Tuesday, June 07, 2005
On Language 6/7: My wife’s words
In a changing world of words, you say potato, I say potatoest
Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Here are some of the words and phrases I first heard from my wife, Andrea. Given this level of inventiveness displayed by one person, is it any wonder that language as a whole changes and evolves as much as it does?
Analyzation: combination of “analysis” and “rationalization,” connoting excess, as in, “Don’t ruin the movie with your analyzations.”
Of my three favorite dictionaries, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (MWC) and the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) list “analyzation” as a variant of “analysis,” while the newly released second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) doesn’t have it (though it does have “analyzable”).
A Google search yields about 700 examples of the word. A quick scan of these results suggests the word usually uses a prefix to connote excess, as in “over-analyzations” and “hyper-analyzations.”
Carefuller: comparative form of “careful.” A clang in the kitchen will elicit: “Be carefuller!”
I thought this was an invented inflection, but MWC has it, though AHD and NOAD don’t. The word gets more than 1,000 results on Google but only five results in a search of the LexisNexis news database for the last five years.
Complexly: adverb meaning “in a complex way.” This also sounded like an invented inflection to me, but it’s in all three of my dictionaries and gets more than 100,000 results in Google.
A LexisNexis search finds eight examples from one publication alone: the prestigious New Yorker—“... the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together.”
...
Later I mention Andrea’s atypical appendage of “car” as “car-o,” suggesting this was a Romance language ending on an Anglo word. Car‘s lineage is actually more complicated. In fact, I’m less sure now whether “car” is Anglo, Latinate, or Celtic than before I wrote the column. From M-W:
Etymology: Middle English carre, from Anglo-French, from Latin carra, plural of carrum, alteration of carrus, of Celtic origin; akin to Old Irish & Middle Welsh carr vehicle; akin to Latin currere to run
(Spanish has both automovil and carro.)