Anatoly Vorobei has a post at his Russian blog Avva called тяжелые слова [Difficult words] in which he complains that he can never remember the meaning of “that unpleasant — I might even say stuffy — word erstwhile“:
And when I run across it, I get the vague feeling, quite wrongly, that it means something like ‘respected’ or ‘noble’ (apparently by a vague analogy with earnest and worthwhile). And I’m not the only one who has this problem with the word; I remember reading that native speakers get confused by it sometimes, too. Two or three times already I’ve learned the accurate meaning, and it still slips my mind.
And what are some words, foreign or native, whose meaning you can never manage to remember?
The first commenter mentions explicit and implicit, the second hitherto and flagrant/fragrant; others complain about the Russian words сталактиты ‘stalactites’ and сталагмиты ‘stalagmites’ (equally confusing in English, of course) and смазливый ‘pretty, attractive, cute’ (which I too have trouble remembering).
I myself have never had a problem with erstwhile, for whatever reason (and in fact tend to use it more than I probably should), but as I said here:
The Russian word for ‘nitrogen,’ azot, is hard for me to remember, because it’s so different from the English; of course, it’s straight from French azote, but that’s hard for me to remember too — I guess I didn’t have many dealings with the table of elements when studying French.
I feel the same about erstwhile.
It’s easy to distinguish stalactites and stalagmites in English: stalactites are the ones on the ceiling, as they have to hold on ‘tight’. I appreciate that speakers of other languages are screwed though…
Oh, if “erstwhile” seems awkward in a particular context, just swap in “quondam” instead. That will put your readers/hearers at ease and reduce any chance of confusion.
as a teen i was told that stalactites have a ‘c’ because they’re on the ceiling and stalagmites have a ‘g’ because they’re on the ground, and i’ve never confused them since.
“crepuscular” was a word i struggled with for quite a while, though what i thought it meant changed every time i encountered it. but it’s a fine word if one remembers what it means.
After the hoodoos I won’t forget quondam.
as a teen i was told that stalactites have a ‘c’ because they’re on the ceiling and stalagmites have a ‘g’ because they’re on the ground, and i’ve never confused them since.
Same here.
Hard ones in English for many people are affect/effect. (Is there a stalactite rule for those?)
And I always have to think hard about desert vs. dessert — I can’t do it without sounding out the word to ensure/insure/assure that I have the right one.
We had a thread on easily confused words like affect/effect, but I can’t seem to find it at the moment.
Ussure. Ussurian tigers in USSR do that.
RAVEN
Remember: Affect Verb, Effect Noun
Yes, I know, effect can be a verb too…
And affect (with initial stress) can be a noun (“this grammarian has a very flat affect.”)
I think it survives largely as a medical term of art, though.
As a kid interested in science, I had no trouble remembering the names for which flowstone formations were on the floor and which were on the roof of a cave. In elementary school, I heard that mnemonic about: “c” for “stalactite” on the ceiling; “g” for “stalagmite” on the ground. However, that was the first time I noticed that “stalactite” even had a “c” in it; mostly having heard it spoken, I had though it also had a “g”—”stalagtite.” So that titbit taught me how to remember the spellings, not the words themselves!
For erstwhile, I had apparently already assimilated the meaning sufficiently that I misremembered the threatening doggerel from the prologue of The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson:
I liked the rhyme after I read the book (in third grade; I’m certain of the year because I know I saw the Disney television movie starring Donald Pleasance—of whom I was already a fan—on video during the previous summer) and ended of up knowing most of it by heart (the words, although not the spellings). However, I somehow misremembered the line about the the first arrow as having “esrtwhile sped.”
On the other hand, quondam was tricky for me for a long time—probably until the quondam hoodoos discussion.
xkcd also discussed affect versus effect a long time ago.
languagehat: We had a thread on easily confused words like affect/effect, but I can’t seem to find it at the moment.
Was it No, the Other Right!? That spun off from a Language Log post about “inexcusably unmemorable terminology for related concepts”, which in turn grew out of a post on sensitivity vs. specificity (“The modal response is ‘Um, yes, I always have to look those up’.”); you brought up Spanish derecho vs. a la derecha.
The peripheral nerve fibers, the ones outside the of the central nervous system, are classified as afferent or efferent, depending on whether they conduct information towards or away from the CNS. The mnemonic is that the efferent nerves cause an effect, a muscular movement or a change glandular activity.
Stalactites hang on tightly.
David E:
I think [affect] survives largely as a medical term of art, though.
Common enough in modern psychology and in early modern philosophy. In the history of western music theory there is much talk of affects (German, with Affekte, sometimes less happily translated “affections” as in the title of that Wikipedia article, seems to have taken up the Latin original affectus for this purpose before English did). In theory of art more generally also.
I recently realised that “valedictorian” and “valetudinarian” are actually two different words. If you look closely, back and forth from one to the other, you will eventually notice that they have different spellings.
As Andy said, stalactites hold on tight. In addition, stalagmites might reach the ceiling one day.
Our (German) mnemonic, during that time of life when one would learn about such things as stalactites and stalagmites, ie probably in many cases overlapping with puberty, has always been that Stalak*tit*en are the hanging ones. Ahahaha of course.
Was it No, the Other Right!?
It was! Thanks for finding it; I can rest easy now.
It is more efficient to have a mnemonic for only one half of a confusable pair. Mine for stala###ites was m = mound. The Jenolan Caves tourguide’s was “ants in your pants: when the mites go up the tights come down”, which distinguishes mineral formations but mixes up arthropods, and favours the Commonwealth meanings of “pants” and “tights”.
> смазливый ‘pretty, attractive, cute’
Well, probably it differs by locality, but I would never consider these as synonyms. смазливый always implies something unpleasant or even unclean about the object. It is most often applied to seemingly attractive women whom one does not like for some reason. For example, “Ты смазливая” is an insult.
Really? Is that how other Russian speakers feel? Russian Wiktionary does say “часто пренебр.,” so clearly it’s not unequivocally positive, but that’s not the same as saying “Ты смазливая” is an insult. (English Wiktionary just says ‘pretty, cute.’) Offhand, I can’t think of an English word meaning ‘good-looking’ that has a primarily negative sense, and that is hardly surprising.
For example, “Ты смазливая” is an insult.
Never heard of it that way that I could recall. I’ll ask my brother.
I suspect that there’d be some minor negative connotations from similar-sounding negative words, but to the best of my knowledge nowhere near enough to make it an insult.
I guess maybe it’s a bit too archaic* to be used unironically, which could technically make it lean negative because of all the ironic use?
(A vaguely similar English example, though for a different reason, might be pulchritudinous: it’s not an everyday word, and it sounds ugly, so it’s probably more often used ironically than not.)
There are known cases of meaning-inversion from sound symbolism alone – English mickle famously did this – but AFAIK this particular word is not a case of this, or at least not yet.
*) To be honest, “archaic” is not quite the correct term for it, but I can’t think of a good term that would be more correct.
There’s a bit of a register mismatch involved: it’s a lower-register word (or at least a rustic one), but an old one, so it’s not used in low register because it feels too high-class for it due to being old, and it’s not used in high register because it feels too low-class for it due to its rustic connotations. So the leftover uses are mostly the ironic ones that deliberately choose an obscure word.
I’ll ask my brother.
I asked my mother instead and she did say it’s been getting more negative recently – it was a pure compliment when she grew up (in the 1980s), but now it’s closer to a backhanded compliment. I couldn’t quite figure out the specific connotations involved, though.
For dripstone formations, I was taught they’re like ants in the pants. The mites go up, and the tights go down.
I asked my mother instead and she did say it’s been getting more negative recently – it was a pure compliment when she grew up (in the 1980s), but now it’s closer to a backhanded compliment.
Thanks very much, that helps clarify the situation!
@Noetica:
Just saw affectless in the wild (in a Grauniad article describing Mark Zuckerberg.)
You are evidently right.
Not the primary sense, but “cute” as deployed in fixed phrases like “Don’t get cute with me” and “Don’t try to be cute” is negative in English.
I grew up in 80s.
I learned смазливый in the negative meaning.
I never heard it used with the second person (and indeed would take it as either an insult or as said by a speaker of a different variety of Russian).
Instead I saw it used to describe a third person, often male, and often not a person the speaker is of a high opinion of – as if were “attractive” but somehow in a silly/negative way. It was contrasted to симпатичный, приятный etc.
Now, what is “attractive”, but bad? I imagined a person whose face matches an employer’s expectation of what an ideal sales assistant would look like. Or a male asshole with pretty face.
I always have a problem with pusillanimous: to me it sounds as though it should mean “agitated and actively aggressive”, perhaps by mistaken oral/aural association with pugilistic and animated. It always rather surprises me when it turns out to mean “showing a lack of courage or determination; timid”.
Came here to write that every time you, Hat, use the word quondam I have to reach for the middle-click, happy to see I’m not alone.
“cute” in the older sense is current in Irish. Many a male politician in late middle age has been described as a cute hoor. If he has red hair he is a foxy cute hoor.
Rex Quondam is the hero of my Netflix detective series set early medieval Britain. There’s a twist in the tale.
Came here to write that every time you, Hat, use the word quondam I have to reach for the middle-click, happy to see I’m not alone.
Yes, I use that word way too much, but what can I do? I like it!
Does this count:
For us outside the USA, sophomore and other terms of that ilk.
Also the non-metric measurements: Fahrenheit, feet, gallons…
The news reporting around the recent submarine search really exemplifies this: I know a foot is about 30 cm, but Lord knows what that means when they are talking about ocean depths of thousands of feet.
Sometimes I wish they’d just put in subtitles or voiceovers to explain and ‘translate’.
In Latin: I find I need to look up animadvertere every time I come across it.
I don’t think that counts, because it involves words that there’s no particular reason you should know (foreign terms) — the issue is rather words that are theoretically part of your vocabulary but that you can never remember.
The media already squished out by not quantifying the ocean-depth statements in fathoms … But maybe there could be a special 19th-century-Russian-novel edition of the news that tells you how many versts deep the North Atlantic is in that area?
The verst was used only for distances on land; under water, they used (and for all I know still use) the морская сажень ‘sea sazhen.’
This translates “sazhen” as “fathom,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_units_of_measurement, although it’s a bit longer than where the Anglo-American fathom ended up getting standardized. OTOH, wikipedia says that until the 19th century there was variation among various Anglophone maritime subcultures as to the exact length of the fathom and the standardized sazhen may have been within that range of variation. And of course maybe for Russophones the “sea sazhen” was a different length than the regular landlubber sazhen?
@ LH: “I don’t think that counts, because it involves words that there’s no particular reason you should know (foreign terms)”
Ahhh – so we DO speak different languages in Australia and USA. 😀
Anyhow, the sloppy standard of journalism here in Australia means we get US news stories verbatim, including the “foreign terms” I described. Though usually, the voiceover is done by an Australian to give the impression they are reporting the story.
Sometimes, on a slow news day, our network news gives us stories about bears, moose, etc rummaging through American bins, streets & backyards, or alternatively, our lazy journos might tell us about a traffic accident in some US place no one has ever heard of.
TIL that a fathom is exactly 6 feet rather than 1/1000 of a nautical mile. (Apparently the 1/1000 mile definition was in fact official for a while but not used in practice?)
This has the result that there isn’t actually an integer number of fathoms in a nautical mile. (The pre-1970 British definition resulted in a figure of 1013 1/3; other definitions had even worse fractions.) There is, however, an integer number of fathoms in a land mile, namely 880.
The Russian sazhen (sometimes translated as “fathom”) ended up standartized as exactly 7 feet. I’m not sure if it was used for depths, though. Wikipedia seems to say that the marine version was about 6 feet but doesn’t explain why.
There is no particularly obvious reason why a nautical mile would need to be an integral number of fathoms, if you use the former for distance along the surface of the water but the latter only for depth. It might be slightly more inconvenient not to have the nautical mile be an integral number of yards, since yards were traditionally used in discussing how far a warship’s guns could reach and thus whether or not a hostile warship was within range. But the whole historical idea of the nautical mile being tweaked to somehow correspond to an arcminute of latitude shows a dangerous conceptual affinity with the metric system. This would only be practically useful if you were sailing due north or due south, and how often do you do that?
what can I do?
“If you have written a sentence that you think particularly fine, draw your pen through it; a pet child is always the worst in the family.” (The first half of this is generally attributed to Alexander Pope, of all people.)
Language Log had a post about hard-to-remember oppositions, with contributions from the teeming masses. I still can’t untangle unergative-unaccusative-antiergative-antiaccusative-antipassive.
In Hebrew, there are many common fixed expressions from Aramaic which I can never remember. Most often לְהַלָּן lĕhallān and לְעֵיל lĕ‘ēil, ‘below’ and ‘above’ in a written text.
A particular hard barrier to learning languages is that for some languages, for some people, much of the vocabulary looks the same. For me, remembering German verb roots is hard for that reason.
Belatedly: Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, capable of catching fire. The original word was inflammable, from the 17th century. Flammable was invented in the early 20th by the safety people when too many people thought that inflammable meant it couldn’t burn. Then they had to invent non-flammable to mean the opposite.
смазливый/ая
For me (and it seems that different speakers think about it somewhat differently) it means pretty (not beautiful/красивый/ая, which is definitely positive), but only in a skin-deep way. Sort of, comes with a warning sign, “he/she is pretty, but don’t fall for it”
Among nouns, there’s prettyboy.
(It corresponds quite well to German Schönling, except that Schönling is thoroughly obsolete.)
“If you meet the
PopeBuddha on the road, kill him.”I wonder if that was in any way connected with Whorf’s work in fire insurance (his day job), where he pointed out that “empty” gasoline drums were in fact full of explosive gasoline vapors, and as such far more dangerous than “full” ones, though not then treated as such. You can see how that experience would create a predisposition to linguistic relativity.
Whorf made a number of other theoretical contributions, though: he invented the category of oligosynthetic languages, which are characterized by having only a small number of morphemes (hundreds altogether). He also claimed that Nahuatl was oligosynthetic, though this claim has been rejected; the only known such languages are conlangs.
He was also the first to formulate Whorf’s law, which explains the origin of /tɬ/ in the Nahuan languages. Sapir had reconstructed this affricate to Proto-Uto-Aztecan even though it exists only in Nahuan; Whorf pointed out that /ta/ > /tɬa/ would account for it, even though the /a/ sometimes wound up being lost by other processes.
Language Log had a post about hard-to-remember oppositions
That was the one that the Language Hat post mentioned above (No, the Other Right!) was responding to.
Flammable was invented in the early 20th by the safety people
Promoted, not invented. Flammable was used in English before the 20th century — the OED’s first citation is an 1813 translation of Lucretius — though it was relatively rare. Here’s an example in a patent application from 1872 for “the manufacture of charcoal by the heat arising from the combustion of the flammable gases issuing from the wood”.
Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words has a good account of the promotion of flammable, with some actual examples of misused inflammable (“These bricks are said to be light, impervious to wet and utterly inflammable”, 1892), showing that it wasn’t just an imaginary concern.
As Quinion mentions, non-flammable caught on even before flammable. The British Non-Flammable Wood Co. was advertising its product for use on ships in the 1890s.
Perhaps surprisingly, there’s no evidence that Whorf had anything to do with the promotion of flammable, even though he was working for a fire insurance company starting from 1919. If he had, surely he would have mentioned it in his article about the “empty” drums; this article also discusses fire hazards that weren’t recognized because they were described as “stone”, “water”, or “scrap lead”, but says nothing about the word “inflammable”, only a mention of “inflammable acetone”.
Why cloth is in yards and (sounding) ropes are in fathoms.
re: смазливый as commented by drasvi
I completely agree, drasvi gave a very good description of how the word is used.
@ Y. “In Hebrew, there are many common fixed expressions from Aramaic which I can never remember. Most often לְהַלָּן lĕhallān and לְעֵיל lĕ‘ēil, ‘below’ and ‘above’ in a written text. ”
A good mnemonic is to associate לְהַלָּן ‘below’ with הלאה ‘forward'(–> farther on in the text –> below in the text) and לְעֵיל ‘above’ with עלה ‘ascend, go up, rise’ (–> above in the text).