Aghhh! Why don’t people think about what they are saying? I suppose what they mean is "friendly to the environment", in the same way as "user-friendly" means "friendly to the user". So it’s got to be "environment-friendly", surely? "Environmentally friendly" would mean "friendly in an environmental sort of way", whatever that would be!  ::)

You’re absolutely right. I’d never thought about it, even though I’ve written a fair bit on environmental issues.

But the phrase may have won too much acceptance to
be changed. It’s what Fowler called a ‘sturdy indefensible.’

It’s a deeper sickness, though, isn’t it? Environment and environmental have now taken on all sorts of baggage. If you’re sitting in a smoky pub and you announce "I want to preserve the environment", people deduce that you don’t mean your current environment, or indeed any specific environment - in fact, you’re just making a woolly statement of "Green" concern that is so vague as to be information-free. And it’s this environmental concern that is the "environmental way" things can be "environmentally friendly". So the phrase’s construction is acceptable, I think: it just teeters atop a pretty meaningless tower of words.

Grant

So the phrase’s construction is acceptable, I think: it just teeters atop a pretty meaningless tower of words.

But I’m pretty sure that the "-friendly" structure is a borrowing from the German, where you get "umweltfreudlich" (in this instance) and "benutzerfreundlich" (meaning "user-friendly"). In both instances the first part of the compound word is definitely a noun, not an adverb, as is the case with "user-friendly". If anything, I’m arguing for consistency in word-formation.

[quote author=Gillian link=board=grammar;num=1032274943;start=0#3 date=09/18/02 at 04:43:54]If anything, I’m arguing for consistency in word-formation.

OK, sorry. I thought you were saying the construction made no sense.

Grant

Ahh, yes, environment.  You are indeed correct about the baggage.  Part of the issue is that the word has come to be a synonym for "nature" although technically it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing, or at least not from the same perspective.

Nature is a thing or realm in and of itself, not dependent on any relationship to humanity per se.  The term, environment, however, implies a human subjectivity in relationship to the natural world surounding it.  An environment is an environment to or for something else.

I could go on with this.  When I was working on my Ph.D. the focus of my research was on rhetorical constructions of the concept of nature and the environment.

Brad