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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I had my teeth cleaned this week. Most of this involves an action the dental profession refers to as “scalingâ€:
Me (in the brief moment when the hygenist’s hands were out of my mouth): “Scaling†is an odd word, isn’t it? Like “dusting the house.†The verb refers to the removal of its base word. The word really should be “unscaling,†since it is the removal of scales.
Hygenist (a 25-year old who probably thinks that “semantics†are the hijinks at the end of school terms): We don’t call what we remove “scales.” It’s “calculus†or “plaque.â€
Me: True, but “scale†is a more general word for what is removed.
Hygenist: “Scaling†is what we call removing calculus.
(At which point her hands go back in my mouth and the conversation ends.)
She may or may not have been right about the noun “scale.†As a verb applied to teeth, “scaling†is an old term—it goes back at least as far as early-1800s dentistry. The noun-to-verb transition of “scale,†however, preceded the application to teeth by a couple of centuries. So the deposits on teeth were not necessarily referred to as “scales†when the verb was adopted. The action embodied in the verb form may owe something to naval terminology—in the 18th century, ship cannons were regularly scaled to remove patina and rust. The verbal phrasing may also have been adopted from early steam engine tech—boilers were scaled to remove buildups of calcium and other minerals. “Scaling X†was abroad in early 1800s, ready to be metaphorically applied to any action that removed an unwanted surface layer by scraping, especially where the layer came off in flakes. Deposits on tooth enamel would not have had to have been called “scales†for the verb “scaling†to be applied to their removal.
What does this have to do with this Forum, you may wonder. I’ve found myself trying to think of other verbs besides “scaling†where the nominal base is removed by the action coded in the verb. All I could come up with was the veb “dust” (as in “dusting the house”) and “skin.†We dust (rather than dedust) to remove dust and we skin (rather than deskin) animals to get their fur. It sticks in my mind that we discussed this sort of verb on this Forum, but I can’t find the post.
Are there other misverbed verbs like “skin,” “dust,” and “scale?” And is there a class name for these odd verbs?
Last edited by kem (2021-03-26 10:19:06)
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Mucking stalls? I’m sure there are others. Would barking your shins count? Fleecing (people, but can you do it to sheep as well? Pelting them with rocks wouldn’t count, of course!) Skimming the water of the pond? Chipping? Peeling? (Why do those feel more like the noun designating the thing removed is named from the verb rather than vice versa? Does that even matter to the question?)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Mucking, for sure. Mucking should be what horses do, demucking what stablehands do. And barking, meaing to debark a tree (the source of “barking ones shins” for “scraping ones shins”).
Skimming/scumming is probably a non-negated verb of removal. And peeling/pilling. (Scumming and pilling being the more archaic forms of the verbs). Chipping no, because it refers to the laying of or the making of chips, not their removal.
Thanks for the additions, David
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Dusting, at least, can also be done in the opposite direction, dusting your face with powder, and so forth.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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kem wrote:
I’ve found myself trying to think of other verbs besides “scaling†where the nominal base is removed by the action coded in the verb. […] It sticks in my mind that we discussed this sort of verb on this Forum, but I can’t find the post.
Are there other misverbed verbs like “skin,” “dust,” and “scale?” And is there a class name for these odd verbs?
Yesterday someone said (not intending a joke) that a cup of coffee had already been sugared and milked. Made us both laugh and me think of this post. I generally milk my coffee for all it’s worth.
Hiding (as in giving someone a hiding)?
Another type that came to mind is things like pitting cherries (you remove the pit) or hulling peanuts, where you remove the hull. But then there’s hulling a ship, where you destroy the integrity of the hull. And pitting one against another is yet a different kind, where you put the opponents into a bull-pit or cock-pit or something and let them fight it out. (At least that’s the etymology I imagine.)
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It seems that in English any reasonably-expected process saliently involving the named noun, which is naturally associated by physical contact, or especially a part-whole relationship, with a person or thing, can be the basis for a transitive verb whose object is that person or thing. One term that has been used by linguists for such a “naturally associated, named†part is an “active zoneâ€. (I owe the term to Ronald Langacker, I think. He likely invented, and certainly used, it.) So these (except the bull-pit one?) are object’s active zone cases.
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Other cases involve a subject’s rather than, or more than, an object’s active zone, e.g. in handing something to someone, the subject’s hand is in focus for me, though the object’s hand is typically involved as well.
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Shoeing<shooing is relevant; if it is an eggcorn it presupposes a “subject’s active zone†analysis much like that of hand . There are many others.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2021-06-25 13:30:22)
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we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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“Pitting” and “hulling” fruit are good examples.
By default, transitive verbs with tangible noun cognates imply the addition of the noun cognate to the object. We spice our food, water our gardens, wax our cars, oil our gears, kiss our cousins, and hole our shots. What I find interesting are the cases that run counter to this default-transitive verbs with noun cognates that remove from the object the substance named by the cognate. As when we milk our cows, muck our stalls, pit our fruit, skin our prey, and dust our houses.
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Holing our shots doesn’t fit very closely either pattern, to my mind, and there are quite a few like it. You don’t add the hole to the ball or shot, you come closer to adding the ball or shot to the hole, but it feels more natural to describe it as putting the object in the place rather than as adding or substracting. Housing people, boxing things up, pigeon-holing papers, crating eggs. Pitting one against another, if the construal described above is active in a person’s mind, would be another example. When the noun you are verbing names a place, especially an enclosed place, this kind of meaning shift feels prototypical for me. (I remember vaguely a paper describing the porching of newspapers, back in the day.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2021-06-28 15:32:08)
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we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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If we wanted a semantic category that embraced both waxing cars and housing the homeless, we could, rather than talk about the “addition of the noun cognate to the object,” the “conjunction of the noun cognate and the object.”
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