Infinitive Splitter

This is one of several time-irrelevant posts of which drafts have been lingering in my WordPress editor for a while. The excerpt below is too fascinating to stay hidden in the decades-old book in which it appears, so, apropos of nothing other than today’s installment of Married to the Sea, here we are:

In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson writes:

According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. … Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience.

I often think of this when people say a word “isn’t a word,” since it should be obvious that the only way to create new words is to use a word that’s never been used before. There are cases when such obstinance is fair — irregardless is universally rejected because regardless and irrespective already exist, and the offending writer usually means to use one of those — but in general I think it’s best to take a liberal approach.

The Oxford English Dictionary adds new words all the time: on December 14, 2006, adhocracy, corporatize, fugly, unelectable and hundreds of others earned its recognition, and regular readers will recall that I wrote previously about last June’s additions.

But no one — not even the editors of the OED — has the power to confer or deny legitimacy in any meaningful sense. As Bryson, again, writes in Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: “One of the abiding glories of English is that it has no governing authority, no group of august worthies empowered to decree how words may be spelled and deployed.” Indeed, of the four “new” words above, only adhocracy isn’t already in fairly common use, but its meaning is instantly apprehensible. (Fugly, for the unfamiliar or the terminally highbrow, is popular among internet gossips).

None of this is particularly relevant to anything else at the moment, but I think it’s quite interesting, so this is the blog I’ve blogged for today.