:: Found in the course of recreational reading ::

Saturday, May 14, 2005

[Samuel Johnson] included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error. On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.” This story thus illustrates how dictionaries are often viewed as providing norms and how the ultimate arbiter in language, even for the dictionary itself, is popular usage.

Thus the interesting history of the word internecine is used to equate language to never-ending arbitration proceedings. I rather like this idea, that all speakers in a linguistic community are one gigantic committee locked in negotiations, chasing a definitive collective bargaining agreement that will elude them like a carrot dangled in front of a mule.

While on the subject of language, let me except a statement by Burt Reynolds I came upon today from the June 2005 issue of Esquire magazine that, should some committee member duplicate the ambition of Samuel Johnson, clearly deserves a place under the entry for urbanity (available online only with an Esquire subscription):

For a long time, if you were seeing a psychiatrist, you were thought of as being a wacko. But because of good ol' Dr. Phil, people know we need to talk to someone who just sits there and is nonjudgmental and says, "Do you think it's a good idea not to have a bowel movement for three months?" Because a lot of stuff gets clogged up there, and you gotta get some of it out. And getting it out is painful, and you can bleed.

Posted by morland @ 08:31 PM

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