There’s little more flattering than receiving a letter, call or e-mail from a reader in a “gotcha” moment. “I caught a typo in your last column. You were supposed to have spelled it ‘proofreader,’ not ‘poofreader.’”
Well, yes, the first spelling is what you’ll find in the dictionary. The second — done for effect, honest — usually appears in this column.
I once read a list of disclaimers for aging, one that when people reach my age, they’ve earned the right to be eccentric, as in “nobody should argue with me for that’s the way I do things.” In addition, many attribute to us extreme forgetfulness. Just look at most of the senior-based jokes and cartoons in the popular media.
But I’m not pleading any of these. It’s a cop-out to blame our eccentricities on age. Haven’t we seen some of the same quirks that afflict the elderly manifested in the young? How many students one-third my age have used the excuse, “I forgot to bring my term paper”?
As an unrepentant language cop, I chase words and commas. I’ve written entire columns on single words, and this column might shape up to be one of those.
In short, I’m happy over haplology, defined as “the collapse of two identical or very similar adjacent syllables into one.” Sometimes it’s difficult to make the tongue perform complex gymnastics and catch every syllable. The examples my dictionary uses for haplology are reducing “library” to “liberry” and “probably” to “probly.” It’s difficult for some people to juxtapose two such similar sounds.
Well, for years, I’ve taken “probly,” both as a spoken and a written word, a step farther. I go directly to “prolly.” Yes, I realize it’s a Trujillo-type verbal coinage, but isn’t a 70-year-old allowed some leeway? Oops, forgot I’m not going to use age as my crutch or justification.
I came across “haplology” while reading about “nictate,” as part of a vocabulary service available online. The web site explains that “nictate,” meaning “to wink, to blink,” used to be “nictitate” (note the extra syllable and three t’s). The word has nothing to do with smoking or addiction. And the word “pacifist” used to carry an extra syllable, “pacificist.”
It’s all a matter of economy of effort: We tend to pronounce words in the easiest way, as it’s rough to navigate through any word, like “lollapolooza,” or “nurses’s” (pronounced nurseses) with so many repeated and difficult sounds.
And that’s why I struggle with words like “necessitate,” I elide, or cut off one or two syllables. I’ll use “decide” but avoid “decision,” because of something about telling the brain to switch between a “surd” and a “sonant” sound, or between “voiced” and “voiceless” sounds. It’s the difference between the sounds of “z” and “s,” the former sound not existing in Spanish.
In my experience with newspapers in Illinois decades ago, I tried to strip the language not only of repeated sounds but of unnecessary letters as well. The bosses allowed me some freedom — but only when I wrote my own columns, not general news. They allowed me to shorten “though” to “tho,” “through” to “thru” and — surprisingly — even “thorough” to “thoro.” But when I wrote “thot” for “thought,” the managing editor balked. She explained it wasn’t my job “to, in a very bold way, take such liberties with the language, especially with our literate reading public.”
Well, I thot wrong.
Upon first looking into the hap-word, I didn’t snap that it’s spelled “haplology.” I read the word as “hapology,” and it seems here as if we’ve performed haplology on this very word.
It’s common in English speech to drop one of a pair of repeated sounds. A nice irony is that haplology is just the sort of word to which haplology happens.
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Sister Mary Penas Severas, my sixth-grade teacher at Immaculate Conception School, would never have tolerated the instances of split infinitives above.
But first, a disclosure: Some of my best friends are prone to, on several occasions, split infinitives (as I just did), and to my knowledge no classmate ever required treatment in the ER for such splits.
A split infinitive, really, is merely the insertion of a word between “to” and the infinitive verb, such as Star Trek’s “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Only language purists seem to get upset over such splits. What’s egregious, however, is inserting a long string of words between “to” and the infinitive, as demonstrated in the sentence about my experience in Illinois.
And that’s nothing to wink at.
Haplology, then, I can best remember by extracting the peculiar “lol” in the middle of the word, which has become texting shorthand for “laughing out loud.” A friend, a dedicated texter, labels me as naive and uninformed, saying the lexicon of cell phone abbreviations is far more advanced than I realize.
He ended his text message — tapped in, he said, while driving — with “rof.” I have no clue. And do I even want to know? What’s happening to our language?
• • •
Jeanette Yara, bilingual liaison for West Las Vegas Schools, e-mailed to say she enjoys reading the names I give to nuns, my former teachers, at Immaculate Conception School, which I attended for 12 or more years. Now, now, does Jeanette really believe I tinker with the nuns’ names?
• • •
And Sally Hanson, a former copy reader at the Optic, e-mailed about a recent column in which I lamented that Vangie, a teenager whom I invited on a lavish date, responded only with “whatever.”
Sally’s take on Vangie’s response softens the hurt after all these years. She wrote, “Vangie wasn’t putting you down, she was saying she was so thrilled you asked her out that whatever you wanted to do was fine with her. I know because I attended my 50th high school reunion last weekend and it all came back to me. My old boyfriend was there — with his wife. Whatever.”