I had long been given to understand that nauseous meant to cause nausea, whereas to suffer nausea was to be nauseated. However, I happened to look this up recently, and according to Dictionary.com, this is not the case:
So, it looks like this is another one of those not-really-correct corrections that echoes through the word-nerd community essentially unexamined. But the fact that both meanings are attested as appearing in the language from the same period hundreds of years ago would seem to be pretty damning. Is there any reason to continue to propagate this meme?
You write to an audience. If your audience is going to judge you by your use of nauseous, then don’t use it.
I can think of very few knowledgeable audiences that would do so. You’ll certainly find some individuals - the type I call the illiterate pedants - who would howl as such a use. I personally ignore everything they say, but there are certain situations - an academic adviser, maybe - in which knowing the prejudices is helpful.
I’m actually fairly sympathetic to pedantry myself, but with that comes an intuition that where the pedants are wrong, they themselves need to be corrected. See my dilemma?
Anyhow, I thought it would be a good idea to see if anybody had a reason not to dismiss this supposed distinction, which I have advised people of myself, as a hoary old canard.
From that point of view it would seem that using it to mean causing nausea was always improper. I mean, it is arguable I suppose, but I’ve never seen it used that way. When I see “nauseous smell” it seems to be saying that the smell is afflicted with nausea.
English usage does not depend on the meaning of words in precursor languages. Most words in everyday use have changed meaning over the centuries. If you eliminated those you would eliminate all modern English.
That any speaker of English has to look for what -ous or any other suffix (or prefix or whatever) meant in Latin (or Greek or whatever) before a word can be used is proven nonsense. English does not work this way now, and I know of no evidence that it ever worked this way. You only think so because a few 19th century pedants wanted to lay down “rules” for English that would constrict it in this as well as many other ways, and many of their “rules” were indeed taught.
They aren’t rules and they aren’t right. And most good writers of English ignore every one of them.
I agree that common usage is what sets the standard, for better or worse, but you can’t say that all prefixes and suffixes are therefore meaningless. That’s taking the argument to its illogical extreme.
Could you clarify this? You seem to be saying that the meanings of Latinate roots (wherever they occur in a word) should and do override usage. Can you give examples? Certainly, not every root has changed meaning or shifted to obscure its origin but that’s not the same argument as saying that after the shift has occurred we must ignore it because origin is more important.
Did you know that pedants complained vociferously about the coinage of the word “television” because it combined Greek and Latin roots? Really.
I’m not making that argument - at least, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I can tell you with certainty it wasn’t my intention.
My only point was that, despite numerous inconsistencies, prefixes and suffixes do tend to correlate with certain meanings. But it is a correlation, not any kind of fixed relationship. So when approaching a new word with a particular suffix, you can say that it is more likely than not that the meaning of the word will end up being consistent with that suffix. It doesn’t have to be. In many cases it might not be. Even so, it will usually point you in the right direction.
As a general principle I think at least some effort should be made to have consistent usage. It’s futile to try to enforce any such rule, but I would like to see more of a bias favoring consistency.
OK, I don’t disagree very much with any of that. There is a general consistency that does tend to linger. It would probably be better if there were more.
Enforcing consistency is impossible. Encouraging it is very hard, but it’s made even harder if you don’t pick your battles properly. Try to demand a distinction that good writers have been ignoring for centuries and guess who ends up looking foolish.
I know bad writing when I see it. I doubt I could ever define what makes it so. But I’m pretty sure that not making the distinction between nauseous and nauseating is well down the list of where the problems lie. Meaning is almost always the least important variable and yet people seem to be more exercised about it than anything else.
Except for apostrophe’s in plural’s. That even non-pedant’s can agree upon.
You may be right about it being a foolish thing to do. I was prompted to so because I have honestly never seen it used in the sense of meaning to cause nausea. I read a fair amount but virtually all of it is contemporary as in magazines, internet, etc., and that has been my pattern for a couple of decades. So to the extent the bias disfavoring that usage is recent, that would explain my never having seen it. But again I have to say that it really does look and sound very odd to me.
In terms of Latin origin, I can say at least that the verb nausāre meant both “to cause nausea” and “to vomit”. So, both meanings are buried in the roots as far as Latin. I haven’t tracked down the sources of the citations of the meanings as they first appeared in written English, but I suspect that anyone importing such a term from Latin in the early 17th century would have known of its dual meaning.
We talk about “folk etymologies” incorrectly assumed to mean “incorrect etymological notions propagated among the folk” but which really means “it came to be that way because folks talked that way.” It seems like there must be a special version of the folk etymology that applies to pedantry, which so often insists on rules that aren’t really rules, or are only so because some process of “pedant etymology” has managed to get them believed as actual rules.
An example of a folk etymology is that posh originally stood for Port Outward, Starboard Home, the side of the ship that rich people would book for the most favorable conditions.
People used posh to mean “sumptuously furnished or appointed; luxurious” or “elegantly-dressed Spice Girl” but the derivation from an acronym is exactly an “incorrect etymological notion propagated among the folk.”
“It came to be that way because folks talked that way.” is not a possible application of folk etymology, so I assume you’re thinking of some usage issue of a word “incorrectly” used until it became acceptable. That would have a different name, assuming that it actually has a name at all.
Okay, if you want to be picky about it then what I wrote was, strictly speaking, in terms of a system admitting no more than two possible truth values, only one of which may be attributed to any given statement, wrong.
But, let me have another go at it, checking my sources:
A folk etymology is not simply a myth about etymology, though it is used to mean this because it sounds like it would.
Folk etymology is a phenomenon in language by which false beliefs about the etymology of a word affect its form, usage and propagation.