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.