05/19/2023
Is the Dictionary Always Right?
Back in the day, I taught English grammar to college freshmen, and grammatical thinking has always informed my editing work.
But there are always disputed usages. Editors often discuss these in professional forums like those on Facebook.
This morning I found a thread about the use of the phrase "overweight and obesity" in a medical article. Being the grammarian I am, I immediately defaulted to the rule of parallelism, which creates stylistically fluent and logical sentences. So, I’d amend the phrase to a parallel construction of noun + noun OR adjective + adjective.
But there's the rub, depending on what part of speech you assign to "overweight.“ I read it as an adjective, not a noun, so I'd go for "overweight and obese."
But others in the thread argued for maintaining the phrase as is.
So I turned to Merriam-Webster, a dictionary of almost canonical status among many US editors. There I found "overweight" listed as a noun, presenting its use as such from a peer-reviewed medical article and other US newspapers of record, such as the NY Times and USAToday.
So I find myself in the weird position of tilting at the windmill of a dictionary, of all things, but that's where I am. NOT all dictionaries get grammar right.
Despite Merriam-Webster's declaration of "overweight" as a noun, I couldn't construct any example of a naturally, orally spoken sentence where "overweight" is used as a noun. A quick Google search shows that this current usage/mis-usage of "overweight" is a matter of discussion among editors.
Next, I went to the Cambridge Dictionary (UK) and found "overweight" listed as an adjective only.
My take is that the misuse of "overweight" as a noun is just that—a misuse that has crept into medical and other writing, and thus now appears in textbooks and peer-reviewed articles.
This isn't a surprise, since the study of grammar in US schools began to decline in the mid-1980's, under the formal encouragement of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), who urged exclusion of grammar instruction in favor of “language arts.”
Non-grammatical usages have proliferated in US English at least. Compare "graduated from high school/college" to "graduated high school/college."
The latter grates on me because it makes "graduated" into something resembling a transitive verb that can take an object, but high school/college isn't a direct object; the phrase is something new that I can't assign grammatical categories to--making it "an idiom"--an “idiom” being a usage that simply “is” and not explainable by ordinary grammatical categories or rules. (English prepositions fall into this category.)
But it's the nature of language to be dynamic for whatever reasons. What's an editor to do? I'd advise my clients of the grammatical issue, urge them to use the grammatically parallel adjective terms--"overweight and obese"-- but put the decision in their hands.
(Image: Dictionary_flickr_quotecatalog.com July 6, 2018)
