'albeit'

[Larry Trask]

--On Tuesday, June 26, 2001 8:32 pm +0100 petegray
<petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

[quoting on 'albeit']

>> "all-bite" .... the pretentiousness of Times journalists
>> (more justifiably, perhaps).

> The word is not pretentious at all in the educated speech of those I work
> with (or in my own).  I guess its "death and resurrection" is a phenomenon
> not shared by all the English speaking world.

I really wish some linguist had been paying attention to this word.  It's
been doing startling things.

As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a doornail
in English.  I never encountered it at all except in texts written a long
time ago.  Then, something like six or seven years ago, it started to turn
up with some frequency.  One of my colleagues here at Sussex noted that the
word was suddenly appearing in student work.  And I began seeing it more
and more often, in newspapers, in academic writing, and in non-fiction
books.

Now it seems to be everywhere, or almost everywhere.  (It never besmirches
my own writing, I can tell you.)  Why?  How?

How did this decaying corpse get dragged out of its coffin and foisted back
onto the language?  Who did this, and why?  And why have English-speakers
in their tens of thousands been so eager to embrace this reanimated zombie
of an expired polysyllable and to use it in preference to everyday
monosyllables like 'but' and 'though'?

I propose Trask's Law of Lexical Change:

Never use a plain short word that everyone understands if you can use a
long, silly word that many people don't understand -- possibly including
you.

Sorry, folks.  I'm afraid that I, tedious old fart that I am, still find
'albeit' unspeakably pretentious.  In my new handbook of English usage, out
shortly from Penguin, I condemn the word in ringing tones and warn the
reader that its use may get him suspected of belonging to a lower
life-form.  Well, this handbook is a little more forthright than most.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)