coincidentally = ironically = also + "fiction"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Well, I'm sorry I checked.  Many of the titles - said to be "among the most frequently taught" novels in high-school these days - are unfamiliar to me, but do appear to be "novels," i.e., long works of "fiction," i.e., made-up stories sometimes "based on actual events."

  It is difficult, though, to see how these words apply to Maya Angelou's _I KNiw Why the Caged Bird Sings_ and Elie Wiesel's _Night_.  Both are described in the critical readings as "novels" (with Wiesel's memoir of Auschwitz also referred to as a "novella") and as "fictionalized."  The "fictionalization" in both cases seems to be restricted to some reconstructed conversations which the authors  participated in or at least overheard.
  One supposes that inevitable minor tricks of memory are also enough to earn a memoir the labels of "novel" and "fiction."

  In other words, if it's less than 100% true, it's false - or maybe just indeterminate.

  "Fiction" seems to be on its way to meaning "literary or artistic prose, regardless of truth or falsity."  I don't say it means that quite yet, but we'll see. (One mark of "fiction" in Wiesel's_Night_, if I read correctly, is the author's "use of blank space.")

  JL

  Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
    "Coincidence" and "coincidentally" used to be words that you learned the meaning of almost at birth.  Even before you discovered what a "novel" was.

  The source of the quote, if you missed it, is a multivolume reference work for high-school and college students who need to write papers on literature.  I really must check its application of the word "novel."

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: coincidentally = ironically = also
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 2/1/07, Charles Doyle wrote:
>
> >From: Jonathan Lighter
> >
> >Discovered, as usual, by chance:
> >
> > 1999 _Novels for Students_ (ed. D. A. Stanley) (Detroit: Gale) VII 53:
> > Though written in 1891, _Billy Budd_...was first published posthumously
> > in 1924. Coincidentally, the English composer Edward Benjamin Britten,
> > aided by E. M. Forster's libretto, made _Billy Budd_ into an opera in 1951.
>
> Or is "coincidentally" simply used in place of (perhaps confused with) "incidentally"?

This follows the well-known rule that a word sounds fancier with extra
syllables in front. Cf. "epicenter" = 'center', "penultimate" =
'ultimate', "quintessential" = 'essential', "juxtaposition" =
'position', etc.

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--Ben Zimmer

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