Wordwatch: Masterful

“Hals’s imposing, three-quarter-length portrait of an unidentified man … is masterful in its apparent simplicity…”- exhibition catalogue, the Wallace Collection Autumn 2021.

“It was once joked about the masterful TV comedy Seinfeld that it was “a story about nothing”.’ – review, The Critic, November 2021.

“Masterful” Sunday Times’: blurb on the cover of Robert Harris’s novel Imperium (2006).

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “masterful” as “accustomed to insist on having one’s own way”, “self-willed or domineering.” “Masterly” can be used to mean something similar, but can also mean “skilfully exercised or performed,” and that is clearly the sense that’s intended in the cases I’ve just cited.

Arnold Bennett, who was a finer practitioner of the English language than he’s usually given credit for, knew the two words had different meanings: “I read a quarter of the book [Frank Harris’s “The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story“] since dinner.  … The thing is masterful and masterly” – Bennett, Journal, 5 October 1909.

In all the examples I cited at the start, “masterful” should be “masterly”: the distinction between these two words seems almost to have been lost. “Masterly” suggests mastery of the artist’s or writer’s art, not an ability to command or control.

The use of “masterful” in a wrong sense, often by experienced writers, has become so frequent now that I fear “masterly” will be eclipsed completely. Simon Heffer, in his useful book Strictly English, suggests that the muddle is owing to “masterly” looking like an adverb since it has the suffix “-ly.” That may well explain some of the confusion, though I wouldn’t expect the authors I’ve quoted to be frightened by an adjective disguised as an adverb. 

But as my examples show, the problem lies rather with writers being distracted by the “master-” element in “masterful” and ignoring the significance of “-ful.” When an error like this becomes common, a valuable word disappears from our vocabulary. This often means that a fine distinction of sense is blurred, and our ability to say precisely what we mean is blunted. 

While I’m on the subject, let me take another common confusion: “purposely” and “purposefully.” These are two more very similar words differentiated by the suffix “-ful.”  And again, one is being steadily eclipsed by the other: we find “purposely” more and more often giving way to “purposefully.”

They are quite distinct in meaning, but because there is an overlap of sense, and because they look and sound similar they are beginning to be muddled, as in this example: “… the relatively short nave [of St Anne’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Leeds] is purposefully high and wide to counteract this …” Church Building, March/April 2007.

“Purposely” is what is meant. Another specimen: “By increasingly using hybrid instruments to purposefully blur the borders between war and peace, Russia is creating uncertainty about its intentions” – Federal Ministry of Defence, Berlin, White Paper, 2016, quoted (translated?) by John Kampfner in his book Why the Germans do it Better, 2020.

“Purposely” means “on purpose”; “purposefully” means “with a distinct intention”, as Chambers puts it: “directed towards a purpose.”  I guess the reason for this shift is that “purposefully” has more syllables and so sounds more impressive, more attuned to the seriousness of what the writer is saying. 

I also guess that these particular writers had no such thought in their heads. It was an unconscious, instinctive choice of the more apparently “meaningful” word. It was nonetheless a mistake.