Year: 2009

Q: Why do the NY Times and The New Yorker insist on hyphenating “teen-ager”?

A: Some words are like small construction projects. These compound terms start out life as different parts, but get mushed together (first with hyphens, then without) as they become more familiar.

For instance, the earliest published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary for the adjective “teenage” shows it as two words.

Here’s the citation, from a 1921 article in a Canadian newspaper: “All ‘teen age’ girls of the city are cordially invited to attend the mass meeting to be held this evening.”

The next reference (from a 1935 issue of the journal American Speech) joins the two parts with a hyphen: “The dress is probably slinky and suitable for the teen-age group.”

Finally, a 1977 cite from the quarterly Daedalus has the term without a hyphen: “Society may wish to eliminate teenage street corner gangs, but this does not lead sociologists to write articles on the optimal techniques for eliminating such gangs.”

We’ve simplified this process somewhat. In the real world, English can be a messy business.

As for “teenager,” it’s hyphenated in the first published reference in the OED (from a 1941 issue of Popular Science Monthly): “I never knew teen-agers could be so serious.”

But less than two decades later, Kingsley Amis drops the hyphen in his comic novel Take a Girl Like You (1960): “Jenny thought to herself that here she was nearly twenty-one, and instead of having been a teenager all she had managed to do was spend a certain amount of time getting from the age of twelve to the age of twenty.”

Since then, the trend has been toward a hyphenless “teenager,” but some publications have been slower than others to get with the program.

The New Yorker is definitely a slowpoke, as witness this Nov. 3, 2008, headline: “Red Sex, Blue Sex / Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?”

The New York Times, however, isn’t quite so poky. The latest Times stylebook (published in 1999) has “teenager” without a hyphen, though a search of the paper’s archive suggests that a few copy editors haven’t gotten the message.

[Update, April 30, 2019: The New Yorker continues to hyphenate “teen-age” and “teen-ager,” but the New York Times does not.]

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Q: What is the history of the phrase “this, that, and the other thing”? I find it to be one of the most vacuous expressions in the English language. I have a near visceral reaction when it falls upon my ears.

A: Well, this may not be the meatiest of expressions, but the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t consider it quite as empty as you do.

The OED defines the phrase “this, that, and the other” as meaning every possible or every imaginable or every sort of. It’s listed in a group of phrases contrasting “this” and “that.”

In fact, English speakers have been pairing “this” and “that” in expressions since the 14th century. For example, John Gower’s Middle English poem Confessio Amantis (1390) says: “In ech of hem he fint somwhat / That pleseth him, in this or that.”

The first published reference for “this, that, and the other thing” in the OED is from Sir Walter Scott’s novel St. Ronan’s Well (1824): “I am sure I aye took your part when folk miscaa’d ye, and said ye were this, that, and the other thing.”

The OED has a more recent citation from the Ngaio Marsh mystery Artists in Crime (1938): “It’s a bit awkward what with this and that and the other thing.”

I’m not especially bothered by this expression. Is it vacuous? Well, I usually hear it used loosely in the sense of every sort of, rather than with the somewhat more precise meaning of every possible or every imaginable.

So, you may have a point. But I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it.

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Q: I asked you on the air about “spendthrift,” which means the opposite of what one might think, and you promised to look into it. Have you discovered why this odd thing happened?

A: Yes, it’s one more example of the many puzzles, surprises, and muddles that have resulted from changes in our ever-changing language.

The word “spendthrift” refers to someone who spends money recklessly, not wisely as one might expect from the modern meaning of “thrift,” the careful or frugal management of money and other resources.

But in the early 1600s, when “spendthrift” first showed up in English, “thrift” meant, among other things, wealth or savings. Thus, someone who spent his wealth, rather than saved it, was a spendthrift.

Shakespeare uses both “thrift” and “spendthrift” in these senses: “thrift” to mean wealth and “spendthrift” to mean someone who wastes it – that is, if you consider one’s words to be valuables.

In The Merchant of Venice (1596-98), for example, Shylock remarks that “thrift is a blessing, if men steal it not.” And in The Tempest (1610-11), Antonio says: “Fie, what a spendthrift is he of his tongue!”

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for “spendthrift” is from a 1601 English translation of Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis: “What would he have cost our prodigal spendthrifts, if hee had been taken upon our coasts neere Rome?”

Finally, here’s a 1670 quote from Dryden: “Thus, as some fawning Usurer does feed / With present Sums th’unwary Spendthrift’s Need.”

As I said, “spendthrift” is just one example of the confusion sowed by changes in the language. In my latest book, Origins of the Specious, I discuss many myths and misconceptions that have resulted from the evolution of English.

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Q: I recently came across a blog post about a struggling rookie football player “experiencing a steep learning curve.” The author clearly intended to say the athlete faced a long, difficult learning process. However, it’s my understanding that a steep learning curve would depict learning something very quickly. Why not replace this inaccurate cliché with “steep hill to climb”?

A: Technically, you’re right. A learning curve is a graph that represents the rate of mastering a skill against the time required to master it. A steep learning curve would therefore show the quick and easy mastery of a skill.

The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) define the term “learning curve” in pretty much this way.

But the people who actually speak and write the English language generally seem to use “learning curve” in a figurative way that has little to do with its technical meaning.

Thus, a “steep learning curve” in common parlance refers to the difficulty of learning something.

In a search of the New York Times archive, I found 108 references to “steep learning curve” since 1981. I checked out a few dozen, and all of them used the expression in the “inaccurate” figurative way.

I suspect that the lexicographers at my favorite dictionaries are a bit behind the curve here, and that they’ll eventually catch up with the rest of us.

I agree with you, however, that “steep learning curve” has become a bit of a cliché and that perhaps we should give it a rest. I’m not sure that a “steep hill to climb” is the answer.

In looking for a better way to describe such a challenging situation, you may face a steep learning curve.

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Q: I was appalled at your nonchalance on WNYC about the use of “absolutely” in place of a simple “yes.” Surely this is a juvenile ramping up of ordinary conversation, usually for no valid reason. Example: “Do you want fries with that? ABSOLUTELY!” Consider this new ending of Ulysses: “… and absolutely I said absolutely I will Absolutely.”

A: I don’t remember exactly what I said on WNYC about using “absolutely” in place of a simple “yes,” but I’m sorry that you found it appalling. (Nevertheless, your version of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy made me laugh!)

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the use of “absolutely” for “yes” as colloquial, but cites published references for it by major writers going back nearly two centuries.

Here’s a citation from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): “Is such really the state of matters between you and Rivers?” “Absolutely, sir!”

And here’s one from Mark Twain’s The American Claimant (1892): “Do you mean to say that if he was all right and proper otherwise you’d be indifferent about the earl part of the business?” “Absolutely.”

Also, Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917): “But, sir, was it true to Harrow life?” “Absolutely; and it’s as true to the life of any other Public School.”

More recently, here’s Rex Stout’s The Red Box (1937): “I trust that we are still brothers-in-arms?” “Absolutely. Pals.”

I see nothing wrong with using “absolutely” in place of plain “yes” once in a while in speech or informal writing, but I wouldn’t recommend overdoing it. Once in a while, yes, but not every other sentence.

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She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. If you miss a program, get the podcast on Pat’s WNYC page.

Q: Is the English language growing or shrinking? And is the rate of evolution faster or slower than in the past? I’m a scientist, not a linguist, but I’m familiar with statistics and I’ll take a swing at reading anything.

A: It’s difficult to answer your questions precisely because nobody knows quite how to count all the words in English. They’re literally countless. Here’s how I explain the problem in my latest book, Origins of the Specious, written with my husband, Stewart Kellerman:

“Is ‘sleep’ one word or two (a noun as well as a verb)? Is “sleeps” yet another one (or two)? Does “sleepy” count as a separate word? And should we count the gazillion (give or take) scientific and medical and technological terms (‘2,4,5-Trimethylbenzaldehyde,’ for example) that only specialized dictionaries include, not to mention all the acronyms and abbreviations and texting wrds and so on? The lexicographers at Oxford University Press, publisher of the OED, think we probably have a quarter to three-quarters of a million English words, minus all those 2,4,5-Trimethyl-whatevers—way more than French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, and so on.”

But back to your questions.

Is English growing? The linguist Mark Liberman wrote an interesting item about this on the Language Log website back in 2003. Liberman said it was “almost impossible” to count “in any useful way” the number of new words that enter English each year.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “it’s easy to come up with some specific numbers that are not completely devoid of interest.”

One number is his estimate that the Oxford English Dictionary was adding about 2,500 to 3,000 new items a year. He said lexicographers were undoubtedly aware of other new words that didn’t make it into dictionaries, but he doubted that the total number of new coinages or borrowings was more than 5,000 a year.

Is this rate of change faster or slower than in the past? Well, if 2,500 words were added to English each year since the early Anglo-Saxon era 1,500 years ago, we’d now have about 3.75 million words. However, the online OED – the granddaddy of English dictionaries – had “only” 616,500 main entries and derivative word forms as of 2005.

So, yes, we do now seem to be gaining words at a faster clip, though I suspect that the rate of increase has gone up and down over the years. I had a blog item earlier this year about the myth that English was about to reach – or had reached – a million words.

Another complication here is that we’re losing as well as gaining words. But when is a rare word considered lost? Many terms listed in dictionaries as obscure or archaic are still occasionally used. Should we count them or not? H-m-m.

Over all, though, we seem to be gaining more words than we’re losing, the linguist Morris Swadesh suggests in The Origin and Diversification of Language (1971), edited by Joel F. Sherzer.

“Since human cultures have tended to acquire more and more artifacts and concepts, one of the main directions of change in lexicon has been expansion,” Swadesh writes. “In English, for example, dictionaries of the epoch of Beowulf list some thousands of meaningful items, or lexemes, as against hundreds of thousands today.”

By comparison, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), by Samuel Johnson, had nearly 43,000 words, and Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) had 70,000 words.

I’m sorry that I can’t be more precise, but this is a case where the math really is fuzzy.

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Q: I recently came across an article in the Atlantic that described readers in the digital age as “ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices.” I haven’t seen another example of this initialism used as a participial adjective. Have you? I don’t expect the usage to be widely taken up, but I rather like it.

A: I hadn’t noticed this evolution of the abbreviation for Attention Deficit Disorder. And it doesn’t yet appear to be on the radar of the language types who track such linguistic UFOs.

However, a bit of googling has produced a few dozen examples (spelled a variety of ways) of “ADD out” used as an intransitive verb (“I ADD’d out on it”), a past participle (“you have definitely a.d.d.’ed out”), and as an adjectival phrase (“the ADD’d-out techno-junkie”).

It’s probably politically incorrect for me to say so, but I agree with you: I rather like this usage too.

I’ll bet we soon hear about this hyped-up initialism on language websites. (For anyone unfamiliar with the term “initialism,” it refers to an abbreviation formed from the first letters of the words in a phrase.)

Will this usage have staying power? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t count it out!

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Q: This one has been driving me crazy. In my first 45 years, I always heard TV meteorologists say “seasonal” with regard to weather conditions. Now, I hear them all saying “seasonable.” Which is correct and why?

A: I can see why you’re confused.

“Seasonal” and “seasonable” are both legitimate words, and they do overlap a bit. But they have somewhat different meanings when talking about the weather and other things that vary with the seasons.

The adjective “seasonal” refers to things that depend on, or occur in, specific seasons of the year. Example: “Hurricanes are seasonal in Florida.” In other words, hurricanes occur in Florida during the hurricane season, from June 1 to Nov. 30.

The word “seasonable” refers to something that is timely or appropriate to the season. Example: “Heavy rains are seasonable during the hurricane season.” In other words, you can get heavy rains at any time of the year, but they’re likely during the hurricane season.

That’s the short answer to your question. You can stop here. But read on if you’d like to find out more about these two tricky words.

“Seasonal” is relatively new, as words go. It was first recorded in print in the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and meant “pertaining to or characteristic of the seasons of the year, or some of them.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from Robert Mudie’s book Man, in His Physical Structure and Adaptations (1838): “The call of the partridge – the seasonal song of the nightingale.”

Today, we use “seasonal” to describe things that vary from season to season, depend on the seasons, or are typical of them (as in “seasonal migrations” and such).

The adjective “seasonable” is hundreds of years older. It made its first published appearance around 1380 in a sermon by the English theologian John Wycliffe.

When Wycliffe wrote that “tyme is lesse sesounable, and charite withdrawen,” according to the OED, the meaning was “suitable to the time of year.”

A similar meaning, “occurring at the right season, opportune,” was first recorded around 1412. And today we also use “seasonable” to describe something that’s timely, occurring at the proper time, or suitable to the season or circumstances.

So it’s correct to describe as “seasonable” anything (weather, for instance) that’s appropriate to the season.

However, there are right and wrong ways to use “seasonable.”

The OED notes that “seasonable” is sometimes erroneously used in place of “seasonal” when describing workers or trades dependent on a particular season.

The dictionary cites this line from a Glasgow newspaper in 1923 as an erroneous usage: “Persons engaged in seasonable trades in which the duration of seasonable employment is too short to enable them to qualify for benefit.”

It also has an excerpt from a letter to The Listener in early January 1980: “Will the BBC please note that the word they want is ‘seasonable,’ not ‘seasonal.’ One has seasonable items like mince pies and carols; ‘seasonal’ is applied to rainfall and fluctuations in car sales, i.e., things that happen with the changing seasons.”

That letter-writer’s view may be a bit narrow, however. We in the states (and our retail outlets) often describe tinsel and holiday gift wrap and pumpkins and turkeys and Valentine cards as “seasonal” merchandise.

That description seems accurate to me: tinsel, Valentine cards, and so on are dependent on particular seasons. Their appearance could, of course, be called “seasonable” as well: timely and appropriate to the season.

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Q: I think of the past participle of “slay” as “slain,” but a recent item on USA Today’s website referred to people who think “they’ve slayed the dragon” by beefing up security. Any comments?

A: The USA Today writer should have used “slain” (unless the dragon was tickled to death).

When “slay” means to kill, the principal parts of the verb are “slay” (present), “slew” (past), and “slain” (past participle), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

But when “slay” is used in the sense of to overwhelm (as with laughter), the dictionary says, “slayed” is “often” used for the past tense and past participle. The past participle is the form of a verb used with “has,” “have,” or “had.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (11th ed.) agrees somewhat. It says “slayed” is “also” used instead of “slew” for the past tense, “especially” when the meaning is “to delight or amuse immensely.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has only one published reference for “slayed” used in the sense of tickled to death: “Well, anyways, my dear, it simply slayed me” (Just Between Us Girls, 1927, by Lloyd Mayer).

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Q: I’d like to know whether the following sentence is correct: “I stayed there in front of the door, ruminating my sourness, until I heard them take their leave.” It feels to me as if it should be “ruminating on,” but my writing partner disagrees.

A: The verb “ruminate” can be transitive (“She’s ruminating her future”) as well as intransitive (“She’s ruminating” or “She’s ruminating on her future”).

The Oxford English Dictionary has published references for both usages going back to the 16th century. In fact, Shakespeare’s characters “ruminate” both transitively (with a direct object) and intransitively (without one).

In Titus Andronicus (1588), for example, Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, uses “ruminate” with the direct object “plots”: “Knock at his study, where, they say, he keeps, / To ruminate strange plots of dire revenge.”

In Henry VIII (1613), the Surveyor uses the word without a direct object: “The monk might be deceived; and that ’twas dangerous for him / To ruminate on this so far.”

The word “ruminate” is derived from the Latin ruminare (to chew the cud), and the English verb is still sometimes used that way: “The Holsteins are ruminating in the field.”

The cud, by the way, is the regurgitated grass chewed by those grazing Holsteins and other ruminants (sheep, goats, deer, etc.)

The word “ruminate” was first used in English in its literal — that is, bovine — sense in 1547, says the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

But it was used even earlier, as far back as 1533, to mean “turn over and over in the mind” or “meditate deeply upon,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

One last thing to chew on: The earliest published reference in the OED for the noun “rumination” is from Shakespeare. In As You Like It (1588-1600), Jaques tells Rosalind of “my travels, in which my often / rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”

Are you puzzled by that reference to “humorous sadness”? In Shakespeare’s day, “humorous” (derived from the bodily humors or fluids) meant moody, fanciful, or peevish.

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Q: I’ve wondered about this ever since I was a schoolchild many years ago: When did we start pronouncing “Christ” with a long “i”?

A: In Old English and Middle English, the name was Crist (“the anointed one”); the “ch” spelling didn’t become standard until after 1500, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The word is an Anglicization of the Greek title Kristos (Latin Christus), meaning “anointed.” In the classical languages, the first vowel had a short “i” sound (as in “mist”).

The name was pronounced with a short “i” in Old English too – until Irish missionaries in England in the 600s and 700s encouraged the long “i” pronunciation (as in “heist”).

I haven’t been able to find out why the missionaries did this. However, the derivatives “Christian,” “Christmas,” and all the rest kept the short “i.”

German, by the way, retains the old short-“i” pronunciation. The name Kriss Kringle comes from the German Christkindl (German for “Christ child”). In German, “Christ” sounds like “Kriss” with a “t” at the end.

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Q: Being from the south, we eat grits on a fairly regular basis, and the discussion inevitably turns to telling the chef (I use that term loosely) how good the day’s preparation tastes. So here’s the question: “The grits is good” or “The grits are good”? (Of course, nobody fixes grits like Mom.)

A: The word “grits” is considered a plural noun, but it can be used with either a plural or a singular verb, according to both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

So it’s acceptable to say either “The grits are good” or “The grits is good.” I like “are” better myself.

You may be surprised to learn that “grits” is a very, very old word with roots in the early days of Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons.

The word was written as grytt when it was first recorded in English around the year 700, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The plural was grytta or gretta. It originally meant bran, chaff, or mill dust, but that sense is now obsolete.

By the 16th century, the term was being used for oats that had been husked but not ground or oats that had been ground coarsely – that is, coarse oatmeal.

In the United States, of course, “grits” usually refers to corn, not oats. The first citation in the OED for this usage is from 1886, but Merriam-Webster’s gives 1876 as the earliest date for “hominy grits.”

As for “hominy” (hulled, dried, and boiled corn), it’s believed to come from an Algonquin word for parched corn, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

The word (spelled “homini”) first showed up in 1629 in the writings of Capt. John Smith, who refers to “Milke Homini, which is bruized Indian corne pounded, and boiled thicke, and milke for the sauce.”

Finally, here’s a yummy quote from The Yearling, the 1938 novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: “Jody heaped his plate. There were grits and gravy, hot cakes, and buttermilk.”

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Q: I’ve always assumed that “know the score” is a sports expression, but a friend of mine used it in reference to a violinist performing the Brahms Concerto in D. So did it originate in the sporting or musical worlds?

A: I think your friend may have unwittingly – or perhaps wittingly – made a nice pun! “Score” itself is an interesting word, so I’ll back up a bit before getting to your question.

The noun “score” originally meant a cut or a notch, and the verb meant to cut or notch something, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. These senses are still alive and well, of course.

Both noun and verb were first recorded around 1400. But we know the word was around much earlier than that.

The OED says a “score” meant a group of 20 as far back as 1100, apparently from the practice of counting large herds of sheep or cattle, and making a “score” or notch on a stick at every 20 animals.

In the 1200s, the verb “score” in the counting sense meant to record debts. The amount owed was “scored” (that is, cut or scratched) on a tally of some kind: notches in a stick or marks on a slate, for instance. In those days, a “score” at a public house was a bar tab.

Here’s a humorous citation from Chaucer’s The Shipman’s Tale (1386), in which a husband tries to get money from his wife. She replies: “For I wol paye yow wel and redily / Fro day to day, and if so be I faille, / I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille, / And I shal paye as soone as ever I may.”

Soon the word was being used to mean “count” in a more general way: to record a number of anything.

And in 1742 the verb “score” came to mean adding points to one’s game; the first published use was in Edmond Hoyle’s A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist. From card games, “score” made a short jump to team sports in the mid-19th century.

Meanwhile, back once more to the Middle Ages. Another early meaning of “score” was to mark something with a line or lines.

This sense of the word later gave us the musical meanings: a “score” is music written on lined paper with the staves connected by vertical lines; to “score” a ballet or movie or whatever is to write music for it.

So where does “know the score” come into the picture?

Both Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang and Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English claim the expression grew out of sports imagery. But the OED doesn’t say as much, and I’m not convinced.

The OED traces the use of “score” to mean “the essential point “ or “the state of affairs” to the late 1930s. The citation given for this sense is from the journal Better English (1938), in which the word “dope” is defined as “a guy who doesn’t know the score.”

Does the guy fail to “know the score” in the game sense, or in the more general sense of what it all adds up to? We don’t know.

The musical “score” is probably out of the running. But as with so many expressions, it’s difficult to tell the original source of this one.

Sorry I can’t be more definitive.

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Q: On a professional blog, I criticized someone for saying “one of the most.” Shouldn’t it be either “the most” or “one of the more”?

A: There’s nothing wrong with using “one of the” plus a superlative, as in “one of the most” or “one of the best” or “one of the worst.”

Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with using “one of the” plus a comparative, as in “one of the more” or “one of the better” or “one of the worse.”

Since the late 18th century, the convention has been to use the comparative (the intermediate degree of comparison) when two things are being compared, and the superlative (the extreme degree of comparison) for three or more.

However, the so-called “superlative of two” – as in “she’s the oldest” when there are only two people – has a long history and is common in everyday usage.

Aside from this sort of comparison, where one side of the equation consists of a single member, there are comparisons where groups are compared with groups.

For example, I might say, “That’s one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.” The meaning is that I’ve tasted many good things: some good, some better, and some best. And while this may not be THE best, it is AMONG the best.

Here’s a further example. I might say, “That’s one of the most frightening movies I’ve ever seen.” The meaning is that I’ve seen many frightening movies: some merely frightening, some more frightening, and some most frightening. And while this may not be THE most frightening, it is AMONG the most frightening.

In case you’d like to read more, I wrote a blog item last year about comparatives and superlatives.

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Q: Why do we watch things “on” television, but we watch them “at” a movie house and “from” the balcony of a theater?

A: English has an incredible array of prepositions, and it often seems that we have far more than we need!

Generally, when we talk about the place where we do the viewing, we use “at,” as in “I watched the movie AT home … or AT the movie theater … or AT Jennifer’s.”

When we talk about the medium on which we view the movie, we generally use “on,” as in “I watched it ON my new flat-panel TV … or ON DVD … or ON film.”

When we talk about the position from which we watched something, we usually use “from,” as in “I watched FROM the 50-yard line … or FROM the third row … or FROM my armchair.”

I wrote a blog entry a while back about some of the oddities of prepositions.

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Q: I’ve had many discussions with people (including some New York Times writers) who misuse the term “graphic designer” by adding “s” to “graphic.” We don’t say “dresses designer,” do we?

A: When I worked at the Times, editors on the Culture Desk used the term “antiques dealer” rather than “antique dealer.” I suppose the thinking was that the person was a dealer in antiques, not an antique himself.

But I feel that if no misunderstanding is possible, a phrase like “graphic designer” is fine. To my ear, “graphics designer” sounds unnecessarily fussy. Let common sense and your ear be your guide. Go with what sounds idiomatically right.

In fact, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) lists “graphics” as a noun and “graphic” as an adjective. The dictionary also has separate entries for “graphic arts,” “graphic design,” “graphic novel,” etc.

And if those Times writers you mentioned insist on using “graphics designer,” you might mention (tactfully, of course) that the Times stylebook says the phrase should be “graphic designer.”

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Q: I was on Facebook the other day when this ad popped up: “Are you smarter then the President? Take our IQ test to see.” I see this “than/then” mistake more and more, and it drives me crazy (not a far drive – more like walking distance). I know languages evolve. Should I just relax and accept this vowel movement?

A: You’re right, of course, that English is always evolving, but not in this case. The words “than” and “then” are similar only in the way they sound.

I explain the difference between them this way in my grammar book Woe Is I: “If you’re comparing or contrasting things, use than, as in more than or less than. If one thing follows or results from another, use then (as in, Look, then leap).”

Here’s an example I give of the two words at work: The next morning, Paolo was sicker than a dog. He took some aspirin, then went back to bed. “If gin disagrees with you, then avoid it,” said Francesca.

As I say in Woe Is I, if a sentence like “He’s taller then his brother” doesn’t make your hair stand on end, you should go stand in the corner. Not you, of course! But you might be interested in a blog item I wrote last summer about “than I” versus “than me.”

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Q: Now that Sonia Sotomayor has been named a candidate to the Supreme Court, I have a question: Is she a “Latina” or a “Hispanic”? The talking heads on television have been using those two words interchangeably. She was born in the Bronx, but her roots are from Puerto Rico.

A: The short answer is that a case could be made for using either one. If we had to choose between them, however, we’d go with “Latina.” Here’s our reasoning.

The noun “Hispanic” (derived from Hispania, Latin for the Iberian Peninsula) is considered the more far-reaching term, referring to a male or female person who has roots in any country where Spanish is spoken.

(Although the Iberian Peninsula includes Portugal, the term “Hispanic” is generally not used to refer to people with roots in Portuguese-speaking countries.)

The noun “Latina” is thought to be a short form of Latinoamericana, Spanish for (among other things) a female Latin American. The noun “Latino” is believed to be a short form of Latinoamericano, Spanish for a male Latin American, one whose sex is unknown, or in the plural Latin Americans of both sexes.

Both “Hispanic” and “Latina” are widely used in English for a woman living in the United States who has roots in a country where Spanish is spoken.

The New York Times, for example, has used both “Latina” and “Hispanic” in referring to Judge Sotomayor.

The Times stylebook’s entries on “Latino” and “Hispanic” say the two words, as both nouns and adjectives, can refer to someone with roots in a Spanish-speaking land or culture. Here’s an excerpt from the 1999 stylebook:

“The use of Latino, long preferred in the West and Southwest, is spreading in the United States; for now, though, Hispanic remains in wider use. When writing about specific people or groups, use the term they prefer.”

That concluding piece of advice makes sense to us.

Since Judge Sotomayor has repeatedly referred to herself as a “Latina,” and seems to prefer that word, we’d refer to her that way too.

The term “Latina” would also be more precise in her case, since she’s a woman with Latin American roots who lives in the United States.

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Q: This has been driving me nuts. No one can answer me: Are the words “exhibit” and “exhibition” interchangeable sometimes? For instance, “I’m going to an art exhibit/exhibition.”

A: When I worked at the New York Times, editors on the Culture Desk used “exhibition” for the show and “exhibit” for something being shown. So a reporter would write, “The exhibition’s most popular exhibit was the dinosaur skeleton.”

But the Times stylebook didn’t (and still doesn’t) deal with this “exhibit/exhibition” business, and dictionaries say a show itself can indeed be termed an “exhibit.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, gives “exhibit” as one of the meanings of “exhibition,” and “exhibition” as one of the meanings of “exhibit.”

In fact, the use of “exhibit” to mean an “exhibition” isn’t a particularly recent phenomenon, at least not in the United States and Canada.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which describes the usage as North American, has published references dating back to the 1890s. Here’s one from an 1894 guide to a farm exhibition in California: “The following are the groups into which the exhibit in the Agricultural building is divided.”

The OED also has a few published references, dating from the late 18th century, for “exhibition” used in the sense of “exhibit.” A citation from around 1790, for example, refers to some “excellent prints” as “exhibitions.”

Interestingly, the word “exhibitionism” has occasionally been used to mean a mania for exhibitions, but the OED says this sense of the word is rare.

The more usual sense is, in the dictionary’s words: “Indecent exposure of the sexual organs, esp. as a manifestation of sexual perversion. Also fig. and gen., a tendency towards display; indulgence in extravagant behaviour.”

The first OED citation is from an 1893 translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which refers to the “hereditary and degenerate impulsive exhibitionism” of a man who exposes himself to “young, voluptuous women.”

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Q: Isn’t a “categorical” denial a limited denial restricted to a specific category? Why do people “categorically” deny something when they should be denying it “uncategorically”?

A: A “categorical” denial is an unconditional one, not merely a denial applying to a single category.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “categorical” entered English in 1598 as a term in logic. A “categorical” proposition was – and still is – one “asserting absolutely” and “not involving a condition or hypothesis,” according to the OED.

The adjectives “categorical” and the now obscure “categoric” are from the Latin categoricus, derived in turn from the Greek kategorikos, meaning accusatory or affirmative.

In the 17th century, “categorical” acquired the meaning of “direct, explicit, express, unconditional,” as in a “categorical” statement or denial.

And this is the principal sense today of the adjective “categorical” (as well as the adverb “categorically”).

The word “category” entered English in 1588, also as a term in logic; its original meaning was a predication or an assertion, a sense borrowed from Aristotle.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the word is derived the Greek kategoria, whose roots originally meant to assert or speak in an assembly.

The usual meaning now (“a class, or division, in any general scheme of classification”) came into use in 1660, the OED says.

And that’s as categorical an answer as I can give you.

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Q: During a college lecture on German declensions, my professor said “nonce” in the phrase “for the nonce” is the only remaining word in English that retains a piece of an early English declensional ending. Is this the case?

A: The phrase “for the nonce” (meaning “for the occasion” or “temporarily”) has been seen in various forms and spellings over the years.

The version you ask about is the result of a mistake in medieval times as Old English was evolving into Middle English and declensions were falling into disuse.

(In Old English, as in modern German, a word may change its form – that is, be declined – to show its function in a sentence.)

In Old English, the language spoken in Anglo-Saxon days, the phrase was seen as to tham annum, meaning for that one thing.

By early Middle English, when the article “the” was still being declined, the expression was for then anes, meaning “for the one.” (The word then was the form “the” took with a singular neuter indirect object.)

Sometime in the 12th century, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, English speakers (apparently because of their declining grasp of declensions) mistakenly thought the expression for then anes was for the nanes.

The earliest published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary for the erroneous version dates from around 1200: All forr the naness.

The first OED citation for the full “nonce” version of the phrase is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (1598): “I have cases of Buckram for the nonce, to immaske our noted outward garments.”

Does “nonce” preserve a snippet of an early declensional ending? Perhaps, but I see the word not as a relic of Old English declensions, but as a reminder of English’s evolution by trial and error.

The word “nickname,” for example, is the result of a similar error. It’s derived from an extremely old word, “ekename” (an “eke” is an addition or a piece added on). The first published reference to “ekename,” according to the OED, appeared in 1303.

Over the years, the pronunciation of “an ekename” was misunderstood as “a nekename,” which in turn led to the modern word “nickname,” first recorded in the 17th century. I touched on this subject last year in a blog posting about nicknames.

The same thing, but in reverse, happened with “an apron” (originally “a napron”). And our word “orange” went through a similar transformation before entering English. It started in Old French as une narange (borrowed from the Arabic naranj), but it became une arange, une orenge, and eventually une orange. It entered English from Old French in 1380 – as “an orenge.”

Is “nonce” unique in preserving part of a declensional ending from Old English? Not by a long shot. The words “who” and “whom,” “he” and “him,” “she” and “her,” and others reflect similar Old English endings.

I might mention here that “nonce word” (a word coined or used for a particular occasion) is a term that James Murray, the founding editor of the OED, coined and used in 1884 for the first edition of the dictionary.

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Q: I love Origins of the Specious and intend to shill it whenever I can, which brings me to the reason I’m writing: Is the word “shill” derived from the British shilling?

A: I’m glad you like the book, but I may have to disappoint you about the origin of “shill” in the sense of to pose as a satisfied customer to encourage buyers.

The word first showed up in the United States in the early 20th century, as a verb in 1914 and as a noun in 1916, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines the verb as to “act as a shill” and the noun as a “decoy or accomplice, esp. one posing as an enthusiastic or successful customer to encourage other buyers, gamblers, etc.”

The dictionary describes “shill” as “slang (chiefly N. Amer.)” and says it may be an abbreviation of “shillaber” (1913), which the dictionary simply defines as a shill. As for the etymology of “shillaber,” the OED says, “Origin unknown.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology also makes a possible “shillaber” connection and adds that the usage was probably of “circus or carnival” origin.

The “shilling,” a former British monetary unit, is derived from an Old Frisian or Old Saxon coin called the skilling, according to the Chambers reference.

The dictionary’s etymologists speculate that the word may ultimately be derived from one of three ancient roots: skell (to resound), skel (to divide, as of gold or silver), and skeld (shield).

None of my language references connect “shill” and “shilling,” but I suppose it’s possible a coin that rings true and a shill that sings false may ultimately descend from an ancient root that resounds. I wouldn’t put money on it, though.

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She’ll be speaking at 2 p.m. Sunday, June 28, at Minor Memorial Library, 23 South St., in Roxbury about myths and misconceptions of the English language. Admission will be free. There will be refreshments, and Pat will sign copies of her latest book, Origins of the Specious, with her co-author, Stewart Kellerman.

Q: As a sophomore in high school (50 years ago), I asked my English teacher if “the reason why” is a redundancy. He punted on the answer. I was, and still am, unsatisfied. To my mind, the word “reason” MEANS why … no?

A: I don’t consider “the reason why” a redundancy in a sentence like this: “The reason why the brakes failed is unknown.”

It’s true that “why” could be eliminated, but that doesn’t make it incorrect. This is an idiomatic usage that’s been around since the Renaissance, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

And no, the word “reason” (a noun) doesn’t mean “why” (a conjunction) here. In this expression, “why” means “for which” or “on account of which,” according to American Heritage.

As Bryan A. Garner points out in Garner’s Modern American Usage, the phrase “the reason why” is no more redundant than “the time when” or “the place where.”

However, the expression “the reason is because” is an outright redundancy, since the word “because” means “for the reason that.” I once wrote a blog entry about this klutzy usage.

Redundant or not, both expressions (“the reason why” and “the reason is because”) are extremely common and likely to remain in the language – with or without the approval of our English teachers.

I can’t end this item without a snippet from Tennyson’s 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

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[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 3, 2022.]

Q: I’ve read that the word “dasn’t” is common in a small community in Nova Scotia founded by German immigrants in the 1800s. And my grandmother, who was born to German-immigrant farmers in Wisconsin in the 1860s, also used it. All of this makes me wonder if “dasn’t” originated among German immigrants.

A: The word “dasn’t” is an irregular negative contraction of forms of the verb “dare.” It’s an American regionalism formerly found in parts of the Northeast, South, and Midwest.

We haven’t seen any evidence that would show a connection with German immigration, though some linguists have noted that it was often heard among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Examples of the term date back to the late 18th century in the Dictionary of American Regional English. The earliest is an entry in Benjamin Dearborn’s The Columbian Grammar (Boston, 1795): “Dazzent for Dare not.”

DARE’s examples also include this early 19th-century sighting: “Dasent, dare not.” From a play, The Yankey in England (circa 1814), by David Humphreys. The term occurs in a glossary of Americanisms appended to the play.

There are many examples of “dasn’t” in American literature of the 1800s, where it’s generally used colloquially in dialogue or reported conversation. Though DARE cites examples from well into the 20th century, it’s rarely heard today. As the dictionary notes, “Modern colloquial usage tends to avoid all irregular forms and constructions.”

The dictionary’s spellings of negative “dare” contractions include “daren’t,” “durn’t,” “dursent,” “durstn’t,” “ders(e)n’t,” “daredn’t,” “dar(e)sn’t,” “darshin,” “das(s)n’t,” “das(s)ent,” and “dazzent.”

We found this example of the modern spelling in Ralph Lockwood’s novel The Insurgents (1835): “he’s sixteen, and as full of mischief as ever, tho’ he dasn’t let it out.”

There are many examples of “dasn’t” in the works of Mark Twain, whose novels brim with colloquialisms. This one is from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): “You’re a fighting liar, and dasn’t take it up.”

And these are from the second chapter of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): “There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn’t scratch it…. My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come into my eyes. But I dasn’t scratch.”

So how did an “s” creep into contractions of “dare”? We can only suggest that “dasn’t” evolved because it was easier to pronounce than “daren’t” or “daresn’t.”

We wrote a blog item last fall about a related word, “dast,” which some authorities speculate may have come about as a back-formation of “dasn’t.” (A back formation is a word formed by dropping a real or imagined part from another word.)

Another related term, “durst,” an old past tense and past participle of “dare,” goes back (spelled various ways) to Old English.

The Old English verb durren is a cognate (an etymological cousin) of the Old High German gitturan (to dare), which bears a slight resemblance to the modern German verb dürfen (to be allowed or permitted, to dare, to be likely).

Karl Hagen, on his website polysyllabic.com, remarks on the use of “dasn’t” among the Pennsylvania Dutch. But he adds that DARE’s early citations aren’t limited to German speakers or to the Northeast.

Hagen mentions early examples from Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, as well as New England.

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Q: I am writing from Bangalore with an issue that may seem nit-picking, but I want to get it right. Which of these sentences is correct? (1) “We are the best,” roared Barcelona. (2) “We are the best”, roared Barcelona. The point is the placement of the comma.

A: The American system of punctuation always calls for placing a comma or period inside the closing quotation marks: “We are the best,” roared Barcelona. Or: Barcelona roared, “We are the best.”

But the British system often calls for placing the comma or period outside the quotation marks: “We are the best”, roared Barcelona. Or: Barcelona roared, “We are the best”. This is true, for example, if what’s being quoted is only part of the original; the fans might actually have cried, “We are the best in the hemisphere!”

As for colons and semicolons, Americans always place them outside the closing quotation marks: “We are the best”; the crowd was deafening.

The British sometimes place a colon or semicolon outside closing quotation marks and sometimes inside them. But the colon or semicolon goes inside only if it’s part of the original quotation.

Question marks and exclamation points are treated the same way in both the American and the British systems. The question mark or exclamation point is placed inside the closing quotation marks only if it’s part of the quotation.

Which system should you follow? The country in which you find yourself generally has an affinity for one system or the other, American English or British English.

I’d go with whatever system is more common where you live. I imagine that you (writing from India) should follow the British system.

If you’d like a bit of brushing up, I wrote a blog entry a couple of years ago about how to use quotation marks with other punctuation, at least in American usage. And I wrote one last year on how to punctuate a question within a question.

In case you’re interested in more about American versus British English, I wrote a blog item last year about a similar question, the differences in the way prepositions are handled from country to country. And I devote a whole chapter of my new book, Origins of the Specious, to myths about American and British English.

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Q: As an SAT writing instructor, I am intrigued by your Grammar Myths page, which debunks the rule that “none” is always singular. Since the College Board follows this rule, we have thousands of students learning to write sentences like “None of the chickens is hatched.” What do you think about that?

A: What do I think? I think it’s unfortunate that the College Board may be penalizing students who are in fact using the language correctly by writing, “None of the chickens are hatched.”

It is not true that “none” always means “not one.”

It is true that “none” is an etymological descendant of the Old English pronoun nan, which indeed is a combination of ne (“not”) plus an (“one”). But “any” is also descended from the Old English an, and historically “none” has always been closer in meaning to “not any.”

As you know, “any” can be either singular or plural; it can refer to “any of it” (as in “any of the mail”) or to “any of them” (as in “any of the letters”). Hence these sentences are both correct: “None of the mail was delivered” … “None of the letters were delivered.”

As my husband, Stewart Kellerman, and I write in our book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language:

“It seems that ‘none’ has been both singular and plural since Anglo-Saxon days. Alfred the Great used it as a plural back in the ninth century, when he translated a work by the Roman philosopher Boethius. Although the OED lists numerous examples of both singular and plural ‘nones’ since Alfred’s day, it says plurals have been more common, especially in modern times.”

Let me also quote Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage: “Clearly, none has been both singular and plural since Old English and still is. The notion that it is singular only is a myth of unknown origin that appears to have arisen late in the 19th century.”

Here’s the advice I give in my grammar book Woe Is I: If “none” means “none of it,” treat it is as singular (“None of the merlot is open”); if “none” means “none of them,” treat it as plural (“None of the carafes are full”). And if you mean “not one,” then say or write “not one.”

I hope the College Board is not also perpetuating the myths that it’s incorrect to “split” an infinitive or to place a preposition at the end of a sentence or to begin a sentence with a conjunction. These, too, are well-known grammatical misconceptions that are alien to the syntax of a Germanic language like English.

If any visitors to the blog would like to read more about these and other myths of English, check out Origins of the Specious.

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Q: Your recent entry on “due process” made me think of “due diligence,” as in “He did due diligence,” which is an odd one to parse. If “diligence” means “conscientiousness,” then it’s not really something one does, is it? Just a thought for a rainy day when you don’t have a blog idea … although the supply seems inexhaustible.

A: Well, it’s a rainy day, but the supply is indeed inexhaustible. In fact, I apologize to all those who’ve sent in questions but haven’t gotten answers yet.

Now, let’s give diligence its due.

In the phrase “due process,” first recorded in 1447 (more fully, “due process of law”), the adjective “due” means proper or in accordance with established rules, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

As for “due diligence,” first recorded in 1598, “due” means appropriate, sufficient, or proper. This sense of the adjective has been in use since around 1400.

The word “diligence” here carries more of an active than a passive sense. It means care and attention, industry, endeavor, and effort to accomplish what is undertaken.

So “due diligence” means something like “the necessary care” or “the effort required.” And one can “exercise” or “perform” or “do” it.

Now, I’d better get back to exercising due diligence on the rest of the questions in my mailbox.

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Q: If dogging one’s footsteps means relentlessly and closely following someone, shouldn’t slowly preceding while swerving erratically be catting one’s footsteps?

A: H-m-m. We never thought of that. We must have been catnapping.

The noun “cat,” of course, is a very old word, dating from around the year 800, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it thusly: “A well-known carnivorous quadruped (Felis domesticus) which has long been domesticated, being kept to destroy mice, and as a house pet.”

The verb first appeared in English in the mid-18th century with the nautical meaning of to raise anchor to the cat-heads, or beams, projecting from the bows of a ship.

In the mid-19th century, the verb took on the meaning of to flog with a cat-o’-nine-tails, according to the OED. Here’s an 1865 citation from the Spectator: “Thirty of them were lashed to a gun, and catted with fifty lashes each.” Yikes!

By the way, the expression “no room to swing a cat” has nothing to do with the cat-o’-nine-tails. If you’d like to read more, we wrote a blog item about this cat-swinging business a few years ago.

Interestingly, the noun “dog” first showed up in English a couple of centuries after the appearance of “cat,” according to the OED. Before then, a dog was referred to as a hund, the Old English word for “hound.”

The verb “dog,” however, has been used since the early 16th century in the sense of to follow closely and stubbornly – that is, doggedly. And that brings us to a linguistic term with a following.

A “cataphora” (pronounced kuh-TAFF-ur-uh) is a pronoun or other stand-in for a following word or phrase – for example, the use of “her” to refer to “Sally” in this sentence: “With her, Sally had a bichon and two poodles.”

Finally, a “cataphor” is an obsolete term for deep sleep. It comes from the Latin for coma and the Greek for an attack of lethargy. Speaking of which, we think it’s time for a catnap.

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Q: Here’s one that’s been bugging me. When referring to something written, is it fair game to use the verbs “say,” “tell,” “talk,” and “speak”? I’m thinking of a sentence like this: “She told me in an email she’d be late.” And, by extension, can a watch or a radio say something? For example, “My watch says we’re five minutes late.”

A: All of the verbs you mention – “say,” “tell,” “talk,” and “speak” – can be used to refer to written as well as oral communications. Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say (see what I mean?) about each of them.

(1) “Say”: One meaning is “to utter or pronounce (a specified word or words, or an articulate sound). Also, in wider sense, used of an author or a book, with quoted words as object.” The word is used “of a speaker, writer; also of a literary composition, a proverb, etc.”

So well-established is this sense of “say,” according to the OED, that “its use with reference to written expression does not ordinarily, like the similar use of speak, involve any consciousness of metaphor.”

As for whether a watch or a radio can say something, this is a legitimate usage too. The OED notes that “say” can be used “with an inanimate item as subject: to communicate or represent; esp. of a clock, calendar, etc., to show (a certain time or date); of a notice, to state (a certain message).”

(2) “Tell”: One of the definitions given is “to make known by speech or writing; to communicate (information, facts, ideas, news, etc.); to state, announce, report, intimate.” No problem there either.

(3) “Talk”: The primary meaning is of course to communicate by using speech. But the OED says it is also used “by extension: To convey information in some other way, as by writing, with the fingers, eyes, etc.”

(4) “Speak”: Principally, this means “to utter or pronounce words or articulate sounds; to use or exercise the faculty of speech; to express one’s thoughts by words.” But another meaning is “to state or declare in writing, etc.”

And here’s another use: “Of a writer, literary composition, etc.: To make a statement or declaration in words; to state or say.” And “speak of” means “to mention, or discourse upon, in speech or writing.”

Although it’s fine to say a book “speaks” or “talks” of something, I think it’s venturing a little too far into metaphor to use those verbs with a newspaper. A newspaper article or columnist may “speak” or “talk,” but I’m not ready to accept that a newspaper itself can.

How about other inanimate physical objects? Can they speak or talk? Only if they produce sounds, like radios, TVs, smartphones, computers and so on.

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Q: Here’s a quick one for you: In the book I’m writing, I have a character say, “I gave him the thumbs up.” Why do we use the plural “thumbs” in this expression when we use only one thumb to make the gesture?

A: Why the plural? Because when the expression originated, it referred to the many people (a coliseum full of them, in fact) who were voting with their thumbs. But back then, “thumbs up” was bad news.

Under its entry for “thumb,” the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “thumbs down” and “thumbs up” were originally “expressions referring to the use of the thumb by the spectators in the ancient amphitheatre, to indicate approbation or the opposite.”

In the time of the Romans, “thumbs down” signaled spare him, while “thumbs up” was a death warrant.

In modern usage, the significance of the signals has been reversed, according to the OED, so “thumbs down” now means “disapproval or rejection,” while “thumbs up” is “a sign of approval, acceptance, encouragement, etc.”

Rudyard Kipling, for example, used the modern sense in Puck of Pook Hill (1906), “We’re finished men – thumbs down against both of us.”

So did Arthur Guy Empey in a 1917 glossary of terms used in the trenches: “Thumbs up, Tommy’s expression which means ‘everything is fine with me.’ “

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[Note: An updated and expanded post about “thank you kindly” appeared on the blog on July 29, 2024.] 

Q: Can you please explain the silly expression “thank you kindly.” It seems sort of self-congratulatory!

A: In an early edition (1921) of his book The American Language, H. L. Mencken suggests that “thank you kindly” was brought to America by Irish immigrants who were “almost incapable of saying plain yes or no” and “must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.”

“The Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart,” Mencken adds. “The American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized.”

He notes that P. W. Joyce, author of English as We Speak It in Ireland (1910), “shows the Irish origin of scores of locutions that are now often mistaken for native Americanisms, for example, great shakes, dead (as an intensive), thank you kindly, to split one’s sides (i. e., laughing), and the tune the old cow died of, not to mention many familiar similes and proverbs.”

Interestingly, the expression “thank you kindly” doesn’t appear in my 1937 edition of Mencken’s book. Perhaps he changed his mind about its origins.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any other references that might explain the expression, which is undoubtedly odd, rather like greeting someone with “Hello expectantly” or saying farewell with “Goodbye reluctantly.”

Though I can’t shed much light, I can pass on a poem, called “Graciousness,” that appeared in The English Journal in 1967:

I’d like to spank
Those oafs behindly
Who don’t just “thank…”
But “thank you kindly.”

– A. S. Flaumenhaft, Far Rockaway, New York

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