In my post ‘Who’s the boss of English?’, I refuted several prescriptivist rules about English usage asserted by the journalist Simon Heffer. One was his insistence that when it comes to alternatives ‘there can only ever be two’ – that any more than two means they are ‘options’. This curious belief is worth a closer look.
Heffer is not the first to peddle it, but this dubious rule has little support among experts. Even back in 1965, Ernest Gowers’ revision of Fowler called it a ‘fetish’. It seems to originate in the word’s Latin ancestor, which specified a choice between two. But English is not Latin, and this is the etymological fallacy – the belief that a word’s older or original meaning must be more correct or solely correct. It is a misconception that underlies many false beliefs about words.
The meanings of words emerge from collective usage, not from the demands of pedants and purists. To find out what ‘alternative’ really means, we consult a good, modern dictionary whose definitions are based on large corpora of language in use. Macmillan Dictionary is one such, and it defines alternative (n.) as ‘something that you can choose instead of something else’. There is no requirement that there only be two.
Other dictionaries concur. The OED traces the noun’s history from the early seventeenth century, and in defining its various senses refers more than once to ‘two or more’ – explicitly contradicting Heffer’s assertion. The American Heritage Dictionary adds a note on the findings of its expert panel, who by an overwhelming majority reject the narrow rule.
I am, to my relief, not so self-assured as to dismiss these reputable authorities and cling to an outdated nicety, an anachronistic pet preference of what a word means – and not just cling to it but attempt to impose it on others, regardless of the evidence. Using alternative to refer to more than two things is common, standard usage. Calling it a ‘common mistake’ merely scuppers one’s credentials.
No one can uphold the etymological fallacy consistently and still hope to communicate with people. Because so many words drift semantically, the purists must pick and choose a few examples and forget all the rest. Were they to insist that orient means ‘face east’, that silly means ‘happy’, or that ‘girl’ can refer to a male child, no one would take them seriously.
So why accept certain changes in meaning but not others? What is the point of these usage prescriptions? Is the main motivation, as I wondered in my last post, to maintain shibboleths that allow an in-group to congratulate itself on observing them, and to scold anyone who doesn’t? If there are other alternatives, I’m listening.Email this Post