"novel" once again

[Jonathan Lighter]

In this matter of "truthilization,"
  We still must eschew obfuscation :
  The _novel_ abusers
  Are misinformed losers
  Who mix up "fact," "tale," and "narration."

  JL


sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: sagehen
Subject: Re: "novel" once again
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>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
Ahah! Here is where "truthiness" reveals its utility: we will invent
"truthilization."
AM

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