Roblog

I’ve always wondered why “paradigm” is pronounced pa-ra-dime, but “paradigmatic” is pronounced pa-ra-dig-ma-tic. Why does that silent ‹g› suddenly become noisy?

This answer, from the user tchrist on the English Stack Exchange, explains it incredibly clearly.

In short: the ‹g› is there because it’s there in the Greek original. We can’t pronounce it because English phonotactics forbid the pronunciation of a /g/ followed by a nasal at the end of a word (hence “align”, “consign”, “foreign”, “phlegm”, etc.). But keeping the ‹g›, rather than spelling it “paradim” or “paradime”, is helpful:

“We tend to keep the written ‹g› in English words like this, even though we ‘can’t’ say it there at the end of the word right before that final nasal. This helps us understand the shared relationship with longer words like paradigmatic that have a vowel after the nasal, which allows the /g/ to ‘reappear’. But we probably no more ever said it in paradigm(e) than we ever said it in phlegm. Our phonotactic rules forbid it.”

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James Greig examines the “concept creep” of the language we collectively use to talk about behaviour in the dating game. “Trauma”, once limited to life-altering events, now essentially means “anything that hurts me”. “Love-bombing”, a manipulative behaviour that involves showering someone with a disorientating amount of affection at the start of a relationship, is now used to describe behaviour that previously might have been called “a bit keen”. Everyone, it seems, is either a narcissist or going on dates with one.

As well as watering down useful concepts to the point that they no longer hold meaning, this language reinforces problematic relationship dynamics:

”Using this kind of language can also lead to ‘moral typecasting’: the idea that the world is split between moral agents (people who do either good or bad) and moral patients (people who have good or bad things done to them). What’s interesting is that studies show that we think of people as either one thing or the other, and very rarely a combination of the two…

“But if you think of yourself as a moral patient and anyone who hurts you as a moral agent, it means that anything you do to them becomes fair game, because you are constitutionally incapable of inflicting harm, and they are constitutionally incapable of experiencing it.”

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