1016. This week, we look at why some verbs are so irregular their forms don't even seem related, like "go" and "went." Then, we look at the surprising finding that corporate euphemisms are worse than annoying — they can also hurt a company's stock price.
1016. This week, we look at why some verbs are so irregular that their forms don't even seem related, like "go" and "went." Then, we look at the surprising finding that corporate euphemisms are worse than annoying — they can also hurt a company's stock price.
The "suppletion" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
The "corporate euphemisms" segment was was written by Kate Suslava, an associate professor of accounting at Bucknell University. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license, BY-ND 4.0.
🔗 Share your familect recording in a WhatsApp chat.
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook.Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about why the past tense of "go" isn't "goes" and why if you're better than good, you aren't "gooder." Then we'll talk about corporate euphemisms. They're widely hated, but their problems aren't limited to just emotions.
by Valerie Fridland
Have you ever wondered why one can be smart, smarter, or smartest but we can’t be good, gooder, or goodest unless we are under the age of three? Likewise, why can I go and have gone, but never go-ed? And don’t get me started on how the verb “to be” shifts its form almost as often as I change socks, appearing as “is,” “am,” “are,” “been,” “was,” and “were” depending on the company it’s keeping.
Some might chock this up to English simply being a little haphazard and arbitrary – in the same way that someone from Virginia is called a Virginian while someone from Michigan is a Michigander – but it turns out all the examples I previously mentioned are created through a rare process linguists call "stem suppletion."
Now, stem suppletion is where members of a semantically related grammatical set (like "go/went" or "bad/worse") have separate origins and sound quite different. This is different from cases like “sing," "sang," "sung” or “ox" and "oxen” where they are actually just relics of a more general way English used to create different tenses or form a plural. In those cases, the roots are all still formed off the same stem. In stem suppletion, there is basically no relationship between members of the pair in terms of how they are pronounced or in terms of their origin. A good analogy here to the example I just used would be this is sort of like the way someone is called a “Hoosier” instead of an “Indianian.” While we can see the relationship between the words "Virginia" and "Virginian," it is very unlikely that "Indiana" and "Hoosier" come from the same etymological source.
So how does stem suppletion happen? Well, that is a great question and one that linguists aren't absolutely certain about, but it seems to be related to the way different words with close or compatible meanings can get merged into a single set over time, especially when there is a grammatical gap or a lost form for one of the original roots. Let’s look at the history of the verb “to go” as an illustration.
Now, the verb “go” was originally “gan” in Old English. Although it also carried a sense of “go” back then, its meaning was more specific to going by way of walking (as opposed to other modes). To more generally talk about motion, people used a different Old English verb — “faran” — which meant “to set out or go.” At the same time, there was yet another Old English verb, “wendan,” which meant “to wind or turn,” still found today in the expression “to wend one’s way.”
Now, the simple past tense form of “gan” seems to have been lost early on or maybe even never existed in Old English, creating a problem for speakers who wanted to talk about their past walk-going. But there were also a number of Germanic languages and dialects present in Old English times, and chances are people were familiar with, and some used, words from these other varieties. And that's probably how people came to use a past tense word from a separate Germanic root for a while: “eode.”
Over time, “faran” started to fall out of favor, and “gan” became the way to refer to motion more generally. In other words, “gan” enlarged in meaning and then pushed “faran” out of regular use. Meanwhile, “wendan” had also shifted its meaning somewhat during this time to having a sense of “moving in one direction” or “reaching a destination,” and it was used particularly by people in the northern part of Britain. Unlike “gan,” “wendan” did have a past tense that people were using: “wente.” (W-E-N-T-E.)
So, as might be obvious at this point, by the time people were speaking Middle English, there was a confusingly large number of ways to talk about going, with some subtle distinctions in meaning and also different preferences in terms of which forms were used more often and where they were used. Over time, it seems, “faran” died out altogether, and by the 14th century the “went” form of “wend” that was used a lot in the north replaced “eode” everywhere too.
That means the past tense of “go” has actually gone through two separate instances of suppletion to get to the stable "go/went" (present/past) paradigm we have today. And although historical linguists don't tend to study the social causes of language change, it is likely that the "went” form managed to stick around because it was used by people who held some kind of social sway. And, as you might suspect from the way it sounds “gone,” the past participle form, did more directly come from the Old English word “gan,” which is how we ended up with “go," "went," and "have gone.”
Next, the verb “to be” has an even more convoluted history, with four separate roots from an ancient precursor language known as Proto-Indo-European blended together into a single set.
From the Indo-European root *bheu, meaning “to become or to grow” we get “to be,” “been” and “being.”
In contrast, the Old English words “eom” and “es,” which gave us our modern words “am” and “is,” came from a separate Indo-European root, *es, which meant “to exist.”
The modern word “are,” pronounced as “art” in earlier days, as in “Where art thou?” came from the Indo-European root *er, which meant “to arise.”
Finally, "was" and "were" come from different inflected forms of the Old English word “wesan,” which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *wes, “to remain.” As with "go" and "went," different dialects seem to have played a role in the way different forms came together over the centuries until “to be” finally settled down into its modern pattern by the 15th century or so.
And good/better/best? Yup, another example of suppletion. The word “good” comes from the Indo-European root which carried the meaning “gather or unite.” This root took on a positive sense (hey, who doesn’t love to gather?) and became “godaz” in English’s Germanic precursor language, becoming “gōd“ in Old English. So why don’t we have "gooder" and "goodest"? Well, the Proto-Germanic word that “good” comes from did not arrive with a comparative or superlative form, but there was another Proto-Germanic word, *bat, from which we ultimately got “better” and “best.”
Unfortunately, although linguists have discussed the history, definition, and criteria for suppletion for a long time, they haven't explored the reasons it happens as much. But the missing piece appears to be the way people pick and choose among the various words floating around in their universe to achieve both social and linguistic aims. For example, “father” is a Germanic word inherited into English, but “paternal” comes from Latin. Sometimes, instead of saying “fatherly,” we say “paternal” because, for a long time, people who spoke Norman French and French’s swanky Latin roots were considered high-brow in Britain. This is a perfect example of suppletion driven by people who wanted to adopt a fancier lingo – so in the end suppletion is probably as much about our social lives as it is about our grammatical inclinations.
And this leaves us with only one final question: How is it that you can still be a do-gooder when you can’t do it gooder? Well, because “to do-good” is treated in that case as a phrasal verb, and the "-er" at the end isn't actually the comparative "-er" ending. Instead, it is a different "-er" ending — the one we use to make verbs into nouns, as in “a runner” or “a baker.” And this solves the mystery of why you can always be a do-gooder, but never a do-goodest.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
This next segment about corporate euphemisms is by Kate Suslave, an associate professor of accounting at Bucknell University.
by Kate Suslava
Corporate America has invented many ways to avoid letting the public know it’s laying people off – or telling employees themselves “You’re fired.”
Common parlance includes “downsizing,” “headcount management,” “restructuring” or even the unsightly “involuntary separation program.” Or a boss might say “Your position has been made redundant” or simply, “You’ve been let go.” General Motors recently came up with a new one: “You’re unallocated.”
That’s basically how the automaker announced it was getting rid of several plants and potentially hundreds of employees – leading to much confusion among workers about what “unallocated” actually meant.
To better understand why companies turn to euphemisms rather than spill bad news with plain language, I pored over thousands of conference calls, where these mild, vague and often ridiculous paraphrases often surface. As I found, using corporate BS can often backfire.
Humans have always used euphemisms to camouflage harsh realities and to avoid offending an audience.
People employ euphemistic terms to talk about anything they find embarrassing. For example, “rest room” is a euphemism for lavatory or toilet, even though no one goes there to rest. In educational circles, dropouts are referred to as “early leavers.” And “glass ceiling” often disguises discrimination at work.
To be considered a euphemism, an expression should first refer to something unpleasant – in GM’s case, layoffs and plant closures.
Second, it should be a mild way of referring to the unpleasantness, so “unallocated” is a substitute for the blunt expression “We are firing workers and shutting down the facilities.”
Finally, it should be a secondary meaning to an already used term. In business, unallocated funds refer to the money that is not currently used in a project.
In the context of corporate disclosures, euphemisms are also used to refer to something embarrassing or difficult to predict and control.
To develop a proxy for euphemism usage, I created a dictionary of corporate communication euphemisms by analyzing 78,000 earnings call transcripts for U.S. companies over the last 14 years.
During a 2011 conference call, for example, TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. CEO Ralph Quinsey talked about “cloudier near-term visbility” rather than simply discussing his company’s failure to plan ahead. The same year, Lennox International Chief Financial Officer Bob Hau used “headwinds” to suggest the impact of markets is as fickle as the weather. And in 2005, Marty Singer, chief executive of Pctel, a provider of wireless security services, called his failure to execute on a plan merely a “hiccup.”
The most common euphemisms I uncovered tended to be rather banal or technical sayings, such as citing “headwinds” instead of clearly explaining outside challenges hurting a business or “lumpiness” to describe operational problems with delivering a product. To soften the blow of a particular bad quarter, corporate executives often call it a “transition period.”
Euphemisms were most popular in the cyclical industries, such as consumer companies, where managers need strong verbal skills to explain the perennial ups and downs.
I also found that their use spiked during the financial crisis, as companies tend to use more euphemisms when they are going through tough times. In addition, the companies that use euphemisms the most tend to be older businesses with fewer opportunities for growth, falling earnings and recent stock drops.
To me, this shows that these phrases are used to sugarcoat what companies would rather leave unsaid altogether to avoid giving investors, employees and other concerned parties bad news.
But this often backfires.
After analyzing the conference calls for euphemisms, I examined how markets reacted. When a company is reporting bad news, typically, share prices react quickly and then stabilize after the information has been absorbed. I found that when companies used a lot of euphemisms on earnings calls, investors didn’t seem to fully understand the magnitude of the bad news.
As a result, shares tended to slide for several months after an earnings call filled with euphemisms, as investors are having a delayed reaction to the bad news. And managers with strong BS skills tend to succeed in delaying the scrutiny of the “hiccups” to the period after the call when there is less focus on company performance.
That segment was written by Kate Suslava, an associate professor of accounting at Bucknell University. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license, BY-ND 4.0.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"So here's my story. My name is Dan and our family word is "goggy." It comes from ga-ga goo-goo baby talk and "goggy" means a young child. One time when we're at daycare, I just happened to use it out in public, and all of the kids just froze because they hadn't heard that word before, and they were very curious what it was, and so I explained it to them. The next day, I went back there, and I dropped it in again to see how they reacted, but they had moved on. It was part of their vocabulary."
Thanks, Dan. Isn't it amazing how fast kids pick up new words! Thanks for the call.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson in advertising, Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; Dan Feierabend in audio; Nat Hoopes in marketing; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; and Davina Tomlin in marketing, who recently acquired a love of hiking and a hatred for terrible hiking boots.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.
The following references for the suppletion segment did not appear in the audio but are included here for completeness.
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1994. Suppletion. In Asher, S. and Simpson, F. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 4410-4411. Oxford: Pergamon Press
Bobaljik. Jonathan D. 2012. Universals in Comparative Morphology : Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words. MIT Press.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “good (adj., n., adv., int.),” June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5923139829.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “boot (n.1), Etymology,” September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5923139829.
Unebe, Noriko. (2013). Wend in Early Middle English. 東京家政学院大学紀要 = Journal of Tokyo Kasei Gakuin University, 53, 67–74.
Welna, Jerzy. 2001. Suppletion for suppletion, or the replacement of eode by went in English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36. 95-110.
Veselinova, Ljuba N.. Suppletion in Verb Paradigms : Bits and pieces of the puzzle, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006.