"novel" once again

[Jonathan Lighter]

Jesse, don't think I haven't considered that.  But at what point do we stop making excuses to rationalize away the horror ?  If many of the exx. simply represent a factual error, at what point does the upshot of an endemic sort of research error (not caring or not bothering to check what's fiction and what isn't) become absorbed by others as a new sense or nuance of a word ?

  Consider. I first encountered the broad use of "novel" among undergraduates twenty-odd years ago, and more than sporadically since. This is plenty of time for a semantic shift to spread and establish itself. In fact, it may have been around for many years among unsophisticated speakers before I noticed it.  If I weren't an academic, I mightn't have noticed it and I certainly wouldn't have posted it.  Two decades later, we find Ph.D.'s, journalists, and Internet site-owners using it.  This is entirely consistent with an emergent usage.

  Note too that I'm not seeking these exx., the one exception being today's blog ex. So these instances are fairly common. That too is suggestive of a semantic shift.

  Consider too: there's no single-word, all-encompassing complement to "novel" meaning "nonfiction book." It may be that users of "novel=book-length prose work" at some level regard it as simply a more learned synonym for "book," as books in general tend indeed to be in prose. We've already mentioned the possible influence of "nonfiction novel," popularized forty years ago.  A further influence may be the phrase "based on the novel by" on movie posters, as misinterpreted by ten-year olds.

  A similar shift, which I noticed as soon as I started teaching and which may be even more familiar to comp instructors, is the use of the word "story" to cover anything in a literary anthology, including poems and plays. Like "novel," this is easily corrected, but that's not the point. The point is that many U.S. high-school graduates feel comfortable in characterizing sonnets as "stories" and nonfiction books as "novels."

  Some of them probably, if put on the spot, would distinguish between "novel" and "nonfiction book."  But what they "know" is not necessarily identical with their actual practice. What seems to be, for "sophisticated" speakers, an automatic and crucial distinction between a noun that designates a book-length fiction ("novel") and one that may or may not ("book") seems for many unsophisticated speakers (and some sophisticated ones) an afterthought at best.

  This novel use of "novel" is hardly standard Inglish today, but tomorrow....

  JL


Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Jesse Sheidlower
Subject: Re: "novel" once again
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On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 06:59:57AM -0700, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> 2003 Joanna Berry in Steven Jay Schneider, ed. _1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die_ (London: Quintet) 421: _The Great Escape_ (1963)...based on the novel by Paul Brickhill, is backed by a memorable score by Elmer Bernstein that beautifully punctuates every fantastic moment.
>
> Paul Brickhill's book (1950; rpt. N.Y.: Norton, 2004) is nonfiction, based partly on his own experiences. (The well-known film is heavily fictionalized.)
>

Y'know, the problem with a lot of these examples is that the
books in question are ones that could reasonably be mistaken
for novels. Maybe some people know that _The Great Escape_ or
_Two Years before the Mast_ were actually memoirs, but I think
it's forgivable for people to assume they are fiction.

In other words I think a lot of these examples are more likely
to be errors of fact by people who think these books are fiction,
than a shift in meaning of the word _novel_ to encompass any
kind of narrative work.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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