Inflammable versus Flammable: Inflammable Got Burned

There is a small family of words with negating suffixes that mean the same thing as the related word. They seem like they should be opposites, but they are synonymous. (De)bone, (in)valuable and (de)press come to mind, but the king of all of these is flammable, whose counterpart, inflammable, means exactly the same thing. The story behind the two words is fascinating.

In saying they are related, first understand they are related as cousins rather than brothers. Both flammable and inflammable derive from Latin words relating to burning, but the precise words each derive from are different. Inflammable was by far the more popular of the two English derivations through the 19th and into the early 20th century.

The industrial revolution was in full swing and early 20th century user documentation and marketing materials sometimes presented the term inflammable incorrectly in describing a product’s potential combustibility, and anecdotal evidence of some consistent misreading of inflammable having inspired user carelessness was in the ether. 

Insurance companies and safety experts took notice and launched a campaign urging authors, attorneys, physicians, newspaper writers and others to begin using flammable instead to avoid potentially confusing people with something that could cause injury and property damage. The following notice was commonly found in technical journals in the early 1920s:

 

"The National Safety Council, The National Fire Protection Association, and similar organizations have set out to discourage the use of the word inflammable and to encourage the use of the word flammable instead. The reason for this change is that the meaning of inflammable has so often been misinterpreted."

Flammable indeed is the dominant usage now, though when the directive first began to be adopted, the academics howled at the injustice, perfectly happy to let the hoi polloi burn in their own ignorance. Both remain permissible by modern editorial standards.

So what does the future hold for inflammable? As language in general tilts more and more toward the utilitarian and away from the bejeweled, I suspect that flammable has won the battle once and for all by virtue of conserving a syllable and two characters in a tweet, and that inflammable’s flame will flicker and fade further and though not die out entirely, before long become solely the province of sophists and hidebound doctrinaires. It sounds pretentious to my ear and I recommend against it in favor of flammable.

Avoid Being Involuntarily Committed by Mastering Bad v. Badly

Today’s nugget is bad versus badly, an easy one to cognize, perhaps even more so if you enjoy this odd way of looking at it.

We shall examine the question through the declarative sentence, “I feel bad.” Some may be tempted to say, “I feel badly.” Don’t do it. When you say, “I feel badly,” the conclusion I reach is that you have just returned from the woods where you buried four members of a traveling circus in a shallow grave.

You may ask, “Well that’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?” I don’t think so. When you say you feel badly, badly is an adverb that is modifying the verb to feel. You are saying, “I am bad at feeling.”

You don’t feel things. You are incapable of empathy. You are a sociopath. You display antipathy to the pain of others. You went to the circus when it came to town. You killed a mime, two clowns and the magician’s lovely assistant. And now here you are, admitting your depraved indifference to humanity. You feel badly.

The adjective works here, not the adverb. If you feel bad, you may badly need a drink. Here, badly is modifying need, adding adverbial intensification to the act of needing. The main thing to remember is that adverbs do not function independently, so if you see one hanging out by itself, the adjectival form is probably called for.

Painting by Andrew Salgado

Learning From Donald Trump's Grammar Mistakes

Over the weekend, Donald Trump wrote an ungrammatical sentence in a press release that was shared with Entertainment Weekly as part of his damage control strategy. I guarantee that either no staffer looked at it, or no staffer was permitted to edit it.

Pertaining to his having been fired by NBC, Trump wrote, “My view on immigration is much different than the people at NBC.” The word much is an adjective that typically modifies non-count nouns: much love, much happiness, much fun. Different is an adjective. What Mr. Trump is looking for here is an adverb - a word that modifies an adjective, not a word that modifies a noun.

The obvious choice here is very, the English language’s most common intensifier adverb. All very does is turn the heat up a little bit. It makes whatever adjective succeeding it just a bit more of what it already is. Trump's view would then be very different, rather than much different. Still, most professional writers recommend against the overuse of adverbs in general and of very in particular, as it is very overused and very unilluminating. 

Next we have, “different than the people at NBC.” Some grammarians permit the “different than” construction. I do not like it one bit. Things differ from one another, not than one another. Thanks to the unquenchable objections of the hyper-permissives, it is not a grammatical error per se, though tens of thousands of writers reject it out of hand. Unsurprisingly, this fractured part of the press release found its way into the headline, with what I'm sure was a lightly suppressed chuckle from the editor.

My preferred translation of Trump's inscrutable utterance would be, "My views on immigration differ from NBC's."

Donald Trump packed two grammar oversights into three words in a written statement that was supplied to the press. In releasing this hack language to news outlets, he shows such a shameful disinterest in expressing himself properly that he merits every harsh rebuke that this tawdry little corner of the Internet can muster.

And I guess that was it.

A Word That Means Its Own Opposite is not a Politician: It's a Contronym

We touched briefly on the idea of contronyms last week through the gradual morphing of the word terrorism’s initial 18^th century definition into the one that now contradicts it. In the case of terrorism, it’s not really a contronym; it’s a word that grew to mean its virtual opposite. Contronyms are chameleons. Depending on where they are, they can become wholly different, even opposite things.

You can garnish wages or a swordfish dinner. One is amelioration and the other is diminishment. Troy can rent an apartment to Julian, and Julian can rent an apartment from Troy. Seems fair, right? Aught ought to mean one thing, oughtn’t it? It doesn’t mean one thing at all. In fact, it can mean everything or the digit zero. And when you provide oversight on a project, you try to catch any oversights.

Here are a few more to ponder:

Consult

Skinned

Quantum

Dust

Left

Fast

Have fun with contronyms! You can find lists of them all over the web. Some are cheesy and weak, but some are unbelievably weird.

Grammar Rules to Unlearn

Today’s item is, "things you may have been taught are wrong that are in fact grammatical," the first of which is split infinitives. Not only are split infinitives permissible, they always have been.

Would America’s most famous split infinitive, “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” lose anything as “To go where no man has gone before,” or worse yet, "To go boldly where no man has gone before?" Quite obviously it would, so, case closed.

That said, in my opinion, split infinitives often diminish a piece of writing and if you find yourself tempted to use one, you may wish consider revising the sentence. By their nature, split infinitives invite an adverb, so not only do you interrupt a two-word phrase, you do so with what is in many cases a superfluous word. If you are one of those rarefied souls who can split an infinitive like William Shatner, be my guest and split away. But know that you are in very heady company.

Another good one to unlearn as an absolute is the rule against beginning a sentence with a conjunction, such as and or but. The final sentence in the previous paragraph began with a conjunction  and I think it worked. I mean, it’s not Jonathan Franzen, but it was pretty good rhythmically, and altogether a perfectly fine sentence to end the paragraph with.

Which leads me to the next former rule you’re off the hook for. Dangling prepositions. The utterance, "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put," which has been misattributed to Winston Churchill, stands as the test case for the crumbling rule’s flaws. Please notice that the last sentence of the last paragraph and the first sentence of this paragraph both end with prepositions and neither of them are horrific. Again, not Franzen, but not horrific.

It’s Friday, and that ought to do for now. Have a pleasant weekend, and just as Don Miguel Ruiz would have you always be impeccable with your word, so too may you be with your words.

What Does the Word "Terrorism" Mean?

That of course depends on whom you ask and when.

Terrorism is derivative of terror, from the Latin terrorem: something that intimidates, an object to be feared. Of greater relevance to modern usage though is the 11th century Roman term, terror cimbricus, which referred to the fear in the ranks as an army was anticipating a battle with a fierce enemy. Watch the first few minutes of Saving Private Ryan before the ramps on the Higgins Boats go down. Men shaking, retching, smoking, some of them laughing in response to the abject fear. This state of dread is terror cimbricus, and it is the point of terrorism; not necessarily the spectacular assaults, but rather the unease that inhabits the time between them.

The guillotining of Louis XVI in Paris ushered in the Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre, who routinely guillotined his political opponents in the town square. This period in France’s history would become known as The Reign of Terror. In a tip of the hat to terror cimbricus, a well understood term in those days, a journalist for The London Times coined the word terrorism to describe the actions of Robespierre. In 1795, it was entered into the Oxford English Dictionary as describing government by intimidation.

The definition has since come to mean the use of violence to coerce or intimidate governments or civilians. So when did that happen? Well, it took some doing. First, unrest in Russia in the late 19th century led to the rise of The People’s Will, a reasonably successful group of assassins who killed Alexander II among other prominent political figures. A giddy American press watching Russia in turmoil described the covert, committed and surgically accurate assassins as terrorists, only with a connotation of revolutionary gusto, while still implying the reek of being less than moralistic.

American newspaper writers would wrestle the word “terrorism” back again to its original meaning in the 1930s to describe the totalitarian governments of the time, notably Russia and Italy, Stalin known in those years as “The Great Terror.”  Then after World War II, the pendulum swung back to the revolutionary nuance of the word, only this time without the glint of approval, as it was happening to the friends of post-war industrialists seeking to make the most out of fresh treaties and new borders, and so began the contemporary definition of the indiscriminate killer of innocents, often to political or religious ends, sometimes indiscriminately. It is such a good word, such a prima facie indictment of its target that it couldn't lay fallow while the enemy was our own so the definition had to be managed a bit, and that was all done in the press.

The definition of terrorism is fluid, and it has been since its initial coinage, largely massaged by power and media, and in classic Orwellian 1984 Newspeak, terrorism has now come to mean its own original opposite. That one of the most important news stories of my lifetime is a contranym spanning the centuries is just one example of why words fascinate me.

Enough About Me. What Do You Think About Me? Personal Pronouns in the Age of Narcissism.

As individuals and society grow more narcissistic, it behooves everyone to master the use of first-person pronouns. George Harrison saw it heading this way back in 1969 when he wrote, “All through the day, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine. All through the night, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.”

The self-obsession pronoun you really want to watch out for is myself. The opportunities for proper use of myself are rare, as it should only be used reflexively, that is to say when the action of the verb happens to the speaker or writer personally.

In The Four Tops' number-one smash hit from 1965, “I Can’t Help Myself,” the act of not helping is being done both by and to the persona of the song, so the reflexive pronoun is appropriate. To digress briefly, “I Can’t Help Myself” is one of those songs that is perhaps better known by its first lyric, “Sugar pie, honeybunch,” than its title. Avoid constructions like “The winning team consisted of Mark, Debra, Steve and myself.” Not only is it incorrect, it also feels a little pompous. The correct first-person pronoun in this case is “me.”

The great peril lies in subject usage versus direct object usage. The reason this grammar school staple still trips people up is because you are so trained to say, “Ara and I went to the Pearl Jam show with Tibbetts,” that it can feel unnatural to say, “Tibbetts went to the Pearl Jam show with Ara and me.”  You might instead feel like saying, “Tibbetts went to the Pearl Jam show with Ara and I.” But please, don’t do it. Your lack of personal pronoun mastery will reveal you as being an amateur narcissist, and that is so far down the rabbit hole you may never get out.

Human Ken and Human Barbie, two narcissists who hate one another.