Eggcorn Forum

This weekend I spent a day with a friend I hadn’t seen in 35 years. He hadn’t changed much. He was and still is an analytic fellow, concise in his speech and careful in his choice of words. For this reason I was mildly surprised to hear him say “formulative” in a context that I would have thought required “formative.”

This sent me off on a short research trip to find out whether there might be some reason for his substitution of “formulative” for “formative” and whether the exchange of these two words might be an eggcorn. I came up with three discoveries and one conclusion.

My first discovery was that my old friend was not alone in his confusion. The extent to which these two words are confused is mind-boggling. Take, for example, the popular expression “formative years,” a canned expression whose stale date has long expired. More than a quarter of the instances of “formative” in COCA and BNC occur inside this phrase. One would have thought that such a rigid expression was fixed securely in the minds of English speakers. Yet Google reports more than 20K hits for the phrase “formulative years.” The single example “formulative” in the BNC is, in fact, this broken phrase (“He has vowed not to miss a moment of the children’s formulative years.” Liverpool Daily Post and Echo ) Google citations also show that “formative period” is similarly combobulated with “formulative period.”

Given these numbers, we would expect grammatical prescriptivists to have issued multiple warnings about the consequences of mixing these two terms. I find almost no web references, however, to this potential confusion. This was my second discovery. The only exception to this silence is an off-the-cuff remark by Richard Mitchell. Mitchell, the author of The Underground Grammarian newsletters and the author of several books on language, seldom pulled punches when he came across substandard usage–he was the sort of writer who helped put the “cur” in “curmudgeon.” In an interview Mitchell remarks:

I can give a very convenient example of that because it was terribly striking to me at the time. This was already many years ago, and I was working on a commentary on a piece by some very silly boob, a professor of some kind of education or other somewhere, and he had written the following sentence: “The childhood years may be perceived as formulative.” Now I suppose he meant formative unless he was thinking of babies, you know, sucking on formula…..

Biologist and linguists have more specialized uses of “formative,” but for the nontechnical speaker something is “formative” if it has the ability to form/shape/create or it relates in some way to formation/growth. We can see this meaning at work in the stock expressions created from the word: besides “formative years” and “formative period,” we find “formative influences,” “formative stages” and “formative experiences.”

“Formulative” is hard to find in dictionaries–my third discovery. The adjective seems to be built from the verb “formulate.” In its nontechnical sense “formulate” means to draft, to draw up, to express in a way that is often ingenious and systematic. We can put forward a formulative hypothesis, for example. In the early stages of a project our thinking is formulative. The word occurs in phrases such as “formulative work,” “formulative designs,” and “formulative studies.” “Formulative” doesn’t always have a positive connotation. “To formulate” can also mean to reduce something complex and interesting to a mere formula. A writer on flexible learning systems, complains that a certain study is “based on a reactionary and formulative approach.” A church historian speaks of “a formative period becoming a formulative period.”

The main difference between “formative” and “formulative” seems to lie in their domains of action. Almost anything, physical or mental, can be formative. But when something is “formulative” it must be conceptual to some degree. In addition,“formative” is usually transitive: some X is working on some Y to form it. “Formulative” tends to be used intransitively, as a description of a state. In the rare case in which “formative” describes a static conceptual activity and might have some chance of synonomy with “formulative,” we still have to sort out whether the speaker might be using “formulative” in its negative sense, making it more of an antonym than a synonym.

I conclude, in short (if anything can be short after a discussion this long), that in most contexts “formative” cannot be replaced with “formulative” without altering the intended meaning, sometimes in subtle ways. So long as we are not dealing with the negative sense of “formulative,” the replacement in either direction–“formative” with “formulative” or “formulative” with “formative”–might constitute an eggcorn.

Last edited by kem (2009-08-26 12:52:43)