synergy

16 January 2014

Words come into and go out of fashion. Sometimes, a particular word will catch a wave of popularity and become overused to the point where it becomes essentially meaningless and is used primarily to show that the speaker is fashionable and up on the latest trends. Such words are buzzwords, and you often see them in business writing, as firms indicating through their language that they are on the cutting edge of their field by using cutting edge language. A good example of a buzzword is synergy. The word hit its peak of popularity in the early 1980s. It is still common, but perhaps not as overused as it once was.

Synergy is the cumulative effect of coordinated action by a number of independent factors. Anytime you have the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, you have synergy. It’s a modern word coined from Latin roots. The Oxford English Dictionary has one citation of synergy’s use from 1660, but this appears to be an outlier, and the use didn’t catch on back then. It was recoined in the mid-nineteenth century in medical jargon, where it was used to describe the effects of multiple organs working together. From an 1847 translation of Ernst Feuchtersleben’s The Principles of Medical Psychology:

The transition to the homogeneous is called irradiation (in motor nerves, synergy,—in sensitive, sympathy).

It took about a hundred years for the business world to become wise to the word, and synergy began appearing in business writing in the late 1950s. From Raymond Cattell’s 1957 Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement:

Immediate synergy through group membership [...] expresses the energy going into the group life as a result of satisfaction with fellow members.

Synergy continued to be unremarkably used for several decades, until suddenly in the 1980s, for some reason or another, synergy became a business imperative. As The Economist put it in its 28 November 1981 issue:

Others, through mergers (eg, research houses into retail brokerage houses), have demonstrated that there is something to be said for synergy.

Suddenly, every company had to be exploiting the “synergistic effects” of something or other. The word appeared on just about every executive resume. Products named synergy hit the market. Companies even changed their names to incorporate the word.

Of course, in reality nothing had changed. Businesses have been “exploiting synergistic effects” for as long as there has been business. The word synergy became so overused that it became something of a joke. Since then, synergy has settled back into the frequency of use it had prior to the furor of the 1980s. It can again be used without triggering rolling eyes and sniggering, but one should be careful to not overuse it, or the synergistic effect of that overuse will once again become negative.

Source:

“synergy, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

sur-

27 February 2017

The other day I was wondering about the word surname. What is the sur-? prefix. The etymology, while perhaps not immediately obvious, is quite straightforward; the sur- is a French variation on the Latin super, meaning above or beyond. It comes to us, like many French roots, from the Normans. So a surname is one’s second or higher name, and the word dates to the fourteenth century.

But there are other sur- words, some like surname, borrowed whole from French (Anglo-Norman surnum, early fourteenth century), while others have been formed in English:

surcharge, an additional charge, originally a verb (1429) borrowed from the Old French surcharger and turned into a noun by 1601

survive, to live beyond or after (1473), from the Anglo-Norman survivre, which was formed from the Latin vivere, to live

surpass, to go over or beyond (1588), from the French surpasser.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. sur-, prefix

suborn

19 January 2019

Suborn is a verb that is usually heard in the context of lying under oath, and indeed roughly half of the instances of the verb in the Corpus of Contemporary American English are in the phrase suborn perjury. The verb clearly means to induce someone to commit a crime, but where does it come from?

Like many English legal terms, this one comes from French, a result of the Normans taking over the English legal system after 1066. (One of my favorite podcasts is a legal one, Opening Arguments, where the interlocutors are fond of jokingly attributing legal terms to “thirteenth-century Saxony.” But while the principles of English common law do indeed have roots in pre-Conquest, Germanic notions of justice, English legal jargon is usually from French.) In particular the English suborn comes from the Anglo-Norman suburner or subhorner, the meaning of which is remarkably consistent with the present-day English verb.

From a 1358 city of London statute:

Et plus curial chose serroit et accordaunt a ley et reson que homme se acquittat par son serment et siz bones gentz de jurer ovesqe lui ou par enquest de doze hommes qe par deux, issint subornés et faucement procures et enformés
(And because it would be more seemly and more according to law and reason that man should acquit himself his oath and that of six good people swearing with him, or by an inquest of twelve men, than by the witness of two thus suborned and tortiously procured and primed)

Of course, with the word being French, we can trace suborn’s roots back to Latin, where the basic meaning of the verb subornare is to equip, to adorn, but where it was also used to refer to inducing or inciting a crime, especially perjury. For instance we have this from Cicero’s Pro Aulo Caecina 71, a speech he gave in 69 B.C.E.:

itaque in ceteris controversiis atque iudiciis cum quaeritur aliquid factum necne sit, verum an falsum proferatur, et fictus testis subornari solet et interponi falsae tabulae, non numquam honesto ac probabili nomine bono viro iudici error obici.
(Therefore in other disputes and trials, when the question at issue is, whether a thing has been done or not, whether what is alleged be true or false; and when false witnesses are sometimes suborned, and false documents foisted in; it is possible that sometimes a virtuous judge may be led into error by a seemingly honorable and probable pretense.)

The etymology of suborn is, therefore, quite ordinary and straightforward, but it is unusual in that the meaning and patterns of usage have been preserved pretty much unchanged for over two millennia.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Universities of Aberyswyth and Swansea, 1977–92, s. v. suburner.

Bateson, Mary, ed. Borough Customs, vol. 1, Seldon Society 18, London, 1904, 169–70.

Corpus of Contemporary American English, Brigham Young University, 2019.

Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1879, s. v. suborno.

Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, June 2012, s. v. suborn, v.

stiff upper lip

17 July 2019

Having a stiff upper lip is considered the quintessential British quality of resolution in the face of adversity. But surprisingly, the phrase itself is an American import to Britain.

The phrase first appears in the pages of the newspaper the Massachusetts Spy on 14 June 1815:

I kept a stiff upper lip, and bought [a] license to sell my goods.

Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas C. Haliburton uses it in his 1837 novel The Clockmaker:

Its a proper pity sich a clever woman should carry such a stiff upper lip.

And it appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

“Well, good-by, Uncle Tom; keep a stiff upper lip,” said George.

The earliest British citation in the Oxford English Dictionary isn’t until 1887, when it appears in the newspaper The Spectator.

Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. stiff, adj., n., and adv.

speed

12 January 2014

Speed is a word with a rather straightforward etymology, but one with several archaic meanings that may be surprising to some. It is from the Old English word sped, which, among other senses, carried the meaning of quickness, swiftness that we are familiar with today.

In Old English the sense of quickness was a secondary and rarer sense of the word. In the extant literature it only appears in the dative plural form spedum and is used adverbially to mean speedily. (In Old English the dative plural of a noun can function as an adverb.) For example, there are these lines from the Old English poem Genesis, 2033–35:

                    Him þa broðor þry
æt spræce þære    spedum miclum
hældon hyge-sorge    heardum wordum.
(In that conversation, the three brothers very speedily healed his heart-sorrow with hard words.)

In Middle English speed is still mainly used adverbially, but as part of an adverbial phrase, often with a preposition. An example from the mid-thirteenth century poem The Story of Genesis and Exodus, line 1598:

Fro bersabe he ferde wið sped.
(He went from Beersheba with speed.)

It isn’t until the Early Modern period that speed starts to be widely used as a general noun meaning quickness, as in these lines from Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost, 2:699–700:

Back to thy punishment,
False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings.

Going back to Old English, the Anglo-Saxons more commonly used sped to mean abundance, wealth and power, might. These senses died out in the early part of the Middle English period, not being found after about 1250, so they are among the words and meanings that didn’t survive the transition from Old to Middle English.

The Anglo-Saxons could also use sped to mean success, good fortune. This sense of speed was somewhat more successful and is commonly found into the early modern era. It is still found in Scottish dialect and in the old-fashioned, but not quite obsolete, wish of good speed.

The verb to speed follows a similar pattern. The Old English verb spedan means to succeed or prosper. It isn’t until the Middle English period that it starts to be used to mean to hasten.

In its Indo-European roots, speed is part of a larger group of words relating to swaths of time and distance and movement toward a goal. Some examples from other languages include the German spät (late), the Latin spatium (space), and the Old Slavic speti (to thrive).

Speed also has some specialized meanings that have developed with technology. The sense meaning the gear ratio of a bicycle, as in a ten-speed bike, dates to 1866 and the early forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede. The application of the word to photographic film dates to 1892. One wonders how long this photographic sense will survive into the digital age—probably for quite a while as digital cameras also have a speed setting and film will probably remain in use for specialized applications for decades to come. And the use of speed as a slang term for methamphetamine is first attested to in 1967, one of the children of the Summer of Love.

Sources:

Bosworth and Toller, “sped,” “spedan,” An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 1898.

Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins...And How We Know Them, Oxford University Press, 2005, 192.

“sped(e (n.),” “speden (v.),” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

“speed, n.,” “speed, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.