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Advisor Dissent

October 23, 2011, 4:25 pm

Would this company have done as well if it had been called "TripAdviser"?

Quick quiz: What do you call a person whose job is to offer advice? Or, rather, how do you spell that job?

If you said advisor, you would be in accordance with 100 percent of my students; with the practice of my university and I believe most others in this country; with the popular Web site TripAdvisor; with Merrill Lynch, which sends to its customers a publication called Merrill Lynch Advisor; and, in fact, with the English-speaking world generally.

If you answered adviser, you would be right. Or, to be more precise, right from the perspective of The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and history. Adviser first appeared in 1611, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was formed by appending the suffix -er (in this case, merely the letter r) to the verb advise, along the lines of such similar constructions as baker, candlestick-maker and, well, not butcher, which comes from the Old French bouchier, but teacher, seeker, and beekeeper.

The OED’s first citation of a different spelling is a periodical that first came out in 1899 and was called, simply, Advisor. The dictionary doesn’t specify its country of origin, but the new spelling became sufficiently popular in the United States that American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, mocked it in 1931: “Following the advent and acceptance in this country of advisors, newspapers now occasionally mention debators.” (There are, of course, -or nouns for occupations and identifications, but they are usually not formed from verbs: doctor, debtor, proctor, author, executor, curator, donor.)

The chart below is a Google Ngram showing the comparative frequency, in books published in America between 1900 and 2008, of adviser (blue line) and advisor (red line). The -or spelling pulls ahead in about 1999. (In Britain, -er is still ahead though its lead is fading.)

Ngram’s database, as I say, consists of books, which tend to stick with traditional usages longer than other forms of writing do. The Internet itself gives a more accurate snapshot of current usage, and if you stage a Google Fight between the two spellings, -or blows -er away, by 23.7 million to 5.7 million.

How to explain the dominion of advisor? First, it sounds fancy (because, I conjecture, the real -or nouns have longer pedigrees than the formed-from-verbs -er ones). Second, it sounds British. And when it comes to language in our country, that is an unbeatable combination.

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http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

I grew up thinking that the correct spelling was advisor, and it wasn’t until I started working as an editor that I learned that it was supposed to be adviser. But even though I’ve learned the “correct” spelling, it has always looked odd to me because I’m so used to the -or form. I imagine that it’s the same for a lot of people, especially younger generations.

jamessh

You mean you started working as an “editer.”

http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

Hey now. I’ve got to maintain some standards.

jffoster

It will depend in part on how people pronounce the syllable in question when it is stressed, i.e., in this case on whether the faculty are said to have _advisorial_ (“advizOREial”) or _adviserial_ (advizEErial”) duties. Neither is common, but when one hears it at my university in SW Ohio, it’s virtually always the former. And yet the university insists on spelling it *adviserial*.

http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

Perhaps because your latter offered pronunciation of “adviserial” sounds uncomfortably close to “adversarial”, which is the last thing we want to predicate of our advisers. (I instinctively wrote, at first, “advisors”, but then my inner schoolmarm took over and corrected it.)

jffoster

Then again, perhaps not.

11167504

There are no such words as adviserial and advisorial. Or, rather, they do not predate adviser and advisor but are merely formed from them. In any case, neither is included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

midevilprof

Is there a difference between “advisorial” and “advisory”? I would think that the latter, being a word that already exists, fits the bill.

jffoster

re 11–504,
Well most words that are “merely ????” derived from other words chronologically follow into existence the words they are derived from. The question is that of what is the underlying vowel in _advisor_’s last syllable. Now, whether it’s in the OED or not, one can hear the form _advisorial_. Perhaps one hears ?_adviserial_ too, but this “one” has never heard it.

Note also, as I believe another person below has, that nobody issues weather or traffic _*adviseries_. They issue _advisories_. Unfortunately, the { – y} suffix, unlike the {-ial } one, does not shift the stress to the syllable in question, so _advisory_ is diagnostic for spelling usage, but not for the phonological underlying form.

Guest

I have a similar confusion about protesters and protestors. I would love to see the next column about those words.
richardside

Being British, I am puzzled by your penultimate sentence. I would pronounce both spellings the same (with my southern English accent – I can’t speak for my compatriots elsewhere in Britain). To stress the -or ending (to rhyme with snore) sounds affected at best. And since, as is stated elsewhere in the article, the -er ending still predominates in the UK, I cannot understand how the -or ending ‘sounds British’.

dw

It “sounds British” to some people, even though it’s not the most common British usage. Just as some usages (usually ones that are disliked by the speaker) “sound American” to many British people, even though they aren’t.

Or, at least, that’s what this article is suggesting. I don’t know whether it’s true, but it’s not implausible.

mbelvadi

With regard to your list of other “or” people-roles, I’m not sure of the timing of their development, but at least three DO appear to come from verbs – executors execute (e.g., a will), curators curate (an art collection) and donors donate. Although maybe these three are all back-formations?

11167504

Curate, at least, is a back formation from curator.

xcoulter

I’m guessing from this article that “mentors” should really be called “mentorers,” yes?
tomadams

An example of this pairing where a semantic difference exists is “sailer” and “sailor”–the former engaging in this activity as a hobby and the latter as a member of the navy.

jffoster

????? Where and among whom is such a distinction between *sailer and _sailor_ made? I’ve been around sailors, both professional and avocational, much of my life and I have never seen it spelled *sailer. Unfortunately, there is no adjective whose suffix pulls the stress to the next syllable, so unlike the case with _advisor_ ~ advisOrial, we can’t get a handy diagnostic test showing what the underlying, systematic phonemic, vowel really is. But a sailor I am and so’s everybody else I know or know of who does it, whether they sail a yacht, a yawl, or a YP.
jamesebryan

Isn’t a sailer is a craftsman who makes sails?

jffoster

Actually, Mr. Jamesbryan, that person we generally call a _sailmaker_. And if we sustain fatalities aboard and have to bury our dead at sea, it is the ship’s sailmaker who also has the task of sewing our departing shipmate in weighted canvas.

But your question did remind me of one use of the term _sailer_, namely to refer to a ship and how she sails. We might say for instance that she is a better _sailer_ with a quartering wind than with one from dead astern. But the “she” refers to the ship or boat, not to a person. I have no idea whence Mr. tomadams got his “semantic distinction” between a professional sailor and a “hobby sailer”. Perhaps he or one of the up to now 4 readers who “liked” his comment will tell us.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

(Not that anyone these days refers to a boat as “she” . . . )
jffoster

Ms. Saller, a LOT of us refer to ships and boats as ‘she’. And we really don’t care whether you or anybody else, especially landlubbers and landlubbresses, approve or not.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Sailer (nd some spelling variants) as a surname comes from the German for ropemaker, rope being a Seil, as in abseil (literally: down-rope).

http://www.facebook.com/steven.a.levine Steven A. Levine

I could not figure out whether to use adviser or advisor. I laboured hard to find the answer and realized I was an American and labored hard to find the answer. Spelling does change over time.
clynch1

Advisory: there’s a good reason for the “-or”.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

“There are, of course, -or nouns for occupations and identifications, but they are usually not formed from verbs: doctor, debtor, proctor, author, executor, curator, donor.”

Oh, I’m not so sure. here are a few -or things from verbs, such that if you replace -or with nothing or -e, you get what they do:

translator, editor, dictator, actor, abductor, adjudicator, administrator, agitator, benefactor, aviator, arbitrator, auditor, appropriator, conspirator, collaborator, commentator, communicator, competitor, conciliator, contractor, contributor, decorator, demonstrator, director, fornicator, impostor, interlocutor, inquisitor, legislator, liquidator, investigator, predator, operator, perpetrator, prevaricator, spectator …

accelerator, accumulator, activator, actuator, attractor, aspirator, calculator, decorticator, defibrillator, defoliator, deflector, denominator, desalinator, dessicator, detonator…

If you are slightly more generous about how to get to a verb form, there are things like captor, applicator, etc.

For more, see

words ending with tor

But basically, I have the impression that -or is holding its own pretty well. Given that there’s not that much difference in pronunciation between many -or and -er forms (professor/hairdresser?), I’m not really surprised.

I suppose the -or has something to do with having a latin root of the verb. It’s not a matter of importing existing words from modern Italian or Spanish – I don’t think defibrillators were first invented there and then transferred to the English-speaking world – but that with a latin-seeming verb we often choose -or rather than -er as somehow being more fitting.

Or am I missing a point?
nordicexpat

I think .or suffix occurs pedominantly with verbs with a Latin origin, or with what is called a bound base (e.g. author) or otherwise techical. .er occurs elsewhere.

Count me among those who are mystified by the last two sentences. Do you have even a shred of evidence for this assertion? Does anyone pronounce the last syllable of “beggar,” “author,” and “baker” differently? And if British English is so influential in the States, why are formerly non-rhotic varities of American English becoming more rhotic?
http://twitter.com/lynneguist Lynne Murphy

I blogged about this at Separated by a Common Language in 2007, and given what I found then, I think you may be a bit influenced by your location in the US. Searching university sites in various parts of the US and the UK, I found that all had some preference for ‘advisor’ but that preference was far stronger in the northeastern university than in the midwestern and Texan universities. The Texan rate was 31% ‘adviser’, compared to 36-38% in the two English universities. In case anyone is interested, that post is at: http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/10/agentive-suffixes-er-and-or-and-little.html
http://twitter.com/lynneguist Lynne Murphy

I’m not really sure where the assumption that the -or form ‘sounds British’. First of all, it sounds the same as -er. Secondly, the -er spelling is more common in the UK than in the US. (See link at my last comment.)
dw

In Britain, Defence Secretary Liam Fox was recently forced to resign over a scandal involving his close friend Adam Werritty. One of the sins committed by Werritty was handing out a business card incorrectly claiming to be an “advisor” to Fox. However, British newspapers almost universally reported this card as claiming that he was an “adviser” (even in direct quotation) .

Clearly there is a strong bias against the spelling “advisor” in the British media that compels its avoidance even when directly quoting a source explicitly using that spelling.
tjgrites

This debate occurred as we were forming the National Academic Advising Association in 1977 – 79. As I recall, at the time we were told that the “er” ending was “reserved” for the legal profession. Thus we chose “or” for our By-Laws and subsequent publications, etc. Granted, we were advised by an attorney, but nevertheless that’s how we chose the “or” ending.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=513417754 Sonya Pleasant Spencer

Hmmm…something to ponder
gjabbott

Actors act as do actresses,,, are there any other examples where this indicates gender?

jffoster

I believe you mean “indicates sex”. Waiter ~ waitress, steward ~ stewardess, ….

Actually, what happened here is that the [-er} is the nominal ‘one who verbs’ suffix. That is the default. The form for ‘a female who’ is the {-ess} suffix, added onto the derived form V-er.
The vowel in the {-er} suffix is elipted. So the underlying form of _actress_ is not

*{act + ress} but rather {act + or + ess}.

We see that this the case is because of instances like {steward ~ stewardess} in which the {- ess} ‘female’ (not “feminine gender”) is attached to the original stem of the noun when it is not derived via the {-er} suffix from a verb.