common or mutual Yet commentate is sometimes disparaged, as a clumsy and unnecessary extension of comment (which it isn’t), or else because it’s a backformation from commentator. (See further under backformation.) There is no need to avoid it on either count if it carries its distinctive meaning. commercialese Letter writing has its conventions, and letters written in the name of business canbethe most stylised of all. The routinenatureofmany business letters has fostered the growth of jargon and formulaic language, in phrases such as: further to your letter of the 12 inst. re your order of the 27 ult. your communication to hand please find enclosed for your perusal at your earliest convenience Clich ´ es suchas those sound increasingly stilted, and businesses these days generally encourage their letter writers to avoid them: to use direct and natural language instead, and to communicate in friendly terms if possible. For the conventional layout of letters, see Appendix VII. See also letter writing. commitment or committal Both words are of course from the verb commit and provide an abstract noun for it. Some dictionaries seem to say that they are interchangeable, yet they differ in their breadth and frequency of use. Commitment is much more common and widely used, for committing oneself to anything, be it a religion, or amateur sport, or ridding the bush of nonnative plants. The statement “I have another commitment” can mean almost any activity. Committal by contrast has been particularly associated with legal processes, the committal hearing and committal proceedings, which involve the examination of evidence before a full trial. Committal is also the word used in connection with the formal burial of a body. So there are ritual and legal overtones to committal which commitment is free of. common or mutual Common has numerous meanings, but it contrasts with mutual in emphasising sharing rather than reciprocation in a relationship, as in common origin or common interest. Mutual involves reciprocity. Mutual satisfaction implies the satisfaction which two people give to each other, and mutual agreement emphasises the fact that something is agreed to by both parties (assuming there is no tautology). Reciprocity is carried to excess in a mutual admiration society. Mutual has also long been used to refer to a reciprocal relationship which is enjoyed by more than one other person, as in the title of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865. Yet for some reason this usage was censured in the later nineteenth century, as the Oxford Dictionary notes. The dictionary also noted 159 common gender that mutual was the only possible word in expressions like Dickens’s title. (When class distinctions were so important, who would take the risk of referring to “our common friend”?) The linguistic propriety of using mutual has never bothered insurance companies, which offer thousands of “mutual insurance” policies, and many build the word Mutual into their company titles. common gender See under gender. common nouns These contrast with proper nouns. See further under nouns. Commonwealth The phrase Commonwealth of Australia has been a political football for most of the one hundred years of its existence. It was voted in as the official title for Australia (by a majority of one) at the Federal Convention held in Sydney in 1891. Other former British colonies such as Canada and New Zealand adopted the title Dominion. The word commonwealth was first used by English social reformers of the early sixteenth century, who wanted the state to be the ideal republic existing for the common good, and not advantaging the rich and powerful. (Common was to parallel public, and weal(th) then meant “welfare” rather than “affluence”.) Several of the original American states, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, are commonwealths by charter, because the word expressed republican and antimonarchic ideals which were popular in nineteenth century America. It appealed to Australian federationists for the same reason. But the republican associations of commonwealth were presumably not strongly felt by the British government when it renamed what had been the British Empire as the British Commonwealth. The recruitment of the word for that other purpose led both Menzies and Whitlam in the 1960s to declare publicly their preference for “Australian Government” rather than Commonwealth of Australia. (The comments of other Australian historians are documented in Right Words (1989).) Whitlam went further, in reducing Commonwealth of Australia to Australia on banknotes, and removing the word Commonwealth from the Governor-General’s title. The latter change was however revoked by Fraser in 1975. In the early 1990s, the interim state of affairs could be seen in the fact that the Australian Government Publishing Service still used the Commonwealth Government Printer. Since the turn of the millennium, fresh logos have been designed for all federal government departments, with Australian Government superimposed over the departmentalname. The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) has yet to join the trend, though in 1986 it adopted the spelling organisation (instead of organization) to bring it into line with Australian government style. The need to abbreviate the word Commonwealth is still felt in relation to legislation and other Australian institutions. According to the Australian Government Style Manual (2002), it should be the rather Welsh-looking Cwlth, 160 competence or competency rather than C’wlth. Cwlth is also recognised in the Oxford Dictionary of Abbreviations (1992), and—among others—by the Barnhardt Abbreviations Dictionary (1995). Yet the most frequently used abbreviation in Australian documents on the internet (Google 2006) is Cth. For the Commonwealth of Independent States, see Russia. comparatives For comparative forms of adjectives, see under adjectives. See also than. compare with or compare to Is there any difference? Consider: Compared with other products, it’s inspired. Compared to other products, it’s inspired. Some suggest there is a slight difference in meaning: that compare with is used when the comparison is part of a broad analysis, and compare to when it’s a matter of specifically likening one thing to another. This distinction goes back to separate definitions in the major English dictionaries. But whether they are distinct for the common user seems doubtful, and Webster’s English Usage (1989) cites instances in which the two meanings can scarcely be separated. Webster’s evidence shows little correlation between the particles and the two meanings; if there is any tendency to use to with the meaning “liken”, it’s only when it works as an active verb. When passive or just a past participle, to and with are used indifferently. Fowler (1926) believed that in one context compare with still reigned supreme, i.e. in intransitive statements such as: The product compares very favorably with imported ones. Yet the evidence collected by Webster’s shows that even here, with shares the field with to. Compare(d) to is thus an established option to compare(d) with, occurring in a ratio of about 1:3 in over one hundred instances in the Australian ACE corpus. Compare with was once underpinned by the Latinists’ insistence that with was the only possible particle when the prefix in compareistheLatincum“with”.(Compare averse.) But with the decline in common knowledge of Latin, compare(d) works more and more on English analogies, and for words such as liken and similar the regular particle is to. comparison of adjectives and adverbs For degrees of comparison, see adjectives section 2 and adverbs section 3. compendium For the plural of this word, see under -um. competence or competency Dictionaries often give these as alternatives, and in some contexts they are synonymous in their now dominant sense of “sufficient capability or skills”. But English databases show that competence occurs a good deal more often than competency in general use, and dictionaries 161 complacent or complaisant record newly developed specialist meanings for it in linguistics, biology and geology. The two words have an extraordinary trail of meanings behind them. When first recorded in English they shared several meanings related to our verb compete (“contest”). These meanings have been totally eclipsed, and those we know are related to a different verb, compete meaning “come together” and figuratively “be convenient or fitting”. That verbitselfhasdisappeared,nodoubt under pressure from the other one. But competence/competency with their sense of sufficiency or adequacy are fossils of the second verb, and legal extensions of this (meaning “fitness or adequacy in law”) were the ones which dominated the record until the eighteenth century. Strictly speaking however, in Australian law it is capacity (not either competence or competency) which stands as the legal term. One other development of competency (but not competence) has been for it to acquire a plural form competencies. It thus becomes a count noun, whereas competence remains a mass noun only. This grammatical differentiation is not uncommon for word pairs like these. See further under -nce/-ncy, and nouns. complacent or complaisant Complacent hasbeen making inroads into the domain of complaisant during the last two centuries. Both words derive from the Latin verb “please”, though this is more evident in the spelling of complaisant, the French derivative. In English it has meant “eager to please” or “obliging” in a positive sense. Complacent, the regular Latin form, usually means “pleased with oneself and with the status quo”. Its overtones are somewhat negative, suggesting undue satisfaction with one’s self and a reluctance to improve things. Complacent is occasionally used as a synonym for complaisant, and seems now to be infecting it with negative connotations. Examples quoted in Right Word at the Right Time show complaisant meaning not just “eager to please” but “overready to condone”. This perhaps is the final stage in this verbal encounter, though that definition is not yet included in the Australian Oxford or the Macquarie Dictionary (2005). Note also that the older complacence is giving way to the newer complacency. See further under -nce/-ncy. complement or compliment These identical-sounding words represent earlier and later developments of the same Latin word complementum “something which completes”. The spelling complement still corresponds to that kind of meaning, as in: His creativity and her business sense are the perfect complement for each other. A similar meaning is the one used by grammarians when they speak of a complement to the verb. (Note that the term complement is reserved by some grammarians for the item following a copular verb (especially be), whereas others 162 compos mentis apply it to any item which completes the verb phrase: objects, adverbs, verb phrases or complements (as just defined). See further under predicate.) The spelling compliment which we use to mean “a commendatory remark” comes tous through Italianand French. Thisextension of meaning can be explained in terms of etiquette, where a compliment is that which completes or rounds off an act of courtesy. Until theseventeenth century, the spelling complement represented this sense also. Since then compliment has helped to distinguish the two, though it adds yet another detail which the competent speller has to know. complex sentences See clauses section 3. complex words A complex word embodies more than one distinct component, but only one which can stand alone. See for example: children denigrated evolutionary remodel unpremeditated watering The independent (or free-standing element) has been italicised in each case. In cases such as hungriest, racism and trafficking, the italicised part should still be regarded as the free-standing element, since there’s no doubt that hungry, race and traffic can stand alone. The alternative forms they take in those words are simply dictated by the following suffix and certain basic rules of English spelling. (See under y>-i-, -e and -c/-ck- for the three involved in those cases.) Complex words have either prefixes, suffixes or both attached to their freestanding element, which add extra dimensions of meaning. (See further under prefixes and suffixes, and under individual examples, such as -ate, be- etc.) Compare complex words with compounds. compliment or complement See complement. compline or complin The name for the lastchurch service of the day has been growing with the centuries. Its regular French antecedent had neither n nor e, being compli “completed”. However on English soil it began to be called compelin, and it was complin in thesixteenthcentury when Cranmer removed it asa separate service from the English Prayer Book. In scattered references over the next three centuries it appears as compline, and when the service was reinstated by the Anglican church in 1928, it was compline. In the current prayer book of the Anglican church in Australia, and in Catholic liturgical books, the spelling is compline. The second edition of the Oxford Dictionary (unlike the first) gave priority to compline, and it is preferred in all modern dictionaries including the New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (1986). It’s remarkablethatcomplin is nevertheless still supported by the standard pronunciation of the word. The addition of the unhistorical -e may be an instance of frenchification, though the motive is less clear than in other cases. See under that heading. compos mentis See non compos mentis. 163 composed (of) or comprise composed (of) or comprise See comprise. compound sentences See clauses section 2. compound verbs This phrase is applied to several kinds of verbs whichconsist of more than one word: 1 Those which embrace one or more auxiliary verbs, such as: was going am being taken would have liked (See further under auxiliary verbs.) 2 Those which combine with particular particles to express a meaning, such as: compare with differ from give up protest against (See further under phrasal verbs.) 3 Those which are compound words, such as downgrade and shortlist. (See further under compounds.) compounds These are expressions which consist of two (or more) separable parts, each of which can stand as a word in its own right. English has very many of them, of which the following are only tokens: r nouns car park football machine gun take-over r adjectives airborne home-made icy-cold keen-eyed r verbs baby-sit blackball blue-pencil overturn r adverbs downtown overseas upmarket worldwide Although four examples have been given in each group, there are infinitely more noun compounds at large. Note that in the first three groups, some have hyphens and others do not, either because they are spaced or set solid. It is sometimes said that compounds developfrom being spaced as separatewords, are then hyphenated, then become set solid; and there are some examples to prove the point among the shorter noun compounds. But compound adjectives and verbs often go straight to the hyphened (or set solid) stage, which ensures that they are read as a single grammatical unit. With noun compounds this is less crucial. (See further under hyphens.) Whatever the setting, the two parts of a compound come together in terms of meaning, and this special integration of meaning is what makes a compound. A car park is unlike a national park in almost every way, in spite of the common element park, because both are compounds. For the plurals of compounds, see plurals section 2. Compounds differ from complex words in that the latter have only one part which can stand alone. Compare football with footing, machine gun with machinery, worldwide with worldly and so on. (See further under complex words.) For blended words such as brunch, electrocute and telecast, see portmanteau words. 164 comprise or composed of comprehensible or comprehensive These words are both related to the verb comprehend, which in Latin (and earlier English) meant “take a grip on”; and still the sense of holding or including (many things) is the most common one for comprehensive nowadays. A comprehensive approach (to a problem) takes in almost every aspect of it, just as a comprehensive school is intended to teach subjects right across the educational curriculum, not just the academic or technical strand. But the verb comprehend has for centuries also meant “have a mental grasp of or understand”. (The Oxford Dictionary notes that this is actually the first recorded meaning in fourteenthcentury English, though the more classicalmeaning was in use then too.) The notion of understanding is the primary meaning for comprehensible “able to be understood”. Just occasionally comprehensive also shows this development of meaning as well, when used in the sense of “having understanding”: They were not fully comprehensive of the corruption within their ranks. Though recorded from time to time over the last three centuries, this usage is uncommon nowadays, confined to formal style and deliberately lofty writing. comprise or composed of Comprise is a verb over which many people pause, and several constructions are now acceptable with it. Traditionally it meant “include or contain”, as in: The book comprises three sections: background, argument and applications. It was thus equivalent to the passive of compose: The book is composed of three sections: background, argument and applications. The two constructions offer a stylistic choice—more compact expression (with comprise) or something less dense (with composed of). Those two constructions seem to be blended in two other uses of comprise: r The book is comprised of three sections (where comprised means “made up of”) and r Three sections comprise the book (where comprise means “combine to make up”) This last construction is the mirror-image of the first use: it begins with the parts that make up the whole, rather than the whole which consists of certain parts. The meaning of comprise thus depends on whatever the writer makes its subject (the whole, or its parts), and readers take their cue from that. The second edition of the Oxford Dictionary (1989) now recognises all three uses of comprise, and all are well attested. Yet the Australian Oxford (2004) still lists both the second and third constructions as disputed, and cautions especially against a fourth one: The book comprises of three sections. TheMacquarieDictionary(2005)notespossiblecriticism from conservative writers against the third and fourth constructions (passive or 165 concensus or consensus active with of ). Clearly the grammar of comprise has been and still is evolving. Some take it in their stride better than others. concensus or consensus See consensus. concerto For the plural of this word, see under Italian plurals. concomitance or concomitancy See under -nce/-ncy. concord See under agreement. concrete or cement See cement. concrete nouns These contrast with abstract nouns. They refer to visible, tangible things such as apple, bridge, ceiling, house, student, water, as well as observable aspects of behavior such as laughing, running, shouting, typing, and natural phenomena which have some measurable correlate, such as electricity, heat, humidity and wind. They may be either mass nouns like flesh and water, or count nouns like apple and student. See further under nouns. concurrence or concurrency See -nce/-ncy. conditional In languages such as French and Italian, this is the term for a special form of the verb which shows that an event or action may take place, not that it will. The conditional is formed rather like the future tense, though the suffixes are a little different: • French je viendrais (conditional) je viendrai (future) • Italian (io) verrei (conditional) (io) verr ` o(future) Translators usually use the English modal verb would to translate conditionals from French and Italian. Conditionals express the writer’s judgement that the fulfillment of the verb’s action depends on something else. For example: Je viendrais mais je n’ai pas d’auto. (I would come but I don’t have a car.) Si j’avais un auto, je viendrais. (If I had a car, I would come.) As the last example shows, conditional statements are often expressed in English by means of a conditional clause, prefaced by if, unless or provided that and are a type of adverbial clause. See further under clauses section 4c. condominium This legal word is used in American English (and increasingly in Australia) to refer to a high-rise apartment which can be owned by strata title. For the plural, see under -um. 166 conjugations The abbreviation condo originated in the US, thoughittoohashadsomecurrency in Australia since 1984, no doubt because it chimes in with other informal words ending in -o. confidant(e) or confident These both relate to confidence, but while confident (adjective) means “having confidence in oneself”, a confidant (noun) is one who receives the confidences of others. Originally (up to the eighteenth century) confident was the spelling for both. Although confidant(e) looks like a French loanword, the French themselves use confidente. Their word referred to a conventional stage character who was privy to the secrets of the chief characters. The English spelling of confidant(e) with a is thought to havebeen a way of representingFrench pronunciation of the lastsyllable (with stress and a nasal vowel). No doubt it was also a way of differentiating it from confident, in times when people tried to maintain formal differences between words with different functions. The presence or absence of e on the end might be expected to indicate the gender of the person in whom one confided (with confidante for a woman, and confidant for the man). However Webster’s English Usage (1989) finds this is not systematically observed in contemporary English. conform to/conform with Of these two possibilities, Fowler (1926) commented that “idiom demands conform to”, and it’s certainly the more common. But conform with is also used occasionally, perhaps under the influence of the phrase in conformity with where with is the standard collocation. There is no particular resistance to with, so the choice is open. Compare compare with/to. conjugations The verbs of a language fall into distinct classes or conjugations according to their patterns of inflection and characteristic vowels. In Latin there were five major conjugations, the most distinctive of which was the first with a as its stem vowel. Its descendants in English are the many words ending in -ate, -ator, -ation and -ative. Most modern European languages have many more than five different classes of verbs, with numerous subgroups created by changes to word forms over the centuries. In English the original seven types of “strong” verbs are now a mixed bag of remnants, and the so-called “weak” conjugation has also spawned many small subgroups. Remnants of the strong conjugations (those which alter their vowels to indicate the past tense and past participle, often adding (e)n to the latter) include: sing sang sung cf. ring, swim ride rode ridden drive, write bear bore borne tear, wear break broke broken speak take took taken forsake 167 conjunctions and conjuncts The weak conjugation simply added -(e)d or -t for both the past forms, though some of these verbs now show vowel changes (and spelling changes) as well: live lived lived cf. love, move keep kept kept creep, meet, sleep sell sold sold tell say said said pay Strong and weak elements are also mixed in verbs such as: do did done shear sheared shorn show showed shown See further under irregular verbs. conjunctions and conjuncts Though both these serve to link words together, only conjunctions are widely known. They join words in the same phrase or clause: bread and butter white or black coffee The children were tired but happy They also link together whole clauses, as in: The milkbar sold bread rolls but there was no supply of bagels. When joining clauses, conjunctions serve either to coordinate them as equals, as in the examples above, or to subordinate one to the other. Different sets of conjunctions are used for each type. 1 The major coordinating conjunctions are: and but or nor yet In grammatical terms they link together main clauses (see further under clauses). They appear at the head of a clause, and allow the subject following them to be deleted if it’s the same as the one just mentioned. See for example: Marion came and (she) demolished the cheese cake. Others saw her at it yet (they) didn’t intervene. Note that conjunctions like these can appear at the start of a sentence, and are then strictly speaking conjuncts (see adverbs section 1). They forge a cohesive link with the previous sentence while being grammatically unconnected. Others saw her at it. Yet they didn’t intervene. (See the table in section 3 for more examples of conjuncts.) Grammarians and some teachers have in the past objected to the use of but or and at the start of a sentence— presumably because they recognised them only as conjunctions, not as conjuncts. See further under and and but. 168 [...]... ordered the ship back to port The narrative keeps the ship in the spotlight—in the topic position in both sentences (see further under topic) In their respective writing contexts the opening phrases of sentences 1 and 2 have a discourse function beyond the sentence itself If we rewrite the sentences to eliminate the dangling participles we lose the topicalising effect they have Any sentence in which the. .. to acquit the murderer It coincides with an English stereotype of the French: as people for whom the affairs of the heart are paramount The principle for “crimes of passion” seems to be there in the French 184 crueler or crueller, cruelest or cruellest Code Penal, article 32 4, which allows husbands finding their wives in flagrante delicto to shoot them Whatever the legal issues, English spelling of the. .. three sentences: the opening phrase in each is unattached to the subject of the following clause But only in the third sentence does it become a distraction, when the meaning is sabotaged by the grammar Where the contents of the sentence are more abstract (as in the first), or where the opening phrase can be related to the object of the sentence (as in the second), the problem is hardly there Castigation... credibility, and dictionaries now add the meaning “capacity to believe” to credibility Meanwhile credulousness is available if we want to stress the fact of being too willing to believe something 1 83 crematorium crematorium For the plural of this word, see -um creme de la creme To be the cream of society is not enough You have to be ` ` cr` me de la cr` me “cream of the cream” The elitist symbolism of cream... though none of them nowadays refers to the living human form The oldest of the three in English is corpse, going back to the fourteenth century It was earlier spelled corse and corps, and until about 1700 could refer to bodies either living or dead Only since the eighteenth century has it been confined to the dead body, and only in the nineteenth century did the final e become a regular part of the spelling... or graves (pl): maqabrey, maqbara and maqabir The confusion led to the dropping of the acute accent from the word macabre, and to the spelling macaber found occasionally in American English (See further under -re/-er.) The danse macabre expresses the threat of death in the form of frenzied energy, contrasting with the cold symbolism of the skull, the memento mori (“reminder of death”) which was a subject... of mortality is the Latin phrase dies irae “day of wrath” (or Judgement Day), taken from the opening lines of the Requiem Mass dare (to) This verb often takes another verb in train, sometimes using to as a connecting rod between them, sometimes not: They dared to speak their minds They dared not speak their minds They didn’t dare to speak their minds He will curl up and die if you dare to do that Don’t... Co-respondent is the legal term for the third party in a divorce suit The hyphenated spelling used in Australian and British English helps to prevent confusion between the two words—although in Australia the co-respondent no longer has to be named after radical changes to divorce procedures since the Family Law Act of 1975 But when the corespondent is 178 could or might referred to in American English, the word... the dangling participle of the first sentence would have a dual function: to draw preceding arguments together, and to alert readers to an imminent change in the argument It works as an extended conjunctive phrase (see further under conjunctions) The second sentence would sound natural enough in the context of narrative: The bows of the vessel had been scarred by pack ice Now damaged in the stern, the. .. glorious fruits to your table! cousins Are they my second cousins, or my first cousins once removed? Strictly speaking, they cannot be both To sort it out, the first question to ask is whether they share one set of the grandparents with you If the answer is yes, then you’re first cousins If the closest common ancestors are your greatgrandparents, then you’re second cousins Removed registers the fact that . to bring it into line with Australian government style. The need to abbreviate the word Commonwealth is still felt in relation to legislation and other Australian institutions. According to the. grammatical terms they link together main clauses (see further under clauses). They appear at the head of a clause, and allow the subject following them to be deleted if it’s the same as the one just. respectively, the French, English and Latin word for “body”, though none of them nowadays refers to the living human form. The oldest of the three in English is corpse, going back to the fourteenth century.