Tastefully separate?

Dear Word Detective: In electronics a component that is not part of an integrated circuit is referred to as a discrete component. In something I wrote, it read: “discreet component” (it’s a spellchecker not a meaningchecker). With appropriate discretion, a colleague let me know that it was not a “discreet component” but a “discrete component.” I checked; he’s right. “Discreet” is “circumspect” and “discrete” is “singular.” But, it’s so close, concrete, discrete, secrete, desecrate, the island of Crete. What’s up with that? — Gary Phillips.

Before we get to that, you know what’s really weird? My spellchecker doesn’t like your “spellchecker” and wants to change it to “spell-checker” or “spell checker.” Yet the other day it seemed to think that “abf” standing alone was just fine. Clippy’s revenge?

In any case, I was just sitting on the front porch thinking about your question. (Yes, it’s ten below zero with a nasty wind, but the dogs refuse to use the kitty-litter.*) It occurred to me that the sort of “discreet/discrete” confusion you note might be the best argument for not nuking Facebook (otherwise a very attractive idea). I’ll bet that at least 50 million of its 600 million users have made that mistake (or a similar one, e.g., “your” for “you’re”) in their postings in the past week. But probably at least two or three million of their “friends” have pointed it out to them! Hey, it’s better than nothing.

The fact that one word sounds like another and the two may closely resemble each other in form is often due to nothing more than coincidence; there are, after all, a limited number of sounds that the human mouth can make. In some cases, of course, the words share roots or components, which accounts for their similarity.

In still other cases, however, the two words are essentially one and the same word, with different spellings and meanings because of their separate historical uses. And that’s the case with “discrete” and “discreet.” They’re historically the same word. More specifically, “discreet” and “discrete” are what’s called a “doublet,” two words that come from the same source but arrived in English via slightly different routes and thus differ in form and meaning.

The root of both “discreet” and “discrete” is the Latin verb “discernere,” meaning “to separate, distinguish,” from “dis,” apart, plus “cernere,” to separate. (“Discernere” is also the root of our modern English word “discern.”) The past participle of “discernere,” which was “discretus,” was used in Classical Latin to mean “separate, distinct,” and entered English with that meaning in the form “discrete,” which became common in the 16th century. Two centuries earlier, however, we had adopted another “discrete” from French, with the different meaning of “discerning, prudent.” This “discrete” had apparently been derived from the original “separate” sense under the influence of the late Latin noun “discretionem,” meaning “the act of separating, distinguishing, discerning.” Thus “discrete” in English could, in the 16th century, mean both “separate or distinct” (our modern “discrete”) and “possessing the quality of making distinctions; prudent” (today’s “discreet”).

Making the situation more confusing was the rise of the spelling “discreet” in the late 16th century by popular analogy to the “ee” of native English words such as “feet” and “beet.” For a while the two spellings were used for both words, so “discreet” could mean “separate” and “discrete” could mean “prudent.” By the beginning of the 17th century, fortunately, most people recognized the common spelling differentiation between the two words that we (most of us, anyway) observe today.

That distinction, however, may be fading again. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (the sanest usage guide on the market, available online in full (free) via Google Books) notes that, as of the 1980s, some well-respected newspapers (including the New York Times and Boston Globe) were occasionally using “discrete” where “discreet” was clearly meant and vice versa.

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* Subscribers saw this column last January.

My friend the idiot?

Dear Word Detective: I just saw “A Girl, a Guy and a Gob” (1941), starring George Murphy, Lucille Ball, and Edmond O’Brien. In it, a guy gets into a cab and the driver says, “Where to, chum?” The guy looks insulted and says, “Why’d you call me a chum?” The driver says, “Any guy that would turn down a dance with a dame like that is a chum.” I used to think a “chum” was a buddy or a pal, but now I think it meant a “chump” back then, an idiot. What do you think? — John Watson.

That’s an interesting question. I spent quite a while poking around online, hoping to find the script or even a closed-caption file from the film, but no dice. Yet more evidence that the internet is only really good at telling you things you already know. I did find a review of the film from the New York Times from when the film opened back in 1941. Their reviewer called it “a ribticklish little comedy,” noting that “It is full of irrevelant [sic] notions. Practically anything can happen — and does.” I suspect that typo was introduced when the Times digitized its archives, but I’m surprised that the cornball cliche “anything can happen — and does” passed muster at the copy desk in 1941. Come to think of it, the whole review reads like it was written by a studio hack. It was, incidentally, the first film produced by Harold Lloyd in which he himself did not appear, but it does feature Doodles Weaver, Sigourney’s grandpa and a noted actor and comedian in his own right.

The question raised by your question, and the reason I was looking for a text version of that scene, is whether the cab driver actually said “chum” in that exchange. Might he have said, “Where to, chump?” That would explain the other guy’s reaction; he would have been expecting “Where to, chum?” (a plausible greeting from cabbies at the time) and thus be surprised when he realized that he’d actually been addressed as “chump.” Since I haven’t seen the film, I can’t judge the quality of the soundtrack, but it wouldn’t surprise me if “chum” and “chump” were almost indistinguishable after seventy years.

However, assuming that the driver did say, “Any guy that would turn down a dance with a dame like that is a chum,” I’m at a loss to explain it. I can’t find any evidence that “chum” was used as a synonym for “idiot” at any point in its history.

“Chum” first appeared in the late 17th century (“To my Chum Mr. Hody of Wadham Colledge,” 1684) with the meaning of “one who shares a room or rooms,” especially at college, and, by extension, a close friend and/or constant companion. The origin of “chum” in this sense is, strictly speaking, uncertain. But the traditional assumption has been that it originated as a clipped form (popular in the 17th century) of “chamber-mate,” “chamber-fellow” or the like. In favor of this theory is the fact that the first uses of the word in print clearly referred to a person sharing rooms at college, as opposed to the more general “pal” sense of the term. There is, incidentally, another “chum” in English, meaning “entrails, etc., of fish used as bait to attract other fish,” but that word is clearly unrelated to this “chum.”

“Chump,” meaning “an idiot, a blockhead” or “a sucker, a loser,” actually appeared in English at roughly the same time as “chum,” but has never been anything but a dismissive insult. The initial meaning of “chump” when it first appeared in print in 1680 was “a lump of wood chopped or sawed off a bigger piece,” i.e., an end-piece or trimming. The source of “chump” is, alas, uncertain, but one possible source is an Old Norse word “kumba,” meaning “block of wood,” perhaps influenced in English by the form of such words as “lump” and “stump.” In the 19th century, “chump” was used to mean the blunt end of anything (“As if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump-end of something,” Great Expectations, Dickens, 1861), as well as being slang for the human head (“Think how unpleasant it is to have your chump lopped off,” V. Nabokov, 1960). But by the late 1800s, “chump” was also being used in its modern sense of “a person as stupid as a chump of wood” (“Such a long-winded old chump at telling a story,” 1883).

So I haven’t been able to find any historical sense of “chum” to mean anything close to “chump.” I’ll keep an eye out for the movie, and if I find it I promise to listen very, very closely to that scene. But for the time being I think we’ll have to assume that it’s that ancient soundtrack that transformed “chump” into something that sounds like “chum.”