Category: Etymology

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Etymology Usage

The echt article

Q: I see the new vogue word in NY literary circles is “echt.” Caught it the other day in the NYT.

A: The adjective “echt” (it means authentic, genuine, or typical) may be in vogue now among the literati, but it’s not especially new. English-speaking literary types have been using it since around World War I.

In the last year, the adjective “echt” has made quite a few appearances in the pages of the New York Times.

In December, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach was said to attract “a breezy mash-up of Hollywood royalty and echt nobility.” And a piece in the Book Review in November described an episode in the life of Kurt Vonnegut as “echt Vonnegut.”

In June, a DVD review referred to “that echt ’70s subject, the Woman in Search of Her Identity.” And a travel piece last March about Trieste used the term “echt-Austrian architecture.”

A dining-out review last January referred to a restaurant as an “echt East Village establishment.” And in December 2010, an article about the sale of the clothing company Lilly Pulitzer described it as “perhaps one of the echt totems of prephood.”

As we mentioned, “echt” has been in use in English since the war to end war, so there’s no longer any need to italicize it now, as the Times Book Review did last month.

The Oxford English Dictionary says English adopted the word from German, but Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) traces it to both the German echt and the Yiddish ekht.

The OED’s earliest citation is from an article by George Bernard Shaw that appeared in 1916 in the journal The New Age: “Many Englishmen who know Germany, and whose social opinions are echt Junker opinions, hail this war as a means of forcing England to adopt the Prussian system.”

The word has appeared in literary or consciously fashionable writing ever since.

In 1917, for example, Ezra Pound used it in a letter to James Joyce: “The opening is echt Joice.” (In his comments on Ulysses, Pound improvised further on Joyce’s name: “All I can say is Echt Dzoice, or Echt Joice, or however else you like it.”)

Whenever it’s used, “echt” seems to call attention to itself, as in these later citations from the OED:

The British composer Constant Lambert went on an “echt” spree in his book Music Ho! (1934): “England has never produced an artist so ‘echt-English’ as Mussorgsky is ‘echt-Russian,’ or Renoir ‘echt-French.’ ”

And here’s a flirtatious usage from Nicolas Freeling’s crime novel Love in Amsterdam (1962): “ ‘Are you married? … I see your ring, but is that camouflage or echt?’ ”

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Etymology Usage

Farewell, My Lovely

Q: In your post about “goodbye,” you say it doesn’t mean leaving someone for good. How about “farewell”? My impression is that it might be suitable for “goodbye forever.”

A: This was our impression, too—that “farewell” implied a more or less permanent “goodbye.” But the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t say that in so many words.

“Farewell” is a one-word version of the phrase “fare well,” in which to “fare” means to travel or make one’s way.

The word was first recorded in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (1377). And the OED defines it simply as “an expression of good wishes at the parting of friends, originally addressed to the one setting forth, but in later use a mere formula of civility at parting.”

Nevertheless, we detect a sense of permanence when “farewell” is used as an attributive noun (that is, adjectivally) in phrases like “farewell address,” “farewell dinner,” “farewell gift,” “farewell letter,” and “farewell speech.”

The OED describes “farewell” as synonymous with “Goodbye!” or “Adieu!” But it adds that today “farewell” is used poetically or rhetorically, “chiefly implying regretful feeling.”

The “regretful” part may be the key here. Certainly there’s an element of sadness in “farewell” that isn’t present in “goodbye.”

Perhaps that’s because “farewell” conveys the idea that the parting is a long one, as if a friend were “setting forth” (as the OED says) on a journey. This could be why we associate “farewell” with more long-lasting partings.

On a less poignant note, we wrote a blog item a couple of years back on why “so long” means goodbye.

Finally, all this talk about “farewell” makes us think of two Raymond Chandler novels, Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. He wrote The Long Goodbye while his wife, Cissy, was dying.

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Etymology Usage

Think piece

Q: Way back in high school, I had Sister Aloysius for an English teacher. Each time a supposedly educated student started a comment with “I don’t think,” she’d stop him with “You’re right, you don’t think.” She wanted us to say “I don’t believe….” Today when I hear “I don’t think,” particularly from a speaker I don’t like, I yell out “You’re right, YOU DON’T THINK!” What is your take on the matter?

A: We think Sister Aloysius was being cranky for no good reason. There’s nothing wrong in beginning a sentence with “I don’t think….”

People do this quite regularly, as in “I don’t think it’s going to rain after all,” or “I don’t think it needs more salt, do you?”

The verb “think” is legitimately used in the sense of “believe” and accompanied by a direct object—a word, phrase, or clause indicating what is thought, believed, etc.

We suspect that Sister Aloysius was under the impression that “think” cannot correctly be used as a transitive verb—that is, one that has a direct object.

But for more than a thousand years, “think” has been both transitive and intransitive. When used transitively, it takes a direct object (as in “to think evil thoughts”). When used intransitively, it has no direct object (as in “Now think!”).

Here are some more examples of each, from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Transitive: “Canst thou remember … ? I doe not thinke thou canst” (from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1610-11); “No doubt you think yourself as good” (from a poem of Ambrose Bierce, 1910).

Intransitive: “Pause here, and think” (from a poem by William Cowper, 1800); “Consider: take a month to think” (from a poem of Tennyson, 1842).

As the OED explains, one of the meanings of “think,” used transitively, is “to hold as an opinion, to believe, judge, consider.”

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Pinkies up

Q: Is my little finger my “pinkie” because it’s pink or because it’s little?

A: Just when we think we’ve been asked every question under the sun, a new one pops up in our inbox.

So why is the digitus minimus called a pinkie? We call the little finger a “pinkie” because it’s small, not because it’s pink (and, of course, not all pinkies are pink).

The word comes from Scots English. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from the first edition of John Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808).

Jamieson, who was an antiquary and philologist, defined the word this way: “Pinkie, the little finger; a term mostly used by children, or in talking to them.”

The Scots term may have originated in the nursery, but it soon graduated. In his novel The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828), the Scottish poet and physician David Macbeth Moir wrote: “His pinkie was hacked off by a dragoon.”

The OED says “pinkie” (also spelled “pinky” and occasionally used for the little toe) is derived from an earlier noun, “pink,” a now obsolete 16th-century Scottish word for “a very small person or creature; a brat; an elf.”

In the 17th century, this same word was used in Scotland to mean a very small thing, like a speck or tiny hole. Until the 18th century, the word was spelled “pinck” or “pinke.”

All of these Scottish words are of “uncertain” origin, the OED says. But there could be a Dutch connection. As the OED notes, similar words in Dutch and West Frisian (pinck, pink, pinke) had been used earlier to mean the little finger.

The original Dutch pinck is described as “of unknown origin, perhaps originally children’s language.” The modern Dutch for the little finger, pinkje, emphasizes the littleness idea by adding the diminutive suffix –je (similar to our suffixes “-y” and “-ie”).

The OED doesn’t go so far as to say the Scottish word came from Dutch. But some etymologists make the leap. The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says “pinkie,” meaning “the smallest finger,” was “borrowed from Dutch pinkje, diminutive of pink little finger.”

As we said earlier, the color pink is no relation—at least not directly. The color was named after a garden flower, the pink (a dianthus).

Chambers explains: “About 1720 the plant name began to be used attributively in the sense of having the color of the garden pink when pale or light red, of a pale rose color.”

The name of the flower, which we have in profusion in our garden, was first recorded in the late 1500s, but we don’t know its origin.

The OED says there may be a connection with an old use of “pink” to mean “pink eye” or “little eye.” Or perhaps the flower got its name because of its jagged edge, since the verb “pink” once meant to ornament by cutting holes or slits.

The verb “pink” now means, among other things, to cut with a zigzag edge, the kind of finished edge you get when using pinking shears or scissors.

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Caffeine content

Q: Why is “teacup” one word but “coffee cup” two words?

A: Although “teacup” is usually written as one word and “coffee cup” as two, they’re sometimes spelled the same way. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, hyphenates both: “tea-cup” and “coffee-cup.”

We checked six standard dictionaries—three American and three British—and all of them listed “teacup” as one word. Only one had an entry for the cup used to drink java, and listed it as two words: “coffee cup.”

So why is “teacup” usually one word and “coffee cup” two? The answer may lie in the dearth of dictionary entries for the container used to drink coffee.

Perhaps lexicographers feel that “teacup” is popular enough to be listed as a single word while “coffee cup” isn’t popular enough to get an entry.

In googling the two terms, we got five times as many hits for “teacup” as we did for “coffee cup.” (The “coffee cup” results included the hyphenated version.)

However, both “teacup” and “coffee cup” are very popular, with many millions of hits apiece. So perhaps the answer lies elsewhere.

Interestingly, many dictionaries that ignore “coffee cup” have single-word entries for less popular terms like “coffeecake,” “coffeemaker,” and “coffeepot.”

Words often begin life as two separate terms (like “try out”), then become hyphenated (“try-out”), and finally lose their hyphens as they become more common (“tryout”). But “teacup” and “coffee cup” appear to be exceptions that prove the rule.

The earliest citation for “teacup” in the OED (from a play by William Congreve that premiered in 1700) is a hyphenated version: “Let Mahometan Fools … be damn’d over Tea-Cups and Coffee.”

A one-worder showed up 14 years later in the writings of Joseph Addison: “The fashion of the teacup … has run through a wonderful variety of colour, shape, and size.”

As for “coffee cup,” it began life as two words connected with a hyphen, according to OED citations, and ended up as two words, minus the hyphen.

The OED’s first published reference for the usage is from a 1782 book by Horace Walpole about English painting: “I have a coffee-cup of his ware.”

But more recent citations are two worded and hyphen-free. Here’s a colorful one from what appears to be a Vanity Fair review of the 1999 film Office Space:

“The fiefdom’s key rat fink and enforcer is a supervisor named Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), a walking vanity plate who patrols the tick-tack-toe cubicles, coffee cup in hand, acting as if he just happened to be dropping by.”

Sorry we can’t be more helpful. We drink coffee as well as tea, and we use the same containers for both. What do we call them? The small ones are “cups” and the big ones are “mugs.”

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When golf was banned in Scotland

Q: I cringe every time someone says “I’m going golfing” or “Did you go golfing today?” I tell them “Golf is not a verb! You don’t go tennis-ing or basketball-ing, do you?” But no one seems to care. Has the word “golf” become a verb after all this misuse?

A: We hate to disappoint you, but “golf” is indeed a legitimate verb. It’s listed as such in standard dictionaries, including The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

In fact, “golf” has been used as a verb for more than 200 years. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation is from the autobiography of a golfing parson, the Rev. Alexander Carlyle, a leading figure in the Church of Scotland in the 18th century.

In the OED’s citation, Carlyle uses a derivative of the verb, a participial adjective: “We crossed the river to the golfing-ground.” (Carlyle, who died in 1805, wrote his autobiography some time in his final years. It wasn’t published until 1860.)

Another well-known Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, used the verb more straightforwardly: “You might golf if you wanted” (from “The Lantern-Bearers,” a story published in Scribner’s magazine, February 1888).

As for the noun “golf,” it’s very old, as you probably know. The oldest existing written reference to the game is from a 15th-century manuscript in which golf and football were banned in Scotland.

Here’s the OED’s first citation, from a passage in the Scottish Acts of Parliament enacted in 1457, during the reign of James II of Scotland: “And at the fut bal ande the golf be vtterly cryt downe and nocht vsyt.” (Translation: “And that the football and the golf be utterly cried down and not used.”)

The game of golf, as the OED notes, is “of considerable antiquity in Scotland.” And it’s surely older than that first citation in the dictionary.

If the sport was so popular that it had to be banned, then obviously both the game and the word “golf” were around for quite some time before that 15th-century law was passed.

Why the ban? Apparently the military-minded Scottish kings felt that able-bodied men should be busying themselves with longbows instead of golf clubs. In the end, the prohibition proved futile, and James IV eventually took up the game himself.

But to get back to the noun “golf,” its origin is obscure. The first recorded spelling was “golf,” though later Middle English spellings included “gouff,” “goiff,” and “golfe.”

The OED notes that the word is “commonly supposed to be an adoption” of a Dutch word, kolf or kolv, which means “club” and refers to “the stick, club, or bat, used in several games of the nature of tennis, croquet, hockey, etc.”

So did the game or golf originate in the Netherlands? Sports historians have debated the issue for years. It’s perhaps inevitable that when you’re talking about a game that involves hitting balls with sticks, you’re going to get disagreement about where it came from.

The OED seems to come down on the side of Scotland as the origin: “None of the Dutch games have been convincingly identified with golf, nor is it certain that kolf was ever used to denote the game as well as the implement, though the game was and is called kolven.”

In some modern Scots dialects, the OED notes, the word for “golf” is gowf, which literally means “a blow with the open hand.” The pronunciation roughly rhymes with “loaf.”

This Scottish version apparently influenced an “l”-less pronunciation of “golf” (it rhymes with “off”) that the OED describes as “somewhat fashionable in England.”

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Etymology Pronunciation

Preppy pronunciation

Q: Why is there such a proliferation of “prepatory” schools these days? I thought the word was “preparatory.” I’ve even heard a spot on WNYC that uses “prepatory.” If my sons were still of school age, I certainly would not send them to that prep school!

A: We can’t tell you why this is showing up, only that it’s considered a mispronunciation and not yet listed as standard (or as any kind of variant) in any dictionary we can find.

What’s being dropped in this pronunciation is not just the second “r” but the entire second syllable. The five-syllable “preparatory” becomes the four-syllable PREP-a-tor-ee.

Standard American dictionaries include several five-syllable pronunciations. They can be stressed on either the first syllable (PREP-er-a-tor-ee) or the second (pre-PAR-a-tor-ee).

One of the references we checked, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), does accept a four-syllable pronunciation in which the first “r” is retained: PREP-ra-tor-ee.

By the way, the British pronounce the word as four syllables with the stress on the second syllable (pri-PAIR-a-tree), according to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

The adjective “preparatory,” meaning preliminary or introductory, entered English in the early 1400s, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. It was borrowed from Middle French, but its ultimate source was the Latin verb praeparare (to prepare).

The term “preparatory school” first showed up in the mid-1600s and the short form, “prep school,” in the late 1800s, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation for “prep school” is from an 1891 issue of the Cosmos, the student newspaper at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

“A prep school girl being told by her teacher to parse the sentence, ‘He kissed me,’ consented reluctantly.”

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Etymology Usage

A word pileup on the traffic report

Q: As I listen to traffic reports, my teeth are set to grating by the phrase “an accident in the process of being cleared.” I understand (I think) that there’s nothing technically wrong with that phrase, but it’s a personal bugbear of mine. Grrr!

A: We can’t see anything grammatically wrong here, just an inelegant pileup of unnecessary words.

One would think, though, that a fast-talking traffic reporter trying to squeeze two minutes’ worth of words into a 60-second spot would be the last person to get wordy.

One could say “an accident being cleared” and dispense with “in the process of.” Or better yet, just say “an accident.” We’d assume it was being cleared, no?

We were once startled by a usage on a traffic report. Because of an accident (of course!), an exit ramp had been “coned off.” In other words, it had been blocked off by those orange traffic cones.

A bit of googling, though, produced hundreds of thousands of hits for “cone off” and “coned off.”

We couldn’t find the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary or the two standard US dictionaries we consult the most, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

However, the unabridged Collins English Dictionary (10th ed.) describes “cone off” as a British usage meaning “to close (one carriageway of a motorway) by placing warning cones across it.”

And it’s defined in the Cambridge Dictionaries Online as a phrasal verb meaning “to prevent traffic from using a road or area by putting special objects that are shaped like cones on it. Part of the road had been coned off for repair work.”

Live and learn!

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Etymology Pronunciation

Window shopping on FITH Avenue

Q: I have taught languages for almost 40 years and I am befuddled by two usages that seem to be accepted today in American English: (1) The pronunciation of words like “interstate” and “antiterrorist” as “innerstate” and “anniterrorist.” (2) The pronunciation of “fifth” as “fith.” Should I not instruct students in correct usage anymore regarding these examples? Please enlighten me.

A: The short answer is that most dictionaries consider these consonant-dropping pronunciations nonstandard. In other words, mispronunciations. So you’re safe in holding your ground here.

As you note, such pronunciations aren’t unusual. Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd. ed.) includes “fifth” and “interesting” in its list of frequently mispronounced words in American English. (They’re spoken as if they were spelled “fith” and “inneresting.”)

Common or not, all the dictionaries we’ve checked agree that the “t” is pronounced in words beginning with an “anti-” or “inter-“ prefix, as well as in “interesting.” (The “t” is often dropped here in unaccented syllables.)

But not all authorities agree about “fifth.” One source, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), accepts the pronunciations FITH and FIFT.

In accepting this latter pronunciation, M-W has ancient history on its side. In Old English, “fifth” was pronounced and written differently, as fifta. Similarly, the word had no final “th” sound in the other old Germanic languages.

So where did the “th” sound come from? The Oxford English Dictionary has the answer: “The normal form fift still survives in dialects; the standard form, which first appears in the 14th cent., is due to the analogy of fourth.”

So if “fourth” were “fourt” instead, we’d probably still be saying “fift.”

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English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

On holy days and holidays

Q: Happy holidays! Apropos of the holiday season, when did “holiday” become a word and when did it lose its holiness? I assume it was originally “holy day,” but I’ve never looked into it.

A: The word “holiday” was first recorded in English around the year 950, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but it looked a lot different back then.

In Old English, it was written haligdæg or hali-dægh (literally “holy day’). And later, in Middle English, the first vowel was also an “a”: halidei, halidai , halliday, haliday, etc.

A bit later in the Middle English period (12th to 15th centuries) the “a” became an “o,” and eventually the usual forms of the word became “holy day,” “holy-day,” or “holiday” (a spelling first recorded in 1460).

The different forms of the word—that is, whether it was written as one word or two—had something to do with its different meanings.

Originally, the word meant a consecrated day or a religious festival. But in the 1400s, it acquired another, more secular meaning.

The OED defines this sense of the word as “a day on which ordinary occupations (of an individual or a community) are suspended; a day of exemption or cessation from work; a day of festivity, recreation, or amusement.”

That’s how the single word “holiday” came to include the secular side of life and became identified with vacations. But the two–word versions (“holy day,” “holy-day”) retained the original meaning—a day set aside for religious observance.

Today we still recognize these different senses and spellings.

Now here’s an aside. In the Middle English period, people sometimes observed holy days by eating a large flatfish called butte. Thus this fish became known as “halibut” (“hali” for holy and “but” for flatfish).

And happy holidays to you!

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Etymology Pronunciation Usage

A formidable subject

Q: “Formidable” used to be pronounced FOR-midable in the US, but I believe the
pronunciation was influenced after WWII by British speakers, who pronounced it for-MID-able. For some reason this latter pronunciation has taken hold in the US.

A: Let’s establish at the outset that in modern American usage “formidable” can be pronounced correctly with the accent on either the first or the second syllable (FOR-mid-able or for-MID-able).

Both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), among others, give the two pronunciations, in that order, as standard English.

We can’t find any evidence, though, that Americans acquired the for-MID-able pronunciation from the British, as you suggest. But the pronunciation does appear to be relatively new—both in the US and in Britain.

For one thing, older standard dictionaries in both countries—even those as recent as the mid-1980s—list only one pronunciation, FOR-mid-able.

And for another, usage guides didn’t begin noticing the word until the mid- to late-20th century, which suggests that its pronunciation wasn’t an issue before then.

Even now, the only pronunciation given in the Oxford English Dictionary is accented on the first syllable (FOR-mid-able). One would think that if for-MID-able were a well-established British pronunciation, and if in fact Americans had acquired it from the British, the OED would list it as a variant.

Yet another British reference book, the latest version of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed., 2004), has this to say:

“The standard pronunciation is with the main stress on the first syllable. Second-syllable stressing, though increasingly heard (a limited opinion poll by J. C. Wells, 1990, actually revealed a slight preference for for-MID-able), is not recommended.”

Later the editor of the new Fowler’s, R.W. Burchfield, includes “formidable” in a list of multi-syllable words with “unstable accents.”

Words in which the accent is moving from the first to the second syllable in British usage, he says, include “applicable,” “clematis,” “controversy,” “despicable,” “exquisite,” “formidable,” “harass,” “hospitable,” “integral,” “lamentable,” and others. (Obviously, some of these newer pronunciations have already established themselves in American usage.)

As far as we can tell, the for-MID-able pronunciation seems to be a mid-20th-century phenomenon. The first edition of Fowler’s (1926) doesn’t mention it, nor does our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition). But it does show up, among similar “unorthodox” pronunciations, in the second edition of Fowler’s (1965).

Despite that “unorthodox” label in the ’60s, several recent dictionaries, British as well as American, list both pronunciations as standard today. Macmillan, for example, publishes British and American editions, and both of them give the two pronunciations. When both are given, the one accented on the first syllable is invariably listed ahead of the other.

Clearly, however, this pronunciation is in flux. Cambridge Dictionaries Online gives for-MID-able as the standard British pronunciation and FOR-mid-able as the American.

As for why the for-MID-able pronunciation has taken hold, the original Fowler’s offers a clue. In a section about the “recessive accent,” Henry Fowler commented on “a repugnance to strings of obscure syllables.”

Some people’s tongues, Fowler explained, “cannot frame a rapid succession of light syllables hardly differing from each another.” In reaction, he said, they tend either to shift the stress to the second syllable or to drop a syllable.

Fowler used the example of “laboratory,” a five-syllable word (at least it was in his day). Its “orthodox” pronunciation, he said, is accented on the first syllable, but some people “find four successive unaccented syllables trying.”

So rather than accent the first syllable, he said, they accent the second (la-BOR-a-tor-ee) or drop the fourth (LAB-or-a-tree). And, as we know, some British speakers do both (la-BOR-a-tree).

Americans have no trouble accenting the first syllable, but they drop the second (LAB-ra-tor-ee), the usual pronunciation in the US. Fortunately, “lab” is standard English on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Etymology Grammar

What is your heart’s desire?

Q: I am guessing that there should be an apostrophe in “My heart’s desire is a Lab puppy,” since the desire belongs to the heart. Am I right?

A: Yes, there’s a possessive apostrophe. The phrase is properly written “heart’s desire,” as in “Those diamond stud earrings are my heart’s desire,” or “His heart’s desire was a six-pack and a large pizza with double cheese.”

Here, “my heart’s desire” is equivalent to “the desire of my heart.” Both are possessive constructions. By the way, we had a posting a while back about the history of the apostrophe in possessive constructions.

The expression “heart’s desire” dates back at least as far as the 14th century, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary. This was before the apostrophe showed up in English, and when “es” was the possessive ending for most nouns.

The phrase first appeared in writing, according to OED citations, in a Middle English poem, The Gestes of the Worthie King and Emperour, Alisaunder of Macedoine (1340-70): “Hee hoped to haue there of his hertes desyres.”

Here’s a later example with modern punctuation, from a piece by Richard Steele in the Tatler (1709): “Farewel my Terentia, my Heart’s Desire, farewel.”

And if YOUR heart’s desire really is a Lab puppy, go for it! We recently welcomed a golden retriever puppy into our home.

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Topology

Q: Please comment on this UK slang expression for suicide: “to top oneself,” usually in lieu of facing trial or dishonor or worse at the hands of villains.

A: Since the 13th century, people have used the noun “top” to refer to the head. And since the 18th century, the verb “top” has been used in one way or another to mean to behead or to put to death by hanging.

(In the 19th century, “topsman” was a slang word for a hangman.)

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for the use of “top” in the executioner’s sense is from Charles Hitchin’s crime exposé The Regulator (1718): “He being known to be an old Practitioner, will certainly be cast and top’d, alias hang’d for the same.”

Now, according to the OED, “to top someone” usually means to commit murder and “to top oneself” means to commit suicide.

The sense of topping oneself first showed up in the mid-20th century, according to the dictionary’s citations. Here are some suicidal examples:

“He also took my tie and belt so that I could not top myself” (from Frank Norman’s Bang to Rights: An Account of Prison Life, 1958).

“I have to try and get a key to it all, otherwise I’ll just top myself” (from the former BBC publication The Listener, 1983).

Let’s end this on a lighter note with an excerpt for the campaign season from Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”:

I’m the nominee of the G.O.P.
Or GOP!
But if, baby, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top!

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Is your English busted?

Q: What about using “busted” for “broken”? I was taught NEVER to do that, but now I always hear things such as “He has a busted leg.” I realize usage, and grammar, evolve but what do YOU think about this?

A: How acceptable is using “bust” for “break” (and “busted” for “broken”)? That depends on the dictionary you consult.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) calls this usage informal, and the Oxford English Dictionary labels it colloquial (that is, more suited to speech than writing).

But at least one dissenting voice, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), accepts it as standard English without reservation.

Since you asked our opinion, we’ll tell you. We agree with American Heritage that a sentence like “He busted a leg skiing” is too informal for polished written English, but it’s OK for informal speech.

However, some other meanings of “bust” and “busted” are more widely accepted and can be used without apology in writing as well as speech. Here’s the story.

The verb “bust” got its start a couple of hundred years ago as an “r”-less pronunciation of “burst.” As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, this pronunciation was “apparently common in many dialect areas in the 19th century and earlier.”

In those days, the verb “burst” had more meanings than it does today. In addition to its most common modern meaning, to explode, “burst” meant to break or smash. So when the “bust” pronunciation came along, It too conveyed those meanings.

The OED credits the American explorer Meriwether Lewis with the first recorded use of the verb “bust.” In 1806, during the Lewis and Clark Expedition, he wrote in his journal: “Windsor busted his rifle near the muzzle.”

In the mid-19th century, Charles Dickens used “bust” in the sense of “burst” in his novels.

The OED gives one example from Nicholas Nickleby (1839): “His genius would have busted all bounds.” And it cites two examples from Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44): “Keep cool, Jefferson. … Don’t bust!” and “If the biler [boiler] of this vessel was Toe bust, Sir.”

Soon, “bust” and “busted” acquired more meanings.

People began using “busted” to mean bankrupt (first recorded in 1829); demoted or reduced in rank (1918); and placed under arrest or raided (1953).

And they used “bust” to mean punch or slug, a usage the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces back to 1873. (P. G. Wodehouse used it artfully in his 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress: “I shall infallibly bust you one on the jaw.”)

All the senses of the verb “bust” are more or less informal sounding. But which are considered standard English? Again, this varies from dictionary to dictionary.

Merriam-Webster’s is the most lenient, accepting nearly all the modern meanings of “bust,” even “to bust one’s chops” (give someone a hard time) and to “bust one’s butt” (to work hard or exhaust oneself). M-W  regards only one sense of “bust” as slang: to arrest.

American Heritage regards “bust” as informal when it means to smash, break, or render inoperable; to reduce in rank; or to arrest. (It labels the busting of chops and butts as “vulgar slang.”)

If there’s a safety zone for “bust,” it consists of usages that both dictionaries consider standard—that is, the ones they list without reservation.

These senses get two thumbs up: to bring an end (“bust the monopoly”); to tame (“bust the bronco”); to bankrupt or ruin financially (“bust the budget”); to hit or punch (“bust him in the nose”); and to explode (“laugh fit to bust”).

And that busts our budget of information.

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Etymology Phrase origin

Sleeping with the fishes

Q: During Pat’s WNYC discussion of euphemisms for death, a caller mentioned the expression “sleep with the fishes.” I believe it originated with the first Godfather movie. After Luca Brasi is thrown into the sea, Tessio carries in Brasi’s bullet-proof vest with a fish inside. Sonny says, “What the hell is this?” Tessio says: “It’s a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”

A: That line from the 1972 movie undoubtedly helped popularize the expression, but it didn’t originate with The Godfather or even with the Mafia, which arose in Sicily in the 1860s.

A search of books digitized by Google suggests that the expression was alive and well in English at least as far back as the 1830s and probably earlier.

In Sketches of Germany and the Germans (1836), Edmund Spencer describes a trip by a British angler to an area occupied by superstitious villagers who considered fly fishing a form of black magic:

“This terrible apprehension was soon circulated from village to village: the deluded peasants broke in pieces the pretty painted magic wand, and forcibly put to flight the magician himself, vowing, with imprecations, if he repeated his visit, they would send him to sleep with the fishes.”

Here’s one more fishy example. An article from the July 15, 1905, issue of The Search-Light, a magazine specializing in international affairs, describes an attempt by the Russian fleet to capture a pirate ship:

“After her at full speed hurried the torpedo boat ‘Smetilvy,’ manned by a crew of officers and faithful blue jackets, and pledged to send the rebels to sleep with the fishes.”

We couldn’t find any citations for “sleep with the fishes” in the Oxford English Dictionary, but the OED does have an entry from an 1891 slang dictionary of “feed the fishes” used figuratively to mean “to be drowned.”

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Etymology Punctuation Usage

When did “Venus’s beauty” get a second “s”?

Q: I am 50 and I was taught that words ending in “s” (“Chris,” for example) were made possessive by adding an apostrophe (“Chris’ coat”). But in recent years I have noticed another “s” being added after the apostrophe. When did “Chris’s” get an extra “s”?

A: As far as we can tell, an apostrophe plus the letter “s” has generally been used to mark the possessive case of singular nouns since at least the 1700s. This has been true whether the nouns ended in “s” or not.

A 1772 edition of Joseph Priestley’s The Rudiments of English Grammar, for example, says the possessive “is formed by adding (s) with an apostrophe before it” to a singular noun. Examples include one with a singular noun ending in “s” (“Venus’s beauty”).

So a name or other singular noun that ends in “s” (like “Chris”) is usually made possessive with the addition of an apostrophe plus a final “s” (as in “Chris’s coat”).

Here’s the rule, from The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.): “The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s. … The general rule stated at [that paragraph] extends to the possessives of proper nouns, including names ending in s, x, or z.”

[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 24, 2019, to cite the wording in the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual.]

The examples given in the Chicago Manual include “Kansas’s legislature,” “Marx’s theories,” “Dickens’s novels,” “Berlioz’s works,” “Borges’s library,” “Camus’s novels,” and “Jesus’s adherents.”

The manual goes on to say: “Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s—hence ‘Dylan Thomas’ poetry,’ ‘Etta James’ singing,’ and ‘that business’ main concern.’ Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago.”

The point about pronunciation is a good one. When a name ends in  “s” or another sibilant sound, we add a syllable when pronouncing the possessive form. So the possessive form of the name “Chris” is pronounced KRIS-ez—a good enough reason to retain the final “s.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written before on the blog about forming the possessive of plural names. And if you’re game for a little history, we had an item on how the apostrophe became the mark of possession.

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Etymology Usage

Tennis, anyone?

Q: Many years ago, I was flipping through a book at friends of my grandparents. It was a compendium of expressions and claimed bizarrely that “Tennis, anyone?” meant “Would you like to go for a walk in the rain?” Can you shed any light on this?

A: We doubt that “Tennis, anyone?” is—or ever was—another way of asking, “Walk in the rain, anyone?” The book you read might have suggested this as a joke, since only the most obsessive tennis obsessives are likely to play in the rain.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the tennis expression (which has lots of variants) as “a typical entrance or exit line given to a young man in a superficial drawing-room comedy.”

The phrase is also used adjectivally to describe someone or something reminiscent of this kind of comedy (as in “He used his tennis-anyone voice”).

The OED quotes John van Druten’s book Playwright at Work (1953) on the use of the expression:

“There is no average Mr. and Mrs. Blank at all. An attempt to draw one … will lead you into the pit of emptiness, and you will emerge with something as unreal as the juveniles in plays who come in impertinently swinging tennis rackets, and when the time for their exit arrives, make it with the remark: ‘Tennis, anyone?’ ”

The first to use an equivalent expression may have been George Bernard Shaw. In his play Misalliance (1914), a rich young man says flippantly, in mid-conversation, “Anybody on for a game of tennis?”

Shaw’s line is quoted in Fred A. Shapiro’s The Yale Book of Quotations, which goes on to say that “Tennis, anyone?” later became “a catchphrase associated with drawing room comedies.”

“Humphrey Bogart is often said to have originated that phrase, but no example of its use has ever been found in the plays in which he appeared,” Shapiro writes. “The earliest example to date of ‘Tennis, anyone?’ is in the Dixon (Ill.) Evening Telegraph, 5 May 1951.”

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On the tarmac

Q: Why does the media insist on using “the tarmac” as a catchphrase for different areas of an airport: runways, aprons, taxiways? Tarmac is largely obsolete and hasn’t been used at airports for many years. For some reason this just bugs me.

A: You’re right technically, though it doesn’t pay to be too technical about this. English is a work in progress, and dictionaries are starting to accept “the tarmac” as the paved part of an airport where planes stop to take on or let off passengers.

But let’s back up a bit. In the early 1800s, a Scottish engineer named John Loudon McAdam developed a technique of road building using layers of small pieces of stone. This road surface was referred to as “macadam.”

In the early 20th century, an English surveyor named Edgar Purnell Hooley developed a technique for combining tar with macadam to produce a road-building material called tar macadam or tarmac.

Although tarmac was used extensively in the construction of airports during World War II, no major airport now uses it. The pavement at major airports is now usually asphalt or concrete.

(While we’re metaphorically waiting on the runway, check out our blog entries about “cement” and “concrete,” their meanings and their pronunciations.)

To get back to your question, a baggage handler or a language stickler would refer to the loading and unloading area at an airport as a ramp or an apron. But we think “the tarmac” is evolving and it’s not a crime for laymen to use it loosely for such an area.

Some dictionaries still restrict the term “tarmac” to paved areas made of tar macadam (or tarmacadam), but others now say it can refer generally to airport areas made of any kind of pavement.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “tarmac” as the “registered trade-mark of a kind of tar macadam consisting of iron slag impregnated with tar and creosote; also designating a surface made of tar macadam.”

However, the OED then notes that the phrase “the tarmac” is often used colloquially to mean an airfield or runway.

The British and American versions of the online Macmillan Dictionary go one step further and define “the tarmac” simply as “the part of an airport where the planes stop and that people walk across to get on a plane.”

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Why do we favor a sore foot?

Q: Please enlighten me about this sentence: “He is favoring his left leg.” Does this mean the person in question is depending more on his left leg (presumably because his right one is injured)? Or does it mean he is giving special protective treatment to the left leg because it is the injured one?

A: “Favoring” one leg means treating it gently—that is, using it less than the other.

This use of the verb “favor” was first recorded in English in 1526, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED defines this sense of the word as “to deal gently with; to avoid overtasking (a limb); to ease, save, spare.”

Not surprisingly, many citations for this usage come from books on horsemanship.

The OED includes an early example from Gervase Markham’s Cavelarice, or the English Horseman (1607): “When a horse doth stand but firme upon … three feete … favoring the other.”

Late in the following century, William Augustus Osbaldiston wrote in The British Sportsman (1792): “He will set his foot on the ground warily, and endeavour to favor it.”

And here’s a human example. Samuel Pepys, who experienced severe pain while reading and writing, wrote in a 1668 diary entry about “walking in the dark in the garden, to favour my eyes.”

This sense of “favor” is perhaps a natural extension of the word’s original meaning.

When “favor” first entered English in the 1300s, the OED says, it generally meant to regard with favor or show favor to; to look kindly upon or to treat kindly; to have a liking or preference for; to encourage or patronize; to treat with partiality, and so on.

It’s not surprising that one—whether equine or human—should want to deal kindly with sore feet and sore eyes!

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Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Gallows rumor

Q: It seems to me that the word “executor” has two pronunciations, one for the person who carries out the terms of a will, and another for the person who carries out the sentence in a capital crime. Am I right about this?

A: Yes and no. The use of “executor” for a hangman is now considered obsolete (we’ll get to this later), but there are indeed two different kinds of “executor” in modern usage, and most people pronounce them differently.

(1) The one we meet most often is accented on the second syllable (ig-ZEK-yuh-ter). It means a person who executes the terms of a will (as in “Mr. Beazley is my late father’s executor”).

(2) Less frequently we hear the one accented on the first syllable (EK-suh-kyoo-ter). This means a person who executes something else or gets it done (“The sculptor is both designer and executor”).

Those are the pronunciations assigned to the two meanings in almost every reference we checked—the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and half a dozen other dictionaries and usage guides.

Only one source, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), says the pronunciations are interchangeable. In our opinion, pronouncing “executor” indiscriminately is likely to raise a few eyebrows.

In both of those definitions, #1 and #2, something’s being executed, and here the verb “execute” means to carry out, produce, or put into effect.

But, as you know, to “execute” also means to put to death. And once upon a time, an “executor” (pronounced EK-suh-kyoo-ter) meant someone who executes a condemned prisoner. But this sense of “executor” has been replaced by “executioner.”

Our verb “execute” was first recorded in English in 1387, according to OED citations. Interestingly, it was recorded more than a century after “executor,” circa 1280.

Both words came into English from Anglo-Norman, but their ultimate source is the Latin verb exsequi, which is composed of ex plus sequi—literally “to follow out,” or pursue to the end.

Originally, to “execute” something was to perform its functions (as in “to execute the office”).

In the following century, the word acquired most of its other senses, including one first recorded in 1413 and defined this way in the OED: “To carry into effect ministerially (a law, a judicial sentence, etc.).”

The meaning of “execute” that we associate with the gallows came along 70 years later, in 1483. How did it gets its meaning? This remains a puzzle.

“It is not quite clear,” says the OED, whether the capital punishment usage grew out of the 1413 sense of the word (that is, to put a judicial sentence into effect), or whether it partly represents “the etymological notion of Latin exsequi ‘to pursue to the end.’ ”

With that, we’ve pursued this subject to the end.

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Etymology Usage

Wanna argue?

Q: What does the word “arguably” mean? Does it mean “without a doubt” or “possibly”?

A: It usually means something in between those two definitions. In a sentence like “He’s arguably the best player in the National League,” we’re saying that one could make the case that he’s the best player in the league.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the adverb “arguably” describes something that “may be argued or shown by argument.” It gives these two examples: “an arguably effective strategy” and “arguably the greatest writer of his era.”

If you find that confusing, Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary, a guide for students of English as a second language, offers a clearer definition: “used to say that a statement is very possibly true even if it is not certainly true.”

Although some people are confused about whether “arguably” is negative or positive, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains that it “is used in a positive sense and that it is primarily a qualifier or hedge against too strong a statement.”

One reason for the confusion is that the adjective “arguable” can be either positive or negative. M-W Collegiate says it’s used for something that can be “open to argument” or “convincingly argued.”

In fact, the M-W usage guide also includes some examples of “arguable” used in what it considers a neutral sense. A 1982 book review in the New York Times, for example, refers to “an arguable issue that he does not pause to argue.”

The adverb “arguably” is relatively new. The earliest published reference for the word in the OED is from an 1890 issue of the Saturday Review: “His policy, if sometimes arguably mistaken, was almost always a … generous policy.”

Although the adjective “arguable” dates from the early 1600s, it doesn’t appear to have been widely used until the mid-1800s.

In an 1860 example, the English essayist Walter Bagehot writes that the Jacobites believed in “an hereditary family, which claimed the Crown, not on arguable considerations of policy, but on ascertainable claims of descent.”

As for the etymology of these words, both the adjective and adverb, as well as the verb “argue,” are ultimately derived from the Latin arguere (to make clear, prove, assert, accuse, blame).

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Etymology Pronunciation

Hwat’s up with what?

Q: Please explain to me why some people, generally older and perhaps Southern, pronounce the word “what” in such a way that it sounds as if it’s spelled “hwat.” I hope my cumbersome explanation conveys what I’m asking.

A: In modern American usage, “what” can be pronounced with either a simple “w” sound at the beginning, or with a breathier “hw” sound

In standard American dictionaries, like The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), both of those pronunciations are acceptable.

This wasn’t always true. Formerly, the latter pronunciation—it sounds something like HWUT—was preferred. For example, our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition), gives that as the only pronunciation.

But today, while both pronunciations are acceptable, the “hw” sound is losing ground. Most Americans have dropped the “h” sound at the beginning of “what” and other such words (“which,” “why,” “when,” “whim,” “white,” and so on).

These days, as you suggested, the “hw” sound is more likely to be heard in parts of the South than elsewhere in the country.

This trend away from the “hw” sound isn’t restricted to American English. Modern British usage favors an “h”-less pronunciation of “what” that sounds something like WOT.

The online Macmillan Dictionary, which has both British and American versions, gives both “w” and “hw” pronunciations for American usage but only one, the “h”-less version, for British usage. The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, which also has US and UK pronunciations, agrees.

As you might suspect, the “hw” pronunciation is the much older one. In fact, when “what” first showed up in Old English in the 700s, the word was spelled with an “h” in front: hwaet or huaet.

The British began losing the “h” sound in “what” long before Americans did, and even before the Colonies existed.

We found an interesting perspective on all this in Kate Burridge’s book Weeds in the Garden of Words (2005).

Burridge, an Australian linguist, writes, “Over the years English has been simplifying the clusters of consonants it allows, in particular the clusters that occur at the beginning of syllables.”

“We know that the change in pronunciation from ‘hw’ to ‘w’ started in the south of England as early as the Middle Ages, but it couldn’t have been a big hit, since the ‘hw’ cluster went across to North America in the 17th century,” she goes on to say.

In 18th-century England, Burridge adds, “the pronunciation ‘w’ was clearly gaining ground. It had even begun to creep into the speech of the educated, who had earlier condemned it.”

“By 1800 which and witch and whether and weather had become homophones in Standard English pronunciation,” she writes. “The cluster is managing to hang in there in places like Scotland and Ireland, but everywhere else it’s well and truly on the way out.”

Update: A reader of the blog calls our attention to an episode of the animated TV show “Family Guy” in which Stewie, the precocious infant, asks for “Cool Hwip topping.”

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Etymology

Dead as a doornail

Q: I hope you may be able to provide me with some insight regarding the phrase “dead as a doornail.” I believe it first appeared in Shakespeare, but how might a doornail convey deadness?

A: Although Shakespeare does use “dead as a door nayle” in Henry VI, Part 2 (1594), William Langland used the expression hundreds of years earlier in Piers Plowman (1362): “Fey withouten fait is febelore then nought, / And ded as a dore-nayl.”

In case you’re wondering, doornails (or door-nails) are large-headed nails once used to strengthen or decorate doors. The Oxford English Dictionary says we don’t see much of them anymore except in alliterative phrases (like “dead as a doornail”).

What, you ask, does a doornail have to do with death? There are several theories.

One is that the knocker on ancient doors would strike the doornail in question (perhaps fatally?), but the OED says that there’s  “no evidence” this is the source of the expression.

Another suggestion is that nails are inanimate—that is, dead. And still another is that nails are considered dead once used because it’s hard to reuse them, though we’ve resuscitated a good number of those nails over the years.

Still another theory is that the expression refers to clinching (or clenching), the practice of securing a nail by hammering it through the wood and bending the sharp end flat. The doornails on old doors were clinched, thus difficult to reuse.

The technique is sometimes referred to as dead-nailing, according to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phase Origins, because a clinched nail cannot be easily removed.

Although this idea seems to make sense, we can’t find any OED citations in which clinching is referred to as dead-nailing. We’d have expected to see some sign of the connection in the 14th century, when Langland used the expression.

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The day’s eye

Q: I’m a big fan of Beverley Nichols. In one of his garden books (I can’t remember which), he suggests that the name “daisy” refers to the “day’s eye,” presumably the sun. This sounds too good to be true.

A: We’re also fans of Nichols’s garden books. In Sunlight on the Lawn (1956), the last of his three books about the gardens of Merry Hall, he writes: “The daisy—the ‘day’s eye’—is a token of virginity.”

His suggestion that “daisy” originated as “day’s eye” may sound too good to be true, but it’s perfectly sound. The Oxford English Dictionary says the Old English name of the flower, daeges eage, does indeed refer to the “day’s eye” or “eye of day.”

The OED explains that the common name for Bellis perennis, the European daisy, is an “allusion to the appearance of the flower, and to its closing the ray, so as to conceal the yellow disk, in the evening, and opening again in the morning.”

Here’s the dictionary’s description: “a familiar and favourite flower of the British Isles and Europe generally, having small flat flower-heads with yellow disk and white ray (often tinged with pink), which close in the evening; it grows abundantly on grassy hills, in meadows, by roadsides, etc., and blossoms nearly all the year round; many varieties are cultivated in gardens.”

Nichols is on less firm ground when he describes the flower as “a token of virginity.” He’s alluding here to another common English name for the daisy, the “Margaret flower.”

Over the years, the daisy has been linked to the maiden St. Margaret of Antioch as well as the not-so-maiden but reformed St. Margaret of Cortona. But the OED says the “Margaret flower” apparently got its name from the pearl sense of the Old French margarite or margerite, which meant both pearl and daisy. (In modern French, a daisy is a marguerite.)

We might add that the daisy is a favorite of ours too and grows prolifically in the meadows around our home in rural New England. “Daisy” is also the name of our four-month-old Golden Retriever puppy as well as a neighbor’s Jersey cow.

Interestingly, according to the OED, the identification of the flower with the name “Margaret” led to the “use of Daisy punningly as a pet-form of Margaret, although later currency as a personal name owes much to the 19th-cent. vogue for flower names as personal names.”

The earliest published reference for an Old English version of “daisy” (the flower) dates from around 1000, according to the OED. Here’s a Middle English citation from The Legend of a Good Woman (circa 1385), one of Chaucer’s longest poems: “Wele by reson men it calle may / The dayeseye, or ellis the eye of day.” (In modern English: “Well by reason men may call it the daisy, or else the eye of day.”)

In Word Origins and How We Know Them (2005), Anatoly Liberman wonders who coined this word: “A child discovering the world, Adam-like, creating naive and beautiful metaphors? Or a farmer who needed a new plant name and used the resources of his mother tongue?”

“Can we imagine a golden age when all words were as young and transparent as ‘day’s eye’?” Liberman writes. “If such an age existed, it was one of perfect harmony: things revealed their nature in words, and words captured the most salient features of things. Happy cave dwellers exchanged nosegays of day’s eyes, and no one needed lessons in etymology.”

Of course Liberman, who teaches linguistics, etymology, and folklore at the University of Minnesota, might find himself out of a job in such a world.

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Sold down the river

Q: I know that to sell someone down the river means to betray him, but what does a river have to do with it and why down rather than up?

A: The expression “to sell someone down the river”—along with a slightly later version, “to sell someone south”—originated in the days of American slavery, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says these phrases meant “to sell (a slave), esp. one regarded as a troublemaker, to a plantation on the lower Mississippi, typically regarded as providing the harshest conditions for labour.”

The earliest incarnation of the expression, according to OED citations, was recorded in 1835, when a Missouri cabinet maker named Aaron S. Fry wrote in his journal:

“A negro man of Mr. Elies, having been sold to go down the river, attempted first to cut off both of his legs, failing to do that, cut his throat, did not entirely take his life, went a short distance and drowned himself.”

(The journal entry is reported in Harriet C. Frazier’s 2001 book Slavery & Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865.)

Suicide was not an uncommon reaction among slaves who were “sold down the river” or “sold south,” according to records from the period. In the words of Lucinda MacKethan, a scholar of African-American literature, “To go down the river, for a slave, is to watch one’s destiny take the darkest imaginable turn.”

The OED has another early citation, from an 1836 issue of the African Repository and Colonial Journal:

“Suppose it be enacted that after the year 1840 slavery shall cease to exist in Kentucky. What would follow? All who chose would sell their slaves down the river; the benevolent would free them, and send them away, or let them remain, as they thought best.”

After the Civil War, these slave-trade expressions adopted other meanings—to be cheated, betrayed, ruined, or delivered into some kind of servitude. Here are a few of the OED’s citations:

1921: “Its editors were chiefly concerned to prevent it from being ‘sold down the river’ ” (from Elmer Davis’s History of the New York Times, 1851-1921).

1927: “When Sigsbee Waddington married for the second time, he to all intents and purposes sold himself down the river” (from P. G. Wodehouse’s novel The Small Bachelor).

1942: “If the Casino should go down the river, it meant back to the press agent grind again” (from The Big Midget Murders, by Craig Rice, the pseudonym of Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig).

In reference to prison, someone can be sent either “up the river” or “down the river.” Apparently the route to prison is a two-way stream.

The “up” version, the OED says, originally referred “to Sing Sing prison, situated up the Hudson River from the city of New York.” But later the phrase was used more generally to mean any prison.

Here’s one of the OED’s Sing Sing citations, from Charles Sutton’s history The New York Tombs: Its Secrets and Its Mysteries (1874): “ ‘Well, Colonel,’ he remarked, when the Colonel was brought before him, ‘here you are again. This time I think you stand a good chance for a trip up the river.’ ”

And moving from the Northeast to the Midwest, here’s a hard-boiled example from a 1946 issue of the Chicago Daily News: “I done it. Send me up the river. Give me the hot seat.”

The OED’s citations for “down the river” (meaning prison) begin in 1894 with this quotation from the Atlantic Reporter, a regional case-law publication: “The witness … has testified here that he heard the chief say that he had got H. H. Hollister, and was going to send him down the river, whether guilty or not.”

Another courtroom citation comes from a 1910 edition of the Southern Reporter: “Latham was guilty and, should he be a juror, he would send him down the river.”

More recent is this line from Jack Barnao’s novel LockeStep (1987): “You don’t send a bunch of Godfathers down the river for twenty years without making some serious enemies.”

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Reputation management

Q: I am writing a personal statement for a business school application and I have a question about this sentence: “Carlson’s reputation precedes it.” I think “it” is correct because “itself” would refer to the reputation, not the school, right? And the purpose of this statement is to say the reputation precedes the school.

A: We agree with you that “it” is the correct pronoun if you want to say the Carlson school’s reputation precedes the school. But we’re puzzled by exactly what that’s supposed to mean.

In common usage, someone is preceded by his reputation. That is, people have heard of him—for good or for ill—before actually meeting him. So we say things like “Your reputation precedes you” or “Lady Eustace’s reputation preceded her.”

It wouldn’t be idiomatic to say that the reputation of a school or cathedral or lake or other static inanimate thing precedes it. One could perhaps say the reputation of an invading army precedes it. And perhaps the reputation of a vintage wine given as a gift may precede it. But both the army and the wine are moving toward the people who’ve heard of them.

Maybe you meant to say that anyone with knowledge of business schools (or anyone in the business world) would be familiar with Carlson’s reputation. Or maybe you were referring to the reputation of the entrepreneur who gave the school its name.

The University of Minnesota School of Business was renamed the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management in 1986 after the founder of the Carlson Companies donated $25 million to the university.

Speaking of money, the word “reputation” has a financial background, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The word entered English in the late 1300s by way of Anglo-Norman, but its roots are in Latin.

In classical Latin, the OED says, reputation referred to, among other things, consideration in drawing up a financial statement. In post-classical Latin, it could refer to a good name as well as a good balance sheet.

And, speaking of good names, who hasn’t at times felt the need of some “reputation managment,” the catchphrase for PR in the age of the Internet.

As for that sentence in your application, we’d recommend rewriting it. Then the admissions director at Carlson might shake your hand next fall and say, “Your reputation precedes you.”

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International studies

Q: Why are “foreign students” now called “international students”? Is political correctness to blame?

A: Students who study outside their home countries have been referred to as “foreign students” for nearly 300 years. But a somewhat newer term, “international students,” appears to be more popular on some campuses these days, if our cursory Google searches are any indication.

Spot checks show that a great many colleges and universities prefer “international students.” But some, like the University of Iowa, use both “foreign students” and “international students.” And some organizations and agencies (like the College Board and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) use both too.

Overall, the “international” version seems to be far more popular, outnumbering the “foreign” phrase well over three-to-one in our Google searches.

Of the two phrases, it’s not surprising that “foreign students” is older, if only because the adjective “foreign” dates from the 1200s while “international” didn’t show up until 1780, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Our Google searches turned up quite a few 18th-century references to “foreign student” (or “students”).

The earliest we found is from a 1734 translation of Pierre Bayle’s The Dictionary Historical and Critical. An entry about a controversial German professor of divinity says, “He had most of the Foreign Students on his side.”

An encyclopedic book published in 1743, partially titled A Description of Holland, includes a reference to “foreign Students, who come hither from all Parts of Europe.”

And Charles Este’s A Journey in the Year 1793, Through Flanders, Brabant, and Germany, to Switzerland (1795), has this passage: “For general philosophy, for the belles lettres, for experimental science, for medicine, a foreign student may almost every where be better—and cannot any where be worse.”

The use of “international student” (or “students”) didn’t begin appearing until the 19th century, as far as we can tell.

Here’s a passage from an article in the Medical Times and Gazette, published in London in 1876:

“Advantage was taken of the presence in Paris … of the foreign and provincial deputies to make some preliminary arrangements towards the institution of an international students’ society—I fear, however, without much success.”

Why is “international student” preferred by many institutions of higher learning?

Perhaps, as you suggest, political correctness has something to do with it. Dictionaries list abnormal, improper, unnatural, and irrelevant among the senses of “foreign” while the more neutral “international” simply describes something involving two or more nations.

Or perhaps the longer and newer phrase is more appealing to academics and other lovers of officialese.

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Good golly, Miss Molly

Q: I was reading Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen when I came across the offensive British term “wog.” I always thought it was an acronym, but my dictionary says it’s probably short for “golliwog.” Can you tell me more?

A: Let’s begin with Officers and Gentlemen (1955), the second novel in Waugh’s World War II trilogy Sword of Honour. During a conversation after a dinner party, Colonel Tickeridge is asked about a brigadier thought to be dead.

“He was lost,” the colonel says. “Not dead. Far from it. He turned up in western Abyssinia leading a group of wogs. Wanted to go with them, of course, but the powers that be wouldn’t stand for that.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the slang term “wog” as a “vulgarly offensive name for a foreigner, esp. one of Arab extraction.”

In an etymology note, the OED says: “Origin uncertain: often said to be an acronym, but none of the many suggested etymologies is satisfactorily supported by the evidence.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say the term is chiefly British. American Heritage adds that it’s probably a clipped version of “golliwog.”

From our experience, British bigots are more inclusive in using the term than the OED suggests. Although we usually read or hear of Brits applying it to dark-skinned foreigners, especially those from the Middle East or the Far East, we’ve noticed it used for Italians, Spaniards, and Latin Americans as well.

If you read much 20th-century British literature, you’ve probably seen “wog” or variations of it. The first two citations in the OED, though, come from an Irish classic, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “She called him wogger. . . . She may have noticed that her wogger people were always going away.”

The OED’s first reference for “wog” itself comes from a 1929 British book on sea slang: “Wogs, lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast.”

And if you’ve spent much time in Britain or around British expatriates, you’ve probably heard the story that “wog” is an acronym— for “wily oriental gentleman” or “worthy oriental gentleman” or “we oriental gentlemen.”

No, “wog” isn’t an acronym, but it’s sometimes called a backronym, a false acronym created after the fact from an existing word. (There’s a word for almost everything!)

In Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, we discuss the possibility that it might be a short version of “golliwog.”  Here’s an excerpt:

“Where does ‘wog’ really come from? We don’t know for sure, but some lexicographers have traced it to the Golliwogg, a black rag-doll character in the children’s stories of Florence Kate Upton. The American-born British author and artist, who wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was widely successful but failed to protect her creation. The name soon became public property (spelled ‘golliwog’) and inspired dolls, toys, books, and many other products. A golliwog named Golly was featured on the Robertson & Sons jam and marmalade jars from 1910 until 2001. And the popularity of golliwogs may also have inspired a mid-twentieth-century revival of blackface minstrel shows in Britain. The Black and White Minstrel Show ran on BBC television from 1958 until 1978. A stage version of the variety show ran in London from 1960 to 1972, and traveling troupes performed it for another fifteen years.

“Good golly, Miss Molly! Where are the PC police when you need them?”

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Vice isn’t nice, but is it vicious?

Q: After reading your entry on pairing “vicious” with “circle” or “cycle,” I recall reading works from the 19th century and earlier in which “vicious” is used as the opposite of “virtuous.” For example, a womanizer might be described as “vicious.” Any idea when, how, or why this sense evolved to the more loaded current definition?

A: The adjective “vicious” did indeed mean pretty much the opposite of “virtuous” when it entered English in the early 14th century. In fact, that’s still among the word’s meanings in contemporary standard dictionaries.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, defines it as, among other things, given to vice or immorality.

This sense of the adjective is understandable, since it’s ultimately derived from the Latin vitium (fault, defect, shortcoming), which has also given us the noun “vice.”

The earliest definition of “vicious” in the Oxford English Dictionary says it refers to habits or practices of “the nature of vice; contrary to moral principles; depraved, immoral, bad.”

By the late 14th century, the OED says, it was being used to describe immoral, depraved, or profligate people as well as those who fall short of “what is morally or practically commendable; reprehensible, blameworthy, mischievous.”

How, you ask, did the word take on its “more loaded current definition”? By “more loaded,” we assume you mean its sense of being violent, savage, or cruel.

The OED doesn’t explain this evolution, but we suspect that it had something to do with a sense of “vicious” that developed in the early 1700s, when people began using the word to refer to animals, especially horses, that were savage or dangerous.

In An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1774), for example, Oliver Goldsmith writes that horses “naturally belonging to the country, are very small and vicious.”

Pretty soon, the usage was being extended to people, though only loosely at first. An 1814 citation in the OED describes Napoleon as having “a dusky grey eye, which would be called vicious in a horse.”

The OED doesn’t have a more violent human citation, but Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, has one in which the Australian poet Rex Ingamells refers to someone taking “a vicious swing at him with the pick.”

Ingamells, who died violently in a car crash in 1955, was a founder of the nationalist Jindyworobak literary movement in Australia.

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The long goodbye

Q: I have the habit of using “goodbye” in parting, but a lot of my friends say it should be used only when leaving someone for good. Am I using this correctly? I am from India and English is not my first language.

A: Yes, you’re using the word correctly. Standard dictionaries say “goodbye” (also spelled “good-bye” or “good-by”) has two meanings: (1) a remark at parting; (2) the act of parting.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for the word (spelled “good-bye”) doesn’t include any evidence that the term was ever limited to a permanent leave-taking.

The OED says the word, which entered English in the 16th century, is a “contraction of the phrase God be with you (or ye).”

The dictionary speculates that the substitution of “good” for “God” may have been influenced by “such formulas of leave-taking as good day, good night, etc.”

The OED dismisses the idea, as some have suggested, that “goodbye” originated as “God buy you” (that is, God redeem you).

The earliest citation for “goodbye” in the OED is from a 1573 letter by the Elizabethan scholar Gabriel Harvey: “To requite your gallonde of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of how-dyes.” (A “pottle” is half a “gallonde,” or gallon.)

Published references in the dictionary suggest that “goodbye” (spelled various ways) and “God be with you” coexisted until the early 1800s, when the clipped version became the dominant usage.

Here’s the longer expression in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) by Shakespeare: “I thanke your worship, God be wy you.”

And here it is 70 years later in a 1668 entry from Samuel Pepys’s diary: “To Mr. Wren to bid him ‘God be with you.’ ”

In case you’d like to read more, we’ve written several items on our blog that touch on “goodbye,” including postings in 2009 and 2011.

And now we’ll bid you a gallonde of godbwyes.

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Southern discomfort

Q: On the BBC news site, I came across this quote about people switching accounts from banks to credit unions: “It would have to be a number way north of 40,000 to make an appreciable difference.” What is the history of using “north” and “south” to mean higher or lower numerically? And what about using “south” for a deteriorating situation?

A: We wrote a blog entry a while back on the use of “north” to mean up and “south” to mean down geographically—that is, on a map—as well as the use of “uptown” and “downtown.” In the same geographic vein, we once wrote a post about “upstate.”

But we haven’t yet written about the use of “north” and “south” to mean higher or lower numerically, or “south” to mean a deteriorating situation. Now is our chance to fill in the gaps.

Not surprisingly, financial writers were the first to record these usages. For some reason, in these senses “south” was used half a century before “north.” The story begins with the phrase “headed (or going) south.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for this pessimistic expression is from a 1920 issue of the weekly Elgin (Illinois) Dairy Report: “Meat, grains and provisions generally, are like Douglas Fairbanks, headed south—in other words, going down.” (The reference is to a Douglas Fairbanks movie called Headin’ South.)

The phrase is also used figuratively to mean “in or into a worse condition or position,” the OED says.

Although the dictionary has a citation from the 1970s that suggests this figurative use, the first clear-cut example is from Robert B. Parker’s novel Stone Cold (2003): “But your marriage went south and you had a drinking problem.”

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that people began using “north” to mean higher, higher than, or in excess of, according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a 1978 article in the Guardian Weekly: “Money supply growth for the past year has ended up quite a long way north of the target band—at 16¼ per cent.”

The movie producer Julia Phillips used the expression in her memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991): “So Spielberg tells me the budget’s going north.”

And a writer for the San Francisco Business Times used “north” in a similar way in 2001: “What’s your average deal size? It’s gone north of $250,000 per contract even as high as $300,000 per contract.”

Finally, this gives us a chance to put in a plug in for Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel North and South. The title refers to the contrast between the industrial north and agricultural south of England.

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The more the merrier

Q: I’m an ESL teacher in Istanbul and my students are confused about this sentence in our exercise book: “The more money a person has, the more he or she can buy.” They think it is a sentence fragment, and after looking at it, so do I. Can you shed light on this? My students like grammatical explanations, and they love stumping their teacher.

A: What has caught your students’ attention is a common way of setting up a comparative sentence in English. In this case, the sentence is made up of two comparative clauses, each one beginning with the word “the.”

The example in that exercise book (“The more money a person has, the more he or she can buy”) is a complete sentence, not a sentence fragment. The word “the” at the beginning of each clause is an adverb and part of the adverbial phrase “the more.”

It might be easier to see what’s going on here if we use a simpler example: “The faster I work, the sooner I’m done.” This is grammatically similar to “I work the faster, I’m done the sooner.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the adverbial “the” is used to precede a comparative adjective or adverb, with the two words forming an adverbial phrase that modifies a verb.

The usage isn’t as complicated as it sounds, and it’s easy to spot. Just look for sentences with pairs of clauses that start with “the more,” “the less,” “the better,” and so on.

This way of constructing comparative sentences has been a feature of English since the late 800s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Citations in the OED include this passage from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (1598): “Though the camomill, the more it is troden on, the faster it growes: so youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it weares.”

What’s happening grammatically? The OED says these constructions indicate “proportional dependence between the notions expressed by two clauses, each having the + a comparative.”

The dependent (or subordinate) clause usually comes first, says the OED, using this example: “The more one has, the more one wants.”

In sentences like these, the OED adds, “the … the …” pairs can be defined as meaning “by how much … by so much …” or “in what degree … in that degree….”

So the OED example above (“The more one has, the more one wants”) can be reinterpreted as “In what degree one has more, in that degree one wants more.”

Another source, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, has these examples: “The more you practice, the easier it becomes” and “The longer we stay, the more chance there is that we’ll be caught.”

The Cambridge Grammar calls sentences like these “correlative comparative constructions,” and says they can be arranged in two ways:

(1) More commonly, both clauses begin with a “the + comparative” phrase, and the subordinate clause comes first: “The older he gets, the more cynical he becomes.”

(2) But the clauses can be reversed, with the comparative in the main clause omitting “the”: “He becomes more cynical the older he gets.”

In adjectival comparatives, Cambridge says, the verb “be” is sometimes dropped. Here’s one of the examples given (we’ll put the omitted verb in brackets): “The harder the task [was], the more she relished it.”

We run across these elliptical usages in poetry as well as in catchphrases like “The hotter the oven the better the pie.” Even more compact are well-known expressions like “The sooner the better” and “The more the merrier.”

That last one is described by the OED as a proverb meaning “the more people or things there are, the better an occasion or situation will be.”

It was first recorded (as “ye mo ye myryer”) in a Middle English poem from the late 1300s. The lack of a verb hasn’t hurt it any, since it’s been rolling along merrily ever since.

We hope this answers your question. We’ve used more technical language than usual on the blog, but you say your students like grammatical explanations!

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Catharsis, anyone?

Q: Can something be “a catharsis” or is it always “cathartic.” Example:  “I draw because, more than anything, it is a catharsis.”

A: Something can be “a catharsis” or “catharsis” or “cathartic.” In fact, a bit of googling suggests that “it is a catharsis” is more popular than either “it is cathartic” or “it is catharsis.”

Here’s the Google scorecard: “it is a catharsis,” 898,000 hits; “it is cathartic,” 521,000; “it is catharsis,” 76,800.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, defines “catharsis” in the sense you’re using it as “any purification or purgation that brings about a spiritual renewal or a satisfying release from tension.”

The dictionary gives this usage example: “these drawings served as a catharsis, relieving him of his burden of terrible memories, at the same time releasing hidden creative forces.” (The quote is from Eva Michaelis-Stern, a Jewish activist who helped rescue thousands of children from Nazi Germany.)

English borrowed the word from Latin, but the ultimate source is the Greek katharsis (a cleansing or purging).

When the word entered English in the early 19th century, it referred to the purging of body fluids and waste, the original meaning of the Greek term.

But by the mid-19th century, it was being used in reference to the purging of emotions, an idea introduced by Aristotle in his Poetics (circa 335 BC), which refers to purging pity and fear in tragedy through catharsis.

We’ll end with a not-so-cathartic exchange between two characters in D. H. Lawrence’s play Touch and Go (1920):

Anabel: “But I don’t WANT to hate and fight with you any more. I don’t BELIEVE in it—not any more.”

Gerald: “It’s a cleansing process—like Aristotle’s Katharsis. We shall hate ourselves clean at last, I suppose.”

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A slew of meanings

Q: I believe the phrase “a number of court filings” takes a plural verb, due to synesis, but would this also be true for “a slew of court filings”? My question is prompted by an Oct. 25, 2011, article in the LA Times about the bankrupt Dodgers.

A: The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense of “slew” as meaning “a very large number of, a great amount of.” So there’s not much difference here between “slew” and “number.” Both are singular collective nouns.

This is the sentence from the LA Times that caught your attention: “As the bankruptcy case moves forward, a slew of court filings on Monday show that beating victim Bryan Stow will be central to the arguments and outcome in court.”

Is this use of “slew” correct?

While it’s certainly proper to use a singular verb (“shows”) here, many commentators on language find nothing wrong with using the plural (“show”).

A singular collective noun (like “slew”) at the head of a phrase ending in a plural (“a slew of court filings”) is often accompanied these days by a plural noun.

Linguists say that what’s at work here is “notional agreement,” sometimes called by the Greek term you use, “synesis,” meaning something like intelligence or reason.

We’ve written about notional agreement several times on our blog, including posts last September and July.

What it amounts to is agreement based on sense or meaning—that is, the meaning an expression has to the writer or speaker—rather than on form.

In one blog entry, we used these phrases as examples: “a wide range of colors” and “a bunch of the boys.” The meaning is clearly plural, although the collecting nouns (“range,” “bunch”) are singular in form. Someone using notional agreement would accompany these phrases with plural verbs.

In case you’re wondering, the use of “slew” to mean “a large number” originated in 19th-century America, according to the OED. It was an import, and came from the Irish word slua (or sluagh), meaning a crowd or multitude.

“Slew” in this sense was first recorded in Daniel Pierce Thompson’s novel The Green Mountain Boys (1839): “He has cut out a road, and drawn up a whole slew of cannon clean to the top of Mount Defiance.”

This usage is not to be confused with another kind of “slew.” This one is a variant spelling of “slough” (a boggy or marshy area) that’s used in the US and Canada.

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