Penultimate (Revisited) and Erstwhile

Mike left a comment on yesterday's post with a link to one of his own posts about how -sicle, as in Popsicle, became a productive morpheme--in layman's terms, attached itself to other words to form combinations that mean "X on a stick." (Dreamsicle, Creamsicle, etc. Oh, and corpsicle: a body frozen in the hope of revivification.) This despite the fact that -sicle was originally shortened from icicle, and icicles in the wild do not necessarily contain sticks.

The title of Mike's post is "Erstwhile Trademarks¹," which started me thinking about how frequently "erstwhile" is misused.

Erstwhile means former (adjective) or formerly (adverb); it's a blend of erst, an Old English word meaning "once" or "long ago" that's familiar to crossword solvers; and while, meaning "during" or "at that time." But that's not how many people use it.

I used to have a very nice client who, while we were sitting in the same room, would refer to me admiringly as "our erstwhile copywriter." He did this more than once, apparently ignoring my stricken look. (Had I been fired?) Eventually I figured it out: he thought erstwhile meant esteemed.

And he's far from alone. A cursory (hasty, hurried, superficial) search revealed quite a few complaints about the misuse. Here's what the Australian linguist Ruth Wajnryb, who says she's often invited to settle usage disputes, has to say:

The latest contretemps is between a pair of elderly, well-educated gentlemen disputing the meaning of "erstwhile". I'll call them Elderly Gentleman 1 (EG1) and Elderly Gentleman 2 (EG2). EG1 is upset that EG2 insists on using erstwhile to mean "esteemed", "stalwart", "dependable", "worthy", even "wise". For EG2, it's a laudatory adjective: he'll comfortably refer to a staff member as "erstwhile", intending the word to be taken as public praise.

EG1 protests furiously. Erstwhile means "prior" or "former", and there's no shortage of authoritative sources to support him. As an adverb, erstwhile has been part of English since the 16th century, formed from two much older words. The adjective joined about 1900. EG1 argues, rightly, that referring to an employee as "erstwhile" would suggest that the employment is over.

EG2 dismisses EG1's evidence. He disputes EG1's notion that people produce and receive words according to an unstated consensus about meaning. EG1 is outraged: an individual cannot simply take it upon himself, crusade-style, to make a word mean what he wants it to mean. But EG2 argues that word meanings aren't fixed in concrete. "Terrific" and "naughty" didn't always mean what they mean today.

If EG2 sounds familiar, it might be the echoes of Humpty Dumpty's exchange with Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Humpty is wrong, of course, as is EG2. You cannot make a word mean whatever you want it to mean - that is, if you wish to be understood. Usage does not determine correctness. If a person starts swapping labels ("cats" for "dogs" and vice versa), all that will happen in the short term is confusion. The reductio ad absurdum is chaotic unintelligibility.

I'm on Ms. Wajnryb's side. In the short term, and as long as there's a likelihood of confusion--as there was when my client called me "erstwhile"--I want to stick to traditional definitions. And suggest three little words to my (yes!) erstwhile client and others like him: use a dictionary.

Is it possible that erstwhile for esteemed results from a contextual misunderstanding? That was the case for Jed Hartman:

I assumed that "my erstwhile colleague" (the phrase I usually heard the word in) meant "my esteemed colleague," but it really means "my former colleague." I wasn't alone in this misunderstanding; many people misuse this word.

(One of Jed's commenters says that he she always thought erstwhile meant ersatz--a German loan word meaning fake. Again, a dictionary can be ever so helpful in sorting these things out. Try it yourself!)

Or maybe erstwhile just has that hifalutin tone that self-important people like to assume. Which brings me back to penultimate, one of the subjects of Monday's musings.

In a column mostly about the misuse of erstwhile, Barbara Frederickson wrote recently in TampaBay.com that penultimate is also frequently misued:

[I]t isn't the pinnacle of the ultimate; it's the next-to-last item, as in "she reached her pinnacle in the penultimate song."

I admit it hadn't occurred to me that misusers of penultimate were thinking about pinnacles. (Obviously that's because, being a native speaker of pure, wholly unaccented California English--oh, go ahead and scoff--I clearly distinguish between pen and pin, unlike some of my fellow citizens in Flyoverland.) But it does make sense in a way. It's wrong, but it's logical and rather creative.

___

¹ By the way, Popsicle is the furthest thing from an erstwhile trademark: it is very much alive, and no doubt sturdily defended by its owner, Unilever.

Comments

[Orange]

I had no idea erstwhile was being abused this way. *shakes head sadly*

[Jed]

(I just tried to post a comment, but it got flagged as spam -- I'm guessing that's because it was long and had four URLs in it. Sorry about that....)

[Nick Tata]

I've always thought of "erstwhile"as negative regarding friends or aquaintences; meaning that the relationship no longer exists personally or professionally.
About the spam flags: the servers, especially in California,are starting to flag much more easily now. I live in Japan and have a Japanese cell phone and PC. I can still send e-mails to Michigan , Texas and Canada with either, but the same e-mails were being flagged and sent back from California even the e-mails without attachments in some cases.Apparently some of my e-mails to California just disappeared according to a friends report. It's probably because of the Japanese operating system. However, I switched to Yahoo Mail from Outlook Express and that has solved the problem so far.Good luck! cheers, Nick

[evvance]

Off the main topic, but you did open the door (as they say in court) --

Re "pure, wholly unaccented California English": When I was in college (again, in the late 1960's), studying linguistics, one teacher played recordings of people reading the same phrase in English, but with various regional American dialects. She said that the Utah accent was actually the least accented (!), but since TV news broadcasting had originated in California, the California accent was becoming the standard for American English. As it now has.

[goofy]

Erstwhile means former (adjective) or formerly (adverb); it's a blend of erst, an Old English word meaning "once" or "long ago" that's familiar to crossword solvers; and while, meaning "during" or "at that time." But that's not how many people use it.

Etymological fallacy?

You cannot make a word mean whatever you want it to mean - that is, if you wish to be understood. Usage does not determine correctness. If a person starts swapping labels ("cats" for "dogs" and vice versa), all that will happen in the short term is confusion. The reductio ad absurdum is chaotic unintelligibility.

I think this is a straw man argument. Is something like this ever likely to happen, outside of a few isolated cases? Has it ever happened?

Usage does determine correctness, but in a more sensible way than Waynrib suggests. If most speakers in a community use a word in a certain way, then that is the meaning of the word. (I am not suggesting that this is the case with "erstwhile".)

[Nick Tata]

It's always the other person that has the accent. Seriously though,I find the terms "California accent" , "Canadian accent"or even "British accent" for example to be so vague as to be practically useless. I work with English speakers from all over the globe everyday and it's my opinion that high schools and universities attended have the strongest influence on pronunciation and that enunciating clearly far outweighs any local accent for ease of communication in spoken English. How would you describe a "California accent" as opposed to a "Utah accent" ? Both would be very difficult to understand if the speaker mumbled.

[Mr. Wuxtry]

OK, but wait. How did Ruth Wajnryb get to be Ms. Waynrib?

[Nancy Friedman]

Mr. Wuxtry: Well, SHE spells it Wajnryb, and that's good enough for me.

Speaking of names, Mr. W., yours is swell. Wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it!

[Nick Tata]

I think Mr.Wuxtry is refering to the spelling (or typo?). Before the first green part it's "Ruth Wajnryb" and just after it becomes "Ruth Waynrib's". Hope this was helpful.

[Nancy Friedman]

Aha! Fixed now. (I really need a proofreader...)