GINGER(LY).

Geoff Nunberg has a post at Language Log on the word gingerly: a NY Times story on Falluja included the statement “it was a gingerly first step,” which pleased him by its proper use of gingerly as an adjective [thanks to Tim May for catching my original misstatement!]; then he had second thoughts about his idea of proper use:

Maybe I should throw in the towel on this one, I thought, but then began to wonder whether there was ever actually a towel for me to be holding in the first place.
In defense of the usage, gingerly began its life as an adverb. It was formed from the adjective ginger, “dainty or delicate,” and the OED gives citations of its use as an adverb right up to the end of the 19th century — the adjectival use appeared in the 16th century. And unlike most other adjectives in –ly, like friendly or portly, gingerly has an adverbial meaning, so that it can only apply to nominals denoting actions (like “step” in Ekholm and Schmidt’s article); otherwise it requires a clumsy periphrasis like “in a gingerly way.” Moreover, Merriam-Webster’s exhaustive Dictionary of English Usage gives no indication that anybody has ever objected to the use of the word as an adverb.

But the adjective ginger has been obsolete for a long time, and it’s notable that nobody is tempted to back-form it anew, as in “his ginger handling of the question,” which is what you’d expect if the adverbial gingerly were really analyzed as composed of the root ginger plus the derivational suffix –ly.
What we seem to have here, rather, is a haplology (or “haplogy,” as some linguists can’t resist calling it), the process which gave us Latin nutrix in place of the predicted *nutritrix and which leads people to say missippi instead of mississippi. Gingerly is just the way the mental lexicon’s gingerlyly comes out on the tongue or the page. That’s natural enough, but there’s something to be said for insisting that the word be used as an adjective, as one of the small obeisances we make to the capriciousness of grammar.

(Followup here: it seems people do in fact use the back-formation ginger as an adjective, though not very often.) While I love the capriciousness of grammar, I think this battle has been lost, tradition giving way to convenience.

Comments

  1. or they’re forming a legit adj from the noun ginger. Friend : friendly :: ginger : X, where X = gingerly. With a pretty weird use of “ginger”, I grant.

  2. Hm. I would see “gingerlyly” as a dittography (or “dittottography”, as some linguists ought not to be able to resist calling it, if they are to be consistent). In any case, it ought to be spelt “gingerlily”, on the model of SOED-attested “kindlily”. But then, of course, it would be confused with “ginger lily”, for which SOED has: “any of various chiefly Indo-Malayan plants of the genus Hedychium, of the ginger family, grown for their spikes of showy fragrant flowers”.
    There are several English adjectives formed from other adjectives by the addition of “-ly”. The following are given as adjectives in SOED:
    cleanly (with “cleaniness” as a derivative)
    evenly (obs.)
    badly
    goodly
    deadly
    easterly (etc.)
    elderly
    fitly (rare)
    googly (!)
    lightly
    lowly
    nicely
    poorly
    sadly
    soothly
    sprightly (from adj. “spright”; “spritely” is from the noun “sprite”)
    tiddly (as one of the three headwords)
    towardly
    weakly
    whitely
    That should to be enough.

  3. Oops! I meant “That should be enough”.

  4. Geoff Nunberg has a post at Language Log on the word gingerly: a NY Times story on Falluja included the statement “it was a gingerly first step,” which provoked his automatic resistance.

    Mmm, no, it didn’t. You’ve got Nunberg’s argument backward (or I have, but I’ve been over it several times, because it seems so strange to me). What he says is

    The sentence caught my attention merely because it used gingerly in what I always assumed to be the correct way, as an adjective.

    He’s saying that gingerly is, basically and traditionally, an adjective, and the adverbial use results as a haplology of the derived form gingerlyly.

  5. I read Nunberg’s article the same was Tim does. Racking my brain for some way to throw in a pun about “gingerly snaps” or “beer” but nothing seems to be forthcoming. “He gingerly snapped to attention”? Weak, very weak.

  6. Quite right — I was trying to rewrite quickly, and that rarely goes well. I’ll fix it. Thanks!

  7. Another common adjective in -ly is friendly; every few months I find myself stammering through some circumlocution in order to avoid the adverb friendlily. Friendly used to be an adverb, as can be seen from the ME letter of Henry (IV?): Henri … cyng on Engleneloand … send igretinge to alle his hold … on Huntendonscire freondlice. (I quoted that from memory and could easily have blown it, but the point is that friendly is here an adjective modifying send.

  8. Pace the late Nunberg, I don’t think the pronunciation indicated by the spelling Missippi comes from haplology of Mississippi. The -ss- is a geminate consonant, resulting from the complete reduction of the second vowel, and the original stress pattern is retained: strong but secondary stress on the mi, primary stress on the si. And compare coke-cola: I think it’s a pattern in Southern American English for words with two trochaic feet. Someone with a better knowledge of these dialects probably could generalize it better (and someone probably already did).

  9. That makes perfect sense to me.

  10. Nunberg’s original claim that adverbial gingerly arises from haplology sounds extremely unlikely to me. Adverbial gingerly was the original sense, and it is the predominant sense today; in situations like that, a survival seems more likely than any kind of innovation. Indeed the older sense of gingerly as an adverb never went out of use; the OED has a continuous record of usage from the sixteenth century onward.

    The disappearance of ginger as an adjective is interesting but hardly dispositive. Nunberg’s argument seems to be that any adverb ending in –ly must inevitably be semantically associated with an adjective that lacks the suffix; thus, since that adjective sense of ginger has disappeared, the corresponding adverb gingerly should have disappeared also, unless some other process has intervened to recreate it. But that argument is pretty unconvincing; it assumes a regularity to linguistic development that is simply not factual. Sure, the most likely evolution might be that adjective ginger and adverb gingerly would do extinct together, but nothing says that they have to.

  11. John Cowan says

    Far off shore, the sweet low calling
    Of the bell-buoy on the bar,
    Warning night of dawn and ruin
    Lonelily on Arrochar.

    “Pulvis et Umbra”, by Bliss Carman (last stanza)

  12. David Marjanović says

    From 2005:

    Another common adjective in -ly is friendly; every few months I find myself stammering through some circumlocution in order to avoid the adverb friendlily.

    Oh, so that’s another place where foreign-language teaching oversimplifies things! We were taught, at the very first opportunity, that -ly adjectives like friendly get turned into in a friendly way.

    Friendly used to be an adverb, as can be seen from the ME letter of Henry (IV?): Henri … cyng on Engleneloand … send igretinge to alle his hold … on Huntendonscire freondlice.

    We could be looking at the adverb ending -e here. Its phonetic disappearance is what triggered the whole confusion.

    (Independently in German, too. From OHG -o to complete reorganization of the whole concept in about 500 years.)

  13. We were taught, at the very first opportunity, that -ly adjectives like friendly get turned into in a friendly way.

    That’s what editors do with written text. People do not normally talk that way.

  14. @David Marjanović: By the time of Henry IV, the old adverbial suffix –e was long gone. In that quote, “freondlice” is simply friend-like (just as in German freundlich, although modern German obviously gave up morphological distinction between adjectives and adverbs). The –like suffix was later eroded to become –ly.

    When I was young, my father and I got into a discussion that led to our wondering what the prescribed adverb form corresponding to the adjective friendly was. We looked in a dictionary and found friendlily, which seemed hopelessly affected. However, two days later, we came across that very word while reading a Cordwainer Smith story. I thought it might have been “Scanners Live in Vain,” but I just looked and didn’t find it. It was actually “A Planet Named Shayol”:

    Mercer wondered how long the super-condamine had lasted him. He endured the ministrations of the dromozoa without screams or movement. The agonies of nerves and itching of skin were phenomena which happened somewhere near him, but meant nothing. He watched his own body with remote, casual interest. The Lady Da and the hand-covered woman stayed near him. After a long time the half-man dragged himself over to the group with his powerful arms. Having arrived he blinked sleepily and friendlily at them, and lapsed back into the restful stupor from which he had emerged. Mercer saw the sun rise on occasion, closed his eyes briefly, and opened them to see stars shining. Time had no meaning. The dromozoa fed him in their mysterious way; the drug canceled out his needs for cycles of the body.

    At last he noticed a return of the inwardness of pain.

    The pains themselves had not changed; he had.

  15. Lars Mathiesen says

    FWIW. Danish (and the rest of Scandinavian, I’m pretty sure) has a robust adverbial -t; hun er venlig and hun taler venligt, and putting one in the other’s place is just and simply wrong. (Of course there is no difference when the adjective agrees with a neuter noun, and diachronically the adverb may simp(li)ly be a neuter; I can’t come up with a synchronic difference off hand, but that’s not a proof of anything).

  16. David Marjanović says

    Interestingly, Slavic adverbs are also generally identical to “short-form” (*indefinite) neuters.

  17. January First-of-May says

    Interestingly, Slavic adverbs are also generally identical to “short-form” (*indefinite) neuters.

    This actually came up just yesterday in a Discord discussion I had – someone asked me if the space version of воздушно-десантные войска (“airborne forces”, sez Wikipedia) would be космос-десантные войска?

    I said it would probably be космические десантные войска, and that космос is a noun, which doesn’t make sense in this context. At which point we ended up in a discussion of which part of speech воздушно is (in this context, an adverb, but Wiktionary apparently said it was a short-form adjective, which I said it is, but only in the neuter singular).

    …of course if we substitute the adverb form we get космически-десантные войска, which sounds ridiculous. I ended up compromising on космодесантные войска, and I think the text as written ended up just calling them KDV without expanding the abbreviation.

    (I asked my brother just now, and he said космическо-десантные войска, apparently analogizing from the neuter adjective; somehow this does sound better. The form космодесантные is apparently attested in WH40k contexts; Google finds several examples of all the variants given above except the silly космос-десантные.)

  18. David Eddyshaw says

    short-form” (*indefinite) neuters

    The semantics are maybe analogous in Kusaal. There is no fully productive way of forming manner adverbs from adjectives in Kusaal, but the commonest way is to use the adjective stem with the noun-class suffix -m; actual nouns in that class refer overwhelmingly either to substances (“water”, “blood”, “beer”, “medicine”, “fire”) or to non-count abstractions (“hunger”, “life”, “death”‘, “emptiness”, “childhood”, “goodness.”)

    Swahili does something a bit similar: it uses the noun-class prefix ki to make manner adverbs: mtoto “child”, kitoto “childishly”; this is (kinda) the “thing” class (compare mtu “person”, kitu “thing”), though the association of meaning with noun class in Bantu is generally fairly vague, apart from the “human” class 1/2 and some specifically locative-adverbial classes. (Oti-Volta tends to show more in the way of class/meaning correlation, though it’s still very imperfect.)

  19. David Marjanović says

    At which point we ended up in a discussion of which part of speech воздушно is

    I’d call воздушно-десантные a compound adjective, making воздушно- a prefix. That would be analogous to how Russian handles compound nouns: they tend to get -о- in the middle, too.

  20. Surprised that nobody has mentioned Modern Greek so far.
    Adjectives in the plural neuter are used as adverbs, eg:
    Τον ξέρω καλά – I know him well.

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    The boundary between nouns and manner adverbs is very unclear in Kusaal, and you can (for example) even say

    O keŋ nɔba.
    He go legs
    “He’s gone on foot.” (“pedally”)

    (though one of my informants didn’t like this, and insisted on putting “with” before “legs.”)

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