Round and Around

In my previous post in this series I remarked on the fact that the Ministry of Truth that appears in George Orwell’s 1984 is frequently misquoted as ‘Ministry for Truth’.

Such almost universal misquotations are much commoner than one might imagine. Michael Hoey in his eye-opening study of Lexical Priming notes that the Jules Verne novel, the title of whose first official English translation was Around the World in 80 Days, is almost universally misquoted by journalists as ‘round the world’ especially in articles on yacht races, luxury cruises and the like.

Hoey notes that the original translation of Verne’s title (Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours) is infelicitous. ‘Round’ is the more commonly used preposition where literal circular motion is involved, while ‘around’ is used when we mean ‘all over’ or ‘throughout’. Writers would thus seem to prefer to follow prevalence of use rather than accurate citation. Some more recent translations reflect this.

‘Round’ and ‘around’ also provide a good illustration of different phases in the historical process of language change that linguists call grammaticalization.

A corruption of the Latin adjective ‘rotundus’ meaning ‘like a wheel’ (rota), ‘round’ still preserves its original lexical sense and can be used as an adjective to mean ‘circular’ or ‘spherical,’ as in the phrase ‘The earth is round.’

‘Around,’ on the other hand, has been fully grammaticalized and lost this more specific meaning. In fact, ‘around’ can be used to refer not only to approximate values but also to anything vaguely located in time or space. “They live around here” means “They live somewhere in this neighborhood”. ‘I’ve been around a long time’ is a euphemism for ‘I’m old’.