Track Mangoes

This is a response that got out of hand to a message that Steph sent me, which included the clause: “I wiki-ed this before.”

Speaking of morphology, let's investigate the morphology of the newly verbed neologism 'wikipedia' that you so cleverly brought up. Given that it is a neologism, it should take a regular suffix 'd' or '-ed' in both its preterite and past participle forms. Now, this presents no problem in speech: I have never heard, nor do I expect to, any past form of wikipedia or wiki that does not sound like /,wɪki'piːdiəd/ or /'wɪkid/. The only real issue is one of spelling; it's not a terribly important issue, because no form of the word is likely to be misunderstood (except, perhaps, 'wikid,' which might be mistaken for a hip new spelling of the ever popular adverb (Boston) and adjective (Britain)). But the instinct towards standardization carries us forward, because no one wants to be wrong.

There are two main contenders for the preterite and past participle form of ‘wikipedia.’ The first, ‘wikipediaed,’ is currently the form listed on Wiktionary, while the other, ‘wikipedia’d,’ seems to be in broader usage. ‘Wikipediaed’ is a fairly regular spelling, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. The explanation of this phenomenon is complex, relating to unspoken—except by linguists—rules of English orthography and the troubled and ambiguous relationship the English language has with the apostrophe.

First of all: what’s wrong with ‘wikipediaed?’ It’s regular, and I doubt many people would have trouble figuring out its pronunciation. But it looks funny. Well, it’s a letter problem. First of all: ‘ae’. Formerly a ligature, this combination of letters has gradually been eliminated from American English. Paediatrics became pediatrics, encyclopaedia (how coincidental!) became encyclopedia, and aesthetic is now sometimes spelled esthetic, though the first is still more common. Few English verbs end in ‘a’, so this problem doesn’t usually occur. To start adding in ‘ae’s where none were before is to swim against the current of linguistic movement—and this time you don’t have the grammarians on your side.

The problem with ‘wikipedia’d’ is the apostrophe, sure to get any sticklers hackle’s up. Apostrophes are among the most commonly misused aspects of English. In their correct usage they may denote possession or omission. However, in exceptions they can also be used in the plurals of initialisms, as in NGO’s, and numerals, as in 1970’s, or in cases where the regular plural would be ambiguous, as with lower case letters. Furthermore, in the near past (17th through 19th centuries) it was common practice to use an apostrophe in the plurals of loanwords that end in vowels, as in kangaroo’s. It seems to me that all these exceptional cases of apostrophe usage serve the purpose of isolating nonlinguistic or foreign elements from the regular morphology of English. ‘Wikipedia’d’ thus continues this tradition, as its clunkiness as a verb makes it a kind of unnatural element to be isolated. Furthermore, there is a direct line from cases such as NGO’s and kangaroo’s to Wikipedia’d, because the apostrophe-d construction does have precedent in the verb forms of certain initialisms such as KO’d or PO’d and in loanwords such as pajama’d (from Hindi roots) or, more recently, ninja’d.

The use of the apostrophe in ‘wikipedia’ is seemingly justified by the rationale that the apostrophe stands for the omission of the ‘e’ in ‘wikipediaed,’ which looks wrong. But if my theory of isolation is correct, the apostrophe in fact omits nothing at all, but rather serves as a barrier between the unnatural word and its conjugation. There is, of course, a simpler explanation, which is that English, having no verbs ending in ‘a,’ (if you find a common one please tell me) simply doesn’t know what to do with them. My guess is that it is somewhere between the two. The apostrophe-d construction only appears in words ending in ‘a,’ but the use of the apostrophe is drawn from the tradition of isolating the foreign or unnatural; in this case, it is the final ‘a’ that is truly unnatural.

The abbreviation, ‘wiki’d,’ retains its validity even though it doesn’t end in ‘a’ because verbs ending in ‘i’ are almost as rare, and because in this case the apostrophe actually is omitting something—the rest of the word.

Note that all this trouble results not from the context of the word’s verbing, but from the ending of the word itself. Neologisms of a similar vintage and origin, such as ‘photoshopped,’ have no such problem.

And, sorry Steph, I don’t think there is a case to be made for the hyphen. It seems to serve the same isolating function as the apostrophe, but has less precedent. As an alternative solution to avoid the issue, you can always go old school and exclusively use the separate 'did,' so you would instead say 'I did wiki this before for some reason.' This doesn’t, however, solve the problem of the past participle form, and it is probably misleading for modern listeners who expect 'did' to be used for emphasis, or in interrogative and negative clauses. Or you could say ‘I looked it up on Wikipedia.’


Epilogue:

A separate issue is the usage of ‘wiki’ as an abbreviation of Wikipedia. Wiki is it’s own word, predating Wikipedia, but the latter has largely subsumed the original meaning. Whether this event will be helpful or destructive depends on whether wikis (or is it wiki’s?) other than Wikipedia begin to rival it in the public consciousness. But, of course, if they do, the original meaning of the word will likely reëmerge, if you will forgive my playful use of the now sadly defunct dieresis. Such is the strength of language’s flexibility; I’m no prescripitivist.