Month: June 2008

“Quote” vs. “Quotation”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Versus

I have been wondering about these two nouns for awhile.

Problem:
One of these nouns is less appropriate in more formal situations.

Explanation:
According to Dictionary.com, the noun “quote” has been accepted — at least informally — as a truncation of the noun “quotation” for more than a century.

However, most consider “quote” to be less formal than “quotation” and not appropriate in all situations.

For example, while many consider “quotes from the Three Stooges” to be acceptable, fewer consider “quotes from the Bible” to be acceptable.

I doubt that the phrase “price quote” will disappear from American English.

It’s valuable, though, to know that “quote” is a truncation of “quotation” and therefore is less formal.

Although using “quote” as a truncation of “quotation” does not lead to ambiguity (in contrast to “install” — a truncation of either “installer” or “installation”), I believe that this use is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to say the one-syllable word than it is to say the three-syllable word.

Solution:
Use “quote” in informal situations; use “quotation” otherwise.

“… good number to reach you back at?”

Prepositions

I heard this yesterday from a customer-service agent.

Problems:
1. The question ended on a preposition.
2. The word “back” is a poor substitute for what the agent should have said.

Explanation:
The full question was “Is this a good number to reach you back at?”

The agent wanted to confirm that the telephone number that she had would be a valid number to call in the event of getting disconnected during the current call.

Removing the preposition “at” from the end of the question requires rewording “to reach you … at?” as “at which to reach you …?”; that solves the first problem.

The second problem comes from laziness on the part of the agent. This is obvious when one realizes that “back” was a substitute for “in the event that we get disconnected”. This gives us the solution to the second problem.

Solution:
“… good number at which to reach you in the event that we get disconnected?”

“… as seemless as possible.”

Adjectives, Misspellings

I saw this in an email message from a new supervisor of a department of employees.

Problem:
The word “seemless” is nonsensical.

Explanation:
The supervisor sent a “Good Morning!” email message to the employees in an existing department to which he had just been assigned.

He was trying to tell them that the transition from the previous supervisor to him would be smooth — that effectively it would have no seams.

That gives us the solution.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “seamless” — 33,700,000 matches
  • “seemless” — 771,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “seamless” over “seemless” by a ratio of 43.7:1 — good, but not great, especially given the nearly one million matches for the misspelled word.

Solution:
“… as seamless as possible.”