Category: Linguistics

Q: I am disappointed. In discussing the use of “up” and “down” in England, you noted that you had already “touched on this issue.” Perhaps you meant: “touched on this subject.” I have difficulty understanding why “issue” has become the preferred alternative to “problem,” “concern,” “subject,” etc. It is sad to see you following this trend.

A: We’re sorry you were disappointed by that wording in our posting last May about “up” and “down,” but we beg to disagree.

The noun “issue” has been used to refer to a problem, concern, subject, and so on for nearly two centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s how the OED defines this sense of the word: “Of a matter or question: In dispute; under discussion; in question.”

We checked six standard dictionaries in the US and the UK, and all but one of them say “issue” can be used to mean a subject of discussion.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, begins its definition with this sense of the word: “A point or matter of discussion, debate, or dispute: What legal and moral issues should we consider?”

And the Cambridge Dictionaries Online starts its definition this way: “a subject or problem which people are thinking and talking about: environmental/ethical/personal issues.”

The only exception (and not much of one) is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), which insists that the subject must be vital, unsettled, or in dispute.

A more controversial issue concerning “issue” is the use of the noun to mean a problem (as in “I have an issue with that”). We discussed this on the blog a couple of years ago.

In our earlier posting, we described the many meanings that “issue” has had since it entered English in the 1300s as a verb and a noun.

All of these senses arise more or less out of the word’s early meanings of egress, outflow, exit, discharge, or output.

The “issue,” in other words, is what comes out, whether from a drain pipe, the human body, a magazine publisher, a stressful situation, or a problematic legal settlement.

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Q: I’ve wondered about this one for a while and didn’t know (until I discovered your blog) whom to ask about it. Why is everyone saying “insurgency” and not “insurgence”? We don’t say “resurgency,” do we? We say “resurgence.”

A: We’ll start by saying that both “insurgence” and “insurgency” are legitimate nouns.

The first means an act of rising up against authority, and the second generally means a state or condition of being insurgent. There’s a very subtle difference here, and in fact “insurgency” can be used both ways.

By the way, “resurgence” and “resurgency” are legitimate words too, and we’ll have more to say about them later.

Your question illustrates an interesting point about English. It’s a very expansive language, and it has many suffixes for forming new nouns from adjectives, verbs, and other nouns.

Some of the most familiar noun-forming suffixes are “-ence,”
“-ency,” “-ance,” “-ancy,” “-acy,” “-cy,” “-ment,” “-ation,”
“-age,” “-ness,” “-ship,” and “-ism.”

The ones we’re concerned with here are the first two, “-ence” and “-ency,” which can be traced to a suffix the Romans used to form nouns: the Latin –entia.

To speakers of English, it would seem, nouns are like peanuts. We can’t have just one.

So over the centuries we’ve frequently formed twin nouns by appending both “-ence” and “-ency” to the same base.

Often, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the twins quietly drops out of the picture.

But sometimes both survive, as with “persistence” and “persistency,” “coherence” and “coherency,” and others. Both forms are legitimate, and though the differences are often extremely subtle, they aren’t haphazard.

The suffixes “-ence” and “-ency” have played different roles in the development of English nouns.

As the OED explains, the Latin suffix –entia yielded two types of nouns, those representing “action or process” and those representing “qualities or states.”

In English, the first type (ending in “-ence”) is more closely associated in meaning with its corresponding verb, the second type (“-ency”) with its corresponding adjective.

When the same word exists in both the “-ence” and “-ency” forms, there’s often only a fine line of difference.

We can see how this works in the case of “insurgence” and “insurgency.”

The first to appear, “insurgency,” was coined around 1800 as a noun meaning the state of being insurgent. Only later did the concrete sense (an insurgent movement or revolt) develop.

The second to appear, “insurgence,” was coined in the 1860s to mean the act of rising against authority. So though the words overlap, both are legitimately used today to mean an insurrection.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines “insurgence” as “an act or the action of being insurgent.”

M-W defines “insurgency” as “the quality or state of being insurgent; specif: a condition of revolt,” and includes “insurgence” as a second definition.

Similarly, “resurgence” and “resurgency” are legitimate nouns, both now meaning the act of rising again.

“Resurgency” was first recorded in 1798 and “resurgence” in 1810, according to OED citations.

While you’ll find “resurgency” in the OED, however, it’s not often used and it isn’t included in standard dictionaries. So it’s probably dying out.

As we were writing this, we thought of two extremely different twin nouns, “emergence” and “emergency,” both of which appeared in the 17th century.

The older of the two, “emergency” originally meant a “state of things unexpectedly arising” and demanding immediate attention, the OED says.

“Emergence,” on the other hand, meant an action—the act or process of emerging, as from a hidden or submerged place.

But for much of their history, “emergence” and “emergency” were used interchangeably in both senses.

For example, in his Memoirs, written sometime before 1676, the historian Henry Guthry writes, “The Castle of Dunglass was blown up with Powder,” an event he later refers to as “this tragical Emergence.”

With two such different meanings, however, there was room for two distinct nouns. So over time the two became increasingly different. Today, as a result, an “emergence” is vastly different from an “emergency.”

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Q: I caught the tail end of Pat’s comments on WNYC last month about “Referendum, Shmeferendum,” a headline on a news site in Amman, Jordan. So has Yiddish infiltrated Arab journalism?

A: Pat wasn’t the only one to raise an eyebrow over that headline. It also caught the attention of contributors to the Linguist List, the mailing list of the American Dialect Society, and prompted an exchange of comments in March.

For readers of the blog who haven’t seen the Feb. 28, 2012, headline on the English edition of Al Bawaba, here it is in full: “Referendum, Shmeferendum: A Famous ‘Yes’ as Syrian Celebs Vote For Assad.”

The article, with an accompanying slide show, is critical of nine Syrian celebrities—mostly movie stars—who supported the government of Bashar Assad in the Feb. 26 referendum.

So has Yiddish infiltrated Arab journalism?

Well, it’s true that rhyming jingles like “referendum, shmeferendum,” “fancy-shmancy,” and “gravity-shmavity” (from a 1990s ad for the Wonderbra) are characteristic of a Yiddish construction.

But this playfully derisive rhyming usage is thoroughly English by now, and many (if not most) English speakers who use it are probably unaware of its Yiddish origins.

In expressions like “referendum, shmeferendum,” the speaker or writer pooh-poohs a word by repeating it with “shm-” at the beginning, forming a rhyming compound.

The history of the Yiddish language is complicated and often unclear, but one thing is certain about this usage.

It didn’t (as many people believe) just spring into being on the Lower East Side after the waves of Jewish immigration to New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So where does this usage ultimately come from?

Many scholars of Yiddish linguistics believe the construction has Turkish roots and may date back as far as the 13th century.

This isn’t as weird as it may sound. As we wrote in a posting earlier this year, it was the Turks who gave Eastern European Jews the word pastrami.

And the familiar Yiddish word yarmulke (from Polish jarmułka and Ukrainian yarmulke) is ultimately of Turkic origin, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Recent scholarship suggests that Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews adopted  rhyming shm- doublets through contact with the native East Slavic languages—Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Russian—spoken in the regions where they lived.

And those languages, in turn, got the rhyming-couplet construction through contact with Turkish and other Turkic languages spoken in neighboring parts of central Asia.

The linguist Mark R. V. Southern has written that the East Slavic and the Turkic language families had their own parallel sets of rhyming compounds that were used in a mockingly humorous way.

But in their case, according to Southern, the prefix was m– instead of shm-. Yiddish speakers just added the sh sound.

As Southern writes in his book Contagious Couplings: Transmission of Expressives in Yiddish Echo Phrases (2005), the spread of the “Turkic m- echo-pairs” led to the “development within West Germanic of Yiddish/‘Yinglish’ shm- echo-twins.”

To illustrate this development, linguists have pointed to Yiddish expressions like Liebe-shmiebe, Poezje-shmoezje, and gelt shmelt. (In English, these would translate as “love-shmove,” “poetry-shmoetry,” and “money-shmoney.”)

Meanwhile, examples from Turkish include sapka-mapka and kitap-mitap (“love-shmove” and “books-shmooks”).

So expressions like “fancy-shmancy” got their start in the Ottoman Empire, made their way into the East Slavic languages, were adopted into Yiddish, then migrated to New York and beyond. Fancy that!

This feature of Yiddish, linguists say, has also been absorbed into Israeli Hebrew, and to some extent into modern German. It’s even been re-borrowed from Yiddish into a handful of playful phrases in Russian.

In the last half-century or so, the tradition of rhyming “shm-” compounds has spread across the United States.

For instance, the language researcher Barry Popik has pointed out that in Texas, the phrase “Texas shmexas” is often used by people who don’t think that much of the state.

Why has the tradition become so popular? Perhaps because there’s something inherently humorous  in words starting with “shm-” or “shl-” (like “shlep,” “shlemiel,” “shmooze,” and “shlock”).

And using a rhyming compound to ridicule a person or a notion—as in “Freud-shmoid”—turns the sneer into a joke.

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Q: I was taught that the meaning of an idiom cannot be derived from the meaning of its words. For instance, “kick the bucket,” which refers to dying, not to kicking or buckets. But many expressions are called idioms even though they make some literal sense (“to keep an eye on,” for example). Doesn’t an idiom have to be nonliteral?

A: Your definition of “idiom” is a bit narrow. An idiomatic expression isn’t always nonliteral.

Broadly speaking, an idiom is simply a peculiarity of language. It’s an expression or some characteristic of speech that’s peculiar to a language, a region, a dialect, or a group of people.

For example an idiom can be, as you say, an expression that can’t be interpreted literally (as in “it’s raining cats and dogs,” or “he reached for the stars”).

But it could also be a speech form that’s grammatically unusual or that just doesn’t parse (“I could care less,” “that dress isn’t you”).

An idiom could be a specialized language or vocabulary used among a particular group of people—like doctors or journalists. Or it could be a particular regional or dialectal speech pattern.

And “idiom” is sometimes used in reference to artistic forms of expression (as in “the idiom of Greek Revival architecture” or “the idiom of Abstract Expressionism”).

The word “idiom” came into English in the 16th century from the French idiome, but its ultimate source is the Greek idioma, meaning a peculiarity or a peculiar phraseology. The root of the word is the Greek idios (one’s own).

In classical Latin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, idioma meant a “special term or phrase used by an individual or group.”

In post-classical Latin (from the 7th to 13th centuries), idioma came to mean a language, a peculiarity, a special property, a dialect, or a spoken form of language, the OED says.

When “idiom” first came into English, in 1573, it meant the individuality or character of a language.

But today when we use “idiom” in the linguistic sense, we generally mean (and here we’re quoting one OED definition) “a form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the word used in this sense is from a sermon, delivered by John Donne sometime before 1631, that cites “amen” as an example of an idiom:

“There are certaine idioms, certaine formes of speech, certaine propositions, which the holy Ghost repeats severall times, upon several occasions in the Scriptures. … How often does our blessed Saviour repeat his Amen, Amen?” (We’ve expanded the  citation.)

Donne was right. “Amen” (which we’ve written about on our blog) is a pretty good example of a form of expression used in a distinct way.

The OED does include the more specific sense of “idiom” you’re asking about: “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.”

In other words, the nonliteral truth!

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