Author: Pat and Stewart

Q: “Inartful” seems to be the word of choice now for excusing comments by public figures that cross the line, especially those by President Trump. However, I can’t find it in my American Heritage and Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Is it a legitimate word?

A: Yes, the adjective “inartful” is a legitimate word that showed up in the early 19th century. But it’s in only one of the 10 standard dictionaries that we regularly consult. Lexico, the former Oxford Dictionaries Online, defines it as “lacking artifice; unsophisticated, unrefined; wanting polish or technical skill. Later also: unsubtle, tactless.”

Wiktionary, an online collaborative dictionary, has only that later sense: “Awkwardly expressed but not necessarily untrue; ill-phrased; inexpedient.” (Merriam-Webster online has an entry for a similarly spelled word, “unartful,” which it defines as “lacking craft” or “lacking skill.”)

“Inartful” is now generally used in that newer sense of being awkwardly expressed, according to our searches of the News on the Web corpus, a database of newspaper and magazine articles from 2010 to the present.

Although the term was relatively popular in the early 19th century, “inartful” fell out of favor for a century and a half until it was revived in the late 20th century, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books.

As you’ve noticed, it’s sometimes used by supporters of President Trump to explain his more controversial comments, though we haven’t seen him use the word himself. Here are a few “inartful” examples from both Democrats and Republicans:

“Do I think some of his verbal formulations are inartful? Yeah” (Ken Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati and Trump transition official, on the President’s language, Politico, Aug. 3, 2019).

“I think the president is often inartful, but remarkably effective” (Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker, Washington Examiner, July 16, 2019).

“He said the truth in an inartful way” (Jesse Jackson on former Vice President Joe Biden’s comment that he worked with segregationists when he was in the Senate, Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2019).

“The expression I used the other day was inartful: Of course America is great and, of course, America has always been great” (Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York on his saying, two days earlier, “We’re not going to make America great again—it was never that great,” Politico, Aug. 15, 2008).

As for its etymology, “inartful” originally meant lacking artifice—that is, natural. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early 18th-century political tract: “A Man of plain and Inartful Simplicity of Manners” (from The Life of Aristides the Athenian, anonymously published in Dublin in 1714).

But all of the OED’s examples from the 19th century onward use the word in its negative senses (unskilled, badly done, clumsy, tactless): “lace … clotted together in a very inartful manner” (1831); “inartful language” (1957, describing poor writing); “flawed and inartful drafting” (1986); “this inartful reference to his client’s probable future” (2005).

The word’s origins are simple enough. It was formed, the OED says, when the negative prefix “in-” was added to “artful.” So on the surface, at least, “inartful” is comparable to another “artful” opposite—“artless,” a word that appeared slightly earlier than “artful” in the late 16th century.

Both “artless” (first recorded in 1586) and “artful” (1590) were formed with the addition of suffixes to the noun “art,” which since the 1300s had meant not only skill but also artifice. And these new words formed from “art” reflected its two-pronged meanings.

Consequently, for several hundred years “artless” has meant unskilled, ignorant, inexperienced, clumsy; but it has also meant free of artifice—that is, sincere, natural, without guile. Similarly, “artful” has meant skilled or clever, but it has also meant artificial, cunning, deceitful.

These varied meanings of the two adjectives are still found in current usage, according to standard dictionaries. But in the case of “artless,” the OED says, “the usual sense” now is “without guile; sincere, ingenuous.” And in many standard dictionaries, the leading definition of “artful” is sly or cunning.

Meanwhile, as we said earlier, since the 19th century “inartful” has had only negative meanings—clumsy, tactless, and so on. So while “inartful” and “artless” look like they’d mean the same thing, they’re by no means synonymous as used today.

We borrowed the title of this post from the headline of an On Language column by William Safire in the New York Times Magazine (Aug. 4, 1985). In that column, Safire said “inartful” wasn’t a legitimate word. Even years later, in a 2008 column, he said it was “lexicographically unrecognized” (the OED’s entry for “inartful” was not written until 2009).

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[Note: This post was updated on Dec. 23, 2020.]

Q: In an article about the Gilroy, CA, shooting, the NY Times says investigators “also are continuing to scrub various electronic devices and trying to learn if he had any help carrying out the shooting.” Isn’t this an incorrect use of “scrub,” which I’d always understood to mean, in this context, to make data unrecoverable?

A: No, that’s not the only definition of “scrub” in digital technology. When used in technical senses, the verb “scrub” can mean either (1) to clean or erase, or (2) to examine by fast-forwarding or rewinding.

These uses of “scrub” are well known to people familiar with digital and audio/video technologies. They’re becoming more common as time goes by, though the second one is rather new.

However, in searching the ten standard British and American dictionaries we usually consult, we were surprised to find that only two have caught up to these senses of the word.

For instance, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has definitions having to do with cleaning and erasing; here they are, along with examples:

“a. To maintain the integrity of by finding and correcting errors: software that automatically scrubs stored data.

“b. To erase in such a way as to render unrecoverable: scrubbed the laptop’s hard drive to destroy incriminating evidence.”

And Dictionary.com has this in the audio/video sense: “to fast-forward or rewind in an audio or video file by dragging the progress marker forward or backward across the timeline bar: Scrub forward through the pregame and start playback from the kickoff.”

Some older, specialized reference books have limited definitions too, perhaps because fast-forwarding and rewinding technology was less developed at the time. Here are examples of the verb as used in computer science:

“To examine a large amount of data and eliminate duplicate or unneeded items” (McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 2003). “To wipe information off a disk or remove data from store” (Simon Collin’s Dictionary of Computing, 2009).

In its nontechnical usage, “scrub” has similar senses: (1) to vigorously clean something by rubbing, as in “he scrubbed the kitchen floor,” and (2) to cancel or eliminate, as in “the launch was scrubbed” or “his horse was scrubbed from the race.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has no entries for computer senses of “scrub,” at least not yet. As for less technical uses, the OED describes the verb as Germanic in origin and “of obscure history.”

The verb was first recorded in Middle English writing in the 1300s, when it meant to curry-comb a horse, a sense that may have come from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch terms for scraping or scrubbing.

In its modern sense—to clean by hard rubbing—“the word may perhaps have been re-imported from Dutch as a nautical term,” the OED suggests.

This current sense of “scrub” was first recorded in the 16th century, at a time when Holland was a major naval power and many Dutch nautical words came into English. In those days, the English word meant “to clean (esp. a floor, wood, etc.) by rubbing with a hard brush and water.”

However, the earliest OED example, from 1595, uses the term figuratively. It’s from a contemporary account of Sir Francis Drake’s final, disastrous expedition against Spain in the West Indies:

“If part of our companie had been sent thither upon our first arrival at Rio de la Hacha, doubtles we had done much goode, but now they [the Spaniards] had scrube it very bare.” (From Sir Francis Drake His Voyage, 1595, a contemporary narrative written by a passenger, Thomas Maynarde. In December 1595, Drake’s men landed at the city only to find that the Spanish had “scrubbed” it bare—that is, removed everything of value.)

The dictionary’s earliest use of “scrub” meaning to cancel or eliminate is from the early 19th century, and is found in the private writings of Sir Walter Scott:

“If I were alone, I could scrub it [a visit to London], but there is no doing that with Anne” (a diary entry written March 22, 1828, and first published in The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1941).

The dictionary defines the word in this sense as “to cancel, scrap, call off; to eliminate, erase; to reject, dismiss.” It adds that this usage was “reinforced by the popularity of the expression amongst servicemen in the war of 1939–45.”

Oxford includes several WWII uses, both British and American, including this enlightening passage from a letter to the editor of the Spectator. The letter, from a British naval officer, ran on May 25, 1945, in response to a review of a book on air force slang:

“The author can possibly justify the inclusion of the term ‘scrub,’ meaning ‘to cancel,’ in a collection of R.A.F. slang. The expression is in common use in the Royal Navy and has been for many generations. It derives from the days when all signals and orders were written on a slate. When the signals were cancelled or orders executed, the words on the slate were ‘scrubbed out’ or, equally correctly ‘washed out.’ ”

[Note: Two readers called our attention to the increasingly common fast-forward and rewind sense of “scrub.” As one commented: “Audio and video scrubbing is moving quickly through a recording (fast-forward or fast-rewind) while the recording plays in order to find a specific spot in the recording. It does not seem like a stretch to me to go from searching an audio or video recording for something specific to searching data recorded on a computer drive for something specific.”]

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Q: Can you help me understand what ’Change means in this sentence from a short story I’m reading: “The tears just flowed like thawing snow; as they do in nature, though less often on ’Change.” The apostrophe and capital letter seem to be very confusing here. The author was an Englishman.

A: In Britain, the term “change” or “Change” has referred to a money exchange, a stock exchange, or a commercial exchange for hundreds of years, though the usage isn’t seen much now. In the late 18th century, an apostrophe was added in the mistaken belief that “Change” was short for “Exchange.”

In the sentence you’re asking about, the word apparently refers to a stock exchange. It’s from “The Fetch,” a story by Robert Aickman from his collection Intrusions: Strange Tales (1980).

The narrator, a merchant banker in London, uses it in describing the tears shed by his new wife’s maid, who has discovered that the banker’s ancestral home in Scotland is haunted.

The noun “change” was first used in the Middle Ages to mean a place for bartering or money-changing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It had this sense for centuries before “exchange” came to mean the same thing and eventually replaced it. Here’s the story.

In the business sense, a “change” was originally “a place for the conversion of money or bullion,” and “a place where merchants or bankers transact business,” the OED says. Those meanings today are obsolete or historical, the dictionary adds.

The word in these senses can be traced to a verb in post-classical Latin, cambiare, which in the 8th century meant “to exchange, to give in exchange, to obtain by exchange” and in the 11th century meant “to change money,” the dictionary says. From medieval Latin, the usage passed into Old French, Anglo-Norman, and finally into English.

Around the year 1200, Oxford explains, chaunge in Anglo-Norman was used “with reference to a money changer’s table,” and toward the end of the 1200s or perhaps earlier, “La Chaunge” was used “as the name of such a place in London.”

Early English uses in the dictionary include “Le Eldechaunge” (1317) and “Le Oldechaunge” (1389), meaning “the Old Change.” (This in fact was the name of a lane in London where such business was conducted in those days. Similarly, in the 18th century, “Change Alley” was a street in the City of London where many stockbrokers did business at coffee houses.)

So “change” long preceded “exchange” as a noun for a place of trade. It wasn’t until the mid-16th century that an “exchange” came to mean a money-changer’s office or “a building in which the merchants of a town assemble for the transaction of business,” the OED says.

The word acquired an official stamp when the capitalized noun “Exchange” came to mean the Royal Exchange, a commercial center in the City of London where merchants traded goods.

The building, modeled on the Antwerp Bourse, was constructed in 1566 and originally called the “Burse,” but in 1571 Queen Elizabeth gave it the title “Royal Exchange.”

The OED’s earliest written use of “Exchange” as short for “Royal Exchange” dates from 1589, but no doubt merchants used it in speech much earlier.

Beginning in the late 17th century, according to OED citations, the phrase “upon Change” (later “on Change”) was used to mean “at the Royal Exchange” or “on the stock exchange.”

In the early 1800s, the apostrophe crept in. As Oxford explains, the shorter word has been “often apprehended since the 19th cent. as a shortening (with elision of the initial syllable) of exchange … and hence frequently spelt ’change.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a Nov. 23, 1821, entry in the English journalist William Cobbett’s diary of his travels through rural England:

“Young wives standing in need of something to keep down the unruly ebullitions which are apt to take place while the ‘dearies’ are gone hobbling to ’Change.” (Cobbett’s travel diary was first published in serial form from 1822 to 1826 in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, and as a book, Rural Rides, in 1830.)

Henry W. Fowler, in the 1926 first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, notes that “Change” is “not an abbreviation of Exchange, & should have no apostrophe.” Sir Ernest Gowers repeated that in the 1965 second edition. However, the usage was so rare by the late 20th century that R. W. Burchfield dropped the entry in his revised 1998 third edition.

The example you came across in that 1980 short story is unusual. In searches of newspaper databases, we’ve found plenty of examples from the 19th century, but very few from the 20th later than the 1930s. Today the usage is found mainly in historical writing, as is the case with this OED citation:

“He knew he could make money on ’Change—he had demonstrated that over the last few years.” (From Norman B. Ream, a 2013 biography of a 19th-century businessman, by Paul Ryscavage.)

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Q: Gretchen Whitmer, our new governor in Michigan, ran at least in part on a pledge to “fix the damn roads.” She hauls out that line on a regular basis. When did “damned” shrink to “damn”? And for that matter when did “waxed paper” and “popped corn” become “wax paper” and “popcorn”?

A: Both “damn” and “damned” as well as “wax” and “waxed” have been used adjectivally for hundreds of years, while the movie munchie has been written variously as “popped corn,” “pop corn,” and “popcorn” over the last century and a half.

The loss of the “-ed” in these terms isn’t at all surprising. The “-ed” ending can be difficult to pronounce before a consonant. As a result, it’s often dropped in speech, or not heard when pronounced. This can lead to its loss in writing. For example, “ice cream” and “iced cream” both appeared in the 17th century, but only the “d”-less version has survived.

The use of “damned” as an adjective to express disapproval or add emphasis showed up in the late 16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The first OED citation, which uses the word in both senses, is from The Taming of the Shrew, a Shakespeare comedy believed written in the early 1590s: “Where is that damned villaine Tranio?”

The earliest Oxford example for “damn” used similarly, which we’ll expand a bit, appeared in the late 18th century: “a man that was in Company there the evening before that cut up a caper and was noted for a damn cuss” (from a March 12, 1775, entry in the Narragansett [R.I.] Historical Register).

Although you can find this use of both “damn” and “damned” in standard dictionaries, the shorter version is more popular now in newspapers, magazines, and books.

A search of the News on the Web Corpus, a database of online newspaper and magazine articles from 2010 to the present, indicates that the expression your governor used, “damn roads,” is 20 times as popular as “damned roads.” A search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, shows the unsuffixed version is more than twice as popular.

The earliest OED example for “wax” used adjectivally is from Anglo-Saxon times: “Funalia, cerei, waex-condel” (an entry for “wax candle” in the Corpus Glossary, circa 725, a Latin-Old English glossary preserved at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). The Old English waex in the compound waex-condel is an attributive noun—a noun used adjectivally.

The dictionary’s first example for “waxed” used as a participial adjective is from a Middle English account of St. Augustine’s life, written sometime before 1380. Here’s an expanded version of the citation from Sammlung Altenglische Legenden, an 1878 collection of medieval English legends edited by Carl Horstmann:

“Þe ache for þe tyme was so stronge / þat he lafte þe speche of his tonge. / Þerfore in a waxed table / he wrot þat alle men, wiþouten fable, / for him schulde preize God witerly” (“The ache was so strong that he was speechless for the time being. Therefore he wrote on a waxed tablet that all honest men should praise God truly”).

As for paper treated with wax, the phrase “waxed paper” showed up in the mid-18th century, while “wax paper” appeared in the early 19th, according to our searches of digitized books. Here are the earliest examples we’ve seen for each phrase:

“The merchant now thinks it necessary to enclose all his country despatches in oiled or waxed paper cases, as he is aware that the rivers will soon be flooded, and that the Tapall [postman] must swim over with the post-bags on his head” (from Sketches of India, 1750, by Henry Moses).

“The pattern must first be cut out, and afterwards traced on the wax paper with a pencil, and again cut out with a sharp pair of scissors” (from The Wreath, Or Ornamental Artist, 1835, written anonymously by “A Lady”). The passage is from instructions for making a decorative light fixture out of wax paper.

You can find both “wax paper” and “waxed paper” in standard dictionaries. The shorter version is nearly twice as popular in the NOW database of online newspapers and magazines, but the two phrases are equally popular in the digitized books searched by Ngram Viewer.

Finally, we get to “popcorn,” which was “pop corn” when it first appeared in writing in the 19th century as the corn grown for popping.

The earliest example in the OED is from a newspaper in Norwalk, Ohio: “We believe, if the pop corn was not flinty, it would be a better crop, and certainly a more productive one, than the large eared corn” (from the Huron [County] Reflector, May 15, 1838).

It’s “popped corn” in the dictionary’s first citation for corn that’s been popped: “I have been popping corn to-night, which is only a more rapid blossoming of the seed under a greater than July heat. The popped corn is a perfect winter flower, hinting of anemones and houstonias” (from a Jan. 3, 1842, entry in Henry David Thoreau’s journal).

We’ve found several 19th-century examples of the snack written as “popcorn,” the only version now in standard dictionaries. This one is from the October 1879 issue of Potter’s American Monthly: “PopCorn balls and cider, that’s the bill of fare; popcorn and cider. There is something in a five-cent popcorn ball that just knocks a butter-brown country girl off her pins.”

Finally, here’s an early 20th-century example with the usual spelling: “He purchased a large bag of popcorn” (Just William, 1922, a collection of short stories by the English writer Richmal Crompton).

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Q: I keep seeing “admonishment,” “abolishment,” and “diminishment,” though I assume that correct usage dictates “admonition,” “abolition,” and “diminution.” Are these “-ment” words recently fashioned? Do their users deserve punishment (or punition)?

A: Interestingly, all six of those nouns (the ones ending in “-tion” as well as those ending in “-ment”) showed up hundreds of years ago, borrowed to one degree or another from Anglo-Norman, Middle French, or Old French, but ultimately derived from Latin.

The “-tion” versions you prefer have been preferred by English speakers for centuries, though they seem to be used less these days. As far as we can tell, there’s been no significant increase lately in the use of the “-ment” versions.

That’s the impression we have after comparing the three pairs in Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words or phrases in digitized books: (1) “admonition” / “admonishment,” (2) “abolition” / “abolishment,” and (3) “diminution” / “diminishment.”

We suspect that your belief that the “-ment” versions may be new is an example of the “recency illusion,” a term coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky for “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

The older of these words, “admonishment,” appeared in the late 13th century. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a Kentish sermon dated around 1275: “So us defendet þo ilke þinges fram senne and fram þe amonestement of þo dieule” (“So these very things defended us from sin and from the admonishment of the devil”).

“Admonition” showed up a century later. The earliest OED example is from Chaucer’s translation (circa 1380) of De Consolatione Philosophiæ, a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius: “Nedeþ it ȝitte … of rehersyng or of amonicioun” (“It needs … of rehearsing and admonition”).

Both “admonishment” and “admonition” are ultimately derived from the classical Latin verb admonēre (remind, advise, urge, warn, inform, or rebuke).

As for “diminution,” the OED cites another Chaucer work, the poem Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1374), for the earliest example: “To encrece or maken dyminucioun Of my langage.”

“Diminishment” arrived nearly two centuries later. The first Oxford example is from a religous tract by the English cleric John Bales: “All is to demynyshment of a kynges power” (from The Actes of Englysh Votaries, a 1551 critique of the monastic system).

The two nouns ultimately come from two classical Latin words: the verb dīminuĕre (make smaller) and the adjective minūtus (small).

(We wrote a post in in 2014 on the common misspelling of “diminution” as “dimunition.”)

The last two words, “abolition” and “abolishment,” showed up around the same time in the early 16th century.

The first Oxford citation for “abolition” is from The Supplycacyon of Soulys, a 1529 treatise in which Thomas More defends the Roman Catholic clergy against Reformist critics: “They by the dystruccyon of the clergy, meane the clere abolycyon of Chrystys fayth.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for “abolishment” is from Common Places of Scripture, Richard Taverner’s 1538 translation of the writings of the Lutheran theologian Erasmus Sarcerius: “Where so euer throughout the worlde the abolyshment of the bysshop of Romes vsurped power shal be bruted or cronicled.”

As for the suffixes, “-ment” ultimately comes from the classical Latin -mentum (used to form nouns from verbs), while “-tion” comes from -io and io-nem (added to the t ending of Latin participial stems to form nouns).

Getting back to your question, do the users of these “-ment” words deserve punishment (or punition)? No. We have no objection to the “-ment” versions. As for the relatively rare “punition,” that’s more likely to raise eyebrows these days.

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Q: I’ve encountered “mayn’t” often lately— e.g., in Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, etc.—but my usage manual says the contraction is now rare. What happened to it?

A: The use of “mayn’t” is indeed rare today, though it was common in the 19th century, when Lewis Carroll was writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and in the early 20th, when Kenneth Grahame published The Wind in the Willows.

Many standard dictionaries still have entries for “mayn’t,” the contraction of “may not,” but it’s rarely heard now in British English and it’s virtually nonexistent in American English.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, says “mayn’t is rare in all varieties of English.”

Suzanne Romaine, writing in The Cambridge History of the English Language (1992), says the contraction “moved from colloquial normality to great rarity in the course of the twentieth century.”

In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum note the virtual demise of “mayn’t” as a negative auxiliary verb: “though current in the earlier part of the twentieth century, it has now virtually disappeared from the language.”

And the British linguist David Crystal, in a Jan. 25, 2015, entry on his website, says “mayn’t” is “very rare in British English, and would hardly ever be used in American English.”

Why is “mayn’t” dying out or dead? Probably because English speakers are using “can’t” instead. And that’s undoubtedly the result of the increasing use of “can” for “may” as an auxiliary verb to ask or grant permission, a subject that we discussed in 2017.

As we say in the earlier post, the traditional rule is that “can” means “able to” and “may” means “permitted to.” For example, “Jesse can run fast” and “May I go for a jog, Mom?”

However, standard dictionaries now accept the use of both “can” and “may” as auxiliary verbs for asking permission, though some suggest that “can” here is informal.

As Merriam-Webster Unabridged explains, “The use of can to ask or grant permission has been common since the 19th century and is well established, although some commentators feel may is more appropriate in formal contexts.”

The M-W lexicographers suggest that the permission sense of “can” evolved from the use of both auxiliaries to express possibility, “because the possibility of one’s doing something may depend on another’s acquiescence.”

The contraction “mayn’t” showed up in writing in the early 17th century, according to citations in the OED. The dictionary’s earliest example is from “On the University Carrier,” a 1631 poem that Milton wrote during his Cambridge years: “If I mayn’t carry, sure I’ll ne’er be fetched.”

The comic poem marks the death of Tobias Hobson, driver of the coach that carried students between the university and The Bull, a London Inn. Hobson also hired out horses. The expression “Hobson’s choice” is said to come from his insistence that anyone hiring a horse must choose the one nearest the stable door.

We’ll end with a “mayn’t” example from Alice in Wonderland. It’s a bit long, but we couldn’t resist the pun at the beginning of this excerpt.

“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily: “really you are very dull!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, “Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these words:

“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”

“I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.

“You did,” said the Mock Turtle.

“Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock Turtle went on.

“We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”

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Q: I’ve read that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been subjected to “progressively severe” punishment. I see that sort of usage a lot, and it seems to require a “more” (“progressively more severe”). Am I too picky?

A: Yes, you’re too picky. This doesn’t raise a red flag with us, perhaps because the use of the adverb “progressively” to mean “gradually” or “steadily” seems to have a built-in sense of “more”—that is, it suggests an increase unless a word like “less” is added to indicate otherwise.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, defines “progressively” in this sense as “by continuous advance; step by step, gradually; successively.”

Cambridge Dictionary online, one of the few standard dictionaries with an entry for “progressively,” defines it similarly and cites “increasingly” as a synonym. (Most dictionaries list “progressively” without comment in their entries for the adjective “progressive.”)

Another standard dictionary, Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online), defines the adverb as “steadily” or “in stages,” and has more than half a dozen examples in which “progressively” is used by itself  to mean “increasingly” or “increasingly and steadily.” Here are a few of them:

“Over the past decade, straw burning has been progressively prohibited” … “The drought situation is getting progressively worse” … “An ever-increasing population is progressively intensifying the stresses on the environment” … “He has progressively moved his students towards a fully integrated digital design process.”

Lexico also has several examples with “more,” including these: “The approval process became progressively more difficult and politicized” … “It was progressively more difficult to find work in the theatre” … “I created a situation in which my job could only get progressively more difficult.” Although “more” in these examples adds emphasis, it could be dropped without significantly changing the sense.

The dictionary doesn’t have any examples in which “progressively” is used with “less” to mean “decreasingly,” but here’s one from a recent news article about the impact of testing driverless cars on public streets:

“Still, we can rest assured that the testing will become progressively less disruptive to us as the technology advances” (the Hill, May 14, 2019).

When the adverb “progressively” showed up in the early 17th century, it meant “in a progressive manner; in the way of progression or progress,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first citation is from Syntagma Logicum, a 1620 treatise on logic, in which Thomas Granger writes of “the conforming, adapting, and disposing” of things “being inuented progressiuely.”

In the 20th century, the dictionary says, “progressively” developed its modern sense of “in a forward-looking, innovative, or avant-garde manner.” The first Oxford citation is from The Miracle of Right Thought (1910), a self-improvement book by the American writer Orison Swett Marden:

“The man who would succeed must think success, must think upward. He must think progressively, creatively, constructively, inventively, and, above all, optimistically.”

The adverb is derived from the adjective “progressive,” which was originally a term in astronomy for “moving forward in space,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s first citation for the adjective is from a late 14th-century translation of a Latin treatise that purports to predict the weather by using astrology:

“A good shorte table for to knawe when all the planetis are stacionarye or retrograde or progressive.” (From Exafrenon Prognosticationum Temporis, by the English mathematician, astronomer, and abbott Richard of Wallingford. The Latin treatise was written in the early 1300s, and the OED dates the anonymous English translation at sometime before 1388.)

Over the years, the adjective “progressive” has taken on many other senses. Here are the current meanings, with examples, from Lexico:

• “Happening or developing gradually or in stages: a progressive decline in popularity.”
• “(Of a medical condition) increasing in severity: progressive liver failure.”
• “(Of taxation or a tax) increasing as a proportion of the sum taxed as that sum increases: steeply progressive income taxes.”
• “(Of a person or idea) favouring social reform: a relatively progressive Minister of Education.”
• “Favouring change or innovation: the most progressive art school in Britain.”
• “Relating to or denoting a style of rock music popular especially in the 1970s and characterized by classical influences, the use of keyboard instruments, and lengthy compositions: classic progressive albums … progressive bands like Black Sabbath and the Edgar Broughton Band.”

The adverb “progressively” has evolved too, though not as extensively. It is now primarily used in only the gradually developing and innovative senses of the adjective, as in these Lexico definitions and examples:

• “Steadily; in stages: successive governments progressively increased expenditure on welfare … symptoms become progressively worse over a period of years.”
• “In a forward-looking, innovative manner: we have a strong product but to retain this momentum we must think progressively … a circle of progressively minded reformers.”

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Q: A friend gave me a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Almost from the start, the creature is referred to as “the wretch.” An online search indicates that some variation of “wretch” appears 64 times in a novel of only 200 pages—more often than “monster” (33) or “dæmon” (20). But “wretch” seems to have lost its punch in our times.

A: In modern English, “wretch” principally means someone who’s extremely unfortunate, an object of pity. But less commonly it also means one who’s despicable, an object of loathing.

Both senses of the word have been around for more than a thousand years, and nearly all standard dictionaries still accept both. But the bad-guy sense has slipped to second place, and today some British dictionaries label it “literary” or “humorous” or “informal” (as in “those ungrateful wretches!”).

In Mary Shelley’s time, both meanings of “wretch” were common and she uses them both in her novel. Sometimes she calls Frankenstein’s creature a “wretch” because he’s suffering in misery and loneliness, and the reader is supposed to feel sorry for him. But at other times, as when he murders a child, the “wretch” is loathsome, a “filthy dæmon” that must be destroyed.

The two meanings developed from an earlier and now obsolete sense of “wretch”—an outcast. This use dates back to Beowulf, which may have been written as early as 725. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s citation from the poem:

“Ða wæs winter scacen, fæger foldan bearm; fundode wrecca, gist of geardum” (“Then winter was gone, earth’s lap grew lovely, longing woke in the cooped-up exile for a voyage home”). We’ve used Seamus Heaney’s translation, which renders the Old English word for “wretch” (wrecca) as “exile.”

The OED cites another Old English use: “Ða lioð þe ic wrecca geo lustbærlice song ic sceal nu heofiende singan” (“The songs that I, an outcast, once sang joyfully I must now sing grieving”). From King Ælfred’s translation, circa 888, of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ.

The OED defines that original use of “wretch,” which has now died away, as “one driven out of or away from his native country; a banished person; an exile.”

It was from that sense that the two modern meanings developed in Old English. The first to come along, according to OED citations, was the sense of a terrible person. This is the earliest known example in writing:

“Hyre se feond oncwæð, wræcca wærleas, wordum mælde” (“To her the fiend answered, faithless wretch, and spoke his words”). From Juliana, an account of the martyrdom of St. Juliana of Nicomedia, presumed written by the poet Cynewulf between 970 and 990. The “wretch” in the passage is the demon Belial.

The OED says “wretch” in that sense means “a vile, sorry, or despicable person; one of opprobrious or reprehensible character; a mean or contemptible creature.”

The other modern sense, in which a “wretch” is miserably unhappy or unfortunate, was first recorded circa 1000, Oxford says.

This is the dictionary’s earliest citation: “Ne mæg mon æfre þy eð ænne wræccan his cræftes beniman” (“No one can ever rob a wretch of his skills more easily”). From the Metres of Boethius, a later rendering of De Consolatione Philosophiæ.

That sense of the word, still the most common in standard English, is defined in the OED as “one who is sunk in deep distress, sorrow, misfortune, or poverty; a miserable, unhappy, or unfortunate person; a poor or hapless being.” (In an offshoot of that usage, the OED says, “wretch” is sometimes used playfully, a meaning that emerged in the 15th century.)

A final note about the history of “wretch.” It can be traced to an ancient Indo-European word stem that linguists have reconstructed as wreg-, meaning to push, drive, or track down. (This root wreg–, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, is also the source of our words “wreck,” “wrack,” and “wreak,” a verb that originally meant to avenge, punish, or drive away.)

After wreg– entered prehistoric Germanic, it became a noun, wrakjon, which American Heritage says meant both “pursuer” and “one pursued.” Later, in the era of writing, this old noun took different directions in different Germanic languages.

What developed into our word “wretch” became recke in German, which means a warrior or hero. As the OED comments, “The contrast in the development of the meaning in English and German is remarkable.”

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Q: “Undisputed” or “indisputed”? Is there a clear winner? My sense is “undisputed” means neither party disputed the facts, which is the sense I’m seeking, while “indisputed” means not capable of dispute. Can you help?

A: If your choice is between “undisputed” and “indisputed,” there is no choice. The word you want is “undisputed.” The adjective “indisputed” is now considered archaic or obsolete. However, “indisputable” is a possibility. Here’s the story.

We’ve checked ten standard dictionaries and none regard “indisputed” as standard English. In fact, only two even mention it. Merriam-Webster Online and the subcription-based Merriam-Webster Unabridged both describe “indisputed” as an “archaic” synonym for “undisputed.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, says “indisputed” is an “obsolete” adjective meaning “not disputed; undisputed, unquestioned.”

“Indisputable,” the oldest of the three adjectives, showed up in the mid-16th century, the OED says, and describes something “that cannot be disputed” or is “unquestionable.” It’s derived from the medieval Latin indisputābilis, combining the negative prefix in- and the classical disputābilis (disputable).

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Ralph Robinson’s 1551 translation of Utopia (1516), a Latin political satire by Thomas More: “[That] whiche with good and iust Judges is of greater force than all lawes be, the kynges indisputable prerogatiue.”

“Undisputed,” which showed up a couple of decades later, originally meant “not disputed or argued with,” according to the OED, but now generally means “not disputed or called in question.” Standard dictionaries agree.

The first OED citation for “undisputed” is from a 1570 edition of Actes & Monumentes, an ecclesiastical history by John Foxe: “So in the end the bishop making to our Ambassadours good countenaunce … dismissed them vndisputed wythall.” The reference is to a clerical appointment made without opposition.

Etymologically, “undisputed” ultimately comes from disputāre, which meant to compute, investigate, or discuss in classical Latin, but took on the sense of to dispute or contend in colloquial Latin.

“Indisputed,” which appeared in the 17th century, meant not disputed. The first OED citation is from Religio Medici (1643), a wide-ranging memoir by the English polymath Thomas Browne:

“Natura nihil aget frustra, is the only indisputed Axiome in Philosophy.” The Latin axiom means “Nature does nothing in vain.”

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Q: My grandfather used a lot of idioms that I’ve never heard outside Pequannock, Lincoln Park, or Montville, N.J. (all settled by the Dutch—good farmland). One was “snout,” meaning to complain loudly and make the listener feel as if he/she were at fault. Would love to know the origin.

A: The words “snoot” and “snout” have been used by Americans in various ways since the mid-1800s to express disdain for someone. Both terms ultimately come from the contemptuous use of “snout” for a big or oddly shaped human nose, a usage that dates back to England in the mid-13th century.

We suspect that this 19th-century American sense is the source of your grandfather’s use of “snout” to mean complain loudly and critically. But it may also have been influenced by expressions in German or the variety of German spoken in Pennsylvania, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English.

In the 19th century, DARE says, Easterners began using the expressions “make a snout” or “make snoots” in the sense of “to grimace, to make faces (at someone).” The dictionary suggests that this “US use may in some cases reflect the equivalent Ger phr eine Schnauze (or Schnute) machen, PaGer en schnut mache.”

The regional dictionary’s earliest example is from a New York newspaper: “This reminds us of the language of the little fellow to the chap that had him down … ‘If I can’t lick you, I can make snoots at your sister!’ ” (Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, June 20, 1844.)

The only other 19th-century DARE citation is from a newspaper in Frederick, Md.: “She made a snoot at me and told me to scat.” (Daily News, Aug. 27, 1884.)

An early 20th-century example from southeastern Pennsylvania supports the dictionary’s suggestion that the usage may have been influenced by German, especially the dialect spoken in Pennsylvania, which is also known as Pennsylvania Dutch:

“Make a snout (snoot). Grimace. ‘Teacher, he’s making snouts at me.’ … fr. Pa. Ger. schnoot mŏchă; Ger. schnauze machen.” (From German American Annals, Philadelphia, January-February 1908.)

(German-speaking settlers and their descendants in Pennsylvania were often referred to as “Dutch” because the word “German” was Deutsch in German and Deitsch in the local dialect.)

DARE doesn’t have any examples for “snoot” or “snout” used by itself as a verb meaning to complain or grimace. However, all five standard American dictionaries now list “snoot” as a verb that means to treat disdainfully or condescendingly.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, has several 20th-century American examples of “snoot” used in the sense of “to snub; to treat scornfully or with disdain.”

The earliest OED example is from A Couple of Quick Ones, a 1928 novel by the New Yorker writer Eric S. Hatch: “I followed him … up the street to where the Wright limousine was snooting the world in general at the kerb.”

The latest Oxford citation is from a review of The Slipper and the Rose, a film updating the Cinderella story: “Cinderella (Gemma Craven) gets snooted by her Stepsisters and gazes sorrowfully into the flames of the scullery fire.” (Time, Jan. 17, 1977.)

Oxford doesn’t connect the pejorative use of “snoot” and “snout” in verb phrases with the use of “snoot” alone in the scorning sense, but we wouldn’t be surprised if a connection is found one day.

Interestingly, the OED does have several examples of “snout” used in much the way your grandfather used it, but they’re all from Australia. The dictionary says that in Australian slang, “snout” means “to bear ill-will towards; to treat with disfavour, to rebuff.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from The Moods of Ginger Mick, a 1916 novel about World War I by C. J. Dennis: “An’ snouted them that snouted ’im, an’ never give a dam.”

If your grandfather served in World War I or II, he may have picked up his use of “snout” in the fault-finding sense from Australian soldiers, though we think a more likely source is the grimacing American use of “snoot” and “snout” in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Both the Australian and American usages ultimately come from the scornful use of “snout” in medieval England for a big or odd human nose, a sense that showed up in King Horn, a Middle English poem of chivalry and romance dating from the mid-1200s:

“He lokede him abute, / Wiþ his colmie snute” (“He looked all about / With his sooty snout”).

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