Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 March 27

= March 27 =

Cotton's higher than an opium fiend
Translating Lyndsay Faye's the Gods of Gotham, I found the sentence as follows:

"Take a glass for yourself on my account, Tim, cotton's higher than an opium fiend!"

The speaker seems to be a finanacier ordering champagne, and Tim is a young barman. There seems no relevant context at all.

Could you help to figure out the meaning of the sentence?--Analphil (talk) 04:47, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I looks to be a play on words - 'high' as in the price (presumably the financier is expecting to profit from this), and 'high' as in intoxicated on drugs. See also George Gershwin's Summertime. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:56, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Most of this seems to be jargon or idiom from the US from the early 20th century. "Take a glass for yourself" the barman should pour a drink for himself.  "on my account" to be paid for by the speaker, not by the bar tender.  "cotton's higher" the price of cotton commodities on the stock market is very high.  "higher than an opium fiend" this is a comparison over a pun on the word "high" which means both "great in volume" and "chemically intoxicated."  Opium fiends, or opium addicts, get very chemically intoxicated.  The financier wants to buy the barman a free drink, because he is very happy, that the price of cotton commodities on the stockmarket is very high. Fifelfoo (talk) 04:58, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I got it. Which means, it is impossible to translate into another language in a single sentence...! Thank you --Analphil (talk) 05:02, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Technically, I believe it is a form of syllepsis, which is generally very language dependent. -- LarryMac  | Talk  13:03, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I think that this is a case where the best translation would not be a literal translation, assuming you are translating this for its meaning and tone rather than trying to unpack this specific utterance semantically for a non-English speaking audience interested in the meanings of the individual English words. I think cotton and high are more important terms in the utterance than opium fiend, since they establish that the speaker cotton investments are doing well.  So you would probably want to translate those terms literally. Ideally, you would find a second meaning for a translation of high in your target language that allows for a colorful double entendre similar in spirit if not meaning to "higher than an opium fiend".  Of course, "on my account" is an idiom that also should not be translated verbatim.  That said, I think you could and probably should translate the utterance into another language in a single sentence if your goal is fidelity to the meaning and tone of the original text.  Marco polo (talk) 14:31, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
 * In the UK, we might say "have one on me", which would make literal translation even harder! Alansplodge (talk) 14:45, 28 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Those [English-speaking Americans] unfamiliar with cotton growing and harvesting would likely recognize an allusion to the song "Summertime", which says that "fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high". Cf. a line in "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" from Oklahoma! that "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye". References to "high" meaning intoxicated are too numerous to think of, let alone enumerate, but a popular mass magazine about marijuana and similar drugs is called High Times. —— Shakescene (talk) 03:28, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * But in both "Summertime" and "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'", what is high is the plant itself, not the price. In the quote Analphil is asking about, the speaker is almost certainly referring to the price rather than the distance from the top of the plant to the ground. Pais (talk) 14:33, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Rule on Abstract Nouns derived from polysyllabic Adjectives.
Greetings.

Quite some time ago (2007, to be exact) somebody on here asked about when one may appropriately use the suffixes "-ity" and "-ness" to construct Adjectival nouns. The answer given stated that -ity, for the most part, is no longer productive and has largely become subsumed by -ness.

In 21st-century English, one may create abstract nouns from practically all adjectives by simply adding -ness. To wit, while some adjectival nouns—such as availableness and incredulousness—seem awkward, they are by no means ungrammatical. But -ity, nowadays, seems practically extinct in abstract nouns derived from one-syllable adjectives. (save, of course, for a handful of fossilized nouns such as falsity and scarcity.) When it comes to polysyllabic adjectives, however, methinks that -ity's productiveness persists—particularly when said adjectives end in a Latinate suffix.

My question is as follows: If an adjective of two or more syllables ends in a suffix such as able/ible, ive, ile, al, or ous/ose, then (as a general rule) may one utilize the -ity suffix?

To my ear, agreeableness/agreeability, addictiveness/addictivity, tensileness/tensility, pluralness/plurality, and ambidexterousness/ambidexterity all sound perfectly acceptable. What do you think? Pine (talk) 09:19, 27 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Agreeability, addictiveness, plurality and ambidexterity are perfectly normal words, while tensileness is marginally "better" than tensility IMO, but neither of the two sounds quite right since neither has ever been uttered in my presence. None of the rejects sound natural to me. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:49, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Words that appear in the dictionary should almost always be preferred over neologisms with the same intended meaning. For all of the examples listed above, there are accepted forms.  Actually, tensility appears in dictionaries, whereas tensileness does not.  Marco polo (talk) 19:50, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with Marco Polo that the dictionary is the best guide. However, dictionaries sometimes simply append derived words like availableness to the entry for the root word, without discussing any difficulties in their use. Let me give an example which others here may or may not agree with, and for which I have no evidence but intuition. I find availableness less acceptable as an alternative to availability, for example, in discussing the "availableness of contraception" than in "One of the things I like about John is his availableness" (how he always tends to make himself available). However, there is nothing about any distinction between the two words in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. It's as if when I hear availableness, I ask myself why the speaker isn't using availability, and assume that they must have in mind some less common meaning of the word available. What do others think? 64.140.121.160 (talk) 04:48, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
 * About the words you listed, I can't find addictiveness or addictivity in my dictionary. While addictiveness sounds entirely normal to me, addictivity doesn't. Pluralness sounds like it could be a technical term in linguistics, but couldn't be used in "What sets those people apart is their plurality" (i.e., the fact that there are many of them). Ambidextrousness (note the spelling) and ambidexterity both sound fine to me, although ambidextrousness isn't in my dictionary. I might use agreeability or agreeableness in "John's agreeability" (pleasant manner) or "the agreeability of the proposal to all parties" (its acceptability), but I would hesitate to use agreeability in "what surprised me about that beach was its agreeableness.") Everything I've said is based on fairly vague feelings, so it's quite possible I'm the only one who thinks this. 64.140.121.160 (talk) 05:27, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
 * 64.140..., I agree with all of your points except those about availableness. This may be a matter of taste, but I can't think of a single case where I would use availableness instead of availability, which is the more established nominal form, and which I think works in every situation.  Otherwise, though, I agree with you.  Marco polo (talk) 14:54, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, I would prefer availability by far in that case too. I was considering the following question: if availableness had to be used, how would it be used? I think my basic feeling may be that availableness is more likely to be used where it refers to an inherent property of the thing being described, as opposed to one that is ephemeral or related to specific circumstances. 64.140.121.160 (talk) 00:11, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * A minor (and non-scholarly) point might be that most, though far from all, words ending in 'ble seem to come from some form of -able in English, French, Latin or another language. In English where ability is the universal (and very early learnt) noun form of able, -ability or -ibility is the natural-sounding and naturally-created noun form of a word ending in -able or -ible. Perhaps by assimilation, that also applies to some other -ble words that don't derive from able, such as noble. Not only notability from notable, but nobility from noble (where the French is noblesse). Ableness and nobleness are possible (although possibleness is definitely impossible), and might be used perhaps by a writer trying to make some distinction (for example between the nobility as a class and nobleness as a moral attribute), but they, especially ableness, would be rare enough to make the reader pause for a second. On the other hand, humbleness (perhaps from religious or biblical texts inherited from the 16th and 17th centuries) is a perfectly acceptable, though less common, alternative to humility. There are good etymological reasons (such as independent derivations from nobilitas and humilitas) for much of this, but I'm far too ignorant to provide them. I don't have the capability or capacity (let alone the capableness). ¶ As for [ambi]dextrous, I prefer dexterity to dextrousness, but ambidextrousness seems far more common than the cleaner, more elegant ambidexterity. But it might well be different in a medical, behavioural, biological, technical or educational field where this topic is mentioned frequently. —— Shakescene (talk) 03:00, 29 March 2012 (UTC)