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Word of the week—Stadia versus stadiums
Stadia versus stadiums
This week more FIFA executives are denying corruption charges; the awarding of the 2022 FIFA Soccer World Cup to Qatar (which Australia had tried to bid for) is again being questioned; and Sepp Blatter (pictured), the man in charge, was re-elected unopposed as FIFA president.
But this all obscures another corruption, a corruption of our language. The crime is an example of what Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, refers to as didacticism, or sometimes, as pride of knowledge. It occurred during the unsuccessful Australian bid for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup of six months ago: the bid spokespeople and the press all used stadia as the plural of stadium.
In an earlier post on my website I referred to my abhorrence (perhaps even a little didactically) of the use of fora as the plural of forum. Using stadia instead of stadiums is almost as bad. Although most dictionaries list the plural of stadium as stadiums or stadia it is time to eliminate the pompous use of stadia. There are good reasons to do so. Stadium has a different story to flora but the story provides us with very good reasons to pluralise it as stadiums rather than the pseudo-Latin stadia.
Origins of stadium
In classical Latin a stadium is a length. It is derived from the ancient Greek, stadion (anglicised as stade), a length of 600 feet, or approximately 180 metres. It did not come directly into English because early English used a similar measure, furlongs. Furlongs was used to translate Biblical references to stadia, but they are otherwise unconnected. Furlong derives from the Old English words furh (furrow) and lang (long) and originally referred to the length of a ploughed furrow in medieval strip farming (an eighth of a mile or 201 metres).
The stadion was the length of a running track in Greece. The length of the stadion was 176 metres. The first Olympic Games consisted of only one race run over the stadion at Olympia. Spectators were seated on tiered seats around the track, and hence the structure for watching a running race became known as a stadion or stadium.
Stadium, when first imported into English in about 1600, meant a running track. Its meaning was broadened in the early 19th century into its modern usage meaning large oval structures with tiers of seats for viewing a sporting event.
Amphitheatres, arenas and circuses
What we in modern English refer to as stadiums were not referred to as stadiums (or indeed, stadia) by the Romans. The main sporting events that the Romans attended were battle recreations, gladiatorial combats, and chariot and horse races. The venues they built for these events were not called stadiums but were variously amphitheatres, arenas or circuses (venue is from Latin venire meaning to come).
The most famous Roman sporting venue was the Flavian Amphitheatre, more commonly known as the Colosseum in Rome. It staged many events involving gladiators, wild animals, hunts, and battles. Amphitheatre derives from the structure being imagined as two theatres built facing each other, from the Greek amphi-, on both sides and théātron, for theatre (meaning place for viewing).
Arena, from the Latin, harena, is a place of combat and is thought to have come from Etruscan for sand or sandy place. The central stages of arenas were filled with sand to soak up the blood from the sports played there. (Paris has the Arènes de Lutèce, the Roman arena that now hosts schoolboys playing soccer and old men playing pétanque but once hosted gladiators).
The Latin circus, simply meant ring, from Greek, kirkos for circle. The Romans used circus for circular arenas for performances and contests and also for the oval courses for horse racing (especially the Circus Maximus in Rome).
False didacticism
So what does all this mean? It means that the word stadium was used by the Romans and Greeks to describe a place to watch a footrace, the plural being stadia. The places the Romans watched big sporting events were amphitheatres, arenas or circuses. Stadium, therefore, is a word that has was adopted into English only recently to describe large sporting venues and should be treated as an English word with plural, stadiums.
The Romans would not have called a venue for a football game a stadium, it would have been an arena, an ampitheatre and perhaps even a circus but not a stadium. So using stadia to describe a collection of soccer venues cannot be historically nor grammatically justified. This didacticisim is false.
For more words of the week visit the Madrigal Communications blog
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Comment by Justin Lowe on June 16, 2011 at 10:10
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So how do you stand, Tim, on the concertos v. concerti debate?
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Comment by Adrian Wiggins on June 16, 2011 at 10:20
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Lolz - I'm still torn over octopii or octopodae.
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Comment by Tim Entwisle on June 16, 2011 at 10:50
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Justin, at the risk of being very serious, the music world has adopted Italian as its "standard" nomenclature, so I think using concerti, especially in formal situations, is absolutely correct and neither pompous nor didactic. I am also, as a plebiean, willing to accept concertos because concerto is a naturalised English word. My beef is with the pomposity of using pseudo-Latin endings not with sharing English with Latin/Italian endings.
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Adrian, Octopuses are Greek and that is a different story all together. According to the Oxford Dictionary:
The standard plural in English of octopus is octopuses. However , the word octopus comes from Greek and the Greek plural form octopodes is still occasionally used . The plural form octopi, formed according to rules for some Latin plurals, is incorrect!
I wish I could say I knew that beforehand! I am definitely sticking to octopuses—you'd be a sucker not to.
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Then someone should inform Margaret "Throbbas" Throsby, et al. Damian Beaumont seems to be the only classical music announcer who gets it right.
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Justin, I have been mulling over your comment about Ms Throsby. How does she deal with concerto grosso when the plural is concerti grossi? Concertos grossos really isn't going to work. Tim
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To be honest, Tim, I switch off when "Throbbas" comes on.
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Comment by Jonathan Shaw on June 20, 2011 at 12:46
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Well, I say 'stadiums', but your argument doesn't convince me at all. Just because a word has changed its meaning doesn't mean it changes its behaviour. Rendezvous in English has a (slightly) different meaning from rendezvous in French, but that doesn't make its English plural rendezvouses.
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Jonathan, Thank you for your comment—as you already say 'stadiums' my argument doesn't need to convince you. In response, though, I think a word that changes its meaning in a different language (or indeed keeps its meaning) doesn't bring its own language's conjugations, declensions, plurals etc with it.
Your example is a case in point, the plural of rendezvous in English IS indeed rendezvouses!
However, I think you miss my point or I have failed to clearly spell it out. The use of stadia for the plural of stadium is a back formation by posers trying to impress their listeners (or readers) by referencing Latin. They are seldom Latin scholars but pretentious hacks trying to keep up with the Joneses (or should that be keeping up with the Jonia—I wish I had thought of that to call the blogpost). Common usage is stadiums and there is no reason to think it wrong. To try to re-instate stadia as correct usage has no grounds in English. My blogpost was attempting to suggest that it has no historic merit either.
It is a bit like the split infinitive argument, which tries to apply Latin grammar rules to English, which, as a Germanic language mixed with the Norman French, is not on the whole based on Latin grammar. There is nothing wrong with a split infinitive in English.
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Jonathan, I apologise I need to correct myself. The plural of rendezvous is rendezvous. The verb is rendezvouses!
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