The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (22 page)

Interestingly, the pieces fit together in only certain ways. Thus
Darwinism
, a stem formed by the stem suffix -
ism
, cannot be a host for -
ian
, because -
ian
attaches only to roots; hence
Darwinismian
(which would mean “pertaining to Darwinism”) sounds ridiculous. Similarly,
Darwinsian
(“pertaining to the two famous Darwins, Charles and Erasmus”),
Darwinsianism
, and
Darwinsism
are quite impossible, because whole inflected words cannot have any root or stem suffixes joined to them.

Down at the bottommost level of roots and root affixes, we have entered a strange world. Take
electricity
. It seems to contain two parts,
electric
and -
ity:

But are these words really assembled by a rule, gluing a dictionary entry for -
ity
onto the root
electric
, like this?

Not this time. First, you can’t get
electricity
simply by gluing together the word
electric
and the suffix -
ity
—that would sound like “electrick itty.” The root that -
ity
is attached to has changed its pronunciation to “electríss.” That residue, left behind when the suffix has been removed, is a root that cannot be pronounced in isolation.

Second, root-affix combinations have unpredictable meanings; the neat scheme for interpreting the meaning of the whole from the meaning of the parts breaks down.
Complexity
is the state of being complex, but
electricity
is not the state of being electric (you would never say that the electricity of this new can opener makes it convenient); it is the force powering something electric. Similarly,
instrumental
has nothing to do with instruments,
intoxicate
is not about toxic substances, one does not recite at a
recital
, and a five-speed
transmission
is not an act of transmitting.

Third, the supposed rule and affix do not apply to words freely, unlike the other rules and affixes we have looked at. For example, something can be
academic
or
acrobatic
or
aerodynamic
or
alcoholic
, but
academicity, acrobaticity, aerodynamicity
, and
alcoholicity
sound horrible (to pick just the first four words ending in
-ic
in my electronic dictionary).

So at the third and most microscopic level of word structure, roots and their affixes, we do not find bona fide rules that build words according to predictable formulas,
wug
-style. The stems seem to be stored in the mental dictionary with their own idiosyncratic meanings attached. Many of these complex stems originally were formed after the Renaissance, when scholars imported many words and suffixes into English from Latin and French, using some of the rules appropriate to those languages of learning. We have inherited the words, but not the rules. The reason to think that modern English speakers mentally analyze these words as trees at all, rather than as homogeneous strings of sound, is that we all sense that there is a natural break point between the
electric
and the -
ity
. We also recognize that there is an affinity between the word
electric
and the word
electricity
, and we recognize that any other word containing -
ity
must be a noun.

Our ability to appreciate a pattern inside a word, while knowing that the pattern is not the product of some potent rule, is the inspiration for a whole genre of wordplay. Self-conscious writers and speakers often extend Latinate root suffixes to new forms by analogy, such as
religiosity, criticality, systematicity, randomicity, insipidify, calumniate, conciliate, stereotypy, disaffiliate, gallonage
, and
Shavian
. The words have an air of heaviosity and seriosity about them, making the style an easy target for parody. A 1982 editorial cartoon by Jeff Mac-Nelly put the following resignation speech into the mouth of Alexander Haig, the malaprop-prone Secretary of State:

Another cartoon, by Tom Toles, showed a bearded academician explaining the reason verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were at an all-time low:

In the culture of computer programmers and managers, this analogy-making is used for playful precision, not pomposity.
The New Hacker’s Dictionary
, a compilation of hackish jargon, is a near-exhaustive catalogue of the not-quite-freely-extendible root affixes in English:

Down at the level of word roots, we also find messy patterns in irregular plurals like
mouse-mice
and
man-men
and in irregular past-tense forms like
drink-drank
and
seek-sought
. Irregular forms tend to come in families, like
drink-drank, sink-sank, shrink-shrank, stink-stank, sing-sang, ring-rang, spring-sprang, swim-swam
, and
sit-sat
, or
blow-blew, know-knew, grow-grew, throw-threw, fly-flew
, and
slay-slew
. This is because thousands of years ago Proto-Indo-European, the language ancestral to English and most other European languages, had rules that replaced one vowel with another to form the past tense, just as we now have a rule that adds -
ed
. The irregular or “strong” verbs in modern English are mere fossils of these rules; the rules themselves are dead and gone. Most verbs that would seem eligible to belong to the irregular families are arbitrarily excluded, as we see in the following doggerel:

People must simply be memorizing each past-tense form separately. But as this poem shows, they can be sensitive to the patterns among them and can even extend the patterns to new words for humorous effect, as in Haigspeak and hackspeak. Many of us have been tempted by the cuteness of
sneeze-snoze, squeeze-squoze, take-took-tooken
, and
shit-shat
, which are based on analogies with
freeze-froze, break-broke-broken
, and
sit-sat
. In
Crazy English
Richard Lederer wrote an essay called “Foxen in the Henhice,” featuring irregular plurals gone mad:
booth-beeth, harmonica-harmonicae, mother-methren, drum-dra, Kleenex-Kleenices
, and
bathtub-bathtubim
. Hackers speak of
faxen, VAXen, boxen, meece
, and
Macinteesh. Newsweek
magazine once referred to the white-caped, rhinestone-studded Las Vegas entertainers as
Elvii
. In the
Peanuts
comic strip, Linus’s teacher Miss Othmar once had the class glue eggshells into model
igli
. Maggie Sullivan wrote an article in the
New York Times
calling for “strengthening” the English language by conjugating more verbs as if they were strong: