Maneuvering my shopping cart through the brassiere section of a Wal-Mart in Charles Town, West Virginia (on the way, I swear, to men's ultrarelaxed jeans), I was struck by the brand name of a Hanes underwear product: Sensuale.
By adding an e to the word sensual, the manufacturer not only gives a Frenchified twist to the term but also enables the "lightly lined underwire" to be trademarked. Nothing incorrect about that. But a close examination of the package reveals this selling pitch: "Sensuous styling that's sure to allure."
Which is it, then -- sensual or sensuous? Is there a difference? Yes; just as in underwire and underwear, the distinction is worth preserving.
Sensual has to do with the pleasurable gratification of the senses; for five centuries, it dealt with sexual appetites and carnal desires. "He loves," sneered a disapproving prude in 1618, "as far as sensual love can go." To this day, a sensual person is one more inclined to revel in physical pleasures than to get a charge out of moral rectitude.
The poet Milton was not blind to this connotation of lewdness. However, writing in 1641 about the difference between soul and body, he needed a neutral adjective to apply to the body that meant "pertaining to the senses" of touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing. So he dropped the -al from sensual and substituted -ous, writing, "The Soule ... finding the ease she had from her visible, and sensuous colleague the body."
The poet Coleridge announced in 1814 that he would reintroduce Milton's word "to express in one word what belongs to the senses"; ever since, usagists have differentiated sensual, "indulgent in physical pleasure," from sensuous, "descriptive of aesthetic appreciation." You get a sensual kick out of watching an R-rated movie and a sensuous kick out of listening to music or sniffing the cookies in the oven.
Shouldst Milton be living at this hour, he would surely take umbrage at the misuse of his uplifting adjective by the bra makers at Hanes. They are alluding to the luxurious feeling of their lightly lined Sensuale product, implying, as in the OED's sense 3, "a luxurious yielding up of oneself to passive enjoyment."
I noodled this around with Steven Pinker, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. He does not see the semantic difference to be holding up.
"The distinction was blown to smithereens in the early 1970s," he says, "when `J' published The Sensuous Woman, which as I recall suggested some interesting new uses for Jell-O and saran wrap. Apparently there have been attempts to reserve sensuous as a synonym for `sensory' -- pertaining to the senses in a clinical way, as in `sensory physiology' -- but they have failed."
Not with me, they haven't. I like the distinction. It reminds me of the difference between continual and continuous.
Even Pinker, a descriptivist, goes along with me part way on that: "The most consistently respected meaning difference between continual and continuous," he notes, "is that continuous can be used for spatial as well as temporal continuity [a continuous line of trees], whereas continual can be used only for temporal continuity. We see this in the spatial adjective discontinuous [a discontinuous line]."
Prescriptivists like me go all the way. We say continually means "repeatedly," like the plumber upstairs going bang, bang, bang when you're trying to sleep. Pinker agrees that although continuous is nine times more common in writing, continual "is said to be used for iterated events." (Iterate means "repeat, say again"; I think he treats reiterate as semiredundant.)
Continuous, on the other hand, is like the steady whine of a buzz saw in operation. Continuous "is said to be used for a truly gapless state or condition, such as heat, war or illness. One can sense this in the contrast between `John is working continuously' (without interruption) and `John is continually working late' (every day)." Pinker has counterexamples, but I refuse to become confused.
Remember the difference between -al and -ous. Suffixes count. It's fine being imperial (having an empire) but not being imperious (overbearing). Those who observe these distinctions are virtually virtuous.
human versus
animal
In finding that Microsoft violated antitrust laws, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson cited the 1890 Sherman Act, which requires the plaintiff to prove "that the defendant has engaged in predatory or anti-competitive conduct."
He ruled, "Viewing Microsoft's conduct as a whole also reinforces the conviction that it was predacious." The New York Times headline writer preferred the more familiar adjective in the Act, and went with "predatory behavior."
Which is it? The Latin root is praedari, "to prey upon." Since 1589, predatory behavior has been characterized by pillaging, plundering and robbery. Edward Gibbon, in his 1781 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote of a general who "recalled to their standard his predatory detachments."
Predacious, more often spelled predaceous, came along in 1713 to be applied to animals. Samuel Johnson's friend and acolyte Mrs Piozzi wrote in 1789 of "one predaceous creature caught in the very act of gorging his prey."
Today, predacious is almost always applied to the savagery of animals; predatory, which appears in databases 100 times more often, describes the plundering or rapacious action of humans, extended to the monopolistic action of corporations.
Ironically, Microsoft's Encarta dictionary loosely defines both adjectives first as pertaining to animals; not so in the OED or Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, and their sequence of definitions is clearly backed up by my usage count.
Therefore, I say the judge erred in choosing predacious; Bill Gates' practices may be monopolistic, but to judge them to be savagely animalistic goes overboard.
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