A Connecticut cop says his dad, a retired professor of English and comparative literature at Yale, has been reading his son’s police reports. They disagree about whether complainant is a legitimate word, or whether it should be complainer. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Complainant vs. Complainer”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Dave Hartman calling from New Haven, Connecticut.
Hi, Dave, welcome.
Well, how are you?
Doing very well. What’s up?
Very interesting situation, I think, unique to me.
My father is a retired professor of English and comparative literature from Yale University, and his only son has decided that police work is going to be his vocation.
So he joined the police academy about 15 years ago, and the only thing that was of interest to my father, it seemed, was reading some of my police reports.
And I was very willing to show him these reports.
And he read one, and he looked at one word over and over again, reoccurring in the report, and the word was complainant.
And he looked at me, and he said, what is this word that I keep seeing?
And I said, well, this is the person making the complaint.
You know, I’m looking at him like he was daft, and he said, well, that’s not a word.
I said, well, of course it’s a word.
They taught us this in the police academy for the last eight months.
He said, well, there already is a word for someone who makes a complaint.
I said, well, yeah, complainant.
He said, no, complainer.
And we both kind of agreed that someone making a complaint as a crime victim, to call them a complainer, would probably not be appropriate.
It had a negative ring to it.
Yeah, it sounds like a catcher or something.
I was wondering what your take on that would be.
Well, I’m glad to hear that you two came to the right decision on that.
I would hate to try to undermine a respected retired Yale professor, particularly one who specializes in English and literature.
Right.
But here’s the thing.
Complain it is legal jargon, and it belongs to that body of work, including law enforcement.
And so within that domain of expertise, it is the right word for that particular thing to mean the person who complains.
And complainer is not—
I feel vindicated now.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Except in Scotland, complainer is not the right word.
In Scotland, in their courts and in their law, they use the word complainer.
Right.
So complainer is absolutely 100% the correct word to use.
It sounds a little bit like overblown language, but you just nailed it.
You itemized the exact reason why we don’t want to use complainer. Because it sounds like you’re making a personal judgment rather than a legal judgment.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And it’s one of those French legal terms that comes from the French present participle, like defendant, like tenant.
The complainant is the one complaining.
Right.
It’s from a present participle. It’s just a statement of fact.
Yeah.
And what’s interesting is that complainant and complainer have long histories in English, and they forked, so to speak. That is, they split off from their common etymological ancestor a long time ago.
So they’ve had plenty of time to take on nuance and meaning so that they are very different from each other.
Right.
One of the things my dad did say was that the word complainer also seems to denote somebody who does this over and over and over again.
Yes.
Very good.
Very good.
A habitual complainer.
I find that nuance to be there as well in my own understanding.
-huh.
All right.
Well, I hope we helped, Dave.
You certainly have.
Okay.
Super duper.
Thanks for calling.
All right.
No complaints.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, if you have a linguistic complaint or a linguistic question, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send those complaints to words@waywordradio.org.
