In Praise of the Hideous Bastard

I. A Declaration, or the Stake of a Man Who Counts

Let us begin with a confession that ought to disqualify the author at once: I work with numbers, not words. I arrive at the great quarrel over whether a Greek root may decently be seen in public with a Latin one as a tourist arrives at a civil war, with no credentials in philology, a calculator, and a strong wish to see the sights.

I do, however, have a stake to declare, and it is a sentimental one. I love pure mathematics. I love it as one loves a cathedral in a country whose religion one does not practise: the proof that the primes never run out, the square root of two declining for ever to be a fraction, the whole cold edifice in which nothing is true until it is shown and nothing shown is ever taken back. G. H. Hardy, its most elegant propagandist, wrote in A Mathematician’s Apology (1940) that “I have never done anything ‘useful’”, and the essay around that sentence treats it as a point in his favour.

Then Monday comes, and I go to work, where the mathematics is applied, approximate, rounded to two decimal places and paid for. Business does not, on the whole, commission existence proofs.

So I confess to a soft spot for the language purist. He is the pure mathematician of the dictionary: rigorous, beautiful, correct, and almost entirely beside the point. I propose to defend him, convict him, and keep him — in that order.

II. The Case for the Prosecution, or Not a Nice Word

Let us first do the purists the courtesy of stating their case at its strongest, because it is better than its reputation.

The charge is that English builds words by bolting a Greek front on to a Latin back. Television is Greek tele-, far, joined to Latin visio, seeing. Automobile is Greek autos, self, with Latin mobilis, movable. Sociology runs the other way, Latin socius with Greek -logia trailing behind. None of this is in dispute. Nor is the principle contemptible. A word made from a single language is a small coherent system: whoever knows the language can take it apart, extend it and guess at its cousins. Consistency of notation is a real good, as anyone who has inherited another man’s spreadsheet will confirm, and it is precisely what a mathematician would demand of his own symbols.

The prosecution has also retained distinguished counsel. Havelock Ellis wrote in 1897 that “‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it”. In January 1899 the New York Times judged automobile, half Greek and half Latin, so nearly indecent that it hesitated to print the word at all. H. W. Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), drew up a blacklist of hybrids of every parentage, on which he expected each reader to find something to deplore; it included amoral, bureaucracy, coastal, pacifist and speedometer. And in the Manchester Guardian of 4 October 1930 the critic Ivor Brown allowed that teleoptics might have been cumbrous, but pronounced television a bastard, and a hideous one.

The most celebrated witness is C. P. Scott, for fifty-seven years that paper’s editor, and here the record wants handling with tongs. Quote Investigator, which has done the archival digging, finds the earliest evidence in a memoir by Kenneth Adam, published in The Listener in 1955, which has Scott in 1930 remarking of the new coinage: “Not a nice word. Greek and Latin mixed. Clumsy.” That much the investigators think credible. The celebrated sequel, that no good would come of the device, is another matter: the earliest attribution they can find is from 1956, under the byline of Bernard Levin, twenty-four years after Scott had died and could no longer be consulted. In 1960 an advertisement printed in his old newspaper had him saying it of the telephone, a word of unimpeachably Greek descent on both sides. By 1984 a syndicated puzzle was crediting the line to H. L. Mencken. The best-known complaint about a hybrid word thus turns out to be a hybrid: a Scott front, a Levin back, and a Mencken badge on the bonnet.

I concede every count. The words are mongrels; the pedigree charts are accurate; the aesthetic objection is not foolish. The prosecution rests, and has been resting for well over a century.

III. What the Romans Did, or the Kennel

The difficulty begins when one asks what, exactly, is being protected.

Latin, to start with, kept no such rule. The classicist Elisabetta Magni has documented the Latin of the Republican era borrowing a Greek suffix, -ĭnus, and fastening it to native stock such as iuncus, a rush, and fungus, which needs no gloss. Hybrids of Greek and Latin were therefore being made in Latin, by Romans, no later than the first century BC. In the same paper she cites a remark of Biville’s to the effect that hybridisation is to the single word what code-switching is to the sentence. The purist, in short, is defending the chastity of a language that had been seeing Greek on the side since the Republic.

Nor can I, of all people, cast the first stone, for the vocabulary of my own trade is a kennel. Polynomial is Greek poly- stapled to Latin nomen, on the model of binomial. The nine-sided figure is a nonagon, Latin nonus on a Greek ending; the all-Greek enneagon exists, is arguably the more correct, and is the rarer of the two. The metric system, as first laid down in the 1790s, took its multiples from Greek and its fractions from Latin, so that a kilometre is a thoroughbred and a centimetre a cross. One commits a hybrid every time one measures a shelf.

Pure alternatives were offered, and declined. In July 1899 the Boston Sunday Globe noted a champion of autokineton, all Greek and philologically spotless; the paper granted him his philology and reported that the public was not interested. In 1927 one Harvey W. Wiley wrote to the Washington Post proposing suimobile for the car and teloptiky for the television. Dr Wiley, I am delighted to record, was the chemist behind America’s Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Having spent a career getting adulterants out of the nation’s food, he turned at eighty-two to getting them out of its vocabulary, with less success. The Greeks, who have some standing in the matter, do say aftokínito and tileórasi. Most of the rest of us carried on.

And now, at last, somebody has brought numbers, so I may speak with a little authority. In 2014 the linguist Ana Díaz-Negrillo took 425 compounds of the classical type from the British National Corpus, sorted them by ending, and measured which endings are still breeding. Her measure is a plain ratio: words that turn up exactly once, over all occurrences. The venerable -logy, with 177 words to its name, scores 0.001. The upstart -mania, with 48, scores 0.246. In my line of work one would call the first a mature utility and the second a growth stock. She also found that compounds built on an ordinary free-standing word, the Beatlemania pattern, made up about 17 per cent of the nineteenth-century coinages in her sample and just over half of the twentieth-century ones.

It is one study, of ten endings, in one corpus of British English from around 1990, and nobody should hang a thesis on it. The direction of travel, though, is plain enough. The public has moved on from mixing Greek with Latin to mixing Greek with Liverpool.

IV. The Applied Branch, or Heaviside’s Dinner

My own profession had this quarrel long ago and settled it the same way.

Oliver Heaviside, a self-taught electrical engineer, solved his equations with an operator calculus that worked and that the rigorous mathematicians of his day could not justify. His answer, in Electromagnetic Theory (1899), was to ask whether he ought to refuse his dinner merely because he did not fully understand the process of digestion. Not, he added, if he was satisfied with the result. The rigour arrived later, supplied by other hands, and found the cables already in service.

That is the whole relation between the pure and the applied, and between the purist and the speaker. The pure branch establishes what would be right. The applied branch finds out what works, and sends the invoice. Television had neither elegance nor pedigree to recommend it. What it had was transparency, a pronounceable shape and availability on the day the thing needed a name; so it won, as centimetre won, and as the approximation that closes the books by Friday will generally beat the exact solution due in the spring.

There is a last indignity, and Hardy supplies it. The branch of mathematics he held up as the purest and least useful was the theory of numbers. It is now the working foundation of public-key cryptography, which stands guard over internet commerce. Purity, on this evidence, is often no more than usefulness that has not yet found its client.

V. How to Enjoy a Purist

What, then, is to be done about the purists?

Nothing. They are to be kept, fed and listened to, as one keeps number theorists.

Consider what they supply. It is only because Scott grumbled, Brown thundered and Dr Wiley wrote to the papers that most of us know television has a seam at all. The purist is the one guest at the party who can say where a word came from, and that he says it in the tone of a man reporting a burglary is part of the entertainment. One suspects that fewer people each decade can spot the join unaided, though I know of no census, which would make him an endangered species as well as an amusing one.

He is also courteous enough to lose. Ellis, having called his word barbarous, conceded in the next breath that it was convenient and widely used. Punch, in 1935, called television a monster and admitted that nobody had found a better. And Robert Burchfield, revising Fowler in 1996, surveyed the old blacklist and concluded that “the language has suffered only invisible dents”.

For the next occasion on which a hybrid is denounced over dinner, three lines, to be delivered with a smile:

1. The Romans did it first, to Latin, under the Republic.
2. Monolingual is half Greek and half Latin.
3. The man who said no good would come of it is not recorded as saying so until twenty-four years after his funeral.

Then pass the port and change the subject.

So let the purists rant. Smile, enjoy it, and go on bastardising the language with a clear conscience, in the company of Romans, Frenchmen, engineers and every schoolchild who has ever used a ruler. No good, runs the prophecy, would come of it. A great deal did; and the bastard, as so often in the better families, inherited everything.