'albeit'

[Larry Trask]

My little posting on 'albeit' a couple of weeks ago has attracted quite a
number of responses -- so many that I've lost track now, and I'm afraid I
can't thank all the respondents by name, as I would normally do.  For this
I apologize.

A very few respondents agree with me that the word has been resuscitated
from near-extinction.  Most, though, take issue, and report that they have
used the word, or at least encountered it, without interruption for several
decades.  This disproportion doesn't surprise me, since members of the
second group are more likely to reply to my assertion.

It's interesting that some people report that the word has never gone out
of use for them.  Still, I insist that the word was seldom used in a very
wide variety of contexts for a long time, before becoming far more
prominent a few years ago.  I strongly suspect that I could in principle
document this by searching a corpus of texts published around twenty years
ago, but I'm afraid I'm not going to make the effort.

I have one further point to report.  Just yesterday, I was looking at
something written by one of my research students -- a native speaker of
British English -- and I noticed that she had written "all be it".  She is
a woman in her forties, well educated and a senior teacher, and her English
is generally excellent.  So I have to assume that she had picked this up
from hearing it spoken, and not from seeing it written, since her error is
exactly the opposite of the "all-bite" pronunciation reported by a couple
of correspondents.  This example, I think, is consistent with my view that
the word was until recently little used.

There are just three particular points about 'albeit' I'd like to reply to.

One respondent reports that he makes a semantic distinction between
'albeit' on the one hand and 'but' or 'though' on the other, in that
'albeit' means something like 'though, admittedly'.  This is certainly news
to me, and I'm curious to know whether anyone else does the same.

Another queries my declaration that 'albeit' is pretentious.  Well, I'm
afraid I find it so.  I am confident that I'm not alone here, but I haven't
so far troubled to conduct a survey of my colleagues.  Maybe one day I
will, though perhaps such a survey really should have been carried out a
few years ago, before the word became so prominent.  For me, the word is
right up there with 'aforementioned' as a piece of modern standard English.
;-)

Another respondent drew attention to the use of 'albeit' as a subordinator,
as in this example:

  "The Basques are suspicious of outsiders, albeit they are wonderfully
  hospitable once they get to know you."

The respondent found this use much less acceptable than the other use of
the word, and I agree: I don't regard this as English at all, even though I
have begun to encounter examples of it in writing, and even though OED2
confirms that it was once English.

A final comment on my facetious "law".  I really do believe that very many
people are eager to avoid plain words in favor of fancy ones, and that they
are constantly looking for new fancy words, which they then go ahead and
use even if they don't understand the words they have chosen.  My
forthcoming usage handbook lists piles of these.  Just a few examples:

  'utilize' for 'use'
  'fortuitous' for 'lucky'
  'author' for 'write'
  'parent' for 'bring up'
  'adequate' for 'enough'
  'purchase' for 'buy'
  'educator' for 'teacher'
  'physician' for 'doctor'
  'ruination' for 'ruin'

I begin to think that this tendency may be an important force in language
change, but I don't think we have an established name for it.  Is there one?
All I can think of are 'hyperurbanism' and 'inkhornism', but neither term
seems to be right.

Anyway, I'd like to thank all those who took the trouble to reply, and I'm
sorry I can't list them all by name.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)