Faulty inference can turn a heartfelt reply into fighting words

saxo-archive

Saturday, Dec. 29, 2007 | midnight

Boston

Sometimes I feel a twinge of envy for my colleague Alex Beam, whose abundant hate mail fills a monthly podcast. Then I remember: I hate conflict! But this year brought a couple of dissents worth sharing.

First was the one -- provoked, I admit -- from a grammar guru whose blog claimed that “quicker” could not be an adverb. I wrote to protest: Even her dictionary labeled it an adverb, I noted, as did most usage guides.

I was wasting my keystrokes. “I don't agree that quicker is an adverb,” she tersely replied. “So your truth just doesn't happen to match mine in this case.”

Indeed.

At the opposite end of the volubility spectrum was a guy who thought I should be offended if a flight attendant handing out bagels responded to my “Thanks” with “Mm-hmm.”

“‘Mm-hmm' is a slightly more pleasant version of the grunt,” he insisted. “It says ‘I can't be troubled to say the right thing' ... Maybe she should just mumble ‘whatever.' Why not? That's what she really thinks ... You're a language writer -- so support the language. Don't just watch it swirl around the drain.”

A week or two later, on the phone with my sister, I thanked her for something, and what was her reply? A cheery “Mm-hmm!” Maybe I'm inured to the usage, having grown up with peaceable Midwesterners, but only a paranoid imagination could have heard that “Mm-hmm” as dismissive.

My conclusion hasn't changed: If you want to hear rudeness in responses like “Mm-hmm,” or “Sure thing” or “No problem,” well, it's your blood pressure. But surely it's also rude to go around taking offense when none is intended.

• • •

Tilting at Spanish: If we say Don Quixote's name kee-HOH-tay, asked Roger Rouleau, why is the adjective form, “quixotic,” pronounced kwik-SAHT-ik instead of kee-HOH-tik?

The short answer is: It's an American thing. In Britain, Don Quixote is usually called KWIK-sit, as he has been since his literary debut 400 years ago. (In French he's Quichotte, in Italian Chisciotte.)

Americans, however, prefer to aim for the Spanish: “Kee-HOH-tee is the dominant pronunciation and the quasi-Spanish kee-HOH-tay, though not usually listed (in dictionaries), is often heard,” writes Charles Harrington Elster in “The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations.”

But the way, we say the proper name Quixote has nothing to do with the pronunciation of “quixotic”: After centuries as an English adjective, it's beyond the reach of its Castilian progenitor.

• • •

We heart eggcorns: Buried in last spring's eggcorn bounty was a delightful one spotted in the Concord Monitor by Barbara Richardson of Amsdem, Vt.: “The family ... would like to send a heart-filled thank you.”

“Heart-filled” as a replacement for “heartfelt” was new to me, and it hasn't hit the Eggcorn Database, where such creative misunderstandings are catalogued. But it nets more than 1,500 Google hits.

It's a plausible reanalysis, since we say hearts are “filled” with emotion. Still, “heart-filled,” formed like “air-filled” and “cream-filled,” would more logically mean “full of hearts” -- or “filled with heart,” I suppose, if the subject were a deli sandwich.

Then there's the “heartful” thanks alternative, found in both print and Web sources. It too may spring from an eggcornish mishearing of “heartfelt,” but unlike “heart-filled,” it can't be called an error: Its first recorded use -- heartfully, “cordially, wholeheartedly” -- is more than 600 years old.

Jan Freeman writes a column about language for The Boston Globe.