Outrage (was: a New York Times article about a single word)

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:48 AM -0400 4/30/08, Damien Hall wrote:
>Larry said:
>
>>  On the other hand, "outrage" in French, where
>>nobody would connect it with the
>>  (non-existent) "rage", remains pretty strong; my Larousse glosses it as
>'affront > ou offense grave, manquement à une
>règle morale', which sounds a lot
>more
>>  serious than your garden-variety anglophonic outrage.
>
>But _rage_ does exist in French.  I'd say that Eng. 'rage' isn't it's primary
>meaning - people are maybe more likely to use _colère_ or something for that,
>unless they really want to make a point - rather, the primary meaning of Fr.
>_rage_ is 'rabies'.  Of course, it's hard to
>think of an instance where context
>wouldn't disambiguate between these two, but I mean that most French people,
>seeing _rage_ in a word-list, would think of the disease (especially since
>rabies does still exist in France, and people
>are still very careful about it).
>  Nevertheless, the 'rage' meaning is there, both as an independent noun and in
>at least one idiom, _faire rage_ 'rage' (v.), as in _La bataille a fait rage
>pendant deux ou trois jours_ 'The battle raged for two or three days'.
>
All true, as I should have noted.  The intended
point remains that no French speaker would have
reanalyzed "outrage" (or "outrageux", "outrager",
etc.) as deriving from "outr-" + "rage" rather
than the etymological "outr-" + "-age", while the
pronunciation of the corresponding English words,
with the syllable break between the "out" and
"rage" (as opposed to, say, "outage"),
demonstrates that this reanalysis has been made.
(Besides the difference in word-formation
processes that make the "out-" + "rage" unlikely
and the non-existence of a particle/preposition
"out", the suffix "-age" is considerably more
productive in French than in English, even in the
post-Buffy era.)

LH

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