10

Something that's always bothered me is that the word "transversal" is very commonly used as an adjective, but my understanding is that "transverse" is the correct adjective, and that "transversal" is a noun which means "an object which is transverse [to a given object]." So for example you would say "transverse intersection" and "pick a transversal for the line."

However, I could be wrong. I'd like people to answer with their opinion on which is the correct word for the adjective. I'm making this a community wiki since it's too soft to gain reputation over.

Jim Conant
  • 4,838
  • 3
    I've been reading some physics recently, and it puts me in mind of my favorite Grand Unified Theory: at high energy scales, my theory predicts, nouns and verbs and adjectives all become the same thing. :) – Theo Johnson-Freyd Jul 13 '11 at 17:32
  • 7
    Theo, I see that you enjoy the quarks of language as much as I do. – Tom Goodwillie Jul 13 '11 at 17:41
  • 3
    @Theo: Any noun can be verbed. – Andreas Blass Jul 13 '11 at 18:28
  • FWIW: I just checked in the Oxford American Dictionary and it lists transversal both as an adjective and as a noun with derivatives transervality and transversally. – Theo Buehler Jul 14 '11 at 02:26
  • A verb is just a noun smeared through time. – Spice the Bird Jul 14 '11 at 04:21
  • I don't know how relevant it is, but in French, both "transverse" and "transversal" are adjectives. The latter one has been nominalised in both the mathematical and the everyday languages ("la transversale" = "la barre transversale" being the crossbar of the soccer goal). I suspect some kind of contamination between French and English on that matter... – Maxime Bourrigan Jul 14 '11 at 07:50

1 Answers1

19

"Transversal" is a good old geometry word, a noun, as you say. It goes way back to long before anybody was thinking of transversality in the modern sense.

It grates on me to hear it used as an adjective, and this owes something to the fact that in my impressionable youth I saw one of the chapter-heading quotations in Hirsch's graduate text on differential topology: From Whitehead, "'Transversal' is a noun. The adjective is 'transverse'". No doubt this also had an impact on others who (like me) tend to be fussy about language.

On the other hand, language does drift along, and there's no stopping it, and generally no harm is done. By the time you perceive a serious need to tell the world that some usage is wrong, a case can always be made that it is no longer wrong.

In the case at hand it's understandable that "transversal" has come to be used an adjective; after all, "-al" looks like an adjective ending. (But there are words in English where people have been fooled by that, changing the language. "Bridal" is an example.)

By the way, if we were going to be sticklers on this point, mightn't we want to go back and change "transversality" to "transversity"?

Tom Goodwillie
  • 54,421
  • "Reversal" is another noun with an "al" ending. – Jim Conant Jul 13 '11 at 17:18
  • 2
    How about "commutative" versus "commuting" diagram? – John Klein Jul 13 '11 at 17:52
  • 3
    How about "homotopic" versus "homotopy equivalent" (or "homotopy-equivalent") for a relation between two spaces? – Tom Goodwillie Jul 13 '11 at 18:21
  • That one also annoys me. – Jim Conant Jul 13 '11 at 18:48
  • How about homotopical! – Tom Mrowka Jul 14 '11 at 07:45
  • 1
    I suppose the correct use is that homotopical::homotopic = historical::historic.

    Historic things live inside history, historical things live outside history and deal with it. Homotopic things (like pairs of maps) are related by homotopy, homotopical things (like topologists, conferences, and certain areas of mathematics) deal with it.

     – James Cranch Jul 14 '11 at 07:59
  • That seems to be roughly how the words have come to be used. But most -ical adjectives related to branches of learning do not have the luxury of an -ic adjective to divide up the work with. I can think of one case (geographic/geographical) where there are two words but they seem perfectly synonymous. And note that even if you do have both kind of adjective, they will collapse into one adverb (homotopically). – Tom Goodwillie Jul 14 '11 at 11:29
  • I'm not sure I entirely agree about "historical", either. It's true that we talk about historical investigation and writing and associations, but of historic events; but we also talk about historical events, with a different sense. – Tom Goodwillie Jul 14 '11 at 11:33
  • How about "two complex-analytic spaces are holomorphic if there is an invertible holomorphism between them"? – Allen Knutson Jul 20 '11 at 18:17
  • Do people really say that? I know they use "birational" like that (a map can be called birational, and when it is then the two varieties involved are also said to be birational), but that's not bad because a map is not called birational unless it has (in the appropriate sense) and inverse. – Tom Goodwillie Jul 20 '11 at 19:14
  • Okay, so I've figured out how to rationalize "transversal" as both noun and adjective. "Universal" is a word with same property. And, to turn things on their head, "Universe" is a noun. – Jim Conant Aug 16 '11 at 21:42