by A three-minute-and-a-second-or-two read
Please read. This is of uppermost importance
The other day I was editing a chapter written by a French/Flemish academic who is a non-mother tongue speaker of English. Apart from a few lurking French-English false friends, it read extremely well, given its (predictably) dry academic style. Then I came across ‘Researching…NOUN bla, bla, bla, rather than simply focusing upon its rhetorical representations is, therefore, of uppermost importance’.
of upmost importance
Tiens! thought I. (Well, I didn’t; I’m just being more than usually pretentious. Reading lots of academic writing in the Humanities can make you like that, you know. Be warned!)
When English speakers diverge from the collocation ‘(of) utmost importance’ they usually replace utmost with upmost. I hadn’t come across uppermost in that slot before.
But I can easily see how, if none of the three words is part of your language, uppermost makes sense. It certainly seems to make sense if you consider its dictionary definition: ‘Highest in place, rank, or importance’ as the Online Oxford Dictionary defines it. And if you know the physical meaning (e.g. on the uppermost shelf), it is a mere hop, skip and jump to the metaphor.
It just so happens that uppermost does not generally associate or ‘collocate’ with importance.1
For example, in the Oxford Corpus of Academic English, Journals (June 2015, 1.67 billion words), a search for each of the three adjectives followed by importance retrieves this league table: utmost 1,765, upmost, 27, uppermost 4. Clearly, uppermost is a very distant ‘outrider’.2
The BYU Now Corpus (6 billion words) gives a similar result for the first two: utmost at 6,241 and upmost at 142, but uppermost is even rarer, with a single occurrence.
Could upmost be spreading?
I have long known about ‘upmost importance’; it’s something I must have noted mentally long, long ago. Google Ngrams shows its steady rise since roughly 1930.
But I was a bit surprised to find that upmost limpets itself to other nouns as well.
Looking for example in the Oxford Monitor Corpus (February 2018, about 8 billion words), in addition to the well-ensconced upmost importance, I found upmost respect/integrity/professionalism/dignity:
I can only hope that today’s verdict goes some way to bringing closure to the victim’s family who have behaved with the upmost dignity throughout this very harrowing ordeal.
That is from the BBC News website, repeating, presumably, what someone said, so it might be a transcription glitch. Or it might not.
Those collocations do not appear in the Corpus of Academic English, Journals, which probably reflects the edited nature of the journals, compared to the content of the Monitor Corpus.
Is upmost wrong?
I’d say, rather, that it is, according to current collocational preferences, somewhat anomalous.
However, many people would consider it wrong tout court, that is, with no qualifications, and therefore an editor should probably change it, or, at the least raise the issue with the writer. I would.
Confusing upmost with utmost is hardly surprising given their sound and meaning similarity. It just so happens that from the early eighteenth century onwards, the meaning, as the OED defines it, ‘That is of the greatest or highest degree; of the largest amount, number, etc.’ became largely confined to utmost, rather than upmost or uppermost, s.
However, the eggcorns database labels it as practically ‘mainstream’, while explaining its occurrence: ‘[The constituent “ut”] is liable to reanalysis to something that more transparently expresses superlative meaning, such as up+most (‘uppermost’), which fits with the MORE IS UP-type metaphor. This may also involve anticipatory assimilation to the nasal in “most”.’
(The last part about ‘anticipatory assimilation’ means that what you do with your lips and mouth when you pronounce p in upmost is closer to how you produce the m of most than the t of utmost is and that therefore, without consciously deciding, it is easier to prepare for the m by producing a sound that is similar in some feature. Both p and m are what is known as ‘bilabial’, meaning your lips meet to produce them. Try saying um as if you were hesitating and note what your lips are doing.)
Conclusion
Collocation is such a tricky part of language; it is what invariably distinguishes the ‘native’ speaker from second-language speakers (like our professor at the start) no matter how proficient they might be.
It is also often unpredictable. Why do you make a mistake rather than do one?
For example, if you repay a debt, it seems kind of obvious and logical that the words ‘go together’, that repay is the right word to go with debt, given the meaning of each.
But if you honour a debt, or a cheque, that is, to my mind a rather different order of language combination (though, admittedly, one that is shared by French, Italian, and German, but not Spanish). And you cannot dishonour a cheque.
Moreover, like everything in language, collocational conventions change over time.
Which gives me a pretext for one of my favourite quotes, from that granddaddy of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure:
‘Le temps change toute chose : il n’y aucune raison pour que la langue échappe à cette loi universelle.’
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
1 What it does, of course, often collocate with is mind and related words (e.g. As Europe seeks to increase pressure on Moscow over its seizure of the Crimea region from Ukraine, making Moscow pay an economic price is uppermost in leaders’ minds).
In its original, literal, physical meaning, uppermost often goes with layers, reaches, tiers, floors, and the like: Ms. Langley’s ascent represents a slight evolution in how women have navigated moviedom’s uppermost ranks.
2 Outrider – not to be confused with the popular series Outlander – is a modish cliché I’ve discovered is popular in Academe. It means something like an exception, a solitary or unorthodox case.
Jeremy Butterfield Editorial 
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