Mind your language | 14 July 2007

‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’

‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Do you know,’ replied my husband, ‘I can’t remember.’ So that’s his last useful function gone.

I was asking because, in a discussion of hospital posts for young doctors, the news kept referring to specialties, and I itched for specialities. Fowler’s Modern English Usage confirms that specialty is used especially in North America, but also in Britain, in the two chief senses of ‘a special pursuit’ and ‘a special feature or skill’. But the Oxford Guide to English Usage says that specialty is ‘restricted to North America’.

What then of other optional syllables: orient or orientate; burgle or burglarise?

We tend to think that we are given to irrational hatreds of Americanisms, but Americans have mirror-image distastes for British usages. ‘At best, orientate is a back-formation used humorously to make the speaker sound pompous. The correct word is the verb orient,’ says a helpful language website made in America. It is quite wrong.

‘In the perverse way in which such things often happen,’ wrote good old Robert Burchfield in his edition of Fowler, ‘these two verbs drawn from the same base (French orienter, ‘to place facing the east’) have fallen into competition with one another in the second half of the 20th century’. It still continues.

Orient came into English in the middle of the 18th century; orientate 100 years later. But there is no need to invoke ‘back-formation’. Orientate corresponds to orienter as or felicitate does to féliciter.

The mechanism of back-formation did operate in the coinage of burgle. The word burglar, itself a strange law-Latin term, had been around since the 13th century (‘Murdritores & robbatores & burglatores,’ wrote Bracton.