Nouns

“Perogative” Revisited

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I got an interesting email message last Sunday from one of your fellow readers of this blog.

I will refer to him simply as “Ian” because I don’t have permission to use his surname.

Ian had read “Perogative” and wanted to share his own perspective from the United Kingdom.

When I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) for my original blog post, I got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,750,000 matches
  • “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,610,000 matches

This told me that Web authors had favored the incorrect word over the correct word by a ratio of 1.02-to-1, which is horrible!

When Ian tries to access Google.com in the UK, Google auto-redirects him to Google.co.uk, where he got these statistics:

  • “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 244,000 matches
  • “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 4,000,000 matches

I could not exactly reproduce Ian’s results, but I searched at Google.co.uk and got nearly the same ratio that he did.

The 16.4-to-1 dominance of the correct spelling at Google.co.uk puzzles Ian and his fiancée, given that they agree that the incorrect pronunciation and spelling of “prerogative” is very common in the UK.

“antidotal evidence”

Adjectives, Mispronunciations, Nouns

I saw this yesterday in a message about story-related evidence.

Problem:
The adjective “antidotal” has nothing to do with story-related evidence.

Explanation:
The word “antidotal” is the adjectival form of the noun “antidote”, which means a medicine for counteracting a poison.

The word “anecdotal” is the adjectival form of the noun “anecdote”, which means a short account of an incident as an unpublished narrative.

Those who confuse these two adjectives probably are distracted by

  1. the fact that both adjectives have “dotal” — spelled D-O-T-A-L — in them because both nouns have “dote” — spelled D-O-T-E — in them,
  2. the fact that both adjectives start with A-N, and
  3. the fact that both adjectives are nine letters long.

The noun “antidote” is constructed from the prefix “anti-“, which means against, and “dote”, whose origin essentially means given. In other words, the roots of “antidote” when assembled mean given against.

The noun “anecdote” is constructed from the prefix “an-“, which means not, and “ecdote”. The “ecdote” part of “anecdote” is a combination of “ec”, which means out, and “dote”, whose origin, as just noted, means given.

So the “ecdote” part of “anecdote” essentially means published. In other words, the roots of “anecdote” when assembled mean not published.

Solution:
“anecdotal evidence”

“A prestige watch is part of your image.”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

I saw this in the subject line of a spam email message a week ago.

But this statement means nothing except for the positive implication that the spammer wants to give it.

Someone usually says a statement such as “It is a prestige product.” to tell the listener that “it” is a high-prestige product.

But the noun “prestige” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “A prestige watch is part of your image.”?

This statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “prestige” must be hyphenated with an adjective to form a compound adjective that can indicate the value of the noun — in this case, “watch” — that the compound adjective modifies.

In contrast to the inherently meaningless statement “A prestige watch is part of your image.”, here are some meaningful statements:

  • “A high-prestige watch should be part of your image.”
  • “A low-prestige watch should not be part of your image.”
  • “A prestigious watch should be part of your image.”

I believe that the use of the noun “prestige” in place of the adjective “prestigious” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to speak or write the two-syllable, eight-letter noun than it is to speak or write the three-syllable, eleven-letter adjective.

So respond with a “Huh?” the next time that someone says to you a statement such as “It is a prestige product.”, and see what happens.