Now that we have had a look at affixes in general, let us consider a use of suffixes that yields example after example of a type of noun that the regulation griper abhors. Some of the horrible words we have so far encountered in this book could be characterised as good words out of place, just as a wildflower from the hedgerows found growing on a roundabout may be taken by council workers for a weed. But other sorts of horrible word are deemed by the gripers to be bad in and of themselves—irredeemably bad. And it is words of this second kind that will concern us here.
Percival Leigh, in his Comic English Grammar of 1840, mocks the idea—which he credits to Lindley Murray**—that a noun or ‘substantive’ should be defined metaphysically, for instance as ‘the name of anything that exists, or of which we have any notion’. Leigh quotes a jokey piece of logic to show why this is a problem: ‘A substantive is something, / But nothing is a substantive; / Therefore, nothing is something’. More seriously, he adds that ‘A substantive may generally be known by its taking an article before it, and by its making sense of itself: as, a treat, the mulligrubs, an ache’. Today’s foremost linguists can also be found arguing that we go about matters backwards when we try to define a noun as a sort of ‘thing’: instead, they say, a noun is best understood as being any word that has the grammatical properties of a noun, and let ‘thingness’ take care of itself.** Yet this admirably graspable approach is not so helpful when what interests you is the concept of an ‘abstract’ noun, of which the word thingness would itself qualify as an example. And English speakers have somehow been managing to write about ‘abstract nouns’ for over six hundred years. There is, it is true, a grey area around this category. When Thomas Hardy’s character Jude looks at Sue and sees the ‘applelike convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella’s amplitudes’, just how abstract are those convexities and amplitudes? One might conclude: not altogether. But even if the ‘abstract noun’ is a mere ‘notion’ whose margins are open to being queried, that does not stop the griper furiously resisting many new—or seemingly new—examples of this class of word. We too, therefore, shall cling to this label as having its uses.
Flick through any edition of the eighteenth-century dictionary of Nathan Bailey,** and you will find, before you even get past ‘A’, numerous forgotten abstract nouns. Some of them will be lost names for surviving entities: abaction, defined as the stealing of cattle, what we now call ‘rustling’; abligurition, ‘a prodigal spending in Belly-Cheer’: you know it when you see it. Others will be outré by comparison, ‘things’ defined by Bailey that no longer obviously need a name, e.g. aestuary, ‘estuary’, which he explains as meaning the ‘receiving of Vapours or Steams of boiled Drugs in the Body, through a Hole made in a Seat or Chair’. As well as these, there will also be in a historical work such as Bailey’s numerous variant forms of words that we continue to use, naming what we still know as standard ‘things’. Take the currently useful word a concern: Bailey also supplies a ‘concernment’. The OED dates a concern back to 1589, then mentions that a concerning, dating to 1594, and sometimes used by Shakespeare, also meant a ‘concern’. It believes a concernancy, of 1604, a word apparently actually invented by Shakespeare, possibly meant a ‘concernment’, but is certain that a concernance, of 1645, meant a ‘concernment’. So what does the OED understand by a ‘concernment’? This word, dating from 1621, is defined by the OED as a ‘concern’. Mildly foxing this may be; however, the point of interest to us here is that for a person wishing to conjure up new abstract nouns, there is an oversupply of suffixes that will do the job.
Of course, an abstract noun does not always require a suffix, as witness an idea, a loss, the mulligrubs. But plenty of the suffixes that generate abstract nouns allow for the super-easy coining of new examples.** The suffix -ness is incredibly handy. Add it to red and you get redness, to thing, and you get thingness. Back around 1200, the word skillwiseness meant intelligence or reason; and centuries later, -ness is still being pressed into widespread service, as here: ‘Speaking my mother tongue with my parents on an everyday basis only cemented its kitchenness’; ‘… testament to his wife’s saintliness and his own pussy-whippedness’.** The same sort of job is done by -ity: ‘anyone who hopes to achieve virality of any kind needs to think about how their message will work on mobile’ (Guardian); ‘bejewelled with streams of ornament, and shot through with a keening expressivity’ (Telegraph); ‘a Birtwistlean thrill ride of explosivity and stasis’ (Guardian).
The construction pussy-whippedness may seem comical, from some points of view. And indeed, the ability to create novel, abstract ‘thingnesses’ has attracted many word-spinners of a humorous bent. Trawling the OED, we find some writers taking this to an extreme. George Sala, friend of Dickens, wrote in 1859 of an ‘irreproachable state of clean-shirtedness, navy blue-broadclothedness and chimney-pot-hattedness’. Using an equally popular suffix, Horace Walpole, in 1784, playing on the idea of an ‘airgonaut’, coined airgonation to mean ‘travelling by hot-air balloon’. Fanny Burney once described herself as suffering ‘infinite frettation’, while George Eliot, using yet another suffix, and in a more acerbic frame of mind, had Lydgate in Middlemarch decry London medical expertise as ‘empty bigwiggism’. So useful is -ism in the language that it has long been discussed as a thing in itself. In 1809, the poet Robert Southey could write the impatient sentence, ‘It has nothing to do with Calvinism nor Arminianism, nor any of the other isms’. Two years later, Shelley wrote similarly of someone who professed ‘no “-ism” but superbism and irrationalism’. And in a modern echo, the dilatory Ferris Bueller, in 1986, would declare, ‘Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism’. If -isms are not good, however, Walpole and Burney’s choice, an -ation, is, to a griper, even worse.
In one of his early plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare created a pedant whom he mocked for being ludicrously fond of abstractions. Holofernes believes himself to have the gift of a spirit full of ‘apprehensions, motions, revolutions’. In full flow, he manages to say, ‘Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, of explication; facere, as it were, replication …’. Barbarous this may itself have been—but at least here Holofernes was sprinkling the suffix about. How much worse might it be to take two such words and use one to modify the other? No griper could applaud the phrase devolution revolution, applied repeatedly by our current governing classes not only to Scottish independence, but also to local council funding; could read cheerfully about ‘consultation responses’ to a proposed information revolution in the NHS; could sit still during a sermon on right speech given in Connecticut in 2012 under the title ‘Disambiguation of Cogitation Situation’.**
But that is only the start. It is also a popular trick to slap -ation on the back end of a second suffix, say -ize. We have seen already that Ben Jonson raised an eyebrow back in 1631 when he introduced problematise into the English language. This word did not immediately flourish, and in John Craig’s New Universal Etymological, Technological, and Pronouncing Dictionary of 1849, it is followed by the blunt note ‘Not used’. There must be those who are sorry that John Craig was wrong about this. They will be even sorrier that problematise has since yielded problematisation.
Dickens takes a cool look at ‘ization’ in his novel of 1865, Our Mutual Friend. In it, Mr Podsnap, a smug, insular bully, is provoked by the poor taste of a ‘meek man’ who dares to mention in polite company that six or so people have recently starved to death on the streets of London. Podsnap declines to believe it. The meek man mentions the existence of inquest reports. Podsnap blames the victims. The meek man doubts that the victims wished to starve to death. Podsnap declares that no other country looks after its poor so well. The meek man suggests that that is all the more reason to find out what went wrong. Podsnap triumphantly remarks, ‘I see what you are driving at. I knew it from the first. Centralization. No. Never with my consent. Not English’. The meek man here submits that he was not aware of ‘driving at any ization’, and says that he is more staggered by the terrible deaths than by names ‘of howsoever so many syllables’.
Podsnap’s contempt for ‘Centralization’ is a blatant dodge: he floats the term in order to deride it. But the meek man—so rudely fobbed off—is himself no more enamoured of the banked-up suffixes. The two might even agree that a hint of fakery often clings to a word formed this way. The Bishop of Llandaff had written in 1836, ‘all is “centralization,” as it is called; a word not more strange to our language, than the practice, which it indicates, is foreign to our ancient habits and feelings’.** And a modern griper must also wonder drearily why a word like premiumisation ever had to be invented (so that readers of the Telegraph can learn about ‘the continued premiumisation of sportswear’), let alone otherisation—to which comes the ready answer that ‘it is often only by seeing things strangely that ideology and otherisation can be detected’.**
Perhaps even now you are noting to yourself that centralisation actually has three suffixes, the -al in the middle having been used to turn the noun centre into an adjective. Absolutely; and we now have regionalisation as well. But what do you get if you take that -al and stick it on one of our abstract nouns of the -ation kind? By this means, inspiration becomes inspirational (and leaves poor old inspiring in the dust), transaction becomes transactional, and manipulation, manipulational, as in: ‘We refer here to the negative motivation regarding laboratory manipulational experiments …’. Ablution gives ablutional, which falls outside the notice of the OED but was used by Henry James when he referred to bathwater as ‘ablutional fluid’; and irritation gives irritational, as used in a report on a ‘test for evaluation of irritational potential of dental materials’.**
The gripers will already be clutching their stomachs, but this is just the start. Take an adjective on these lines, and you can easily turn it into a new abstract noun, as dimension becomes dimensional becomes—in the hands of certain writers—dimensionality: Will Self, writing on the suburbs of Paris, remarks, ‘But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history’.** Better yet, take, oh, operation, make that into an adjective, operational, and then, remembering ‘ize-mania’ from Chapter 4, make that into a verb: operationalise—and then make that into another abstract noun, operationalisation, as here: ‘Governmentalities are not just “govern mentalities”; they also refer to the operationalisation of knowledge …’. As ever, there are words on this pattern—with this pile-up of suffixes—that gripers will use quite happily, not one of them spitting their teeth out over, say, rationalisation (ratio shares its root with the word reason). Note, however, that even this word can be pushed beyond what a griper will tolerate by turning it back into an adjective: ‘… the meaningful associations were decisional rather than rationalizational’ (we now have two -tions and two -als). Meanwhile, if operationalisation means something, can operationalisational be made to mean something too? Lo: ‘Reassurance policing was tested as an operationalizational concept through the Home Office’s National Reassurance Policing Programme’; ‘… operationalizational difficulties are so relevant’, etc.**
You may be thinking that in your enormous efforts to impinge slightly on the limits set around Good English, you might just pass over the matter of abusing abstract nouns, not least because there appear to be so many people in on this game already. But why not embrace the ‘normalisational aspects’ of joining in?** Simply take a suffix or two—or three, or four, or five—and give way to your Frankenstein instincts! Run the galvanic power of noun-ness through the dead frog of the abstract or even doubly abstract ‘thing’ you are trying to create—throw in perhaps a couple of adjectival jolts for good measure, and a dose of verbifying too. The gripers, seeing your efforts towards the operationalisation of one of these sparky monsters, must cry, ‘That is not a living word!’ It will be your job, in defying them, to attempt to keep the wretched creature going.