The private/personal synonyms have much in common with the complicated/complex pair. In both cases, the pair shares an antonym -- "public" for the former, "simple" for the latter -- and within each pair is a subtle separation by connotation.
Private is from the Latin privatus, "apart from the state," its meaning extended to "belonging to the individual or interest and not owned by any government." As a noun, privacy has a good connotation (keep out of my computer, you prying cookie). As an adjective, however, private is often associated in political discourse with "the truly greedy," as in "private developers." Consequently, liberals deride the idea of setting aside a portion of the payroll tax destined for Social Security as the dreaded privatization, while conservatives like to call that percentage set aside a "personal retirement account."
Personal probably comes from the Etruscan phersu, "mask," from which we get persona, an assumed character or "image." With the rise of interest in the person, individual or self, personal took on an intimate character: We enjoy e-mail's personal correspondence on our personal digital assistants and grunt happily if wearily at the behest of our personal trainers.
In a word, personal is in; impersonal can be an insult, and private -- especially in its verb form as privatize -- has more enemies in the media than friends.
Nearly near there
"You have ruled out tax cuts," a reporter said to the president, "and no cuts in benefits for the retired and the near retired." Then came the semantic zinger: "What, in your mind, is `near retired'?"
Bush half-answered that with a reference to "our seniors," but let me deal with the dropping of the adverbial -ly and the overuse of near as a combining form.
It became controversial with near miss, a nonsensical version of near thing; some of us patiently but uselessly pointed out that the writer meant "near hit." Near miss has since entrenched itself as an idiom. (Idioms is idioms, and I could care less.) The above-mentioned Vlad the Impaler refers to Russian speakers in the nations that broke away from the Soviet Union as the near abroad. And now we have Bush's near retired, presumably but not decidedly people approaching their 60s.
Two paragraphs back, today's column was near finished. The compound nouns are chasing the adverbs out of the language.
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