So over on this other board where I hang out, they were having server troubles, and they posted a notice that the board was “currently experiencing slowness.” Which was pretty funny, and a few people commented on it. But it turned out that at least one person thought it was funny because “slowness” wasn’t a legitimate word.
Now, I can find it in the dictionary, and I’ve heard it used, and my problem with the sentence wasn’t the word, but the odd construction. But he insisted that slowness wasn’t a real word, and that, the flexibility of English aside, one could not make a noun by merely adding -ness to a “comparator.” I had never heard this term before, and he said a comparator was “any adjective which implies a normality with which it is a variant.”
Huh?
A web search only turned up machines and programs that compare things. Is there such a thing as a “comparator” in English grammar, and would, say, a really picky prescriptivist have a problem with “slowness” as a legitimate word? He says he taught English at one time and is pretty insistent, and is generally pretty intelligent–is my education deficient somehow? What gives?
Well, his definition of “comparator” seems like a reasonable one… I can absolutely say, for instance, that a person or animal is “male”, without comparison to anything else, but if I say that something is “slow”, I have to ask “compared to what?”. So, one could certainly argue that “male” and “slow”, both adjectives, nonetheless belong to different categories of adjectives.
I don’t see, though, why the -ness suffix would be invalid with a comparator… For a computer to be “currently experiencing slowness” obviously means that it’s currently running more slowly than it or comparable computers usually does.
Ah, that makes sense! Comparative and superlative I had heard of. But in that case, “slow” wouldn’t be a comparative–“slower” would be. And “slowerness” would indeed be a bit odd, but that’s not the word he was protesting.
JeffB wrote:
I’m reading that “by comparison with a standard” as modifying the part before–that it’s an instrument that measures or checks by comparing with a standard. It doesn’t seem to work for describing words.
And thanks for the OED check for me–obviously “slowness” isn’t some recent, barbaric innovation.
And thanks, all, for putting my mind to rest about the supposed oddness of “slowness.”
How is slowness the comparitive form of slow? Slower is the comparative, slowest is the superlative. But slowness is a different form of the word.
The form of the sentence is awkward, but colloquial. “The board is currently experiencing slow posting times” would be more formally correct, he said in the comparative.
I understand the OP’s friend to mean that a comparator is an adjective which can have a comparative form. So “slow” is a comparator, since “slower” is a word, but “male” is not a comparator, since “maler” isn’t a word.
That’s what I understood too, although I had never heard the term before, which is what confused me. I did a search for “comparator linguistics” and “comparator grammar” and got a bunch of computer language stuff, but nothing for English grammar. Has anybody ever heard of comparator used as a term for a particular kind of adjective? Is this distinction even made? That’s what I’m wondering now–is this some sort of term that I’ve forgotten from school, or is really obscure, or somehow I failed to learn and should have? Or did he missllep something else? Or was he just off in outer space when he wrote that and doesn’t want to back down?
Like I said, he’s normally a perfectly intelligent and nice guy, but it’s bugging me that I have no idea what he’s talking about here.
I have read a lot of linguistics (even once published a paper in the journal Theoretical Linguistics) and I have never heard the term. Nonetheless, it makes sense to have a word that describes an adjective whose meaning makes sense only in terms of a comparison with something else and slow, small, etc. would seem to qualify. On the other hand, I see no problem with smallness, although it sounds unusual. I have always wanted it to be sloth–or slowth.
OK, smartass. Now you’re gonna get it! :: Scarlett whacks dantheman with her MW3 unabridged ::
I follow the logic of the queen of copyediting, Karen Judd, who is the author of a very highly regarded guide for copyeditors. In Chapter 1 she writes (I paraphrase, but I but I have it verbatim): “A copy editor edits copy. A copyeditor copyedits copy.” There are many ways to edit text, and copyediting is a specific approach, with a specific goal (although it can have different levels: light, medium, heavy).
MW had it as two words, and for our publications, that’s the golden rule.
Now, as far as I’m concerned, this is a word/phrase that can be either one or two, depending on the style of the publication - and of course, assuming it’s used as such consistently throughout.
Of course, saying someone “copyedits copy” is redundant and not particularly good writing, IMO.
