This week: English loves new words; making up new words is an exercise in re-examining the world around us and creating new meaning by building new connections between pre-existing ideas. Also, dogs.
Doggone Interesting
New Yorkers never visit the Statue of Liberty1 and native speakers never examine their pre-conceptions about their own language. Or, to put it another way, we rarely take the time to think about the things that have always been there, like giant statues or the words we use every day.
But second-language learners do. They have to. In order to understand the language they’re learning, a near constant examination of words is required; how are these new words formed on the tongue, how do they change in pitch and meaning, how2 do they fit together to form more complex words and sentences - without asking oneself these questions, it becomes ever more difficult to learn a language.
As learners get more familiar with their chosen language, they start to play with it. They start to make jokes and to form puns and to use it in strange, interesting, not-at-all-intuitive-to-native-speakers, new ways. And sometimes, they even make up new words.
So, let’s talk about dogs.
I love dogs. I’m a dog-person. A dog-lover. Someone who has an affinity for dogs. I’m even a dog-parent. My dog Lucy is presently dozing under my desk while I write this, half-asleep in that way that dogs have, ready to bolt awake at the mention of a treat or a walk and otherwise content to let the world take care of itself3.
I'll admit to being more than a little jealous. But I'm also armed with the knowledge that it wasn't always like this. For most of the many centuries dogs have lived with humans, they have been working for their place in the pack. They've helped hunt for us, ridden into battle alongside us, and sat outside in the cold to ward off thieves and bandits while we stayed warm and safe inside. And our language reflects these working origins. We use idioms like "dog-tired," or "sick as a dog," and have created words like "dogged," and "doggerel," to describe things when we want to use less than flattering terms.
Over the past century, though, the role of the dog in everyday life has changed dramatically. While there are still hunting dogs and battle dogs and guard dogs, there are also visual and hearing-impaired assistant dogs and cancer-sniffing dogs and emotional support dogs. But we haven't quite gotten there with the language yet.
Instead, we've anthropomorphized them more ever before. We've relabeled ourselves as dog-parents and dogs as fur-babies, we talk about our furry friends and build websites to make sure we can safely watch a movie without seeing one of our precious angels being hurt4. And this is fine. But it seems like we're doing dogs a disservice in trying to humanize them. Instead, we should be recognizing their distinctive place in our lives and in how their differences complement us and vice-versa.
In her 2009 book, Inside of a Dog, author Alexandra Horowitz borrows the German word “umwelt,” or “environment,” to define a set of demarcations that separate our perception of the world from a dog’s. She does this by emphasizing repeatedly that what we see as a problem, a dog may not notice, and that what we are content to ignore, a dog may be unavoidably distracted by. These differences in perception lead to what we consider problematic behavior. Horowitz goes on to implore we dog-owners to not anthropomorphize our pets. Love them, treat them with great affection, and give them the best lives possible, but always remember that they are not, in fact, human.
Like most puppies, Lucy had no trouble fitting herself into the hearts of everyone in the family. She quickly learned the rules and did her best to follow them. As she grew up, her personality became more defined: quiet, calm, independent, patient and, like all dogs, fiercely loyal. But my wife did have one, tiny, small issue. Not with the dog. With English5.
She wanted to know why we use the word personality to describe a dog’s character. Shouldn’t the word be dogsonality?
What? No, don’t be ridiculous. Only, maybe?
Dog, as a word, is one of the enduring mysteries of English - we don't know where the word comes from. It just sort of showed up one day in the 11th century and slowly made its way into daily life, until, by the 16th century it had come to mean "animal of the genus Canis familiaris."
Personality, on the other hand, comes to us straight from Latin through French. It had all its modern connotations and uses by the 18th century. Additionally, it is not considered to be an English derivative of person, but rather a separate word stemming from the (presumed) same Latin root.
But, more importantly for this discussion, the fact that personality is not a stem+root is why dogsonality is such an awkward smushing. Normally, when we create a portmanteau, we either replace one word completely - doghood in lieu of personhood, for example, or we break a word at a more natural boundary, like that between a stem and a suffix. For example, if we wanted to combine dog and iPad, we see the natural separation between the prefix i and the word pad. Dogpad6! But we most often see dog in combination with other, small, whole words: dogleg, dognap, dogfight, etc.
So, dogsonality doesn’t work. The end. Only, this is English we’re talking about. The only rule is that there are no rules, only patterns and habits, and maybe, on a good day, the occasional, traceable continuity of thought. And, speaking of thought - if we are to de-anthropomorphize our pets, if we are to understand that their way of viewing the world is, in fact, not human, wouldn’t it make sense to change our language to reflect that?
I don’t know. And, if I’m being honest, I’d be surprised if dogsonality, as a word, ever caught on. I’ve googled it while working on this piece and, guess what, it doesn’t really appear out there in the world. There’s at least on pet-photographer who’s seized on it as a branding tool, and I’m assuming there are a least a couple of people who have asked the same question my wife did, but it hasn’t made it out to the wider world yet. Searching through both the iWeb and COCA corpora returned exactly zero results, so even though it’s brought my a lot of fun to my house, I don’t see it becoming common. Besides, the trend of humans anthropomorphizing things is a straight line going in only one direction.
But the greater point is that it never would have occurred to me to question such a basic and fundamental word. It’s like the Statue of Liberty - it’s always been there and so there’s no need to really visit it just yet. Instead, it took a tourist to point out that there was something interesting and worth thinking about within.
91 Days
Issue 11 has been posted; the project has been a lot of fun and now that we’re down to the last couple of weeks, I have pretty mixed feelings. I don’t think I’ll be able to continue doing a daily photo once school is back in session, but I definitely want to do more with photography and I plan to do something more with the site eventually. So, if you’ve thought about subscribing and want to see some of my photo work, now’s a great time to do so!
Down the Rabbit Hole
One of my more niche-obsessions is the Land of Oz. Like with most niche-obsessions, this one goes back to my childhood, when I first read all of Baum’s Oz books. As the year’s went on, I kind of ducked in and out of the fandom, popping back in whenever there was another new, major adaptation (like Wicked) and popping back out when said adaptation inevitably disappointed me. In more recent years, however, I’ve come to really enjoy the tiny world of Oz self-publishing.
Oz has been out of copyright for a long time, meaning that anyone who wanted to could write their own Oz book. Many, many people have. And, combined with the ease of publishing these days, entire companies have grown up around it. Here are a couple:
From the Archives
This week, let’s go back to April 2019, when I wrote about the idiom “when pigs fly,” and how Tom Petty subverted it by writing the lyric “I’ll be king, when dogs get wings.” It’s one of my favorites from the early years of Learned. Enjoy!
I’ll take unprovable adages for $1,000, Alex.
To be clear, these questions don’t necessarily have to be voiced aloud. They’re the sub-conscious questions that we often don’t realize we’re asking when we learn.
I haven’t figured out how to condense that to a pithy “live, laugh, love” level of syrup, but when I do, it’ll be all over the internet. Bet.
A little context, my wife is Japanese. She didn’t begin studying English until she was in high school and even then, didn’t take it too seriously until she started dating me.
I don’t know what the product is, but I’m getting my trademark in now.
I could definitely see dogsonalities catching on... it sounds marginally better to my ears than its potential contenders doggalities and doggonalities. Something's gotta stick!