Hi! I’m Joel and this is The Glossary, a bi-weekly supplement to Learned. This week, we're getting occasional.
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A good title does more than just sum up a collection of ideas, it grabs the reader and draws them in. One of my favorite titles graces the cover of a 1994 Jonathan Lethem novel: Gun, with Occasional Music. Right away I wanted to know, was I supposed to interpret this as “sometimes” or “for the occasion?” Maybe both? The title grabbed my attention and never let go.
These days, I occasionally have occasion to teach the word occasionally.
Sorry.
Anyway, occasionally is in many of the textbooks I use as an adverb of time. It tends to get put on a scale that goes like this: never - rarely - occasionally - sometimes - often - usually - always. Its noun form, occasion, often appears right alongside it, but the adjective form, occasional, is just not as common. And yet, it is the form with the most definitions.
The Oxford English Dictionary has 5 separate definitions for occasional as an adjective. In Lethem’s novel (spoiler), the reader eventually realizes that the occasional in the title shifts in meaning from definition 2, something that happens "without certainty or regularity," to 4a: "required by, or made for, a particular occasion." (It is a really good novel. If you’re into near future, dystopic science-fiction, I recommend it.)
But that's not the only obscure meaning of occasional. Listed even before the two definitions used above, the OED tells us that it can mean "imperfect, incomplete." As ever, this begs the questions - where did the word come from and how did it acquire so many meanings? And, as ever, the second question is the harder to answer.
The oldest form of the word comes from the 10th century but it didn't really acquire its modern meaning of sometimes until the 1600s. As to how, well the OED doesn't really have a theory there. However, Etymologeek.com gives a possible answer by separating occasion, meaning "a favorable opportunity" from its suffix ~al. I'd speculate that it went through a few centuries meaning lucky before arriving at sometimes. But I've been known to be wrong, on occasion.
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Joel