I am as big of fan of a complete use of the English language as most anyone, but I think it goes without saying that such usage must be “correct” (please, let’s not have a linguistics debate on the meaning of correct language) or standard in so far as using real words.
From this coming Sunday’s New York Times in, “The Catastrophist,” Leon Wieseltier reviews the Martin Amis book, The Second Plane. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Wieseltier-t.html) Quite ironically, he condemns the book for being, “busy with the glamorous pursuit of extraordinary sentences.” Wieseltier continues on, “but when he describes the second plane on its way to the south tower as “sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty,” the ingenuity of the image is an interruption of attention, an ostentatious metaphorical digression from the enormity that it is preparing to reveal, an invitation to behold the prose and not the plane.”
Then, we come across this gem in the sixth paragraph: “that the sexual stringencies of Islamic law and morality do not differ significantly from the exceedingly unvoluptuary codes of other religions.”
I’m sorry, ‘unvoluptuary’? I’m not familiar with that term. Neither is my roommate. Moving on to some more authoritative sources, The Merriam-Webster Dictionary stares blankly. Google is scarcely less innocent with a total of three examples: MySpace, an online film review, and the Times piece itself. Perhaps someone here has access to an unabridged OED or an online subscription to the, “definitive record of the English language,” but I don’t. This is clearly an example of word choice that conflicts with the communicative goal of the piece.
I recognize that language is a living thing, and I don’t know who it is that’s permitted the privilege of making up new words, but a writer from the Sunday Book Review claiming the pretense is a bit much for me.
Everyone has that privilege. That’s sort of the point of the whole “living language” thing. But even if you think that there should be some sort of restriction on who can invent new words, it seems odd that you think professional writers should be excluded from that group.
That’s not all you aren’t familiar with, fuckwit*: you need to learn how to use a dictionary. Dictionaries as a rule don’t bother to list un- formations of valid words unless there’s something peculiar about them. Lookup voluptary and you’ll see it’s a perfectly valid word, ready for combining with perfectly valid English affixes like un-.
*It’s the Pit, after all. Nothing personal.
However, I agree that someone snarking about the use of an existing word in a new way loses a little credit by dipping into obscure vocabulary like voluptuary. “He’s coming across as pompous with his ‘clever’ use of language. Now watch as I write something even more pompous!”
Well, one could argue that it’s about context-appropriate language. Writing a book about 9/11 calls for a humble, somber tone, as befitting the nature of the tragedy. Whereas, a book review for the New York Times practically requires a certain level of pompousness.
Alright, I concede that I wasn’t aware that I’d have better luck in pursuing the definition of ‘voluptuary’ than ‘unvoluptuary’. Obviously, the former could have provided a usable definition of the word, but I’m not yet ready to grant that I’m free to take any word in the English language, tack ‘un-‘ to the front of it, and call it standard English. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it would produce some damnably unstandard or uncorrect usages. Unusages, if you will. Even excluding the various rules that apply to applying prefixes to words, I’ll leave it to someone else more versed in the English language to tell me if you can indeed go around adding prefixes at will.
Perhaps Miller is on to something regarding the context.
Exactly who do you think has the authority to stop you?
As for “unstandard”, “uncorrect”, and “unusages”: Probably “unstandard” and “uncorrect” sound off to you because it is much more conventional to use “nonstandard” and “incorrect”; I doubt, however, you feel that the overpowering influence of “nonvoluptuary” or “involuptuary” is the root of your discomfort with “unvoluptuary”. Regarding “unusages”, there is the existence of “misusages”, which serves the purpose towards which you seem to be putting it. However, if we think about “misuse” vs. “un-use”, even if we’ve never heard the word “un-use” before in our lives, I’m sure we all know perfectly well what the two mean and can appreciate a semantic distinction here. At any rate, after being prompted to think along these lines, “un-use-age” is not such an odd word after all.
And while the word “voluptuary” does seem to have fallen out of widespread use (the last sample quote listed in the complete OED is from 1869), it has been used with reasonable frequency in the New York Times itself, right up until the present.
A search of the Times’s full historical database, through ProQuest, returns 458 articles containing the word “voluptuary” in the period 1852-2004, with just over 60 of those coming from the last 20 years, and almost 40 in the period 2000-2004. The word certainly seems to have made a recent resurgence in the Times.
Browsing the titles of these recent articles, most of them seem to come from the arts and literary sections of the newspaper. Here’s a selection:
FILM REVIEW; The Marquis de Sade in a More Complex Guise
THEATER REVIEW; When Puppets Outshine Real-Life Actors THE ALAMO PIECE
An Aging Hippie, Making Both Love and War
At 87, a Playboy Can Dream, Can’t He?
Leone Classic, Liberated at Last From Television; Film
A Voluptuary Composer Grown Lean and Searching
A Venerable Sax Man Channels a Couple of Patriarchs
A French Mood For a Festival In Washington
DeMille’s Commandment: Honor Thy Dancing Girls
How Seurat Worked Up To Sunday
Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71
The last sample quote listed in the OED for “cat” (under the first definition, “A well-known carnivorous quadruped (Felis domesticus) which has long been domesticated, being kept to destroy mice, and as a house pet.”) is from 1832. As I understand it, the sample quotes aren’t meant to document the entire continued existence of a word, just its historical development.
On another note, the primary danger to “voluptuary”, judging from my own fallible intuitions, is that people rather prefer to use “voluptuous” instead.
The mind reels at the concept of an avid English reader who can see the word “unvoluptuary” and not realize to parse it into “un-” and “voluptuary”, even if they’ve never heard of the word “voluptuary”.
(Of course, random brain farts can happen, which is what I assume occurred to the OP. That or simple incompetence [perhaps of a semivoluntary, stubborn sort (“I’m not yet ready to grant that…”)] with dictionaries.)
“Unvoluptuary” is “voluptuary” plus a ridiculously common prefix that everyone uses hundreds of times every day. This is basic morphology. If that’s “making up words”, how do you think we came up with words like “uninteresting”, “unseeming”, “uninitiated”, etc? English is an unusually fluid language which gives its speakers and writers an incredibly high degree of room to manipulate words and even create new ones without losing any understandability (see? I might’ve just made one up right there, and you know exactly what it means), even among Germanic languages.
No, that looks awful. JMHO. Or should I say awe-ful?
