Just a quick post to let readers know that I’m headed underground for the next couple of weeks as I thoroughly read the available documentation for OCS. I plan to journal in near-real-time my OCS deployment experience, which will likely start on approximately May 1. Stay tuned.
I was writing a blog post the other day and used the word, “notwitholding.” The spell checker immediately underlined the word as misspelled, so I checked what the suggestions were and the word I was looking for didn’t appear in the list. A cursory check of dictionary.com and m-w.com didn’t turn up any results, but a Google search showed the word being used in multiple places, some of which seem to be pretty credible. I don’t have an Oxford Unabridged handy, so the question hangs in my mind: is it, or is it not a word?
Language is a funny thing. The English language, in particular, has a number of really strange artifacts. Although we have a language largely descended from the same family as German and heavily influenced by Greek, we’ve lost the case endings that allow Greeks to move words around in the sentence to stress importance. In English, the structure of the sentence largely dictates the case of the word. Nominative case usually comes near the beginning of the sentence, dative frequently follows a preposition. There are all sorts of complex rules that I remember having difficulty learning in grade school; I can’t imagine what it’s like for a foreigner. Granted, we don’t have to learn any declensions, but I think we lose something at the same time.
Add to that our verb system. In many languages (Romance languages, German, Greek, at least), verbs have different conjugations for different tenses. In English, we largely use the same conjugation (or a very few conjugations) and fill in the gaps with auxiliaries (helping verbs). Verbs are already one of the most difficult parts of language - most learners of a foreign language don’t struggle with vocabulary as much as they do proper verb conjugations.
The thing that really gets my goat (we’re leaving idioms out of this rant), though, are words like inflammable. Dictionary.com has a good note on usage, but at first blush the average person aware of prefixes in the English language would think that inflammable and flammable are opposites. They are, in fact, synonyms - both mean combustible. Other prefix problems like inhabiting a habitation have always befuddled me.
I suppose I’m just getting a little bit of this off my chest, but there are things that worry me: as I was growing up, my mother was very meticulous about grammar. I read quite a bit and became comparatively articulate. However, I am finding it increasingly difficult to communicate. In many instances, I present a statement in what I believe to be very clear terms, and the statement is misunderstood. Is it my presentation, or their understanding, or both that are at fault? Or does language have some part to play in that miscommunication? I’ve always been thankful that English doesn’t have a board of people admitting and dismissing words from the official language, but sometimes I wonder where we’ll be in 10, 20, 100 years.
