"novel" once again

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 08:16:28AM -0700, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> 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.
>

But all this is consistent with the possibility that the
people might honestly think that the works they are referring
to are, indeed, fictional. It's not that implausible that
what's happened in 20 years is not that _novel_ is undergoing
semantic broadening, but that now, Ph.D.s and journalists,
instead of just callow undergrads, think that _A Rumor of War_
is fictional.

I follow with interest the citations you post on this matter,
and I agree that a number of them do seem fairly solid. But I
also think that most of them are ambiguous on the issue of
what the speaker thinks the truth-content is of the book in
question. And most of them refer to works of narrative
nonfiction that incorporate elements of fiction, such as, er,
narration, or a gripping storyline (_Black Hawk Down_ comes to
mind, among your examples).

I'd really like to see some examples of _novel_ applied to
work which no one could conceivably regard as fictional,
e.g. _Mastering the Art of French Cooking_ or _The Careful
Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage_ or _Database
Programming in Java_ or even _Shakespeare: A Biography_.
Such examples from Ph.D.s or journalists would be impressive
evidence of a real semantic shift. (The _Winning Golf_ thing
was a good step in this direction.)

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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