Word Court

by Barbara Wallraff

A friend and I cannot agree on the meaning of phrases combining deceptively and a modifier—for example, deceptively easy. I contend that something that is deceptively easy is in fact easy and is deceptive because it appears difficult. My friend argues that a deceptively easy task is one that appears easy but is in truth difficult. Please help.
Peter Schalestock
Tacoma, Wash.

The sad truth is that at this moment in history deceptively easy means nothing in particular. The American Heritage Dictionary asked its usage panel, which is made up of mostly eminent “educated speakers,” about deceptively, and, the dictionary reports, about a third ot the panel thought that the word in effect contradicted the adjective (that is, deceptively easy would mean “hard”), half thought the opposite, and the remainder said they found the meaning ambiguous.

If you want to be understood, you need to phrase it some other way. In most cases, I suspect, doing that will be easier than you’d think.

My friend Henrich believes that truth comes from God and The New York Times. I suggested he put all his faith in the divine after I saw a Times photo caption recently: ”The Kennedy’s posed for a portrait. . . .”I told Henrich that the Times erred, and that using an apostrophe to make a plural is a conspiracy against language which originated with house-sign carvers at flea markets (“THE BAKER’S. WELCOME”). Henrich responded that if the Times prints “Kennedy’s as a plural, then it is obviously accepted common usage. Your decision, please!
Rabbi Robert A. Alper
East Dorset, Vt.

If Henrich wants infallibility, God is his only option. Too bad God doesn’t do copy-editing.

My wife and I have a dispute: When I use the expression “I could care less,” she contends that the literal meaning is I care somewhat and that if I want to show a total lack of interest, I should say “I couldn’t care less.”I say that “I could care less" is idiomatic usage, with the same meaning as “I couldn’t care less.” Can you resolve this for us?
Craig Brown
St. Peters, Mo.

Could care less has been with us since about the 1960s, and has been driving some people bonkers all the while. It’s not considered appropriate for formal speech or writing, and of course it’s illogical. But English doesn’t behave any more logically than people tend to do. Two analogous examples: How did “Tell me about it" come to mean “I know"? How did “You can’t be serious!" come to mean “I know you are serious, and I am surprised”? Etymologists have answers to these questions. The answer to yours is that I could care less is by now indeed an idiom that means what you say it does.

Able writers, considerate editors, and respectable publishers have long distinguished between the restrictive and the nonrestrictive, by properly using that for the former and which for the latter. But Word Court asksits readers whether they have “had a dispute about language which [they] would like...” That sounds terrible. Why have you worded it that way ?
William B. Rhodes
Vallejo, Calif.

Thanks for noticing! The Atlantic does use that and which to distinguish between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses (those unfamiliar with the distinction may enjoy looking it up in The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, or reading a more thorough discussion in Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler). But the magazine also subscribes to something called “the exceptional which”: when another noun ("language,” in your example) intervenes between the one (“dispute”) being modified by the restrictive clause and the clause itself, and that second noun might be misread as the antecedent, we use which without a comma to signal the connection to the first noun. In the example it’s not language that a person might like the column to resolve but a dispute. Thus the exceptional which, a device promulgated by Eleanor Gould, who has been upholding linguistic standards at The New Yorker for half a century now.

The distinction seems fairly natural once one is used to it. And it solves a real problem, by enabling one to disambiguate, as they say, the likes of “A book about misbehavior which I very much enjoy”—or at least it would if the distinction were widely known and used. So I am enlisted in your cause; can I enlist you in mine?