Solecism

Posted by Tom Joad on Sep 27, 2007 | 5 comments

I may soon have to rename this blog Greek Word du Jour. I’m frankly surprised they managed to create one of the most sophisticated and influential cultures of the modern world – where did they find the time? They were all sitting around inventing words for things, obviously – “Hey, Adelphos, what about solecism – that’s a good one”. As you’ll have gleaned from the unnecessarily long introduction, today’s word is brought to us via the Greek language. More specifically, it comes from the Attic language, a dialect of Ancient Greek which was spoken in Attica – an area of coastal (and peninsular) Greece. Happily for historians, it is the dialect that most closely resembles Modern Greek. The word has morphed slightly, via Latin soloecismus, Greek soloikismos and the original Attic soloikos (speaking incorrectly). Soloikos meant “inhabitant of Soloi” and came about because the people of this Attic city were renowned for their appalling Attic language skills.

So, a solecism (or less frequently, soloecism) is a verbal or grammatical gaffe or blunder. It shouldn’t be confused with a barbarism. A barbarism is a single word mispronounced – such as “anenemy” for “anemone” and similar errors. Interestingly, the words barbarism and barbarian have the same root. In Ancient Greek (yeah, them again) “bar bar bar” was like saying “blah blah blah” today, so they take their names from people who speak gibberish.

Common solecisms include what is known as “hyper correction”. People will often correct sentences which are perfectly fine in an attempt to use grammar properly. The sentence “I would like to thank you all on behalf of my family and I” is an example of this. The good old-fashioned double negative is also a classic solecism: “He didn’t do nothing” is intended to express the subject’s innocence, but serves only to confirm his guilt – as “not doing nothing” implies something was done.

To finish, a couple of related solecisms from our old pal George W Bush. The first one I have quoted on these pages before, but it’s such a cracking error, it bears repeating:

“Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?”

Highly amusing in and of itself, but it transpires there is more to the story. Just this week, when addressing Congress to try to coerce them into adopting his “No Child Left Behind” programme, he said:

“As yesterday’s positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured”

This was a televised event, but somehow this new howler didn’t make it to the screened version. The spoilsports cut it from the tape. Still, he managed to answer his own question with some aplomb!