by
Howard Richler
Prosecutors had been
seeking a five-year prison sentence but the decision effectively
lifts the threat of any sanction
against the 75-year old media tycoon{Silvio Berlusconi}.
National Post-Feb
25, 2012
“{The
company Lavalin} did and would not sanction
an
attempt at an extraction mission or any other action that would
contravene local or international laws or regulations,” Ms. Quinton
said in an email. National Post-
Feb11, 2
In the first quote the
word sanction is used to mean a penalty but two weeks earlier the
word means authorize. How can the National
Post copy editors sanction such confusion? I
mean is sanction good or bad?
The easy answer is that
sanction when used as verb usually means “permit” but when used
as a noun it invariably means a “penalty.” Complicating matters
even further, dictionaries are at odds on this issue. For example,
Merriam Webster,
Cambridge , and Encarta
only recognize an approving sense for the verb whereas, the OED,
Canadian Oxford, and
American Heritage
allow that it can denote a punitive sense. Since using the word in
this manner might be misunderstood, it might be wise to say “issue
sanctions against” to eliminate the possiblity of
non-comprehension.
The OED
explains how the dichotomy in meanings
occured. “Sanction” first surfaces in English as a noun in the
1570s and the OED
relates that the word derives from the Latin
sanctio, “decree” where it referred to
the “action of ordaining as inviolable under a penalty.” Thus
sanctions most often refer to measures taken by authorities to
discourage courses of actions that are not approved of by
muckety-mucks. Perhaps because it is more efficacious to dissuade
with a stick than to persuade with a carrot, the punitive sense of
the noun took hold. Interestingly,when used in the singular, as in
“UN sanction or “Church sanction” often the word is used to
mean approbation.
We first see the verb
sense of sanction in the 1770s and consistently it has been used in
the original sense of endorsement or recognition by an authoritative
decree. This is the intended meaning in Edmund Burke's
1791
An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs :
“Tests against old principles, sanctioned by the law.” The
“penalize” sense of the verb sanction seems to have arisen in
the middle of the 20th century, and although this usage is not
inherently illogical, I would advise against employing it unless the
context makes your intention perfectly clear. Hence in 2010 when
Sarah Palin told right-wing political commentator Glenn Beck “We're
not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out
with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea
is going to do,” we assume because of her politics that she didn't
have the approval sense of the verb sanction in mind. (However, I
stand to be refudiated, on this point.)
Notwithstanding the above,
in the last five years I've noticed an increasing use of the verb
sanction to mean “penalize.” This is no doubt caused because
the punitive sense of sanction to refer to actions taken by a
nation or an alliance of nations against another as a coercive
measure to enforce a violated law or treaty is the most common
usage. In the process of back-formation this sense gets extended to
the verbal sphere. Though this use of the noun only developed in
the 20th century,
I predict this usage will eventually represent the dominant verbal
sense and one day sanction the noun and sanction the verb will live
in harmony.
Howard Richler's next book
From Gay (Happy) to Gay (Homosexual) and other mysteriuos semantic
shifts will be published by Ronsdale Press in
2013.
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