Many times I read about people discussing their “new car stereo install” or “I wish you could do the install for me.” Is this correct? Should it be “installation?”
Another example could be “some companies will not install customer provided…”, which seems the correct usage.
All usages may be correct, I don’t know.
Linguists would call that “clipping’” A method of word formation by dropping the end off another word.
If anybody wants to think about it hard enough, they can come up with a subtle nuance of meaning to distinguish the two apparent synonyms. If they can pull it off by persuading enough other people, then a new word is born. More likely they will continue as synonyms.
Same reason people send you an “invite” instead of an “invitation”.
An Installation is a piece of art. Apparently.
In my industry, engineering drawing titles often have the word abbreviated to INSTL, which lends itself to being read as “install” rather than " installation". Similarly for “mod” replacing “modification”. The really enraging titles include both, yet tell you nothing about the subject - “GALLEY MOD INSTL”.
As I tried (unsuccessfully) to explain in another thread, this is not a question for linguists. They are largely concerned with explaining how language words, not prescribing usage. It is a question for pedants, maybe, except I am a pedant and I don’t give a damn on this. Either word is clear enough for use.
What I do care about are things that destroy meanings, especially useful distinctions (disinterest vs uninterest, for example).
I ask myself similar for quote vs quotation and estimate vs estimation. There’s also orientated.
Real linguists don’t even care about questions like this one because they have more interesting and more important things to study. As @Andy_L put it so felicitously in the thread I started on this subject,
asking a professional linguist about the line between good and bad English usage would be something like asking a sociologist about which fork to use at dinner with the Queen
Why bother answering?
To fight ignorance.
Oh, I dunno-- my mother was a linguist very much interested in the evolution of language; her actual field was dialectology, but she found language evolution fascinating. She was not interested in being a prescriptive grammarian, but inasmuch as things like clipping, and eventual loss of the longer form, are parts of language evolution, she was interested in them.
I guess that’s a waste of her time.
I appreciate the original answer, but the follow up was rather strange.
What do the mods think of all this?
Huh? As a MPSIMS mod, i have no real opinion on this topic. Why would i?
I said most linguists are interested in structure. One linguist I knew very well wrote a book called Principles of Diachronic Syntax studying language change. He was particularly concerned with the evolution of the English verb during the 16th century during which modals ceased being verbs and became their own part of speech. In 1500 you could say “He must can …”, by 1600 you had to say “He must be able to…”. The other linguist I knew well was a student of Chomsky’s and was interested only in the structure of her French Canadian language; in particular how it differed from official French. She, along with the entire Chomskian school, was interested only in actual structure.
Because you asked and I am a linguist.
You restated what I said in my answer about word formation by clipping. As I stated, this is something linguists study. But the question asked by the OP was “Is this correct?” A linguist would then ask, “Who defines what is correct, and how is this done? What are the effects? If certain factors are altered, how different are the results?” etc. That is science. “What is the schoolmarm living rent-free in my head going to say about this?” is not.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but if you are suggesting that linguists study languages divorced from the humans that created it, I don’t know any linguists like that, and I know Dr. Dan Dinnsen, who came up with the theory of Atomic Phonology.
My mother’s dissertation was called Colloquial Czech: A Study in Code-Switching. It concerned the differences between spoken and written Czech that happened after Germany ruled what is now the Czech Republic, and outlawed the language, so German became the literary language, while Czech was still the spoken language.
She also wrote the first grammar of Slovak for English speakers. She was brilliant at grant writing. Probably could have gotten a grant to sleep in every day for a month if she’d tried.
Because someone is wrong on the internet.
Lol!!