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Chris -- 2018-04-11
About one percent of web pages that contain the word “discipline†spell the word “disipline.†The omitted “c†is almost soundless, so one suspects this may be just a misspelling.* But one percent is still a half million web pages, so something else may be happening.
I wonder if the “something else†might be the word “dis,†which emerged from the black subculture in the 1980s. “Dissing†means putting down or insulting, and discipline, even if done with the best of intentions, feels like a form of abuse.
“Dis†is not a word I tend to use-my speech was patterned in the decades before the word appeared. But “dis†is extremely popular among the under-forties, with the variants “dissed†and “dissing†occurring on several million web pages. The popularity comes with a large restriction: “dis†is not used much outside of North America. The COCA database, for example, yields hundreds of hits for “dissed†and “dissing,†the BNC almost none.
Compare this one percent error rate for disipline/discipline with the word “disciple,†which also has the disappearing “c.†“Disciple†is often misspelled “disiple,†but the ratio between the web frequency of error and that of the correct spelling is only is one fifth (i.e., one fifth of of one percent) that of the parallel disipline/discipline error. Is it possible that this lower rate reflects the lack of semantic fertilization from “dis?†(You wouldn’t attract many disciples if you dissed them.)
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*The “c†may be soundless, but it is not without orthographical sense. Leaving out the “c†forces some rule/exception realignments to account for the short “i†before the “s.â€
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This is an intriguing theory to which I, unfortunately have very little to add. I will make one comment regarding potentially confounded variables, though.
“dis†is not used much outside of North America. The COCA database, for example, yields hundreds of hits for “dissed†and “dissing,†the BNC almost none.
This might owe in part to the age of the corpora, and not only to their regional bases. The BNC was constructed between 1991 and 1994 to reflect “British English of the late twentieth century.” No texts or transcriptions have been added since 1994. COCA has been continuously updated from 1990-2008 and is said to “serve as a unique record of linguistic changes in American English.” COCA might, therefore, be expected to contain more post-1980s usages, at the same time that it contains more North American usages.
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I would think more quickly of the negative dys-/dis- ‘abnormal, bad’, that shows up in dysfunctional, disturb, disgust, distress, dysphemism (that ordinary household word) and so forth. (I’m not talking etymology here: I expect that if I hadn’t learned to spell them differently I’d have no clue that some were from one source and some from another.) I understand the prefix may have been part of the ancestry of the verb to diss (short for disrespect?), which seems likely enough. In any case, I see no need to go through diss to get to a negative morpheme in disipline.
On the other hand, lacking a confession from a perpetrator and given the ready explanation for it as a spelling error (and the most repeatable kind of spelling error: making it look more like it is pronounced rather than less), the whole thing seems a bit mare’s-nest-ish.
It would be interesting to do a bit of historical research and see if the misspelling was less common before the verb diss was born. I would bet it happened pretty often back then too. (Of course we don’t have such a wonderful repository of informal writing as the Internet from back then, and people may well have been generally more careful about spelling anyway.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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It would be interesting to do a bit of historical research and see if the misspelling was less common before the verb diss was born. I would bet it happened pretty often back then too. (Of course we don’t have such a wonderful repository of informal writing as the Internet from back then, and people may well have been generally more careful about spelling anyway.)
A diachronic study would be difficult, as you note. That’s why I suggested a synchronic analysis using the disciple/disiple confusion. The 5 times increase in error with discipline/disipline may be significant.
I suspect that the rate of spelling errors per written sentence has actually decreased in recent decades because of the universality of spelling checkers. I’ve worked with some collections of nineteenth century letters. The spelling in a few of these letters is worse than even bad web examples.
Perhaps there is an analogy here with a common belief about the math skills of young people. You sometimes hear the complaint that “kids today have poorer math skills than their parents.” The decline is often blamed on the universality of electronic calculators. Actually, the math skills of modern kids are significantly better than those of their parents-because of calculators. Asking kids to do math without calculators is a bit like asking their parents to multiply using Roman numerals.
Last edited by kem (2008-11-22 23:59:40)
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I think there are a lot of other factors that would have to be accounted for. Does the change of stress between discipline and disciple play a role? Are other alternate spellings (dissiple/dissipline, diciple/dicipline) differentially claiming “market share” in ways that need to be accounted for? Could differing perceptions of syllable breaks be relevant here? And on and on…. I think I would need to know far, far more about the patterns and causes of misspelling than I do before I’d feel comfortable saying that a certain very common and predictable misspelling is in some instances the result of eggcornish influence. And the semantic link between “to dis” and “discipline” just doesn’t seem very strong to me.
The following note caught my eye for a different reason:
*The “c†may be soundless, but it is not without orthographical sense. Leaving out the “c†forces some rule/exception realignments to account for the short “i†before the “s.â€
I’d say that the short “i” in “disipline” isn’t that problematic. A short stressed vowel followed by a single intervocalic consonant is really common in words of three or more syllables that are accented on the first: diligent, simile, dysentery, misery, physical, trinity, militant, minimum, sibilant, etc. I think the unvoiced sibilant in “disipline” might actually be more of a problem for some spellers—“dissipline” would be my first guess if I didn’t know the standard spelling.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-11-23 00:41:53)
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Many factors may enter into the lack of parity in the misspellings of “disciple” and “discipline.” One of the reasons I called attention to the dis-parity was to solicit a few ideas.
The item in Pat’s list that may be the most relevant to this issue is the different syllable stress patterns in “disciple” and “discipline.” The vocalization “dis-SIGH-pull” seems to demand an extra sibilant. The vocalization “DIS-ip-lynn” doesn’t. This factor could account for some of the increase in misspellings with the discipline/disipline pair.
Even if all of my hard evidence dis-sipates, I would still retain some level of suspicion that “dis”-whether the lately coined word “dis” or, as David suggests, the “dis/dys” prefix-contributes to the spelling “disipline.” One of the few insights I brought away from my graduate work in computational linguistics in the 1990s was a conviction about the fundamental granularity of the semantic engine. When we access the areas of our mind we associate with semantics, we are a like a diver going the bottom of a lagoon to find a treasure. We have only so much air and we can’t stay on the bottom as long as we would like. When the air begins to run low we grab whatever looks interesting, just to avoid coming up empty handed. There doesn’t seem to be a “no treasure” category in our semantic storage. The interpretation of “possible treasure” can be as wide as the ocean.
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I’m waking this thread from its slumber to ask if there’s any dissing in “dis spite”.
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