two of the panelists, Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis, were the most dazzling creatures Id ever seen. But the shows that made the deepest impression on me were the specials that were broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera and the NBC Opera Theater. My mother never missed them.

It wasnt the music that made them so memorableit was my childs-eye view of history. Until I was six or seven years old, I thought that ordinary speech must have been a recent invention, because in the olden days (the days of Carmen and The Magic Flute), people apparently didnt know how to talk. It seemed that they had to sing whatever they wanted to say. This was my first major misconception about language. (The second was that my mother had invented scrumptious, a word I regarded as too silly to be real.)

All of us, Im convinced, have similar misconceptions. When we grow up, our mistakes get more sophisticatedthats all.

Shortly after my first book, Woe Is I, came out in 1996, people started sending me their questions, observations, and grievances about language. When I began appearing regularly on WNYC, a public radio station in New York, the comments multiplied. And they multiplied again when I started a language blog. My in-box was overflowing. To my surprise, every other message seemed to involve a myth, misunderstanding, or mystery about English. If the emailer wasnt misinformed, then it was his daughter-in-law or her boss or a golf partner or even the word maven herself.

And so an idea was born. I had a ready-made source of information: all that correspondence from readers and listeners. Why not write a book to save them from themselves? No one, especially a language junkie, wants to sound like a fool and risk public humiliation. (I know this from personal experience. I once embarrassed myself on the radio by misleading listeners about the origin of the word jeep.) Besides, it would be fun to collect and correct the more amusing, mystifying, and startling misuses of our language.

No subject was safe. Many people insisted that no room to swing a cat referred to the cat-o-nine-tails once used on British warships. Quite a few, I found, were puzzled by what they took to be in high dungeon; one even imagined a dungeon on stilts. Still others thought the word crap could be traced to a man named Thomas Crapper, the supposed inventor of the flush toilet. Some believed that posh was an acronym for port out, starboard home. Would-be sticklers scolded me whenever I split an infinitive on the air or (gasp!) ended a sentence with a preposition. Yet all those are misconceptions, even that business about what not to end a sentence with. Where do these ideas come from, and why do the persistent ones persist?

In some cases, we imagine interesting acronyms for words with ambiguous or prosaic roots. The origin of posh, for instance, has never been pinned down. In other cases, our ears play tricks on us, especially when unfamiliar words resemble more familiar ones. Dudgeon, a case in point, is frequently misheard as dungeon.;

Other mistakes have more complicated histories. Mr. Crapper, for instance, did exist and did sell flush toilets. But he didnt invent them, and the word crap was in use when he himself was barely potty trained. As for those bogus rules against splitting an infinitive and ending a sentence with a preposition, blame a gang of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Latinists who stubbornly and snobbishly tried to make English more like their favorite language.

In fact, weve been bungling the mother tongue since the days of Beowulf. A medieval scribe once miscopied a single letter in a list of kitchen terms and transformed a cooking utensil into a ferocious hunting dog. He wrote hrodhhund (Old English for a mastiff or hunting hound) instead of brodhhund (believed to be a metal rack for simmering pots of broth). That one had scholars scratching their heads for many a year.

Sometimes, a centuries-old blunder can lead to a modern one. A fifteenth-century mistranslation by the Dutch scholar Erasmus is responsible for the expression call a spade a spade. (The original Greek meant, roughly, call a trough a trough.) Today, many people who dont know the etymologythat is, the historyof this phrase unjustly condemn it as racist. Thus a myth is born.

Even language experts arent immune to these boo-boos. None other than Samuel Johnson, who wrote the great-grandmother of all dictionaries, is responsible for one of them. He suggested that the word nincompoop was derived from non compos mentis, Latin for mentally incompetent. Sorry, Dr. Johnson. The precise origin is unknown, but nincompoop is probably related, like ninny, to the word innocent.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is that English never changes, that its immutable, like the multiplication tables or the boiling point of H2O. But its ability to renew itself is what has kept English alive and kickingespecially kicking. Words evolve over time, and legitimately so. A wife, for instance, was once simply a woman. The word didnt mean a married woman until 150 years after it first appeared. And flair once meant an odor or the sense of smell; a dog with keen flair had a good nose. But today the original definition exists only in old dictionaries, those repositories of linguistic fossils. Not every fossil is dead, though. The spelling of fierywhich many people think makes no sense whateveris a living fossil, a leftover from the thirteenth century, when fire was spelled fier.