Category: Etymology

Q: In editing technical writing, I replace the word “primary” when it’s used as a synonym for “important.” Example: “There are three primary reasons for this occurrence.” Am I being unnecessarily fussy? The root of “primary” does seem to be singular, but maybe the word has taken on a broader meaning.

A: There’s nothing wrong with using “primary” to mean important. What’s “primary” isn’t necessarily the one that’s first in line, so a phrase like “three primary reasons” isn’t incorrect.

Many people use “primary” in the same way they use “principal” or “chief,” and there’s nothing unusual in this. Let’s take a look at the word’s etymology.

The word “primary,” which entered English in the 15th century, is from the classical Latin primarius, which means “of the first rank or importance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

At the root of the Latin adjective, the OED says, is primus, which to the Romans meant “first in order of time, earliest, young, most notable or distinguished, chief, principal, of the best quality, first class, primary, fundamental, from which all else is derived.”

When first used in English in the first half of the 1400s, the dictionary says, “primary” meant “occurring or existing first in a sequence of events; belonging to the beginning or earliest stage of something; first in time.”

One early citation for the use of “primary” in this sense pairs it with a plural noun. George Ripley in his Compend of Alchemy (1549) uses the phrase “primary quallytes” (qualities).

In the later 1500s, “primary” was used in two new ways, the OED says: (1) to mean “of the highest rank or importance; principal, chief”; and (2) to mean fundamental, original, or “not subordinate to or derived from anything else.”

In these and similar senses of the word, “primary” is often used with plural nouns. After all, several things of equal importance can be described as “not subordinate” to any of the others, and “primary” is often used this way in scientific and academic language.

For example, philosophers from the 17th century to the present have written about the “primary qualities” of matter. Doctors speak of “primary symptoms,” “primary nerves,” and “primary branches” of the carotid artery.

Astronomers say the “primary planets” are the ones that orbit the sun. In academic research, “primary sources” are original documents.

In biology, birds have “primary feathers,” and people have “primary sexual characteristics” as well as secondary ones. Economists speak of “primary commodities,” “primary products,” and “primary industries.”

So it’s not unusual that in ordinary usage we can call more than one thing at a time “primary.” Every state has its “primary roads,” and everybody who’s ever owned a box of crayons knows about the “primary colors.”

Standard dictionaries endorse the plural usage.

Within its entry for “primary,” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) uses the examples “primary stages” and “primary materials.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) uses “primary sources” and “primary nerves” as examples.

In case you’re wondering where (or whether) the noun “primer” fits in, take a look at a posting we wrote earlier this year.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: A lot of people (including me!) use the word “feel” to describe thinking, as in “I feel there’s a Starbucks on every corner.” Why is this? Is it here to stay? Where does it come from?

A: Using “feel” to mean “think” or “believe” is very common and quite legitimate. This usage has been around for a lot longer than Starbucks.

But your example offers a subtle variation on that theme. Although we’ve occasionally heard this usage, it’s less familiar to us.

We’re more familiar with uses like “I feel you’re avoiding me,” or “They feel they’re not being treated fairly.” Here, a speaker uses “feel” to convey a conviction about a subjective reality. This is the traditional use of “feel,” the one that gets hundreds of millions of hits on Google.

On the other hand, in a sentence like “I feel that guy just ran a red light,” or “I feel there’s a nail salon on every block,” the speaker uses “feel” to express a conviction (whether exaggerated or not) about an objective reality. This use of “feel” is what’s unusual to us.

Will it catch on? We can’t say. But what we can do is explain how “feel” came to be used to mean “think” or “believe.”

When the verb “feel” was first recorded in Old English in the 900s, it meant to handle—to examine or explore by touch. And that’s still one of its meanings.

But almost immediately the word took on several wider, more figurative, meanings.

Even during the Old English period, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, to “feel” meant “to perceive mentally, become aware of.”

Somewhat later, around the late 1200s, it came to mean “to be conscious of (a subjective fact)” or “be the subject of, experience (a sensation, emotion), entertain (a conviction).”

In the Middle Ages, for example, people used phrases like “feel feeble,” “feel well,” and “feel friendship.” One OED citation from 1393, “feleth he ful ofte guile,” or roughly “he feels full of guile,” is translated by the OED as “finds himself deceived.”

In various later usages, people in the 17th through 18th centuries were said to “feel a loss,” “feel emotion,” “feel woes,” “feel curiosity,” and “feel little inconvenience.”

And in the 19th century people began using constructions like “I do not feel like eating,” “I now feel like ending the matter,” “I feel indebted to you,” “I don’t feel myself,” “I did not feel up to much fatigue,” “felt some misgivings,” “felt the influence,” “feel vengeance,” and so on.

The sense we’re getting at—described in the OED as “to believe, think, hold as an opinion”—was first recorded in the late 1300s.

The OED’s earliest citation for this sense of the word is from a 1382 quotation by Nicholas Hereford, who collaborated with John Wycliffe on the first complete English translation of the Bible: “We were required to seyne what we felyde of diverse conclusions.”

In modern usage, the OED says, to “feel” in this sense means “to apprehend or recognize the truth of (something) on grounds not distinctly perceived; to have an emotional conviction of (a fact).”

One of the OED’s citations for this modern sense is from Anthony Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers (1861): “She felt that she might yet recover her lost ground.”

They say that seeing is believing. And it’s long been true that feeling is believing as well.

Of course, we still feel good, bad, or groovy, which gets us to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The 59th St. Bridge Song”:

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feelin’ groovy

(Paul Simon’s book Lyrics 1964-2011 doesn’t use punctuation at the end of these lines.)

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Just when I figured we had enough words to worry about, Merriam-Webster’s throws a bunch more at us. It’s enough to make me throw one right back—“f-bomb.” What do you guys think about this article from the Atlantic?

A: After checking out the latest additions to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary over a “craft beer” at our local “gastropub,” we had an “aha moment.” Most of these terms aren’t “game changers” and they aren’t going to give anybody a “brain cramp.”

See what we mean? We’ll bet that nobody who’s reading this has to look them up. After all, what part of “f-bomb” (the term that turned you into a bomb thrower) doesn’t the average guy understand?

The Merriam-Webster company usually adds about 100 new words a year to its Collegiate Dictionary, though most of them are technical or scientific.

The 2012 update was announced on Aug. 14 with a selection of the sexiest new additions—that is, if you get a buzz from the likes of “sexting,” “mash-up,” “energy drink,” and the other newbies we quoted above.

Other terms that need no introduction are “cloud computing,” “bucket  list,” “life coach,” “earworm,” “e-reader,” “tipping point,” and “shovel-ready” (a phrase whose time may have come and gone).

But not all of the new words and phrases are household terms.

Take “copernicium,” described as “a short-lived artificially produced radioactive element that has 112 protons.” (And don’t pretend you knew it already.)

To be honest, another newbie, “obesogenic,” was news to us, but we had no trouble figuring out what it means—“promoting excessive weight gain.”

Not worried about your waistline? Maybe the economy is keeping you awake nights.

M-W Collegiate can help you put your worries into words: a “toxic” asset that’s gone down the drain, a house that’s worth less than its “underwater” mortgage, a “systemic risk” posed by a bank that’s too big to fail.

OK, we can hear you grumbling. All these changes pose a “systemic risk” to the English language! Why can’t the editors at Merriam-Webster’s leave well enough alone?

There’s a very good reason. Lexicographers, the people who write dictionaries, don’t add new words because they like or approve of them. New words get into dictionaries because people are using them—a lot—and they’re expected to keep using them.

The Oxford University Press, for example, issues quarterly updates to the Oxford Dictionaries Online.

The latest Oxford additions, announced yesterday, include many that are new to us, such as  “lifecasting” (continuous video of one’s daily activities), “tweeps” (followers on Twitter), and “dog food” used as a verb (to test a new product before it’s marketed).

Where do new words come from? As Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at the Merriam-Webster company, puts it, “They’re in the ether.”

Life changes, and English changes along with it. That’s why a term like “man cave” (a space a guy can have for himself) has shown up on the M-W Collegiate list of new entries.

Technology changes too, and that also requires new words, like the aforementioned “cloud computing,” “sexting,” and “e-reader.”

A new word doesn’t make it into the dictionary overnight, though. It has to be around for a while. No wonder so many of these “new” M-W terms don’t seem all that new.

Many people think that dictionaries shape the language. But just the opposite is true. The people who use the language determine what gets into dictionaries.

If a word is out there, if people are using it, then you can be sure that dictionary editors are watching and weighing it. Lexicographers always have their feelers out.

But don’t assume a word is standard English just because it’s in a dictionary. You have to read the fine print.

Dictionaries include standard usages, but also ones that are labeled colloquial, slang, dialect, nonstandard, regional, disparaging, offensive, obscene, and vulgar. (Covers just about all the bases, doesn’t it?)

And don’t assume every word in a dictionary is there to stay. Most dictionaries discard obsolete, unused words as they add fresh, new ones.

And as a word’s meaning or its spelling or its pronunciation changes in common usage, so does its entry.

Do you find this disturbing? Relax. If dictionaries didn’t keep up, they wouldn’t be of much use. And once you accept that, you’ll have an “aha moment.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Why is a lawyer called an “attorney at law” and not an “attorney of law”? Doesn’t “at” refer to a place? An MD is a “doctor of medicine” not a “doctor at medicine.”

A: In American English, the terms “lawyer,” “attorney,” and “attorney at law” are pretty much interchangeable, according to Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage (3rd ed.). All three refer to “a licensed lawyer.”

The legal dictionary, written by Bryan A. Garner, says “lawyer” and “attorney,” the most common of these terms in the US, “are not generally distinguished even by members of the profession.”

However, these three terms have had different meanings in different places and times.

In England, for example, an attorney used to practice in common-law courts and a solicitor in equity courts.

But the term “attorney” developed “an unpleasant smell about it,” Garner writes, and “in the nineteenth century it was supplanted in England by solicitor.”

(As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the word “attorney” was often used reproachfully to mean something like “knave or swindler.”)

In the US, on the other hand, the term “attorney” has become a somewhat tony (or, as Garner puts it, more formal and less disparaging) version of “lawyer,” while “solicitor” has taken on an offensive whiff, as in signs like “No Peddlers or Solicitors.”

Why, you ask, is an attorney “at” law rather than “of” or “in” law? Doesn’t “at” refer to a place?

Well, all three prepositions were used in the past, according to published references in the OED, but they referred to the place where the attorney practiced, not to the practice of law itself.

The Oxford editors say “attorney-at-law” (they hyphenate the term) originally referred to a “professional and properly-qualified legal agent practising in the courts of Common Law (as a solicitor practised in the courts of Equity).”

Interestingly, the earliest OED citation for “attorney at law,” from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1768), refers to lawyers at admiralty and ecclesiastical courts, not courts of common law:

“An attorney at law answers to the procurator, or proctor, of the civilians and canonists.” (A procurator, or proctor, used to be a legal representative in English admiralty or ecclesiastical courts.)

Why, you might wonder, has the term “attorney at law” survived when “attorney” and “lawyer” can do the job just as well with two fewer words?

Well, we could be cynical and say that the kind of lawyer who feels it’s classy to be called an “attorney” would probably feel it’s even classier to be called an “attorney at law.”

But there’s a more respectable reason for the survival of the longer term. It distinguishes an “attorney at law” (a licensed lawyer) from an “attorney in fact” (someone with a power of attorney to act for another).

In fact, when the word “attorney” entered English in the 1300s (borrowed from Old French), it referred to someone “appointed or ordained to act for another; an agent, deputy, commissioner,” according to the OED.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (circa 1594):

I will attend my husband, be his nurse,
Diet his sickness, for it is my office,
And will have no attorney but myself;
And therefore let me have him home with me.

By the 1400s, the word “attorney” was being used to mean a lawyer practicing in the common-law courts in England.

But around the same time it took on its negative sense. Here’s a later example from Alexander Pope’s essay Of the Use of Riches (1733): “Vile Attornies, now an useless race.”

And here’s one from The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), by James Boswell: “Johnson observed, that ‘he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney.’ ”

The word “lawyer,” which entered English around the same time as “attorney,” has roots in the Old English word for law, lagu.

From the beginning, according to the OED, it meant what it does now: “One versed in the law; a member of the legal profession.”

We’ll end with this proverb from The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), by Thomas Wilson: “The lawyer never dieth a begger. The lawyer can never want a livyng till the yearth want men.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Is there a difference between “instantly” and “instantaneously”?

A: Yes and no, and whatever distinction exists between these two adverbs is getting less distinct.

Both words can mean in an instant, immediately, or at once, but “instantaneously” has another meaning: it can refer to two events that occur at the same or virtually the same time.

For instance, you can say “The corporal obeyed instantly” or “The staff sergeant obeyed instantaneously” (though “instantly” sounds more idiomatic to our ears).

But if you want to indicate that the two orders were carried out at the same time, you’d say, “They were obeyed instantaneously.”

A bit of googling, however, suggests that this distinction between “instantly” and “instantaneously” is being lost.

That may explain why R. W. Burchfield, author of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), dropped the “instantly”/”instantaneously” item added by Sir Ernest Gowers in the second edition. Here’s what Gowers had to say:

“Instantly is virtually a synonym of at once, directly, and immediately, though perhaps the strongest of the four. Instantaneously is applied to something that takes an inappreciable time to occur, like the taking of an instantaneous photograph, especially to two events that occur so nearly simultaneously that the difference is imperceptible.”

Bryan A. Garner, writing in Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), generally agrees with Gowers.

But the only standard dictionary we found with an entry for the adverb “instantaneously” doesn’t make the distinction. The Collins English Dictionary defines it this way:

(1) “in a way that occurs with almost no delay; immediately ⇒ Airbags inflate instantaneously on impact.” (2) “in a way which happens or is completed within a moment.”

The older of the two adverbs is “instantly.” When it entered English in the 15th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant “urgently, persistently, with importunity,” but this sense is now considered archaic.

In the mid-16th century, it took on the modern meaning we’re discussing: “In a moment; immediately, forthwith, at once.”

“Instantaneously” appeared  in mid-17th century English writing, according to the OED, with the meaning of “in an instant, in a moment; without any perceptible interval between beginning and completion.”

Interestingly, the OED entry for “instantaneously” doesn’t mention the distinction cited by Gowers or Garner, and it has no published reference for the usage.

Our Google searches suggest that many, if not most, English speakers are unaware of this distinction.

As we’ve said, we think “instantly” sounds more idiomatic than “instantaneously” in describing something that happens immediately.

And if we wanted to indicate that two events occurred at the same time, we’d say they occurred “at the same time” or “simultaneously.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I’m arguing with someone who says “whole other thing” should be “whole different thing.” What do you think? Is “whole other” grammatical or not?

A: There’s nothing wrong with a phrase like “whole other thing” except, possibly, its informality. But not everybody would consider it informal.

In this construction, “whole” is an adverb meaning “wholly” or “entirely”; it modifies the adjective “other,” which has meant “different” or “additional” since Anglo-Saxon times.

So the phrases “whole other” and “whole different” are pretty much the same.

“Whole,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has been used as an adverb since at least as far back as the 1300s, but its use as an adverb is now obsolete except in certain phrases.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says the adverbial use of “whole” is considered informal.

American Heritage gives the example “a whole new idea.” (So AH would also consider the phrases “whole other thing” and “whole different thing” informal English.)

But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has no such reservations. It treats the adverbial use of “whole” as standard English, giving as an example “a whole new age group.”

We’ve written posts on our blog in 2008 and 2011 about the phrase “whole nother,” which is a whole other thing.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: On a jaunt through western Maryland, we passed a billboard for The Horsery. We’d never seen the word “horsery” before, but we instantly understood what it meant—a tack shop. The same can be said about the “Hair Cuttery” chain. So – our question to the Grammar Mavens is: What’s up with “-ery”? And no jiggery-pokery.

A: The suffix “-ery,” which is used to form nouns, first showed up in the Middle English period (originally spelled “-erie”) in words that were adopted from French.

Since then, the suffix has taken on a life of its own and has been used extensively to make new English nouns.

In fact, words with this ending are so numerous and varied that we’ll have to simplify our etymology a bit. That’s because the suffix “-ery” doesn’t have a single function in English—it has many.

First, it might be helpful to back up and look at how this ending was used in French.

As the Oxford English Dictionary says, many French nouns ending in –ier or –er designate a person engaged in some occupation, like drapier (a draper, or dealer in cloth).

And words derived from these but with –erie endings sometimes designate the class of goods those people deal in, like draperie (drapery).

In other cases the –erie ending designates an employment or art, like archerie (archery), from archer (an archer). And sometimes it designates a place of business, like boulangerie (bakery), from boulanger (a baker).

Still other French nouns were formed by adding –erie to verbs.

The resulting nouns might mean an action, like braverie (braving), from braver (to brave); or an occupation, like confiserie (confectioner’s business), from confire (to preserve fruits, etc.); or a place of business, like brasserie (brewery), from brasser (to brew).

All these same patterns, and more, were transferred to English. But in English, as in French, the patterns don’t always result in neat triplets like “bake,” “baker,” and “bakery.”

For example, the “-ery” in “nunnery” adds the sense of a residence or community—a place where nuns live. The same is true for “rookery”—a place where rooks (crows) live.

Often, “-ery” designates “the place where an employment is carried on, as bakery, brewery, fishery, pottery,” the OED says.

And occasionally, it designates “classes of goods, as confectionery, ironmongery, pottery.”

By analogy, the OED adds, sometimes the suffix adds the sense of “-ware,” “-stuff,” or the like, “as in crockery, machinery, scenery.”

Such nouns, Oxford says, ”sometimes (though rarely) signify a state or condition, as slavery.”

But more often “the force of the suffix is ‘that which is characteristic of, all that is connected,’ in most cases with contemptuous implication, as in knavery, monkery, popery.”

In yet other English nouns, the “-ery” ending denotes a “place where certain animals are kept or certain plants cultivated, as piggery, rookery, swannery, vinery.”

And the OED says that in modern usage, particularly in the US, the example of “bakery” has been extended to form such words as “beanery, bootery, boozery, breadery, cakery, carwashery, drillery, drinkery, eatery, hashery, lunchery, mendery, toggery, wiggery.”

And now, apparently, we can add “horsery” to the list!

As for “jiggery-pokery,” that’s a late-19th-century colloquialism meaning, more or less, humbug.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I’m writing about an expression I’ve just started noticing: the use of “I can’t with” to mean “I can’t deal with” something. I won’t ask if this is a thing (another useful and seemingly recent usage), since it clearly is, but how long has it been one?

A: You’re right. A lot of people are using the expression “I can’t with” in the sense of “I can’t deal with” someone or something. 

Here are a few recent examples from Google searches: “I can’t with this show!” … “I can’t with this cat” … “I can’t with my stupid family sometimes” … “I can’t with these people on this site.”

So, yes, it’s a thing, and if saving a word is useful, then perhaps it’s a useful thing. And as you suggest, it’s a recent usage, though perhaps not as recent as you may think.

In Susane Colasanti’s young-adult novel Waiting for You (2009), for example, the narrator complains about “the weirdo spaced-out people” on the subway, and says, “I can’t with them.”

And in “Here and There,” a short story in David Foster Wallace’s collection Girl With Curious Hair (1996), the narrator says: “All the time I thought of her constantly—but she says ‘My feelings have changed, what can I do, I can’t with Bruce anymore.’ ”

Although it’s been around for a while, it’s hard to pin down exactly when this usage showed up. People routinely drop verbs after “can’t,” complicating database searches for “I can’t with.”

When “can” or “can’t” is used as an auxiliary (that is, a helping verb), the main verb is often dropped when the auxiliary is repeated. Here’s an example: “I can deal with your family, but I can’t with mine.”

This is standard English. But in the usage you’ve asked about, the main verb never appears. The auxiliary does all the work.

You won’t find this sense of “I can’t with” in standard references, but it’s definitely out there. And if enough people use it, we may be seeing it in dictionaries someday.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: You’re pretty good on negative words like “gruntled” that don’t have positive versions. How about extraordinary words that don’t have ordinary versions? For example, “extravaganza” when a single “vaganza” just isn’t enough.

A: Just when we think we’ve been asked everything under the sun! Unfortunately, you won’t find the word “vaganza” in standard dictionaries (too bad!), though that won’t stop you from getting thousands of hits for it in Google searches.

We’ve seen it used as a synonym for “extravaganza” (“Home Vaganza: Home of Extravaganza Design”) as well as an oomphless version of it (“Just a regular vaganza”).

In fact, the prefix “extra-” (or at any rate its spelling) crept into “extravaganza” by the back door. Here’s the story.

Our word “extravaganza” was borrowed from the Italian estravaganza, which means oddness, peculiarity, or eccentricity of behavior—in other words, extravagance. Today, the Italian word is more commonly stravaganza.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, when English glommed onto the Italian estravaganza in the 18th century, it was “refashioned” into “extravaganza,” giving it the Latin prefix “extra-.”

It must have seemed natural to English speakers to begin the word with “extra-” rather than “estra-.”

The earlier words “extravagance” and “extravagant” had the “ex,” and so did the words they came from—the French extravagance and extravagant, and the medieval Latin noun and adjective extravagantem.

Since the Italian alphabet has no “x,” Italian words prefixed with the Latin extra- are instead spelled estra-. So you might say that when English borrowed estravaganza, it gave it back the “x.”

The OED says that in its original English sense, “extravaganza” was “bombastic extravagance of language or behaviour.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a review in a 1754 issue of the journal Connoisseur: “Thalia … was … with difficulty restrained from falling into ridiculous drolleries, and what our author calls extravaganzas in her manner.”

A few decades later, according to the OED, the word was used to mean “a composition, literary, musical or dramatic, of an extravagant or fantastic character.”

Oxford’s earliest citation for this sense of “extravaganza” is from Thomas James Mathias’s satirical poem The Pursuits of Literature (1797).

In a footnote, Mathias identified a now forgotten writer, Maurice Morgan, as “author of the pleasant Extravaganza on the Courage of Sir John Falstaff.”

Matthew Arnold used the word in the same sense in 1873, when he wrote in his essay Literature and Dogma: “The difference between the grandeur of an extravaganza and the grandeur of the sea or the sky.”

Nowadays we also use “extravaganza” loosely for any over-the-top production or display, like a wildly extravagant party. (We’ve found no evidence, though, of a boring event being described as a “subvaganza.”)

By the way, the literal sense of “extravagant”—wandering out of bounds, straying beyond the limits—is reflected in the medieval Latin verb it came from, extravagari.

The Latin roots are extra- (beyond or outside) and vagari (to wander). Although you won’t find the noun “vaganza” in dictionaries, something resembling it is cited in the OED:

In her book The Wandering Scholars (1927), Helen Jane Waddell coined the term “vagantes” to mean “the scholar monks who travelled about Europe in the Middle Ages.”

Perhaps medieval monks who wandered out of bounds could be called “extravagantes.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I think the verb “segue” means to move gradually or smoothly from one subject to another. But the chairman of a board I serve on never changes a topic without saying, “Let’s segue to X.” This irritates me, as I think an abrupt change isn’t a segue. Am I right or do I owe her a mental apology? Also, an educated person recently used the word “segway” in writing to me (not in reference to the scooter). Is this acceptable?

A: Most of the standard dictionaries we checked say the verb “segue” in its non-musical sense means to move smoothly and uninterruptedly from one subject to another.

For example, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines the verb this way:

“1. Music To make a transition directly from one section or theme to another.

“2. To move smoothly and unhesitatingly from one state, condition, situation, or element to another: ‘Daylight segued into dusk’ (Susan Dworski).”

Does one have to move gradually, as you believe? Not necessarily. It’s OK to move directly from one subject to another as long as it’s done smoothly.

Is your board chairman moving smoothly from subject to subject when she says “Let’s segue to X”? It’s a judgment call, but we’d give her the benefit of the doubt.

You also asked if “segue” can be spelled “segway” (like the vehicle with two wheels).

The only dictionary we found that mentions this variant spelling, the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (2nd ed.), calls it “a frequent misspelling of segue.”

As for the etymology, English borrowed the verb “segue” directly from Italian, where segue is the third person present singular of the verb seguire (to follow). It was initially used—and still is—as a musical direction (“segue the lieder” = “the lieder follows”).

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1740 translation of a French musical dictionary: “Segue, it follows, or comes after; this word is often found before aria, alleluja, amen.”

In the mid-20th century, the verb came to mean “to move without interruption from one song or melody to another.” (Oddly, the OED considers this sense of the word slang, though standard dictionaries include it without comment.)

The dictionary’s first citation is from The Decca Book of Jazz (1958), by Peter Gammond: “Then, without stopping, the guitarist and Ellington segued into Body and Soul.”

The first example in the OED of the verb used in a nonmusical way is from George Baxt’s 1972 murder mystery Burning Sappho: “The crowds … let up a roar which soon segued into a mixture of cheers, jeers, jests, gibes.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: When did it become insulting to call someone crippled rather than handicapped or disabled?

A: Of the three words, “crippled” is by far the oldest, with roots going back to Anglo-Saxon times.

The adjective “crippled” has been in use since before 1300, and the noun “cripple” since about 950, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But another adjective, “lame,” which we wrote about last year, is even older, dating back to around 725, though it’s not heard much today in reference to people.

The OED doesn’t say exactly when “cripple” and “crippled” were first considered insensitive and their use discouraged. And we can’t tell from the published examples cited in the dictionary.

But it’s safe to say that these words began to be replaced in the 20th century—first by “handicapped” and “person with a handicap,” and later by “disabled” or “person with a disability.”

Lately, even “disabled” and “disability” have been criticized by some as negative words that emphasize what people can’t do, rather than what they can. So usage is still changing.

While we can’t precisely pin down dates for these shifts in sense and sensibility, we can pin down a few etymologies.

“Cripple” has similar-sounding relatives in other Germanic languages, all of which have prehistoric roots in a word stem that’s been reconstructed as krupilo-, from the verb kriupan (to “creep”).

As the OED explains, the connection to “creep” may be explained “either in the sense of one who can only creep, or perhaps rather in that of one who is, in Scottish phrase, ‘cruppen together,’ i.e. contracted in body and limbs.”

“Handicap” and “handicapped” were terms used in games and sports long before they were used to refer to disabilities.

They can be traced to “hand i’ cap” (that is, “hand in cap”), an expression originating in the mid-17th century and referring to a game of chance in which forfeit money was put into a cap.

“Handicap” was first applied to horseracing in the mid-18th century. In the sporting sense, it means a disadvantage (extra weight, strokes, or some other condition) imposed on a superior competitor in favor of an inferior one to equalize chances.

“Hence,” the OED says, in the 1890s a handicap came to mean “any encumbrance or disability that weighs upon effort and makes success more difficult.”

But it didn’t specifically mean a person’s physical or mental disability until the early 20th century. The adjective “handicapped,” the OED tells us, was first used this way in 1915.

“Disabled” has been around since the late 16th century in the general sense, defined by the OED as “rendered incapable of action or use; incapacitated; taken out of service.”

While “disabled” has been used since the 17th century in reference to people’s physical and mental capacities, it didn’t replace “crippled” and “handicapped” until modern times. As the OED explains:

“The word disabled came to be used as the standard term in this sense in the second half of the 20th cent., and it remains the most generally accepted term in both British and North American English today. It superseded outmoded, and now frequently offensive, terms such as crippled, handicapped, etc.”

We should mention, however, that not every disabled person considers the term “crippled” insensitive.

For example, Bill Veeck, the owner of several major league baseball teams from the mid-1940s to the early ’80s, didn’t.

Veeck, who was missing part of a leg, gave one of the chapters in his book Veeck as in Wreck this title: “I’m Not Handicapped, I’m Crippled.”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: Google helps me with almost all my language questions, but I couldn’t find a satisfying answer to this one: Is “bad quality” an oxymoron and “good quality” redundant?

A: No, “bad quality” is not an oxymoron (a combination of contradictory or incongruous words). And “good quality” is not redundant.

The noun “quality” has a lot of meanings, including many that could be described as good or bad: a character trait, an inherent feature, a characteristic, and so on.

Merriam-Webster Online lists quite a few examples of such senses, including these: “Honesty is a desirable quality” … “Stubbornness is one of his bad qualities” … “The house has many fine qualities.”

Of course some uses of the noun do indeed suggest excellence, and “good” or “bad” would be unnecessary or out of place with them.

We’ll make up a few examples: “The shop sells only merchandise of quality” … “He’s a member of the quality” … “Where can I find quality at a reasonable price?” … “I was blown away by the quality of the writing.”

When the noun “quality” first showed up in English around 1300, it referred to someone’s character or nature, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. A century later, it came to mean a personal attribute.

Although English adopted the word from the Anglo-Norman or Old French qualité, the ultimate source is the Latin qualitas, which was Cicero’s translation of the Greek word for quality, poiotes, coined by Plato. 

If you’d like to read more, we had a posting a few years ago on the use of “quality” as an adjective meaning excellent or of high quality (as in “quality time”).

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I work for a company where the word “basis” is pervasively misused as a shortcut for “based upon.” Example: “The results were disappointing, basis our quarterly report.” No matter how often I speak up, the misuse has become entrenched in the corporate vernacular.

A: We’ve found several complaints online about the prepositional use of the noun “basis” to mean based upon, regarding, in reference to, and so on, but the usage doesn’t seem very common—at least not yet.

This sense of “basis” isn’t standard English and apparently never has been. We couldn’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary or in any of the standard dictionaries we checked.

When the word “basis” entered English in the 16th century, it meant the bottom of something, like a foundation or a base.

Although English borrowed the word directly from Latin, the Romans borrowed it in turn from the Greek basis (a step).

The ultimate source, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, is a reconstructed Indo-European root for going or stepping.

The English noun took on a figurative meaning—the main constituent or fundamental ingredient of something—at the beginning of the 17th century, according to citations in the OED.

Over the years, the word acquired other senses, including a basic principle and an underlying condition or state of affairs. But we see no basis for using it to mean based upon.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: You can settle a dispute I’m having with my doctor. I say all conditions are pre-existing; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to diagnose them. No? Nu?

A: Well, from your standpoint, all the medical conditions you have when you walk into the doctor’s office are preexisting.

But they’re not necessarily preexisting from your doctor’s standpoint. And especially not from your insurance company’s.

The issue is not whether the condition preexists when you arrive at the examining room. It’s whether the condition preexists when you take out an insurance policy (or, rather, whether it existed “pre” the policy). 

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “pre-existing condition” defines the noun phrase as an insurance term for “a disease or disorder from which a person taking out an insurance policy is known to be suffering, the effect or treatment of which is thus often not covered under that policy (or is only covered after a certain amount of time).”

The usage is relatively new. The first published reference in the OED is from a 1947 issue of the Reno (Nevada) Evening Gazette:

“Many people with disabilities that formerly were not insurable can now secure this new health service and have these chronic pre-existing conditions removed or repaired.”

The latest citation in the OED is from a 2003 issue of New York Magazine: “My new health insurance doesn’t start until March 1, and I wasn’t sure if dirty-bomb radiation would be considered a pre-existing condition.”

Although the OED uses a hyphen in “preexisting,” as do all the examples cited for this sense of the term, we’ll follow the hyphenless spelling in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Interestingly, the adjective “preexisting” is surprisingly old, showing up in English (minus the hyphen) in the late 1500s.

The earliest citation in the OED is from The Silkewormes and Their Flies, a 1599 book written in verse by the farmer, physician, and naturalist Thomas Moffett:

“Now what are seedes and egges of wormes or foule / But recrements of preexisting things.”

In this sense, the OED defines “preexisting” simply as existing beforehand. A similar adjective, “preexistent,” showed up two years earlier. And the verb “preexist” appeared earlier still.

We’ll end with the OED’s first citation for the verb, from The Difference Betwene the Auncient Phisicke, First Taught by the Godly Forefathers (1585), by Robert Bostocke:

“God, which of nothing, that is hauing no matter, preexisting, or goying before, hast created al the world.”

We’ll assume that “goying” here means going, not hanging out with goys. Nu?

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I missed Pat the last time she was on WNYC and didn’t get a chance to ask her about something that has been bothering me. In describing a religious procession, the Catholic press often says things like this: “The priest and lector processed to the altar.” Shouldn’t it be “proceeded” to the altar or “approached” it?

A: We’re sorry you missed Pat on the Leonard Lopate Show, but do you know that you can listen at any time on your computer by going to our WNYC page?

As for your question about the verb “process” (accented on the second syllable), this usage dates from the early 19th century, so it’s relatively new as words go.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb as meaning “to go, walk, or march in procession,” and in fact it’s a back-formation from the noun “procession.” (A back-formation is a new word formed by dropping part of an older one.)

In this sense, “process” is modeled after the verbs “progress” and “transgress,” the OED adds.

It was first recorded, according to Oxford, in Strains of the Mountain Muse (1814), a book of old tales and traditions collected by Joseph Train, a Scottish antiquary and folklorist.

Train wove the old tales into narrative verse form, and the relevant lines (which we’ve expanded from the OED citation) read:

From old Kilwinning’s sacred fane,
Slow marches forth a mystic train,
As venerably as when they
Process on Dedication day.

The OED’s next citation records the use of the verb in the past tense. It’s from a letter written in 1824 by Countess Granville: “On Christmas Day we processed into the chapel.”

In its early days, the dictionary says, the verb was considered colloquial—that is, more suited to speech than to formal writing. (Many back-formations begin life as colloquial expressions.)

But it eventually gained acceptance. Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) list this use of the verb “process” as standard English, though M-W labels is as a “chiefly British” usage.

It retains something of the flavor of a procession or a stately march, which can lend humor when used in an ordinary situation.

For example, the illustration used in American Heritage, from a novel by Anita Brookner, is faintly humorous: “The man in the panama hat offered his arm and … they processed into the dining room.”

This verb, as we said earlier, is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable (pruh-SESS).

The other verb spelled “process” has a different pronunciation (it’s accented on the first syllable, PRAH-sess), and means to prepare, treat, alter, or deal with something.

And you may be surprised to hear the verb meaning to process something (food, for example) is even newer than the verb that means to process somewhere (say, to the altar).

The OED’s earliest published reference for this sense of the word is from an 1878 issue of the Burlington (Iowa) Hawkeye: “Some have been adding a sufficient quantity of that non-crystallizable substance, known as glucose. Honey thus ‘processed’ will not thicken, but it is certainly not pure.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the newer verb was derived from the noun “process,” meaning “a set of actions or changes in a special order (as in the process of making cloth from wool).”

Though the two verbs spelled “process” are so different in pronunciation and meaning, they have a distant ancestor in common.

The nouns they come from, “procession” and “process,” can be traced to the classical Latin process-, the participial stem of the verb procedere (to advance, go forward, come forth).

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I’ve been thinking lately about the often meaningless use of “going forward” in the corporate world. Do you know if there’s anyone who has looked into it—academically or etymologically or otherwise? The phrase keeps nagging at me for some reason and I feel as if there might be something interesting there.

A: We’ve written briefly about “going forward” on our blog, but your question gives us a chance to expand on that earlier posting.

Let’s back up a bit, though, before getting to the biz-speak sense of the phrase you’re asking about.

Within its entry for adverbial uses of “forward,” the Oxford English Dictionary says the word is used figuratively to mean “onward, so as to progress or advance.”

This sense of the word, the OED says, is used chiefly in the phrase “to go forward,” which means “to be in progress or ‘on foot,’ to be going on.”

The infinitive phrase is “to go forward,” and the participial form is “going forward.”

The usage isn’t as new as you might think. The OED’s earliest example is from the works of Thomas More, written sometime before he was executed in 1535:

“There must it nedes bee long ere anye good conclusion goe forwarde.”

Here are the other relevant citations:

1535: “To se that the worke of the house of the Lorde wente forwarde.” (From Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible.)

1766: “Mr. Burchell … was always fond of seeing some innocent amusement going forward.” (From Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield.)

1832: “Dinner was going forward.” (From Life in the Wilds, a parable by the political economist Harriet Martineau.)

We ourselves found many examples of this usage from newspapers published in the early- to mid-20th century.

A headline referring to the marriage of Woodrow Wilson’s daughter in 1913, from the Pittsburgh Gazette Times, reads: “Preparations Going Forward Rapidly for White House Wedding Tuesday.”

A headline about a 1936 strike in Illinois, from the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, reads: “Business Is Going Forward in Strike Town.”

And a picture caption in a 1960 issue of the Southeast Missourian reads: “Buildings Had Been Razed Today and Site Preparations Were Going Forward.”

In all of these citations, the phrase means, generally, “continuing” or “progressing.”

But none of them convey the often empty, throat-clearing sense that’s heard in boardrooms, on the hustings, and so on today—“looking ahead,” “in the future,” “from now on,” and so forth.

This seems to be an extension of that earlier usage, though it’s hard to pin down when the new sense showed up, since many examples from the last few decades can be read two ways, in the old sense and in the new one.

What could be the earliest example may be seen in a November 1980 issue of the New York Times, reporting on a press conference by President-elect Ronald Reagan.

In response to a question, Reagan said: “I not only have confidence in Howard Baker, but I have been informed by members of the Senate that there is no friction and there is no move going forward to change in any way that his position is solid. He will be the majority leader of the Senate.”

In that quotation, however, Reagan could have meant “going forward” in the earlier sense of “progressing,” rather than “looking ahead.”

By the 1990s, clear examples of the new usage were appearing in the news media. Here’s one from the Oct. 8, 1997, issue of the Syracuse Herald Journal:

“ ‘Going forward, a nuclear plant that’s run well is a valuable source of energy,’ Sylvia said.”

We’ll finish this with a recent example of biz speak by Joe Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade:

“The past quarter was great, but going forward many companies may have problems. People are confused about what to think.”

Update: A reader, commenting on July 26, noted that “going forward” is also used in biz speak as “a conversational spacer, like ‘moving right along.’ Example: ‘We’ve heard from Tim. Thank you, Tim. Going forward, let’s hear from Ron.’ ”

Check out our books about the English language

Q: While reading your blog, I notice that you place a comma before “and” in a list of things. For instance, “in the laundry hamper, on the bathroom sink, and under the bed.” I have always thought that it was incorrect to place a comma before the “and” at the end of a series. Where did I get that?

A: The final comma before “and” in a series is optional. It’s sometimes called the “serial comma” or the “Oxford comma” (because it’s a staple at the Oxford University Press).

The use of the serial comma is not incorrect. We don’t know how you got this impression, but we can guess.

There’s a popular misconception that a comma represents a missing “and,” which would make that final comma redundant. This isn’t true, as we pointed out on the blog last year.

Although the serial comma is optional, many publishers and authors (we’re among them) prefer to use it because the comma can add clarity to a series.

This helps when the list includes phrases rather than single words. Example: “His favorite foods are apple pie, bacon and eggs, and mashed potatoes.”

A final comma can also help to avoid putting terms in apposition—that is, identifying them with one another. Example: “He consulted two top oncologists, his uncle and his best friend.”

Are the oncologists his uncle and his friend? If not, use a comma before “and.”

We used a similar example in a posting a couple of years ago. As we said then, a sentence like this cries out for a clarifying comma: “The biggest influences on my career have been my sisters, Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey.”

See what we mean? A serial comma can make a big difference.

R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.), agrees: “The ‘Oxford comma’ is frequently, but in my view unwisely, omitted by many other publishers.”

Many news organizations, including the Associated Press and our old boss, the New York Times, don’t generally use serial commas.

When the two of us worked for the Times, we naturally followed the house style. But we think the serial comma is a good idea. That’s why we use it on our blog.

While we’re discussing commas, we should mention that the word “comma” referred to a small piece of a sentence when it entered English in the late 16th century, but it soon came to mean the punctuation mark at the end of the piece.

Although English adopted the word from the Latin comma, it’s ultimately derived from the Greek komma (literally, a piece cut off), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto adds that the Greek verb koptein (to cut) gave Russians the word kopeck and probably gave English the word “capon.” And with that, we’ll cut this off.

Check out our books about the English language

Q: I was browsing through a collection of “best loved poems” the other day and came across the charming rondeau “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” a favorite of mine. Once upon a time I even had occasion to memorize it (wrongly as it turns out). Two of its lines are: “Time, you thief, who love to get / Sweets into your list, put that in!” I remembered it as “who loves to get,” which sounds better to me. I’m certainly not the one to correct Leigh Hunt, but I would be interested in any comment you might have.

A: You can find published versions of Leigh Hunt’s poem (originally published in the November 1838 issue of the Monthly Chronicle) with either “love” or “loves.” But most of them use the second-person singular “love,” which is appropriate, as we’ll explain.

The earliest version of “Jenny Kiss’d Me” that we could find online was from an 1847 collection of Hunt’s prose writings. In one of the essays, he mentions that a rondeau written by Pope inspired him to write this one of his own:

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.

(We’ve used the punctuation from Hunt’s essay.)

Why does Hunt uses “love,” not “loves,” in his poem? Because the line is addressed to “Time, you thief!” so the second-person verb—the form used with “you”—is correct.

Similar second-person constructions (as in “you who love,” “you who say,” “you who are,” and so on) can be found throughout English literature, whenever the writer addresses a subject referred to subsequently as “who.”

Here’s an example from a sermon by John Wesley: “And as to you who believe yourselves the elect of God, what is your happiness?”

And here’s another, found in a letter written from Italy by Lord Byron in 1819: “All this will appear strange to you, who do not understand the meridian morality, nor our way of life in such respects.”

By analogy, Hunt might have written, “Time! You who love to get / Sweets into your list, put that in.”

Hunt’s poem, commonly known as “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” is actually entitled “Rondeau,” though it’s technically not a rondeau. It has only one stanza and it doesn’t have the typical rhyme scheme of a rondeau. But it does, like a rondeau, begin and end the same way.

Who, you may ask, was Jenny and why did she kiss him? Here’s Hunt’s explanation:

“We must add, lest our egotism should be thought still greater on the occasion than it is, that the lady was a great lover of books and impulsive writers: and that it was our sincerity as one of them which obtained for us this delightful compliment from a young enthusiast to an old one.”

The Carlyle Encyclopedia, edited by Mark Cumming, identifies Jenny as Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle. Her nickname was “Jenny,” according to the encyclopedia, and she kissed Hunt on learning that he’d recovered from one of his many illnesses.

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

Q: Is there any difference between “for example” and “for instance”? I use them without distinction, mainly to avoid repetition, but I guess that some differences in meaning or style may exist.

A: There’s no real difference between “for example” and “for instance,” though the second phrase may be slightly more informal.

One definition of the noun “example” is “a typical instance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And one definition of the noun “instance” is “an example.”

The phrase “for example” was first recorded in 1584, and “for instance” in 1657, according to published references in the dictionary.

The OED doesn’t specifically define the phrase “for example, but it says “for instance” means “for example, as an instance of what has been said.”

The abbreviation “e.g.” (for the Latin exempli gratia) means “for example” (literally, “for the sake of example”), but it can be used in place of “for instance” as well.

By the way, we’ve said this before but it deserves repeating: don’t confuse the abbreviation “e.g.” for “i.e.,” which means “that is.” Both abbreviations came into use in English in the 17th century, and they’re often used incorrectly.

Here’s how Pat explains them in her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I (revised 3rd ed.):

“Go ahead. Be pretentious in your writing and toss in an occasional e.g. or i.e. But don’t mix them up. Clumsy inaccuracy can spoil that air of authority you’re shooting for. E.g. is short for a Latin term, exempli gratia, that means ‘for example.’ Kirk and Spock had much in common, e.g., their interest in astronomy and their concern for the ship and its crew. The more specific term i.e., short for the Latin id est, means ‘that is.’ But they had one obvious difference, i.e., their ears. Both e.g. and i.e. must have commas before and after (unless, of course, they’re preceded by a dash or a parenthesis).”

Check out our books about the English language