Index v. Indice (minicast)

Welcome to another summer minicast from A Way with Words.

People do all sorts of things to language. They make mistakes, they make assumptions, they learn things incorrectly. Sometimes they like to fool around with it and spit out the odd absurdity just for a laugh.

Ken called us with the strange singular form of a word used by a client. He thought it was wrong. He was pretty sure it was wrong. But how can you get away with correcting the speech of a client? Well, you don’t. You call A Way with Words instead.

Once upon a time, I worked on a website project for a small financial services firm. And I don’t know, there were four or five guys who we worked with. And when they would talk to themselves and with us, they would always talk about indices, you know, like the plural of index. But when they would talk about the singular, they always said indice. I don’t think I ever heard them say index.

Oh, really? It was always indices. So how would they use that in a sentence? Well, half the time I didn’t know what they were talking about.

Oh, because they spoke financial jargon and you didn’t. Right, right. They would say, oh, yeah, yeah, this product is attached to this particular indice.

Really? And so, Ken, did you loudly correct them and point at them with your indice finger? And you’re calling us because you’re like, that’s wrong, right? Well, I’m not upset about it, if that’s what you mean. I was kind of amused by it. And, you know, I didn’t try to correct them because, you know, they’re the client.

Well, I’m kind of wondering if there are other examples of this. Oh, there we go. I haven’t been able to find any. I can give you a couple of those.

Oh, cool. Well, first let’s just clarify that the singular form of indices is index. Yes. Let’s just make sure we get that on the record. I can, however, see where there might be a little bit of confusion, especially in the financial industry. When you said you were working in the financial industry, right? Right.

Because a lot of the financial terms, the higher level stuff, does come to us from French. And in French, the word for index, meaning a financial index, not the index in the back of a book, is indice, I-N-D-I-C-E. And there are other French words that we use in a tranche, for example. This has particularly come about because of the mortgage crisis. You might have heard this word. It means where they take a bunch of debt, pool it together, and then they cut tranches or slices of it. And then they sell those slices as investment properties. So we’ll find a lot of languages.

So I could see how maybe they picked up the singular form somehow and it seemed natural. I’m kind of giving them probably a little more credit than they deserve, but I could see maybe how that would happen. Yeah.

But the other thing is words that have been back formed from the plural to an incorrect singular, English abounds with them, and we use them pretty frequently and don’t realize it. Martha, how about this one? In Spanish, what is the singular form of tamales? Tamale? No, it’s not. It’s tamal, T-A-M-A-L.

Oh, yeah, you’re right. Yeah, we do that in English. We decided that tamales, which are almost always served as more than one. You don’t order one tamale, you know. We decided in English that that’s how we were going to treat it. So we did.

Here’s another one. This is more recent. I first encountered this actually in French. They do this in France as well. Have you had these sandwiches in the mall or at the store or wherever called paninis? Sure. Sure. But the problem with that is what? That panini is Italian plural for panino. And really, you can’t have a panini in Italian.

Right. It’s like people going into Starbucks and asking for a biscotti. Right. Exactly like that. Exactly. And we do that, too. Biscotto. The biscuit. It’s not a coincidence that this frequently happens on words that still retain a little bit of their foreign heritage. Yeah.

Indice is a new one on me. I think it’s hilarious, Ken. I appreciate your comment. It’s our attention. And, you know, you’re not the only person that has encountered this. There have been a few other people who said, hey, I just heard people use this word incorrectly. That’s not right, is it? Because it’s one of those things that sounds like, well, maybe it could be so deep in the financial jargon that it’s right, you know, and maybe you don’t know it because you’re an outsider, but it’s actually wrong.

Right. Everybody knows but me, right? It’s wrong. Well, yeah, you know, when you encounter people who speak their own special business language, sometimes you shut up because you’re like, oh, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I have no idea. When you first worked in radio, Martha, did you have that going on? You’re like, oh, what are they talking about? Put the cans on my head. I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Exactly, exactly. Or people were calling me Princess Leia. I didn’t get it. And Ken, in your business, you say you work in web design or web… Right, right. I did it at the time anyway. You did it at the time. Tons of that kind of language, right? The clients probably often try to bluff you and try to make you think that they understand what you’re talking about. But the truth is you’ve got your own special lingo and sometimes you…

Well, who knows? Well, yeah, I assumed that when they were using indice, that it was some kind of at least common term for them, that they weren’t just making it up or that they weren’t, you know, dumb. Yeah, again, I’ll probably give them too much credit. I could see how they could make that mistake. Everyone understands them, and they just move on. They’re not in a business. Yeah.

They’re in a business where clarity is important. Yeah. But they’re not in a business where being grammatical is important, if that makes sense. Yeah, so, Grant, it doesn’t bother you. I mean, it just makes me laugh. Yeah, it’s wrong. Yeah, it makes me laugh because it’s wrong. But it’s funny because it reminds me of the things that kids do to language that they don’t realize that they’re doing, and it’s just pretty funny.

We didn’t even get into the Latinness of index. It comes into modern English from Middle English and before that from Latin. The original meaning of index was indeed index finger, your pointer finger. Despite its long history, you can still pluralize the word the Latin way, thus Ken’s talk of indices, or you can pluralize it the English way as indexes.

We welcome your comments about this or any subject at our website, waywordradio.org, by email to words@waywordradio.org, or by telephone to 1-877-WAYWORD. That’s 1-877-929-9673.

That’s all for this summer minicast. You can hear past shows for free on our website, as well as talk about our topics with other listeners. For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett.

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