I’ll admit that I am rather finicky in my choice of words, rarely giving in to the temptation of using nice-sounding words of doubtful meaning or origin. When the time came for me to put together my early English-usage newspaper columns into my first book, in fact, 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: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, finally went to press, I had tied up whatever vocabulary loose ends I might have overlooked in my original column pieces due to the pressures of newspaper deadlines.
A few weeks after the book came out, 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). The comment, which was part of an incisive post-publication critique by an extremely discerning reader, was this: “Enthused is a back-formation, one disapproved of by some careful writers/smug pedants.”
IMAGE CREDIT: THEQUIRKSOFENGLISH.BLOGSPOT.COMUsing back-formations can be perilous because as words coined from previously existing words, many
of them have yet to prove themselves as valid and genuinely useful additions to the language.
True enough, I discovered to my consternation that “enthuse,” which means “to show or express enthusiasm,” is not a well-accepted word. According to
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, this back-formation from the word “enthusiasm” has 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 widely 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 as 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 presumed to be the root word “peddle” with “r” added to it, but “peddler” is, in fact, the root word itself and “peddle” is simply 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 has 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 have done by discarding it in my revision for the succeeding printings of my book.
This is not to say, however, that we should eliminate back-formations altogether from our vocabulary. What would have happened to English if people simply hadn’t come up with such catchy words as
“scavenge” (from “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 had 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 each time we encounter words that just don’t seem to look or sound right.
This essay, which forms Chapter 103 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge
, first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times
,©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times
:The perils of using back-formationsNext week:
The noun-to-verb conversion syndrome (August 29, 2024)
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
