To feel nauseated (from being exposed to something nauseous)
In “Summer of 4 ft. 2”, the twenty-fifth and last episode of
The Simpsons’ seventh season (and
also, in my opinion, one of the series’ very best offerings), the Simpsons go to stay at
Ned Flanders’ beach house. Hanging out with a new set of kids, Lisa is
accepted, while Bart feels left out. He tries, as only Bart can, to sabotage
his sister’s new-found acceptance but fails.
“I’m dizzy!” she declares. “I’m nauseous! … But I’m popular!”
Oh, Lisa. Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. How I relate to you. Brainy.
Overachieving. Geeky. Always on the margins and struggling so hard to fit in, feeling so good about
yourself when you discover your new friends accept you for who you really are…
And yet that Lisa Simpson, whom I consider about as “word-nerdy”
as I, would confuse these makes me downright sick.
You see, nauseous, thought to have entered English as early as the 1600s, at that time meant “inclined to nausea, easily made queasy”. Today, it is an adjective describing something that causes nausea or squeamishness. The adjective denoting the feeling “made sick” is, actually, nauseated.
Nauseated (from the
Middle English nausea, from Latin,
from Greek nautiā, nausiē,
seasickness, from nautēs, sailor, from naus, ship) was first used in the
1630s to mean “to feel sick, to become affected with nausea”. During the early
seventeenth century, the verb nauseate
also had transitive sense of “to reject (food, etc.) with a feeling of nausea”
and “to create loathing in”. This meaning has persisted; today, nauseated still refers to the act of
feeling or causing nausea, loathing or disgust—what I feel when people use nauseated and nauseous interchangeably.
They do it quite often, in fact. The
change in a word, phrase or expression over time as the result of people’s
replacing an unfamiliar form with a more familiar one is known as folk etymology
(from the nineteenth century academic German Volksetymologie).
Unlike real etymology, which is determined by the rules of
language as they shift and change over time, folk etymology represents
erroneous changes made by people who mishear words (usually foreign words) and
try to make them more “English”. In this way, folk etymology doesn’t reflect
natural, historical changes in words.
Careful writers use nauseated
to mean “sick to the stomach” and reserve nauseous for “sickening to contemplate”.
Then again, Lisa was once
heard to say “Relax? I can't relax! Nor can I yield, relent, or... Only two
synonyms? Oh, my! I'm losing my perspicacity!” Maybe she’s right.
Good one! Another one that drives me nuts is when people say "it's so claustrophobic in here" when they mean "it's so enclosed in here." Claustrophobia is a psychological disorder, not a spacial state of being. It's bad enough when people say "this room makes me feel claustrophobic," when claustrophobia is something that you either have or you don't have, but describing a room as "claustrophobic" is downright bizarre.
ReplyDeleteThat rankles me, too. You never hear people say "Oh, my it's so agoraphobic in here. I'm just so overwhelmed by the openness of it all!" A testament to their closed minds? Tee hee!
Delete