Category: Etymology

Q: I bristle at the use of “back to back” for more than two things: “I’ve had over a dozen appointments today, all back to back.” Have you blessed this construction?

A: Some old familiar idioms lose their literal meaning over the years. This is the case with “back to back.”

In modern usage, this phrase is often used to describe not only physical objects alongside each other, but also events that come one after another.

As we all know, events come in threes and fours as well as twos, while logic would require that only two things can be “back to back.”

Besides, events don’t really have fronts and backs. And even if they did, they’d follow one another “front to back,” not “back to back.”

The point is that the phrase “back to back” has broken the bounds of logic.

There are several literal examples in the Oxford English Dictionary of the phrase used adverbially, including this one from a ballad version of Robin Hood (circa 1500): “And there they turnd them back to back.”

The OED’s earliest examples of the phrase used adjectivally (and hyphenated) are in 19th-century writings about houses. In those days, the phrase was meant literally.

The first quotation is from Dr. Lyon Playfair’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Large Towns in Lancashire (1845): “Back-to-back houses cannot be considered dwellings of proper construction.”

A century later, the phrase was used literally to describe paired fireplaces. This OED citation is from the sociologist Dennis Chapman’s The Home and Social Status (1954):

“The other living-room usually has a ‘back-to-back’ combination fireplace ‘shared’ with the kitchen.”

But when used to describe events, the OED says, the phrase means “following one upon another without a break, consecutive.” And by extension, it also means “full, crowded.”

The use of “back to back” for events is “chiefly” American, the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from a sports story that appeared in the New York Times on August 24, 1952:

“Back to back doubles by Gene Woodling and Joe Collins off Early Wynn in the fourth inning produced the only tally of the day.” (The Yankees beat the Indians, 1-0.)

And here’s an example of the phrase used in the sense of “crowded.” It’s from Lady Bird Johnson’s A White House Diary (1970): “Today was one of those full, back-to-back Washington days.”

Have we, you ask, blessed such constructions? We think the nonliteral use of “back to back” is now firmly established in English.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines the adverbial “back to back” as an idiom meaning “consecutively and without interruption: presented three speeches back to back.”

The dictionary defines the adjectival “back-to-back” as meaning “consecutive; successive: back-to-back performances; back-to-back home runs.”

American Heritage doesn’t even bother with the literal meaning. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives two definitions: (1) “facing in opposite directions and often touching,” and (2) “coming one after the other: consecutive.”

Apparently the only problem with this usage is what to do about the hyphens. Our advice is to use hyphens only when the phrase is used adjectivally before a noun (“back-to-back doubles”). Otherwise, drop the hyphens.

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Q: Sometimes the things political pundits say on the air send me screaming from the room. Other times, I just cringe and stick my fingers in my ears. Take, for example, “takeaway,” a word that sticks in my craw. WHERE did it come from?

A: We first noticed this use of the noun “takeaway” about five years ago when a newcomer brought it with him to our rural New England town.

But the usage was undoubtedly around in the US before that, and it has roots in an earlier adjectival use in Britain dating from the early 1960s.

As far as we know, however, only one standard dictionary, British or American, includes this newish sense of “takeaway.”

The recently published American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) includes this definition: “The lesson or principle that one learns from a story or event. Used with the.”

Most of the Oxford English Dictionary’s entries for the adjective and noun “take-away” (which it hyphenates) have to do with the kind of food that Americans call “takeout” (a term that’s been in use in the US since the early 1940s).

In Britain, for example, “take-away” is food that’s meant to be eaten off the premises, and a “take-away” is a shop that sells takeout food. These date from ’60s and ’70s, the OED says.

But the OED has a more general definition of the adjective “take-away,” referring to anything “that may be taken away.” And—voila!—here’s where we find usages similar to the one we’re after.

The citations the OED gives for the general adjective “take-away” refer to food (early 1960s), exam papers (early ’70s), and finally to messages or lessons (mid-’70s).

Here, for example, is one from a 1976 issue of Nature magazine: “The takeaway message of the Dunbars’ monograph is that superficially similar social systems may be the product of different behavioural arrangements.”

And this one is from the London Review of Books (1982): “As a takeaway sample of what he had in mind, Alvarez contrasted the horses of Larkin’s poem ‘At Grass’ … with the ‘urgent’ horses of Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses.’ ”

So what’s the takeaway here? Should we conclude that the message or lesson sense of the noun “takeaway” is ultimately derived from the food term?

Perhaps, but the answer is probably much simpler. It seems likely to us that the sense of “takeaway” as a lesson or message is merely an extension of the verbal phrase to “take away.”

We’ve often heard similar (though less annoying) usages, like “What did you take away from the corporate retreat?” and “I took away a feeling of camaraderie.” It’s only a short jump to “What was your takeaway from the corporate retreat?”

While we’re at it, we should mention that the noun has other definitions as well. As American Heritage says, a “takeaway” can be “a concession made by a labor union during contract negotiations; a giveback.”

And in sports terminology, a “takeaway” is also an act or instance of taking away the ball or puck from an opposing team, according to AH and to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Both the OED and Merriam-Webster’s include another sports usage, in which “takeaway” means the initial movement of  a golf club at the beginning of a backswing. The OED’s first example is from the early 1960s.

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Q: A Slate headline: “Stop Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl.” Huh? We can’t compare two nuclear accidents because one was much worse? Isn’t that what a comparison is? Many people seem to think “compare” just means finding things equivalent. But how might one express such equivalence? We need a word, perhaps “equivalate.”

A: English does seem to need a verb meaning “to regard as equivalent” or “to find similar.”

“Liken” is sometimes appropriate, and a lot of verbs come close: “approximate,” “equal,” “imitate,” “match,” “parallel,” “resemble,” and so on. But they’re not quite there, or might not always do. The verb “equate,” for example, can mean to make equivalent as well as to regard as equivalent.

Actually, there is a verb that’s equal to the task, “equivale,” but it’s considered rare or obsolete. English adapted it in the early 17th century from the French équivaloir, which is derived from the Late Latin æquivalēre (to have equal force).

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “equivale” lists two meanings: (1) to provide an equivalent, and (2) to be equivalent to.

The OED doesn’t have any written examples for the first sense, and describes it as obsolete. The dictionary describes the second sense as rare and has several examples from the 1600s, but none since then.

If enough people feel the need, perhaps “equivale” may be revived one day or perhaps your suggestion, “equivalate,” may catch on.

Certainly, “compare” can’t always be relied on to do the job. Are people right to take offense over its use? On that point we’re forced to equivocate. Perhaps they’re right, but then again maybe they’re being oversensitive.

In modern English, to “compare” two things isn’t necessarily to find them equivalent. It can have that meaning, but it can also mean to merely examine for similarities and differences. Here’s the story.

Our verb “compare” comes from French and ultimately from Latin, in which comparare literally means “to pair together, couple, match, bring together,” according to the OED.

When it was first used in English writing, in 1447, “compare” did have that narrower meaning. It was generally followed by “to” and meant “to speak of or represent as similar; to liken.”

Here’s an example from Thomas Starkey, written sometime before 1538: “The one may … be comparyd to the body & the other to the soule.”

When this sense of “compare” is used in the negative (as in “not to be compared to”), the expression usually implies “great inferiority in some respect,” the OED says.

Here’s an example from a 1611 version of the Bible: “All the things thou canst desire, are not to be compared vnto her.”

Note that in this sense, the verb “liken” could replace “compare.”

However, a broader sense of the word emerged soon after the original.

This meaning, first recorded in the early 1500s, is defined by the OED as “to mark or point out the similarities and differences of (two or more things); to bring or place together (actually or mentally) for the purpose of noting the similarities and differences.”

Here are examples of this usage, from the pens of famous writers:

Sir Robert Burton: “Whats … the world it self … if compared to the least visible Star in the Firmament?” (from The Anatomy of Melancholy, before 1640).

John Milton: “To compare Great things with small” (from Paradise Lost, 1667).

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “In England … property stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any other [country]” (from an 1847 work on Montaigne).

Both senses of “compare”—to liken as well as to mark similarities and differences—are still alive today, which can account for hurt feelings once in a while.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) has these definitions:

“1. To consider or describe as similar, equal, or analogous; liken: Is it right to compare the human mind to a computer? 2. To examine in order to note the similarities or differences of: We compared the two products for quality and cost.”

The definitions in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) are similar. Yes, we compared them for similarities and differences!

The lesson, though, is not to use “compare” loosely when sensitive topics are being discussed. The audience may assume you’re likening two things, when in fact you’re merely examining them.

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Q: David Brooks recently said in the New York Times that Rick Santorum “has a tropism for the tragic.” I happen  to like the word “trope” and use it fairly often, but I’m unfamiliar with the use of “tropism” in other than the scientific sense.

A: When David Brooks said Rick Santorum “has a tropism for the tragic,” he meant the candidate is drawn toward tragedy.

Brooks went on to explain: “Santorum seems to dwell on misfortune—the enemies the country faces, the depravity closing in on us, the unfair criticism hurled against him, the terrible things that have happened. When the campaign goes into its fallen state, he has the pleasure of seeing his tragic worldview confirmed.”

Brooks was using “tropism,” a scientific term meaning a turning, in a metaphorical way.

When “tropism” first came into English in the early 19th century, it wasn’t a word in itself, but merely an element in other words. And all of them had something to do with turning in a particular direction in response to a stimulus.

Many such words can be found in botany or biology. For example, plants that exhibit “heliotropism,” a term dating from 1854, turn or bend toward light. And “geotropism” (1873), a characteristic of plant roots and some animals, means a turning (or a growth pattern) in response to gravity.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the separate word “tropism” came into English in the late 19th century in response to those longer scientific terms of which it was previously a part.

The OED defines the word as “the turning of an organism, or a part of one, in a particular direction (either in the way of growth, bending, or locomotion) in response to some special external stimulus, as that of light (phototropism, heliotropism), heat (thermotropism), gravity (geotropism), etc.”

The dictionary’s first citation is from the biologist C. B. Davenport’s Experimental Morphology (1899):

“All cases of true tropism are cases of response to stimuli: such are chemotropism, hydrotropism, thigmotropism, traumatropism, rheotropism, geotropism, electrotropism, phototropism and thermotropism.”

All the OED’s citations for “tropism” use it in the scientific sense. But we’ll bet that Oxford will soon be adding examples of its metaphorical use, in which it seems to mean a general tendency or predilection toward something.

The key element in all this turning is the noun “trope,” which ultimately comes from the Greek tropos, a turn.

“Trope” has been part of English since the 16th century, when it was used to mean a figure of speech—a nonliteral turn of phrase.

More recently, the word has also come to mean a recurring theme or motif. The OED’s first example of this newer usage is from a book review in the Chicago Tribune in 1975:

“Barthelme is funning with the eternal trope of fatherhood.”

And here’s a final example, from David Rieff’s Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World:

“A more unvarnished version of the same trope was Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.”

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Q: An insurance company I work with consistently uses “spend” as a noun in place of “spending.” I realize this is common jargon in the financial services industry, but I think it’s unacceptable slang.

A: The word “spend” is a legitimate noun meaning the spending of money or the amount of money spent, and it’s been used this way since the late 1600s.

However, “spending” is much more common, and most of the standard dictionaries we checked don’t list “spend” as a noun.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, includes “spend” as both a verb and a noun, but Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists it only as a verb.

None of the standard dictionaries we looked at describe the noun as slang, but we agree with you that it sounds like bureaucratic jargon.

We prefer the noun “spending,” which is much older as well as more popular. It entered English around 1000, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an example from Piers Plowman, the 14th-century allegorical poem by William Langland: “But owre spences and spendynge sprynge of a trewe wille, / Elles is al owre laboure loste.”

The earliest citation for the noun “spend” in the OED is from Israel’s Hope Encouraged, a book by John Bunyan written sometime before he died in 1688:

“What if I cannot but live upon the spend all my days, yet, if my friend will always supply my need, is it not well for me?”

Here’s a more recent example, from the Jan 16,1983, issue of a British newspaper, the  Observer: “The battle for advertising spend.”

Although the OED doesn’t consider this use of “spend” slang, it does include an obsolete slang noun meaning “semen, vaginal secretion; ejaculation.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of the slang usage is from an 1879 issue of the Pearl, a short-lived magazine that was closed by the British authorities as obscene.

Here’s a head-scratcher. The OED says the verb “spend” is the source of the noun “spending.” But the dictionary has older citations for the noun than for the verb. Hmm.

The first OED citation for the verb, meaning to pay out or expend money, is from Poema Morale (circa 1175), an anonymous Middle English poem.

We’ll end with a figurative example of the verb from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (written in the early 1590s): “Sir, if you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt.”

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Q: Do you have any idea when people began wishing other people “good luck” in a backhanded way that suggests the outcome isn’t likely or especially lucky?

A: People have been wishing one another “good luck” in the ordinary—that is, the non-sarcastic way—for many hundreds of years.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “good luck” used as a regular noun phrase (rather than as a salutation) is from William Caxton’s translation of The History of Reynard the Fox (1481): “Tho thought reynart, this is good luck.”

By its very nature, the salutation “Good luck!” is more often spoken than committed to writing. But this citation, from Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible, hints at a spoken usage offstage:

“The kynges seruauntes are gone in to wysh good lucke vnto oure lorde kynge Dauid.”

And here’s a written example from the early 19th century, with “good luck” directed at a country instead of a person. It’s from a letter written by Eleanor Cavanaugh, who was traveling in Russia, to her father back home in Ireland:

“‘Well to be sure,’ sais I. ‘Russia! & good luck to you, you are a comical place!’ ” (The letter is quoted in The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, written in 1803-08 and published in 1934. Eleanor was Catherine’s maidservant.)

We can’t tell you when people began using the phrase sarcastically or doubtfully, as if the result were unlikely to be good. But a little googling suggests that it’s a fairly recent phenomenon.

When delivered sarcastically, “Good luck!” (or “Good luck with that!”) isn’t meant literally. It means, more or less, “Yeah, sure” or “Fat chance.”

Examples would be “Good luck beating me at arm-wrestling!” and “You’ve decided to fight City Hall? Good luck with that!”

Either the speaker is doubtful that that such a thing will happen, or hopes it won’t.

As far as we can tell, none of the published references in the OED’s entry for “good luck” convey this kind of doubt or sarcasm.

However, a citation in the entry for “black” as an adjective suggests such a usage.  The quotation is about dangerous ski runs.

Here’s the reference, from the Feb. 25, 1973, issue of the Chicago Tribune: “Slopes marked red correspond to expert runs in the United States, and the black runs, well … good luck!”

We made a cursory search of our own and turned up this example, from an exchange between two characters in Gwyneth Cravens’s novel Speed of Light (1979):

“ ‘One person could warn another, with the provision that the information be retold in exactly the same way.’ ‘Good luck with that,’ he said, ‘No—another way had to be found.’ ”

And here’s another example, from Jonathan Carroll’s novel A Child Across the Sky (1990): “Philip Strayhorn wanted to be a very famous man but stay private, live his own life. Good luck with that, as we all know.”

Finally, David Letterman used the phrase in a whimsical way when he said goodbye to Al Gore at the end of the Vice President’s appearance on the Late Show in 1993: “Good luck with that government thing.”

We’ve found several discussions of the sarcastic “Good luck!” on blogs, but nothing that would pin down an origin or a chronology.

Interestingly, there are similar usages in Yiddish, where A glick ahf dir (Good luck to you) is sometimes used sarcastically, and A glick hot dir getrofen (A piece of luck happened to you) is used in the sense of “Big deal!”

But we’ve seen no suggestion from authoritative sources that the sarcastic English sense was influenced by these Yiddish expressions.

Again, the earliest examples of this usage we’ve found are from the early 1970s. We’re not saying there aren’t earlier ones. We invite you to do some googling of your own—and good luck with that!

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Q: Mma Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist of Alexander McCall Smith’s detective series, says the mother of her foster children “is late.” Of course, she doesn’t mean their biological mother is not on time. It sounds as odd to me as if a tardy student were referred to as “the late Jimmy Jones.”

A: It’s true that Mma Ramotswe has an unusual way of referring to the dead as “late.” And so do the other Batswana (residents of Botswana) in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels.

Usually the adjective “late,” in the sense of “deceased,” precedes the noun, as in “her late father” or “the late Mr. Dithers.”

But the characters in Smith’s novels speak a dialect in which the adjective is used predicatively after the noun, as in “her father was late” or “Mr. Dithers became late.”

To most of us, “late” after a noun means tardy or not on time. If we mean a person is no longer alive, we use a different adjective in that position, like “dead” or “deceased.”

Smith is well acquainted with the English dialect used in Botswana. A British writer born in what is now Zimbabwe, he was a professor of law (first in Scotland and later in Botswana) when he began writing fiction. He now lives in Edinburgh.

This passage from The Double Comfort Safari Club, the 11th book in Smith’s series, illustrates how the Batswana use “late”:

“ ‘That road,’ observed Mma Mateleke, ‘goes to a place where there is a woman I know well, Rra. And why do I know this woman well? Because she has had fifteen children, can you believe it? Fifteen. And fourteen of them are still here—only one is late. That one, he ate a battery, Rra, and became late quite quickly after that.’ ”

Later in the novel is a passage in which two women are talking, and the author slips in an explanation of this use of “late”:

“’Standing under a fig tree is safe enough, Mma,’ she said. ‘But you should never stand under a sausage tree.’ The sausage tree, the moporoto in Setswana, was a sort of jacaranda that had heavy fruit like great, pendulous sausages.

“’Certainly not, Mma. there are many people who are late now because of that. Those are very heavy pods and if you get one on your head, then you are in great danger of becoming late.’

“She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there. A dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do—he is finished.”

Suddenly, the usage makes sense!

Unfortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary has no entries illustrating this use of “late” in Botswana, whose official languages are Setswana and English.

However, the OED has examples going back to the 15th century for the adjectival use of “late” preceding a noun and meaning “recently deceased.”

Here’s the first citation, from William Caxton’s translation of The Boke yf Eneydos (1490): “Her swete and late amyable husbonde.”

No doubt the OED will eventually get around to the use of “late” in the dialect of Botswana. Better late than never.

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Q: I tried to post a hotel review on TripAdvisor, but got this response: “We can’t accept reviews that use profanity.” However hard I looked, I couldn’t find any profanity. In despair, I wrote to TripAdvisor. Two weeks later, a human informed me that “because of the double meaning of a particular word in the second-to-last sentence, we ask that you edit your original review.” Then, it dawned on me. Here’s the sentence: “It’s especially nice that La Mariposa is not only a language school cum Eco hotel, but part of a community which it is able to support in all sorts of ways.” Spot the word?

A: This is a hoot! We were both down with the flu when your email arrived, and it gave us a much-needed laugh.

Here’s the etymology of the perfectly respectable word “cum,” and we only wish the folks at TripAdvisor could see it.

The Latin preposition cum means “with” or “together with,” and it was adopted into use in English in the late 1500s.

In English, “cum” is frequently used “as a connective word forming compounds to indicate a dual nature or function,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is precisely how you used the word when you described La Mariposa as “a language school cum Eco Hotel.” You meant that the Nicaraguan resort is both a language school and an Eco Hotel. Generally, though, hyphens are used: “language school-cum-Eco Hotel.”

As the OED points out, the preposition “cum” is also “used in English in local names of combined parishes or benefices, as Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Stow-cum-Quy, where it originated in Latin documents.”

It can also be found, Oxford says, in several much-used Latin phrases, including “cum grano salis (or familiarly cum grano), lit. ‘with a grain of salt,’ i.e. with some caution or reserve.”

Here are some OED citations, from the 19th and 20th centuries, in which writers used “cum” just as you did, to indicate a dual nature or function:

“He greatly preferred coffee cum chicory to coffee pure and simply” (1871, from Julian C. Young’s book about his actor father, A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young, Tragedian).

“The Belgrave-cum-Pimlico life” (1873, from Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds).

“Easy motor-bike-cum-side-car trips round London” (1913, from Rudyard Kipling’s story collection A Diversity of Creatures).

“The fervent mediaevalism … developed a philosophic-cum-economic tinge” (1939, from Osbert Lancaster’s book on domestic architecture, Homes Sweet Homes).

“Three short … dinner-cum-cocktail dresses” (1959, from the Manchester Guardian).

“The atmosphere of laboratory-cum-workshop” (1959, from Viewpoint magazine).

Now for the word that TripAdvisor thought you were using.

It’s simply a flippant misspelling of the slang noun “come,” which the OED says has been used since 1923 to mean “semen ejaculated at sexual climax, esp. spilt ejaculate. Also (rarely), fluid secreted by the vagina during sexual play.”

This noun sense of “come,” the OED says, originated with the identical verb (“to experience sexual orgasm”). And the sexual sense of the verb has been in English since before 1650, when it was recorded in a collection of raunchy songs.

Obviously, this wasn’t what you had in mind when you used the preposition “cum.” Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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[Note: This post was edited on May 20, 2023, to update information from dictionaries and reference books.]

Q: My colleague and I work in the apparel industry and are designing packaging for socks. I think the packaging should read “6 Pair,” but he prefers “6 Pairs.” Who is right? Or are we both right?

A: This isn’t a black-and-white issue, but our advice is to go with “6 Pairs,” the usual choice and one that no usage expert would quibble with.

That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, though. The plural “pair” can be defended on historical and etymological grounds. And while “pairs” is the only standard choice in Britain, both plurals are standard in American English (though “pairs” is usually the preferred variant).

There are yet other complications with “pair,” since even the singular form, “a pair,” can be the subject of a plural verb.

Since Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I (4th ed.) addresses both questions at once, we’ll go there first:

“If you’re talking about two separate things (a pair of pumpkins, for example), treat pair as plural: A pair of pumpkins are in the window.

“If you’re talking about one thing that just happens to have two parts (like a pair of shoes), treat pair as singular: One pair of shoes is black. But add another pair and you have multiple pair or pairs; either plural is fine: Two pair [or pairs] are brown.”

And here’s a British reference, Fowler’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.):  “The pl. form pairs is desirable after a numeral (e.g. seven pairs of jeans). The type seven pair of jeans is non-standard in BrE but standard in AmE.”

British dictionaries agree: the standard plural is “pairs” in the UK, period. But nearly all dictionaries, in both the UK and the US, say that both plurals are standard in American English, with “pairs” preferred.

Merriam-Webster Online gives the plural as “pairs also pair,” meaning that “pair” is the less common variant, though both are standard.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, also lists both plural forms, adding this in a usage note: “After a number other than one, pair itself can be either singular or plural, but the plural is now more common: I bought six pairs (or pair) of shoes.”

Similarly,  Dictionary.com, based on the old Random House Unabridged, gives both plural forms and adds in a usage note that “pairs” is “more common” after a number.

So our advice is to take the path of least resistance and use “pairs” in a situation like yours: “Each package contains six pairs of socks.”

As for its etymology, the word “pair” first appeared in English writing around 1300, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes from Old French via Anglo-Norman.

The OED has Middle English citations dating from the early 1400s of “pair” used after numbers greater than one.

In fact, the dictionary says this usage “was until recently frequently used.”

But Oxford labels the “unmarked plural” (that is, “pair”) as “Now regional and nonstandard.”

This may or may not settle the argument. But no one will question the use of “pairs,” so it’s certainly the safer choice.

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Q: “Normalcy” or “normality”? What are your thoughts?

A: Both “normalcy” and “normality” are legitimate nouns in American English, though only “normality” is used in British English.

Anyone who quibbles about “normalcy” should keep in mind that both words came into use only in the 19th century, so they’re relatively new.

So, for that matter, is the adjective “normal” in its usual sense. It’s derived from the Latin norma, a carpenter’s rule, and until the 1840s it meant perpendicular.

So these words are still sorting themselves out.

As Robert W. Burchfield writes in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.): “What we are dealing with here is a group of modern words that has hardly had time for the customary processes of assimilation or rejection to have taken their course.”

He continues: “Normalcy and normality stand side by side in AmE as legitimate alternatives. In BrE normality is the customary term, and normalcy is widely scorned. The distribution of these two abstract nouns in the rest of the English-speaking world needs to be investigated further before any claims are made about their currency.”

Since this is an election year, here’s a political aside. While “normalcy” existed in American English in the 19th century, it was uncommon until Warren G. Harding popularized it in his 1920 presidential campaign.

Harding ran on a platform promising a “return to normalcy” in the wake of World War I. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave in Boston in 1920:

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

We quote the whole sentence only to demonstrate what a windbag and a clumsy writer Harding was. But when his critics tore the speech to shreds, they were rather clumsy themselves. They accused him of using “normalcy” in error and assumed he meant “normality.”

In fact, Harding was using an established word (he was fond of 19th-century expressions, and is also credited with reviving “bloviate”).

Despite his tin ear (“nostrums”? “equipoise”?), Harding won the election. And “normalcy” survived the criticism, too.

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Q: This is from the actress Elizabeth Moss of Mad Men: “I started the show way more confident, way more wizened, way more aware of the world around me than Peggy was, but over the years she’s caught up quite a bit.” Wizened? Wow, she started more shriveled than her character, and now they’re both old and dried up. I wish these stars had grammar stylists as well as fashion stylists.

A: You’re right. Elizabeth Moss, who plays the secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson on the AMC series, goofed during her March 8, 2012, interview with the New York Post’s Page Six.

She obviously meant “wise,” not “wizened,” but this is a mistake of usage, not grammar. The word “wise” means discerning, sensible, and sagacious, while the adjective “wizened” means withered, shriveled, and dried up.

The adjective “wizened” showed up in English in the early 1500s, but it’s ultimately derived from an older verb, “wizen” (wisnian in Old English), which first appeared in the late 800s and meant (as you might imagine), to dry up, shrivel, or wither.

The adjective “wise,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first showed up in the Old English poem Beowulf (circa 1000): “Thu eart mægenes strang, and on mode frod, wis wordcwida!” (You are strong of might and wise in spirit, wise of words!)

We’ve expanded on the OED citation, and changed the runic letter thorn to “th.”

We’ll end this with a look at “wisenheimer,” a slang American term for a smart aleck that showed up in the early 20th century, according to published references in the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The Show Girl and Her Friends, a 1904 book by the humorist Roy McCardell: “He wants to know some good way to reduce his weight. … You don’t know any such a way? No? Why, I thought you was a wisenheimer.”

Finally, here’s a comment from H. L. Mencken in The American Language (1919):

“Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity.”

Well, “wiseheimer” has acquired an “n” and 338,000 hits on Google, but as far as we can tell it hasn’t acquired all that much dignity.

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Q: I see that AIPAC is referred to as Aipac in the NYT (or perhaps NYt). Please help me understand this. Are we now going to see the U.s., the F.b.i., and Nato?

A: First, let’s sort out those abbreviations. An abbreviation that’s spoken as a word (like NATO) is called an “acronym”; an abbreviation that’s spoken as letters (like FBI) is called an “initialism.”

Usage writers generally note this distinction, but many people use the term “acronym” for an initialism, and some dictionaries accept the usage. We’ll have more to say about this later.

The New York Times’s practice is to print acronyms of proper names entirely in capitals if they have four letters or fewer: NATO, NASA, PIN, SALT. With longer acronyms, only the first letter is capitalized: Unesco, Nascar, Unicef, Nasdaq, and so on.

That’s why the Times capitalizes only the first letter of Aipac, the acronym for the American Israel Political Action Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group.

However, many publications—the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor, among them—disagree and prefer AIPAC.

The Chicago Manual of Style, which is widely used in book publishing, generally prefers the all-capital form unless the term is listed otherwise in standard dictionaries.

Chicago would consider an acronym like “radar” an exception, since it’s all-lowercase in dictionaries (it stands for “radio detection and ranging”).

Getting back to your question, initialisms are supposed to be all-cap in Times style, and we don’t think you’ll be seeing U.s. or F.b.i. in the paper any time soon. If you do, consider it a typo.

As we said above, usage authorities generally make a distinction between the terms “acronym” and “initialism.”

We’re among those who make the distinction. And so is Bryan A. Garner, who writes in Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) about “the technical differences between the two types of abbreviated names.”

R. W. Burchfield, in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), agrees that the “test of a true acronym is often assumed to be that it should be pronounceable as a word.”

But Burchfield writes that this use of the term “is not widely known to the general public” and it’s “often applied to abbreviations that are familiar but are not pronounceable as words.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) considers the use of the term “acronym” for an initialism a “usage problem.”

A usage note in American Heritage says the distinction between the two terms “has some virtue in precision,” but it acknowledges that the distinction “may be lost on many people.”

Published references in the Oxford English Dictionary suggest that the term “acronym” is a relative newcomer in English, showing up in the early 1940s.

Interestingly, “acronym” referred to what we now consider an “initialism” when it first entered English in 1940, according to OED citations. But by 1943, it was being used as well for abbreviations pronounced as words.

The dictionary says the term was adapted from the German akronym, which the OED dates to “1921 or earlier.”

The citations in the OED suggest that the English term “acronym” has been used steadily since the early 1940s for an abbreviation spoken as a word as well as one spoken as letters. Here are a couple of recent examples:

“The acronym TSS—Tout Sauf Sarkozy (‘Anything But Sarkozy’).” The Atlantic, June  2008.

“Turning tea into an acronym for Taxed Enough Already, demonstrators were expected to attend more than 750 rallies to protest government spending.” The New York Times, April 16, 2009.

(We assume the Times writer would have used all caps, TEA, for the actual acronym.)

Yes, there’s a case to be made for using “acronym” loosely. But for now we’ll continue to observe the distinction in our writing, while making allowances for the many people who are unaware of it.

We’ve written before on the blog about acronyms and initialisms. You might find the postings helpful.

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Q: Is there is a term for pre-qualifying statements like “Nothing personal, but …” or “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …”? I don’t want anyone to take this personally or the wrong way, but people who use these phrases are cowards and morons.

A: You can find several non-technical terms online for these back-handed statements, including “false fronts,” “wishwashers,” “but heads,” and “lying qualifiers.”

“It would be nice if we all stood behind our words instead of erecting walls of disclaimers in front of them,” McKean says. “But it’s also human to want to mitigate people’s reactions when we say something negative.”

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 26, 2020.]

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Q: A “trusty” is a prisoner who can be trusted not to try to escape while a “trustee” is a person reputed to be of good character who can be entrusted with great responsibilities. So it’s laughable to hear people refer to “trustees” raking leaves outside a prison wall! I welcome your thoughts.

A: We can think of a few banking trustees involved in the foreclosure scandal who may end up as prison trusties, but let’s leave their fate to the courts.

As for the words, “trusty” is the usual spelling for a trustworthy prisoner, and “trustee,” broadly speaking, is the term for someone entrusted with property. Here’s how these words evolved.

Their ancestor, the noun “trust,” was first recorded in early Middle English sometime around 1200, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it probably had a more distant, unrecorded history in Old English.

“Trust” was derived from a word in Old Norse, traust (help, confidence, firmness), the OED says. There are similar words in many other old Germanic languages, as well as in prehistoric Proto-Indo-European.

And, as you might suspect, “trust” is distantly connected with “true” and “truth.”

The word “trusty” entered English as an adjective. When first recorded, it meant trusting—that is, having faith or confidence. But that meaning is rare today, and now the adjective means trustworthy, a sense it acquired in the 1300s.

But beginning in the late 1500s, “trusty” was also used as a noun for a trustworthy person—that is, someone who could be trusted, like a loyal employee or the faithful family retainer.

This is the sense of the word that was adapted into use in the American prison system in the mid-19th century, the OED says.

In the 1850s, Oxford explains, “trusty” was used both as an adjective and as a noun to describe a trustworthy prison inmate.

A “trusty prisoner” or, more simply, a “trusty,” is defined as “a well-conducted convict to whom special privileges are granted.”

Here’s the first such usage cited in the OED, from an 1855 issue of the San Francisco Citizen: “Two ‘trusties’ named Scottie and Greene, escaped in a whale boat from the State Prison grounds on Sunday night.”

A “trustee” is another person altogether (not that trustees haven’t occasionally found themselves in the pokey).

This noun dates from the mid-17th century, according to the OED, as a legal term for “one to whom property is entrusted to be administered for the benefit of another.”

But the word is also used more loosely to mean “one of a number of persons appointed to manage the affairs of an institution; also a member of the controlling body of a trust.”

Now for the flies in the ointment! There are two, but they’re easily dispensed with.

(1) Pronunciation. The two words, “trusty” and “trustee,” are generally pronounced differently, with “trusty” accented on the first syllable, “trustee” on the second.

Those are the only options given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says “trusty” is also, though less commonly, accented on the second syllable. We don’t advise it. Anything that distinguishes between these two words helps!

(2) Variant spelling. The prison word “trusty” is occasionally spelled “trustee,” as in Norman Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song (1979): “A trustee standing by a glass museum case was selling convict-made tooled leather belts to a group of tourists.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate makes note of this variant spelling of “trusty,” but American Heritage doesn’t mention of it.

Another source, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, says the “trustee” spelling for a prisoner “is not common, and people who pride themselves on their spelling will undoubtedly call it an error. We recommend that you use trusty instead.”

We second that recommendation. These words are confusing enough when spelled the usual way. Why add to the confusion?

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