a short interlude of language geekery

[deird_lj]

It just occurred to me that, not only do oversee and overlook have completely different meanings...

...but oversight, which sounds like it should have a similar meaning to oversee, is actually much closer to overlook.

Weird.

Comments

[taiba.livejournal.com]

I love English.

[dreamincolor.livejournal.com]

The English language does the wacky.

..speaking of the wacky, when/how do you think of these things?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_sabik_/]

You seem to have overlooked the other meaning of oversight — "supervision or management". Bit of an oversight, there.

η

[deird1]

Not overlooked. Checked the definitions on lots of online dictionaries - 90% of them went for "omission, something missed or forgotten, failure to notice, inattention", and stuff like that.
So, as far as I can see, the main meaning for "oversight" has very little to do with supervision.

(Or, you know, huge amounts to do with supervision, given how much omission, forgetfulness, not noticing, and inattention there is in most types of supervision...)

[deird1]

In this case, someone used it in an email - incorrectly. Made me think...

[deird1]

Isn't it great!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_sabik_/]

Well, the wiktionary has both, as does my paper Oxford, though neither of them have frequency of use. Google finds 265,000[*] hits (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22has+oversight%22+OR+%22have+oversight%22) for the phrases "has/have oversight", which I'm pretty sure mean "supervise(s)" regardless of further context.

It would seem to be perfectly valid and current usage, if less usual.

η

[*] although sometimes it puts up 596,000 as the number...

[deird1]

I bow to your superior Googling.

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

And thus we show that English is such an amazing language the same word can mean completely different things depending on whether it's a noun or a verb!

[taiba.livejournal.com]

Seems like they're all nouns to me.

Oversight as management is a noun as far as I can tell.
Oversight as an act of omission is also a noun as far as I can tell.

Of course, I'm not the best at English so if I'm wrong please correct me :-)

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

No, you're right. I mean, I can make it a verb if I want to (this is English, we can make any word class into any other word class with absolutely nothing at all added!), but it doesn't actually make any difference in this case.

My bad!

[mabus101.livejournal.com]

I was gonna mention the "oversight committee" thing too, but someone's beat me to it! And then I was going to bring up the usual function of such a committee, and someone beat me to that, too. Work is Fail.

[dreamincolor.livejournal.com]

Ooo, gotcha..

From Laney

[(Anonymous)]

I can't see any way to use the specific word 'oversight' as a verb.

But I love expressions like 'my bad' and 'work is fail', which I'm encountering frequently as I encounter the world of Netspeak (yeah, I know, you lot probably have some much more trendy term for it). The grammar is completely mad. It's fascinating.

Somewhere, someone is doing research on the changing grammar of the net...

Re: From Laney

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

Hey, I totally oversight my students...

It does make it look a tad Buffy-speak (because that's the basis of Buffy-speak - using null-transforms and English's rigid word order to force words into different word classes than expected), but it is technically a grammatically valid statement, if not at all Standard English...

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know what else is fun? As far as I can tell (I have no research to back myself up here, sadly), the phrase 'all downhill from here' has two very antonymic (yeah, that's not a word) meanings: either that from now on things will be very easy, or that from now on things will be very hard.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.