I’ll admit that I’m rather finicky in my choice of words for my English-usage columns, rarely giving in to the temptation of using nice-sounding words of doubtful meaning or origin. Indeed, when the time came for me to put together my early columns into a book, I became literally obsessive with my vocabulary. I was therefore supremely confident—“smug” is perhaps the better word—that when my first book,
English Plain and Simple, finally went to press, I had tied up whatever vocabulary loose ends I might have overlooked in my original column pieces owing to the pressures of newspaper deadlines.
IMAGE CREDIT: THEQUIRKSOFENGLISH.BLOGSPOT.COMA few weeks after the book came out in December of 2004, however, I got very upset when someone took issue with my use of the word “enthused” in this sentence: “In time, distracted and enthused by English-language stylists with comparable if not greater facility with prose, I gave up my search for both the writer and the book.” (“Rediscovering John Galsworthy,” Chapter 39, page 116 of the first edition). The comment, part of an incisive post-publication critique by Niels Hovmöller, a cyberfriend of mine in Sweden who was an English teacher and educational software developer, was this: “Enthused is a back-formation, one disapproved of by some careful writers/smug pedants.”
True enough, I discovered to my consternation that “enthuse,” which means “to show or express enthusiasm,” isn’t a well-accepted word. According to
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, this back-formation from “enthusiasm” had continued to be looked upon with distaste despite its having entered the English lexicon as far back as 1827. Apparently, the guidebook observed, this distaste for “enthuse” stems from people’s “dislike for the external emotional display and manipulation” conveyed by the word itself.
The
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, on the other hand, while similarly noting disapproval for “enthuse,” qualifies that “current evidence shows it to be flourishing nonetheless on both sides of the Atlantic especially in journalistic prose.” Even so, had I known that “enthuse” was still far from respectable, I would have avoided using it rather than risk being labeled as a less-than-careful writer.
Indeed, using back-formations can be perilous because as words coined from previously existing words, many of them have yet to prove themselves to be valid and genuinely useful additions to the language. After all, a back-formation typically results from extracting what is wrongly supposed to be the root word from an existing longer word, when in fact that longer word is the root word itself. This often happens in the case of words ending in “-er,” “-ar,” “-or,” or “-ion,” not a few of which are thought to be verbs-turned-“doer”-nouns because their endings look like suffixes.
For instance, the verb “peddler” is most often presumed to be the root word “peddle” with “r” added to it, but “peddler” is, in fact, the root word itself; “peddle” is a back-formation created by dropping “r” from “peddler.” The verb “donate,” on the other hand, results when “-ion” from “donation” is replaced with the ending “e” to form the back-formation “donate.” The noun “donation,” however, is actually the root word here, even if “donate” sounds and structurally looks more like the root word itself.
The same back-formation process has produced such words as “edit” (from the root word “editor”), “emote” (from “emotion”), “accrete” (from “accretion”), “aesthete” (from “aesthetics”), “burgle” (from “burglar”), and “televise” (from “television”). The difference is that through continuing usage that had whittled down opposition by vocabulary gatekeepers, these back-formations have become generally accepted English words. Of course, it’s probably only a matter of time before “enthuse”—along with such dreadful back-formations as “liaise” (from “liaison”), “surveil” (from “surveillance”), “elocute” (from “elocution”), “incent” (from “incentive”), and “aggress” (from “aggression”)—similarly gains respectability. Until then, however, I think it would be prudent to put the usage of “enthuse” on hold, as I did by discarding it in my revision for the forthcoming second printing of my book.
IMAGE CREDIT: MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COMIS “GRUNTLE” AN ACCEPTABLE ENGLISH WORD?
This is not to say, however, that we should eliminate back-formations altogether from our vocabulary. What would happen to English if people simply wouldn’t use such catchy words as “scavenge” (from the root word “scavenger”), “diagnose” (from “diagnosis”), “escalate” (from “escalator”), “tweeze” (from “tweezers”), “jell” (from “jelly”), and “sleaze” (from “sleazy”)? Even the most exacting pedants have already given up their resistance to these words, for along with scores of other back-formations, they have already proven their semantic mettle as concise and forceful expressions of new ideas for which no single words existed before.
The perils of using still unacceptable back-formations will always be there, of course, but no matter. We can easily deal with them by simply checking with a good dictionary every time we encounter words that just don’t seem to look or sound right.
This essay, 453rd in the series, first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the October 10, 2005 issue of The Manila Times
, ©2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.INTERESTING RELATED READINGS:“Is ‘couth’ a word?”“Shall we ‘conversate’?”
