Conflicting Meanings of “Peruse”

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, good afternoon, how are you?

Great, who is this?

This is Christian from New Haven, Connecticut.

Well, welcome to the show, Christian. Glad to have you along.

Hi, Christian.

Hey.

What’s on your mind?

Well, the other day my boss asked me to proofread a contract, and as I’m going through it, I saw the word peruse. And I thought, you know, perusing a contract isn’t really what I do. You really want to understand every level of it. So I quickly, I looked up the definition of peruse, and it turns out it means the complete opposite of what I’ve thought it meant for the past 27 years.

-oh.

How so?

Peruse means to investigate to the finest detail. I thought it meant to skim lightly, to kind of never really get to the whole point, just to kind of understand on the surface.

So you want to get that right if you’re talking to your boss, right?

I want to get that right, and now I have this horrible feeling that maybe there are other words I don’t understand that I use on a day-to-day basis.

Join the rest of us. It’s a club. It’s called English Speakers Anonymous. Pull up a chair.

Yeah, peruse is a really confusing word. I think you have to use it with a lot of care.

Yeah, definitely.

I’m one of the people who grew up being taught that peruse meant to look at something really carefully, really, really sift through it carefully. But a lot of other people were taught exactly the opposite.

Right, Grant?

Yeah, yeah.

It’s not a word that ever occurred in my household. I learned it from books.

Oh, yeah?

But which way did you learn it?

I learned both, actually, side by side, and have just come to accept it as kind of what they call the Janus word, the two-faced word that has two meanings.

Yeah.

And so I look carefully for context. But as you know, the problem is the context with peruse isn’t clear almost any of the time.

Yeah.

If somebody asks you to peruse a contract, you know. Did you mean skim this and take a minute? Or did you mean read this carefully over the next two days?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And part of the problem is that in the early 1900s, some grammarians started saying, well, peruse definitely means to look something over very carefully. They were using the Latin sense of it. The P-E-R there is a word that can mean thoroughly and like pervade. And so they thought, well, you know, just use the Latin sense of the word. But other people have other authority. I mean, Samuel Johnson, for heaven’s sakes. He just thought it meant read in his first dictionary.

In 1755, yeah.

So perused throughout its history has meant a variety of kinds of reading. And there has never been one of these meanings that has really won out over the others, which is really interesting. It’s always meant to read, but it never really was certain whether it meant to just quickly scan or whether it meant to go line by line with a pen.

Yeah, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to mean read.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You can peruse, I don’t know.

Yeah, the fashions. One of the style guides mentions about a number of quotes where they were walking through the store perusing the fashions. They weren’t even perusing. There were no words involved. They were just looking at clothes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Christian, don’t feel bad about it. So, Martha said something I think is important. I don’t know if this word is skunked, but our advice to you probably is going to be that you avoid using the word peruse in a professional environment because these meanings are so variable.

Certainly so.

It hasn’t settled out yet. We may get 100 years now where one meaning wins out over the other, but right now it’s just too much conflict.

Well, and what about perusal? You know, I hand you this document for your perusal.

Yeah, same story. What does that even mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, the other thing about it, to be honest with you, Christian, is that peruse is often used by people who just want to sound important when actually they should just use the word read.

Consider it avoided now. Now, is there anything else I’m going to step in or other words like this?

Tons of things.

Oh, my gosh. Keep our number by your phone. This is the hotline. Next time you have a legal emergency.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Christian. Take care now. Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

You know, scan is another word.

It is, yes.

It’s so weird. Originally, scan meant to look at something really, really carefully. And this confused me when I was in college and I was reading Greek poetry because you’re supposed to scan the poetry. And that’s a slow, tedious process to scan the poetry. And I never could understand why I was scanning Greek poetry. And was it when the computer era kind of came about and scan started to mean something technological that it started to change? Or was it prior to that?

I suspect it was prior to that.

I don’t know.

Okay.

Well, English, what a mess she is. But call us and we’ll all talk about her when she’s not around.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.