Saturday, November 19, 2011

A kind word for the crossword

Like any recovering nitpicker, I still feel a certain allegiance to the shibboleths of my youth. (The earlier you learn them, the harder they are to ignore.) So a clue in Wednesday's New York Times crossword made me smile, once I had the answer.

The clue to 48-down was: "Muscle strengthened by curls, informally." The answer: BICEP. And the prescriptivist dog whistle in the clue is the word "informally."

As Miss Mossman explained years ago in Latin class, biceps is a singular, though it's long been used as the English plural too. (Fowler liked bicepses better than the Latin bicipites, but neither caught on.) So according to traditionalists, the word bicep shouldn't exist. Like pea and cherry and kudo, it was formed on the erroneous assumption that a final-s sound signaled a plural.

But the advance of singular bicep was so stealthy that few language mavens noticed it over the years. By the time Bryan Garner got into the usage trade, it was so well established that he simply accepted it. In the most recent (2009) edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, he says that "to refer to a person's right biceps ... seems pedantic." Despite etymology, "the standard terms are now bicep as the singular and biceps as the plural."

I'm not so sure singular biceps has been relegated to nonstandard (or even "pedantic") status, and neither is Google Books, despite that ominous post-2000 drop on the Ngram chart. But "right bicep" is obviously acceptable to many, even if some of us still think of it as "informal." Sorry, Miss Mossman!

10 comments:

Johanna said...

I'm wondering if biceps' beginning with "bi" doesn't add to the confusion, since we associate that prefix with two. It almost makes "biceps" feel like a doubled double, and dropping the "s" relieves that.

tudza said...

Is it necessarily a bad thing to make foreign words regular when you use them in English? We don't even have to take the blame since at least pea and cherry were formed hundreds of years ago.

The Ridger, FCD said...

I feel that when a word fully works its way into English, regularization is (one of) the signal(s) that it is, in fact, English now. We talk of troikas, not troiki, after all, and stamina isn't plural any longer, nor is data (for most of us).

I hate it when they do things like clue "anime" as "a genre".

Jonathon said...

Of course, the problem with Google Books or any other corpus of published writing is that it's impossible to filter out the effects of editorial intervention. It could be that a lot more writers use "bicep" and that editors change this to "biceps".

Ø said...


I hate it when they do things like clue "anime" as "a genre".


Ridger: I can't appreciate this peeve of yours unless you tell me more. What other things do they do that are like cluing "anime" as "a genre"? That are like it in what way? Why is anime not a genre?

Gaston said...

Ah, I didn't know these examples (bicep, pea, cherry). I did know about skate < Dutch schaats.

languagehat said...

Since I grew up in the '50s and '60s, when (as can be seen from the chart) "bicep" barely existed, it will always sound wrong to me, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there are people to whom "right biceps" sounds wrong. O tempus, o mos!

medrecgal said...

"Biceps" refers, of course, to the number of heads the muscle has anatomically, and not to the number of these muscles. (Triceps follows the same idea; it is a muscle with three heads, but we only have two of them.) Most anatomical terms are Latin or Greek in origin, and therefore do not follow English rules of pluralization. To this lover of both anatomy and language, therefore, "bicep" is an absolute abomination. It is "regularizing" a term that is already standard in its original form since the "s" does not indicate a plural. You can refer to the left biceps or the right one or bilateral biceps. To do otherwise is like a Ken doll, anatomically incorrect.

Richard Hershberger said...

What strikes me is that Garner seems not to consider the possibility of there being more than one standard form. He seems to think that singular "biceps" was the one correct usage until, through mysterious means, singular "bicep" suddenly became the correct usage.

Presumably before that magical moment, using singular "bicep" would reveal one as a hopeless ignoramus. Since then, anyone who didn't get the memo and still uses singular "biceps" is revealed as a hopeless pedant.

Thank goodness we have Bryan Garner to help us keep us on these things!

The Ridger, FCD said...

@Ø: "anime" is a medium, not a genre. You can tell any kind of story in anime: romance, historical, super-girls, porn, space-opera, fantasy, hard sci-fi, soap opera ... "Japanese film genre" is not "anime" unless "live-action" is a genre.