podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

A repeat episode from May 2006 

I got the idea for this word of the day from reading more about the Oxford English Corpus, that dictionary maker’s tool said to have a billion words in its database.

One of the things that lexicographers have been able to do, that they weren’t able to do before, is give words more flavor along with their meaning.  I don’t have access to the Oxford English Corpus so I don’t know exactly what it would make of “proclivity” but here’s what I did.

Traditional dictionaries include a definition for a word. In the case of “proclivity” it might run something along the lines of “an inclination or predisposition toward something.”  That’s actually from Merriam Webster.  But there is a tone to proclivity too.  I was listening to the radio where they were talking about a natural history exhibit on the mating habits of wild animals.  The word proclivity came up in the conversation more than once.  The tone was one of titillation.  I thought…is there a kind of cheeky aspect to the word proclivity?  Something not exactly disapproved of, but not exactly respectable either?

The Oxford English Corpus would have let me look at numerous contexts of the word to tease out whether this was the case.  Since I don’t have the Corpus I had to settle for Google.  I actually used the search engines within newspapers like the LA Times and The New York Times.  Sure enough proclivities came associated with not buying new underwear, mincing around in bathing suits—sun tanning while visible from the street, cross dressing, overspending and more.  So even if the dictionary tells you that proclivity means a predisposition, it doesn’t tell you that most people use proclivity when talking with light disapproval…or is that winking approval?  The etymology of the word proclivity is ironically appropriate for this flavor of usage.  The word comes from Latin and is related to “incline,” where cl?vus means slope.  So that proclivity holds a figurative etymology of “going forward down a slope.”  And in practice our proclivities are things we allow ourselves, like a ball rolling down its natural course.