A Rabble Of Worrying Freebutters
Yesterday I caught myself employing usage I recall first hearing on cable news. A lot of expressions from mainstream or social media are fun, like shared jokes. The trick is knowing when to drop the joke. “WTF,” “fail,” “not so much”—aren’t they all getting to be like Top 40 hits you’ve heard one too many times?
But some usage sounds wrong from the start, and for me this was one of those cases—“concerning” as a synonym for “worrying” or “worrisome,” as in:
I find Johnny’s meth use concerning.
Gah, nails down a chalkboard, right? But is it incorrect, or am I simply unaccustomed to it?According to Patricia T. O’Conner (WNYC’s grammar maven and author of Woe Is I and Words Fail Me):
it’s standard English to use [“worrying” and “alarming”] as adjectives, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. For example, “We’re having an alarming week on Wall Street.”
But it’s not considered standard to use “concerning” that way, at least not in modern times. In the past, though, “concerning” was indeed used as a participial adjective, according to the OED.
The dictionary has a few citations for this usage, dating from 1649 to 1834, including this one from Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1741): “I cannot bear anything that is the least concerning to you.”
Richardson seems to have had a thing about using “concerning” as an adjective. In The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1781), he describes Lady L. as “speaking for her sister on this concerning subject.”
Even there, to my ear, “concerning” clunks down like the big words my students misuse in attempts at formality through higher syllable count.
Maybe “concerning” grates on my ear so because it’s more commonly used as a participle in situations where “worrying” or “alarming” could not be substituted:
The dealer had little to say concerning Johnny’s meth use
Or maybe it’s because while “worry” and “concern” (as verbs) are synonyms, they’re not exactly parallel. We say:
I worry about global warming
but
I’m concerned about global warming
So we’re used to hearing them slightly differently. Yes, we could say, “global warming concerns me,” or “global warming worries me,” but both of those usages are slightly off, attributing the action to global warming when you, the object of the sentences, are doing the worrying and being concerned. Global warming doesn’t worry you in the same way it affects you.
One of Patricia T.’s readers feels the same way about “worrying” as I do about “concerning,” preferring “worrisome.” According to the OED, “worrying” is the older term, first recorded in 1610, when it meant “given to harrying or raiding,” as in:
“A greater rabble of worrying freebutters.”
Ar, me hearties. So much for hard and fast rules for the English language. A rabble of worrying freebutters, we.
