“Alone of the four cardinal virtues,” writes Christopher Ricks in Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Penguin, 2003), “fortitude does not go in for an adjective or an adverb. Temperance is happy to grant us temperate and temperately; prudence, prudent and prudently; justice, just and justly. But fortitude declines to allow fortitudinous and fortitudinously.” Ricks being Ricks, though, he includes a note at the bottom of the page: “The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] records that Fielding and Gibbon in the eighteenth century tried ‘fortitudinous.’ But the language wasn’t having it.”
I’m not sure whether this is an argument for prescriptivism or descriptivism. Or an argument at all. But it’s interesting that my dictionary, published three years earlier, lists fortitudinous as the adjective form of fortitude.
So what gives? Over at the Oxford Dictionaries blog, Lynne Murphy writes that such discrepancies might have more to do with American and British (Ricks is a Brit) attitudes toward dictionaries than the dictionaries themselves. Even the way they’re marketed is completely different:
“One big general-purpose British dictionary’s cover tells us it is ‘The Language Lover’s Dictionary.’ Another is ‘The unrivalled dictionary for word lovers.’
“Now compare some hefty American dictionaries, whose covers advertise ‘expert guidance on correct usage’ and ‘The Clearest Advice on Avoiding Offensive Language; The Best Guidance on Grammar and Usage.'”
I think Murphy has a point. The American in me wants an authoritative answer; the Brit in me finds words like fortitudinous inherently unlovable. “The language wasn’t having it,” says Ricks. In this case, the language was right—and the dictionary is wrong.
