This week: putting the end on the sentence. Also, footnotes, a little bit of housekeeping, some notes from the wide world of linguistics news, and to end things this week, a question I’ve been mulling over. Here we go.
As a teenager, I burned through as many of Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth novels as I could get my hands on (1). Foster was, and is, known for making very punny titles: Surfeit turned a sports story about a surfing contest on a planet with waves several hundred feet high into an examination of the soul of a surfer. Cachalot told the the story of an ocean world Terran cetaceans had immigrated to and what they found there. And then there was my favorite: Sentenced to Prism. In it an explorer crashes on a planet where life evolved from crystals. Our astronaut is stranded with no way off the planet and no one coming to rescue him. He has been sentenced to wander the planet prism.
I knew, of course, the term “to sentence someone to prison,” but it had always seemed punitive, something done by someone to someone else. The idea that fate could unintentionally, inadvertently sentence someone to their, well, fate was new to me (2). And, honestly, looking at the etymology of the word, you wouldn’t blame me. Etymology online:
c. 1200, "doctrine, authoritative teaching; an authoritative pronouncement," from Old French sentence "judgment, decision; meaning; aphorism, maxim; statement of authority” … From early 14c. as "judgment rendered by God, or by one in authority; a verdict, decision in court;”
So, uh, yeah. Sentencing someone is a judgement; it is something of a formal verb. It’s something we reserve it for legal proceedings (both real and on t.v.) and for pronouncements from on high (both imagined and on t.v.). In fact, looking at synonyms for sentence as a verb gives us the equally serious words censure, condemn, rule, pronounce, and penalize. Which, again, are not things we use lightly in conversation.
Instead, for conversation, we draw upon the plethora of idiomatic phrases we use in its place: tell off, smack down, put away, and, of course, throw the book at someone. In fact, it's this last idiom that tells us how serious a verb to sentence actually is. We have an idiom derived from court proceedings where sentences are handed down from the judges bench, something that can lessen the terror and anger being felt by the sentenced and bystanders alike. Even adding unnecessary, semantically repetitive verbs in front of the word, as in pass sentence or the aforementioned hand down a sentence can be seen as a way of minimizing the impact of such a serious topic.
Minimizing through idioms and repetitive words are old tricks in the English language and ones we utilize quite often. I think it’s something worth thinking about - when we catch ourselves using these tricks, what is we’re trying to lessen? What fear are we hiding from? Knowing these linguistic tricks and having a solid example of how we use them can keep us from becoming trapped in our own fears; it can help keep our sentence unpronounced and our worries unfounded.
And that is a sentence to end this chapter on. Thanks for reading, footnotes, etc. below.
Footnotes
This was in the early 90s. There were, I think, about a dozen Commonwealth novels then. There are many more than that now and they hold up really well as individual stories and as an overarching universe of stories.
In my defense, I was only 11 or 12 the first time I read this book; I hadn’t yet read or been exposed to enough to realize that this was, and is, a central theme in literature. And for the blame for its popularity and longevity can be laid at the feet of Paradise Lost. Fight me.
Housekeeping
This week marks the end of the beginning of Learned Volume 4. As you may recall, this year’s theme, or subtitle is “Words We Use When We Talk About Words.” So we’ve discussed words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. But what’s next? Glad you asked. The next eight issues of Learned will focus on words again, but this time, we’ll look at how we make new words by adding bits and pieces to existing words, how sounds combine to make words, and talk just a bit about punctuation. Hope to see you there.
News of the Word
Jargon and work-speak have always been a part of English; the relative ease with which new words can be created in English lends itself to groups having in-jokes, specialized vocabulary, and, well, jargon. Linguist Kathryn Hymes, writing in The Atlantic, builds on that idea, explaining that even groups as small as families can have their own dialects, which she calls familects. Now, because of the global situation, our familects have become even more odd and self-referential. However, they are an essential part of being a family: “Familects help us feel like family. Private in-group language fosters intimacy and establishes identity.” Add it to the list of uncomfortable gains brought on by the pandemic. Read the full article here.
Ponderous
What will the next logograph to replace standard English words be? As you probably know, symbols like the ampersand and the at mark (& and @, respectively) take the place of words in many forms of English text. But, of these two, only the ampersand has a long history. While the at mark has been around for centuries, it didn’t really gain widespread recognition or acceptance until the advent of email. So, with the preponderance of new forms of text communication becoming ever more available, what’s next? Will we see another, extant symbol rise out of obscurity, like the at symbol? Or will something entirely new take the world by storm? If you have any thoughts on the matter, let me know by commenting below.
Stay curious,
J