Year: 2009

[Note: An updated post about “the whole nine yards” appeared on Dec. 14, 2016.]

Q: Your cryptic etymology of the “whole nine yards” traces it to the space program in the ’60s, when it meant a detailed report. Such a report would have been on a folded stack of perforated printer paper – perhaps nine yards long.

A: You’re the second person to email me with this theory. I guess it’s possible that “the whole nine yards” originally referred to a continuous computer printout, but I can’t find any evidence to support it.

As of this writing, we simply don’t know for sure when or how “the whole nine yards” originated.

Many theories (involving cement mixers, machine guns, nuns’ habits, Scottish kilts, ships’ sails, shrouds, garbage trucks, a maharaja’s sash, a hangman’s noose, etc.) have been debunked.

As more information is digitized, however, we’re finding earlier and earlier printed references for the phrase. It seems as if word sleuths posting to the Linguist List, the American Dialect Society’s mailing list, are coming up with new citations every few months.

I’ve already had two items on the blog about the expression – in 2008 and 2006 – but I think it’s time for an update.

To date, the earliest known use of “the whole nine yards” in print comes from Senate testimony by Vice Admiral Emory S. Land in 1942 about production at nine shipyards:

“You have to increase from 7.72 to 12 for the average at the bottom of that fifth column, for the whole nine yards.” (The admiral is obviously using the phrase literally here, not in its usual sense as the whole enchilada.)

As of now, the earliest published reference for the expression in its usual sense is from “Man on the Thresh-Hold,” a short story by Robert E. Wegner printed in the fall 1962 issue of the literary magazine Michigan’s Voices.

A rambling sentence in the story refers to “house, home, kids, respectability, status as a college professor and the whole nine yards, as a brush salesman who came to the house was fond of saying, the whole damn nine yards.”

It’s clear that the author didn’t coin this usage. We can safely assume that it was an expression familiar to him (though perhaps not to his readers, since he felt the need to explain it somewhat).

The next known appearance is from a letter to the editor published in the December 1962 issue of Car Life magazine:

“Your staff of testers cannot fairly and equitably appraise the Chevrolet Impala sedan, with all nine yards of goodies, against the Plymouth Savoy which has straight shift and none of the mechanical conveniences which are quite common now.”

But perhaps the most tantalizing early citation so far is from an article by the World Book Encyclopedia Science Service about jargon in the space program. (A reprint appeared in the April 18, 1964, issue of the San Antonio Express and News and elsewhere.)

The article (entitled “How to Talk ‘Rocket’ “) defined “the whole nine yards” as “an item-by-item report on any project.” The author, Stephen Trumbull, added that “the new language” from the space program was spreading “across the country – like a good joke – with amazing rapidity.”

Could NASA, which was established on July 29, 1958, be the ultimate source of this usage? We don’t know, but stay tuned.

(Sam Clements, Bonnie Taylor-Blake, Stephen Goranson, and Joel S. Berson are among the word detectives who helped track down the latest footprints of “the whole nine yards.”)

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Q: You uttered the term “hoo-ha” (shiver), instead of “hoopla,” not once, but twice on the air! Didn’t you know that “hoo-ha” now means vagina and the word for uproar is “hoopla”?

A: No, I didn’t know!

The word “hoo-ha,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has meant “a commotion, a rumpus, a row” since 1931, when it was introduced in the pages of the British magazine Punch: “The devil of a hoo-ha in the papers about increasing the demand for English-grown corn.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) also lists “hoo-ha,” which it defines as a fuss or disturbance, and so does Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), which defines the term as an uproar or an exclamation of surprise.

The OED says the origin of “hoo-ha” is unknown, but American-Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s say it’s probably from a Yiddish word for uproar or exclamation.

As for “hoopla,” it has long been used for a similar purpose, with the additional meanings of excitement or extravagant publicity. The two US dictionaries suggest it may be derived from houp-là, a French exclamation similar to “upsy-daisy.”

By the way, “hoopla” (or “hoop-la”) is also the name of a game in which the players try to throw rings around potential prizes, according to the OED.

But you’re right about “hoo-ha” – a little googling does turn up some telltale uses of the term to mean a woman’s genital area. I guess I’d better watch myself until this catchy usage goes away (if it does).

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Q: I’m in a writing group. One of my submissions was criticized for having too many dashes. I thought dashes were used in mid-sentence to denote a pause longer than a comma or a semicolon. After our last session, I came across some essays by William Styron in which two pages had 11 dashes. I was wondering what your opinion might be.

A: Many people overuse dashes, though if you’re a famous author you can do as you please!

A dash isn’t used merely to signify a pause in a sentence. Ellipses (…) do a better job of conveying a pause or hesitation. Here’s how I explain the correct use of dashes in my grammar book Woe Is I:

“The dash is like a detour; it interrupts the sentence and inserts another thought. A single dash can be used in place of a colon to emphatically present some piece of information: It was what Tina dreaded most—fallen arches. Or dashes can be used in pairs instead of parentheses to enclose an aside or an explanation: Her new shoes had loads of style—they were Ferragamos—but not much arch support.

“Dashes thrive in weak writing, because when thoughts are confused, it’s easier to stick in a lot of dashes than to organize a smoother sentence. Whenever you are tempted to use dashes, remember this:

“Use no more than two per sentence. And if you do use two, they should act like parentheses to isolate a remark from the rest of the sentence: After the flight, Tina looked—and she’d be the first to admit it—like an unmade bed.

“If the gentler and less intrusive parentheses would work as well, use them instead. Tina’s luggage (complete with her return ticket) appeared to be lost.“

It’s OK to use dashes once in a while. But a lot of them can get boring. Think of them as spice. A dash of cayenne is wonderful, but too much of it can ruin a good dish.

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If you missed hearing Pat on the Leonard Lopate Show today, you can listen to her by clicking here.

Q: During a recent appearance on WNYC, you tossed off the statement that it’s a myth the phrase “rule of thumb” originated in an English law codifying domestic violence. People working with victims of such abuse frequently use that explanation in building awareness of a HUGE social and moral problem. Instead of debunking this so casually, it would have been helpful if you had taken just a moment to explain what you meant.

A: Thanks for your question, and thanks for being patient. I get such a huge volume of mail that it sometimes takes me weeks to get through it. Only a fraction gets on the blog, but I’m moving you ahead in the queue because this is an important issue.

There are actually TWO myths here. These are the facts.

(1) There was never a law in Britain or the United States, even in “common law,” that allowed a husband to beat his wife with a rod or stick no thicker than his thumb.

(2) The expression “rule of thumb” has no etymological connection with spousal abuse.

In our new book, Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, which is due out in early May, my husband and I devote a considerable amount of space to these widespread beliefs. I’ll summarize.

The phrase “rule of thumb” entered English in the mid-1600s and referred to a method based on experience or approximation. It first appeared in print, as far as we know, in a sermon by James Durham, a Presbyterian minister in Glasgow.

Durham wrote that “many profest Christians are like to foolish builders, who build by guess, and by rule of thumb, (as we use to speak) and not by Square and Rule.”

Durham’s statement implies that “rule of thumb” had existed even earlier. Much later, a 1785 dictionary defined “by rule of thumb” as “to do a thing by dint of practice.”

Etymologists believe the phrase comes from the old custom of using parts of one’s body as rough units of measure.

A man’s foot is about foot long; the palm of the hand is about four inches wide, a unit once called a “hand’s breadth” (a measure still used to gauge the height of a horse); and the thumb is about an inch wide, a unit once called a “thumb’s breadth” and common in the textile trades.

As for the “rule” in “rule of thumb,” think of a ruler or measuring stick.

Now for the legal history. It’s true that a husband once did have the right under English common law to “give his wife moderate correction,” according to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). But the old right, Blackstone said, began to wane in the 1600s (and thumbs were not in the picture).

Nobody connected thumbs with chastisement until 1782, when an English judge, Francis Buller, supposedly ruled that a husband could beat his wife if the rod or stick were no thicker than his thumb.

There’s no published record of his comments, but the judge was viciously ridiculed in the press and caricatured in cartoons of the day, which labeled him “Judge Thumb” and “Mr. Justice Thumb.” He was fiercely criticized because no such law or precedent existed.

Nevertheless, in the following century, judges in three American court cases – two in North Carolina and one in Mississippi – also referred to such a doctrine.

But none of the judges offered a shred of verifiable evidence that the doctrine had ever existed. (As we now know from legal scholars, it never did.) And none of the judges used the expression “rule of thumb.”

So how did “rule of thumb,” a 17th-century term for a rough measurement, get linked with a mythological legal doctrine?

This seems to have happened after the feminist Del Martin used the phrase, apparently as a pun, in a 1976 report on domestic violence. She presented the debunked legal doctrine as if it were fact, then followed it with her unfortunate play on words.

“For instance,” she wrote, “the common-law doctrine had been modified to allow the husband ‘the right to whip his wife, provided that he used a switch no bigger than his thumb’ – a rule of thumb, so to speak.”

Ever since, we’ve been saddled with both a fictitious legal doctrine and a false etymology.

In case you’d like to know more, here’s the most authoritative study of this issue: Henry Ansgar Kelly, “ ‘Rule of Thumb’ and the Folklaw of the Husband’s Stick,” Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 44, No.3 (September 1994), pp. 341-365.

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Q: Here’s a pet peeve of mine: the loss of the verb “garnishee.” The use of “garnish” is rampant, especially in broadcast television. Everybody seems to have checks covered with parsley!

A: The situation with the verbs “garnish” and “garnishee” isn’t as black and white (or as parsleyed) as you seem to think.

Among American lawyers, the preferred verb meaning to take property (usually wages) by legal authority is “garnish.” But among their British counterparts, and in a few US jurisdictions, both “garnish” and “garnishee” are used as verbs.

My authority here is Bryan A. Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage. He ought to know, since he’s a lawyer as well as a usage expert. In fact, he trains lawyers in the efficient use of the language.

Garner’s conclusion is that “garnishee” (as a verb) and “garnisheement” are “historically unwarranted and therefore ill advised.”

The Oxford English Dictionary backs him up. Its principal definition of “garnishee” is as a noun for a person whose property is garnished. This noun led to the use of “garnishee” as a verb (and “garnisheement” for the process) in the 1800s.

Nevertheless, both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) seem to prefer “garnishee” for the verb, though “garnish” has been used in this way for almost 500 years.

I’m with Garner. Why not use the shorter, older word?

The English verb “garnish,” whether it means to serve with parsley or with a legal notice, comes from the Old French verb garnir, which had a variety of meanings: to fortify, defend (oneself), provide, prepare, or warn.

It entered English in the 1300s meaning “to fit out with anything that adorns or beautifies; to decorate, ornament, or embellish,” according to the OED.

In the 1400s “garnish” was used to mean to equip or arm oneself (or a fort or garrison), and in the 1500s it was first used in the legal sense.

In the late 1600s “garnish” was first used to mean pretty up a dish for the table. The earliest published citation in the OED is from John Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s Satires (1693).

Here’s the Dryden passage, from a scene where a sturgeon is ceremoniously brought in on a platter: “With what Expense and Art, how richly drest! Garnish’d with ‘Sparagus, himself a Feast.”

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Q: I’ve discovered a new word – right out in the open! So many people use it, but it’s not yet in dictionaries. The word is “nitch,” an apparent merger of “niche” and “notch.” It’s used when someone finds his place (or “niche”) in the world and his level (or “notch”) at work. Do I get a reward?

A: No reward for you! What you’re hearing is the word “niche” pronounced in the traditional way – NITCH.

Today, the word “niche” is properly pronounced as either NITCH or NEESH. But this wasn’t always so.

For generations, the traditional English pronunciation was NITCH. A Gallic pronunciation, NEESH, has been gaining in popularity in recent decades, and now American dictionaries accept both versions.

“Niche” entered English in the 17th century, a borrowing from the French, who had borrowed it from the Latin nidus (nest).

We aren’t sure how it was pronounced originally, but 14 editions of Daniel Jones’s influential English Pronouncing Dictionary, from 1917 to 1977, give NITCH as the typical pronunciation and NEESH as a variant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In writing, it’s correctly spelled “niche,” and anyone who writes “nitch” should be scratched.

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Q: I often hear the word “horny” used where I think it’s inappropriate. To me, it’s crude slang, but apparently not everything thinks so. Your comments? Also, I assume “horny” is somehow derived from the idea of a cuckold having “horns”? But isn’t a wife who cheats the horny one, not the husband who’s cheated on?

A: Let’s go straight to your original question. Is the adjective “horny” (in the sense of sexually aroused or desiring sex) off limits in polite company?

Well, it is, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), which describes “horny” as vulgar slang.

However, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) doesn’t raise an eyebrow about using “horny” in its sexual sense.

I go along with American Heritage’s assessment. “Horny” may have lost a bit of its old raunchiness, but in my opinion it’s still inappropriate outside one’s circle of friends.

As for your other question, “horny” and “horns of a cuckold” aren’t related. Here’s the history.

The use of “horny” to mean aroused or lecherous is relatively recent. The Oxford English Dictionary says this meaning of the word is “chiefly used of a man.” (I think that last remark needs some updating, but never mind.)

The OED‘s first published citation for this usage comes from Albert Barrère and C. G. Leland’s A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (1889): “Horny, lecherous, in a state of sexual desire, in rut.”

The adjective probably comes from a much earlier use of the noun “horn” to mean an erection or an erect penis. Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) defined “horn” as a slang term for “a temporary priapism.”

The OED, in its entry on “horn,” describes the sexual use of the word in expressions like “get the horn” or “have the horn” this way: “Not in polite use.”

As for the expression “horns of a cuckold,” it’s unrelated to all this priapism business. Cuckolds and horns have been linked for centuries, the OED says, and the phrase appears in many European languages.

In German, “cuckold” (hahnrei) originally meant a capon, or castrated rooster. The “horns of a cuckold,” according to the OED, is thought to be a reference “to the practice formerly prevalent of planting or engrafting the spurs of a castrated cock on the root of the excised comb, where they grew and became horns, sometimes of several inches long.”

Thus, “cuckolds were fancifully said to wear horns on the brow.” (Why this was done to the poor roosters I can’t say. Perhaps all the scar tissue on their heads protected them from being hen-pecked.)

But back to human cuckolds. The idea here is that a man who’s been cheated on by his wife is figuratively unmanned, on the analogy of a castrated fowl.

The analogy, if not the literal expression “horns of a cuckold,” appears in a loose Middle English translation by John Lydgate of Boccaccio’s The Fall of Princes (1430s): “A certeyn knyht Giges … to speke pleyn inglissh made hym a cokold. … I sholde ha said how that he hadde an horn.”

I looked for an updated modern English translation and couldn’t find one. But you get the idea.

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Q: I heard a 93-year-old lady from Leeds use the term “doy” as an endearment for children. It meant something like sweetie/pet/love. Do you know where it comes from or how widely it’s used?

A: A book called The Dialect of Leeds and Its Neighbourhood, published in 1861, defines “doy” as “a name of endearment for a child.” Leeds is the largest city in Yorkshire, a historic county in northern England.

I found a similar explanation in Dialects of the West Riding of Yorkshire: A Short History of Leeds and Other Towns, by Samuel Dyer (1891): “Doy is the diminutive of darling. … Its origin I do not know.”

It must have been common in its time, since I’ve found many such explanations.

Also, the word appears in many old Yorkshire ditties and poems. Here’s one from a collection published in 1872: “Whear is thi’ Daddy doy? Whear is thi’ mam?”

What’s the source of the term? Susan Aaron, born in 1909 in the Yorkshire town of Knottingley, thought it might have been of Scandinavian origin.

“Many Norse words I learnt from Granddad, and when he called me it was ‘Come on Doy’ a form of endearment,” she said in “Childhood in Knottingley,” a long posting to a website called “Knottingley and Ferrybridge Online.” (The item was submitted by a nephew, Don Aaron.)

Was it originally Norse? I can’t tell, since I haven’t found the word in any of my etymology references. Unfortunately, it’s not even listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

A poster to another website, Secret Leeds, described “doy” as a dialect word for love “that was used when I was a kid.” The writer added that it was “a word you never hear these days” and that it “must have died with my grandparents and their generation.”

Another poster to the site also thought that “doy” meant love, and described it as a “Yorkshire dialect word used to me when I was little by my grandma and her friends.”

Sorry I can’t be more definite.

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Q: I recently read that the US would convert from analog to digital television “on June 12th, 2009.” I would think it is wrong to the use of the suffix “th” with a date when the year is included. In other words, it should be either “June 12th” or “June 12, 2009.” Am I correct?

A: The “th” suffix in a date – with or without the year – is unnecessary in writing even though it may be pronounced in speech. Whether it’s wrong is another matter.

This is a question of style, not grammar, and like all style issues, it’s frowned on by some and passes unnoticed by others. I’m reluctant to call it wrong, even if it is usually unnecessary.

In some writing, the author may want to put a little oomph into the date, rather than treat it as a mere statistic: “On the morning of September 11th, 2001, the sky over New York was a cloudless electric blue.”

Style guides generally require “th” in expressions like “the 12th of June” or “the 12th.” In fact, The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) calls for spelling out the day when it stands alone (“the twelfth”). But the Chicago Manual doesn’t require “th” in ordinary dates.

You may wonder how we got the “th” suffix that we attach to ordinal (meaning in order or position) numbers. It originated with the ancient Indo-European suffix tos, which gave us the Old English ending tha, the Greek tos, and the Latin tus (as in sextus, for sixth).

Some stylebooks, by the way, would also prefer that when a date is given in full, the month should be abbreviated if an abbreviation is common (“Sept.” rather than “September”). Issues like these are treated differently in the various house styles of newspapers and book publishers.

Here’s a tip about dates that just about everybody can agree on:

In the month-day-year style, we use commas both before and after the year (except at the end of a sentence): “The party on March 3, 2009, was a blowout.”

But we don’t use a comma if only the day and month, or the month and year, are given: “The March 5 party was a blowout” or “The party in March 2009 was a blowout.”

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Q: Can you please assist me and my wife with the difference between “envision” and “envisage”? In what context would we use each word?

A: These are similar but not identical words.

To “envisage,” according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) is “to view or regard in a certain way (envisages the slum as a hotbed of crime)” or “to have a mental picture of especially in advance of realization (envisages an entirely new system of education).”

But to “envision” is “to picture to oneself (envisions a career dedicated to promoting peace).”

These two words obviously overlap. You might “envisage” as well as “envision” a future career. But originally, one word meant facing or confronting something, while the other meant visualizing it.

“Envisage” is derived from “visage,” a word that entered English in the 1300s as both a noun for a face and a verb meaning to face.

In the 14th century, to “visage” meant to confront as well as face something. In its original meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to “envisage” was “to look in the face of; fig. to face (danger, etc.); to look straight at.”

Later, the OED says, “envisage” took on the meaning of “to obtain a mental view of, set before the mind’s eye; to contemplate; chiefly, to view or regard under a particular aspect.”

“Envision” is derived from the noun “vision,” meaning sight (or foresight), which entered English in about 1290.

Beginning in the late 16th century, there was a verb as well: to “vision” was to picture or call up a vision of something.

And, as George Herbert Walker Bush might put it, that’s all I have to say now about the vision thing.

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Q: I’m interested in learning more about the phrase “heads up,” as in “I will give you a heads up when the contract is signed.” Does it have an origin older than the current corporate use?

A: The short answer is yes, but the longer one is more interesting. So let’s begin at the beginning – a couple of centuries ago.

The expression “heads up,” used as an interjection meaning “straighten up” or “hold your head up,” dates back to the early 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It was first used in this sense, as far as we know, in the English novelist Maria Edgeworth’s short play The Knapsack (1801): “They marched, and I amongst them, to face the enemy – heads up – step firm – thus it was – quick time – march!”

Since the early 20th century, the expression has been used in the United States as an adjectival phrase, meaning alert or in the know, according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first adjectival citation is from a 1913 article in the New Smyrna (Florida) News: “He was always right on the job, and looking ‘heads up.’ “

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has an earlier adjectival usage, from William A. Caruthers’s book The Kentuckian in New York (1834): “There I sat with my feet drawn straight under my knees, heads up, and hands laid close along my legs, like a new recruit on drill.”

In this sense, Random House says, the expression is probably a literal one: a wide-awake, alert person holds his head erect rather than falling asleep and nodding.

Now, on to your question about the current use of “heads up” as a noun meaning a warning. This, it turns out, is of much more recent vintage.

The OED cites a 1981 example from the Associated Press: “When that data is provided … it is regarded as being a heads-up on a sale.”

A bit earlier, in 1979, the Washington Post used the longer phrase “heads-up alert” to describe a warning by intelligence officials about unauthorized diplomatic contacts.

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Q: I’ve always been puzzled by the phrase “to where” as in “It got to where I had no alternative.” Is this a valid usage? Or should we construct the phrase differently?

A: First, let’s get straight which usage of “to where” we’re talking about here. Some combinations of “to” and “where” are perfectly legitimate.

For example: “We drove to where my parents lived” … “We disagreed as to where the sofa should go” … “How did we hike to where we are?” Everyone agrees that these examples are standard English.

The “to where” construction that you mention is quite different. In this case, “where” doesn’t mean an actual place; it means something like “a stage at which.”

For example: “He got ill to where he could no longer eat” … “We cleaned the house to where it sparkled” … “I fixed the toaster to where it didn’t smoke.” This usage is considered nonstandard.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this use of “to where” as American dialect meaning “to such an extent that” or “to or at a point, position, etc., such that.” Here are the first three OED citations, all from Southern novelists:

1933, from South Moon Under, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: “Is your loggin’ to where you kin leave it for a whiles?”

1938, from The Yearling, also by Rawlings: “My grand-pappy got hisself stung oncet to where he was in the bed a fortnight.”

1960, from To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee: “Having developed my talent to where I could throw up a stick and almost catch it coming down.”

The OED adds that sometimes the “to” is omitted, as in this example from an interviewee quoted in Studs Terkel’s Working (1974): “I want to have enough money where I wouldn’t have to be a bum on the street.”

Though the non-geographic use of “to where” isn’t considered standard English, it’s extremely common, and when I google the phrase I find many examples in educated usage.

For example, I found this sentence in a linguistics discussion group, from a person studying Spanish: “Once I get to where I’m only coming across unfamiliar words once every few hundred words or so, then maybe I’ll be good enough to start listening?”

Here’s another such sentence: “This analysis is based on the idea that a Universal Grammar does exist, to where what is good for English is truly good for other languages as well.”

I agree that this is not the best English today. But who knows how it will be labeled in 50 years’ time?

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Q: A colleague and I are grappling with a grammar question and would appreciate your advice. Here is the sentence in question: “A portion of the awards [is/are] based on merit.” I believe the subject is “portion,” which is singular and requires “is.” My colleague believes the subject is “awards,” which is plural and therefore requires “are.” Thanks for your help.

A: You’re right in that “portion” is the subject of the sentence. Here “portion” is what’s called a collective noun, a noun that is normally singular and denotes a collection or a number of things.

R. W. Burchfield, in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, says that when a collective noun is followed by “of” plus a plural (as in “a portion of the awards”), the choice between a singular or plural verb is up to you.

Traditionalists (at least in American English, which is somewhat stricter on this point than British English) would insist on a singular verb – in this case, “is.” But as Burchfield points out, “in practice a plural verb is somewhat more common.”

Faced with this construction, however, I’d rewrite it. A sentence beginning “A portion of the awards is” just doesn’t sound like good English, even if it technically might be.

What’s wrong with “Some of the awards are”? Alternatively, there are collective nouns that are used in the plural more often and more naturally than “portion.”

For example: “A number of the awards are” or “A handful of the awards are” or “A majority of the awards are.” These collectives are more flexible in their usage and are often construed as plural. If you’d like to read about how to use them, I wrote a blog entry about collective nouns a while back.

Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer you. The volume of my mail has mushroomed. My in-box doesn’t understand the concept of portion control!

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Q: I got this purported derivation of “kick the bucket” from my Shakespeare professor: If a prisoner in Elizabethan times wanted to end his life, he could make a noose from an article of clothing, stand on an inverted slop bucket, and kick the bucket. Well, it’s not as far out as some of the other fables one hears.

A: I’ve done a little checking of my own. It seems that there are two possible buckets in the phrase “kick the bucket,” but it’s uncertain which one gets kicked here.

In the late 1500s (when Shakespeare was writing and Elizabeth I was on the throne), “bucket” was a word for a beam or yoke on which something could be suspended. This usage may have come from the Old French buquet (a catapult or balance), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

A pig, for instance, was often hung by its heels from a beam (or “bucket”) before or just after slaughter, and thrashed about in its final spasms. I guess one could say that the dying pig was kicking the bucket.

A more recent reference in the OED, citing an undated “Mod. Newspaper,” says this sense of “bucket” was still being used in Norfolk “even in the present day.” (I assume the Norfolk mentioned was the English county.)

The other “bucket” is, of course, the receptacle. Although the OED says the etymology of this “bucket” is uncertain, it compares the word with the Old English buc, meaning a pail, a vessel, or a belly.

I suppose somebody contemplating suicide (or someone about to be executed) might indeed stand on an overturned bucket with a noose about his neck, then break his neck or strangle when the bucket was kicked away.

The first published citation for the expression in the OED comes from Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785): “To kick the bucket, to die.” Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell which bucket is referred to here.

The expression also appears in a collection of American proverbs from 1789, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which agrees with the OED that the origin remains uncertain “despite much speculation.”

But Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English goes for the slaughterhouse explanation. So does Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, which calls the suicide theory “rather less likely.”

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Q: I edit newsletters for a group of local school districts. In my experience, educators tend to be quite capital happy, but I am often able to change their minds if I can cite a rule. I usually follow The Chicago Manual of Style, but I can’t find an answer to this question: In referring to “the class of 2009 valedictorian,” should “class” and “valedictorian” begin with capital letters?

A: There’s no reason for these words to be capitalized. Schools love to toss around uppercase letters, which is why we see so much of this: “the College,” “the University,” “the Faculty,” “the Art Department,” and so on.

Companies and governments, as we know, do the same (“the Company,” “the Union,” “the City”).

This is a style issue rather than one of grammar, and styles often differ. The house styles at book publishers and newspapers, for example, vary widely in their approaches to capitalization.

The New York Times formerly capitalized the word “president” in reference to the head of our government, but no more, except as part of a name. Thus: “President Obama” and “Mr. President,” but “the president.”

Bryan A. Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, has some interesting things to say about all this. First, he notes: “For writing that goes into print, the standards – in capitalization more than in most other aspects of written English – lie in house styles.”

He adds, however, that these days there’s “a modern trend away from capitalization, resulting in a minimalist rule: unless there’s a good reason to capitalize, don’t.”

In fact, he says, the tendency to overcapitalize is losing ground even in academia: “the University of Colorado at Boulder recently declared that its internal style is to always make university lowercase when it stands alone.”

Bravo, Boulder! And I’d encourage anybody who’s in charge of house style for an organization, company, or publication to go minimalist, too.

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Q: I’m fascinated by the use of a word denoting a body part to characterize a person. For example, an expert in detecting different smells is known in the fragrance industry as a “nose.” And a smart person is commonly known as a “brain.” I’m wondering how this all came about.

A: We have a long tradition in English of referring to people as body parts. In fact, it almost seems that for every body part there’s a hidden (or not so hidden) noun meaning a person. We’ll skip the obscene ones, if you don’t mind!

Besides the usual meaning (one’s schnozz), “nose” has also meant the sense of smell, or the faculty for discriminating scents. It’s had that meaning since about the year 1375, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This use is probably what led to its becoming a slang term for a spy or informant, a meaning it has had since the late 18th century. And it also means “a person who creates, identifies, or judges fragrances, esp. in the perfume industry,” a meaning of “nose” since the late 1950s, the OED says.

A brainy person has been called “a brain” or “the brains” pretty regularly since 1914. But an earlier, figurative use meaning something more like “head” or “nerve center” was recorded in 1844, in Alexander W. Kinglake’s book Eothen: Or, Traces of Travel Brought Home From the East: “The accomplished Mysseri … was in fact the brain of our corps.”

The word “head” has been used to mean a person to whom others are subordinate since the late 9th century.

“Foot” was once used to mean a person traveling on foot (1200-1600s) or a foot soldier (1500-1800s).

Someone who lends a hand or works with his hands has been called a “hand” since 1590 (the same time the word was first used to mean a round of applause).

In Victorian times, a “leg” (short for “blackleg”) was a name for a swindler at a racetrack or other gambling venue, and in the mid-20th century “leg” was a slang term for a young woman of easy virtue.

Since 1382 the word “eye” has meant a person who uses his eyes on another’s behalf (hence the later term “private eye”).

From the mid-1500s until our own time, we’ve used the word “mouth” to refer to a consumer of food or a spokesperson. We’ve also called a big-mouthed person a “mouth” since the 1600s.

And since the late 19th century, the OED says, we’ve used “finger” as slang for “(a) a policeman or detective; (b) an informer; (c) a contemptible or eccentric person; (d) a pickpocket; (e) one who supplies information or indicates victims to criminals.”

A sympathetic person is called “a shoulder to cry on.” And for at least a century, we’ve called someone we depend on our “right arm.”

There are no doubt other examples that I’m missing, but you get the idea! It’s a long and honorable tradition.

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Q: What is the rule for the plural spelling of surnames? My Thunderbird spell-checker adds an apostrophe. But the consensus on the mailing list of the Association of Professional Genealogists is that the apostrophe is not required. What are your thoughts?

A: An apostrophe is NEVER added to a straight plural. Only possessive names (both singular and plural) get apostrophes.

Here are some examples of how to treat four family names.

Surname: Brown … Jones … Smith … Lopez

Plural: Browns … Joneses … Smiths … Lopezes

Singular possessive: Brown’s … Jones’s … Smith’s … Lopez’s

Plural possessive: Browns’ … Joneses’ … Smiths’ … Lopezes’

We hope this helps! If you’d like to learn more, you might check out “Comma Sutra,” the chapter on punctuation in Pat’s grammar book Woe Is I.

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Q: I was reading Shoot the Lawyer Twice, a mystery novel by Michael Bowen, and noticed the term “Lesbian rule.” It was said to be a flexible ruler used to measure curves. Can you tell me more about the term?

A: The Oxford English Dictionary describes a “Lesbian rule” as “a mason’s rule made of lead, which could be bent to fit the curves of a moulding.” It traces the term back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

In the 17th century, according to the OED, the phrase was commonly used in English in a figurative sense, referring to “a principle of judgement that is pliant and accommodating.”

In fact, the first known English use of “Lesbian” in this sense was figurative. The poet Samuel Daniel, in his “Epistle to Sir Thomas Egerton” (1601), writes that justice requires the law to be applied flexibly, like a “Lesbian square” that “Plies to the worke, not forc’th the worke to it.”

But what does the word “Lesbian” have to do with an instrument for measuring curves?

A pliable mason’s rule, it turns out, was made of a kind of lead, found on the island of Lesbos, that was flexible enough to be shaped to fit a curved edge.

In the passage from the Nicomachean Ethics mentioned in the OED, Aristotle uses the Lesbian rule both literally and figuratively:

“For when the thing is indefinite the rule also is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid, and so too the decree is adapted to the facts.”

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Q: I read this story somewhere, but I can’t track it down. When Yogi Berra was coaching the Mets, he said, “You’re never out of it ’til you’re out of it.” Many years later, a writer garbled this and misquoted him as saying “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” UNFORTUNATELY, Yogi used the misquoted version in a Yoo-Hoo commercial and now he believes that’s what he actually said. Do you know the source of this?

A: It seems that Yogi Berra is responsible for both versions.

Fred Shapiro, in his meticulously researched reference The Yale Book of Quotations, attributes “It ain’t over ’til it’s over” to Berra, as quoted in an article in the Washington Post on Sept. 26, 1977.

Shapiro notes that Berra later wrote in The Yogi Book (1998): “That was my answer to a reporter when I was managing the New York Mets in July 1973. We were about nine games out of first place. We went on the win the division.”

Shapiro adds that Berra was quoted in the New York Times on June 30, 1974, as using the similar expression “You’re not out of it until you’re out of it.”

By the way, Yogi used the expressions “Me for Yoo-Hoo” and “The Drink of Champions” in his Yoo-Hoo advertisements in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but I can’t find that he ever used “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over” in promoting the soft drink.

In case you’re wondering about a similar expression, it was the sports publicist Ralph Carpenter who said, “The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

He was quoted in the Dallas Morning News on March 10, 1976, according to Shapiro. Carpenter made the remark during a basketball game between Texas Tech (where he was sports information director) and Texas A & M.

The expression was then used by the sportscaster Dan Cook in 1978 and still later by the NBA coach Dick Motta.

But Shapiro says another version, “Church ain’t out till the fat lady sings,” may suggest “an ultimate origin in Southern proverbial lore.”

Was Yogi the first person to say “It’s déjà vu all over again”? I had a blog item last year that discusses this.

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Q: When my daughter says “aren’t I,” I correct her and tell her that it’s “ain’t I.” After all, “ain’t” and “won’t” have been in the language for the same length of time. Neither is a true contraction, so objecting to one but not the other makes no sense to me.

A: What can I say? I agree that “ain’t” (originally “an’t” when first seen in print in the late 1600s) was once just as dignified and honorable as “can’t” and “I’m.”

But “ain’t” began to drift away from respectability by the early 1700s, when it came to be a contraction not only of “am not” and “are not” (perfectly logical) but also of “is not.” By the 1800s, it was used for “have not” and “has not,” too.

When its parentage came into question in the 19th century, “ain’t” lost prestige. I think this is a shame, as my husband and I point out in Origins of the Specious, a book about language myths that’s coming out in May.

If you’re interested in reading more about “ain’t” now, I wrote a blog item some time ago about how this contraction ended up in the doghouse. (And it is in the doghouse now, so I wouldn’t encourage your daughter to use it, except in fun!)

As for “won’t,” it’s much, much older than “ain’t,” going back to Anglo-Saxon days. It was a “legitimate” contraction in Old English, when “will” was woll. Our “won’t” began life as a contraction of woll not.

Harebrained grammarians had forgotten this by the 18th century, when they began condemning “won’t” as illegitimate. Ain’t that a shame!

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Q: Here’s a riddle: what’s the connection between “utter” and “mutter”? If you manage to get Umm Bab into your answer, I’ll fall face down into the gutter.

A: Get your mind out of the Qatar. (For any puzzled readers, Umm Bab is a city in the emirate of Qatar, which can be pronounced several ways in English, including “cotter,” “cutter,” and “gutter.”)

Now, let’s get serious. I’m glad you asked this question, since I had no idea that “utter” and “mutter” were unrelated. Now I know.

We owe the English verb “utter” partly to the word “out” (an early spelling of “utter” was “outer”) and partly to the Middle Dutch uteren (to drive away, announce, speak, show, make known) or to the Middle Low German üteren (to turn out, sell, speak, demonstrate). This comes from the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the English word to around 1400.

In the early days, “utter” had at least three meanings: (1) to speak or send out an audible sound; (2) to put out goods for sale; (3) to put into circulation or pass off as legal tender (a usage that survives today in the verbal phrase “to utter a check”).

To my surprise, as I’ve mentioned, “mutter” is no relation. It entered English at about the same time, the OED says, noting that it bears similarities to the Latin muttire (to murmur or mutter) and to the Old High German mutilon (to murmur or trickle).

In modern German, though, mutter means mother, and that’s all I have to utter.

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Q: John Mortimer’s recent death gave me just the encouragement I needed to reread some of the Rumpole books. I’ve noticed one thing I overlooked on first reading: Horace Rumpole uses a form of abbreviated English. For example, “rota” for “rotation” and “perf” for “performance.” Is this shortening of some words a British practice? Or do we do the same thing over here and I’ve just missed it.

A: The telescoping of words is not exclusively a British habit. It’s popular wherever English is spoken. Just look at “perp,” “dozer,” “ludes,” “ammo,” “con,” “meth,” “doc,” “bike,” “limo,” “deli,” and other Americanisms.

Although “rota” means a rotation of people or a round of duties, it’s probably not an abbreviated form of “rotation,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The two words are related etymologically, but “rota” is derived from the Latin rota (wheel), while “rotation” comes from the Latin rotare (to turn or swing around).

The OED’s first published citation for “rota” used in this sense is in John Ray’s Observations Made in a Journey Through Part of the Low-Countries (1673): “These [councillors] are taken out of the great Council, and go round in a rota.”

“Perf,” a shortened form of “performance,” first appeared as a “graphic abbreviation” in an advertisement, according to the OED. The first citation is from an ad in the Times of London in 1919: “Scala Theatre. Last two perfs. of The Lady of Lyons.”

I’m going to miss John Mortimer and the Rumpole books. I had the pleasure of reviewing one of the later ones for the New York Times Book Review. If you’d like to read it, here’s a link.

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Q: In news reports on Jan. 30, 2009, it was variously reported that President Obama called the awarding of bonuses on Wall Street “shameful” or “shameless.” So, what did he say, and what is the difference?

A: Mr. Obama used “shameful” on Jan. 29 in remarks from the White House, according to the Associated Press. Here’s the AP report:

“President Barack Obama issued a withering critique Thursday of Wall Street corporate behavior, calling it ‘the height of irresponsibility’ for employees to be paid more than $18 billion in bonuses last year while their crumbling financial sector received a bailout from taxpayers. ‘It is shameful,’ Obama said from the Oval Office.”

If he also used “shameless,” I’m not aware of it. But even if he did, that wouldn’t necessarily have been inappropriate.

While “shameful” and “shameless” are technically opposites (meaning full of shame vs. without shame), they aren’t mutually exclusive and sometimes convey much the same meaning.

A behavior – let’s say corporate greed – can be shameful (something to be ashamed of), and yet be carried out in a shameless manner (that is, with no shame). Unfortunately, this isn’t unusual!

On the other hand, not everything that’s shameless is shameful. For example, a little child who takes off his clothes and runs around naked does this shamelessly (with no sense of shame). Is this shameful? No.

The noun “shame,” which has Germanic origins, was first recorded in Old English around 725, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines it as “the painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one’s own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own), or of being in a situation which offends one’s sense of modesty or decency.”

As for the adjective “shameful,” its first meaning (from around the year 950) was “modest, shamefaced,” according to the OED. Later it came to mean full of shame or causing shame (disgraceful, scandalous, degrading, and so on).

The first meaning of the adjective “shameless,” circa 897, was “lacking shame, destitute of feelings of modesty; impudent, audacious, immodest; insensible to disgrace.” Later it came to mean “indicating or characterized by absence of shame or modesty,” whether used to describe an action or the person acting.

When Arthur Sanders Way translated The Odyssey in 1880, he put both words in the mouth of Homer’s hero. In a big banquet scene, Odysseus speaks of his “ravening belly” and says, “This shameful shameless thing, crieth on me to eat and to drink, / Bidding me fill it, and suffers me not of my troubles to think.”

In poking around the Internet, I see there’s a rock group called My Shameful that Wikipedia describes as “a doom/death metal band with Finnish, German and American members.” Now is that a shameless name or not?

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Q: I am expecting (due date: 4/12/2009) and I would like to name my daughter Linnea. Which spelling is most correct: Linnea or Linnèa? I know the name stems from the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus.

A: If your intention is to honor Linnaeus by naming your daughter after him, then the choice of whether or not to use an accent mark is entirely up to you.

But be aware that the surname Linnaeus is a Latinized version of a word in a Swedish dialect for the linden tree. Latin, of course, has no accents, though that doesn’t mean you can’t use one.

Later in life, after Linnaeus was ennobled, he adopted the name von Linné (note the acute accent).

If you do decide to go with an accent, I’d recommend an acute accent ( é ), like the one Linnaeus used, and not a grave accent ( è ), like the one you proposed. These point in different directions and have different pronunciations. Linnéa would be pronounced linn-AY-uh.

As you probably know, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is often called the father of taxonomy for his system of naming, ranking, and classifying organisms.

How did the Linnaeus family come to be named after a linden tree? Here’s the explanation, from a pamphlet by William T. Stearn and Gavin Bridson, courtesy of the Linnean Society of London:

“Carl Linnaeus’ paternal grandfather, like most Swedish peasants and farmers of his time, had no surname and was known, in accordance with the old Scandinavian name system, as Ingemar Bengtsson, being the son of Bengt Ingemarsson. When his son, Carl’s father, Nils Ingemarsson (1674-1733), went to the University of Lund, he had to provide himself with a surname for registration purposes. He invented the name Linnaeus in allusion to a large and ancient tree of the small-leaved linden (Tilia cordata Miller, T. europaea L. in part), known in the Småland dialect as ‘linn,’ which grew on the family property known in the 17th century as Linnegard.

“Other branches of the family took the names Lindelius and Tiliander from the same famous tree. The name Linnaeus was thus of Latin form from the beginning. Linnaeus, having been ennobled in 1761, first took the name of Carl von Linné in 1762, by which time he had published all of his most important works.”

I hope this helps, and that you have an easy and safe delivery!

PS: Personally, I like the name Linden.

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Q: I have a bone to pick about the loss of an entire word due to the election of a hip president from Chicago. I’m talking about “to,” as in we have “tuh” stimulate the economy. The smartest of eggheads have stopped making a circle with their lips. I hope it’s a fad. It’s like Brian Lehrer in orange gauchos: make it go away!

A: Brian Lehrer in orange gauchos? Heavens!

In standard English, however, the word “to” is pronounced in two ways: TOO and TUH (with the vowel pronounced like the “a” in “about” or the “e” in “item”).

Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) list those two pronunciations. In fact, M-W also lists a third standard pronunciation, with the vowel pronounced like the double “o” in “foot.”

In short, our pronunciation of “to” is determined largely by what follows it.

So Obama is using standard English here, and he’s not responsible for all the tuh-tuh-ing by those smart eggheads.

I also wouldn’t blame the president for the tendency of people to shorten “to,” which is often pronounced as t’ and elided with the following word. I wrote a blog item about this not long ago.

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Q: Can you explain why people declared after 9/11 that irony was dead? Which meaning of “irony” died and what did 9/11 have to do with it? I think “irony” is overused to mean something surprising or peculiar or coincidental. It means the opposite of what is expected, as “It is ironic that Eliot Spitzer got caught with his pants down after being critical of other people’s morals.”

A: Many commentators made statements about the death of irony in the days and weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

For example, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, told the online media-industry site Inside.com: “It’s the end of the age of irony.” And the essayist Roger Rosenblatt wrote in Time magazine: “It could spell the end of the age of irony.”

Also, Gerry Howard, editorial director of Broadway Books, was quoted in Entertainment Weekly as saying: “I think somebody should do a marker that says irony died on 9-11-01.”

What they meant was that ironic, covertly sarcastic humor was no longer appropriate. Irony requires us to keep our distance from something in order to find humor in it. But here was an event that defied humor and defied us to maintain our cool detachment from reality.

Of course irony came back. It always does.

Interestingly, in recent months some pundits have suggested that the election of Barack Obama has killed irony.

An Op-Ed piece by Andy Newman in the New York Times on Nov. 21, 2008, ran under a headline proclaiming: “Irony Is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right.” What occasioned this were statements by Joan Didion and others that in the wake of the election, irony had once again kicked the bucket.

During a talk in New York, Ms. Didion remarked that in the Obama era the country had become an “irony-free zone,” where innocence and naïveté were prized, according to Newman’s Op-Ed article.

Later in the article, Newman quotes Rosenblatt as saying: “Irony is a diminishing act — the incongruity between what’s expected and what occurs makes us smile at the distance.”

But some events, like 9/11 and perhaps Obama’s election, “are so big that they almost imply an obligation not to diminish it by clever comparisons,” Rosenblatt reportedly said.

One of these days, someone is going to proclaim the death of statements that irony is dead!

As for the meaning of “irony,” you’re right. It’s not mere surprise or oddness or coincidence. I did a blog item a while back that addresses your complaint, and a later posting with more history. If your interest in the subject hasn’t died yet, check out my entry about the pronunciation of “irony.”

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Q: The mention of “linchpin” in your blog item about “hinge point” reminds me of this sentence in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye: “A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back.” Whew!

A: Whew, indeed! I’ve done a little research into “linchpin” and “lynch,” and you might be interested in what I found.

“Linchpin,” a word that originated back in the 1300s, is a pin passed through the end of an axle-tree to keep a wheel in place. In even more distant times (as early as the year 700), the device was simply called a “linch,” spelled a variety of ways.

The “lynch” that now means to execute someone without a fair trial is named after Captain William Lynch (1742-1820) of Pittsylvania, Va., according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1780, Lynch and some of his neighbors devised a plan for dealing with outlaws without relying on the distant and slow-moving courts.

To avoid having to comply with what they considered the tedious, technical requirements of the law, the “Lynch-men” set themselves up as a self-constituted court, though they had no legal authority to do so.

Punishments inflicted by vigilantes or self-appointed tribunals were said to be done under “Lynch’s law” or “Lynch law.”

The earliest published reference for the phrase, according to the OED, is this 1811 citation from the journal of Andrew Ellicott, a well-known surveyor:

“Captain Lynch just mentioned was the author of the Lynch laws so well known and so frequently carried into effect some years ago in the southern States in violation of every principle of justice and jurisprudence.”

Although other Lynches have been mentioned in connection with lynching, the OED says, the “particulars supplied by Ellicott, together with other evidence, clearly establish the fact that the originator of Lynch law” was Captain Lynch.

In its earliest uses, to “lynch” did not necessarily mean to execute someone without a legal trial. Here’s how the OED defines the verb:

“To condemn and punish by lynch law. In early use, implying chiefly the infliction of punishment such as whipping, tarring and feathering, or the like; now only, to inflict sentence of death by lynch law.”

An ugly chapter in our history!

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Q: Could you please weigh in on the recent trend of inserting “some” before precise numbers rather than estimates? For example, “The report was some 158 pages long.” It seems to have really caught on among the cable news outlets.

A: This strikes me as a silly way for a talking head to talk. The word “some” used with a number means approximately, so it should go with an estimate, not an exact number.

No one would say, “The report was approximately 158 pages long.” There’s nothing approximate about an exact number; a round number like 150 or 160 perhaps, but not 158.

So, cable news people, don’t use “some” with a number if you wouldn’t use “approximately” with it!

A cable guy who speaks this way has apparently been given precise information, but doesn’t want to be held responsible if it’s not right. So he decides to hedge his bet and insert “some” to make it look like an estimate!

By the way, the use of “some” to make an approximation has been around since Anglo-Saxon days.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a reference from King Alfred’s Boethius circa 888 (“some ten years”), as well as one from Studs Terkel in 1980 (“sixty-some contestants “).

Now, that’s quite a long time – some 1,100 years!

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Q: Why do we say “president-elect” rather than “president-elected”? In other words, why is the infinitive used here instead of the past participle? Granted it sounds better, but that may be because we are accustomed to it.

A: Since the early 15th century, the word “elect” has been used as an adjective meaning picked out or chosen, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s derived from the Latin word eligere (to pick out or choose).

In fact, “elect” was used in this sense for a century and a half before the past participle “elected” was used adjectivally to mean chosen, according to OED citations.

Here’s the OED‘s first published reference for the adjective “elect,” from The Chester Plays, a collection of miracle plays written around 1400: “Man, I saye againe, which is his owne eleckte, / Above all creatures seculierlye seleckte.”

And here’s a citation from The Cronicles of Englond, published by William Caxton in 1480: “Saul … was a good man and elect of God.”

In the 17th century, people began using the word “elect” alongside a noun (as in “bishop elect,” “bride elect,” and so on), to refer to someone selected for a position.

John Milton used this construction in Paradise Lost (1667) when he referred to the Israelites as “the Race elect.”

The earliest example in the OED of “elect” used in something akin to our modern political sense is this quotation from a 1742 translation of Cicero: “Sextius was one of the Tribunes elect.”

In short, “president-elect” has a long heritage.

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If you missed hearing Pat on the Leonard Lopate Show today, you can listen to her by clicking here.

Q: Today I sit on the couch, but yesterday I sat on the floor. I hope my daughter doesn’t hit my son today, because she hit him yesterday. So which form do we follow when I tell someone about what my infant did in his diaper yesterday?

A: You went through some entertaining rhetorical contortions to avoid using our four-letter word meaning to void the bowels (which the Oxford English Dictionary says is “not now in decent use”).

But I probably won’t be able to answer your question without using the word, so I may as well get it over with. Dictionaries now recognized these forms of the verb: “shit” (present tense) … “shit” or “shat” (past tense) … “shit” or “shat” (past participle).

Like “hit,” this is one of a handful of English verbs that can have identical forms in the present, past, and past participle.

So where did “shat” come from?

In Anglo-Saxon days, the verb “shit” was scitan. The Old English forms of the verb were scite … scat … sciten. (The letters “sc” were pronounced “sh” then, so there was indeed an Old English past tense that sounded like “shat.”)

But by the early 1300s the common forms of the verb were “shit … shitted … shitten.” Over time, English speakers began using a single word for all three forms: “shit … shit … shit.”

The variant “shat,” though, didn’t entirely disappear. The OED has eight citations for it from the 15th to the 19th centuries.

In the early 20th century, “shat” emerged as a humorous variant for the past tense and past participle (along the analogy of “sit … sat … sat”).

Not unexpectedly, many people came to believe that the humorous variant was the legitimate form, assuming any form of a vulgar slang term can be considered legit.

Through such misunderstandings, language changes, whether we like it or not. In other words, shit happens (a slang expression that made its debut in 1983 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, according to the OED).

Today, as I noted above, lexicographers recognize both “shit” and “shat” as the past tense and past participle, though “shit” is used more frequently.

If you’d like to read more, I had a blog item about the myth that “shit” is an acronym for “ship high in transport.” (My husband and I discuss many myths about English in Origins of the Specious, a new book that’s coming out in May from Random House.)

Now I need to walk my two Labs. It’s time for them to poop.

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