{"id":17730,"date":"2019-01-11T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T17:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17730"},"modified":"2019-01-10T13:30:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T21:30:45","slug":"relevancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/01\/11\/relevancy\/","title":{"rendered":"relevancy"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I heard somebody say that a database could be sorted by <i>relevancy<\/i>, which grated on my ears something hijjus. The word is <I>relevance<\/i>! It\u2019s right there on the screen! There\u2019s no need to add the extra syllable!\r\n<p>Alas, I have the unfortunate tendency, when grousing about usage, to look stuff up, and yeah, <I>relevancy<\/i> has been in use as a noun form of <I>relevant<\/i> for as long as <I>relevance<\/i> has. It\u2019s legit\u2014the OED says that it\u2019s less common than <i>relevance<\/i>, but less common ain\u2019t necessarily wrong.\r\n<p>The other thing that surprised me was that <I>relevant<\/i>, in the general sense that we use it today, derives from a legal term, and specifically a legal term from Scotland. That is, at one point (that is, in the early 17th century) if you said that something was relevant to something else, you were talking about a legal case in Scotland, or making an analogy to one. It doesn\u2019t get commonly used in a general non-legal sense until around 1800 or so. Before that? We seem to have <i>pertinent<\/i>, which is still in use, and <i>to the purpose<\/i>, which is quaint but still usable, and a bunch of obsolete words or uses such as <i>appliable<\/i> and <i>incident<\/i> and <i>relative<\/i>. Evidently <i>germane<\/i> is a Shakespearean innovation, deriving from <i>cousin-german <\/i>, that is, first cousin, and <i>brother-german<\/i>, full brother, and the like, through the close connection to get to the sense of relevance.\r\n<p>The opposite, which seems important, has of course such structures as <I>irrelevant<\/i> and <i>unpertinent<\/i> (also <i>impertinent<\/i> as well as <i>exorbitent<\/i>, which are both obsolete in that sense) but also\u2014and this is lovely, innit\u2014<i>peregrine<\/i>.\r\n<p>Thanks,<br>-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apropros of nothing.<\/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":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17730","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=17730"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17737,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17730\/revisions\/17737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}