William Safire R.I.P.

The New York Times just announced that William Safire passed away.  While I couldn’t agree with his politics, his column, On Language, for the New York Times was priceless.  He will certainly be missed.

The All-Purpose Pronoun

William Safire’s On Language this weekend addressed the massive argument of English’s lack of a gender neutral singular pronoun. I’d say just read his article, but I’ve dedicated today’s entry to a synopsis. Some argue that to use “he” or “him” for anyone is sexist. Others blow a casket at the proposal that “they” might be used instead. He or she, or his or her, has always been cumbersome, and, as Safire points out, brevity is essential in a Twitter world limited to 140 characters per message.

Safire’s article makes two very important points. First, he explodes the idea that using the first person masculine to mean anyone is an age old tradition of English, dating it back to the mid-1700s by a female linguist. Originally, Safire points out, the use of the plural was always acceptable. Chaucer is his prime example of authors who used the “they” for “he or she” regularly.

Second, on a side note, Safire points outs that we have no problem using “you” to first person and nominative, when orignially it was a plural objective pronoun, as opposed to “thee” and “ye.” The purists, he argues, are barking up the wrong tree.

I never think that we should change the English language out of ignorance, and I do feel that we loose valuable rules that truly hurt the language. Here is a case where adherence to a “rule” continues to hamstring English. Let it go, people. All we need now is to come up with a distinct and widely accepted second person plural.

Apocryphal

adj. of questionable authenticity; specious

William Safire defined this word in his weekly New York Times column, On Language, when questioning a possible origin of the phrase “Location, location, location.”  He defined the word to mean “of questionable authenticity.”  The definition seemed reasonable (I later found it was straight from the O.E.D., but something didn’t sit right with me.  Often I’ve said that something was apocryphal when I’ve meant that it was untrue.  Safire’s definition seems to suggest that the word means something is questionably true.  This is a major difference.

So, I did some basic dictionary hunting.  Dictionary.com, which draws from the Random House Dictionary, offers “of doubtful authorship or authenticity” as its first definition.  As its third, it “false; spurious.”  This suggests a difference between the actual definition and the common use definition.

The Oxford American Dictionary (via my desktop widget) offers “of doubtful authenticity, although widely being circulated as being true.”  It then directed me to an interesting note under spurious, listing the fine distinction between several words meaning false or not what they appear.  It stressed: for something to be apocryphal it must be widely distributed but is still of doubtful origins.

It didn’t look very good for my definition of apocryphal as false.  However, continued search seemed to support me.  Merriam-Webster online had a strange and contradictory entry “of doubtful authenticity: spurious.” I found this problematic because spurious, by its own definition, means “of falsified or erroneously attributed origin.”  There is no doubt involved.  The O.E.D. is a little less vague, offering both of doubtful authenticity and spurious as definitions with a semi-colon, not a colon in between.

Additionally, the Latin origin of the word, apochryphus, was defined by Whitaker’s Words, as “spurious, not genuine/canonical.”  The Greek origin, according to Wikipedia, simply means “those having been hidden away,” casting no judgment as to whether or not their is truth to it.

The earliest usages of the word tacked in the O.E.D. come from the late 16th/early 17th century (oddly late, I thought), and they all imply little doubt that something apocryphal is false, to the point that it is almost fantastic or delusional.

I could go on, but the point is that there appears to be no clear consensus about the actual meaning of this word.  Although it is not quite an auto-antonym, the word does not give a very clear impression of its own meaning.  How sad.