The Amateur Etymologist

Contingent issues

I am across this construction today: contingent issues. It made me pause in my reading. I'm very familiar with using contingent to mean "dependent on". For example: "Your payment is contingent on the completion of the project." In other words, you'll get paid only if you finish the project. Your payment is dependent upon you completing the work.

Contingent has other definitions (check out Merriam-Webster) but what struck me today was how the writer had paired it with issues. Contingent issues therefore means issues that are dependent on or conditioned by something else. For example: "The construction of the hotel is hampered by the workers' strike. In addition, there are contingent issues like the sand shortage that will slow the work."

I like the sound of those two words put together: contingent issues. I plan to use it in a sentence this week.

Orthogonal

Buried in an email that I received from someone at the company was the word orthogonal. The sentence it was used in was:  While these objectives are not orthogonal, there are areas where they work at odds.

My mind tripped over the use of the word orthogonal, because I was unfamiliar with it and had never seen it used that way before. I checked the online Merriam-Webster online and its definitions for orthogonal were related to Mathematics:

1 a: intersecting or lying at right angles b: having perpendicular slopes or tangents at the point of intersection

I checked AskOxford.com and got pretty much the same definition. Then I checked the Visual Thesaurus and it had a definition that goes like this:

not perinent to the matter under consideration.

Screen capture from the Visual Thesaurus.

Aha, finally, a definition other than one related to Mathematics. However, back to the original sentence, the context is still best understood when using the mathematical definition of being at right angles. My co-worker was saying that the objectives were not at right angles (a complete clash) but they were at odds.

The lesson for me here is that while the dictionaries may not state every application of a word, English is such a living, breathing, evolving language that it is capable of creating new word usages. It's like how obtuse--another mathematical term--has now taken on the secondary meaning of "not having or showing an ability to absorb ideas readily". Yes, I was fairly obtuse about orthogonal.

Scapegoat

I'm always amazed how the Bible, especially the King James Version, has influenced the English language. There are so many phrases, words and idioms who have their direct roots from the KJV. Scapegoat is one such word.

We know scapegoat to mean the person who bears the blame for others. But few of us realise that its primary meaning is a goat upon whose head are symbolically placed the sins of the people after which he is sent into the wilderness in the biblical ceremony for Yom Kippur. (From the Merriam-Webster.)

The idea of the scapegoat is from Atonement ceremony in Leviticus 16:7-10 (KJV):
And he [Aaron, the high priest] shall take the two goats, and present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the LORD's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

The goat that gets away (the escape goat or scapegoat) is a visual aid for the people of Israel that their sin will cut them off from God. So the scapegoat, bearing the people's sin had to be driven away, outside the camp.

From this act, we get out modern scapegoat, someone who takes the blame for others.

Sole Breadwinner

A friend asked if the phrase "sole breadwinner" was a tautology, viz., that being a breadwinner for the family meant that you were the only one earning a salary. Interesting. Well, I checked my Oxford and it states that a breadwinner is simply "a person who supports their family with the money they earn". The Merriam-Webster goes further and gives a second (actually its primary) definition as "a means of livelihood". Although it does seem to imply that, neither dictionary says breadwinner is the only money earner for the family. Which means that it's perfectly all right to use the phrase sole breadwinner.

Date and time formats

Date formats seem to trip people up. I remember having a conversation with a writer friend who complained that his editor was insisting that dates need to be written in the following format: 16 May, 2008.

Well, that's incorrect. You need commas if you're writing a date in the American English format: Month Date, Year. For example: May 16, 2008. You need the comma because it would be confusing without it: May 16 2008.

If you're writing the date in the British English format (which we do in Singapore), you don't need commas at all. For example: 16 May 2008. There's no confusion because the two numbers are separated by the month.

You might see this format sometimes: 16th May 2008. That's okay, but clumsy. Why put in the 'th' when it's perfectly understandable without it?

Moving on to time formats. There are several. The traditional format is to use a colon to separate the hour from the minutes. Like this: 10:25 p.m. Note that p.m. has two periods because it's a short form for Prime Meridian. Note also when you end a sentence with the time, the last period is the one after the m in p.m. Similarly, if it's in the morning, the time will be written as 10:25 a.m. (Ante Meridian). These days, you see newspapers and just about everyone else writing time with a period: 10.25 pm. (And the  p.m. has lost a period.) That's just lazy punctuation. We're abusing the period, using it instead of the proper colon.

If you're going to use military-styled time telling, then 10:25 p.m. will be 2225hrs. There are no colons or periods at all. 22:25hrs is just wrong, wrong, wrong.