Notes On a Secret History

[An essay that appeared on the Vocabula Review website in April 2014, lightly revised here.]

“Bridge May Ice,” the signs say, or sometimes, “Bridge Ices Before Road.” I have noticed these especially on interstates, especially in the South and West, but also in the Midwest, and for all I know they exist everywhere in the country. Clearly, this way of using the word “ice” is favored by massive precedent and high authority.  So who am I to find it awkward?

I do, though, quite consistently and involuntarily. Every time I pass one of the signs, my eye catches on it, with a little surge of annoyance that may last twenty or thirty whole nanoseconds. Shouldn’t that be . . .?  Perhaps by writing this I will finally desensitize the reflex, and find myself able to drive right past the signs like a normal person, caring only about content, alert to the danger of ice on this next overpass, glinting in the August sun.

For now, though, I find the usage elliptical and ungainly. My problem is that ice, as a verb, wants to be transitive; it requires a direct object. Icing is not something you do by yourself, as you rise in the morning, but something you do to something or someone else, as you raise the blind for a peek outside. You can ice a cake, or a sprained ankle, or (unusually but comprehensibly) a soda or a just-caught fish, or a kicker or foul shooter (in sports slang, by calling time out). But if you say I’m going to ice now, people just stare.  Bill ices with the best of them does not seem to be a meaningful proposition. Nor does the clock ices in February or even the mountain iced in the storm. The biggest dictionary I own (Random House, 1987) does give an intransitive sense for the word, but far down the list, at number 23, and the example provided — the sherbet is icing in the freezer — sounds quite odd to me.

Yet my inner censor, finicky thing that it is, seems ready to allow various modifiers in place of a full-fledged direct object. The bridge ices over gets by, as does the jet engines are icing up. Handy things, prepositions; they do for English what case endings did for Latin, specifying relationships, assigning words to particular grammatical roles. In these two instances, they quietly transform ice from transitive to intransitive, and icing becomes, not an action aggressively visited upon an object, but more an intrinsic change of condition. The subconscious never objects because the switch has been flipped in time. “Bridge Ices Before Road,” in contrast, remains a bit of a stopper (at least for me), and “May Ice In Winter” (say) improves nothing; the somewhat breathier modifiers are too detached, off on a different branch of the tree diagram if we drew it, and leave “ice” still hankering for an object.

Would it be possible to correct the signs? I think so. “Bridge May Ice Over,” adding just the one word, would improve clarity and grace and still fit legibly on the shiny yellow diamond. So would “Bridge May Be Icy,” notwithstanding the weirdness of the message during most of the year. For now, though, the offending text is hanging all across the nation, very prominently and durably, and “Bridge May Ice” is simply a fact of English, a recognizable catchphrase. Usage proceeds not just by obedience to abstract rules and definitions, but by direct imitation of specific models — perhaps mostly that way, indeed — and by now there must be plenty of speakers who have been influenced by the signs to say things like the windshield iced and that road is icing pretty bad and man, my toes are icing, using the word to mean “become icy” rather than “apply ice to” or “cause to freeze.” (Freeze, indeed, can be either transitive or intransitive without causing any problem: I’m freezing and I’m freezing the fish both work. Grammar is inherently unjust.) Pressed by semantic need and government action, the word has been thrown slightly off-center.

For grammar grouches — that is, everybody sometimes — the worry that attends such trifling changes is that they will prove consequential in the long term. When we frown, the thought implicit in the reflex is, now what? Do we all begin using to ice intransitively, leading to Lord knows what changes down the line, not just in that word but in dozens of others drawn into the force field of its analogy? Is the whole system of distinguishing transitive from intransitive verbs threatened? Or does the intransitive use prove to be an adventure from which ice recovers, returning to its former shape, so that, by 2150 or so, when the current signs have all rusted and fallen and been replaced — why not? — with my amended versions, the sherbet is icing in the freezer sounds stranger than ever?

Histories of language mostly tell a story of permanent, one-way changes. Latin turns into French and Spanish and Romanian, but it never goes back and becomes Latin again. English collects loan words from scores of other languages, but it never pays them back. When the Indo-European case system dies out, over several millennia, no scholarly crusade can resurrect it. From history’s majestic remove, everything appears to be a tale of fateful, irreversible change, like the drifting apart of the continents. Even the choices of Chaucer or Shakespeare hardly matter to the saga, because usage participates in an immense determinism that sweeps us all along.

Likewise, folk wisdom, fortified by descriptivist ideology, teaches that efforts to resist language change are always futile. Even the Tories often concede this. Defenders of the subjunctive and future tenses, or the old sense of disinterested, or the distinction between imply and infer, or generic he, tend to speak in wistful, ironic tones; like the Elves in Tolkien, they fight their battles because they must, but they know they will lose in the end. Thus Robert Greene, in a thoughtful column a few years back, mournfully conceded the death of “beg the question” in the traditional sense; the new sense of “urgently pose the question” had taken over, and that was that, forever. I read recently that “error is the engine of language change.” Don’t get me started on what a howling example of false teleology that remark is; but notice the same implicit fatalism and resignation.

Even Bryan Garner, an authority as amiable and upbeat as anyone could wish, joins the mournful chorus. His influential guide, Modern American Usage, comes with a curious “Language-Change Index” that assigns disputed usages to one of five Steps, from 1, newly emergent, to 5, universally accepted. At its best, the Index admits needed nuance into debates grown too uncompromising. But the device carries a certain overtone of millennialist gloom; it seems to imply that Error of every kind, wherever encountered, however detested, is always on a conveyor belt to eventual triumph.

Pretty obviously, though, the other side of the story is the constancy and continuity of language. Chaucer’s word for day was (wait for it) day, and for man (prepare yourself) he said man. Linguists can sleuth out the structures of languages far older and deader than Latin because so many words and rules persist so doggedly over the ages, filtering down to us, still alive in successor languages.

So it should follow that many particular linguistic changes are not fateful departures at all, but episodic adventures, out-and-back journeys that end where they began. Probably, indeed, such outcomes are subtly encouraged by the way our linguistic sensibility works. We often greet even fairly lame coinages with laughter and other signs of approval; then for a while we tolerate copious imitation and repetition-with-variation. Only when the novelty begins to harden into a new paradigm does that too much derided faculty, the Curmudgeon Reflex, our capacity for linguistic snobbery and sarcasm, take hold in earnest. The Mean Girls begin sneering at last year’s slang, swiftly killing most of it off. Cliches become the target of late-night comedians, and truly persistent ones attract scholarly diatribes. Even old-fashioned print-media scolds score an occasional hit. Before you know it, the language is more or less restored to its prior condition, and it’s time to start messing with it again.

There seems to be another kind of history, hidden in the cracks of the official one: a micro-history of changes that get made but then unmade, of  abused words and flouted conventions that spring back into shape like grass a day after you trample on it: a tale of language’s sturdiness and resilience, the surprising way it survives fad after fad. If the saga is ever written, the heroes are likely to be the same grouches who take such abuse in the conventional histories: the dyspeptic editors and teachers and critics who are supposedly always fighting a losing battle.

Of course, many particular changes really are fateful departures, real metamorphoses destined to survive conservative reaction and take the language on into the uncharted future. The problem lies in telling one kind of change from the other. This is something no one ever seems to know for certain. Who could have guessed, in 1950 or so, that laudatory cool would still be with us in 2014? Yet here it is, more entrenched than ever, increasingly accepted even in formal venues.

But who can resist playing prophet?  Not I. Here is a collection, short and entirely unsystematic, of word vagaries I have been noticing recently, and my guesses as to whether they will prove lasting or not.

Transitive “grow.” Early in President Clinton’s first term, I heard the new chief say, “We have to get to work and grow this economy!” I winced, but the usage, which Clinton himself probably did not invent, seems to have caught on, and these days one hears not just of growing the economy, but of growing the network, growing the sales force, growing one’s vocabulary, and so on.

The problem (for me at least) is the mirror image of the one I have with “Bridge May Ice.” Grow is something you normally do by yourself, intransitively, unless you are a farmer, and in that case, your choices for a direct object are starkly limited: corn, beans, alfalfa, and a dozen-odd other crops. This kind of growing is sharply different from the kind Clinton meant; he did not imagine planting a whole new economy and harvesting it in the fall, but only wanted to enlarge the economy that was already there. “Get this economy growing” might have served his turn, or “expand this economy,” but maybe not. Increase? Augment? Intensify?  Every choice seems less pithy or connotatively poorer or otherwise unsatisfactory. Perhaps transitive grow will prevail, but listeners of my vintage will always picture tractors, straw hats, overalls.

“Relatable.” A few years ago, the students in my literature classes were all suddenly using this one to mean “sympathetic” or “readily identified with” — as in “relatable hope,” “relatable problem.”  Like all grave linguistic sins, this one has the excuse of addressing a genuine need; there seems to be nothing else in English that hits the intended target quite cleanly. Sympathetic, the least bad choice, carries an unwanted overtone of pity. But life isn’t fair, and language never promises to have one-word solutions for every semantic need. I foresee a speedy death for the usage, whose underlying logic seems faulty; unless you are saying and hearing “I can relate, man” all the time, the meaning most readily suggested is, “capable of being told or described.”

“Issue” in the sense of “problem” or “defect” seems to have been a bureaucratic and business school euphemism that escaped quarantine and infected general usage. For perhaps a decade and a half, I have been patiently waiting for the fever to break. No luck so far, but I still see a 50/50 hope of recovery.

“Concerning.” Piggybacking on the buzzword status of “concern,” this has recently come into vogue as a very awkward substitute for worrisome, serious, grave, and so on. I miss my guess badly if it proves more than a flash in the pan.

Singular or hypothetical they/them/their. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a TVR piece that mildly opposed this usage and favored more traditional solutions like generic he/him/her. Since then, of course, I have been noticing singular plurals everywhere, as in this sentence, to me stupefyingly strange, from Geoffrey Miller’s brilliant book The Mating Mind:

Your sexual partner will have mutations of their own, but they are almost certain to be different mutations on different genes.

What to think, when one’s intellectual heroes are writing such things? Either the use of they/them/their  as the English pronoun of all work really has been coming on like gangbusters, or, having voiced my doubts, I have fallen into what Language Log calls “the recency illusion” and “the frequency illusion” — the sensation that whatever usage annoys you appeared just yesterday but has somehow already overtaken the idiolect of everyone but you. In fact, as the laissez-faire crowd love to tell you, “singular they” has been around since before Shakespeare, fighting an endless battle with “generic he” and he or she and other alternatives, all of them patently imperfect. Call me Pollyanna, but examples like the above convince me, not that numberless they/them/their/ is approaching ultimate triumph, but only that the pendulum has swung about as far as it can go in that direction, for now. The forecast here is for a mild resurgence of generic he in the near term.

“Advocate for.” For most of my life, “advocate,” with its sturdy Latin etymology, has been a straightforward proposition: to advocate is to speak for a given thing, to support it. You can advocate Irish independence, or abolition of the death penalty, or flossing at bedtime, and in every case the verb engages cleanly with its direct object, no preposition needed.

But suddenly, over the past few years, people have begun saying “advocate for” — a muddier notion. Apparently the “for” was initially a way of bringing an indirect object on board, a somewhat tricky maneuver in English. (Hence the old joke: “Call me a cab.” “Okay, you’re a cab.”) You might simply advocate the stoning of rap artists, but if you did so in your capacity as a paid lobbyist, you advocated for some third party, such as the Texas Christian Voters League; or at least, you did so systematically and professionally. To advocate for was to lobby, electioneer, speak for, represent. More recently, however, the preposition seems to intercede indiscriminately between the verb and either kind of object. “He advocates for sound fiscal policy.” “He advocates for the Moose Club.”

I advocate dropping the awkward for in every case. It adds nothing but confusion when it intercedes before a direct object, and if an indirect object is meant, represent or lobby is a better word anyway. No one will listen to me, but it seems possible that the traditional virtues of advocate, by itself, will reassert themselves over time, while the current fad departs as mysteriously as it came.

Nominalized modifiers or conjunctive participles, or call them any damn thing you please. Recently my file of ugly oddments has been filling up with examples of including, like, and unlike attempting to govern long adverbial modifiers, like toy poodles trying to get their jaws around Apatosaurus femurs. 

     Scientists believe there are at least 405 dead zones worldwide, including near
     South America, Japan, China and southeast Australia.

     But Dolan points out that, unlike at many other companies, most Zappo’s
     workers are full-time employees.

     Mr. Scorsese fills the film with haunting tableaus and performances —    
     including from Tadanobu Asano, as the Interpreter — that tug from the 
     edges, pulling attention away from its center. 

     Unlike in many other environmental negotiations, it was possible for 
     negotiators to calculate the exact effects of their proposals in real time. 

Ugh! The affectation murders clarity and fetishizes clumsiness. Undo the crime by putting a noun after “including,” “unlike,” or whatever word is doing equivalent duty.

But enough! You will have your own miscellany of doubtful and disliked usages, and so will all of your friends and neighbors. If you have a moment, kindly record one or two of your own favorite peeves in the comment section, below. I like to collect such things, because linguistic peeves can be deeply, weirdly instructive. Nearly always, they stem from structural tensions deep in the language —  not from mere ignorance, as the prescriptive demon likes to insist, nor from arbitrary fussiness, as his descriptive counterpart promptly rejoins.

No two lists are ever quite the same, and the outcome of every particular battle is in doubt, by definition. But the net effect of our resistance, of the fact that we are all conservatives sometimes, is surely positive. Without it language might change with bewildering, destructive, pell-mell haste. You might need a translator to speak to your own grandchildren.

Two Thousand Words About a Word

[A column that appeared in The Vocabula Review in March, 2011]

What is it about the word athleticism? I can still remember hearing it for the first time, in the late eighties, on Monday Night Football, from Hall of Fame lineman and broadcaster Dan Deirdorf. Instantly, prompted by no special theory, I groaned. A moment later I snickered, with that mistaken confidence that washes over an English teacher two or three times a week, when he hears some ungainly usage he knows will never catch on.

Of course, catch on is exactly what athleticism has done. For over two decades now, the commentariat has used it with increasing frequency and self-confidence. During February’s  broadcast of the NBA All Star game, it seemed to find its way into the conversation about twice a minute, often with a solemnity that conveyed the speaker’s deep conviction that he had nailed his point. “The question is whether the East bench can counter the West’s athleticism.” All heads nod solemnly, and we fade to the Miller Lite spot.

Now, in my time I have come to terms with plenty of other initially disliked usages:  “lifestyle,” disyllabic “cool,” “parent” and “party” as verbs, viral “diversity,” viral “awesome,” viral “like,” viral “viral,” “web surfing,” phrases on the plan of “so not ready,” “Google” as both noun and verb, singular “they” in some cases, –gate as a suffix meaning “scandal,” “issue” to mean doubt, problem, defect, or all three, “blog,” “text me,” “self-addressed stamped envelope” (think about it), and on and on. In fact a full census of expressions gradually accepted by my inner censor, or anyone’s, is impossible, for the very good reason that such usages blend in till they feel no different from the rest of one’s repertoire. In the monkey house of language we are all shameless mimics and hypocrites; we first denounce emergent usages, then suddenly adopt them as our own: shoddy behavior, but necessary if our jabber is to remain consistent, communal, shared. 

With athleticism, though, the Hallelujah of acceptance eludes me; I go on scowling though the vote seems to be in. What to make of this?  Language is art not science, a thing we do more by intuition than conscious rule, and our feelings about words do not come from nowhere: they always reflect something that has gone on downstairs, in the majestic mill of unconscious language functioning that hums along in all of us. Those English teacher’s pet peeves, which the public dreads and the descriptive linguist dismisses as unscientific, were simple reflexes before they hardened into doctrine. In any case they are reliable surface markers of underlying fault lines, places where the language conflicts with itself, or one group of speakers with another. Then, too, our supposedly trivial quarrels over usage are in fact hugely consequential; a debate over “whom” or “nukular” or “dived” is really a struggle to resolve a whole class of similar instances, to decide where English goes next in its endless evolution.  All this is to say that mere peeves, especially strong and persistent ones, are well worth interrogating. The point is not to defend one’s preference, so much, but to see what the very existence of a preference may tell us about underlying tensions and structures. So here goes.

Start with the sound of the word, which to my ear is mildly uncomfortable and vaguely un-English. Already in athlete and athletic, the transition from th to l is gluey and difficult, so much so that most dictionaries warn against an eternally tempting mispronunciation, ath-a-lete, which lets the tongue fall back and regroup between the two consonants. (Announcer and Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown, with his New Jersey roots, always brings this one out with special gusto. I have yet to hear him tackle athleticism, but would bet that he increases the syllable count to six.) Farther along in the word, there is something slightly daunting about the way the hard c of athletic changes to a soft c in athleticism, making it a trice harder for the hearer to find her way back to the root perhaps. Of course the transformation is fairly common in English:

                  critic           >>      criticism

                  electric        >>      electricity

                  romantic     >>      romanticism

                  fanatic                 >>      fanaticism

                  eclectic       >>      eclecticism

And yet there seems to be a resistance to the shift, as most –ic words refuse or limit it:

                  allergic        >>      *allergicism

                  frantic         >>      *franticism

                  spastic        >>      *spasticism

                  public         >>      *publicism

Also note that *allergicity and *franticity do not pass muster, but publicity and spasticity do. A wonderful website, More Words, apparently designed for linguists, greeting card writers, or the criminally insane, will list in a twinkling all the English words ending in any coda specified by the visitor. For the –ic ending, it tallies 3647 words. But a search on –city yields only 162, while –icity scores 124 and –cism  a mere 73.

All in all, it seems that the –ic  words are fighting against the hard-soft transformation, yielding only when the word thus derived is irresistibly necessary. The change of the k sound to s in Late Latin is an old family scandal in English, and the –ic  words try to keep it quiet.

In any case, I am not completely alone in my dislike of athleticism. I have seen others (and not just huffy professorial types like me) wince at the term; and the quickest of searches turns up this comment at Answers.com:

Although I prefer "athletic ability," sports journalism has used "athleticism" enough times in the past few decades that it has now become a word. It illustrates that language is dynamic, or that the infidels have won.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_athleticism#

This writer seems to experience the word just as I do, as new and bizarre. A difficult fact for both of us, however, is that athleticism is not a neologism at all. The OED lists the earliest occurrence as 1870, in The London Daily News: “The Controversy about athleticism in Universities and Public Schools” – a citation suggesting that the word was not only extant but fairly familiar. The word turns up in a letter from Theodore Roosevelt to his son (“I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism”) and in a novel by Edith Wharton (“Mary Chivers's mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned”). At this stage, in a more literate era, athleticism seems to have been one of those sturdy, little-used words that step forward gracefully, when the time comes, to do exactly the small job that is asked of them. A usage sample cited on numerous websites is notable for its failure to annoy me: “His music is characterized by a happy athleticism” – a bon mot that suddenly makes the application of the word to athletes themselves seem foolishly empty. Somehow, in these sedate older contexts, amid more formal diction flavored with Latin and Greek, the word has none of the smirky triteness the sportserazzi have given it. It fits in.

A surprising possibility, then, is that the problem with athleticism is less newness than oldness: as if the announcers had taken to saying “prithee” in postgame interviews or yelling “Zounds!” after two-handed dunks. Another possibility is that the word is simply being misused. The OED definition is abstract and minimal: “The practice of, or devotion to, athletic exercises; training as an athlete.” And the Daily News writer seems to have used the word to mean something like “the inclusion of sports in school curricula” – not at all what a contemporary sportscaster means when he exclaims over (let’s say) “the stupendous athleticism of Derrick Rose.”

The problem is not that such announcers (educated people after all, and professional talkers) are truly confused about anything; they seem to know what they mean. They are finding a tolerably brief way to say “high energy combined with exceptional timing, skill, speed, strength and agility.”  They are hybridizing “talent” with what coaches call “hustle” and bridging the gap between ability and actual performance. They are naming the quality that distinguishes one kind of highly proficient athlete from another – Michael Jordan, let’s say, from Larry Bird, or Aaron Rodgers from Tom Brady – and their argument for dragooning Roosevelt’s and Wharton’s fusty old term is so far a good one. The word has gone vogue (as Sarah Palin might put it) because it fills a real need.

Here in the rejectionist camp, though, all arguments converge on two main points: 1) the word itself does not quite say what its users want it to; 2) it is too darned fancy for the thing it would name. Let’s take the second, easier point first.  What is it that gives athleticism its geeky, stilted feel, as if the play-by-play lady were channeling physicists and Classics professors? Sheer length is an important factor, but not a sufficient explanation. As several web posters point out, the nearest synonym, “athletic ability,” is really two syllables longer. (Athletic prowess is actually a better synonym, and one syllable shorter, but is apparently disqualified by the highfalutin’, Arthurian resonance of the second word.) English does seem to have a general, mild constraint against overlong words (in contrast to German, for instance), and it seems possible that one five-syllable word just feels longer (and therefore more unctuous) than one of three followed by one of four. In the Wonderland of English grammar, 3 + 4 < 5 might be a true proposition. Yet many of the five-syllable words in English are perfectly ordinary: unbelievable, humiliating, accidentally. And alcoholism, notice, is five syllables long, shares the same suffix as athleticism, and is perfectly commonplace. (Indeed, we are so comfortable with it that the last part has evolved into a productive suffix, as in workaholism.)

Very interestingly, however, athleticism once coexisted with a tidier form, athletism, which the OED lists as current in 1866, and which several websites list as still current, though my briefcase-sized 1987 Webster’s contains no entry. Why not athletism, indeed? It’s shorter, and the OED definition, “characteristic qualities of an athlete,” is closer to the modern sense than the 1870 gloss on athleticism. The question will be the subject of another column, twice as long as this one, which I promise to write when Hell freezes over. Suffice it for now to say that, like a twin strangled in the womb, athletism seems to haunt its surviving brother. Latently aware of it as a different possibility, we feel with added force the circuitous morphology of athleticism, which first takes a noun, athlete, then turns it into an adjective, athletic, and then adds the -ism which re-nouns the whole concoction: at which point an inner voice murmurs, Wasn’t there an easier way to get here?

But probably the bigger problem is that of using -ism here at all. This gets us back to point 1, that despite endless repetition that ought to stabilize meaning, the word somehow keeps saying something unintended: for a split second, you think you are hearing about the athlete’s religion, philosophy, politics, artistic approach, or medical condition rather than her feats on the field. It is not quite true that –ism must denote a system of abstract belief. Many words thus suffixed (handy lists are here and here) can denote concrete entities: baptism, criticism, spoonerism, embolism, anachronism. A few even manage to convey a sense of realized action as well as potential: hooliganism, sadism, terrorism, schism. (And alas, onanism; also tourism, to my mind one of the hardest to square with the general pattern.)  But even in these cases there is a decisive emphasis on an underlying intellectual perspective: alcoholism is just drinking until medical or social science identifies it as a syndrome, and baptism is just splashing water until religion invests the act with holy import. In roughly the same way, so I would argue, athleticism as used by Roosevelt and Wharton brings to bear upon sports the coolly detached perspective of traditional dualism, with its systematic opposition of mind to body and flesh to spirit. In the music reviewer’s “happy athleticism,” sports itself becomes the outside perspective through which a particular musical style is described, in a sharp metaphor underscored with a pleasant bit of assonance. What counts is the implied frame of reference, the sense of intellectual distance and rigor.

But in the modern usage, it is always and only athletes themselves who are being credited with athleticism. It is as if we were to call them young youths or loving lovers or smart geniuses or murderous assassins. The tautology itself might not be fatal; but the –ism, in such a case, becomes decidedly pretentious, claiming a rigorous external perspective that turns out not to be there.

John T. Reed, author of a web page bluntly entitled Dumb Things People Should Stop Saying and Writing, likewise finds the –ism a false signal. He lists athleticism in the “dumb things” column and comments as follows:

. . . there is no word where the suffix “ism” means “ability” or an extraordinary presence of its root prefix, in this case, the word “athlete;” what the guy who coined the word athleticism was searching for was “athleticity;” “icity” or “ity” are suffixes designed to convert an adjective into a noun like “ethnic” to “ethnicity” or “elastic” to “elasticity;” not that I’m pushing for the word “athleticity;” like “athleticism,” it has five syllables; I recommend we stick with “athletic ability” . . .

I suspect that athleticity would fail for another reason as well: it conveys static quality, not action and realization – the second idea the perpetrators of athleticism are trying to squeeze into one word, their reason for reaching beyond “athletic ability” in the first place. What then? Athletickness, athletitude, athletity?  The point may be that English, in the specific case of athlete, cordially declines to effect any such synthesis of the potential and the actual.

Yoicks!  What excuse for so long a discussion of a single word, and one I dislike at that? My hope is that it shows, in an upside-down way, how artful words have to be, how much is implicitly at stake when we debate this or that usage. We all create nonce-words that answer immediate needs. But real words, words that can be used comfortably and efficiently over time, have to be cunningly crafted, meeting diverse requirements of sound and sense and shape in order to fit in with the rest of the language. They keep their meanings not just by usage, as if each had a separate contract with the speaking public, but by their overall position in the lexicon, which holds the individual word in place like an invisible framework.

To many of us, still, athleticism does not quite fit into English.  It shimmers, wobbles, and will not stay in place, or it shakes the framework, setting off troubling subterranean alarms. Whether the word in its recent sense will continue its climb to full acceptance is anyone’s guess; word fortunes are as hard to predict as stock movements, and for roughly the same reason: all the myriad positives and negatives have already been factored into today’s price. But two things at least can be predicted with confidence: if athleticism ever attains full status, the lexicon itself will be ever so slightly changed; and this will matter more than most people think.