The Word

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

By Jan Freeman, the Boston Globe

There will never be an Oscar for Most Correct English, but that doesn't keep us from grumbling about movie titles that seem to be vying for the Least Correct prize. Remember the murmurs about "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and its missing question mark? And the howls at "Honey, We Shrunk the Kids," Disney's assist to the rest of the English-speaking world in kicking shrank down the stairs and out of the lexicon?

More recently, Lynne Truss made hay from the missing apostrophe in "Two Weeks Notice," using the movie poster in the jacket photo of her best-selling punctuation rant "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." Last year brought us "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," one hyphen short of a compound adjective, and "Good Night, and Good Luck," still burdened with a controversial comma (and, officially, a period), but still a great leap forward from the studio's earlier version of Edward R. Murrow's sign-off line, the ploddingly punctuated "Good Night. And, Good Luck."

With those fat targets to distract the usage police, it looked as if " Brokeback Mountain" might speed on to Oscar glory without so much as a warning. But no: A couple of weeks ago, a Canadian Mountie, in the person of Mary K. Nolan, travel writer for the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator, made a heartfelt plea for a last-minute revision of the title: "Please, please, for the sake of grammarians everywhere, can we please change that to 'Brokenback'?"

Grammarians everywhere? Whoever they are, they haven't been complaining, though a Web search turns up a few posts claiming that "Brokeback" is "bad grammar." Oddly, neither Nolan nor the other would-be reformers suggest correcting the title to "Brokenbacked," though it's the same sort of compound as broken-hearted and cloven-footed. If you want to fix it, why not go all the way?

And broken-backed is, in fact, the way the word is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. But does that mean brokeback is wrong? Not exactly. In the OED's earliest citation, from "The Tale of Gamelyn" (a narrative poem from about 1400), the word is not brokenbacked but brokeback (spelled "broke-bak). Elsewhere in the poem, as later in Shakespeare ("time is broke") and in Jane Austen ("the match is broke off"), we often find broke where modern ears expect broken.

Irregular verbs in 1400, as now, were in flux. The ancient rules that explained why we said ring/rang/rung and sing/sang/sung, but not bring/brang/brung, were no longer discernible. In the confusion, some irregular verbs were simply regularized, but others were mixed up with different conjugations.

The grammar wranglers of the 18th century did their best to round up the maverick verbs, but it wasn't easy. In "The American Language," H.L. Mencken listed dozens of variants-fling/flang, drag/drug, climb/clum, and on and on-among verb forms common in "the vulgar tongue" of the early 20th century. Even in modern times, we've created a couple of new irregulars; dove (for dived) is only about 150 years old, and snuck (for sneaked)-not yet respectable, but probably unstoppable-a mere 120.

So it's no surprise that even when a verb has been tamed, we find evidence of its adventurous past preserved in some familiar expressions. Broke meaning "penniless" was originally the participle broken, but broke became slang 300 years ago, and it's not likely to be reformed now. A horse that has had basic training is green broke (not broken). And "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," though a faux-folk saying only a few decades old, is surely preferable to the sanitized version some killjoys are spreading: "If it's not broken, don't fix it" sounds like business boilerplate, not horse sense.

Then there's brokeback itself, whose meanings have included "having a broken back" and "spinally deformed." In Carson McCullers's "Ballad of the Sad Café," Marvin Macy calls the hunchbacked Cousin Lymon "Brokeback," and bassist Doug McCombs has said he borrowed that insult as the name of his band. A brokeback horse, though, is not hunched but swaybacked, sagging in the spine; and a brokeback mountain has the same swayback curve suspended between two peaks.

(c) 2005 The Boston Globe