Month: June 2019

Q: I’ve had quite a few doctor’s visits and laboratory tests lately and the medical personnel I’ve encountered use “pee” for urinate, both as a directive (in a cup) or while discussing results. I don’t object to this usage, but I wonder if it isn’t a bit informal in this setting. What do you think?

A: We’ve had this experience, too. At doctors’ offices, not only are we invited to “pee” into a cup, but sometimes we’re even asked how regularly we “poop.”

It may be that in medical settings, this deliberate informality is intended to make patients comfortable and put them at ease—a welcome contrast to the bewildering technical terminology the patients are faced with.

Or perhaps it’s an extension of the calculated familiarity that’s sometimes called the “hospital we,” as in “How are we feeling this morning,” a usage we wrote about in 2011.

We aren’t bothered by these usages in a medical setting, largely because our minds are focused on more important things—like whether we’d better start putting our affairs in order!

As for the words themselves, we’ve written before about the etymology of “poop,” which didn’t mean “defecate” until the late 19th century.

And though we have discussed “piss” and words derived from it, we’ve never written about “pee.” So here goes.

As a verb meaning to urinate, “pee” is simply a shorter form of “piss.” It originally developed in the 18th century, when it stood for “the initial letter of piss,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When it was first used, “pee” was a transitive verb—that is, it required an object, the thing that was urinated in or on.

The dictionary’s earliest example is about a cat: “He never stealt, though he was poor, / Nor ever pee’d his master’s floor” (from Ebenezer Picken’s Poems and Epistles, Mostly in the Scottish Dialect, 1788).

Early in the 19th century, the verb was also used intransitively (without an object), and again the OED’s earliest citation is Scottish: “To pee, to make water” (from John Jamieson’s Supplement to the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 1825).

Standard dictionaries in the US and the UK now describe the use of “pee” to mean urinate as informal—that is, acceptable in speech and casual writing.

Here’s an example from Lexico, formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online: “In the bathroom, the girl in the next stall answers her cell phone while she’s peeing.’

In modern British English, the phrase “peed off” is used in the same sense as “pissed off,” according to Lexico, which includes this among its examples:

“She looked really rather peed off but it made for a nugget of great telly.”

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Q: I assume that “equity” and “equality” are related if you go back far enough. Please write about the history of these two words. “Equity” seems to be replacing “equality” at the university where I teach.

A: Broadly speaking, both words mean the quality of being fair or equal. Their ultimate source, and that of their many relatives in English, is the Latin adjective aequus (level, even, just)—not to be confused with the noun equus (horse).

As they’re used in modern English, “equity” and “equality” may occasionally overlap, but they’re generally used in different ways—“equity” in regard to fairness, “equality” in regard to sameness.

Here are the definitions in Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online), which are representative of those in other standard dictionaries:

“equity: The quality of being fair and impartial.” The example given: “equity of treatment.”

“equality: The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities.” The example given: “an organization aiming to promote racial equality.”

(Lexico is an online collaboration in which Oxford University Press provides content for a website owned by the Lexico Publishing Group, owner of Dictionary.com.)

Both words entered English writing in the 14th century, “equity” around 1315 and “equality” in the late 1390s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, traces the two terms, along with their relative “equal” (early 1390s), to classical Latin words derived from the adjective we mentioned above, aequus.

While “equal” came directly from the Latin aequālis, “equity” and “equality” took a less direct route into English, by way of Old French.

First on the English scene was “equity,” from the Old French equité (a derivative of the Latin aequitātem).

The Middle English spellings varied widely (“equite,” “equyte,” “equitee,” and so on), but from the beginning the noun had to do with what the OED calls “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality; even-handed dealing.”

The dictionary’s earliest known use is a reference to the divine mystery of God’s “domes [judgments] in equyte” (circa 1315, from a poem by William de Shoreham, vicar of Chart-Sutton).

In legal language, “equity” has a special sense, one believed to have existed in writing since 1591. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it this way: “Justice achieved not simply according to the strict letter of the law but in accordance with principles of substantial justice and the unique facts of the case.”

As the OED says, this meaning of “equity” comes from the notion that a decision “in equity” was “one given in accordance with natural justice, in a case for which the law did not provide adequate remedy, or in which its operation would have been unfair.”

While “equity” had meanings related to fairness and justice, “equality” had to do with sameness or equivalency. It came into English from the Old French équalité (today it’s égalité), which in turn was a borrowing of the Latin aequālitātem (from aequālis).

The noun “equality” is generally defined, the OED says, as “the quality or condition of being equal,” and in the earliest citation it’s used in a physical sense:

“Þe see hatte equor, and haþ þat name of equalite, ‘euennesse,’ for he is euen and playne.” (“The sea hath aequor [Latin for an even, level surface], and hath that name of equality, ‘evenness,’ for it is even and plain.”)

That passage is from John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1398, of De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopedic Latin work compiled by the medieval scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus. We’ve expanded the quotation and taken it from a different manuscript than the OED used.

Other senses of “equality” followed. In the early 1400s, the word was used to mean equal “quantity, amount, value, intensity, etc.,” Oxford says. And in the early 1500s it was used for equal “dignity, rank, or privileges with others” or “being on an equal footing.”

Toward the end of the 16th century, these usages led to a new sense of the word: “the condition of being equal in power, ability, achievement, or excellence.” The OED credits Shakespeare with the first written evidence:

“The on-set and retyre / Of both your Armies, whose equality / By our best eyes cannot be censured” (King John, probably written in the 1590s).

One of the most common meanings today emerged in the late 19th century in the phrase “equality of opportunity,” which the OED defines as “equal chance and right to seek success in one’s chosen sphere regardless of social factors such as class, race, religion, and sex.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an 1891 issue of the Economic Review (London): “It will possibly, however, be contended that here the ideal is equality of Opportunity.”

Today the phrases “equality of opportunity” and “equal opportunity” (first recorded in this sense in Britain in 1925) are both common—though not equally common. The shorter “equal opportunity” is more popular, according to Google’s Ngram viewer.

The noun phrase “equal-opportunity employer” originated in the US in the 1960s, the OED says. Oxford’s definition is “one who professes not to discriminate against applicants or employees on such grounds”—that is, “race, gender, physical or mental handicap, etc.”

As we said above, the Latin adjective aequus gave us many English words beside “equity” and “equality.” We already mentioned “equal,” which was first recorded in a scientific work by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1391.

A passage in A Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391) explains how to regulate the complex astronomical instrument, and Chaucer uses “howres equales” and “howres in-equales” to mean “equal hours” and “unequal hours.”

That early use of “equal” retains a whiff of the Latin aequālis in its spelling, “equales”; the modern spelling didn’t appear until the 16th century.

Other English words that can be traced to aequus include “iniquity” (1300s); “equation” (1393); “equator” (circa 1400); “equinox” (c. 1400); “equate” (1400s); “equivalent” (c. 1460); “equalize” (1500s); “equidistant” (probably before 1560); “equivocate” (1590); “equivocal” (1601-02); “equanimity” (1607); “adequate” (1608) and “inadequate” (1675); “equilibrium” (1608); “equable” (1643); and a latecomer, “egalitarian” (1885).

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Q: My wife and I started noticing the use  of “ground” for “floor” a few years ago. Now it’s rampant and almost universal. I will just scream at the TV, “It’s the FLOOR dang it!” Is there any reasonable explanation for this widespread abuse?

A: Usually, as we say in a 2009 post, the “floor” is what you walk on inside a building, and the “ground” is what you walk on outside. However, people have been using “ground” for “floor” in the indoors sense since at least the mid-19th century.

We wouldn’t describe the usage as “rampant” or “almost universal.” It’s out there, but not out there enough to get into most online standard dictionaries. Only two of the ten that we’ve consulted include it—with similar qualifications.

Collins describes the use of “ground” for “the floor of a room” as “mainly British,” while Merriam-Webster Unabridged says it’s “chiefly British,” and gives this example from Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point: “kneeling on the ground beside the couch he leaned over her.”

From what we’ve observed, the use of “ground” for “floor” appears in both American and British English.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, includes it without the “British” qualification (or any other).

In fact, the earliest written example in the OED is from An American Dictionary of the English Language (1847), by Noah Webster. The dictionary, a revised and enlarged edition published four years after Webster’s death, defines “ground” as, among other things, “a floor or pavement.”

The OED also cites British sources, including this example (which we’ve expanded) from Murder in the Mews (1937), a short story by Agatha Christie: “We came along at once and forced the door open. Mrs. Allen was lying in a heap on the ground shot through the head.”

As we’ve said, the usage isn’t new. You became aware of it a few years ago, and you now seem to hear or see it everywhere.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the “recency illusion.” The linguist Arnold Zwicky came up with the term, which he’s defined as “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

The use of “ground” for “floor” may have you screaming at the TV, but it doesn’t seem to bother language commentators. It isn’t mentioned in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.), Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.), Pat’s Woe Is I (4th ed.), or other guides.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the usage begins showing up in more dictionaries, perhaps labeled “informal” or “colloquial.” If that happens, usage writers may have something to say about it.

Is there an explanation for this use of “ground”? Well, perhaps it was influenced by the use of the phrase “ground floor” for the floor of a building at ground level. That phrase appeared a couple of centuries before people began using “ground” to mean “floor.” However, we haven’t seen any evidence for or against this idea.

As you know, the noun “ground” can refer to many things other than the surface of the earth—a parade ground, grounds for divorce, coffee grounds, a ground for an electrical connection, the grounds around a house, etc. So it’s not surprising that people might use such a flexible word to mean a “floor.”

If the “ground” at the bottom of an ocean can be called the “floor,” a usage that dates back to the 17th century, is it really so outlandish to call a building’s “floor” the “ground”?

(In “Lycidas,” a 1637 elegy for a friend drowned in the Irish Sea, Milton refers to the seabed as “the wat’ry floore.”)

When the noun “ground” first appeared in Anglo-Saxon times (spelled grund or grunde), it referred to the bottom of something—the sea, a well, a ditch, and so on, according to the OED.

Perhaps the oldest citation is from Beowulf, an Old English epic that may have been written as early as 725: “Me to grunde geteah fah feondscaða” (“A sea fiend dragged me to the ground”).

In the 10th century, “ground” came to mean the surface of the earth. The first Oxford example is from the Blickling Homilies (971): “gefyldan eal oþ grund” (“they all fell to the ground”).

When “floor” showed up in Old English (spelled flór), it referred to the wood, brick, stone, etc. that people walked on in a room.

The first OED citation is from King Ælfred’s translation (circa 888) of De Consolatione Philosophiæ, a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius: “He gefeoll niwol of dune on þa flor” (“He fell headlong down on the floor”).

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