海角大神

Out of the way, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Here comes the Big Data tsunami of the Panama Papers!

The leak 鈥� or hack 鈥� of 11.5 million documents is reckoned to be the largest ever. Others can sort out the legal and political implications. What I noticed first was that everyone is calling them the Panama Papers, not the Panamanian papers.

鈥淎h, c鈥檓on,鈥� you may respond. 鈥淣obody would say 鈥楶anamanian Papers.鈥欌�娾�娾�娾�� My point exactly: We鈥檙e losing our adjectival inflections, or adjectival suffixes 鈥� the endings that turn nouns into adjectives.

In the 1870s, France and Prussia, the latter not yet unified into Germany, fought a conflict that went into the history books as the Franco-Prussian War. If it were fought today, it would likely be headlined as the France-Prussia War.

Panama Papers may have caught on so quickly by analogy with the famous New York Times leak of 1971. When a Boston radio host recently misspoke and referred to this record leak as 鈥渢he Pentagon Papers,鈥� anyone could understand the slip.聽

Not even a grammar nerd like me would have called them the Pentagonal Papers. They were from the Pentagon; they weren鈥檛 themselves five-sided. (The common American pronunciation of this polygon sounds like the past participle of an imaginary verb, Pentago: 鈥淲here did half a trillion dollars of the federal budget go?鈥� 鈥淚t鈥檚 all Pentagon.鈥� But I digress.)

Mossack Fonseca, the center of the scandal, is sometimes called a 鈥淧anamanian鈥� law firm by news organizations outside the United States, but also The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Voice of America. Other sources, though, such as USA Today and the Monitor鈥檚 own editorial page, are going simply with 鈥淧anama鈥� law firm.

Recently I was to introduce a speaker at a professional gathering. Reviewing her r茅sum茅 with her, I noted that one of her fields of expertise was 鈥渙rganization development.鈥� Hmm, I asked, 鈥渙rganization鈥� and not 鈥渙rganizational鈥�? (A generational thing? A couple of friends of mine in this field refer to themselves as 鈥渙rganizational development psychologists.鈥� Some quick mental math suggested they are old enough to be, well, her uncles.)

The woman responded that the distinction is an issue in the field but opted firmly for 鈥渙rganization development.鈥�

鈥淥rganization鈥� in this usage is an attributive noun 鈥� a noun used as an adjective. The decision whether to use an attributive noun or an adjective helps capture the distinction between, say, a newspaper鈥檚 Canada correspondent, as I was for a few years when I reported on Canada, and its Canadian correspondent, which I could never be because I鈥檓 an American.

I see a movement toward attributive nouns even when a straight-up adjective seems in order, though. I see 鈥減olitics editor鈥� instead of 鈥減olitical editor鈥� and 鈥減olitics professor鈥� rather than 鈥減olitical scientist.鈥� Maybe people think a 鈥減olitical scientist鈥� is a biologist who makes nice with the dean to get more research funding?