dialog / dialogue

n. A conversation or other form of discourse between two or more individuals.

Conor brought this up, and when I looked into it I was too entranced to leave it as a mere comment. His post was to a great degree about the rebirth of dialog[ue] as a verb, which hearkens back to Shakespeare but hasn’t seen any real use in that way until politicians and businessmen, with their penchant for superfluity, occasional fatuity, resurrected it. My initial twinge of anal-retentive horror at misuse aside, I am genuinely glad for the reintroduction of the form, though I balk at the fact that we’re left to context from which to derive its part of speech.

But all this is neither here nor there. What inspired my curiosity was the various incarnations of the -log[ue] suffix in the English language, and why it’s inconsistently used.

As Conor so deftly points out, dialog[ue] has nothing to do with the prefix di- meaning two; it’s dia-, which means “across,” and legein, meaning “to speak” (Etymology Dictionary). The confusion here comes on multiple levels: as near as I can tell given my limited understanding of Greek, legein (or perhaps lego) is the infinitive “to speak,” but its present progressive (or whatever Greek equivalent) is -logos (λόγος), which is also the root for the many nouns related to words: speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, and reason.

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