Short-Lived

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kathleen.

Where are you calling from, Kathleen?

Well, I live in Urbana, Illinois, but I’m calling from Duluth, Minnesota.

Okay, great. Welcome to the show. What can we help you with?

Well, a few weeks ago I was listening and you asked people to call in with their pet peeves, and my dad has a lifelong pet peeve of people pronouncing the phrase short-lived as short-lived.

What do you say?

I say short-lived because it’s been beaten into me my entire life. But his argument is, and I guess it makes sense to me, is that the lived in short-lived is not a past participle of to live, but an adjective form of life.

So he’s convinced me, so I go with short-lived.

Is it a peeve for you or it’s a peeve for him?

It’s a peeve for him.

So he left the peeve with you for the weekend and you’re just giving us a call to tell us all about it.

She’s a peeve sitter. And to see what you think, for validation for him.

For validation for him.

If this is not a hotel, I’m not going to validate his parking. Not on this one.

That peeve needs to be parked somewhere else.

Yeah, I tell you, if your dad were running around in the 1600s, he would have a lot of folks to back him up. Because that was the original formation of the word. It was from life. Like short. It had a short life. And Shakespeare used it that way and people back then.

But these days, the other pronunciation is much more prevalent. Like ridiculously more prevalent in all of the English-speaking world.

And so he can hang on to the past, but that means he needs, in order to be consistent, he needs to hang on to everything else from the 1600s. And I bet you he’s not doing that.

Yeah, or hang out with people.

Probably not, but you know, you could probably convince him to.

Oh, you think?

You think so?

He’s flexible then.

I’ve heard this before. People think it should be short-lived. But that isn’t the prevailing pronunciation.

People at all levels of education and professional background and even linguistic authority unanimously say short-lived or long-lived is the prevailing pronunciation, even among the elite classes in all of the English-speaking world.

I mean, it’s kind of hard to argue with that.

Well, there you go. When did it change, out of curiosity?

It’s only been changing since the 1600s. We have a really long—we know this, by the way. We know about the ancient pronunciations, the old pronunciations, because of poems. We will have the words supposedly rhyming. And in the modern era, if they don’t rhyme, we’re like, oh, wait a second. That’s weird. That’s supposed to rhyme.

Yeah. And early on, sometimes it was spelled short-lifed with an F rather than a V.

Very cool. Anyway, he’s fine. He can coddle his peeve baby at all he wants. But it’s not one that we can endorse.

There you go. Well, I will tell him. And he will probably go to his grave saying short lives.

Yeah, that’s fine. No harm, no foul.

Well, we hope he’s long-lived.

I hope so, too. Thank you.

Thanks very much.

All right. Bye-bye, Kathleen.

And this is one of those things where you had a school teacher or somebody of authority who spanked you or hit you with a ruler or just embarrassed you in front of the class with a big red F because you said the wrong thing.

Well, yeah, I said short-lived all my life until I was a young adult. And then I read a book that said, you must say short-lived. And I tried to change, but it always felt weird.

It does. It still feels weird.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it and not had it sound pretentious even.

Right. So if you want to point to traditional authorities a while back, you would say it that way with a long eye, but not today.

But that’s a little bit of the trap of the etymological fallacy, right? We don’t hew to the rules of 400 years ago because we have new rules now.

Right. Give us a call with your language questions, 877-929-9673. Or send them in email to words@waywordradio.org.