Q: News articles often say an issue is “on the table,” meaning being considered. But “tabling” the issue means putting it off. Can you shed light on these  opposite meanings?

A: Both meanings of “table” ultimately come from tabula, classical Latin for a board used to write on, play on, hold sacred offerings, and so on.

When the word “table” first appeared in Old English as the noun tabul, the term referred to a tablet used for votive offerings.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Old English translation (circa 900) of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), an eighth-century Latin church history by the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede:

“Hæfdan hio mid him gehalgude fatu, & gehalgadne tabul” (“They had with them consecrated vessels and a consecrated tablet”).

The noun “table” developed many other meanings in Middle English, including a piece of furniture to work or eat at, but we’ll  skip ahead to the early Modern English of the 16th century when it took on a sense in British politics that the OED defines this way:

“The table which stands before the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, on which the mace lies when the Speaker is in the chair, and at which the Clerk of the House and his or her assistants receive motions, questions to ministers, etc., and new members are sworn in. Hence: a similar table in the House of Lords or in other legislatures modelled on the British Parliament.”

The first Oxford citation for this sense is from a book on parliamentary procedure: “There is onely one Clark belonging to this house, his office is to sit next before the Speaker, at a Table vpon which he writeth and layeth his books” (The Order and Vsage of Keeping of the Parlements in England, c. 1572, by John Hooker).

The dictionary says that meaning of the noun “table” led to the use of the verb “table” in the sense of “to lay on the table of a legislative assembly or other deliberative meeting. Now frequently in extended use.” The term means “to present or submit formally for discussion or consideration” in the OED’s earliest example:

“Upon the presenting of a petition thereanent [concerning this], whereof at least a hundred, at several times were tabled: your wisdome remedied the plaintiff” (from Logopandecteision, or An Introduction to the Universal Language, Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 parody about an artificial language).

Oxford says this sense of the verb “table” is “common in English-speaking regions outside the United States.” But in the mid-19th century, the dictionary says, a new sense of the verb originated in the US and is chiefly seen in American English: “to postpone consideration of, esp. indefinitely; to shelve.”

The earliest OED example of the American usage is from 1849, published in Whig Almanac 1850: “Senator Westcott tried to table the bill, but failed: it became law.”

The dictionary doesn’t discuss why the American usage evolved. We think it may have developed from the idea of tabling something for future rather than present consideration.

As it turns out, the expression “on the table” has the same sense in both American and British English: “under consideration or discussion.” We’ll end with the first OED example for the expression:

“The facts are, so to speak, all upon the table, and I will merely touch upon the main heads of my case” (from Dawn, 1884, the first novel by the British writer H. Rider Haggard).

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Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking. Which came first?

A: The expression “make the cut” didn’t originate in either golf or filmmaking. When it first appeared in print, the expression referred to people who didn’t “make the cut” for Christmas bonuses.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the usage as “to succeed in being included in, or admitted to, something; to be good enough for something.” The earliest OED example compares holiday bonuses to profit sharing:

“It wasn’t really profit sharing, I realized, because it didn’t include the publisher’s telephone operator and my own cook. In short, the common man, as usual, didn’t make the cut” (from “Control,” an essay by E. B. White in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1943).

The golf usage appeared a dozen years later. The OED defines it as “to qualify for the last two rounds of a four-round golf tournament, by equaling or bettering the required score.”  The first citation is from a northern California newspaper:

“One local professional did manage to better the 36-hole total of 148 which was necessary to make the cut and qualify for Sunday’s final round over the Pebble Beach course” (Oakland Tribune, Jan. 16, 1955).

The OED says a much earlier use of “cut” in golf referred to “spin imparted on the ball which makes it curve in flight towards the right (or for a left-handed player, the left), esp. to a moderate and controlled degree.” It adds that such spin typically “results in the ball stopping quickly rather than rolling on, esp. in shots to the green.”

In the dictionary’s first citation, the ball stops suddenly on the green: “Almost every professional gets his ball to stop comparatively dead … by means of putting cut upon it” (from Golf, 1890, by Horace G. Hutchinson). The book was part of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, founded by Henry Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort. Badminton was his main country house and the source of the name for the racket sport played with a shuttlecock.

The OED doesn’t have any filmmaking examples of “make the cut,” though we’ve seen it used literally for making “cuts,” or transitions, in a film. A recent example appears in the title of a book on film editing: Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV (2017), by Lori Coleman and Diana Friedberg.

The noun “cut” has been used since the early 20th century to mean “an immediate transition from one shot or scene to the next”—at first in filmmaking and later in television, video games, social media, etc., according to the OED. The dictionary’s first example is from an early guide to film production:

“There is a cut to some other scene and we come back to Smith standing over Brown with a smoking revolver in his hand.” From The Technique of the Photoplay (2nd ed., 1913), by Epes Winthrop Sargent.

The verb “cut” soon came to be used as a command by a director to stop filming. The earliest Oxford citation is from a California newspaper: “Director Smith yelled ‘cut’ ” (Santa Cruz Evening News, Dec. 22, 1915).

As for its early etymology, “cut” is “of uncertain origin,” the OED says, though it was perhaps inherited from prehistoric Germanic or early Scandinavian.

When it first appeared in the late 12th century, “cut” meant “to separate or remove (something) from a main body or larger whole with a knife, axe, or other sharp-edged implement; to lop off.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Layamon’s Brut, a legendary chronicle of Britain composed sometime before 1200. “He cutte his owe þeh … þar-of he makede breade” (“He cut his own thigh … thereof he maketh roast meat”).

In the tale, King Cadwallon and his men are stranded on Guernsey after a shipwreck. The King is starving and says he has a craving for venison. With no deer on the island, his nephew Brian cuts off and roasts a piece of his own flesh. The citation combines passages from two surviving Layamon manuscripts, Caligula (late 13th century) and Otho (early 14th century).

The dictionary also cites a manuscript, written in legal Latin around the same time, in which the verb appears as part of the compound “cutpurse,” a nickname for someone who steals purses by cutting the straps holding them to belts or waistbands:

“Willelmus Cuttepurs qui occidit Willelmum mercatorem de Corbrigg’ postea captus fuit et coram Justic’ ad gaol’ deliberand’ assign’ suspensus fuit. nulla habuit catall’ ” (“William Cutpurse, who killed William the merchant of Corbridge, was later captured and, before the Justices assigned to deliver him to jail, was hanged. He had no chattels”). From a 1292 entry in the Eyre Roll Cumberland (records of traveling courts).

We’ll end with a comment from a former filmmaker about a 2022 post in which we discuss the expression “cut to the chase“:

As someone who used to inhabit cutting rooms, I think there’s another little element to this one. Why ‘cut’? That’s because in the earlier days of filmmaking, in order to edit a film you literally ‘cut’ the piece you wanted out of the main roll with scissors, and then glued those selected scenes together.

Later, ‘splicers’ turned up―clever little guillotine devices that made far more accurate and consistent cuts to be made, and joins to be made with clear specialist tape to create the ‘cutting copy,’ the first edited version of the film.

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Q: Over the last decade I’ve been seeing an uptick in the use of “drop” to mean something new being released, like a podcast episode or music album. Where does this come from?

A: Something must be in the air. Two people have asked us this same question within a week.

The use of “drop” as a verb or noun for the release of new music, software, movies, podcasts, and so on apparently originated in the late 1980s in the world of hip-hop and rap.

Several online standard dictionaries now have entries for “drop” used this way in speech and informal writing.

Merriam-Webster, for example, defines the noun as “something (such as a song) that is released to the public.” And Cambridge says the verb means “to become available for people to buy, listen to, or watch, especially using the internet.”

The two earliest examples in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, are from an interview with Joseph Simmons of the hip-hop trio Run-DMC in the May 1988 issue of the music magazine Spin.

Simmons uses the verb both transitively (with an object) and intransitively (without one) in these two citations: (1) “I think that I should be able to drop records when I want.”  (2) “Maybe after my album drops and I’m back on the road doing what I’m supposed to do in this world, I’ll be happy.”

The OED cites a somewhat similar use of “drop” that appeared a few months later: “to sing or perform rap lyrics or rap music.” The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from an Oct. 10, 1988, article in The Los Angles Times about a performance by the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince:

“The Fresh Prince gave himself and Jazzy Jeff a last-gasp pep talk before performing their current hit, ‘A Nightmare on My Street,’ a parody of the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ teen-age exploitation horror films. ‘If we drop this record (i.e., play this song) and the crowd don’t go wild, I think we pretty much had it, pally wally,’ he said.” The parenthetical explanation is in the original article.

The earliest example we’ve seen for “drop” used more broadly, in the sense of something new being released, is from a holiday shopping article in the Philadelphia Daily News, Sept. 16, 1993:

“New albums drop like leaves in the fall, as the holiday shopping season approaches. CDs and tapes make great Christmas or Hanukkah gifts because they’re (relatively) cheap, you don’t have to worry about anybody’s size.”

As for the early etymology, the Old English noun (dropa) and verb (dropian) ultimately come from the reconstructed prehistoric base dhreu- (to fall, flow, drip, droop), according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

In Old English, the OED says, the noun originally referred to “a small spherical or pear-shaped portion of liquid.” The plural dropan is used in the dictionary’s first citation for the noun:

 “His swat wæs swylce blodes dropan” (“His sweat was like drops of blood”). From Luke in the West Saxon Gospels, dating from the late 900’s.

Oxford defines the original Old English verb as “to fall in drops; to drip or trickle down.” The third-person plural dropiað is used in the dictionary’s first citation:

“Myrre and gutta and cassia dropiað of þinum claðum” (“Myrrh and aloes and cassia droppeth from your garments”). From a late ninth-century prose translation of the Latin Psalms, traditionally attributed to King Alfred.

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Q: How was the definite article that we now see in the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes actually pronounced in Old English and Middle English when it was written with a thorn?

A: The article “the” was originally spelled se in Old English and pronounced like a clipped version of “say” without the glide at the end. That spelling and its variants continued into Middle English.

However, the Old English article was also spelled ðe and þe during much of this period. The Anglo-Saxon runes eth (ð) and thorn (þ) were pronounced “th,” so ðe and þe did indeed sound like our word “the.”

The first example for the article “the” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early ninth-century will in the Kentish dialect of early Old English:

“Æðelnoð se gerefa to Eastorege” (“Æðelnoð the reeve at Eastry”). From “Will of Æðelnoð & Gænburg,” Anglo-Saxon Charters (1956), by Agnes Jane Robertson.

The first example in the OED for the definite article spelled with a “th” sound is from an Old English gloss, or translation, inserted in the 10th century between the lines of Latin in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

The Anglo-Saxon scribe who wrote the gloss translated the Latin “Herodes rex” in Matthew 2:3 with an eth rune, as “Herodes ðe cynig” (“Herod the King”). The Latin itself dates from the eighth century.

The first OED example written with a thorn is from a gloss inserted during the 10th century in the eighth-century Latin of Matthew 2:9 in the Rushworth Gospels.

The scribe translated the Latin “Stella quam uiderant in oriente antecedebat eos” as “þe steorra þe hiae ær gesægon in eastdæle foreeade hię” (“The star that they had seen earlier in the east went before them”).

The first OED example for “ye” used in the sense of “the” appeared in the Middle English of the late 14th century. It’s from a 1389 list of ordinances governing guilds in Norwich, England:

“alle ye bretheren and sisteren” (English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More Than One Hundred Early English Gilds, 1892, by Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith).

Why was the article written as “ye” here, not þe, and how was it pronounced? When the  printing press arrived in England in the 15th century, printers didn’t have metal type for a thorn and substituted the letter “y,” but “ye” was pronounced as “the.” That use of “ye” for “the” probably inspired the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes.

As for the pronoun “ye,” one of four archaic forms of “you,” it was originally spelled ge in Old English and pronounced like the first two letters of the word “yes.” By early Middle English, it was spelled ȝe, with the “y” sound expressed by the yogh rune (ȝ).

The four ways of expressing “you”-ness in Old English were the singulars “thou” and “thee,” and the plurals “ye” and “you.” The Anglo-Saxons used “thou” and “ye” as subjects, “thee” and “you” as objects.

The earliest OED citation for the pronoun “ye” (spelled ge here) is from the epic poem Beowulf,  believed to date from the early 700s: “Hwæt syndon ge searohæbbendra?” (“Who are ye armor-clad weapon-bearers?”).

The first Oxford example for the ȝe spelling of the “ye” pronoun is from the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies: “Hu ȝe muȝhenn lakenn godd” (“How ye may sacrifice to God”).

The dictionary’s first example with the “ye” spelling is from Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century prose version of the legends of King Arthur:

“My fayre felawes wete ye wel that I will torne vnto kynge Arthurs party” (“My  fair fellows, know ye well that I will side with King Arthur’s party”).

We’ll end with the expression “ye gods,” which Oxford says appeared in the 16th century and was “used to express indignation, disbelief, or amazement, esp. in a consciously archaic or grandiose way.”

The OED’s first citation is from The Paradox of Marcus Tullius Cicero (circa 1543), a translation by the English grammarian Robert Whittington of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum (“Stoic Paradoxes”).

In the passage cited by the dictionary, Whittington translates the Latin “O di immortales” as “O ye goddes immortall.”

(Note: All the senses of “ye” mentioned in this post are now pronounced YEE.)

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Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” i.e., merely able to read and write?

A: The word “literate” meant educated or learned when it first appeared in English in the 14th century. Although the primary meaning now is able to read or write, you can still find the original sense in standard dictionaries.

Merriam-Webster includes “educated,” “cultured,” “literary”; American Heritage, “familiar with literature,” “literary”; Cambridge, “having a good education or showing it in your writing”; Collins, “intelligent and well-educated”; Webster’s New World, “well-educated,” “showing extensive knowledge, learning, or culture.”

So one could defend the use of  “literate” by Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, in the Feb. 28, 2026, Times obituary. But we would have used “learned” or a similar word to avoid confusion with today’s general meaning of the adjective.

As for its etymology, “literate” originally meant “acquainted with letters or literature; erudite, learned, lettered,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation refers to “a c. childer litterate” (“a hundred literate children”). From Polychronicon, John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1387, of an earlier 14th-century work by Ranulf Higden.

In the early 17th century, Oxford says, “literate” took on its “weakened” use—“able to read and write”—which is “now the usual sense.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from The Description of Penbrokshire, by George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Kemes (composed in 1602-1603 and first published in 1892):

“to indorse the wittnesses names on the backe of the deede, and this to be done by the wittnesses themselves, if they were literate; otherwise by some clerke or other for them.”

The OED describes this sense of “literate” as “opposed to illiterate,” which had appeared a half-century earlier. The two terms are derived from the Latin litteratus  (lettered, learned) and illiteratus (unlettered, unlearned).

Here’s the dictionary’s earliest “illiterate” citation: “No more can Iudgis, Illitturate Discus ane mater” (“No more can illiterate judges discuss [adjudicate] any matter”). From Ane Compendious and Breue Tractate (1556), a tract by the Church of Scotland minister William Lauder on the duty of kings, pastors, and judges.

Getting back to “literate,” the adjective took on a new sense in the 20th century: “competent or knowledgeable in a particular area,” such as as “politically literate,” “culturally literate,” or “computer literate.”

The first example in the OED for this sense is from a US newspaper: “The American people were busy becoming ‘politically literate’; that is, learning how to run their political system” (Boston Daily Globe, March 23, 1919).

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “computer literate” is from a 1961 lecture by the British novelist and chemist C. P. Snow about the danger of relying on computers and computer adepts to make decisions:

“It is going to take a major effort to make all scientific administrators computer-literate. It is going to be quite impossible within foreseeable time to make nonscientific administrators computer-literate.” From a report in Technology Review (July 1961) on “Men and Machines,” a conference at MIT.

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Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related. He says they aren’t. Huh? Could that be right?

 A: Yes. Both English words ultimately come from different classical Latin sources: “adult” from adultus (full-grown, mature), and “adultery” from adulterare (to commit adultery, debase, counterfeit, or corrupt).

The first of these terms to appear in English, “adultery,” was recorded in the early 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest OED citation is from a statute, dated sometime before 1325, in A Middle English Statute-Book (2011), edited by Claire Fennell:

“Ant te womman, ȝif heo mide hire oune wille forsok hire hosebonde, ant tuuelde in hire aduoterie, a sal lusen aremanaund accion to purchasen hire dowere of þe tenement of þe foreseide man þat was hire lord.”

(“And the woman, if she of her own free will forsook her husband and lived in adultery, she shall lose forever the right of action to claim her dower [a widow’s share of her husband’s estate] from the holding of the aforementioned man who was her lord.”)

The earliest Oxford citation for the adjective “adult” is from a treatise on how to train statesmen: “Soche persons, beinge nowe adulte, that is to saye, passed theyr childehode” (The Boke Named the Gouernour, 1531, by the English scholar and diplomat Thomas Elyot).

The noun “adult” appeared a century later. The OED example is a from a treatise critical of Anabaptism, the doctrine that baptism should be administered only to believing adults.

In this passage from Anabaptism Routed (1655), John Reading argues that being baptized as a baby provides a stronger Christian foundation than later baptism:

“In the adult, coming to the knowledge of God’s covenant in Christ, and of his own feeling in infancy, it must make him more confident of his implantation into Christ, then if he knew that he never had been baptized.”

To get back to your question, no, “adult” and “adultery” are not related, but only the former can commit the latter.

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Q: I am wondering how chimera has come to mean both “an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts” and “an unrealizable dream.”

A: When “chimera” originally appeared in ancient Greece as χίμαιρα (khimaira), it also had two meanings—a female goat as well as a monster. In its farming sense, χίμαιρα was simply the female version of a male goat, χίμαρος (khimaros).

In the Iliad, which dates from the seventh century BC, Homer describes the monster as πρόσθε λέων, ὄπιθεν δὲ δράκων, μέσση δὲ χίμαιρα, δεινὸν ἀποπνείουσα πυρὸς μένος αἰθομένοιο (“in front a lion, in back a serpent, and in the middle a she-goat, breathing out terribly with the might of a blazing fire”).

When Middle English adopted the term in the late 14th century from the Middle French chimère and the Latin chimaera, it was spelled “chymere” and referred to the monster of Greek mythology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest English citation in the OED is from the prologue of the Wycliffe Bible (early version, 1382):

“Beestis clepid chymeres, that han a part of ech beest, and suche ben not, no but oonly in opynyoun” (“Beasts called chimeras, that have parts of other beasts, exist only in the mind”).

The OED says “chimera” (now pronounced kigh-MIR-uh or kuh-MIR-uh) took on several figurative meanings in the 16th century “with reference to the terrible character, the unreality, or the incongruous composition of the fabled monster.”

In the early 16th century, for example, it came to mean “a horrible and fear-inspiring phantasm, a bogy.” The first Oxford citation for this sense is from an English adaptation of a Latin pastoral poem:

“Agayne [Against] the Chymer [Chimera], here stoutly must he fight.” (From the Fourth Eclogue in The Boke of Codrus and Mynalcas, by Alexander Barclay, based on a 15th-century Latin poem by the Carmelite monk Baptista Mantuanus.)

In the late 16th century, the OED says, the term took on another figurative sense: “an unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.” The dictionary describes this sense as “the ordinary modern use.”

The first Oxford citation is from an English translation of Philippe de Mornay’s French defense of Christianity: “How could that Chymera haue come in any mannes mynd?” From A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (1587), by Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding.

(Golding finished the translation the year after Sidney, a poet, scholar, and soldier, was fatally wounded at the age of 31 in a battle with Spanish forces.)

As for the adjectives, “chimerical” appeared in the early 17th century and the less common “chimeric” a couple of decades later.

The OED has two senses for “chimerical” (kigh-MIR-ik-uhl or kuh-MIR-ik-uhl):

“1. Of the nature of a chimera; vainly or fantastically conceived, imaginary, fanciful, visionary” and “2. Prone to entertain chimeras; filled with idle fancies and wild dreams; whimsical, fanciful.”

Here’s the dictionary’s first adjectival citation: “The fire of Purgatory is rightly termed … Chymericall, because a meere fiction.” From A Case for the Spectacles, or, A Defence of Via Tuta, the Safe Way (1638), by the Church of England clergyman and religious controversialist Daniel Featley.

The OED, an etymological dictionary, similarly defines “chimeric” (kigh-MEHR-ik or kuh-MEHR-ik). Merriam-Webster, a standard dictionary that reflects current usage, says “chimeric” is usually used now in two senses in genetics:

“a: relating to, derived from, or being a genetic chimera: containing tissue with two or more genetically distinct populations of cells. ‘Chimeric  mice are generated by mixing cells from two embryos, generating a mouse with four parental contributions’—Nancy L. Nadon [gerontologist].

“b: composed of material (such as DNA or polypeptide) from more than one organism. ‘He combined this gene material with safer human DNA and created what’s known as a chimeric gene—a gene of antibody instructions that is part man, part mouse’—Eric Hand [science journalist].”

Getting back to your question, it’s not at all surprising that a word like “chimera” would develop various figurative meanings. Many other terms from Greek mythology have metaphorical senses in English. Here are some of them: “Achilles’ heel” (a vulnerable point), “mentor” (an experienced adviser), “Pandora’s box” (a source of troubles), and “odyssey” (a long and eventful journey, from the character Odysseus).

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Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of “osculation,” but it could be ignorance on my part.

A: “Osculation” is being used here to mean “kissing,” the original sense of the English noun and its Latin ancestor. However, the noun is now used humorously in its kissing sense, or used as a mathematical term for the point at which a pair of curves or surfaces touch.

The evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne, a religious skeptic, is using “osculation” satirically on his website Why Evolution Is True to say The New York Times and The Free Press are kissing up to religion by taking it seriously.

English borrowed the noun “osculation” and the verb “osculate” from Latin in the mid-17th century. Both terms ultimately come from osculum, Latin for a “kiss” (literally, a “little mouth,” the diminutive of os, or “mouth”).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “osculation” as “the action of kissing; a kiss.” The earliest OED citation is from The New World of English Words (1658), by Edward Phillips: “Osculation, a kissing or imbracing.” Phillips was a nephew of Milton and educated by him.

As for the verb, the OED defines it as “to kiss (a person or thing), to salute with contact of the lips.” It labels the usage “now archaic or humorous.” The dictionary’s first example is from a dictionary of difficult words:

“Osculate, to kiss, to love heartily, to imbrace.” (From Glossographia: or, a Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue, 1665, by the antiquary and lexicographer Thomas Blount.)

As for the mathematics sense, the OED says the verb appeared first in the 18th century and meant “to touch (another curve or surface) so as to have a common tangent at the point of contact.”

The first citation is from Cyclopædia; or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), by Ephraim Chambers:

“Circle described on the Point C, as a Centre … with the Radius of the Evolute M C, is said to osculate, kiss, the Curve described by Evolution in M; which Point M is call’d by the Inventor [Christiaan] Huygens, the Osculum of the Curve.”

The math sense of the noun appeared in the 19th century. The OED says the noun here refers to “contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from An Elementary Treatise on the Differential and Integral Calculus (1816), an English translation of Traité Élémentaire du Calcul Différentiel et du Calcul Intégral (1802), by the French mathematician Silvestre François Lacroix:

“The contact of the highest order which can take place between the tangent curve, and the one proposed, depends on the number of constants which the equation of the former involves, and is also called the contact of osculation.”

Getting back to the original kissing sense, the OED has this 20th-century example of “osculating” from Don’t Tread on Me: the Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman (1987), edited by Prudence Crowther:

“When I asked him once why his hands were so cold he said, ‘They’ve been insufficiently osculated’ ” (from Crowther’s introduction).

Finally, in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, a small toast to the original sense of “osculation”—the opening lines of “As Time Goes By”:

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh;
The fundamental things apply,
As time goes by.

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Q: What is the meaning of “smack” in a sentence like “it smacked of bigotry”?

A: When something “smacks of bigotry,” it has a trace or a suggestion of bigotry, a usage that dates back to the earliest days of English.

When the word “smack” was first recorded in Old English (spelled smæc), it was a noun meaning a taste or a flavor. When the verb appeared in Middle English, to “smack” meant to perceive by the sense of taste, but it could also be used figuratively in the sense of to experience or suggest something.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots says the word ultimately comes from the prehistoric Germanic base smak- and the Proto-Indo-European base smeg-, both meaning to taste.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “smack” was originally a noun in Old English meaning “a taste or flavour; the distinctive or peculiar taste of something, or a special flavour distinguishable from this.”

The first OED citation is from a 10th-century glossary of Latin and Old English, where the Latin “Dulcis sapor, i. dulcis odor” (“Sweet taste, i.e, sweet smell”) is rendered in Old English as “swete smæc” (“sweet taste or flavor”). From Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies (2d ed, 1884), edited by Thomas Wright and Richard Paul Wülcker.

When the verb “smack” entered Middle English in the 14th century, Oxford says, it meant “to perceive by the sense of taste” and figuratively “to experience; to suspect.” In the dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, it’s used figuratively to mean perceive or experience the sweetness of God:

“And uorzoþe huo þet hedde wel ytasted and ysmacked þe ilke zuetnesse þet god yefþ to his urendes he ssolde onworþi alle þe lostes and alle þe blissen of þise wordle” (“And forsooth whoever has tasted and smacked [experienced] the same sweetness that God gives to his friends, he should scorn all the desires and all the blessings of this world”).

From Ayenbite of Inwyt (“Remorse of Conscience”), a 1340 translation by Michel of Northgate of a French devotional guide, La Somme des Vices et des Vertus (1279), by Laurent du Bois.

In the late 14th century, Oxford says, the verb took on various meanings in reference to food, liquor, and other beverages: “To taste (well or ill); to have a (specified) taste or flavour; to taste or savour of something.” Here’s the earliest citation:

“Som bitter þinges … þat smakkeþ of aloye” (“Some bitter things … that smack [taste] of aloe”). From John Trevisa’s 1398 translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum (“On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedic Latin work compiled by Bartholomeus Anglicus in 1240.

The “taste” sense of “smack,” perhaps influenced by developments in other Germanic languages, may have led to the word’s use for sounds made when noisily eating, kissing, and hitting.

In the mid-16th century, the OED says, the verb “smack” came to mean “to open or separate (the lips) in such a way as to produce a sharp sound; to do this in connection with eating or drinking, esp. as a sign of keen relish or anticipation.”

The first Oxford example is from The Babees Book (1557), by Francis Seager, in a section entitled “How to Behave at One’s Own Dinner”: “Not smackynge thy lyppes, As comonly do hogges.”

The verb soon took on the sense of to kiss noisily: “To Smacke, kisse, suauiare” (from Manipulus Vocabulorum, an English-Latin dictionary compiled in 1570 by the English lexicographer Peter Levens).

In the early 17th century, “smack” took on the sense of “to partake or savour of, to be strongly suggestive or reminiscent of, something,” the OED says.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, believed written in 1603 or 1604: “All Sects, all Ages smack [partake] of this vice.” The vice here is sex outside of marriage.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that “smack” came to mean “to strike (a person, part of the body, etc.) with the open hand or with something having a flat surface; to slap,” Oxford says.

The first citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from a sketch by Charles Dickens about a London slum. It appeared first in the weekly Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (Sept. 27, 1835), and later in Sketches by Boz (1836), Dickens’s first book:

“Mrs. A. smacks Mrs. B.’s child for ‘making faces.’ Mrs. B. forthwith throws cold water over Mrs. A.’s child for ‘calling names.’ ”

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Q: The expression “as I alluded to earlier” has been rife amongst sports broadcasters and now seems to have spread beyond that sphere. Is the use of “allude” for a direct reference another case where popular misuse leads to acceptance?

A: The verb “allude” meant to suggest or hint when it first appeared in Middle English in the late 15th century. In the early 16th century, it took on the senses of to mention indirectly, fancifully, or figuratively. And a few decades later, it came to mean to use wordplay or to pun.

The fanciful, figurative and punning senses, which are now obsolete, reflect the Latin source of the term, alludere, which meant to make a playful comment. As you can see, the verb “allude” has been a work in progress from its earliest days. And it’s not at all surprising that it still is.

Yes, many people are using “allude” these days to mean refer directly, and some usage guides accept that sense of the word. But most standard dictionaries and style manuals still say “allude” means to refer indirectly or casually.

Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage recognize as standard English the use of “allude” to mean refer either directly or indirectly.

Fowler’s, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, says, “It has been claimed by some critics that to allude to someone or something can only properly mean to mention them ‘indirectly or covertly,’ i.e. without mentioning their name, unlike refer, which means to mention them directly, i.e. by name.”

“But in practice,” Fowler’s goes on to say, allude is often used to mean ‘refer,’ e.g. He had star quality, an element often alluded to in Arlene’s circle of show-biz friends—Gore Vidal, 1978 [from the post-apocalyptic novel Kalki].” The usage guide concludes: “This use is well established and perfectly acceptable.”

Merriam-Webster’s challenges the “false assumption” that “the ignorant and uneducated are responsible for the ‘direct’ sense,” and provides examples of its use by “speakers and writers of high cultivation.”

Here’s an early example: “He never alluded so directly to his story again” (from Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Man Without a Country,” 1863).

The usage guide says the “direct” use of “allude” is “simply a logical extension from the indirect use, and indeed is an inevitable development” because the verb was often used ambiguously by established writers.

It cites a half-dozen examples in which “allude” is used in “contexts in which it is not possible to know for certain whether the word is to be taken in its ‘indirect’ sense or not.”

Here’s one from Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (1920): “it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts.”

However, Merriam-Webster says the direct use of “allude” hasn’t “driven the old subtle sense out of the language.” It cites this example, which we’ve expanded here, from “Why I Write,” an essay by Joan Didion in The New York Times Book Review (Dec. 5, 1976):

“You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

As for other views, Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) says “allude” means “to refer to (something) indirectly or by suggestion only.” It says the verb “is misused for refer when the indirect nature of a comment or suggestion is missing.”

And Pat, in her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I (4th ed.) says: “To allude is to mention indirectly or to hint at—to speak of something in a covert or roundabout way. Cyril suspected that the discussion of bad taste alluded to his loud pants. To refer to something is to mention directly. ‘They’re plaid!’ said Gussie, referring to Cyril’s trousers.” 

If there’s a 5th edition of Woe, Pat may recommend avoiding “allude” when there’s any  chance of ambiguity. There are many alternatives, including “refer,” “mention,” and “indicate” for the direct sense, and “suggest,” “hint,” and “imply” for the indirect sense.

And if you do use “allude,” make clear whether you mean refer directly or indirectly, as Didion did when she used it indirectly in her essay and Hale did when he used it directly in his short story cited above.

As for the etymology, “allude” is derived from the classical Latin alludere (“to play with, to make a playful or mocking allusion to, to jest”), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. When the verb first appeared in English in the 15th century, it meant “to suggest, hint, hint at.”

The OED’s earliest English citation, which uses “alluding” to mean “suggesting,” is from John Skelton’s late Middle English translation (circa 1487) of the 40-volume Bibliotheca Historica, written by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) in the first century BC:

“Ne none so covenable a name in theire supposell vnto it can be appropried, as to call it ambrosia … alludyng by that worde enwarde dilectation” (“Nor can any name be more fitting, in their opinion, to call it than ‘ambrosia’ … alluding by that word an inner delight”).

In the early 16th century, the OED says, “allude” took on the sense of “to make an oblique or indirect reference to, to refer indirectly or in passing to.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1531 letter by George Joye, an English Protestant writer living in exile in Antwerp. In the letter, Joye responds to charges of heresy made against him by John Ashwell, the prior of Newnham Abbey in Bedfordshire:

“Christe called his Gospel & holy worde the keye of knowlege or keyes in the plural noumber of the kingdom of heauen alluding vnto the double propertye that one keye hathe both to open and to shutte.”

In that same letter, Oxford says, Joye used “allude” in a sense closer to its Latin source: to “refer (something) fancifully or figuratively to; to compare (something) symbolically.” The dictionary’s first citation expands on Joye’s earlier comment about keys:

“The propertye of a keye is to open that which before was shitte thus doth Luce allude & agre his speach with the propertys of a keye” (“The property of a key is to open that which before was shut, thus doth [the Apostle] Luke allude and agree [symbolize and align] his words with the properties of a key”).

In the mid-16th century, the OED says, “allude” came to mean “to make a play on words; to pun.” The first citation is from The Castle of Knowledge (1556), by the mathematician Robert Recorde:

“There canne be no such allusion of woordes in the englyshe … except a man wold rather allude at the woordes, than expresse the sentence.”

As we’ve noted earlier, the figurative and punning senses of “allude” are now obsolete. However, the OED says the early 16th-century meaning “to make an oblique or indirect reference” evolved “(esp. in later use): to refer in any manner”—that is, to refer directly or indirectly.

We’ll end with a few words from Mrs. Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Charles Dickens’s final completed novel:

“ ‘The mind,’ pursued Mrs Wilfer in an oratorical manner, ‘naturally reverts to Papa and Mamma—I here allude to my parents.’ ”

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