Autumn has arrived and the battle against catching colds has officially begun. The recent weather with its cold winds and heavy rain showers makes it even more difficult to fight off colds. Vitamins and staying dry seem to be the only defense mechanisms which should guarantee getting through autumn and winter without sneezing and coughing. What should do the trick is to eat healthy food and lead a healthy lifestyle. (Check out Ana’s suggestions on
http://bananasanas.wordpress.com/
) But wait a minute. Healthy? Or is it healthful?
While browsing the web for current usage problems, I came across various blog entries and articles about the difference between healthy and healthful. To be completely honest, I am not even sure whether I have ever used the word healthful before, but apparently I have been continuously misusing healthy according to prescriptivists’ views.
The Merriam Webster Dictionary explains the difference.
If something is beneficial for your health, it is healthful. Thus, it would mean that you are eating healthful, rather than healthy food.
Healthy on the other hand means that something or someone is enjoying good health. So unless your vegetables have not led a healthful lifestyle, they cannot be considered healthy. Do you get the difference?
From a historical perspective, the OED shows that healthful was used before healthy, but its use became already rare in the 16th century. Interestingly, the use of healthy in the sense of healthful has been accepted in the past. Even the Merriam Webster Dictionary states that healthful and healthy can be used synonymously. So why then revive the strict distinction between healthy and healthful? It is time for a healthy or healthful debate.
This is a very interesting entry and I came across this ‘problem’ while doing research on Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage. In the preface to his second edition, entitled “Making Peace in the Language Wars” (link to article below), Garner used ‘healthful’ in a sentence, “Likewise, we say apples are not healthful because wise people eat them, but because of their observable effects on the human body” (page 232). I would have expected to read “healthy”, and I don’t think I have ever used the word “healthful”. Nonetheless, I came upon the distinction in meaning by looking up the words in a dictionary. They currently appear to be synonymous in the sense of “conducive to good health”, and I have always used “healthy” in that context. I think “healthful” is still a good and useful word (it seems a bit old-fashioned to me, however), perhaps it is more unequivocal.
Garner wrote in his usage guide, “Strictly speaking, healthy refers to a person (or personified thing) in good health, healthful to whatever promotes good health. […] In fact, though, many writers use healthy when they mean healthful, and healthy threatens to edge out its sibling. Such a development would be unhealthful, since it would lead to a less healthy state of the language” (page 416, 3rd edition 2009).
However, if usage guide writers like Garner maintain that there is a difference in meaning between the two words and that they should not be confused, then I think they’re fighting a losing battle.
Moreover, if you use the Corpus of Historical American English or the Corpus of Contemporary American English to perform a collocate search of “healthful/healthy” + “food” (i.e., “food that is healthful/healthy, or simply “healthful/healthy food”), it becomes clear that in American English “healthy” is much more common.
Incidentally, and I have to disappoint Garner again here, apples are not as healthy as we would like to believe.
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=18246552 – COCA (healthy + food)
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=18246544 – COCA (healthful + food)
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/?c=coha&q=18246491 – COHA (healthy + food)
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/?c=coha&q=18246455 – COHA (healthful + food)
http://www.greenbag.org/v7n3/v7n3_article_garner.pdf – preface to Garner’s second edition of Modern American Usage republished in The Green Bag.
I agree with you completely. Even though the two words are used as synonyms, healthy is clearly the more frequent variant. Even though the distinction made between healthy and healthful seems to be logical and to makes perfect sense, actual usage tells a different story. To be completely honest, I am not even sure whether people know about the difference. It could well be that some editors or proofreaders simply feel the need for reviving this distinction to make language more complex or to sound more sophisticated. http://www.grammarunderground.com/healthy-vs-healthful.html