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Words

Is that a word?

A client phoned the other day to ask if I thought prognose was a real word. 

I assured her it was. But she was unlikely to find it in an everyday dictionary. And her spellchecker would probably reject it. Nevertheless, prognose has been part of the English language for about a hundred years. It’s a back-formation from prognosis. And you will find it in the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 

Why did she ask?

‘I’ve just heard a guy on the radio saying that something or other was as he had prognosed,’ she said.

Something or other?

‘Yeah, I didn’t quite catch what. I was distracted by the word prognose.’

Back-forming verbs from nouns is a fine old English tradition. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the language acquired a great many useful verbs from nouns. Dog, fuel, herd, joke, pocket and voice are just some of them.

Perhaps there was a time when these verbs would also have distracted our client. But I doubt it. Some words just seem to work better than others.

For example, the verb trouser, meaning to pocket or to appropriate (especially dishonestly), seems to me a pretty successful coinage. Whereas surveil (another word your spellchecker will probably reject) just seems wrong – even though it has been in use, sporadically, for about 50 years. And don’t get me started on the use of medal as a verb. There’s something very wrong with athletes medalling, putting their oar in where it is not required.

As our client conveniently demonstrated, the test is not whether or not the word is ‘real’. The test is whether or not the word will sit comfortably with your intended reader (or listener). 

If only the guy on the radio had said that it was as he predicted, our client might now know what it was that he predicted.