May 13, 1997

scan

Your excellent write-up on peruse brought to mind another word: "scan." The Random House Webster's College Dictionary says "scan" can mean either "scrutinize" or "glance at"--which are opposite meanings! How did those meanings develop, and which one is more common today?

Very good question, which I couldn't address at peruse. Let us look at this interesting note on peruse by Frank Vizetelly, the conservative pronunciation expert who was apparently the first person to actively object to the 'read casually' sense of peruse that I discussed last week:

Peruse should not be used when the simple read is meant. The former implies to read with care and attention and is almost synonymous with scan, which is to examine with critical care and in detail.

Scan first appears in English in the late fourteenth century, where it meant 'to analyze (verse) for its prosodic or metrical structure', a sense that is still current. It is a borrowing from Latin, where it literally meant 'to climb'.

The sense 'to examine closely' is found by the mid sixteenth century, and was for a long time the main sense (when, of course, it can be discerned from the sense 'to read or examine'): "Aloof with hermit-eye I scan /The present works of present man" (Coleridge, "Ode to Tranquility"); [after a long discussion of God] "It is not impious thus to scan the attributes of the Almighty" (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman); "Man scans with scrupulous care, the character and pedigree of his horses" (Darwin, The Descent of Man); "But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours" (Melville, Moby-Dick).

The development of the sense 'to read hastily; glance at' is hard to pinpoint but had certainly occurred by the 1920s.

What is notable about this sense is not its existence--after all, words develop contradictory senses all the time, peruse being a case in point--but that hardly anyone cares about it. A few usage critics make negative comments about it, but most simply point it out. The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, which blasted the "loose" use of peruse, merely cautions against the confusion of the contradictory senses of scan. While 66% of the 1993 American Heritage usage panel disapproved of the 'read casually' sense of peruse, in 1969 (the last time they bothered asking), a whopping 85% thought that this sense of scan was fine, at least in informal use.

Both peruse and scan once meant 'to read carefully' and then developed a sense 'to read casually', but in one case the change was harshly criticized while in the other it passed largely unscathed. This demonstrates that questions of usage are very complicated, and can rarely be answered by simple appeals to the history of a word. As for scan, it is unlikely that you will be criticized for either sense, but be sure to make clear through the context what sense you are using.