Bad Salon.com! Bad!

[taimatsu]

I'm a 28-year-old woman, a registered Democrat, and a staunch enough liberal that I take would-be epithets such as "flaming," "knee-jerk" and "bleeding-heart" as compliments. (From here which may or may not be visible - I have a subscription.)

'Epithet' is not necessarily pejorative! An epithet can be good or bad! Argh! Those are not 'would-be' epithets, they are epithets, however she chooses to take them. Argh!

Dictionary.com does give a secondary meaning of 'An abusive or contemptuous word or phrase' but since sense 1 is "(a) A term used to characterize a person or thing, such as rosy-fingered in rosy-fingered dawn or the Great in Catherine the Great. (b) A term used as a descriptive substitute for the name or title of a person, such as The Great Emancipator for Abraham Lincoln." it makes no sense to use it in the limited sense when an expanded sense is more common!

It's true the word 'epithet' is often used to refer to negative descriptions, but the context often elaborates on that and avoids this confusion. The trouble with the usage above is that the author is using 'epithet' and 'compliment' as antonyms, which they are not.

Any comments?

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

No. No comments.

(Bugger!)

[darcydodo]

Any comments?

Yeah, that some people are complete fuckwits and evidently have never bothered to learn the actual definitions of words in their own language. What have we come to?!

[chrisvenus]

Any comments?

You mean apart from stop being so anal? Nope. None. :)

[taimatsu]

I knew someone would have to bring that up :)

There is value in pedantry, though I know you'll probably never agree. 'Flaunt' and 'flout', for example, have different meanings, yet people use 'flaunt' to mean 'flout' so that we are losing the difference between them and hence some usefulness and clarity in our language. Which is not good. I think it's worth pointing out this kind of thing sometimes.

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[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

But it's not a new phenomenon. Just look at etymological roots of contemporary words and phrases. Given the fact we have successfully communicated to a reasonable degree as far back as the earliest recorded civilization, it's a fair bet that we're not running the risk of understanding each other even less any time soon. Not for your above-stated reason, anyway.

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[chrisvenus]

Bah! Making me write sensible things!

it makes no sense to use it in the limited sense when an expanded sense is more common!

How do you know it is the more common sense? Clearly in this author's case it is not the more common sense (since if it were then she clearly knows this so if she is choosingt o ignore the most common sense she is doing it as a deliberate use of language rather than through ignorance). Language is used differently in different places. I don't think I am ever likely to have used the word epithet and I don't recall hearign it used (but when do you really recall hearing words used?)

The discussion on whether we are losing clarity is one that you could probably write a huge entry about. I may be wrong but you strike me as somebody who would complain if somebody gave a new meaning to a word since it wasn't the correct meaning. Either way this sort of thing happens as much as the loss of meanings of words, I'm sure, which is why we can still understand each other. Though apparently there are people who believe we are losing words to the extent that our language will become tonal to differentiate meanings on overloaded words. Long term but something interesting you might want to find more info on if you really care.

As an afterthought having re-read that I think you may be missing her point by being too clinical. They are epithets (in your more general sense) but at the same time they *are* meant to be insults. Therefore she might actually mean "epithet" as in your "less common" definition.

In all honesty I don't mind you pointing this kind of thing out. What I do think is that you really can be too pedantic, not just in that you point out errors but that you point out errors that sometimes may be technical "by the letter" errors but are not in actual fact errors. In this case without asking the author we won't ever know if she knows the difference or not.

I guess I'd use the word "intolerance" which may be exaggerating somewhat but the whole "Argh!"ing thing did seem like a bit of an overreaction to somebody only slightly misusing a word when it is, arguably, not even a misuse...

Oh, and as a final note:

Pedantry - The act, character, or manners of a pedant

Pedant - One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge
or a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit

Both of those definitions of pedant (I left out the one from www.dict.com that was entirely inappropriate) do in fact imply that pedantry is a bad thing (cf pretender and more than they merit).

So while I will admit that accuracy and knowledge are good things I will disagree that pedantry has value. Though if you did just mean correcting things then we can probably find grounds for agreement. :)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm at least unconvinced that the neutral sense is more common; IME when people say "epithet" (which is not that often...) there is usually a strong negatve connotation.

it makes no sense to use it in the limited sense when an expanded sense is more common

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Why not? (You never use a word in its less common sense?)

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[j4.livejournal.com]

I disagree. No, before you ask, I haven't done any research into which is the more common usage; but I've never before come across the idea that the word "epithet" had any negative connotations!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The negative sense seems to be near-ubiquitous in e.g. newspapers. Fowler whinges that the negative sense is a "corruption".

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[taimatsu]

Most terms which are referred to as 'epithets' are negative. By this I mean that sentences such as 'He used unpleasant epithets such as 'vile harridan' to describe her.' are more common than sentences such as ''Mesmerising', 'enchanting' and 'beautiful' were among the epithets heard from the audience after her performance.' However, both are perfectly correct usages.

What I'm trying to get at is that the original meaning of 'epithet' is neutral, not coming down on one side or the other. If it is twisted to mean less than this, confusion is created with other correct (if rare) uses to describe positive language.

What really got me in the original article was the use of 'epithet' and 'compliment' as opposites. A compliment is actually a subset of the group called 'epithets'! It makes no sense! Aaaaaaargh!

I'm not going to reply in detail to everything here - I can't be bothered really with the 'why be picky' argument. Either one gets it or one doesn't, and we must agree to differ. So if I don't pedant at my friends' mistakes, will my friends refrain from calling me 'anal' every time I pick up on a mistake in some other source? Mmmm?

Re: it makes no sense to use it in the limited sense when an expanded sense is more common

[taimatsu]

Sorry. I put that badly. I meant specifically, it makes almost no sense to use the narrow definition because it is a subset of the wider definition, and the nature of the exact usage quoted means that leads to major double-takes - or did for me.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You might as well complain that "very" doesn't mean "true" any more.

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[j4.livejournal.com]

Do you mean that "epithet" is used in newspapers to mean "negative description applied to a person", or rather that most of the "epithets" referred to in newspapers happen to be negative? If you genuinely mean the former, then I can honestly say I've never seen this usage in newspapers (or anywhere else), and I'd be interested to see some examples next time you happen to come across them.

(Referring to a specific negative description of somebody as an "epithet" does not count as using the word "epithet" to mean a negative description of somebody, any more than referring to a sofa as an item of furniture means that the word "furniture" always denotes a sofa.)

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[damerell.livejournal.com]

Possibly part of the way that the language manages to evolve without a breakdown of meaning _is_ that the process is retarded by prescriptivists.

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[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

That was the posit I was going to raise had Lucy responded, but she didn't :-)

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[damerell.livejournal.com]

The idea that prescriptivists are a necessary part of the process certainly appeals to me.

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[ixwin.livejournal.com]

Referring to a specific negative description of somebody as an "epithet" does not count as using the word "epithet" to mean a negative description of somebody, any more than referring to a sofa as an item of furniture means that the word "furniture" always denotes a sofa

That's not quite a fair comparison. It's more as if a sofa was more commonly described as an item of furniture, but a table was more commonly described as a household object. Someone who'd never looked up the terms in a dictionary, might then reasonably assume that "furniture" had something to do with being-made-of-fabric or ability-to-be-sat-on.

Having said that, I agree that I'd never picked up on epithet having any negative connotations, although I probably came across it in books before encountering it in newspapers.