Month: April 2026

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

Why a ‘rise’ can be ‘meteoric’

Q: Why a “meteoric rise”? Meteors crash down on Earth.

A: The use of “meteoric” for something that rises may seem counterintuitive, but the adjective has been used that way for more than a century and a half, and the usage is standard English.

In fact, the usage ultimately comes from ancient Greek, where μετέωρος (meteoros), the source of “meteor” and “meteoric,” means raised or aloft.

Standard dictionaries define “meteoric” as relating to meteors or resembling them in speed or brilliance. All eight standard dictionaries we regularly consult use the phrase “meteoric rise” in their examples for the “speedy” sense.

Here are some examples: “a meteoric rise to fame” (Merriam-Webster, American Heritage): “His meteoric rise to stardom” (Webster’s New World); “her meteoric rise from dancer to professional actress” (Longman); “his meteoric rise in politics” (Dictionary.com), and “The group had a meteoric rise to fame in the 1990s” (Cambridge).

When “meteoric” first appeared in the early 17th century, it meant “relating to, or consisting of elements of, both the earth and the heavens,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The only OED citation for this obsolete sense is from a letter by John Donne to a friend, Sir Henry Goodyer, believed written in 1612:

“Our nature is Meteorique, we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven” (from Letters to Severall Persons of Honour Written by John Donne, Sometime Deane of St Pauls, 1651).

In the late 18th century, the dictionary says, “meteoric” started being used in referring to meteors or meteorites. It cites a satirical column in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 26, 1785, that compares current events to “a fiery ball” in the sky, then asks readers to pardon “this meteoric digression.”

In the late 18th or early 19th century, according to OED citations, “meteoric” began being used figuratively to mean “flashing or dazzling like a meteor, transiently or irregularly brilliant; rapid, swift; appearing suddenly.”

The first Oxford citation for the flashing sense is from “Cheerfulness,” an ode by the Irish poet Thomas Dermody, written sometime before his death in 1802: “His godlike hair, of braided rays, / His vest, a meteoric blaze” (from The Harp of Erin, Containing the Poetical Works of the Late T. Dermody, Vol. II, 1807).

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the speedy sense is from the Daily Chronicle (London), Jan. 16, 1895: “We had occasion to undertake a somewhat meteoric flight from Balmoral.”

However, we’ve found a much earlier example that includes the phrase “meteoric rise.” It compares the suddenness  of Byron’s success as a poet to the “meteoric rise” of Napoleon:

“He called himself, in one of his poems, ‘the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme;’ and there is some similarity between the suddenness and splendour of his literary career and the meteoric rise and domination of the First Buonaparte” (from The Student’s Manual of English Literature: A History of English Literature, 1864, by Thomas B. Shaw).

The phrase “meteoric rise” is much more common than “meteoric fall,” according to Google’s Ngram viewer, but the falling usage does appear once in a while, as in this example about the decline of the moth Alabama argillacea:

“Ode to Alabama: The Meteoric Fall of a Once Extraordinarily Abundant Moth” (the headline on an article by David L. Wagner in American Entomologist, July 1, 2009).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Making the cut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

‘New albums drop like leaves in the fall’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin Writing

‘Thou shalt not loose by it’

Q: How can we get everyone to quit using “loose” when they mean “lose”? It’s driving me insane!

A: The word “lose” is usually a verb with the sense of failing to win or hold on to something, while “loose” is usually an adjective meaning not securely attached, or less commonly a verb meaning to release or set free.

But as you’ve noticed, some people spell “lose” with an extra “o” in casual writing, a usage that some language references suggest may be influenced by the double “o” in “choose,” a word that rhymes with “lose.”

Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4th ed.), for example, says, “Possibly because lose is pronounced like choose, there is a common tendency to write that meaning with two letter os.”

Similarly, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary says, “the fact that lose rhymes so well with choose seems to prompt many people to assume that it too should contain a second O.”

Nevertheless, the spelling of “lose” as “loose” is relatively rare in contemporary books, newspapers, magazines, and other edited writing, both online and off. Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) describes it as Stage 1, the earliest level, in its Language Change Index.

Interestingly, the “oo” usage was fairly common in the early Modern English of the late 16th and 17th centuries, when Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and other writers used “loose” for “lose.” Here are a few examples from the Oxford English Dictionary:

•  “At length, the left winge of the Arcadians began to loose ground” (from The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, 1590, by Sir Philip Sidney).

•  “I thanke thee, thou shalt not loose by it” (from The Taming of the Shrew, written in the early 1590s by Shakespeare). We’ve expanded the cited comment by Petruchio in Act 1, Scene 2, one of many passages in Shakespeare’s plays that use “loose” in the modern sense of “lose.”

•  “As to a monoculos [one-eyed man] it is more to loose one eye, then to a man that hath two eyes” (Of Coulers of Good & Euill, 1597, by Francis Bacon). In the title, “coulers” (colors) refers to questionable arguments or reasons.

•  “The tempting stream, with one small drop to loose / In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe” (Paradise Lost, 1667, by Milton). We’ve expanded the citation, which describes the desire of the fallen angels to drink from the river Lethe and lose their torment in forgetfulness.

Our standard spelling and pronunciation of “lose” and “loose” evolved in Old English, Middle English, and early Modern English, according to the OED.

When “lose” first appeared in Old English, it was spelled losien, according to the dictionary,  but in Middle English it was variously losie, losien, losse, loss, loose, and lose.

As for “loose,” it was originally leowsin in Middle English, then lauce, laus, lowss, loyse, lous, lose, loiss, losyn, louce, louss, loss, looce, looze, los, loase, lows, lowis, lewce, leuse, and loose. 

By the middle to late 18th century, language authorities had recognized the standard modern spelling and pronunciation, but much of the population hadn’t got the word.

In A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson spelled “lose” and “loose” the now-standard ways in their various senses.

And in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), John Walker pronounced “lose” as LOOZ, and “loose” as LOOS. Walker uses an inverted circumflex over each “o” to indicate a “slender o,” like those in “do” and “soon.”

But a century later, language authorities were still commenting on the spelling of “lose” as “loose.” The entry for “lose” in The Century Dictionary (1889), for example, describes the verb as “formerly also loose” and “more or less confused with loose, untie, relax.”

And yet another century later, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994), points out that “this error is rare in edited material but fairly common in casual writing. A quick look in any dictionary is all that is needed to avoid it.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.