January 30, 2012, by Stephen Mumford
Unspecificity
The English language can be infuriating to the creative author. Sometimes it makes no sense. Specificity is a word. Unspecific is a word. One would seem entitled to conclude that unspecificity is a word. When I wrote it into a draft paper the other day, the Word programme gave me the tell-tale squiggly red underlining. The iPhone had a similar prohibition on my perfectly logical construction. It’s not a word.
Of course I could have used some near-synonyms. Vagueness, perhaps, or fuzziness. Philosophy often requires precision, however, and neither of those seemed quite right for what I wanted to convey. We often look for the degree to which something is specific: its specificity. But it’s sometimes interesting to note that things can have a degree to which they are unspecific. Obviously this should be known as unspecificity.
I have a complete Oxford English Dictionary in my office and unspecificity is not contained therein. It’s a few years old but a search on the online version also drew a blank. Perhaps I am entitled to use the non-word as a technical term of art. Philosophers have many of those, like supervenience or supererogatory. But unspecificity seems so obviously a word that it shouldn’t have to be classed as technical vocabulary.
We sometimes speak of a living language and all languages in current use are alive in this sense. They grow and evolve. The dictionary doesn’t just prescribe usage but also describes it. Latin may be dead, in the sense that it is no longer used outside academic circles. But when a language is in use, its speakers are using it as a tool of communication and thought. They are perfectly entitled to adapt the tool to their needs just as I might recalibrate a wrench. New words pass into common usage and eventually are picked up by the compilers of the OED. Some words change their usage over time and the dictionary-makers eventually succumb. Remember when dice meant only the plural? And it’s sad to say that some words fall out of usage completely. Their study can be fascinating, however.
I am now feeling a bit more relaxed about unspecificity. It makes such good sense that it seems only a matter of time before it proudly takes its place between unspecific and unspeckled. It doing so will depend on how we treat it. The social nature of language means that I alone have no power to make it a word. But if it becomes part of common usage among a community of speakers, then such status would have to be bestowed. Such is the process of wordification.
But I don’t get why we would need “unspecificity”. Isn’t something’s degree of unspecificity just its degree of specificity viewed with dissatisfaction? If so, why not just talk about its insufficient specificity? Or have I missed something?
I’m glad we have the word soft and don’t always have to speak of insufficient hardness.
Even if it is not to be a word that will ever be commonly used, let it be a technical term. In the name of specificity, I hail unspecificity!
http://t.co/X0Jmt6aP
For that very reason alone, I think it should be used 🙂
Either way, it is a word, just a non-standard one (cf Stan Carey here http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/not-a-word-is-not-an-argument/ )
Although the word is not in the OED it’s on google. Used (rarely) as a jargon word in immunology and parasitology as far as I can make out. And there is a poem about it too! It’s a bit weird, but one line makes sense in the context of your post “It’s like poetry, you think it’s wrong then you think it’s right…” etc. (http://asiago.deviantart.com/art/Unspecificity-is-too-a-word-44560287)
“Unspecificity” is like “general,” but with the immediate reminder, right there in the word, that general is not particular, and that the particulars can be very precise — delicate, even. I think that it is a word that therefore would appeal, ironically, to those who are attentive to particularity.
Cathyby directed me here via Twitter (and that’s my link in her comment; thanks, Cathy!). I was surprised by how unusual “unspecificity” is: I would have assumed it was in fairly common use and that it would appear in the OED and other large dictionaries. (It’s not in the new American Heritage, either, or in a few others that I checked online.)
Searching the Corpus of Historical American English (400m words from 1810–2009), I get but a single result, from Trends in American Sociology, 1929: “Particularly is this true of human behavior, because of prolonged infancy, organic plasticity and unspecificity in the nervous system, especially in the cerebral cortex.”
Yet I get about 20,000 Google hits. This isn’t many, and many of these are repeats, but it’s not meagre. And the contexts are interesting: a lot of scientific and other academic journals, even in paper titles, but also in comments at sites such as Techdirt and Firedoglake, and in a tweet or two. People are using the word, and its meaning is self-evident — and specific! — so there’s a reasonable chance it will eventually make its way between the hallowed covers of a leather-bound lexicon.
Regardless, I wouldn’t wait for that to happen before declaring “unspecificity” to have been wordified: this has already happened. That it doesn’t appear in dictionaries might affect its Scrabblability but not its claim to be considered a word.
Specific is an adjective so you can add un-prefix to it making it mean the opposite – not specific. Specificity however is a noun, the -icity suffix meaning the quality or condition of (in this case, specific-ness.) When you add the prefix un- to a noun or verb it doesn’t mean ‘not,’ it means, generally, ‘the opposite of,’ or able to do the reverse of, and ‘the reverse of the quality of specific-ness’ isn’t what you want to say (doesn’t even make sense.) What you want to say is ‘not having the quality or condition of specific-ness’ therefore nonspecificicity is correct. (& I’ve got no red squiggle, & it’s in the Webster) (there’s always a rule)
However unpredictability and unaccountability are both nouns and are both in the OED. The nouns are based on the words unpredictable and unaccountable, I imagine, rather than opposites of predictability or accountability.
ETA: the OED actually lists the un- prefix
“2. (added to nouns) a lack of: (unrest | untruth)” Under usage, it notes that the un- tends to be less neutral than non- fwiw.
Specificity is a matter of degree. Whether something is specific or unspecific seems to me a matter of whether its degree of specificity is above or below some (interest-relative) threshold.
I think what you’re looking for, then, is a scalar term for the gap between the threshold and the unspecific thing’s degree of specificity. Given what Suzy Brown says above, neither ‘unspecificity’ nor ‘nonspecificity’ would do this job. But the phrase ‘lack of specificity’ does it perfectly well.
(Just as the perfectly good phrase ‘make more precise’ renders the ugly neologism ‘precisify’ redundant.)
The thing about the “un” – the way that it implies undoing, as Suzy says – is that it marks the intentionality of the retreat from the particular. Or, in the meta-case, flags it as having been already done, by someone other than the author of the meta-frame, that is. And it draws attention to it. So “non-specific,” like “unspecific,” refers to the contrast between general and particular more explicitly than “general” or “generic” does, but it doesn’t introduce the same considerations about it as “unspecific” does. Interesting. You need the “un” *&* the “specific” in order to do that conceptual work. If you want to do it one word, I mean.
I’m aware that this is slightly off topic, but I’m of the opinion that ‘dice’ still refers only to the plural. Language certainly evolves through use, but anyone who states that ‘the dice has been cast’ would, in my opinion, have misspoken.
Yeah…I’m also agree here, “Unspecificity” is like “general,” but with the immediate reminder, right there in the word, that general is not particular, and that the particulars can be very precise — delicate, even.