There’s an old controversy over the word “momentarily” or, more precisely, over one of its most familiar usages. The word really means “for a moment,” but on airplanes, it’s used to mean “in a moment” or “soon.” This war has been going on for a long time. In a 2007 New York Times piece by Dick Cavett, we read: “When the flight attendant would say, ‘We will be landing in Chicago momentarily,’ I used to enjoy replying, ‘Will there be time to get off?’ But I see the forces of darkness have prevailed, and this and many wrong uses are now deemed acceptable by the alleged guardians of our language, the too-quickly supine dictionary makers. Are they afraid of being judged ‘not with it’? What ever happened to, ‘Everybody does it don’t make it right’?”
The intelligent objection to “we will be landing momentarily” is just that “momentary” means “for a moment,” not “in a moment,” so the adverb “momentarily” should correspond with that meaning: Landing momentarily should mean landing for a quick second. English will never be a clean, logical system, but it’s not unreasonable to wish for some semblance of order — or, at least, for things to be intuitive. Adding “ly” should make any word into an adverb form of itself, not completely change its meaning. Nonetheless, the Penn linguist Mark Liberman, on his blog Language Log, huffed that Cavett was providing “an especially clear example of the sentiment that usage, no matter how widespread and how authoritative, doesn’t outweigh the peever’s sense that a certain usage is somehow morally wrong.” Liberman further noted, imagining this to be a knockdown argument, that one can find “momentarily” used to mean “soon” going as far back as 1869.
Cavett is ultimately in the right, but neither he nor Liberman quite gets to the heart of the matter. The two arguments here, about present usage and past tradition of usage, are both beside the point of why using “momentarily” to mean “soon” is wrongful. A word can become legitimate just by being used, only not a word that makes no sense grammatically as it relates to other words. And just because a word has a history doesn’t make it a good idea to use it. A book I read recently used the mid-1800s word “absquatulate,” meaning “leave abruptly.” It may have tradition on its side, but people with a good ear should steer clear. Similarly, if people started saying “see you soonly” to me, I wouldn’t ask a linguist how common the usage had become or how old it is. I would just explain to people that “soon” is already an adverb.
Perhaps soon we will be hearing the cabin crew get on the PA system and inform us that we will be landing transitorily. “Transitory,” after all, is properly closer to “momentary” than flight attendants think. And “transitory” is enjoying a renaissance, a “blip” of surging usage, per Bloomberg’s Stephen L. Carter.
Yet, contra what linguists would predict, all this usage is draining the term of all meaning, not adding new meaning. That’s because the users are journalists who spent last month merely echoing the statements of politicians about “transitory inflation” that are now proving false. As I wrote about the overuse of applying the descriptor “decent” to candidate Joe Biden after the Democratic National Convention, it is inappropriate for writers to let specific words be dictated to them by officials in this way. A momentary or transitory spike in the prevalence of “transitory” following its use by the White House or the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England is, however, a useful philological reminder that many journalists don’t speak truth to power. They quote power verbatim.
