Once More Unto the Breech!

Gaze upon these solecisms that have actually appeared in magazines and newspapers—publications that I would have thought employed editors schooled in the rudiments of the English language, but apparently do not:

            “A central tenant of the University’s philosophy…”

            “I would of helped if I could of….”

            “The excitement left me unphased….”

            “Put a cube of beef bullion in two cups of water…”

            “I promised to forego chocolate…”

I used to be a copyeditor for a daily newspaper, and believe me, if I had let one of these atrocities see print, I would have been ridiculed mercilessly, and probably hooted off the copy desk, by my colleagues. That was, of course, more than fifty years ago, when copyeditors were expected to be omniscient (reporters, not so much).

It goes without saying, or at least it should, that the correct words in each case are:

            “tenet” – Latin for “he holds,” from tenēre (“hold”), meaning a principle or doctrine generally held to be true.

            “would have…could have…” –  these are known as “past modal” verbs and are followed by a past participle to indicate action that did not take place but was possible.

            “unfazed” –  from Old English fēsian (“drive away”), meaning “disconcert, daunt.”

            “bouillon” – from French boillir (“boil”), meaning a “clear seasoned soup.” Bullion, meaning “gold or silver melted into bars,” is thought to be a conflation of Middle French bille (“ingot”) and Anglo-French buillon (“cauldron”).

            “forgo” –  from Middle English forgān (“pass by”), meaning “do without.” Although forgo should not be confused with forego, meaning “come before,” some dictionaries now throw up their lexical hands in frustration and say, “Go ahead and use the words interchangeably if you like.” Tch, tch.

            There once was a very sad gent

            In the cold, gray light of the dawn:

            His trouble was that he forewent

            When he clearly should have forgone.

Forgoing Foregoing

Labor Day is a day when many people are able to forgo labor and enjoy the fruits of their other 364 days of toil. Please notice that they “forgo” labor; they do not “forego” it. Increasingly these two words are confused, usually by people wanting to stick an “e” where it doesn’t belong.

Forgo means to “pass up voluntarily, or do without.” Its root is Middle English forgan (“pass by”), from the prefix for- (“so as to involve prohibition, exclusion, or omission”) and gan  (“to go”). It entered the language sometime before the 12^th century.

Forego (with the “e") means to “precede, occur prior to” and it stems from the Anglo Saxon foregan and the German vorgehen, which mean the same thing. It, too, has been in use since before the 12^th century. Forego is most often used today in its past participle form, as in the phrase “foregone conclusion”—an answer that is decided before the question is asked.

Sad to say, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, now accepts forego as a “variant” of forgo. O tempora!  O mores!

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou does not limit the forgoing of labor to one day a year. He hasn’t done a lick of honest work since he took up versifying.

            There was a young man from Taiwan,

            Whose conclusions were always foregone.               

                   His cart, of course,

                   Came before his horse,

            And he got off before he got on.