Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 2; March 2000
"As someone famously said"
Mike Rundell 18 March 2000
Can there be anyone who isn't heartily sick of hearing the word dot.com? The dot.coms for the benefit of readers who have been on Mars for the last few months are youthful Internet-related companies that are worth billions on the stock market but have never made a penny in profit. They have been almost continuously in the news for what seems like ages, but in fact the word didn't even exist till about six months ago. (Its first sighting was probably in October 1999, according to the excellent Word Spy website: www.logophilia.com/WordSpy
Like the objects it refers to, the term dot.com has itself has enjoyed a meteoric rise in value. At first it seemed a useful and rather witty addition to our lexical store, but after recent blanket coverage and a deluge of bad puns ("e-commerce is dot.coming to town", and worse), most sensitive people are already fed up with it, and it is now about as fresh as that other worn-out cliché, the "information superhighway". A good example, then, of the way language like the stockmarket has its own fads and fashions.
In the case of dot.com, it is easy enough to see the process by which the word came into use, since it provides us with a neat way of describing a new phenomenon in the "real world". Sometimes, though, certain words and phrases acquire a sudden vogue for no discernible reason. For example, the expression sea change (originally used in Shakespeare's Tempest), has been bandied around so often in recent years that it has lost most of its force. And for some reason, many writers are now showing a preference for the even sillier step change. A year or so ago, I began to notice an increasing fondness, especially among journalists, for the word famously. Once this bandwagon picked up speed, everyone started jumping on it, so that it is now barely possible to pick up a paper without encountering famously at least two or three times. Its meaning has changed too. As recently as 1989, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (4th edition) recorded only one context for this adverb, namely its use as an "amplifier" in the phrase get on (or get along) famously. But in its latest incarnation, it appears far more often in expressions like "the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger" or "As Margaret Thatcher once famously said ". In a recent short article in the London Evening Standard (10 December 1999) it appears twice within the space of a few words:
Martin Bell, who famously insisted he would sit for one term only is not scared of a second bout with Neil and Christine Hamilton, who famously ambushed him on Knutsford Heath
Having formed the subjective impression of a rising tide of famouslys, I thought it was time to check out some corpus data. In the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC), there are 116 instances of the word, giving it a frequency rating of a little over 1 hit per million words of text. But remember that the BNC is a "static" corpus which was completed in 1993. The most recent texts it includes will therefore have been written no later than 1992, well before the recent vogue began. By contrast, a small sample of British newspapers from 1999 yields a staggering 171 famouslys in just one million words of text. Its dramatic rise in the frequency charts is reminiscent of the suddenly inflated value of the dot.com companies. If this were a long-term trend, famously would now be in the same ballpark as such august "blue-chip" words like bed (179 hits per million words) or amount (162 per million), and way ahead of household names like catch (146) or arrive (141). Personally, I think it is overvalued and its popularity will decline before long. But meanwhile it is interesting to see how the word is now used.
In around 30% of cases, famously precedes an adjective, for example:
In her private life, Greer is famously kind and generous
the famously celibate Cliff Richard
Gaudi's famously unfinished cathedral
the famously drop-dead gorgeous transexual April Ashley
In all cases, the referent (a person, place, institution, or whatever) is both famous in itself, and also famous for the particular trait mentioned here. Interestingly, quite a few of these adjectives are negative in tone:
the famously dangerous road to Sarajevo
Publishing is a famously inexact science
the famously hot-tempered immigrant
he is famously ruthless in dealing with under-achievers
At one time, the adverb of choice in cases like this would surely have been notoriously (which, by the way, occurs over four times as often as famously in the BNC, but has now been eclipsed in the frequency ratings).
Occasionally, it is used as a disjunct at the start of a sentence ("Famously, he has 'love' tattoed on one hand, and 'hate' on the other"), and this came as a surprise there are several cases where it apparently means "as the well-known saying goes":
football is famously a game of two halves
a week is a famously long time in politics
and most bizarrely
the law, as someone famously once said, may be an ass
Most of the time, however, famously modifies a verb. For example:
when she famously flung a glass of wine over Jonathan Aitken
Canute famously demonstrated that you can't argue with the power of the sea
Most typically, the collocating verb refers to a statement (words like said, remarked, observed, described, sneered, and seethed). What is (almost) missing, however, with just a single hit in the whole 171 occurrences, is the verb get on/along the only collocate recorded in Oxford's 1989 dictionary. Why these sea changes in patterns of usage should suddenly occur is a mystery: there seem, in this case, to be no external conditions creating an urgent need for this linguistic device. These "new" uses of famously are so well established that they are likely to remain in the language for some time, but their frequency has probably peaked. In a couple of years we may look back and see this as no more than a passing fad. What goes up famously also goes down.
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Michael Rundell is a lexicographer, and has been using corpora since the early 1980s. As Managing Editor of Longman Dictionaries for ten years (1984-94) he edited the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987, 1995) and the Longman Language Activator (1993). He has been involved in the design and development of corpus materials of various types, including the BNC and the Longman Learner Corpus. He is now a freelance consultant, and (with the lexicographer Sue Atkins) runs the "Lexicography MasterClass", providing training courses in all aspects of dictionary development and dictionary use (see http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/ae345).
