The OED Word of the Day is \u2018eady\u2019, an obsolete term meaning \u2018fortunate\u2019. \r\n
Random observation about the OED\u2014the word is spelled \u2018eady\u2019 in the headword, but there are no examples in the quotes that use that spelling. The actual texts chosen use the following: eadig, eadigne, edi, eadi, \u00e6idi, eadge, eadi\u021d, e\u00e6di and eddi. Under forms, the OED lists 33 spellings, none of which are the one in the headword. There are no examples of the word \u2018eady\u2019 spelled with those letters before the word drops out of use altogether, but the word is still spelled \u2018eady\u2019. I believe the intent is to indicate that if<\/i> the word had survived until Early Modern English and the age of modern standardized orthography, it would probably have been spelled eady<\/i>. I mean, what do you do in a modern dictionary with words that never had standard spelling?\r\n
I was just going to leave it at that random observation, but it occurs to me that it\u2019s a decent hook to talk a little bit about my philosophy of the English language. I have described myself as a recovering stickler<\/i>, which is as accurate as it might be\u2014I grew up a prescriptivist and indeed a stickler, of the kind that gets cross about speaker-modifying \u2018hopefully\u2019 and split infinitives and so forth. At some point in my early 20s I abandoned that position and called myself a descriptivist, meaning (I think I recall) that I rejected the notion that the correct<\/i> writing was inherently superior to the vernacular, and that the now-obviously-to-me-arbitrary rules dictated Good Writing. Since then, my attitude has changed a few times, mostly as I\u2019ve learned that many of the rules I had been a stickler about were not merely arbitrary but essentially fictional\u2014invented by people who just wanted them to be rules, and were not evident in Good Writing before or after.\r\n
And then there\u2019s orthography. Spelling particularly, but also punctuation and capitalization and so forth. The notion of orthography<\/i> meaning correct writing<\/i> is of course ahistorical nonsense\u2014we\u2019ve decided that the word should be spelled horse<\/i>, but we could have decided on hors<\/i> and the graph wouldn\u2019t have been any less ortho. Words should be spelled correctly because we\u2019ve decided that they should be, and part of that is so that dictionaries can have a single headword and put it in alphabetical order. And that\u2019s awesome. But it isn\u2019t in some arbitrary sense correct<\/i>.\r\n
What it is, is it\u2019s a social norm. It\u2019s like\u2026 oh, it\u2019s like wearing shoes. It\u2019s not necessarily wrong<\/i> to go barefoot in the US these days, but it\u2019s going to make some people upset, and it\u2019s going to make your life more difficult because of that. And I think perhaps I should call my attitude toward English a norm-based<\/i> attitude. I believe we should adapt to the social norms of English because they are norms, not because they are logical rules, or historically rooted, or simply correct. It\u2019s less accurate to say that we should spell words correctly<\/i> and more accurate to say that it\u2019s helpful to use the standard spelling of words. And the advantage, I think, in having a mindset that considers these things norms<\/i>, is that it makes sense to follow social norms, even if the norm itself doesn\u2019t make sense.\r\n
And, of course, sometimes it makes more sense to break that norm. And sometimes the norms change\u2014there was for a while a norm that speaker-modifying hopefully<\/i> was bad, and now there really isn\u2019t. Except among people who loathe it! Because norms are not global, nor even really regional. Subcultures have norms that are entirely legit, and maneuvering between them is tricky, not because one is correct<\/i> and another inferior<\/i>, but because they are different, and you need to pay attention to them. And also, often enough people will claim that things are social norms which indeed are not, and sometimes never have been.\r\n
So, having a norm-based attitude toward the English language isn\u2019t any simpler than being a descriptivist or a prescriptivist. Ah,well. The only advantage, really, is that when I tell myself to follow rules that seem like nonsense to me, I can say: this is building community! I\u2019m contributing to a web of interconnectedness by replacing restrictive which<\/i> with that<\/i>! At the same time, it provides me with a context for deprecating the use of less<\/i> where I might use fewer<\/i> or nauseous<\/i> where I might use nauseated<\/i>. By not<\/i> being a stickler, I am adhering to social norms, and again, contributing to a web of interconnectedness! Now, about the grocers\u2019 apostrophe\u2026\r\n
Thanks,
-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday’s OED word of the day was ‘orthography’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words","category-spelling-orthography"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17569"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17573,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17569\/revisions\/17573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}