A Matter of Factors

I've often written that it is safer not to use 'long' or 'exotic' words unless you're really sure what they mean. Here's an example of a phrase that is neither long nor exotic, but still easily misused because the original context is overlooked.

The 'feel-good factor'. This term is a clever, fairly recent invention, intended to suggest an element in one's experience (such perhaps as sunny weather, good company, being flattered, or pride in one's nationality) that makes one feel good. A factor is by definition an element that affects an outcome. As a mathematical concept, it is a number that by multiplying or dividing (or being added or subtracted or whatever), changes the arithmetical outcome. By extension, it can be something else that affects an outcome (eg the weather, or someone's skill, or a windfall, or an accident, or sheer luck - good or bad).

So to write (as a contributor to a periodical recently did) "You won't get the buzz of applause . . . but you'll get a nice feel-good factor" shows that the author has misunderstood the term.. What he meant was just "you'll feel good". What originated as a piece of imaginative word-play (I wonder who coined the happy phrase ?) has now become a cliché. But factors are not feelings: you don't 'get'* them.

* Having written which, I expect to receive complaints: of course, someone will respond, you can get sunny weather, or you can get mumps: surely they can be factors that affect your life ? True: but I still insist that you cannot correctly talk or write of 'getting a factor'.

" Got any good factors lately ?"

A Matter of Factors

Pluralising the already plural

We all know the English word incident, and we all know (more or less) what it means. I say 'more or less', because a lot of us probably imagine that it means an accident, a mishap or a misdemeanour of some kind.

Actually it just means a 'happening', something that 'befalls', and is derived from the Latin word cado meaning to fall. (There was a literal 'incident' on a slippery road up which I was walking on the way to a party at Christmas. I never reached the party, but slunk home with a couple of bruises.) But you can have good incidents too, like finding a pound coin on a path in the park, or (as we did yesterday) seeing a barn owl from the living room window.

But another word from the same root is 'incidence' - signifying the frequency with which something happens -the incidence of seeing barn owls may be perhaps ten times a year in these parts, and of finding one-pound coins a great deal less, and accidentally falling over, somewhere in between.

But every now and again on telly you hear someone use the non-term 'incidences'. Nearly always they mean the (plural) 'incidents', but because they have heard the (singular) word 'incidence', they assume it means a happening, and pluralise it as 'incidences'.

Incidentally, 'incidentally' is an adverb based on the word 'incidence' - reminding us that not only bad things befall us. "Incidentally, you may like to know that I want to share my Lottery winnings with you."

Pluralising the already plural