Wordwatch: Precipitous
Here’s an old chestnut — it was noticed and authoritatively corrected a hundred years ago – that I’ve come across rather a lot lately in the prose of respectable writers. Is it taking on a new legitimacy? That’s what can easily happen when an outright mistake is repeated often enough.
But as readers of this column may have noticed I belong to the school of optimists who hope that with a little encouragement good English may prevail. Here are some examples of misuses of precipitous culled from recent news items:
“He has been thoughtful, rather than precipitous, in the proposals he has made.” – Daily Telegraph, July 2005.
“Under the proposed legislation, online providers will risk fines and other sanctions from Ofcom if they don’t remove material but will easily be able avoid punishment for acting precipitously…” – Free Speech Union Newsletter, 13 May 2022.
“German forces were directly impacted by the precipitous American withdrawal from Kabul” – Spectator, September 2021.
No, I’m not going to complain about “impacted” — an Americanism that has only recently (in the last 20 years) evolved from the noun “impact” into a verb, “to impact”, used both transitively (as here) and intransitively and now so common that there’s no use objecting to it. My target today is the old mistake, once universally recognised as a mere slip of the pen, of substituting “precipitous” for “precipitate”.
This mistake is actually a malapropism: a confusion between two words that are rather similar but have different meanings. In this case, their meanings are related, but it’s necessary to be clear how each word should properly be applied. “Precipitous” is clearly connected to the word “precipice” and we all know what that means.
The connotation is with a steep drop or falling away, which is what “precipitous” means. That can’t be what any of these writers intended to suggest. The context, in each case, requires something like “sudden” or “unpremeditated”. The correct word here is “precipitate”, which means just that, but is perhaps more difficult to pin down. For a start, it is not one word but several.
“Precipitate” can be a noun, a verb and an adjective. As a verb, it means “to hasten the occurrence of” something, or “to throw down headlong” (I’m quoting from the Oxford English Reference Dictionary). It also has a quite separate sense as a noun in chemistry and physics, referring to the residue or deposit of a chemical solution, or dust or moisture from the atmosphere.
As an adjective, “precipitate” means “impulsively hasty” (I’m quoting Chambers Dictionary now). This is clearly the sense intended by the writers in my examples above, whether as an adjective or as the related adverb “precipitately”. There is a link, of course, between “precipitate” and “precipitous”, which is why they look similar.
Both come from the late Latin word precipitosus meaning “headlong”. The cipit element contains the reference to “head” (caput in Latin) and “pre”, of course, denotes that the action is prior or preceding. But I hope I’ve explained that they deserve to be respected as words which, in the course of the development of modern English, have acquired separate and precise meanings that we do well to recognise.