Washington

In his youth, your leering great-grandfather dated a chorus girl. Your grand­father, his leer slightly modi­fied in the 1930s, dated a chor­ine. And what did your father call the dancer he dated, after both chorus girl and chorine gained a ditzy or lascivious connotation? If he was in show biz, he called her a terp (from Terpsichore, the muse of dance) or a gypsy, and was in­vited, along with the cast's families, to the rehearsal called “ the gypsy run-through.” If he was a stage-door Johnny, Pops called the object of his affection what we call her today: a dancer.

That because the choreo­grapher Agnes de Mille changed the nature of the chorus in the 1943 musical play “Oklahoma!” The ste­reotype of the bored, gum-chewing, leg-pumping chor­ine was transformed into the reality of dancing actors and singers. Even the performers in “A Chorus Line” in 1975 were not labeled chorines or chorus boys; they were identi­fied as members of the troupe or ensemble or just dancers and principal dancers. This raises the question (no, not begs the question, which has to do with circular obfuscation): Where do words like chorine go when they fall into what Grover Cleveland called “innocuous desuet­ude”?

“Whenever we edit a new edition of one of our diction­aries,” says Joe Pickett, execu­tive editor of American Herit­age, “we consider which words we should delete.” He’s like a cowboy forced to shoot a favorite old horse. “We have to be careful about what we consider to be a ‘dead word’.” People still find obsolete terms in old books and turn to the dictionary expecting to find their meanings.

In 1998, Pickett was on the verge of eliminating chad to make room for one of the many new words rushing in­to the language: “What could be more insignificant than those little bits of paper punched out from cards used in an obsolete computing technology?” But because there was still occasional use involving elections, his lex­icographers left it in — “and are we glad we did.” It be­came the hottest word of the year 2000.

What became of the noun motorcar, or the Verb motor­ing? Road kill; both of them, along with dreams of leggy chorines who were the bee’s knees in the rumble seat. And where, is centigrade today, now that Anders Celsi­us’s last name has replaced it? Centi- became ambiguous when the metric system came along: Did it mean 100 or one-hundredth? And the last syllable — grade — could mean step or degree.

Language mavens no longer use, tautology; it has been thrust aside by redund­ancy (and when I am caught out erring along those lines, the Squad Squad has a ple­onasm).

Dictionaries have no labels for words that are still in use but seem to be breathing their last. When no use is re­corded after 1755 (when Samuel Johnson published his dictionary), most lexico­graphers mark it “obsolete”; if the word is only occasion­ally used after that glorious watershed date, it’s marked “archaic”. But how are we to warn those who turn to dic­tionaries for guidance that industrialist is passė and financier hopelessly out of it?

Whole phrases die, too. When I chastised the FBI re­cently for denying the exist­ence of what every crime re­porter knows is called the Cold Case Squard, an e-mail message came in asking about another cold case: the Dead letter Office. I called the Postal Service and was told by its forthright spokes­man, Gerry Kreienkamp, that “we no longer have a ‘Dead Letter Office.’ We stopped using those words in 1994. There are three Mail Recovery Centers, in Atlanta, St Paul and San Francisco, where letters with no dis­cernible address for either the recipient or the sender are sent.”

What if I mailed a letter addressed to the Dead Letter Office with no return ad­dress? Where would it be de­livered? Long pause. “To one of our three Mail Recovery Centers, I suppose.”

I like to think of these words and phrases as unforgotten angels in a Word Heaven, ready to revisit the language when the need for them arises. Hussy, for ex­ample, was originally a phon­etic reduction of “housewife” that came to mean “a mis­chievous, ill-behaved wom­an.” As it faded from memo­ry, Alan Herbert rose in Parliament to deliver his first, or “maiden,” speech to the House of Commons, by tradition a mild and deferen­tial effort. When it came across as fiery and substan­tive, Winston Churchill promptly denounced this “maiden” as “a brazen hussy of a speech.” And so a deli­cious old word was saved; no such luck for chorine.

Alistair Cooke rang me up to say, “Do something about seasonable when you mean seasonal. ” (I use the British­ism rang me up instead of phoned because my nonagen­arian friend is a BBC stalwart.) When I wrote recently that a week in January had been “ unseasonably warm,” another reader, John Connor, e-mailed: “Shouldn’t the word be unseasonable? To me, unseasonable implies that you can’t add salt or pep­per.”

No; as even the most roundheeled permissivists admit, “There ain’t no unseasonal.” Seasonable means“normal for that time of the year” — icy in February and muggy in August I am now shopping for cruise clothes because that is what will soon be seasonable, although cruises make me seasick. By extension, it has come to mean “apt, timely, oppor­tune.”

Contrariwise, seasonal has nothing to do with such suit­ability, its meaning is “occur­ring in a particular season of the year,” like “seasonal un­employment”. That honking you hear is the “ seasonal mi­gration of geese.” If you’re talkin’ winter, spring, sum­mer or fall, you’re talkin’ sea­sonal; only if you’re talkin’ about what’s right and proper for those times are you cor­rect to use seasonable.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-20