A healthful lesson in grammar fact-checking
When I was a child, someone told me that if I crossed my eyes too long they would get stuck that way. Someone else told me that if I stepped on a rusty nail and didnât get a tetanus shot, my jaw would lock shut.
Thus two absolute laws of the universe were seared into my mind. I didnât doubt them. I didnât fact-check them. I didnât make any distinctions between them.
My unquestioning belief in both bits of information had nothing to do with their plausibility. In fact, if youâd told me back then that only one of those two statements was true and asked me to guess which one, I probably would have pegged lockjaw as the fabrication.
Of course, lockjaw is real and that business about your eyes getting stuck is hogwash. But I was a kid, and kids arenât renowned for their critical-thinking skills. No one was in a big hurry to teach those skills, either. No one ever told me I had the option of checking othersâ facts. No one gave me the idea I could take such questions to doctors or libraries. So I went through life, like most kids I suppose, the perfect chump.
As I got older, I started to understand that much of what I believed as a child was nonsense. But thereâs a natural tendency to consider the source. A piece of information that came from the same kid who had warned me of the dangers of saying âBloody Maryâ three times in succession is more suspect than some fact I got from a teacher or parent.
This is part of the reason that so many language myths are alive and well today. Teachers and parents, especially in the 1950s and â60s, told kids that itâs âwrongâ to use such-and-such word in such-and-such way. Kids, never questioning the source or thinking to fact-check, simply believed.
The words âhealthyâ and âhealthfulâ are a quintessential example. Many people during their formative years heard that âhealthyâ means âin good healthâ and that âhealthfulâ means promoting good health and that the distinction is absolute. Thus, they believe, you can say âBobby is a healthy childâ and âBobby eats a healthful diet,â but you canât say âBobby eats a healthy diet.â
But if these same people bothered to look it up, theyâd see theyâre wrong.
âHealthy: adjectiveâŠhealthfulâ â Websterâs New World College Dictionary
âHealthy: âŠconducive to good health; healthfulâ â American Heritage Dictionary
âHealthy: âŠconducive to healthâ â Merriam-Websterâs Collegiate Dictionary
For anyone who would argue that these modern dictionaries are just caving in to a recent erosion of the word, hereâs a definition from my 1933 Oxford Universal Dictionary: âhealthyâŠconducive to health.â
Some might guess that this is an American-grown atrocity against the mother tongue. But that would be wrong, too.
âThe currency of the disliked use in America is not clear to me, but the problem hardly arises in Britain,â notes Fowlerâs Modern English Usage, the venerable authority for British linguistic propriety.
âHealthful, meaning âconducive to good healthâ, is rarely used,â Fowlerâs adds, citing sources that dub the word âliterary,â âold-fashionedâ and âformal.â ââHealthyâ is by far the commoner word of the two and is used to mean either âpossessing or enjoying good healthâ or âconducive to good health.ââ
So it may surprise you to hear that, when editing, I sometimes change âhealthyâ to âhealthful.â But itâs not because the writer used âhealthyâ wrong. Itâs because so many readers might think he did. After all, old myths die hard.
JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of âIt Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences.â She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.