Blog-Deprecating

Neither true nor false. ‘Depricating’ should be a dyadic predicate, just as ‘tall’ is a monadic one. Saying ‘x is depricating’ as opposed to ‘x is depricating y’ (which, as is pointed out, could include ‘himself’ before or after the predicate, etc.) is similar to saying ‘x is taller.’ Really? Than what? Who? When is?

If you think I’m wrong, you’re probably right.

I don’t think it is immediately clear from context – my initial reaction actually was “so who/what is he deprecating?”. Your “charming” comparison doesn’t work for me, because I think reflexivity is probably the issue here.

What would you think of “tall and mocking”, by the way?

And the fact that it’s a gerund makes a difference, doesn’t it? The gerund introduces a note of ambiguity. Terry is mocking, deprecating, teasing, sneering, interrogating. Are those adjectives, or are they verbs? If they are verbs, they do need an object, surely. You can run or walk, for instance, without an object, but can you just ‘tease’ in a vacuum? And if they’re adjectives, well, they’re fairly odd ones. One doesn’t normally describe people as ‘mocking’ or ‘deprecating’ and leave it at that – the construction does seem to cry out for the irritated question ‘Mocking *what*?’

Well, yes, you can tease in a vacuum – if the context is right. As in ‘I’m teasing!’ when someone takes a joke literally. But that’s different. It sounds decidedly peculiar to say ‘Gillian is clever, and tall, and French, and deprecating, and athletic, and witty, and Jewish.’ Could serve as an item for one of those ‘which word doesn’t belong?’ tests.

Ah, yes…I didn’t pay enough attention to the original post.

“If an author had written that Stephenson is “tall and charming” we wouldn’t be calling them out because the things Stephenson habitually charms are other people, rather than his pot plants, or his own temporal parts. I don’t see why deprecating should be any different.”

Because it is indeed a reflexive, that’s why, whereas ‘charming’ isn’t. One doesn’t say X is self-charming, and one does say X is charming. All right two reasons (the Inquistion relies on two things: fear, surprise, and – the Inquistion relies on three things, etc). Reflexiveness (no, not relfexivity, I refuse) and habit or familiarity. Charming is familiar and customary (and custom plays a considerable role in language, to put it mildly) and deprecating is not, and charming is not reflexive and deprecating is. As is self-denying, and self-aggrandizing, and self-promoting. The object is simply attached to the verb (and moved in front of it). Without ‘self’ the absence of an object looks highly peculiar in certain cases – and not others. (Charming makes my gerund point worthless though.)

Well except that that would apply to ‘charming’ too, and it doesn’t – because by long habit, ‘charming’ has become a familiar adjective that doesn’t need an object or a reflexive pronoun. But ‘deprecating’ decidedly has not. So I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

I found the original sentence irritating, and I’m not sure why. I guess that because it uses ‘deprecate’ as an intransitive verb, it makes me suspect that the writer uses the word without understanding it — perhaps they’ve heard it only as part of the phrase “self-deprecating” and thought the “self-” was somehow redundant. However, if that’s the case, I have very little hope of puzzling out their actual meaning, because while I know (or suspect) that they aren’t familiar with the meaning of the word as *I* use it, they surely have some other meaning in mind for it, perhaps one they’ve gathered from contexts in which other people use it. Clearly, if they haven’t even gathered that it’s a transitive verb, they’ve only heard it a few times, and so they could have inferred almost any meaning at all for it. So I have to read the rest of the article I find that sentence in at about half-speed, trying to guess what meaning the author thinks each two-or-more-syllable word is supposed to have.

I don’t have the same problem with “charming” or “mocking”; if I say that John is mocking, I mean that John tends to mock (anything, or nothing, or most things), and if I say John is charming, then I mean John tends to charm (and the usual object of “charm” is “people”, although his charming could plausibly extend to animals as well.) If someone says, “Stephenson is deprecating,” does that mean he tends to deprecate things? Maybe — but it’s close to the opposite of the meaning Brian inferred, which is that he tends to deprecate himself. It seems almost as plausible that Stephenson could tend to deprecate (unspecified) things as that he could tend to mock things. It’s clearly wrong in context; the article also describes Stephenson as “amiable”, and the quotes the reporter ascribes to him deprecate almost nothing, including himself. (He does deprecate the constant suggestions of new names for slime molds, but it sounds like almost anyone would.) This supports my suspicion that the reporter has an entirely different meaning in mind for “deprecate” than I do, but I can find no clue in the article as to what the word might mean to him.

As background, I usually see “deprecate” used in standards documents and man pages, where its object is usually some language feature, API, or protocol element. (Given the subject of this post, I feel obliged to point out that the meanings of the words “language” and “protocol” in this sentence differ subtly from their normal English meanings, and actually, so does “deprecate” in standards documents. Maybe my irritation with people speaking jargon dialects other than my own is just a sort of ethnocentrism?)

BTW, the original complaint is at http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000947.php — and the original article at http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031103ta_talk_maloney — hope this helps. (Sorry for the obnoxious em dashes.)

I think there are a couple of issues here: the growing linguistic separation between the reflexive and non-reflexive forms of ‘to deprecate [oneself]’; and the relative unfamiliarity of ‘deprecating’ in an adjectival form. So you could say ‘Mr X. is tall and caring’, because ‘He is caring’ is no longer read as subject-copula-presenttenseverb but rather subject-copula-adjective. But ‘is… deprecating’ has yet to elide from verbishness to adjectiveness. Um.

Where’s a linguist when you need one?

A number of people seem to be making the point that the meaning is obvious and it’s therefore a matter of familiarity or undefined rule intuitions that causes the ‘problem’.

I disagree. When I first read the sentence, I actually assumed it to mean that Stephenson routinely deprecates other people. Synonymous with “Stephenson, who is sixty, is tall and scathing.” In other words, I was mapping directly from ‘tall and charming’. I found it a cool usage of deprecate in that context.

But “deprecate” does still exist as a normal, productive word. Computer programmers use it all the time: “The current SMTP standard deprecates the SEND command,” which means that it says you shouldn’t use the SEND command. (I don’t remember if the quoted statement is factually true.)

If you want to waste a bunch more time, I have calculated that the word “condone” is used somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times more often as a negative verb than as a positive one. Almost no condoning ever gets done. (Some may suspect my methodology.) I have it up on my front page.