Category: Etymology

Q: I often hear/read people using “resiliency” where I would use “resilience.” What’s up with that?

A: Both “resilience” and “resiliency” are legitimate nouns, and they have been for hundreds of years.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) define “resiliency” as “resilience.”

As for “resilience,” the two dictionaries give these meanings: (1) The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune. (2) The property that enables a material to return to its original shape after being bent, stretched, or compressed.

We’re not surprised, however, that you’re running across a lot of “resiliency” these days.

There’s been a sharp rise in the usage since the 1970s, though it seems to have fallen off a bit in recent years, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, which lets you track a word’s appearance in books over the years.

A regular Google search turned up 5.75 million hits for “resiliency.” That’s quite a lot, but small change compared with the 28.7 million hits for “resilience.”

A bit more googling left us with the impression that mental-health professionals are much more likely to use “resiliency” in sense #1 than the people who go to them for help. That’s not surprising, of course. Professionals of all sorts seem to prefer stuffier usages over common ones.

Both “resilience” and “resiliency,” as well as the adjective “resilient,” ultimately come from the Latin verb resilire (to jump back or rebound). All three words entered English in the 17th century (“resilience” is slightly older than the other two).

One last thought: resilire (the source of all this bouncing back) is related to the Latin verb salire (to jump or leap), which has given English the noun and verb “sally.” And now we’d better sally forth and check our mailbox for more questions.

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Q: During a pool tournament online, the commentator repeatedly used “fortunate” when I would have used “lucky.” Example: “He needs to get fortunate here.” To me, “fortunate” is a state of being and “lucky” is how you get to that state. Was the commentator just trying to sound intelligent?

A: One meaning of “fortunate” is “lucky,” and one meaning of “lucky” is “fortunate.” But that doesn’t mean they’re always interchangeable.

For instance, we often say that someone “got lucky.” But we’re less likely to say that he “got fortunate.” It’s not technically incorrect, just not a very common usage.

On the other hand, both “He was lucky” and “He was fortunate” are common usages and have identical meanings. The only difference is in their tone—“lucky” is less formal than “fortunate.”

Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines these two adjectives when used to describe people.

Lucky: “Having, or attended by, good luck. In early use often, Fortunate, successful, prosperous. Now with narrower meaning: Favoured by chance; successful through causes other than one’s own action or merit.”

Fortunate: “Favoured by fortune; possessed of or receiving good fortune; lucky, prosperous.”

They’re very much alike, aren’t they? So why does English have two words for this?

Because, like “augur” and “bode” (which we wrote about recently on the blog), we got one from each of the two great language streams that make up English—the Germanic (“lucky”) and the Latinate (“fortunate”).

“Lucky” was first recorded around 1503, but the noun it’s derived from, “luck,” was around in the 1400s. The noun, meaning “fortune good or ill,” is from old Germanic sources and probably came into English as a gambling term, the OED suggests.

“Fortunate,” from the Latin fortunatus, was first recorded in English in the late 1300s.

Why do people “get lucky” more often than they “get fortunate”? We can’t tell. Perhaps it’s just the way those adjectives have diverged in their usage.

For whatever reason, “get lucky” seems more natural and idiomatic to more people. The Google score: “get lucky,” 10.4 million hits; “get fortunate,” 162,000 hits.

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Q: Why isn’t the word “summer” capitalized in “Indian summer.” My grammar book says a proper noun “names a particular person, place, or thing.” Isn’t Indian summer a particular time of year? Thanks for your help!

A: The names of seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) are not considered proper nouns. This is a subject we’ve written about before on our blog.

But “Indian” is capitalized because it is a proper noun, so the phrase is properly written “Indian summer.”

We thought you might like to know more about this expression, which originated in late 18th-century America, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines “Indian summer” as “a period of unusually calm dry warm weather, often accompanied by a hazy atmosphere, occurring in late autumn in the northern United States and Canada; a similar period of unseasonably warm autumnal weather elsewhere.”

The phrase was first recorded in writing in the military journal of Ebenezer Denny, an officer in the Revolutionary and Indian Wars.

In an entry written near Presqu’ Isle, Maine, and dated Oct. 13, 1794, Major Denny wrote: “Pleasant weather. The Indian summer here. Frosty nights.”

From Denny’s journal entry, we can assume the phrase was already in use before he recorded it.

Why was this kind of fall called “Indian summer”? The OED says that “the origin of the expression is uncertain,” but adds that “it appears to have had nothing to do with the glowing autumnal tints of the foliage, with which it is sometimes associated.”

The dictionary speculates, however, that the term “Indian” may have been used here in the disparaging sense of suggesting something “substitute or ersatz.”

So, “an “Indian summer” might have implied a pretend summer. In similar phrases, the OED says, the adjective “Indian” was used in those days to mean “something other than that normally denoted.”

The phrase “Indian corn,” for example, is an example of this “substitute or ersatz” notion at work, as we’ve discussed before on the blog.

To the early English settlers, the term “corn” meant grain in general: wheat, rye, barley, oats, and so on. They used the phrases “Indian corn” and “Indian grain” to mean maize, because to them it was substitute grain or the Indians’ version of grain.

Consequently, in phrases like “Indian bread,” “Indian cakes,” “Indian flour,” and “Indian pudding,” the adjective meant that the dish was made of ground maize (which we now call cornmeal) instead of flour.

Something to keep in mind if, like us, you use cornbread stuffing in your Thanksgiving turkey.

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[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 20, 2021.]

Q: I’m wondering which of these is correct: “substitute A with B” or “substitute B for A”?

A: The sentences mean the same thing and both are accepted as standard English. But in our opinion, the “for” construction (as in “substitute B for A”) is preferable because it’s clearer. Here the preposition “for” means “in place of,” so you can easily tell which person or thing is being eliminated.

The “with” construction (as in “substitute A with B”), in which the verb “substitute” means “replace,” was once condemned by usage authorities but is now widely accepted. Here’s what Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has to say:

“In its oldest and still most common transitive sense, substitute means ‘to put or use in place of another.’ ” But MW adds that “substitute has also been used since the 17th century to mean ‘take the place of; replace,’ ” and despite criticism, it’s now “being used in this sense in standard writing on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The usage guide gives published examples that illustrate both senses of the verb: “substituted asceticism for beauty” and “substitute conjecture with facts.”

The British dictionary Lexico, among others, agrees, though it acknowledges the possibility of confusion: “Traditionally, the verb substitute is followed by for and means ‘put (someone or something) in place of another,’ as in she substituted the fake vase for the real one. From the late 17th century, substitute has also been used to mean ‘replace (someone or something) with someone or something else,’ as in she substituted the real vase with the fake one.”

As Lexico comments, “This can be confusing, since the two sentences shown above mean the same thing, yet the object of the verb and the object of the preposition have swapped positions. Despite the potential confusion, the second, newer use is well established … and is now generally regarded as part of standard English.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical usage, used to regard “substitute with” as incorrect but now treats it as standard. Oxford says that “substitute” as a transitive verb—that is, one with a direct object—can be accompanied by either “for” or “with.”

In “substitute for,” the dictionary says, the preposition points to “the person or thing being replaced.” And “substitute with” means “to fill the place of (a person or thing) with a replacement.”

That last use, in which “substitute” means “replace,” Oxford notes, “has been sometimes criticized … but is now generally regarded as part of normal standard English.” So the OED now accepts a sense of “substitute” that’s long been rejected by older and more conservative usage guides.

For instance, Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed., 2016) maintains its earlier view that “substitute” and “replace” are not interchangeable: “You substitute something for something else … but you replace something with something else.”

However, the newest edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2015), edited by Jeremy Butterfield, has accepted the shift.

The “substitute” entry in Fowler’s says that in its “normal uncontroversial sense” the verb is “construed with for” and means “to put (someone or something) in place of another.” But “beginning in the 17c., and running parallel to the normal sense, were transitive (often passive) uses in which the sense is ‘replace.’ ”  This sense of the verb, Fowler’s concludes, “has fully re-established itself.”

Now for some etymology. The English verb is derived from the Latin substituere, which meant to choose someone to fill another’s place. When the verb entered English in the 15th century, it mean to appoint someone to a role or position in place of another.

The first citation in the OED is from the Rolls of Parliament of Henry VI (February 1447) and refers to the appointing of schoolmasters: “Suche scole maistre … [he] may in his owne parich or place remove, and an other in his place substitute and sette.”

In the mid-16th century, people began using “substitute” for things as well as people. At first, it was used with such prepositional phrases as “in the place of,” “in one’s place,” “in one’s stead,” and so on. But it began appearing with “for” in the 17th century, as shown in the OED’s earliest example:

“Xylobalsamum is the Wood of the body, or of the branch, which the Shops sometimes substituted for the liquor” (The Valley of Varietie, by Henry Peacham, 1638).

However, a few decades later, transitive uses of the verb in the sense of “replace” began appearing. And the prepositions used with this sense, when was one needed, were “by” (late 17th century) and later “with” (mid-19th).

This is Oxford’s earliest citation for the “substitute with” usage: “I carried off a rabbit from the spit, and substituted it with the cat of my old aunt” (from The Barber of Paris, an 1839 translation of a French novel published by Charles Paul de Kock in 1826).

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Q: An NPR report on the death of the Indy driver Dan Wheldon while racing in Las Vegas last month said he “passed” rather than “died.” When did we begin to say the deceased “passed”? This seems rather quaint, but is it correct?

A: The subject of how we talk about death has been on our minds lately because we’ve been reading the collected letters of Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death (1963).

We had a posting a few years ago on the use of “pass” to mean “die,” but we’ll revive it here with an excerpt from the third edition of Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I.

As we wrote in the earlier posting, the verb “pass” passed into English in the early 13th century by way of England’s Norman rulers.

The English verb has been used in reference to dying since around the year 1230, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Many of the early published references cited in the OED use it in the verbal phrases “pass to God” or “pass to heaven.”  The verbal phrase “pass away,” which is more common today, dates from the 14th century.

The word “pass” has been used by itself since around 1340 as a verb meaning to die. The OED cites published references in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and many other writers.

Here’s an example from King Lear (1608): “Vex not his ghost, / O let him passe.” The OED says, however, that this use of “pass” alone for “die” is now primarily North American.

We too have noticed a resurgence of this usage in recent years (for example, “Uncle Julius passed a year ago”), and it’s not surprising. We’re very inventive about speaking of death without actually mentioning it.

Is the usage legit? Yes, especially in the US, but we prefer using plain old “die,” whch entered English in the early 12th century, when we mean “die.” This is what Pat has to say about it in Woe Is I:

“You’ve probably noticed that death is a favorite playground of clichés. This is too bad. In situations where people most need sincerity, what do they get? Denial. There’s no shame in saying somebody died, but the vocabulary of mortality avoids it. Think again before using expressions like passed away or passed on (sometimes reduced to just passed ), untimely end, cut down in his prime, called to his Maker, called away, great beyond, this mortal coil, bought the farm, hopped the twig (a variation on fell off his perch), kicked the bucket, gone to a better place, handed in his dinner pail, checked out, grim reaper, in the midst of life, irreparable loss, broke the mold, vale of tears, time heals all, words can’t express, tower of strength, or he looks like he’s sleeping.”

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Q: In one of the recent Republican debates, Rick Perry used “untrustworthy” instead of the appropriate “distrustful” or ”mistrustful.” Do we have another case of a Texas pol whose language is full of malapropisms, or is this unusual for him?

A: In the Oct. 11 campaign debate, Governor Perry said, “One of the reasons that I think Americans are so untrustworthy of what’s going on in Washington is because they never see a cut in spending.”

We won’t comment on Governor Perry’s grasp of English, beyond discussing the issue at hand—the mistaken use of “untrustworthy” to mean “distrustful” or “mistrustful.”

Someone who’s “untrustworthy” can’t be trusted. But someone who’s “mistrustful” or “distrustful” doesn’t trust someone else.

Understanding the difference is simply a matter of keeping one’s prefixes and suffixes straight.

The “un-” in the word “untrustworthy” means “not,” and the “-worthy” part means “deserving.” So an untrustworthy person or thing is not deserving of trust.

As for “distrustful” and “mistrustful,” the prefixes “dis-“ and “mis-“ are negatives and the suffix “-ful” means “full of” or “characterized by.” So if you’re distrustful or mistrustful, you don’t trust someone or something.

At the center of all these words is the noun “trust,” which has been around since the early 1200s and comes from Old Norse.

Derivatives that include “-worthy” (“trustworthy,” “trustworthiness,” “untrustworthy”) weren’t used until the 19th century.

“Untrustworthy,” according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, was first recorded in 1846 in Joseph Emerson Worcester’s A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language.

The OED has a couple of citations for the adjective used in writing.

John Ruskin wrote in The Stones of Venice (1853): “Knowledge is not only very often unnecessary, but it is often untrustworthy.”

And Reginald Bosworth Smith wrote in Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878): “The Gauls, untrustworthy as ever—except when led by Hannibal—were drawn up on a hill to the left.”

Derivatives of “trust” that include the “-ful” suffix (“trustful,” “distrustful,” “mistrustful”) date back to the 1500s.

We’ll end with a 1529 example from Thomas More. In his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, he wonders “what wysedom were it nowe therein to shewe oure selfe so mystrustfull and waueryng ….. of god.”

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Q: On the recent 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s joining the Supreme Court, I was reminded of his characterization of the Senate hearings as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” As an uppity black who dares to think for myself, I was scandalized that a Yale Law School graduate didn’t know the meaning of “deign.”

A: We don’t think anyone has ever written to us before about “deign,” probably because it’s only occasionally used these days. That’s a shame, because it’s a great old word and deserves to be preserved.

You’re right—it doesn’t mean dare. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it this way: “To think it worthy of oneself (to do something); to think fit, vouchsafe, condescend.”

In Justice Thomas’s defense, we might note that “deign” isn’t exactly a household word. (Many of the Google hits it fetches are misspellings of “design.”) On the other hand, anybody who uses an uncommon word should be sure he knows what it means.

When “deign” does legitimately appear it’s often used in a negative way, as in this example from the New York Times a couple of months ago:

“Celebrities and other well-heeled folks don’t usually deign to engage in such hoi-polloi amusements as Whac-a-Mole.”

Or as in this headline, from the Onion, about last spring’s royal nuptials: “Millions of People Prince William Would Never Deign To Speak To Captivated By Royal Wedding.”

In fact, there’s a certain dignity—whether royal or not—in deigning to do something.

The Latin ancestor of “deign” is dignare (to deem worthy or think fit), from dignus (worthy). And “deign” has several English relatives from the same Latin source: “dignity,” “dignify,” “disdain,” “indignant,” and a distant cousin, “dainty.”

The verb “deign” came into English from Old French in the early 1300s, according to citations in the OED. It can be found in English literature from Chaucer to Milton and beyond.

Here it is in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3 (from the 1590s): “And all those friends, that deine to follow mee.” And here it is in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Raphael, the sociable Spirit, that deign’d / To travel with Tobias.”

More recently, we like this citation (which we’ve expanded) from Matthew Arnold’s Mixed Essays (1879): “The grave and silent peasant whose very dog will hardly deign to bark at you.” In other words, the dog will barely dignify you with a bark!

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Q: It was pointed out to me the other day that I had used “attendence” when it should have been “attendance.” So then I wrote “correspondance” when it should have been “correspondence.” Any rules here or is this one of those things you have to remember?

A: The suffixes “-ance” and “-ence” are used to make nouns out of verbs or adjectives. But there’s no rule for sorting them out. The dictionary is your only hope.

Generally, these suffixes form two kinds of abstract nouns. Some have to do with an action or process (“performance,” “convergence”), and some refer to a state or quality (“elegance,” “absence”).

Why the different spellings?

The short (and rather misleading) answer here is that “-ance” and “-ence” differ because their respective Latin counterparts did, the classical suffixes –antia and –entia.

But the story isn’t that simple.

What complicates things is that a great many Latin nouns ending in –antia and –entia came into English from Old French before 1500. And the Old French spellings all were “levelled,” as the OED says, to –ance, thus ignoring the difference in Latin.

After 1500, however, new nouns coming into both French and English followed the Latin pattern, some ending in “-ance” and some in “-ence.” And some of the old “-ance” endings from the Middle Ages were even changed back to “-ence” to conform to Latin.

Meanwhile, “-ance” took on a life of its own as an English suffix. People began adding it to native English verbs to form nouns (as in “furtherance,” “forbearance,” “riddance,” and “hindrance”).

The result is that there’s no meaningful difference between “-ance” and “-ence” spellings today. Some words reflect a Latin spelling—like “impudence” (from impudentia) and “vigilance” (from vigilantia)—but many do not.

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Q: I was reading a press release from a specialty-food company when I noticed this sentence: “Montebello Kitchens soon gained notoriety as the source for nutritious, delicious, healthful, and flavorful specialty foods.” Is the language shifting or is this use of “notoriety” simply wrong?

A: The noun “notoriety” has meant either fame or infamy since it entered English in the 16th century, but it’s especially used, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “for some reprehensible action, quality, etc.”

Although the published references in the OED suggest that “notoriety” has been used more often than not in the negative sense, the word’s roots are free of infamy.

The dictionary defines the word as “the state or condition of being notorious,” so let’s begin with the adjective “notorious,” which entered English in the late 15th century with “neutral or favourable connotations.”

The adjective is derived from the post-classical Latin notorius (simply meaning well-known) and the classical Latin notus (known).

However, one classical Latin relative did hint at things to come: a notoria was a written statement notifying the authorities of a crime.

It wasn’t until the mid-16th century that “notorious” took a turn toward the dark side—or, as the OED puts it, took on “depreciative or unfavourable connotations.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for this usage is from the original Book of Common Prayer (1549): “Suche persones as were notorious synners.”

Getting back to “notoriety,” can the word be used today to mean fame as well as infamy?

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) defines it as the “quality or condition of being notorious; ill fame.” The adjective “notorious,” meanwhile,  is defined as “known widely and usually unfavorably; infamous.”

(Speaking of “infamous,” we’ve written a blog entry about its use to mean merely “famous.”)

Although one could make an etymological case for using “notoriety” in a positive way, the word carries a lot of negative baggage. That’s why you were puzzled by the Montebello Kitchens press release.

Would we use it positively? Perhaps, but only in rare situations.

For example, we might use it to make a hyperbolic point: “Groucho achieved notoriety as a punster.”

Or we might use it to make a play on words: “In Hitchcock’s Notorious, a close-up of the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand gained a certain notoriety.”

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Q: Everyone, including Charles Krauthammer, has done a 180 with the word  “decimate.” It is everywhere both overused and misused.

A: You’re right that almost nobody uses “decimate” in its best-known Latin sense (to kill every tenth man) or in its original English sense (to tax by a tenth).

Like it or not, “decimate” has acquired wider meanings over the years. The old sense of to kill every tenth man is still one of the word’s meanings—but only one.

“Decimate” is generally used these days to mean destroy in part. This is a standard usage, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

As far as we can tell, that’s the way the columnist Charles Krauthammer uses the term.

In a May 5, 2011, column in the Washington Post, for example, he says the last Bush administration’s war on terror “scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.”

Although it’s now OK to use “decimate” in this looser sense, the word still carries some of its old etymological baggage.

That’s why we don’t use it at all and why we think those who do should avoid  using “decimate” in a way that clearly conflicts with its old sense of to destroy by a tenth.

For example, we wouldn’t recommend using it with a specific figure, as in “the storm decimated two-thirds of the city.”

And we don’t think it should be used to describe total destruction, as in “The crop was completely decimated.” Beware of those adverbs!

In Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, we discuss the etymology of “decimate.”

As we write, the word comes to us from the Latin decimus, meaning a tenth, and decimare, to take a tenth. To the Romans, the verb meant to take a tax of one tenth. But it had a darker side too.

“Roman military commanders would sometimes ‘decimate’ a mutinous or cowardly unit by taking every tenth man and executing him,” we say in Origins. “This was called a decimatio, or ‘decimation.’ Occasionally only one in twenty were punished (a process called vicesimatio), or one in a hundred (centesimatio).”

Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, and other historians of the time all describe incidents leading to military decimations.

“From the bits and pieces of information available, it seems that a rebellious unit was divided into groups of ten, with each group forced to choose lots,” we write in Origins. “The unlucky tenth man in each group was flogged or stoned to death, and as a final indignity the corpse might be decapitated. The survivors were later forced to sleep outside their encampment and to eat barley instead of their usual wheat.”

There’s no evidence, however, that this kind of punishment was common. And historians have suggested that commanders often rigged the lottery so only the ringleaders were killed.

When “decimation” first showed up in English, in 1549, it was used to mean a tithe or a tax of one tenth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It wasn’t used to refer to the military punishment until 1580, but that was in a translation of Plutarch.

Over the next three centuries, “decimation” and “decimate” were used in both senses— taxing and executing—though the taxation sense was more common.

Most of the punishment usages were references to classical times, though the British did occasionally revive the ancient practice. The second earl of Essex, for example, used it in Ireland in 1599, apparently inspired by reading a translation of Tacitus.

The OED quotes a 17th-century commentator as saying Essex “decimated certain troops that ran away, renewing a peece of the Roman Discipline.” Essex himself was later beheaded for treason.

In the mid-19th century, the word “decimate” lost the sense of taxing or tithing, but it embraced a meaning that had been seen once in a while, though rarely, in earlier times: to destroy in part or cause great damage.

Charlotte Brontë, for instance, wrote in a letter in 1848, “Typhus fever decimated the school periodically.” We’ve used the word that way ever since.

This sense of destroying in part has been firmly established in English for 150 years. War correspondents from the Civil War to the Crimean War to World War II and beyond have used “decimate” to refer to great destruction or loss of life.

Today this meaning is not only standard English, but also the most common meaning of the word.

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Q: Would you please discuss the trend of using “trending” in news reports? It seems to have cropped up in the past few months and is now ubiquitous. Nary a news report goes by without saying, “Here’s what’s trending.” It rubs me the wrong way.

A: We find this usage a bit trendy, but it doesn’t bug us all that much. If it gets used too much, it’ll lose its trendiness and you’ll be hearing less of it.

The present participle “trending” is being used here to indicate news that’s hot or breaking or engaging or noteworthy or otherwise interesting (at least to the editors).

The CNN website, for example, often begins headlines with this participle: “TRENDING: McCain cautions Christie” … “TRENDING: Palin threatens lawsuit over book” … “TRENDING: Senators place blame for budget stalemate.”

Although standard dictionaries don’t mention this precise sense in their entries for the verb “trend,” it does call to mind one common meaning of the noun “trend”: a new and popular style or fashion.

When the verb entered English more than a thousand years ago, it meant to revolve or rotate or roll, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but that sense is now considered obsolete.

In the late 16th century, the verb took on one of its contemporary meanings: to extend in a general direction or follow a general course (as in, “The path trends to the north”).

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the verb took on the figurative sense that’s common today: to show a tendency or a shift (“Opinions now trend in the conservative direction”).

The OED’s earliest citation for this figurative use is from the British novelist George Alfred Lawrence’s 1863 account of his failed attempt to fight for the Confederacy:

“In which direction do the sympathies and interests of the Border States actually trend?”

Be patient! Trendy usages tend to be overworked and become stale. Eventually, they rub enough people the wrong way … and then they aren’t trendy anymore.

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Q: I used to HATE hearing American newscasters use “Taliban” as a plural. I considered it a British affectation. I finally asked my longtime copyeditor, one of the best in the Bay Area, and she politely informed me that “Talib” is singular and “Taliban” is plural. So it’s OK for an American to use “Taliban” as a plural, because it is one!

A: “Taliban” is widely regarded as a plural noun in both the US and the UK.

Most news organizations, both here and abroad, treat “Taliban” as plural. Here are snippets from a few news and opinion articles published in recent weeks:

“The Taliban have not claimed responsibility” (AP) …. “the Taliban have ordered their forces “ (CNN) … “the Taliban have embarked “ (The New Yorker) … “the Taliban are now inveigling children” (Huffington Post) … “even if the Taliban are in the ascendancy” (Financial Times) … “the Taliban are rightly accused” (The Guardian) … “The Taliban are seeking” (Toronto Star) … “The Taliban are extremely unlikely” (New York Times) … “the Taliban are being strangled” (Fox News).

However, it’s not unusual to find “Taliban” used as a singular collective noun when referring to the Islamic group as a single entity. Here are some examples:

“The Taliban is a concern, but it’s not public enemy number one” (Washington Post) … “the Pakistani Taliban has stepped up attacks” (Voice of America) … “the Taliban has no interest in reconciliation”  (CNN) … “the Taliban has returned to those arid hills” (Boston Globe) … “The Taliban is using the idiom of justice as its calling card and recruiting card” (Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, quoted in the Wall Street Journal).

For the period we examined in a Google News search, the uses of “Taliban” with plural verbs (“are,” “were” “have”) outnumbered those with singular verbs (“is,” “was,” “has”) by about two to one.

Who’s right—is “Taliban” plural, or is it a singular collective noun?

Only a few standard dictionaries have weighed in on this, since “Taliban” came into use in English less than 20 years ago.

The American and English versions of the Cambridge Dictionaries Online say “Taliban” can be used with either a singular or plural verb, but no examples are given.

Merriam-Webster’s Online as well as the online Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English say “Taliban” is a plural noun.

Etymology is on the side of the plural usage, and that’s the position taken by most news organizations.

In the Pashto and Persian languages, ṭaliban is a plural form of ṭalib, a word from Arabic that means a student or seeker. (In Arabic, the plural would be tullab or talaba.)

The Oxford English Dictionary has no separate entry for “Taliban,” but under the noun “Talibanization” it notes: “The name Taliban arises from the fact that the movement began amongst Afghan Islamic students exiled in Pakistan.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the name in English is from a January 1995 issue of Asiaweek:

“A powerful new armed faction, known as the Taliban or ‘religious students,’ mysteriously emerged in October and has already transformed the balance of power in southern Afghanistan.”

Etymology aside, there’s an argument to be made for using “Taliban” as a singular in the US when referring to the Islamic organization itself, rather than the members of it.

In American usage, collective nouns like “company” and “government” are routinely treated as singular, though a British speaker would treat them as plural.

As for how to refer to an individual member of the group, we hear “a Taliban” more often than “a Talib,” etymology be damned. But the usual practice is to use “Taliban” as an adjective in phrases like “a Taliban fighter” or “a Taliban suicide bomber.”

In his book Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (2008), Abdulkader H. Sinno defends the singular usage of “Taliban” this way:

“Taliban joins the Arabic noun talib (seeker, as in seeker or truth or knowledge) with the plural Dari and Pashto suffix ‘an.’ I refer to the Taliban in both the singular and plural to reflect current practice. It is more accurate to use the singular tense, however, because the Taliban is an organization with a structure and not an amorphous group of students like the name would indicate and the organization’s mythology would imply.”

Our position is that the plural use of “Taliban” for members of the movement is firmly established in common usage and is etymologically sound. But when speaking of the organization rather than its members (as in “The Taliban is growing”), it’s reasonable to use the word as a singular collective noun.

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Q: I’ve always thought of tmesis as a newish, nifty linguistic device for being emphatic, folksy, funny, or just plain crude. However, I recently read “A Hymn to Christ,” where John Donne uses it twice in the first stanza. So does tmesis have a respectable literary past? And is “whatsoever” (the word Donne splits) an example of it?

A: Let’s begin by explaining this linguistic critter for readers of the blog who aren’t familiar with the term “tmesis” (pronounced TMEE-sis).

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, defines “tmesis” as a “separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words (as what place soever for whatsoever place).”

When we see tmesis these days, it’s usually used for emphasis or humor, often by inserting a crude term between the parts of the compound word.

Here are a few examples of these buttinskies in compound words: “abso-damn-lutely” …  “a whole nother” … “un-fucking-believable” … “any-bloody-body” … “god-freaking-awful.”

The earliest example of tmesis in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1592 definition of the term that includes this example: “What might be soeuer vnto a man pleasing” (“What might be soever unto a man pleasing”).

As you suspect, tmesis has a respectable literary past. In fact, it’s been used as a poetic device since classical times, though it didn’t show up in English until the 16th century. The term ultimately comes from the Greek verb temnein (to cut).

Interestingly, “whatsoever,” the compound used in the OED and Webster’s examples, is the same term that’s split twice in the 1619 poem you cite. Here are the opening lines, which describe Donne’s concerns as he sets off on a trip across the Channel:

“In what torn ship soever I embark,
That ship shall be my emblem of Thy ark;
What sea soever swallow me, that flood
Shall be to me an emblem of Thy blood.”

Here are some literary examples of tmesis in Shakespeare, from the late 16th and early 17th centuries:

“This is not Romeo, he’s some other where,” Romeo and Juliet

“That man, how dearly ever parted,” Troilus and Cressida

“If on the first, how heinous e’er it be,” Richard II

You’ve asked if “whatsoever” itself is an example of tmesis.

At first glance, it looks as if it is indeed a textbook example, with “so” inserted between the two parts of “whatever” for emphasis.

But “whatsoever” has been an English word since the early 14th century, a combination of the archaic “whatso” and “ever,” according to the OED. In fact, “soever” was also a word, though it showed up a couple of hundred years after “whatsoever.”

As for other “-soever” words, most have origins similar to that of “whatsoever.”

The pronoun “whosoever” was originally formed from “whoso” and “ever,” the adverb “whensoever” from “whenso” and “ever,”  the adverb “wheresoever” from “whereso” and “ever,” and so on.

The “-soever” word that comes closest to being an example of tmesis is “howsoever,” but the OED says it originated in the 16th century by combining “how” and “so” and “ever,” not by sticking “so” in the middle of “however.”

By the way, we wrote a posting earlier this year about compound words, and included a list of triple compounds from a reader.

We’ll end this with a modern literary example of tmesis, from Kingsley Amis’s 1960 comic novel Take a Girl Like You: “It’s a sort of long cocktail—he got the formula off a barman in Marrakesh or some-bloody-where.”

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Q: My daughter came home with a list of words to study for her third-grade class. One was “injustice,” which she had to use in a sentence. She then had to use derivatives and she wrote a sentence using “injust.” I told her “injust” wasn’t a word and she ought to use “unjust,” but she insisted her teacher said it was correct. Can you help clarify?

A: Well, you won’t find “injust” in standard dictionaries, but it is indeed a word—an antiquated adjective that may be having a revival.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which describes the word as “obsolete,” says “injust” means the same as “unjust”: that is, not just.

The earliest citation for “injust” in the OED is from a collection of poems, published sometime before 1430, by John Lydgate. The latest is from a 1711 diary entry by the English antiquarian Thomas Hearne.

A series of Google searches suggests that “injust” began showing signs of a rebirth in the 1970s. Since then, there have been more than 700,000 sightings of the usage on Google.

Despite all its recent fans, we wouldn’t describe “injust” as standard English—at least not yet.

For now, if we meant unjust, we’d use “unjust,” the older adjective and by far the more popular. It entered English in the late 1300s, according to OED citations, and gets more than 25 million hits on Google.

The noun “injustice,” which also entered English in the late 1300s, means the opposite of justice or an action that’s unjust.

All three words are ultimately derived from two Latin terms concerning justice: the noun justitia (justice) and the adjective justus (just).

Interestingly, “injustice” and “injust” have negative Latin prefixes, while “unjust” combines an Old English prefix with a Latin root.

A traditionalist, especially a Latinist, might argue that “injust” is the more “legitimate” adjective because it reflects its Latin roots better than “unjust.”

But the use of negative prefixes in English with words of Latin origin is so capricious that it’s meaningless to use a word like “legitimate” here.

From the 14th century on, the OED notes, the negative prefixes “in-” and “un-” have been added with “considerable variation” to words of Latin origin.

In fact, some of these words had versions using both prefixes. For example, “inability,” “incorrigible,” “incurable,” and “indiscreet” once existed alongside “un-” versions.

Since the 17th century, the OED says, there’s been a tendency “to discard one or other of the doublets, the forms with in-, etc., being very commonly preferred when the whole word has a distinctively Latin character, as inadequate, inadvertence, inarticulate, etc.”

But there’s “no absolute rule” about whether to keep one or both prefixes, the OED adds, “and doublets are still numerous, as in- or un-advisable, in- or un-alienable, etc.”

Getting back to your question: yes, “injust” is a word, but we suspect that your daughter’s third-grade teacher doesn’t know much about etymology and simply mistook it for the far more common adjective “unjust.”

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Q: I was surprised to see “cite” used as a noun in your recent posting about the word “anachronism.” Am I behind the curve? I hope not. I wouldn’t want to see this become standard. I expected to see “citation,” but would have preferred “example.”

A: We do indeed use “cite” every once in a while on our blog when we tire of “citation,” “example,” “reference,” “instance,” “quotation,” etc. As a reader of the blog, you’re aware that we do a lot of citing!

Yes, the word “cite” is a bit jargony, but it’s common among linguists, etymologists, and other language types.

The two standard dictionaries we use the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—don’t have entries for “cite” as a noun.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the noun and considers it standard English. In fact, the OED lists more than half a century of published references for “cite” used as a shortened form of “citation.”

The usage has been particularly handy in legal and academic writing, where authors frequently have to cite cases and references. (Yikes! This is probably the first time we’ve ever defended a usage by citing legal and academic writing.)

The first example given in the OED is from a 1957 issue of the Atlantic Reporter, a regional case-law publication: “The Legislature in 1951 passed the Police Tenure Act, (cite. omitted).”

Note that the term first appeared with a period, a clear indication that the editors considered it an abbreviation. But subsequent examples in the OED dispense with the period.

Here’s a 1975 cite from Bookletter, a New York literary periodical that was once published by Harper’s: “He has personally collected a file of over 250,000 cites.”

Here another usage, from the Yale Law Journal (1998): “First a cite to Morrall, then a cite to the source citing Morrall, and so on until the connection to Morrall is forgotten.”

This abbreviation was probably inevitable, given that the noun “quote”—short for both “quotation” and “quotation mark”—has been around since the 19th century. We touched on this issue in a posting a couple of years ago.

In short, the use of “cite” as a noun, short for “citation,” has been around for more than half a century and it’s certain to last. So you might as well make your peace with it.

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Q: Since when did “shaking” one’s head come to mean affirmative agreement? I thought the term “shaking” was negative and “nodding” was affirmative. But I don’t hear anyone say “nodding” anymore. Is it just me?

A: In much of the world, though not everywhere, moving one’s head down and up indicates agreement and moving one’s head from side to side indicates disagreement.

In English, the vertical movement is referred to as “nodding one’s head” and the horizontal movement as “shaking one’s head,” according to standard dictionaries.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, defines the verb “nod” as “to lower and raise the head quickly, as in agreement or acknowledgement.”

And the Collins English Dictionary says “to shake one’s head” means “to indicate disagreement or disapproval by moving the head from side to side.”

That’s the way we’ve always understood this nodding and shaking business. A bit of googling, however, suggests that an awful lot of people use the terms “nodding” and “shaking” interchangeably these days.

For example, we got 322,000 hits for “nodding his head yes” and 840,000 for “nodding his head no.” Although we got more than 6.5 million hits for “shaking his head no,” we also got 768,000 for “shaking his head yes.”

It’s pretty obvious, as you (and Jerry Lee Lewis) have observed, that there’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

We’ll stick with using “nodding” for vertical agreement and “shaking” for horizontal disagreement, but we wouldn’t be surprised if “shaking” in either direction becomes the default term, especially in American English.

British dictionaries tend to make more of a distinction between “nodding” and “shaking” of the head. In fact, most of the US dictionaries we checked don’t even bother to define “shaking” in this sense.

That’s a shame. The verbal phrase “to shake one’s head” has been part of English since before 1300, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines it as “to turn the head slightly to one side and the other in sorrow or scorn, or to express disapproval, dissent or doubt.”

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin cites examples from Asia, Africa, and Europe where the vertical movement means yes and the horizontal movement means no.

But he adds that “these signs are not so universally employed as I should have expected; yet they seem too general to be ranked as altogether conventional or artificial.”

One exception that’s frequently cited now is Bulgaria, where the vertical head movement means no and the horizontal movement means yes.

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