Here are some questions we see a lot on the Speakeasy, which is a weekly show about language on ABC Radio Perth. Listen here, or on the ABC Speakeasy page.

You can check here to see if someone has already asked your question, as well as find fascinating answers to other language questions you never imagined.

Which letter is silent in the word scent?

It’s the C.

We know that because in Old French, which is where this word comes from, there’s no C. The word was sentir (to smell, feel, touch, and so on).

So then how did the C get there? It looks like the C snuck in around the 1600s, possibly because of words like ascent, descent, or even science.

Why do we say things go pear-shaped?

There are a lot of guesses for this one. Here are the ones I don’t believe:

  • Probably not because some people put weight on in their lower half
  • Probably not because a badly-thrown circular pot can go pear shaped.
  • Probably not a glass-blowing term, where if you overheat a round glass thing, it turns the wrong shape.

The best answer (I think) is that RAF pilots in the 1940s would try and fail to do a perfect loop-de-loop, making instead a pear shape. Why do I believe this answer? Because when you look up pear-shaped in the Oxford English Dictionary, the very first references are to aircraft. That makes me think the RAF really is where this term got started.

Well, not quite started. There’s an earlier meaning of pear-shaped: having a mellow or sonorous tone. And that was good, not bad.

Just one more thing: when things go pear-shaped, it’s bad, but we don’t think pears are bad. Pears are great! We love pears. And pear-shaped people.

Can you say something is very unique?

The objection here is that a thing can’t be more or less unique than anything else. It’s as though a thing is either unique or it’s not.

Well, here’s a funny thing. Many words have been thought to be absolute — either on or off, yes or no — but they’ve changed to be a little more flexible.

In 1838, Joseph Wright published A Philosophical Grammar of the English Language, and here’s a list of some of the other words that he thought couldn’t be very anything — or in other words, they “admit of no variation of state”.

  • honest
  • true
  • untrue
  • quiet
  • full
  • empty
  • proper
  • odd
  • wet
  • dry

If you scan this list, you’ll probably realise that you use modifiers with a lot of them. Doesn’t it make sense that one child could be more quiet than another? Or that one situation could be odd, but another situation could be very odd? Yet if Mr Wright heard you say that your coat got wet in the rain, and after a bit of time in front of the fire, it was less wet — or perhaps even drier — he might have given you a right philosophical ticking off.

He also wrote: “To these may be added the names of colours”. But of course something can get redder and redder. I threw some cleaning stuff into the washing machine, and now my whites are whiter!

It was a bit silly for Mr Wright to claim that unique couldn’t be modified. By the time he wrote his book in 1838, people had been writing almost unique, quite unique, and more unique since the mid-1700s. And that’s just a hundred years after unique first appeared in print, so it didn’t long for people to start adapting it to mean something like unusual.

The lesson here is that when you claim that you can’t use very unique, you sound like Mr Wright, and you don’t want to do that. Unique may once have been used as an absolute, but it’s not one now.

Further reading
Is It Wrong to Say ‘Very Unique’? | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/very-unique-and-absolute-adjectives

Why an invite, and not an invitation?
Can you gift something, or are you giving?
What about learnings?

People sometimes think that it sounds strange to talk about an invite, or gifting a thing to someone. They feel annoyed at expressions that they think are new. Ask people when was the first instance of learnings, and they’ll probably guess that it was from the wild days of the 1960s.

Then they’re surprised to find that there’s nothing new about these words. People have written about gifting as a verb since the 1500s. (It was usually God that gifted people special abilities, but not always.) People have proffered invites since the 1650s.

And the first recorded instance of learnings was from Francis Bacon in 1605. Here’s the quote:

He did send his diuine truth into the world, wayted on with other Learnings

Francis Bacon, The twoo bookes of Francis Bacon: Of the proficience and aduancement of learning, diuine and humane

Notice the word divine spelled with a U. Yep, learnings is so old that people have been writing the word since before the letters U and V had sorted themselves out.

Here’s another thing: people sometimes act as though these words are interchangeable. But I don’t think an invite is the same as an invitation. If you tell someone you’ll send them a calendar invitation (instead of a calendar invite), you might sound weird and snooty. Gifting is a bit like giving, but not exactly the same. You wouldn’t gift someone a sandwich, but you might give them one. These words have their jobs to do.

At any rate, these expressions are not new and wild. People are 400 years too late to complain about this.

If you’re disgruntled when you’re upset, can you be gruntled when you’re happy?

It seems to make sense, doesn’t it? Take disgruntled, remove the dis-… and voila! Perfectly content and gruntled.

Except this dis- is not a not. Not really.

A funny thing about negative prefixes: they like to glom onto words with negative meanings. For example, you could disembowel someone. (Please don’t.) But if we remove the dis-, what does it mean to embowel someone? Are we stuffing more bowels into them? No — in the 1500s, people used embowel just the same as we would use disembowel, to remove them. But dis– jumped on around the 1600s because…

Okay, this is going to be a little complicated, and you can skip this paragraph if you don’t care about Latin prefixes. The em– in embowel looks kind of like in-. You know: empower (put power into), embody (to be in a body). But this em– is different. It’s really Latin ex– (out of). As in: emerge (to come out of), emigrate (to leave a place), and so on. You can see how it must have worked: combine ex– and bowel, and then change the ex– to an em– to make it sound better. Embowel! But that just made it confusing, and people must have added the dis– just to make sure everyone understood. Embowelling didn’t make sense without dis-.

We’re back. So let’s get to disgruntled. It’s a whole story.

Start with grunt. If you’re grunting, you’re unhappy. And if you’re gruntling, you’re really unhappy. What’s the –le? That’s a suffix people used in Old English to mean that someone does something over and over again, and if you’re a cool linguist, you can call it a frequentative. It pops up a lot in English; if you hear one noise, it’s a crack, but if you hear lots of cracks? It’s a crackle. So that person who is gruntling and grumbling is really getting unhappy.

Now this gruntle — with its somewhat negative meaning — attracts the prefix dis-, just so it can have a bit more oomph. Voilá: disgruntled! So people think if you snap off the dis-, you’ll be happy, but no. Some people are never happy. They just stay gruntled.

Why do flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?

This is another case of confusing prefixes. The prefix in– here seems to mean not; ergo, inflammable would be not flammable.

But no. There are two in– prefixes. The other in– actually means in, like with input. So if something is inflammable, you can put flame into it. It can be inflamed.

Confusing, isn’t it? And for such an important warning. So it would probably be better to say that something is non-flammable instead. unless it really is flammable. Or inflammable.

It drives me crazy when people say…

Stop.

Language can be fun, and when you get tense about it, you’re robbing yourself of the enjoyment of discovery.

So when you feel yourself getting tense about other people’s language usage, relax… and realise that you’re on the edge of learning something new.

It could be that thing they’re saying could be something new coming into the language. And that’s interesting! We don’t often get a window into the future like that! (More likely, though, it’s very old and you just hadn’t noticed until recently.)

Or that thing they’re saying could be a marker of their identity; their age, their place or language of origin, their race, their social class, their communities of interest, or other social factors. Language is a proxy for all of these things, and when you get angry because someone is different… maybe it’s time to settle down, go to that quiet place in your innermost being, and think about what it is you don’t like about “those people”. It’s really not about language; it’s about the people.

The good news is that you can learn from it. You can learn how long people have been saying it, and it’s not a big deal. You can find out how words and expressions change. You can learn more about what’s in people’s social world, and how that influences the terms they use.

The more you know about how language works, the less you need to get angry about these things, and the more you can enjoy being in the whirl and tumble of the greatest and most powerful crowd-sourced project that humanity has ever produced: language.