"ONE OF THE Globe's reporters invented a word," said the e-mail from the former English teacher, and it was an accusation, not a compliment: The reader didn't approve of the verb foreground, which appeared in an arts story last fall. "American-style marketing strategies . . . often foreground the names and images most immediately recognizable to the greatest number of people," the reporter had written.
If this had been the first-ever use of foreground as a verb, that wouldn't be cause for complaint in my book. Nouns are used as verbs every day; some never catch on, while others - like progress and tour and pedal - stick around for centuries. To foreground seems like a simple and obvious usage.
But foregrounding doesn't need my vote; the verb is almost 200 years old. The unhappy reader is a victim of the Recency Illusion, as linguist Arnold Zwicky has named it: the impression that a word or usage you've just noticed is new to the vocabulary, not just new to you.
Mark Twain used foreground as a verb in 1892: "We could do a prodigious trade [in portrait-painting] with the women if we could foreground the things they like, but they don't give a damn for artillery." That's the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, but a Google Books search turns up another citation, from an 1819 travel guide to England's Lake District: "This magnificent assemblage at the will of the drafts-man, may be foregrounded by rocks or trees, there being huge and picturesque blocks of the former."
Both of these are literal uses of foreground, meaning "depict in the foreground of a picture." But it's not much of a leap to apply foreground to other kinds of representation, and in the mid-20th century the verb began to spread, both as a term of art in linguistics and literary criticism and as an everyday part of the reviewer's vocabulary. An early sighting comes from a 1941 book review in the Chicago Tribune: "The sweep of time from 1889 to 1914 is foregrounded by a sweep of humans in Louis Aragon's 'The Century Was Young.' "
By 1980, Time magazine was willing to give the word a tryout, describing Woody Allen's techniques in "Stardust Memories" as "seductive black-and-white images, express-train pacing, a foregrounding of comic bit players." Still, the word was not sweeping the nation. Its competitor verbs spotlight and highlight - also formed from nouns, but a century or so later - had galloped right past foreground in the usage race; women were getting their hair "highlighted" as early as the 1940s.
In the three decades since, newspapers have allowed foregrounding, but not embraced it; it remains unusual enough to annoy the occasional reader, and not just conservative Bostonians. Last year, Stanley Fish used the word on his New York Times blog, writing that certain auto commercials "foreground the sexuality that informs the relationship between the car owner and the object of his/her affection."
Soon there came a comment - "Please don't use 'foreground' as a verb" - from someone who claimed he had to read the sentence three times to make sense of it. I was skeptical of that complaint, I admit. I think anyone reading Stanley Fish would be able to parse the phrase "they foreground the sexuality" on the second try, if not the first. And the commenter wasn't objecting to the verbing of the nouns or the nouning of verbs. He just didn't like the verb foreground.
Fair enough; I've seen foyer, ointment, egg, and supple on a list of hated words. But where did we get the notion, shared by my reader and Fish's, that our personal dislikes should govern some other adult's vocabulary? It's a mystery of the modern age of peevery.
. . .
ON THE GROUND FLOOR: "When did the word ground replace the word floor in the vocabulary?" asks reader L. Hankowitz. "People will say, while in the kitchen, 'I dropped the glass on the ground.' Please tell me I'm not the only one to notice this."
You're not the only one. Lynne Murphy, an American linguist who teaches in England - and blogs at Separated by a Common Language - found some differences in individuals' applications of ground and floor when she looked at the question last year.
Print usage seems to follow the convention I imagine you and I agree on: Floors are indoors, the ground is outdoors. But as Murphy notes, self-reporting of usage is notoriously unreliable. If you were in a large enclosed space - an airport terminal, a big hotel or hospital lobby - would you notice if someone said, "My change all landed on the ground" instead of "on the floor"? I don't think I would.
So maybe for some people there's a public-private aspect of the floor/ground distinction, not just the indoor-outdoor difference. But even if the words have some overlap, for some people, there's no evidence that floor is under any threat from ground, or vice versa.
