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Bryan A. Garner is an award-winning author and editor of more than 20 books, including Garner’s Modern American Usage: The Authority on Grammar, Usage, And Style 3rd edition. Below we have posted one of his daily usage tips about the phrase “nouveau riche”. To subscribe to his daily tips click here.

nouveau riche (1).

Today: Generally.

“Nouveau riche” (= [1] a newly rich person; or [2] newly rich people collectively) is sometimes misspelled *”nouveau rich” — e.g.: “It will be for Deng’s heirs to deal with problems such as the widening gap between China’s nouveau rich [read 'nouveau riche'] and rural poor.” James Cox, “Deng Xiaoping: 1904-1997,” USA Today, 20 Feb. 1997, at A1.

The phrase keeps the French plural “nouveaux riches.” But some mistakenly write *”nouveau riches” or even (as a pl.) *”nouveau rich” — e.g.: “Even for those nouveau rich [read 'nouveaux riches'] with the spare change and audacity to have their own personal guard posted at the entrance, it still takes a moment.” “Back Porch,” S.F. Examiner, 22 Dec. 1996, at E3.

Some writers seem to believe that the phrase refers not to people but to newfound wealth — e.g.: “The Victorians couldn’t blow their bucks on big-screen TVs. Instead, their nouveau riches [read 'newfound wealth,' or merely 'wealth'] went toward embellishing their houses.” M.J. McAteer, “A Touch of Class,” Wash. Post, 16 Apr. 1997, at D9.

The singular and plural forms are pronounced /noo-voh REESH/.

Language-Change Index
1. *”nouveau rich” for “nouveau riche”: Stage 1.
2. *”nouveau riches” as a plural for “nouveaux riches”: Stage 1.
3. “nouveau riche” in reference to newfound wealth: Stage 1

*Invariably inferior forms.

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I woke up this morning and thought, "I really need good ammunition against people who say that 'hopefully' can't be used to mean 'I hope'," because that's the sort of thing I tend to wake up thinking (yes, my paranoias are often about being mugged by style goons). I fired up my ol' computer machine and plugged into the intertubes and went immediately to Language Log, where I got a concise explanation of what I needed:

Speaker-oriented (or "stance") adverbial hopefully has been taking abuse pretty steadily for 30 or more years (see MWDEU). Linguists are mostly just baffled by this disparagement; see the discussion in the American Heritage Book of English Usage, where it's noted that "hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth." But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language -- cf. frankly in "Frankly, this soup stinks" and surprisingly in "Surprisingly, this soup is delicious" -- and it provides a way of expressing the speaker's attitude towards a proposition which is both (a) brief and (b) subordinate: "I hope that S", "I have a hope that S", "It is to be hoped that S", and the like are wordier, and have the hoping expressed in a main clause (as the apparent main assertion), while what writers want is to assert the proposition provisionally, adding a modifier expressing their attitude towards it. So speaker-oriented hopefully is a GOOD thing, and it's no surprise that it's spread so fast.

That's followed by some excellent, concise insight about very, which everybody who's been told to never use that word should read as well.

For more on hopefully and ambiguity, see this and this.

Oh, it's a good day when it begins with sane information about style and usage!

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One Story is a marvelous magazine (and not just because they published me -- that should, perhaps, be held against them...) and I can testify that it makes a great gift for people who like to read but generally feel too busy to do so, because receiving a nicely-produced story every three weeks or so in the mail is great fun.

One Story now and then asks for donations, because the magazine is a non-profit and doesn't run ads. Clifford Garstang pointed out that a recent solicitation included this description of the "Editor" donation level:

Editor: $100 – I’ll pay one author for their story

Mr. Garstang notes that there is, according to certain interpretations of English usage, a problem with agreement between the one author and the plural pronoun their.

What he doesn't say, though, is that One Story is simply showing their respect for the history of English literature and the language itself. According to the indispensible Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, here are some of the writers who have used this construction:

Chaucer: "And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,/They wol come up..." ("The Pardoner's Prologue")

Shakespeare: "And every one to rest themselves betake" ("The Rape of Lucrece")

The King James Bible: "...if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses"

Jane Austen: "I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly" (Mansfield Park)

Thackeray: "A person can't help their birth" (Vanity Fair)

W.H. Auden: "...it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy" (Encounter, Feb. 1955)

For further exploration of this fine tradition, click here.

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Historians are always born too late: Alexander the Great is dead, and so is Charlemagne, so that descriptions of past events have to be reconstructed from chance remarks, unreliable accounts, deliberate lies, and semi-obliterated traces. Language historians are in a similar situation. All of a sudden (always all of a sudden) texts begin to suggest odd pronunciations, new auxiliaries, loss of endings, or previously unheard-of syntax. Why did people in 1324 or 1657 change the norm (the dates are, of course, imaginary) and why did the innovation spread? If we could be there and observe! Alas and alack: too late. But every now and then we are allowed to witness such shifts. Curiously, it turns out that phenomena happening before our eyes are often as hard to explain as those of epochs past.

Several years ago, I read the following sentence in a student newspaper: “Pedestrians are warned to not cross the street, etc.” I am sure I missed the “birth” of this process, but I do not think that to not cross the street was so common, let alone universal, in the seventies and even in the eighties. Few questions about grammar are less exciting than the use of the split infinitive. The topic was made famous by H.W. Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926), who divided the English speaking world into five categories: 1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; 2) those who do not know but care very much; 3) those who know and condemn; 4) those who know and approve; and 5) those who know and distinguish. He addressed mainly the second group. What followed that discussion has been a long and trivial anticlimax, though Fowler’s joke about people who would as soon be caught putting their knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive has made several generations of language lovers smile. Since 1926 variations on Fowler’s entry have been repeated in every book with the words English usage in their titles, and every author arrived at approximately the same conclusions: split if you must, but do it with understanding. The essence of the change that has occurred in American English and that constitutes the subject of this post can be captured in the formula: “Split, split, split.” Splitting has become gratuitous.

There is, apparently, no gain in substituting to not cross the street for not to cross the street. From a theoretical point of view, it would be easy to justify either variant, for measurements proving that the particle to is attached more closely to the verb than to the negation do not exist. A phrase like to not cross suggests a great cohesiveness of not cross, whereas not to cross points in the opposite direction. At one time, to (now a formal marker of the infinitive) was the same to that we know today as a preposition. The infinitive could be declined, and originally its dative preceded by to indicated purpose (“in order to”), but quite early this construction began to be used more or less mechanically in contexts in which reference to purpose could not be detected. No words ever stood between the preposition to and the dative infinitive. Splitting became necessary after English had lost most of its endings and the rigid word order deprived the language of its former flexibility. However, with regard to infinitives, tradition remained stable and favored not to be over to not be, unless special emphasis and a particularly artificial mode of expression were required (“How sad it is to not be when flowers bloom and all around make love!”). Needless to say, the new usage (to not cross the street) does not imply emphasis. Here is an ad: “The military is experimenting with a program that uses meditation and yoga to not only treat stress, but helps troops prepare for the rigors of combat.” Why to not only treat instead of not only to treat? The entire text is awkward. The editor knew little about the rigors of writing good English but unwittingly, almost instinctively (a common case in language change) imitated what had become the most recent norm.

The split infinitive creeps in (unless the writer is ready to restructure the whole sentence) when the choice is between delaying an adverb too long and thrusting it between to and the verb (for example, to fully understand the use of such an intricate rule in a few days is impossible). But in the following sentence it would have been easy not to split. “All we expect them to do is to quietly withdraw from regions [where] they have never been before…” To withdraw quietly from regions would have served its purpose equally well and not made the period bulky. “As president of the United States I would order the secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America…” The speaker (John McCain) wanted to say immediately together with buy, not after America, and I would immediately order to buy up is not quite the same as I would order to immediately buy up, but to immediately do something can now be seen everywhere. It has become a stock phrase (compare: they wanted us to immediately discontinue the experiment). In most cases switching the adverb would have been easy, as in: “It is common to relocate or remove buildings that have proven to frequently be in the wake of storms, flooding or other disasters” (= that have frequently proven). Splitting to be strikes me as especially ugly. From students’ papers: “…again allowing French words to easily be borrowed at will” (= to be easily borrowed); “This made them more likely to also be very familiar with… Latin” (= this also made them). I have a rich collection of similar sentences.

Little can be added to what Fowler and others have said about the split infinitive. When used reasonably, it need not irritate anyone, though the commonsense rule (do not split if you can help it) has lost none of its value. In …a nationalism that allowed the English language to once again outlive the language of a foreign conqueror (from a paper), that once again allowed would, to my mind, have been preferable, but let her rip. As an observer, I find it interesting that someone somewhere began to incautiously split infinitives, and now everybody splits them, as though they were firewood. No other shifts in syntax, morphology, or phonetics seem to have triggered the new fashion. Did some celebrity speak so and the public follow the splitter? Do videogames promote this usage? Language historians are always on the lookout for causes. Does anyone know the cause of this change?

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Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at the word “uppity”.

Last week a member of the House of Representatives, Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, created a stir when he used the word uppity in conjunction with Michelle and Barack Obama. As reported in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, Westmoreland said “Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks they’re uppity.”

The remark has drawn wide-spread coverage, and no small amount of condemnation from people who are of the opinion that uppity is what has been delicately termed ‘a racially-tinged’ word. Westmoreland himself has staked out the rather bold position that it is possible to have lived in the South for some five decades and not be aware of the potentially offensive meaning of this word, and offers his own ostensible ignorance as proof of this.

The question of whether the Representative from Georgia is or is not lying has been written about in many other places, as has the question of what would be the appropriate response from the Senator from Illinois or his wife; so have all the other questions of propriety of social discourse, and I’ll not mention them further. What I find interesting is just how difficult it is to really capture the nuance and breadth of a word such as uppity in the dictionary.

It appears to be widely acknowledged that the word has connotations of racism, at least as it was applied to the Obamas. Indeed, much of the commentary has focused on the fact that it would be surprising (or hard to believe) that Westmoreland did not know that he was using a racist turn of phrase. And yet a brief check of several contemporary general dictionaries (the OED, Merriam-Webster, the Encarta) and we find that none of them include this information in their definitions, or in a usage note.

So how should a dictionary address such an issue? It seems like an unwieldy solution to suggest that it could specify that such a word should be used with caution under some narrowly defined set of circumstances (such as ‘may be perceived as insensitive or racist when used in a disparaging sense by a Caucasian speaker referring to a non-Caucasian person or group’). And yet it also seems undeniable that it is in fact used this way, if not by Westmoreland than definitely by others.

One way to address this would be to show the connotations of the word through its use in citations, as the OED does with so much of our vocabulary. But although the OED provides nine examples of uppity being used, from 1880 through 1982, only one of them shows the word being used in an obviously racist sense. And some other dictionaries do not provide such examples at all (such as the American Heritage online dictionary, which has a citation taken from a New York Times article from 1981, which says that some members of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet thought that Alexander Haig “was getting a little uppity and needed to be slapped down” – no one will read that as being racially tinged).

I wonder if there is a limit on how well a dictionary can really capture the nuance of a language in such circumstances. Especially when one bears in mind that Senator Obama’s running mate, Senator Biden, was similarly taken to task for his use of the words clean and articulate some months ago. I don’t know whether they were intended as implicit slights (what reason is there to think that a well-respected senator would be anything but clean or articulate?), but I can see how it would be possible – and yet I’ve not found a dictionary that documents that these specific words are sometimes used thusly.

It is interesting to me that, Westmoreland’s protestations aside, uppity falls into the category of words of which we can say that we “just know” what they mean, without their being defined in a reference work. It exists with an unwritten social definition, and I cannot help but imagine what other words have come and gone through the last few hundred years, unremarked upon by dictionaries past, yet implicitly understood by the speakers of the language.

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The Olympics can bring out the Jingoist (or is it Jingo) in just about anyone.  All that competition, all that pride bubbling to the surface. To learn how to properly use these words keep reading. If you liked this usage tip check out Garner’s Modern American Usage. To subscribe to his daily tips click here.

jingoist; jingo.

The former has come to displace the latter as the agent noun corresponding to “jingoism.” A “jingoist” is a belligerent patriot and nationalist who favors an aggressive foreign policy. The word almost always carries pejorative connotations — e.g.:

- “You want every loser white supremacist, every mean-spirited neo-Nazi, every jerk jingoist out there?” James Coates, “Bait-and-Switch Works on the Web,” Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale), 8 Sept. 1996, at G4.

- “The Duma’s jingoists seem to care little that the obligations of START-2 are finely balanced.” “Russia’s Surly Answer to NATO,” Economist (U.S. ed.), 1 Feb. 1997, at 47.

- “Many Serbs . . . escaped the war of the jingoists by fleeing or deserting.” Peter Schneider, “The Writer Takes a Hike,” New Republic, 3 Mar. 1997, at 34.

“Jingo” has pretty much been driven out, unless a pun is needed — e.g.: “Jingo bells, jingo bells, jingoism all the way on MTV this season.” “The Best of Cable & Satellite,” Independent, 21 Dec. 1996, at 57. Otherwise, it appears mostly in the phrase “by jingo,” a mild oath expressing affirmation or surprise {I’ll do it, by jingo!}.

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Loath as I am to disagree with John Scalzi, I must note a difference of opinion with regard to the word "alright", which John proclaims is not even a word. And he thinks it's ugly.

Whether it is ugly is a matter of taste, and I shan't argue that. Whether it is a word, though ... well, it's definitely a word, since it has boundaries and is used to convey meaning, though I will grant that most American dictionaries of English do not accept it as part of formal, standard English yet.

I will also say here that I use the word "alright" much more often than I use the words "all right", and when an occasional copyeditor changes my alrights to all rights, I change 'em right back whenever possible. (Usually my sometimes-British/ sometimes-American punctuation distracts copyeditors from my other idiosyncracies, but not always.)

In terms of grammar, usage, style, orthography, etc., I am a radical liberal. I teach my students standard English, but also encourage them to make innovations whenever possible. I tell them they must learn standard English not because it is inherently better than anything else, but because pedants will yap at them, and they need to be able to defend their choices. Few things make people more pedantic than grammar, style, and usage, and most of the yaps of pedants are nothing more than pet peeves. We're all welcome to our pet peeves, and I certainly have some ("loathe" for "loath" annoys me, as does "disinterested" for "uninterested" -- the latter I can justify as a useful distinction, though), but I try to let my desire for a lively and vivid language overcome my occasional desire to battle the barbarians. And I have little problem with people deviating from standard English by choice. I wish more people did so, in fact.

Thus, I am stating here and now, in a public forum, that when I use "alright" I mean "alright" and not "all right". Sometimes, in fact, I use both, because I like the distinction that can be made between them, as pointed out by a commenter at this post who says:

The prosodic pattern of the two differs. In alright they are written as one word because they are articulated as one word, initial stress on ‘all’ while ‘right’ is unstressed. In all right the ‘right’ element gets stressed instead as it is the head of the constituent -- an adjective phrase, with ‘all’ as its specifier.

(I first decided to use both forms when I was writing plays, because I hear the two quite differently, and I wanted actors to be able to make a distinction.)

And here's a quote I'm stealing outright from this excellent overview of the controversy -- the quote comes from The Cambridge Guide to English Usage:

The spelling alright is controversial for emotional rather than linguistic or logical reasons. It was condemned by Fowler in a 1924 tract for the Society for Pure English, despite recognition in the Oxford Dictionary (1884-1298) as increasingly current. But the fury rather than the facts of usage seem to have prevailed with most usage commentators since. [...] Dictionaries which simply crossreference alright to all right (as the “proper” form) typically underrepresent its various shades of meaning as a discourse symbol. It may be concessive, as in Alright, I’ll come with you—or diffident, as in How’re things? Oh alright—or impatient as in Alright, alright!. None of these senses are helpfully written as all right, which injects the distracting sense of “all correct.” Those who would do away with alright prefer to ignore its various analogues, such as almost, already, also, although, altogether, always, which have all over the centuries merged into single words. Objections to alright are rarely justified, as Webster’s English Usage (1989) notes, and Burchfield (1996) only makes a shibboleth of it. [...] At the turn of the millennium, alright is there to be used without any second thoughts.

I'm a devoted reader of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, and the entry for alright, all right takes up nearly two double-columned pages. Here are some tidbits: the first OED citation of the word in a context that seems similar to current use is Chaucer's "Criseyde was this lady name al right". Moving beyond Middle English we have a long gap where any form of the word(s) is unrecorded with its current sense until Percy Shelley in 1822 (where it is "That was all right, my friend"). "Alright" doesn't appear until 1893 (in the Durham University Journal). The Dictionary notes:

Alright did not appear in a Merriam-Webster dictionary until 1934, but several dictionary users had spotted its omission earlier and had written to us to urge its inclusion.

They cite a letter from "a New York businessman named William E. Scott" from September 25, 1913:

I wish you would submit to your experts the feasibility of putting the word alright into use. As a matter of fact it is used quite extensively without the authority of dictionaries because it is the quick common-sense way of doing. The cable and telegraph companies are the ones who profit by the lack of an authoritative ruling that alright is synonymous with all right

The Dictionary points out the argument for the different emphasis when speaking "alright" and "all right" and notes that that may explain why, when it is found in books, it is most often found in printed dialogue. Finally, they note that it seems to be more accepted by the British than the Yanks -- it is, they note, "the standard spelling in Punch, and the King's Printer at Ottawa officially sanctioned its use as far back as 1928. The OED Supplement calls it simply 'a frequent spelling of all right" They conclude: "It is clearly standard in general prose, but is widely condemned nonetheless by writers on usage."

Finally, two writers I don't mind having as predecessors:

...however alright well seen then let him go to her...
--James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

A success, a success is alright when there are there rooms and no vacancies, a success is alright when there is a package, success is alright anyway and any curtain is wholesale.
--Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914

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Translation! How come we never talk about it? We're always jib-jabbering on about editors and authors and the like. When do translators of children's books get their due? How come there isn't an award for Best Translation of a given year? Yes yes, we all know about the Mildred L. Batchelder Award. But that goes to the book, not the translator. If you were to ask me to name my favorites, the only person to come to mind would have to be Anthea Bell, best known for her work with Cornelia Funke.

Fortunately for us all, Criticas Magazine recently published an interview entitled Yanitzia Canetti - The Silent Task of the Good Translator.

Wouldn't "The Good Translator" make a great film title? Sorry. I'm easily distracted.

Anywho, this is an interview with the aforementioned Ms. Canetti. She's considered quite the "get" as she has the ability to translate Seuss. No easy task, I'm sure.

The interview is a fabulous look at the challenges facing translators. This exchange particularly caught my ear:

I have received some translations and bilingual books that are awful: they have grammatical errors, strange syntax, and typos. Why do you think that is?

Unfortunately, many English-speaking publishers or editors who outsource translations cannot judge the quality of the final product. More times than not, they hire a Spanish proofreader, but they are not able to judge that person’s work either. They tend to go with someone who has a decent résumé. Some even think that if someone speaks Spanish, that’s good enough. This underestimation of a foreign language only results in terrible translations.

Give it a glance.

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