By Anatoly Liberman
In lieu of an introduction
The best way of finding out whether “the world” is watching you is to err. The moment I deviate from the path of etymological virtue I am rebuffed, and this keeps me on my toes. Even an innocent typo “causes disappointment” (as it should). Walter W. Skeat: “But the dictionary-maker must expect, on the one hand, to be snubbed when he makes a mistake, and on the other, to be neglected when he is right” (1890). Apparently, this blog does not exist in a vacuum, though I would welcome more questions and comments in addition to rebuttals and neglect. Among other things, I noticed that my angriest opponents are those who have no facts (just opinions) at their disposal. For example, I once stated that contrary to the loss of endings or changes in the word order in the history of English, sentences like if a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they were a bad tenant were promulgated and enforced by overzealous social engineering, rather than being a product of natural development. I was immediately told that such constructions had flourished since the days of Chaucer, if not since the reign of King Alfred. I am still waiting for evidence from Old and Middle English. (Peter Maher has recently sent me the sentence: “Officials believe that it were Dissident Republicans opposed to the peace process who carried out the bombing.” This is another example of enthusiasm running away with common sense. They so say in German (es waren…), where the link verb (copula) agrees with the predicate, but English is not German, is it?)
Some time ago I read a vitriolic comment on my post titled “Death of the Adverb” (the writer from Australia was quite “incensed” by it). While discussing the phrase do it real quick, I maintained that hardly any speaker of American English would use either really or quickly for real and quick in it. First of all, it was pointed out that having Oxford University Press in New York (where this blog was founded) is an oxymoron (no need to fear the American conquest like the Viking raids or the Norman Conquest of 1066: branches of OUP are situated in many places, while Oxford is still in England, and may it stay there for another million years). Second, Americans were advised to leave English alone. This is familiar advice. Thus, at the end of the 19th century bitter complaints were voiced about (over?) “…the unlicensed liberty of speech by which some American public men are wont to recklessly debase our common English tongue”; the tongue is common, but don’t you dare paw it over. (Here I cannot refrain from the remark that in British English wont is homophonous with won’t, whereas in American English it is indistinguishable from want, but this is by the way.) Now what about real quick? Here my opponent, who reveals his age (“fifty odd years”) suggested that adjectives and adverbs simply merged in those words and yielded identical forms. I am afraid that during (over?) the last half-century the writer has not had a chance to study the history of English. Mergers are common. For instance, fast (adjective) and fast (adverb) were different in Old English (the adverb had -e at the end), but when unstressed vowels were shed in Middle English, the two words became homonyms. Occasionally tangles are produced, and then we observe division of labor, as between hard and hardly. Nothing simi