Legitimate concerns
"The great question is whether there are within Islam religious resources for legitimating peaceful coexistence with 'the infidel,'" wrote Richard John Neuhaus in a Globe Ideas forum published Dec. 24.
"The sinews of military power lie among the people, who legitimate war and sustain it," wrote Andrew Bacevich in an op-ed last month.
Their choice of the verb legitimate is not only legit, but time-honored; it's been around since the 16th century, and for almost 300 years it was the only "legitimate" verb in town. Late in the 18th century, legitimatize -- an attempt, maybe, to distinguish the verb from the adjective -- came along; not long afterward, the slimmer, trimmer legitimize sprang forth.
Today, the last-born verb is the leader: According to Garner's Modern American Usage, "Legitimize outnumbers the traditionally preferred legitimate by a 6-to-1 ratio in modern print sources." So it's not surprising that the recent sightings of legitimate prompted e-mails from readers wondering what the difference might be.
Sensewise, there is none. "All three verbs are synonyms, meaning 'to make lawful or legal or legitimate,'" said Kenneth G. Wilson in the Columbia Guide to Standard American English. That was 14 years ago, but current dictionaries still list the three versions as verbs in good standing.
How to choose, then? Most of us already shun legitimatize on grounds of economy: who needs the extra syllable? As for the other two, Bryan Garner recommends that we try to firm up a distinction: Let's save legitimate for legal contexts, he says, and use legitimize everywhere else. Legitimatize and legitimate are "needless variants," cluttering up dictionaries and minds.
But then, Garner is a lawyer who likes his language tidy. You can follow his advice -- most of us do -- but if you'd rather revel in needless variation, there's no law against it.
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TAKING UMBRAGE AT FOOTAGE: So many pet peeves are shopworn shibboleths that a novel complaint is a treat. The latest, in a reader's e-mail: "It annoys me to see square footage used to designate space....I believe that the proper term is AREA."
Well, yes, we can certainly say "What's the area of the apartment?" -- but I haven't found anyone else who objects to footage. It means "length, extent, or amount based on measurement in feet," says my American Heritage Dictionary, which offers "the square footage of new office space" as its example.
True, footage is a newbie compared with area. It began as a mining term more than a century ago, designating the amount of work -- measured by the running foot -- done by a miner. The movies soon borrowed it for film footage, and now it's at home even in the digital world, where footage is purely figurative.
But there's nothing untoward about the formation of footage; that -age suffix is a standard way to create abstract nouns. We have sewage and poundage, language and wreckage, suckage (thanks, Buffy!), and many more; footage fits right in.
As for square footage, the earliest citation I found was an ad for the
It's true that "square footage" gets a lot of play -- an annoying amount, perhaps -- in our real-estate-obsessed era. But it's much clearer than area, which has dozens of other senses, so it's probably here to stay. Anyone who finds it irritating will just have to change the subject.
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IT'S MS., PERIOD: "Mrs. is an abbreviation for Missus and therefore needs a period. Ms is not an abbreviation for anything and therefore does not need a period." So wrote one reader after my comments on Madam, Mrs., and Ms. in a column two weeks ago.
She's not the only one who thinks so; this notion is surprisingly widespread, considering that no US publication I know of prints Ms. without a period.
That period was there in the logo of Ms. magazine in 1972. It was there in a 1952 citation in the OED, where an office management publication suggested that Ms. "solves an age-old problem" of business correspondence. Since Ms. doesn't look like an entire word, no doubt it seemed reasonable to punctuate it like Mrs. and Mr., not Miss.
But such decisions are local and mutable. In Britain, Ms. has no period, but then, neither does Mrs. When a title is a contraction -- its middle missing but its final letter intact -- it gets no terminal punctuation: Dr Moriarty, Mr and Mrs Tattersall, Ms Rowling. If logic is what we're looking for, well, here's our model.
E-mail Jan Freeman at freeman@globe.com. For the Word blog, go to boston.com/ideas/brainiac/word.
