misnomer 'misconception'

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 21, 2004, at 2:23 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> "About ten years ago" sounds right to me, though it could be fifteen.
> I hear it constantly on news and talk shows. In fact, "misconception"
> seems no longer to be used on these programs.

i suggested before that it's opacity actually facilitates its spread:
"misnomer" sounds more technical and series.

> Like "is is," it's now the norm, not the exception.

well, "is is" has been around for some time, just mostly unnoticed
(except by a few keen-eared people, like dwight bolinger).  it's hard
to get a real sense of its distribution.  there are some people who are
heavy users (usually without any awareness of this), many who use it
not at all.  what has certainly changed is that some people, mostly
(but not entirely) linguists and other language-focused people, have
started noticing it, so now (to some of us) it seems to be everywhere.

> Note too that "substitute for" is now used generally for "replace
> with," as in "You can substitute the fries for a salad," meaning just
> the opposite of what you'd exspect.

i've noticed this one at least thirty years, in student writing.  at
first i thought it was just non-native speakers of english, but this
hypothesis quickly turned out to be false.  at one point it was on the
list of Arnold's Pet Peeves for Dissertation Writers -- things i
insisted my students adhere to in their dissertations, just to satisfy
my whims (since my name would in some sense be attached to their work).
  the list was small, and over the years most of the items have dropped
off it, as things not worth caring about, and my remaining instructions
are much less mechanical than they used to be.  (now i'll caution them
about the modal "may", say, or the verb "substitute", and explain how
even very well-intentioned readers might misunderstand what they've
written.)

i can't find any formulation of this particular Peeve (from the days
when everything was on paper, of course), but it went something like
this:
   if at Time 1, there's an X
   and P does something so that at Time 2 there's a Y where the X used
to be,
   then that event can be described by any one of the following
expressions:
     1.  P substitutes Y for X
     2.  Y is substituted for X
     3.  P replaces X by/with Y
     4.  X is replaced by/with Y

converses are the very devil, as we all know, and here the problem is
especially acute, since the substitution/replacement event establishes
a kind of equivalence relationship between X and Y, with the different
formulations differing only in whether the event is described from the
point of view of X or Y (and in whether P is mentioned).

in any case, the use of "substitute" for "replace" is venerable; see
MWDEU on "substitute", citing the OED (examples back to the 17th
century), Fowler's rage over the usage, complaints from other
usageists, a pile of examples (including one from Robert A. Hall, Jr.
in American Speech (1951)), and the practice of M-W dictionaries since
Webster's Second (1934) to treat it as standard.

but, but...  the usage MWDEU is talking about has
   "substitute for" [older sense]
   "substitute with/by" 'replace with/by'
so that, as MWDEU notes, the different meanings of "substitute" are
distinguished by the prepositions they occur with.

this is no longer true, given occurrences of "substitute with/by"
'replace with/by'.

in any case, david denison at manchester has a paper (still in draft)
looking at the history of these usages.  i'll let you know when there's
a proper citation.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)