While dynamism of the English language has been observed many times, it is not at all common to hear anyone suggest that verbal expression follows laws like those of the physical universe.
In fact, that proposition seems to remain the sole province of this writer.
It was with great caution that he put forward in this space 5 years ago the hypothesis of universal verbal gravitation (UVG). The implications of UVG are so profound and potentially so dire that he feared his description of it might incite panic.
Yet publishing is not the business of keeping secrets. So the UVG hypothesis eased into the intellectual light in this space (OGJ, Oct. 27, 2003, p. 19).
That no corpus of academic literature has yet developed around the subject must reflect complexity of the proposition and not, surely not, a lack of interest. This is just as well. Esoteric concepts inevitably slip through scholarly fingers and bounce down the intellectual stairs like runaway rubber balls, submitting eventually to the alarmist distortions of popular media. Chaos ensues.
Happy news is at hand. The threat is not as great as it once seemed. This writer has discovered a counterforce in the world of letters with potential to mitigate UVG’s ominous ramifications.
Irresistible force
To review, UVG is the apparently irresistible attraction that causes words to behave like love bugs, or—watch the phenomenon in action here—lovebugs. Anyone perplexed by this analogy should ask an acquaintance from Houston for an explanation, but the name alone is sufficiently descriptive for most people.
UVG works most actively in professional jargon, where writers, for example, eagerly turn “drill bit” into “drillbit,” “draw works” into “drawworks,” “bubble point” into “bubblepoint,” “feed stock” into “feedstock,” and so on.
The attractive force between words probably is some function of the square of the frequency of their occurrences together, but this part of the theory will have to be tested.
The urgent question is this: Where does it end?
Clearly, words possess some attractive force akin to gravity. If word pairs readily fuse to become one, what’s to stop words formed in this manner from mating with equal abandon? Then there would be one word where once there were four. Soon, foursomes would be linking.
In the absence of some repulsive force, the process logically would continue until the entire language had congealed into one giant word—a lavish and wondrous word encompassing all meaning, all feeling, all context and connation, but surely the doom of talk radio and a devil of a thing to spell.
It is not clear how long the language would take to unify completely, but there must be some tipping point beyond which the process becomes irreversible and before which human intervention must begin, whatever the cost. University researchers are no doubt working in secret on these problems now, supported, one hopes, by whatever public funding may be necessary.
Discovery by this writer of a counterforce to UVG is no reason for the efforts to cease. But it does provide hope that the tipping point may be less imminent than once was feared.
The counterforce is extravagant hyphenation (EH), specifically after prefixes.
Small but powerful, prefixes are the tugboats of English. They steer the meanings of root words (not “rootwords,” at least not yet) into new, sometimes reverse, directions. Yet most are not words by themselves. Think of “pre,” “un,” “non,” “anti,” and “re,” all prefixes you’ll never encounter except at the front ends of real words.
With a few exceptions, prefixes are supposed to become seamless parts of their root words, giving rise to verbs like “prejudge” and “untie,” adjectives like “rebuilt” and “noncommercial,” and nouns like “noncombatant” and “antifreeze.”
Notice how the prefixes snuggle up with their root words. Properly hyphenated exceptions include root words beginning with capital letters (“pre-Jurassic”) and numerals (“pre-1900”).
Hyphenating prefixes
Mysteriously, modern writers have developed an urge to insert hyphens after every prefix they use. This is EH. Hyphenations like “non-combatant” and “pre-judge” appear all the time, with evident sanction by that dubious authority, the computer spell checker (not “spellchecker”).
Whereas UVG joins words best left separate, EH pries apart linguistic components that belong together.
EH therefore must be a dynamic language’s way of countering UVG. Discovery of it comes just in time. Once people feel pressured by tipping points, anything can happen.
