So far in this book we have looked at misinterpreting, reimagining, mashing together, mangling, multiplying and generally messing about with various words. In the process, we have rather skipped over those conventional elements, unable to stand as words in their own right, that get added on to words at their beginnings or ends.** These elements are referred to as ‘prefixes’ when they go at the front and ‘suffixes’ when they go at the back, and are jointly known as ‘affixes’.** In Chapter 4, we saw how -ize and -ise could turn existing words of several kinds into verbs: incentivise, smallise, otherise; and we have just seen how the diminutive suffixes -y and -ikin can be used to create endearments such as ducky and sweetikin. Now that we are coming to look at this topic more closely, it is necessary to mention that prefixes and suffixes are divided by linguists into several disputed subcategories. But here we have no need to worry about that.
English would be hamstrung without the word-altering possibilities of affixes. Their use goes all the way back to the known origins of the language. Consider the effects of a few of them on diore, our word dear, an adjective in English from the ninth century on. Originally diore meant glorious, noble, what is viewed with tenderness or love, and that which is valuable—either expensive to buy, or ‘dear to the heart’. In Old English it had its own opposite by way of the negative prefix un-: undeor was used to mean commonplace, cheap or unvalued—before in the fourteenth century this word slipped out of the language. The loss of undeor contrasts with the fate of diorling, meaning ‘dearling’ or darling. The suffix -ling, joined to an adjective, indicates that somebody or something possesses the quality of that adjective. A iungling or ‘youngling’ used to mean a young person; an efenling or ‘evenling’, an equal or a neighbour; an irþling or ‘earthling’, a ploughman; and so on. The word darling, as it now is, has been a treasured resource for speakers of English from the ninth century on. But dear took a very different path when, in the thirteenth century, it was given the suffix -th. Added to an adjective, -th yields a noun: by this means the Old English words mirige (merry), ful (foul), lang (long) and treowe (true), gave mirigþ (mirth), fylþ (filth), lengþ (length) and triewþ (truth).** There was at first pressure to make dearth, ‘dearness’, mean glory or splendour. But the association of dear with high values, and by extension with scarcity, meant that dearth took hold to much greater effect, then and thereafter, as a word for deprivation and lack.
Many Old English words take several affixes at once. For example, from eaþe, meaning ‘ease’ (though ease and eaþe are unrelated), came the noun uneaðelicness, an ‘un-eaþe-like-ness’, or, roughly, a ‘difficulty’; and foreþancfull combined the idea of foreþanc or ‘forethought’ and þancfull or ‘thoughtful’ to produce the beguiling adjective ‘forethoughtful’. Anyone can try sticking an affix on to a word to alter its meaning and purpose. The compound adjective brainsick had been in the English language for several centuries when Shakespeare, wanting it for an adverb in Macbeth, stuck -ly to the end: ‘To think / So brainsickly of things’. He did the same with the noun cannibal in Coriolanus: ‘And he had been cannibally given, he might have broiled and eaten him too’. These two adverbs have been little fancied by the masses since, but their construction is impeccable.
Even when impeccable construction is wedded to a needed and welcome sense, this is not necessarily enough to secure a word in the language, as there is also fashion to worry about. We no longer say ill-willy to mean ill-willed, or careful to mean ‘grief-stricken’. A high Victorian work such as George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, will provide numerous instances of affixes used to generate words that are now outmoded. Flicking through just a few of its pages, we find that she writes greenth rather than greenery, suspensive rather than suspenseful, duteous rather than dutiful, troublous rather than troublesome, tumultuary rather than tumultuous, and scathless rather than unscathed. She uses anecdotic to mean ‘full of anecdote’, dubitatively to mean ‘doubtfully’, and relishing to mean ‘pleasurable’: ‘if his puddings were rolling towards him in the dust, he took the inside bits and found them relishing’. We may judge these words to be ‘relishing’ too, but they would not go down smoothly in modern English prose.
Seeming passé is not the only reason the use of a given affix might come over as incongruous. Our beliefs, almost certainly unexamined, about the fittingness of each for different purposes allow for humour when a writer deliberately strays from convention. The nineteenth-century label an indifferentist sounds fairly frigid. An earlier term for the same character-type, used by Swift but not invented by him, is an anythingarian, which sounds far sillier, perhaps because it mixes the Latin -arian with the humdrum, Old English anything—a word that dates back to around 700. The great eighteenth-century figure Horace Walpole (whose cat died in Chapter 1) was also fond of this sort of fun. In a letter of 1752 that goes on to make an accusation of incest, he writes humorously to a friend, ‘I am glad you are aware of Miss Pitt; pray continue your awaredom’. He also coined the words gloomth, snubee, nabobical, incumbentess and robberaciously (which piles suffix upon suffix). In all cases, Walpole slyly mocked whatever he was writing about by devising a word for it that seemed faintly ridiculous.
The considerable choice we have in how to achieve a particular meaning with one or another affix, the potential nevertheless for the meaning of the resulting word to become a matter of dispute, and the fact that the choice of added element is in part a matter of fashion—all of this means that there is an enormous amount of room for perceived misuse of affixes. There was, for example, a long-fought battle over the word restive by those who wanted it to suggest something like ‘at rest’. Ambrose Bierce, in 1909, wrote the following bitter remark about the mixing-up of restive and restless: ‘These words have directly contrary meanings; the dictionaries’ disallowance of their identity would be something to be thankful for, but that is a dream’. Poor old Whitten and Whitaker, in Good and Bad English, were still troubled by this in 1946. It happens, however, that restive has meant both ‘inactive’ and ‘restless’ from the start (i.e. from around 1550), for the strikingly specific reason that a ‘restive’ or supposedly stationary quadruped, in particular a horse, especially when positively refusing to be driven forwards, is liable to dance about sideways and even backwards rather than simply standing still.
In 1877, Fitzedward Hall, a scholar interested in ‘lingual detrition at its extreme limit’, and a great contributor to the OED, wrote an entire book on ‘Reliable and words similar’.** Richard Grant White, a few years earlier, had described reliable as ‘ignorantly formed by the union of incongruous elements’. Many of his English counterparts wrongly assumed that it was a recent Americanism (the OED dates it back to a Scottish text of 1569), and some blamed its growing popularity in Victorian England on ‘our dreadful cockneys’. A critic for The Saturday Review in 1875 wrote that an Englishman ‘supposed to have been educated’ who ‘can bring himself to use, we cannot say the word, for it is not a word, but that absurd and stupid vulgarism, reliable, must have a screw loose somewhere’.** The argument about reliable as expressed by this critic went beyond describing it as awkwardly put together, to the assertion that a ‘reliable person’ should mean ‘a person who is able to rely’ and not ‘a person who is capable of being relied upon’. To cap it all, there was the fear that it would displace trustworthy, not merely a splendid word, the naysayers felt, but one that meant just what it looked as though it ought to mean.
Yet -able had been used in the disputed fashion in English so widely and for so long that the tide of criticism against reliable seems perverse. What of dependable (depend-on-able), laughable (laugh-at-able), unthinkable (unthink-about-able)? These no more posed a problem then than they do now. And A. P. Herbert must have come across as positively recherché when he wrote in 1935 that he detested the use of knowledgeable to describe one who has knowledge, rather than one able to acquire it. (The first meaning given to the word knowledgeable was actually ‘recognisable’ or ‘knowable’, but on this he had nothing to say.)
Granted, there are examples of adjectives formed with -able that have changed meaning over time, acquiring an implicit preposition along the way. If we say that a house is barely liveable, we mean it is barely ‘live-in-able’—a sense of the word first given to the language by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park. Before this, liveable meant ‘capable of life’, or, as an infant at birth is sometimes said to be, ‘viable’. (NB Bill Bryson declares that viable ‘does not mean feasible or workable or promising’. True, one wants to reply—except on the countless occasions when it does.) Liveable as ‘live-in-able’ is now fully accommodated in English, but what of relatable? Before 1950, relatable on its own meant ‘able to be related’, as a pious but not a bawdy story might be relatable before the Queen. However, since the 1960s, and with gathering momentum, its sense has been changing, so that free advice given to the monarchy recently via CNN—that it needs to be ‘distant but relatable’—is intended to suggest, not prim mythologising from afar, but the idea that the monarchy should be, while dignified, ‘relate-to-able’—a meaning of the word that makes today’s gripers wince.
English is still throwing up -able words on the griper-approved pattern, such as biodegradable, meaning, crudely, ‘able to be decomposed by living organisms’. But -able is a suffix so beguiling that it will never be limited to this one use, as witness the new and exciting non-word bigable, used in a copy-shop slogan: ‘Photos are bigable with a click’.
With reliable and restive, as we now know them, having won their place in Good English at last, American gripers have been left to worry instead about the interpretation of nauseous, a pointless difficulty that Mr Bryson wishes to import into British English. When someone says ‘Harold is nauseous’, should this be taken to mean that Harold causes nausea in others or is suffering from it himself? As the suffix -ous generally means ‘full of’ or ‘abounding in’, there are some words, such as noxious, that might be taken to support the first interpretation, and others, such as obsequious, the second. Yet a word like suspicious can go both ways without this seeming to matter to anyone (‘he appeared suspicious’: either ‘he appeared to be suspicious about X’ or ‘he was viewed by Y with suspicion’). In short, there is no right answer, and it is all a matter of context. Mr Bryson rules loftily that in Harold’s case, if he feels sick, ‘Make it nauseated ’; but popular usage in England does nothing to clinch his little nicety. The Economist Style Guide, meanwhile, with overweening scrupulosity, declares that finally should not be used to mean ‘at last’, but ‘for the last time’—as though the sentence ‘The shift workers finally ate’ ought to be taken to imply that, after the meal in question, the wretched shift workers never ate again.
We have seen that our gripers can be narrow in how they pick their hate-words, directing their animus at a limited hit parade of examples. When it comes to the misuse of suffixes, what they seem to agree on hating most of all is the use of hopefully to mean, roughly, ‘it is to be hoped that’, or—as none of them would say—fingers crossed. In grammatical terms, they object to the use of hopefully as a ‘sentence adverb’, modifying a whole clause, rather than as an ‘adverb of manner’, modifying just a verb: they want ‘Hopefully Bob checked the oven’ to mean that Bob, in a state of hope, looked to see what was in the oven—not to express the speaker’s hope that Bob ensured the meal would not burn. It might seem daft the extent to which use of hopefully in the latter sense bothers the gripers, given the abundance of parallel uses they merrily ignore (clearly, obviously, surely). Yet even the one they single out for special loathing can defeat them. Simon Heffer condemns the ‘it-is-to-be-hoped’ sense of hopefully as a ‘peculiarly horrific popular use’. In his Telegraph Style Guide, 2010, however, he has failed to bother to edit the following introductory sentence: ‘A newspaper develops a “house style” that is recognisable and, hopefully, in tune with its readership’. Kingsley Amis declares that those who use hopefully in this vague but coercive manner reveal themselves to be ‘dimwits’, and goes out on a limb in also disparaging the use of thankfully to mean, essentially, ‘thank goodness’. But these objections already sound like a last hurrah, with the ‘dimwits’ interpreting the suffix -fully as they please.
And anyway, hopefully is the least of it. One wonders how the gripers shield themselves from the numerous other uses of affixes that ought also—surely—to distress them. Mercifully (some of them might say), the OED does not yet recognise impactful, improvemental or cruxive. But real life, in its mailshots and advertising copy, among its option traders and talking heads, does: ‘Download the Impactful Marketing Manifesto’; ‘Self improvemental posters for sale’; ‘that’s another cruxive circumstance’. And the Guardian is happy to give its readers this offering too: ‘sullied by some innuendous stuff’. Whenever you spot such words shivering outside the dictionary—brainsickly dreamt up and cannibally put together—you could do worse, in your assault on Good English, than to try to help them find a way in.