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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Techwreck wrote…If one feels that one is about to vomit, then one is NAUSEATED, not nauseous….
Anyway, I share your disdain for the misuse of “nauseous.” When someone tells me they’re nauseous, I grin and reply, “You sure are!” But we Picky Word People are the ones who are nauseous, I fear.
Do you share my peeve about “momentarily”? When, for example, a newscaster promises to return “momentarily,” I believe the correct if unintended meaning is that they’ll return FOR a moment, and not IN a moment. Then, POOF, they’re outta here!
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I do believe you’re right – my husband seems to be the only person who can tolerate (nay, appreciate – even enjoy) my overzealous attention to word usage; probably because he suffers from a (milder) version of the same ailment.
And yes, “momentarily” is right up there with “nauseous” in the usage problem category!
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It may well be that “nauseous” with the sense of causing nausea is overtaking the sense you object to, perhaps particularly in the US, but “I’m feeling nauseous” is entirely acceptable in the UK as a slightly more formal way of informing others that you may vomit in the very near future.
My Shorter Oxford dictionary has: 1. inclined to nausea 1604. 2. causing nausea or squeamishness 1612, with “loathsome , disgusting, highly offensive” 1663, coming in at number three. The Online Etymology Dictionary confirms this order of meaning. The usage we are familiar with seems self-evidently ‘right’ and I too am often a seething mass of amazement and horror at the way others mangle ‘my’ language, so despite the fact that we disagree, we’re in complete agreement!
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This thread led me to go read the entry on “nauseous” in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. It’s really interesting. The first paragraph lends support to Peter’s comments:
Behind the intense, though relatively recent, controversy over these words is a persistent belief, dear to the hearts of many American commentators, that nauseous has but a single sense: “Causing nausea.” There is, however, no basis for this belief.
It turns out that the origin of the whole controversy can be pinpointed quite exactly. No one had had any concerns about the issue until June 4, 1949, when Dr. Deborah C. Leary wrote a letter to the editors of the Saturday Review, complaining that an article in the magazine had used “nauseous” incorrectly. She wrote, ”’[N]auseous’ implies the quality of inducing nausea and [...] the person or animal in whom this sensation is induced is nauseated.” Perhaps Dr. Leary was employing a technical distinction used by medical professionals; the MWDEU doesn’t comment on that. But her remarks didn’t reflect general usage at any point in the history of the language. Nevertheless, the idea that “nauseous” could only mean “inducing nausea” was picked up by the American usage expert Theodore Bernstein and enshrined in one of his influential books. From there, it was adopted by many other American usage handbooks as an article of faith. British usage manuals, by contrast, generally ignore the issue.
The MWDEU concludes:
Any handbook that tells you that nauseous cannot mean “nauseated” is out of touch with the contemporary language. In current usage, it seldom means anything else.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-05-13 15:18:31)
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from a purely linguistic POV, “nauseous” should mean “containing nausea” because the suffix ”-ous” turns a word into an adjective meaning “containing or full of or being in the state of”
To describe something that induces or causes something is ”-ate” (specifically meaning “to become associated with”)
Thus “Nauseate” would be “becoming associated with” or “bringing about”, and “Nauseous” would be “characterized by”, nausea.
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What’s interesting is that this is one of those piddling and arbitrary usage distinctions that I have actually adopted, even though as a child in NYC, I never heard anyone say anything but “nauseous” to mean “nauseated,” and never said anything else myself. These things spread because careful writers and speakers wish both not to offend and not to look ignorant, even when they think the distinction is more or less nonsense. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. . .
I have to say that “laureate” and “roseate” and “obligate,” the only adjectives I can think of ending in “ate,” don[‘t exactly mean “associated with” or “bringing about.” I do like the idea of the Poet Nauseate, however.
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Yeah, the meaning of a suffix like “ate” in English is just too complex to reduce to any single rule. Like “ous,” it too can mean “containing x” or “being full of x.” A “chordate” body contains/possesses a spine. “Affectionate” and the obsolete form “affectionated” both mean, more or less, “containing or full of or being in the state of affection.” One could argue that you’re “affectionate” once you’ve had affection induced in you—a perspective that makes “affectionate(d)” seem a little more analogous to “nauseated.” But the real lesson of that analogy is that “containing something” and “having something induced in you” can seem like equivalent states. That’s probably why “nauseous” and “nauseated” both mean the same thing for non-pedants. (Though Fishbait Number Two makes an excellent point in saying that you don’t have to be a pedant to feel obligated to make the distinction.)
From a purely linguistic point of view, a suffix in a particular word is going to mean whatever the language says it means in that context.
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