Regarding "re"

A lot of language experts will tell you to avoid the word “re,” as in, “I’d like to speak to you re scheduling.” It’s pretentious, they say, to use this Latin derivative instead of good old plain English — it’s “tasteless as a gold toothpick,” according to Theodore Bernstein’s 1965 guide “The Careful Writer.”  All of us outside the legal profession should “leave this one to the lawyers,” he wrote.

Way ahead of you, Bernstein and friends. I’ve been avoiding “re” my whole life. But unfortunately, I can’t claim that my motive has been to eschew pretentiousness, humbly sidestepping every opportunity to show off my deep knowledge of this preposition and its Latin origins.

No, I avoid it because I’ve never understood “re” well enough to even feign pretentiousness. I avoid “re” not because I’m down to earth but because I’m downright intimidated.

Is it “re:” with a colon? Is the R capitalized? Can you use it in the body of a letter or email, or only in the header or subject line? If it’s an abbreviation of “regarding,” does it need a period at the end, or does a colon preclude the need for a period? And why do you sometimes see “in” before “re”? Wouldn’t that be redundant?

The answers to all these questions are surprising — at least to me. For starters “re” is not an abbreviation for “regarding.” It’s a preposition — a real word like “at,” “of” or “with.” It’s defined not as “regarding” but as “with regard to” or “in the matter of,” which makes it a subtle shade different from “regarding” in some uses.

 “Re” doesn’t even share the same roots as “regarding.” It’s from a Latin noun, “res,” which meant “thing” or “matter.” That’s a clue why “in” is sometimes used before “re.” It’s like saying “in the matter of.” But the way Latin grammar worked, the “in” may be implied, anyway. So it’s hard to know whether “in re” or just “re” better captures “res” in what’s called the Latin “ablative” case. At least that’s the assessment of someone who gave up after half a day trying to understand Latin noun cases. (Ahem.)  

What I do know after half a day buried in books is that, in English, the “in” is optional. One of the definitions for the preposition “re” is “in re” — that is, they mean the same thing. So you can choose.

Another thing I learned is that “re” should not be capitalized unless it begins a sentence. It’s a regular word, so it works like one. Just as you don’t write “Put the book On the table,” you don’t write “See me tomorrow Re scheduling.” In fact, you’d be using the wrong word. Beginning with a capital, Re is the abbreviation for rhenium, a heavy metal.

Because “re” is a regular word, it doesn’t automatically get a colon, nor does a longer  phrase like “Re scheduling: See me tomorrow.” Yes, a colon can be used this way, but not because “re” requires it, only because in many instances the colon helps the whole sentence.

Using “re” was hard enough before email came along. Now “Re:” gets automatically added to subject lines when we reply to another message. And whoever came up with that system didn’t bother to tell us whether “Re:” was short for “regarding” or it meant a “reply” to the original email.

I say don’t worry about appearing pretentious if you use “re,” but you might consider whether it’s distracting. We’re so unused to seeing it used correctly in the middle of a sentence, lowercase with no colon, that it will surely look weird to your reader.

A girl wasn't always a girl

Next time you hear someone ranting about how the language is going to hell in a handbasket or complaining about people misusing this or that word, ask him to define the word "girl."

In my experience, "girl" is the best example of why the language Chicken Littles don't have a leg to stand on.

You see, we actually use the word "girl" wrong, according to an older standard, that is. In the 1300s, "girl" meant a child of either sex. Yet today it means specifically a female child.

Think for a moment what it was like getting from that linguistic Point A to our Point B. There must have been a lot of confusion along the way, right? No doubt it gave language doomsayers plenty of fodder. Could you blame any witness to this transition for thinking it was a problem Could you blame him for decrying the ignorance that fueled this change or the chaos that would ensue?

With 700 years' perspective, we know that such doomsayers would have been wrong. The word "girl" as we use it today is perfectly peachy. People aren't confused by it. No one sounds ignorant for using it. Communication hasn't broken down.

In other words, what was once a wrong usage of "girl" is now right. And clearly that's not a bad thing.

When sticklers fuss over "misuse" of words like "literally" and "healthy" and "aggravate," it's because they just don't understand how words change. They don't understand that this evolution is not a bad thing. It just appears bad to anyone who lacks historical perspective.

And nothing proves this as well as a brief history of the word "girl."

Deceptively easy?

Have you ever thought about the word “deceptively”? I hadn’t, until I came across the following in Word Court, Barbara Wallraff’s compilation from her former Atlantic Monthly column.

Here’s what a reader asked her: “A friend and I cannot agree on the meaning of phrases combining ‘depectively’ and a modifier — for example, ‘deceptively easy.’ I contest that something that is deceptively easy is, in fact, easy and is deceptive because it appears difficult. My friend argues that a deceptively easy task is one that appears easy but is difficult. Please help.”

Good one, huh? I always sort of took the former view: that "deceptively" before an adjective means that it has the qualities of that adjective, just it’s hard to see it at first. So someone who talks in a lot of big words but express a simple message is expressing a deceptively simple idea.

Unfortunately, Wallraff reported, it’s not that simple.

“The sad truth is that at this moment in history ‘deceptively easy’ means nothing in particular,” she wrote, citing the American Heritage Dictionary.

Here’s what that dictionary has to say.

“When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Does the sentence ‘The pool is deceptively shallow’ mean that the pool is shallower or deeper than it appears?”

Unlike many other dictionaries, American Heritage likes to cite a Usage Panel — a group of esteemed wordy types from all across the word-pushing world — for matters like these. Here’s what American Heritage reported: “When the Usage Panel was asked to decide, 50 percent thought the pool shallower than it appears, 32 percent thought it deeper than it appears, and 18 percent said it was impossible to judge. “

As a result, American Heritage gives this advice, which is basically the same as Wallraff’s: When the context does not make the meaning of ‘deceptively clear, the sentence should be rewritten, as in; The pool is shallower than it looks’ or ‘The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.’”

This 'whom' is a keeper

Sometimes it seems like “whom” should die. It causes so many people so much distress. Not many people know how to use it. And a lot of people who think they know how to use it don’t.

For example, I see "whom" used a lot in ways such as this: “John is a man whom I know will always help us when we need him.” People who know that “whom” is an object figure that, in a sentence like this, it’s functioning as an object of the verb “know.” But it’s not. The object of the verb “know” in this sentence is not a single word but a whole clause “who will always help us.” Clauses need subjects. The verb “help” in this clause needs a subject. So correct here would be the subject pronoun “who”: “John is a man who I know will always help us.”

Sometimes it seems “whom” is just mean. And because it’s fading from all from the most formal uses, it’s tempting to look forward to the day we can bid it good riddance.

But here’s why “whom” is not going to die: in one specific construction, people clearly prefer it.

“I’m spending the day with my sister, with who I share many interests.”

That’s totally unnatural, right? Even in the most casual usage, someone who finds herself hemmed in to a sentence like this is going to say “with whom I share” and not “with who.”

In fact, anytime the pronoun comes immediately after a preposition, people seem to prefer “whom”

with whom

to whom

from whom

True, this situation doesn’t come up much. Casual speech usually sidesteps these constructions, for example by putting the pronoun at the beginning and the preposition at the end (“Who are you going to the movies with” instead of “With whom are you going to the movies”). But in those less-common situations, I don’t see “whom” disappearing anytime soon.