“You have an attitude.”

Adjectives, Euphemisms, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “You have an attitude.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 46,200 matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the negative connotation beneath its euphemistic form.

Someone usually says “You have an attitude.” to tell the listener that he or she has a bad or negative attitude.

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

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “You have an attitude.”?

The statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “attitude” must be modified by an adjective to give it value.

Otherwise, you are speaking in euphemisms.

“Beware the ides of March.”

Nouns, Plurals

When I saw this morning that today was March 15, I thought of the statement “Beware the ides of March.”

This statement, which refers to the 15th of March, is from a soothsayer in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

But I still wondered about the origin of the plural noun “ides”, so I looked up the word at dictionary.com.

And I learned a few things.

  • The word “ides” is from the ancient Roman calendar and dates back to approximately 1330.
  • The word “ides” refers not only to the 15th of March but also to the 15th of May, July, and October.
  • The word “ides” refers to the 13th of every other month in the ancient Roman calendar.
  • Eight days in each month collectively are known as the ides, but only the final one (e.g., the 15th of March) gets to be called specifically the “ides” of that month. The day before a month’s “ides” day is called “the day before the ides”, two days before a month’s “ides” day can be called “two days before the ides”, and so on.

Snooping around the Web some more, I learned that astrologists also care about the ides.

So now I am wondering whether we should be careful about May 15, July 15, and October 15, too.

That is what I get for being inquisitive!

“Congressman”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns

The U.S. Congress has been in the news a lot recently, creating bills to spend hundreds of billions of dollars here and hundreds of billions more there.

And I have been thinking about the noun “congressman” as a title.

The U.S. Congress comprises two branches: the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

So technically a “congressman” or “congresswoman” is either a U.S. Senator or a U.S. Representative.

But do not dare called a U.S. Senator by the title “Congressman” or “Congresswoman”; oh, the horror!

No, a U.S. Senator with the surname “Hotair” wants to be called “Senator Hotair”, not “Congressman Hotair” or “Congresswoman Hotair”.

In contrast, a U.S. Representative with the surname “Hotair” typically prefers to be called “Congressman Hotair” or “Congresswoman Hotair”, not “Representative Hotair”.

I suspect that part of this is because the word “congress” often refers to the U.S. legislative branch and not to a state legislative branch, whereas the word “representative” is often used to refer to elected officials in state legislative branches and is much less commonly used to refer to elected officials in the U.S. House of Representatives.

So “congressman” (or “congresswoman”) is more prestigious because it is more often associated with a higher position (the U.S. legislative branch) than is “representative” (applicable to many, but not all, state legislative branches).

But I also believe that “congressman” is more popular than “representative” in modern American English because it is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say the three-syllable “congressman” than it is to say the five-syllable “representative”.

In contrast, but consistent with my hypothesis, because the five-syllable “representative” is only slightly more complex than the four-syllable “congresswoman”, we tend to hear and see “Representative” almost as often as “Congresswoman” in reference to female members of the U.S. House of Representatives.