NOT LONG AFTER the president's inauguration, I was following a trail of Webcrumbs through the online coverage when I found myself stumped by a columnist's comment on how normal the Obamas seemed:
"Normal, that is, for a preternaturally telegenic family - sleek, athletic dad, brisk, stylish mom, prepossessed elder daughter, scamp of a little sister - that happens to have an entire staff to drive, feed and arrange for custom-made J. Crew clothes for them."
What was prepossessed supposed to mean in this context?
Usually, it has one of two senses: It can mean "preoccupied, absorbed in" - "He was too prepossessed to notice the interruption." Or it can mean "biased" (usually favorably): "The judge is prepossessed in the plaintiff's favor." But neither of these fits as a description of Malia Obama. Did the Baltimore Sun writer reach for self-possessed and come up with something that sounded close enough?
A Nexis newspaper search of the past few years turned up clues to another possibility. One reporter described Laura Marling (then 18) as "the spookily prepossessed songwriter." Another, recounting a musician's childhood, said, "The prepossessed piano player emerged early." For these writers, prepossessed may have been a blend of "precocious" and "self-possessed."
The related adjective unprepossessing also occasionally gets bent out of shape. Usually, it means "unappealing" or "unattractive," at least at first sight. An unprepossessing first impression often turns out to be wrong, but the word itself is never a compliment.
So what was it doing in a New York Times profile of Curtis Sittenfeld last summer? Sittenfeld, author of "Prep" and "American Wife," was interviewed "in the living room of her unprepossessing, book-filled brick house" in St. Louis. This was in the Style section, where houses aren't generally called unattractive; was unprepossessing supposed to mean "unpretentious"?
Could be. The Globe, a year earlier, had made the same substitution, also in a profile of a writer, where there was no intent to disparage the house. Time magazine, too, clearly meant to be complimentary when it described the 2007 movie "You Kill Me" as "an unprepossessing delight."
Most uses of prepossessed and unprepossessing have the traditional meanings; this is not a case where popular usage is about to transform the words' senses. And both words are fairly opaque; their current senses are figurative and not all that obvious, compared to the earlier literal sense "pre-owned."
In the case of prepossessed, there's no harm done if it's used for "self-possessed" or "precocious," which are complimentary adjectives. Unprepossessing is a different story; you don't want to call someone (or someone's house) unattractive when you don't mean to. As the faux-Wilde aphorism goes, "A gentleman (or lady) never insults anyone unintentionally."
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IT'S BIGGER THAN WE: In a recent column on the misspelling of than, I used the sample sentence, "He's bigger than me." Several readers were shocked - one even asked, "How could you!" - at the sight of the objective pronoun after than.
Like many of us, they had been taught that to think of that sentence as elliptical for "bigger than I am," which would make the nominative pronoun appropriate. But this "rule" is really a preference, not a law.
Actually, as Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage explains, than was treated as a preposition for a couple of centuries before anyone thought to object; Shakespeare, Swift, and Milton all used the "than me" construction. And when the grammarians did notice, in the mid-18th century, they did not agree; one said than was always a conjunction, another that it was a preposition, a third that it could be either.
Milton had also tossed a monkey wrench into the analysis, by writing, in "Paradise Lost," of Beelzebub, "than whom, Satan except, none higher sat." The strict grammarians should logically demand "than who" here, to match the case in "none sat higher than he." Instead, everyone agreed that than whom was the exception to the "rule."
Both than me and than I are widely used today, the former more commonly in edited prose. But the usage division is not right vs. wrong, but formal vs. informal, and tastes vary. Garner's Modern English Usage gives several examples that Garner prefers with the nominative case but that I prefer with the objective: "Are we really that much smarter than - - ?" Them or they - it's between you, your ear, and your editor.
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SPRING BOOKWARD: Paul Dickson's third edition of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has expanded to nearly 1,000 fact-stuffed pages (Norton, $49.95). In "The Subversive Copy Editor," Carol Fisher Saller offers excellent advice on conducting the editor-editee relationship, from either side (Chicago, hardcover $30, paper $13). And two books I've previously recommended are new in paperback: Michael Quinion's "Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary" (Oxford, $16.95), and Joshua Kendall's biography of Peter Mark Roget, "The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus" (Berkley, $16).
