Hello, gobsmacked

If Americans decide to adopt gobsmacked, they'll do it with eyes wide open; it's not a word you can easily ignore. But language change is often a stealth operation - speakers make a tweak here, take a tuck there, and a decade or five later, the dictionary makers realize that fun (for example) has become an adjective: "It's so fun."

I've been watching a few of these sneaky words - and last week, I heard another one make a bid for respectability. During a commercial break on the Jon Stewart show, a promo came on for "South Park," and though I wasn't really listening, one sentence seemed kind of odd: A character said something like, "Do you have any fathom what this means?"

It's perfectly clear that "do you have any fathom" here means "do you understand, do you have any idea." But that isn't actually a current (or former) sense of the noun fathom. A fathom is a measure of 6 feet, usually referring to the depth of water, as in Shakespeare's "full fathom five thy father lies." The verb fathom is an obvious figurative extension of the noun, meaning "get to the bottom of, sound the depths of, understand." And if the verb can have both literal and metaphorical uses, why not the noun?

"South Park" isn't quite the first to give the usage a try. The Web has a handful of examples from the past few years: "I have no fathom of the stress you are enduring"; "do you have any fathom what birth control can do?" But it's too soon to guess whether this new noun will even get to the audition stage with American audiences.

Another word possibly making its move is stilted, as in "stilted language" ("high-flown, pompous, lofty"). The verb to stilt has, at the moment, only a literal sense "put up on stilts" (as you might build a beach house). But the adjective, in its figurative sense, is about 200 years old. The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary quotes an 1820 letter by Byron: "You are taken in by that false, stilted, trashy style."

But I recently came across the use of stilt as a figurative verb, or at least a participle hinting strongly of verbhood. A Wikipedia contributor wrote, "Not all redundant expressions are easily discarded without stilting the language." A Web commenter said using the term vis-à-vis was "stilting language for no . . . reason." There was even an example from 90 years ago: In a 1919 book, a scholar said it was difficult to translate one kind of Greek poem correctly "without stilting the flow of language." Will teachers 10 years from now be saying, "Don't stilt your language"? It could happen.

Then there's the adjective cliché, as in "that's so cliché." This one is no longer lurking in the shadowy world of speech and online usage, though - it's right out there in print, openly competing with clichéd.

Cliché was originally a French word for a metal impression of an engraving, from which many copies could be printed; hence cliché, an oft-repeated phrase. When the noun cliché became an adjective, in the early 20th century, it was formed the usual English way: clichéd.

But a few years ago, I noticed that clichéd sometimes took the form it would have had as a French adjective: "cliché descriptions" and "cliché expressions." And not just in casual comments, but in prose by linguists and lexicographers who were certainly not doing it by accident. The OED dates the usage to the 1950s, it turns out, and Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate includes it, though my current American Heritage Dictionary ignores it.

At least one critic, however, has noticed it, and not with pleasure. In his 2007 book "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It," Ben Yagoda called it one of the "new adjectives [that] make me Sad to Be Alive. When someone says, 'That's very cliché,' my reaction is 'That's very icky.' Clichéd is a perfectly good adjective that was already in the dictionary."

Perfectly good, and standing its ground, it appears, in the face of the challenge. A search of "cliché(d) phrase" in the Nexis news database finds clichéd leading cliché by 3 to 1 in the past year, a better margin than the 2 to 1 of a decade ago. That doesn't mean cliché is disappearing, though. Some variations we just have to live with, like mic for mike and on accident for by accident. We shouldn't let it make us Sad to Be Alive.