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Truly Calhoun

by Harry Calhoun and Trina Allen

A column is always about people. They shape the columnist's life and they shape his writing.

This particular column may appear to be a self-indulgent spree on the author's part. But it's about what people say. It creates self awareness. It entertains.

Oh, all right. It is sheer self-indulgence. But let me get your opinion on one of my mini-obsessions: Words that appear to have a prefix, but no root word.

"Huh?, " I hear you saying. OK. Take "unmanageable," for example. The root word is "manageable," meaning able to be handled. The prefix "un" creates a word that means you've met with a situation that isn't easily dispatched, hence unmanageable. "Content" has its opposite in "discontent," "relevance" fades into "irrelevance," and so forth.

So the language is meandering its merry way along the logical path and ... ho! What have we here? Cohort. Like the late Clara Peller of "Where's the beef?" fame, we bellow, "Where's the root????" Who among us has said, "I was stumbling through life, a poor hapless hort, until I found my cohorts?" Copilot makes sense, and so does cohabitation...occasionally. But cohort? Rootless and backsliding.

Then we dally through the alphabet and next stub our toe on disgruntled. Imagine yourself over a beer, after work, talking to a coworker--perhaps a hort like yourself. "Ya know, for the first few years here, I was more than happy. I'd even say I was gruntled. But lately ..."

Just a little later, we wander upon expatriate. You know, that word for someone who leaves his homeland. "Ex" is the Latin for "from" or "out of," and "patria" means country. Makes sense, but why isn't someone who stays put in the good old Conch Republic not a patriate? This is a negative little language we have here, isn't it?

Moving on toward the alphabetical middle, we find inflate. (We may have even stumbled across deflate a while back there.) Now, let's say you have an air mattress. You huff and puff and blow it up, and it's inflated. You let the air our and it's deflated. So why, in the state in between, where it presumably spends most of its unpunctured life, is the mattress not flated? Help me, readers. These are the issues that keep grown men, and me, awake at night.

Near the end of the journey, we come upon unwieldy. And while I've never heard anyone use the word in everyday conversation ("Hey, Madge, let me help you through the door with that unwieldy package!"), it exists, on paper at least. So, even nearer the end of the alphabet, why shouldn't I expect to meet the word wieldy? But it's another root-word no-show. Madge can't reply to her rescuer, "Thanks, John, but this is really more wieldy than it looks."

Along the way, we shook hands with some more arcane words, such as defenestration, meaning the act of throwing someone from a window. Presumably, if you fenestrated someone, you would put them in a window. I suppose that's where the term "picture window" originated.

And, of course, we've met the word dependable, reeking with Boy-Scoutish squeaky cleanness and pride. I suppose the last thing an employer or friend would want, then, is someone who is pendable--"That Calhoun is so pendable he rarely shows up for work, and only then when you don't expect it!"

Sometimes it makes no sense at all: "I was remiss not to come to your party. I wish I had been miss and shown up."

There are other possibilities we'd rather leave to your imagination, such as embowled, the presumed root of disemboweled, and gurgitated, the disgusting base for regurgitated. Heck, even disappointed makes little sense under close scrutiny: "Sorry you're disappointed with our service, sir. What did we do to appoint you in the first place?"

And what's going on with flammable and inflammable? Why do we have two words, one with a prefix, one standing bravely alone, that have precisely the same meaning? This should not be allowed, regardless. Or irregardless, as the grammatically impaired say.

I was going to talk about whelmed and overwhelmed, but in checking my dictionary I found that "whelmed" is indeed a valid English-language word. It means about the same as overwhelmed, however, which places it in the same territory as flammable--a needless duplication.

Which brings us to, as Monty Python would say, the department of redundancy department. Forget the words that appear to have no root. (For someone who cannot drive a stick shift, I am remarkably good at switching gears.)

How about wasted words? Is it not a tautology to say "close proximity" rather than simply "proximity," which means "closeness to?" (I am told that in military parlance, "proximity" means the enemy is close, while "close proximity" means they are right on top of you, but I remain unconvinced …) Or how about "month of May," or June, or whatever. Is not May by definition a month?

It still appalls me that, despite the Watergate flap over using "at that point in time"--either "at that point" or "at that time" would do as well, more succinctly--the phrase has lapsed into our common vocabulary.

And I hate it when people say something is more or less unique. "Unique" means one-of-a-kind; if something's unique, it's the only one in existence. It's as impossible to be more or less unique as to be more or less pregnant.

Grammar is tricky. You don't approach it head-on. Unique up on it.


© Harry Calhoun 2008


Harry Calhoun has been published all over the place but you'd probably only recognize a few of them - Writer's Digest and the National Enquirer, for instance. He has found frequent editorial favor as a poet in small-press magazines since the 80s, edited a poetry magazine, and has been a widely published freelance article and literary essay writer. Recently, he has been pleasantly surprised that people recognize him for having published a now-rare booklet of Charles Bukowski poems in 1985. He's happily married to fellow writer Trina Allen.

Send Harry a message either directly or using the Word Catalyst feedback form. 

 

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