Category: Etymology

Q: In his book A Fine Romance, David Lehman writes about the Gershwin songs that Fred and Adele Astaire “sang and danced to.” This got me to thinking. Why can we simply sing a song but we have to dance TO it? It doesn’t make sense to me.

A: It makes sense to us. A singer is HEARD, while a dancer is SEEN.

A song, or any other piece of music, consists of sounds. In order to be heard, the notes must be sounded—that is, they have to be sung.

But the notes are not danced, because a dancer’s movements don’t make notes that are heard. The notes can only be danced TO, because the dancer isn’t sounding notes. (Yes, a tap dancer makes percussive sounds, but they’re not notes.)

Your question concerning David Lehman’s book about Jewish songwriters in America gives us a chance to discuss the expression “song and dance.”

When the phrase entered English in the early 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant a “form of entertainment (spec. a vaudeville act) consisting of singing and dancing.”

The earliest published reference in the OED is from a 1628 account of Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. During a landing in California, he witnessed a “song and dance” by Native Americans.

It wasn’t until the 1870s, though, that the expression was used in its vaudeville sense. Here’s an example from an 1872 issue of the Chicago Tribune: “First week of the distinguished song and dance artists.”

By the end of the 19th century, according to the OED, the expression was being used figuratively to mean “an elaborately contrived story or entreaty” as well as “a fuss or outcry.”

The earliest citation for the usage in the OED is from an 1895 collection of short stories by Edward Waterman Townsend: “Den, ’is whiskers gives me a song an’ dance.”

We’ll conclude with an example from A Diversity of Creatures (1917), a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories: “I don’t see how this song and dance helps us any.”

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Q: I recently used the word “dumpster” in a letter published in a local newspaper. The editor changed it to “Dumpster,” saying it was a trademark, like “Kleenex,” and had to be capitalized. I’d like your opinion: Big D or little d?

A: Let’s begin with the New York Times stylebook, which capitalizes “Dumpster” and describes it as “a trademark for a trash hauling bin.”

Elsewhere in the stylebook, the Times says trademarks “are uppercased as a caution to readers who might adopt a name owned by someone else.”

The Associated Press stylebook agrees that “Dumpster” should be capitalized, but it recommends using a generic term like “trash bin” or “trash container” instead.

The two standard dictionaries we consult the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—also capitalize “Dumpster.”

But American Heritage’s example of the word’s usage (from the Chicago Tribune) describes a street “lined with low-cost apartment buildings and strewn with blue dumpsters.” (As the dictionary notes, “This trademark often occurs in print in lowercase.”)

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “dumpster” lowercases the word, though most of the quotations cited by the OED capitalize it.

A trademark, as you know, is a distinctive name used by a business to identify its products or services. But when the public begins using this name for all similar products and services, the trademark loses its distinctiveness.

In the case of trash hauling bins, the word “Dumpster” comes from the Dempster-Dumpster system for mechanically loading trash containers onto garbage trucks.

Dempster Brothers, which patented the system in 1937, has several trademarks for “Dumpster,” but the word is often used these days as a generic term for a trash container used in any similar system.

We won’t get into the legal situation that arises when a trademark becomes generic. We’ll leave that to trademark lawyers.

The main concern for a writer is to communicate, not to help a business protect a trademark, especially not a trademark that’s widely used as a generic term.

So what would we do? We’d lowercase “dumpster” if we were referring generically to a container used in a mechanically loading trash system.

The alternatives recommended by AP (“trash bin” and “trash container”) are too vague. And the Times definition (“trash hauling bin”) is too clunky.

Anyway, the term “dumpster” is so widely used now that any effort to preserve its distinctiveness would probably be a lost cause, like trying to revive such old trademarks as “aspirin,” “butterscotch,” “thermos,” and “zipper.”

We can’t end this posting without mentioning the noun phrase “dumpster diving,” which the OED defines as the “practice of searching through a rubbish container (esp. a dumpster or skip) for food, items of value, etc.”

The first citation in the OED is from a 1983 caption in Life Magazine: “Rat and Mike call rummaging for food in trash bins behind restaurants dumpster diving.”

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Q: Am I at all justified in my disdain for the word “oftentimes”? I understand the speaker is differentiating from “sometimes,” but it sounds redundant to me.

A: Our language is full of surprises. Redundant or not, “oftentimes” is standard English and has been part of the language since the 14th century.

“Oftentimes,” an adverb meaning frequently or repeatedly, can be found in standard dictionaries like The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

It also has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as meaning “many times; on many occasions; in many cases; frequently, often.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the word is from the late 1300s. In Middle English, the OED says, the term was “written indifferently as one word or as two.” But since the 16th century it’s usually been written as one word.

Today “oftentimes” is used chiefly in North America, according to the OED. Elsewhere, it’s considered archaic or literary.

A shorter version, “oft-times,” was recorded slightly earlier than “oftentimes” but isn’t heard as much in modern times. “Oft-times” is now labeled chiefly archaic or poetic. But it, too, can be found in standard dictionaries and is a quite legitimate usage.

In case you’re wondering, “oft” is extremely old, dating from early Old English. The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says it goes back to before the year 725.

Today it’s still used regionally in the north of England but otherwise the usage is considered archaic or poetic. (It does occasionally turn up, in phrases like “oft-quoted remark” and “oft-told tale.”)

In everyday usage, “oft” was pretty much replaced after the 16th century by the extended form “often.” Chambers says the development of “often” may have been influenced by its opposite number in Old English, seldan (seldom).

And while we’re on the subject, you may be interested in a blog entry we wrote a few years ago on the pronunciation of “often.”

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Q: I was recently reminded, once again, that the captain of the H. M. S. Pinafore commands “a right good crew.” This led me to wonder about the many and varied senses of “right.” Do they all derive from a single core meaning?

A: In Act I of H.M.S. Pinafore, Captain Corcoran sings to the ship’s crew, “You’re very, very good, / And be it understood, / I command a right good crew.”

Sir William S. Gilbert used “right” in that lyric as an adverb meaning something like “very.” This sense of the word, used to modify an adjective, has been around since Old English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s a similar example, from an 1861 letter written by Edward Fitzgerald : “He is a right good little Fellow, I do believe.”

You’re right (that is, correct) in saying that “right” has many and varied meanings. Let’s take a walk through them.

Adverb: We mentioned Captain Corcoran’s usage. “Right” used as an adverb can also mean directly or immediately (as in to “go right home”), vertically (“she sat right up”), appropriately (“make sure it’s done right”), or accurately (“If I remember right”).

Adjective: Among other things, the adjective “right” can mean correct, accurate, straight, direct, true, well-aimed, proper, sound, upright, satisfactory, normal, legitimate, lawful, genuine, or 90-degree. And here are some other adjectival usages.

In British and Irish English, the adjective is sometimes used as an intensifier meaning, in the words of the OED, “complete, absolute, total, utter” (as in “I felt a right fool”).

Also, “right” can refer to one side of the body (as opposed to the left), a usage that the dictionary says was first recorded in Old English in the noun phrase “right hand.”

And “right” is used to indicate a direction, a sense that  the OED says “probably referred originally to the perception that the right hand was the stronger and the more appropriate for most tasks.”

The political sense of “right” originated in revolutionary France, where the term le côté droit referred to the right-hand side of the Assembly. As the OED says, the term “right” was used “with reference to the seating of nobles and high clergy to the right of the Chair, and the third estate and lower-status clergy to the left.”

Interjection: “Right” has been an interjection of agreement since Shakespeare’s time. Today it’s also used ironically to express doubt, as in “Yeah, right.”

Noun: Since early Old English, “right” has been a noun meaning privilege or entitlement (as in “knowing one’s rights”). And for just as long, it’s had meanings related to fairness, goodness, justice, and the like (as in “He’s on the side of right and reason”).

In the 19th century, the plural “rights” was first used in the copyright sense. And of course in political and many other senses, the word is used as a noun: “extremists on the right” … “a right to the jaw” … “take a right at the next corner” … “set the kitchen to rights” … “as of right” … “do right by your brother” … “in her own right.”

Verb: As a verb, “right” can mean to correct, to straighten, to set upright, to recover one’s balance, to set back into place, to put back into order, to rectify, to repair, or to vindicate or avenge.

You asked if all these senses of “right” are derived from the same root. Yes, that’s what linguists believe. Here’s the story.

The word’s ancestor in English and the other Germanic languages is a prehistoric Proto-Germanic root that’s been reconstructed as rekhtaz. This in turn has been linked to an even earlier reconstructed source in Indo-European, reg (to move in a straight line).

The Indo-European reg is thought to be the ultimate source for “right,” not only in English and other Germanic languages but also in Latin (rectus, straight), Greek (orektos, stretched out), Old Irish (recht, law), Welsh (rhaith, law), Sanskrit (raji, straight), and Old Persian (rasta, straight).

Besides its relatives in foreign languages, “right” has many cousins in English—words that are derived from the same Indo-European source. These include “address,” “correct,” “direct,” “erect,” “guide,” “raj,” “rector,” “realm,” “regal,” “regime,” “regular,” “regent,” “regiment,” “royal,” “rule,” and more.

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Q: We on this scepter’d isle wonder why you Yanks are so intent on replacing the s’s in our civilised spellings with z’s.

A: Not so fast! Are verbs ending in “-ise” really better bred than those ending in “-ize”?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which ought to know, the “-ize” ending is actually the traditional one and the only proper one.

The first of these words to enter English, “baptize,” appeared in the 13th century with its z intact, and was later joined by “authorize” (14th century), “organize” (15th), “characterize” (16th), “civilize” (17th), and many, many others.

So the “-ize” spelling is historically correct. As we point out in our book about language myths, Origins of the Specious, the “-ise” spellings weren’t used much until the 18th century or later.

Whodunit? The culprits who introduced “-ise” into English were Francophiles enamored of French verbs like civiliser, dramatiser, organiser, and so on.

As the OED explains in an etymology note, “the suffix itself, whatever the element to which it is added, is in its origin the Greek -ιζειν [-izein], Latin -izāre; and, as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic. In this Dictionary the termination is uniformly written -ize.”

Spelling aside, some language authorities have criticized the practice of creating new verbs by tacking an “-ize” (or “-ise,” if you prefer) onto nouns, adjectives, and proper names.

Critics jumped on Noah Webster, for example, when he included “demoralize,” “Americanize,” and “deputize” in his 1828 dictionary.

Other words condemned in the 19th and 20th centuries were “jeopardize,” “accessorize,” “burglarize,” “prioritize,” “finalize,” and “theorize,”  according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

“If you are one of those persons of tender sensibilities whose nerves are grated by –ize, you would be better off learning to live with the problem,” Merriam-Webster’s says.

We agree that “-ize” words aren’t going away, but that doesn’t mean we have to use all of them, especially those that irritate our tender sensibilities (“circularize,” “operationalize,” “archaize,” “parodize,” “concretize,” etc.).

With that off our chests, we’ll give M-W’s editors the final word.

Although many “-ize” coinages don’t last (Truman Capote’s “artificialize,” Mary McCarthy’s “sonorized”), the usage guide says, “Who today blinks at popularize, formalize, economize, legalize, politicize, terrorize, or capitalize?” Not to mention “baptize”!

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Q: I enjoy reading on the Kindle because all I have to do is point to a word and the Oxford American Dictionary definition pops up. For example, I came across the word “spruce” (as in, he’s looking very spruce) and learned that it’s derived from “Prussia.”

A: Yes, there’s a link between “spruce” and “Prussia,” but the connection isn’t quite so neat as the dictionary seems to imply.

The noun “spruce” (the fir tree) is indeed derived from a now-obsolete term for Prussia that entered English in the 14th century. And the country’s connection with the other “spruce” seems likely, but it’s a bit more tentative.

From the 14th to the 17th centuries, Prussia was often referred to as “Spruce” or “Spruce-land” in English, though spellings differed widely: “Sprewse,” “Sprusse,” “Spruse,” and so on.

This “Spruce” and its variations evolved from the country’s name in post-classical Latin (Prussia), Anglo-Norman (Pruys, Pruz), and Middle French (Pruce, Prusse), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (The German word for Prussia is Preußen.)

The dictionary notes that the country’s name comes from Prussi, a post-classical Latin name for the Prussian people.

It’s probable that “spruce,” meaning the fir tree or its wood, came into English before the adjective meaning neat. A word spelled “spruse” was used for the wood of the spruce fir as far back as 1412, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. 

But “spruce” (spelled various ways) was sometimes used ambiguously in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In phrases like “spruce board,” “spruce ell,” “spruce chest,” “spruce coffer,” and even “spruce tree,” the OED says, the adjective could have meant “brought or obtained from Prussia,” or “in some instances” could have implied the spruce fir.

Here’s one of the examples the OED finds ambiguous:  “A maste of a spruce tree … bought for the foremast of the seid ship” (from Naval Accounts and Inventories of Henry VII, 1497).

There’s no ambiguity, however, in this citation from the OED, which is definitely a reference to the spruce fir: “For masts, &c., those of Prussia, which we call Spruce … are the best” (from Sylva, John Evelyn’s 1670 book about trees).

The other “spruce” (the neat one) was first recorded in the late 16th century in Richard Harvey’s Plaine Perceuall (1589): “neat, nimble, spruse Artificer.”

And Ben Jonson used the word a decade later in his comedy Every Man Out of His Humor: “A Neat, spruce, affecting Courtier, one that weares clothes well, and in Fashion.”

The English verb “spruce” (to neaten) showed up in writing at roughly the same time. The OED’s earliest citation is from The Terrors of the Night (1594), a discourse on apparitions. The author, Thomas Nashe, uses “spunging & sprucing” to mean cleaning up, apparently in the ghost-busting sense.

Etymologists believe that the neatness sense of the word may have come from the term “spruce leather,” first recorded in 1464 and meaning a kind of Prussian leather.

As Chambers says, jerkins made of spruce leather were “a popular style in the 1400s made in Prussia and considered smart-looking.”

And John Ayto writes in the Dictionary of Word Origins, “spruce leather” or “Prussian leather” was “a particularly fine sort of leather, used for making jackets.”

The leather connection would explain how “spruce” came to mean dressy in the 16th century. The OED points readers to Thomas Dekker’s The Guls Horne-Booke (1609), which  refers to “the neatest and sprucest leather.”

But the connection with Prussia here is less neat and tidy than the one between Prussia and the fir tree.

[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 16, 2015.]

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Q: I’m working on a project related to the term “generation gap.” The Web has led me to Jessica Pallington’s Lipstick, which says the phrase dates from 1925. But the book lacks references to substantiate this. I hope you can help.

A: The notion of a generation gap probably dates from the first two generations of humans to walk the earth.

And generations of authors have written about it, from Shakespeare (King Lear) to Turgenev (Fathers and Sons) to Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman).

But you’re asking about the phrase, not the gap itself. And the remark that caught your eye in the 1998 Pallington book, Lipstick: A Celebration of the World’s Favorite Cosmetic, does seem to refer to the phrase:

“One of the first known references to the ‘generation gap’ came in 1925, when people referred to the gap between generations of mother and daughter being signified by one wearing lipstick and the other not.”

We’ve seen several other references on the Internet to 1925 and the expression “generation gap,” but all of them either cite the Pallington book or use similar language.

It may be that she knows something we don’t, but as far as we can tell the phrase “generation gap” first showed up during the early 1960s. [NOTE: See a 2013 update at the end of this post.]

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the expression as “a difference of attitudes and values between people of different generations, esp. parents and children, leading to a lack of understanding.”

The first published reference in the OED is from a July 28, 1962, headline in the Daily Record of Stroudsburg, PA: “Generation Gap Affects Parent-Child Relations.”

We searched several other databases—America’s Historical Newspapers, the New York Times archive, Google Timeline, etc.—and that headline was the earliest citation we could find.

We also searched for “generational gap,” but the earliest example we found was this one from the Sept. 9, 1964, issue of Punch: “The generational gap is even more extended at student level.”

We’ll end this with a Shakespearian flourish. Who can forget King Lear’s words about filial ingratitude: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!”

[Update: On May 31, 2013, a reader in the UK sent us an early sighting of the term “generation gap.” He says, “I’m in the course of reading Goodbye to All That (1929), the autobiography of Robert Graves, and thought you’d like to know that in the first paragraph of chapter 2 he writes: ‘I found the gap of two generations between my parents and me easier, in a way, to bridge than a single generation gap.’ So it looks like that 1925 citation may well be correct.” Graves has said that his autobiography grew from fragments he first began writing in 1916.]

Q: I’m shocked, shocked to have read this in the NY Times: “Hanging over the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington has been the threat that the United States could lose its AAA credit rating, a coveted measure of the federal government’s financial strength. But in corporate America, the top rating long ago became an anachronism.”  Well, the US lost its AAA rating and maybe the NYT should too. That use of “anachronism” is just wrong. Someone has to uphold some standards. Perhaps you hold some sway with the wayward Times editors.

A: You’re right that the word “anachronism” was misused in that Aug. 2, 2011, article in the New York Times.

The reporter should have called the corporate AAA rating “a rarity,” as the headline writer did: “AAA Rating Is a Rarity in Business.”

But do we have any sway with Times editors? Fuggedaboutit! It’s been ages since we worked for the Gray Lady.

As for “anachronism,” English borrowed the word from French in the 17th century, but its roots are in the Greek words for backward and time.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the English word originally referred to an error in calculating time or fixing dates.

The earliest citation in the OED, dated sometime before 1646, is from Posthuma, a tract by the Orientalist John Gregory: “An error committed herein is called Anachronism.”

In the 19th century, the OED says, the word took on the sense that’s most common today: “Anything done or existing out of date; hence, anything which was proper to a former age, but is, or, if it existed, would be, out of harmony with the present.”

The first citation in the dictionary is from The Statesman’s Manual (1816), by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “If this one-eyed Experience does not seduce its worshipper into practical anachronisms.”

Here’s a more recent cite, from Mary McCarthy’s 1952 novel The Groves of Academe: “She herself was a smoldering anachronism, a throwback to one of those ardent young women of the Sixties, Turgenev’s heroines.”

Not all anachronisms, however, are throwbacks. Some of them go in the other direction—anachronistically forward, like a noticeable jet trail seen in a movie that’s set in the Old West.

We recently wrote a posting about anachronistic references in the television show Mad Men.

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Q: I’ve read that the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary once planted a fake word, “esquivalience,” as bait to catch lexicographers intent on stealing their material. Do you know of other examples of this?

A: “Esquivalience” is indeed a fake word. It was planted in the 2001 edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary to protect the copyright of the electronic version that came with most copies of the book, according to the editor-in-chief.

The definition: “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”

In 2005, the humorist Henry Alford wrote an article for the New Yorker about the genesis of “esquivalience.” He even coined a term for fake entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias: “Mountweazels.”

His inspiration for the neologism was a fake biographical entry for “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel” in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia.

The fictional Ms. Mountweazel, Alford says, was supposedly “a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled ‘Flags Up!’ ”

The encyclopedia entry, Alford adds, indicates that she “was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die ‘at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.’ ”

He quotes one of the encyclopedia’s editors as saying: “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright. If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

You asked whether we knew of other examples. As a matter of fact, we do.

Reference books aren’t the only repository of Mountweazels. Maps, too, have been known to contain fake names for streets and towns.

A 1978 Michigan Department of Transportation highway map shows two towns, Goblu and Beatosu, that don’t exist. They were fakes, based on University of Michigan football cheers, “Go blue!” and “Beat OSU!” (for Ohio State University).

Mountweazels have invaded the non-print media as well.

A few months ago, Google said it had rigged a number of fake search queries, using nonsense terms like “hiybbprqag” and “mbzrxpgjys,” which would turn up results with no relation at all to the search terms.

Why? Google said it was trying to catch Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, in the act of stealing its material.

The synthetic queries, Google explained, did not appear within the Web pages that came up, and there was no reason for any other search engine to return the faked results.

Google said the sting operation worked. It claimed, for instance, that a search on Bing for the term “hiybbprqag” turned up a planted page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. Microsoft, however, denied Google’s allegations.

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Q: So my wife opened a Snapple and, as she so often does, read the mini-fact printed under the cap: “Real Fact #916 / The scientific term for a sneezing is sternutation.” We both found the phrase “a sneezing” to be displeasing to the ears. Shouldn’t it be “a sneeze” or just “sneezing”? Side note: I really do enjoy that new word, “sternutation,” even if my spell check doesn’t like it.

A: “A sneezing” is not exactly incorrect, but it certainly is clumsy.

People are more familiar with “sneezing” used as a verbal adjective ( “a sneezing session”) or as a gerund with “the” (“the sneezing was incessant”). A gerund, as you know, consists of an infinitive plus   “-ing,” and is used as a noun.

The reason we don’t often see “a sneezing” is that “a sneeze” does the job a lot better. Perhaps the writer originally wrote “a sneeze,” then intended to use “sneezing” alone and forgot to delete the article “a.” Just a guess.

“Sternutation” is indeed a nifty word, though it’s not all that new. It means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “the action of sneezing” or “a sneeze.”

It was adopted into English in the 16th century from a medieval Latin word, sternutationem, which is related to the Greek word for “sneeze,” ptarnusthai.

Ultimately, all of these versions—Latin, Greek, and English—are probably echoic, or imitative of the sound the word symbolizes. Many words in English have echoic origins, including “cough,” “giggle,” “cuckoo,” “whimper,” “whistle,” and “tap.”

We’ve written before on our blog about “sneeze” and other words that begin with “sn” and have to do with the nose.

In Old English, the verb “sneeze” was fnesan or fneosan. In Middle English it became fnese, which was altered to snese and finally “sneeze.”

How did the alteration happen? In medieval manuscripts, the letters “f” and “s” were very similar, so the change could have been made unknowingly by scribes. But the new art of printing probably was an influence too.

In his Dictionary of Word Origins, John Ayto explains the evolution of the word’s spelling this way:

“Fnese had largely died out by the early 15th century, and it could well be that when printing got into full swing in the 1490s, with many old manuscript texts being reissued in printed form, printers unfamiliar with the old word fnese assumed it had the much more common initial consonant cluster sn.”

One more note. If you like “sternutation,” you’ll like a derivative, “sternutatory,” a word that describes substances that make you sneeze.

Next time you’re in a restaurant and the pepper guy (the peppier, in faux French) offers you an unwanted turn of the grinder, you’ll know what to say: “No thanks, pepper is so sternutatory.”

We could go on, but our noses are starting to itch.

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Q: On the box of my Mr. Coffee, the “Easy to Clean Glass Carafe” is translated as Pot en Verre Facile à Nettoyer. Now you’d think “carafe” wouldn’t have to be translated! Maybe the translator charged by the word.

A: This is odd indeed, since English adopted “carafe” from French in the late 18th century.

If carafe is perfectly good French, why would a French translation use pot en verre (glass jar) instead? Have the French dropped the carafe, or what?

We asked our Parisian correspondent this question, and he thinks this is simply a bad translation. Here’s his reply:

“I have found commercial uses of the following for the carafe of a Mr. Coffee-type machine: (1) verseuse (from verser, to pour), a container with a spout of some sort; (2) carafe, for “carafe”; and (3) bocal, usually a jar (like a canning jar, a pickle jar, etc.) or a fishbowl, conveying the notion of a round glass container.

“Of these, verseuse is most common in the profession, while carafe is quite common in ordinary use. I myself would say carafe. A pot en verre or a pot de verre would be a bocal.

“So why not use carafe? Because most translations are crap. Businesses use machine translation, or they look around the world for the lowest bid on translation auction sites. You get what you pay for, and businesses that produce such basic stuff as consumer appliances don’t want to pay a lot.

“In addition, translations can go through strange channels. I could easily imagine that there was a first poor-quality translation from Mandarin to English that produced something like ‘glass bowl.’ That may have been corrected later on by the North American distributor, while the original bad translation went to a translator (perhaps a machine) that simply translated the original bad English pretty much word for word.

“I have had to translate into French some manuals that were written in such bad English that I hadn’t a clue as to what they were talking about. When it’s for electrical equipment, it makes me worry….

“In short: for a product description, the best choice would have been verseuse, while carafe would have been perfectly acceptable. It’s for that reason that I’m betting the French translation was done by a non-native speaker, based on an original bad English translation.”

That solves the translation mystery, and it explains why the instructions we’ve gotten with some appliances have been so perplexing. (Translation auction sites? Yikes!) Now for a bit of etymology.

“Carafe” first showed up in English in 1786 as a French borrowing, but it also has equivalents in Italian (caraffa), Spanish (garrafa), Portuguese (garrafa), and Sicilian (carrabba).

Some scholars, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, have also associated it with Persian (qarabah, a large flagon), and with Arabic (gharafa, to draw or lift water, and ghuruf, a little cup).

If you read novels of bygone days, you may have come across an older word, “carboy,” which means a large bottle covered with protective basket work. This word and “carafe” are probably distant relatives, since “carboy” is from the Persian qarabah and may also be related to the Arabic qirba (a large leather bottle).

But back to “carafe.” It entered English first in Scotland and later in England. Ever since, it has meant a glass bottle used for water—either at the table or at the bedside—or for wine.

The word’s association with coffee began in the early 20th century, when the OED says “carafe” came to mean “an insulated jug for serving beverages, esp. coffee; (hence, also) such a jug which is an integral part of a coffee-making apparatus.”

The OED labels this sense of the word as originally and chiefly North American. Oxford’s earliest citation is from a 1911 ad in the New York Times for “Vacuum carafes, $5.”

A more recent citation can be found in Nicholson Baker’s novel A Box of Matches (2003): “Then you rinse out the filter basket and the carafe.”

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Q: I’m increasingly irritated by the growing use of “Really?” at the beginning or end of newspaper headlines (e.g., “Really? Squatter lives in Ann Curry’s townhome”). I suppose there’s nothing technically wrong with it, but it seems a slangy and childish construction. I hope this fad soon fades. Just what is “really,” really?

A: The word “really” really gets a workout in the news, not only in headlines but in broadcast journalism.

The writers of Saturday Night Live, for example, spoof this tendency in occasional Weekend Update segments called “REALLY!?!”

The headline example you cite (“Really? Squatter lives in Ann Curry’s townhome”) comes from the Orange County Register.

The California daily regularly uses the word as an apparent play on “real estate” (“Real estate news and views from around the globe that make you go, ‘Really?’ ”)

The New York Times regularly uses “Really?” with headlines on a column about health facts and fictions: “Really? The Claim: To Prevent Migraines, Drink More Water.”

But “really” shows up in a lot of other Times headlines. A search of the newspaper’s archive finds 181 “really” headlines over the last 12 months. Here are a few:

“A Mandate? Not Really” …  “Weiner Was Not the Topic. Really.” … “Who Really Won? It’s Not So Simple” … “Really, New York Has Had Snowier Winters” … “What’s Dumb, Really?” … “Really, Really Last-Minute Gifts” … “When a Tax Isn’t Really a Tax.”

The adverb “really” may sound slangy or childish to you, but it’s been standard English for hundreds of years.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word, which entered English around 1425, this way: “In reality; in a real manner. Also: in fact, actually.”

In the 18th century, the OED says, the word took on the sense in the example you cite: “Interrogatively, expressing surprise or doubt.”

The OED’s first example of this usage is from Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54): “ ‘The Count of Belvedere. He was more earnest in his favour — ’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, really — than I thought he ought to be.’ ”

We’d describe the use of “really” in those headlines above as casual or informal, not slangy or childish.

But we agree with you that headline writers have been giving “really” a real workout lately. They really ought to give it a rest.

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Q: Long before Pink Floyd, people were confusing the “dark side” of the moon with the “far side.” The “dark side” is the one without sunlight, but many think it’s the side we can’t see—that is, the “far side.” It seem to me that the confusion began in the 20th century, but I wonder if you have any information on this.

A: The dark side of the moon, as you say, is the one that faces away from the sun at any given time. The far side is the one that faces away from the earth. Only during a full moon are the dark side and the far side the same side.

It’s understandable, however, that many people refer to the far side (the one we can’t see) as the “dark side.” The adjective “dark” has meant hidden from view or knowledge since Shakespeare’s day, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

We don’t know exactly when the lunar confusion began, but a search of the America’s Historical Newspapers database suggests that it existed at least as far back as the early 19th century.

In fact, the earliest published reference for “the dark side of the moon” in the database, from  the Oct. 1, 1810, issue of the Rural Visitor, a Burlington, NJ, newspaper, seems to be an example of confusion:

“Men may be found possessing great professional knowledge, much integrity, and yet be as utterly unnoticed as though they tenanted the dark side of the moon.”

Most of the 19th-century examples, however, are from articles about eclipses and other astronomical events, and the writers use the term “dark side” properly.

As you suggest, the confusion grew in the 20th century. The July 15, 1915, issue of the Kansas City Star, for example, has an example in its serialization of Winnie Childs: The Shop Girl, a novel by C. N. and A. M. Williamson.

In the Williamsons’ work, “the dark side of the moon” is described as “the side about which people seldom troubled and never saw.”

As for the 1973 Pink Floyd album, The Dark Side of the Moon, it’s probably responsible for some of the recent confusion.

But from what we’ve read, the band chose the title as an allusion to the dark side of lunacy, not of Luna.

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Q: Why do TV networks label every piece of reporting as “breaking news”? To me, this connotes something out of the ordinary, something urgent. Everything else is just “news.” Don’t you think?

A. We don’t watch much TV, so we’ll have to take your word for this flood of “breaking news.”

But as old newspaper hands, we use “breaking news” to mean news that’s hot off the press—or the TV or the iPhone.

In other words, news so hot that you have to stop the presses or break into regularly scheduled programming to get it out to your audience.

But news wasn’t necessarily hot when it was broken back in the 19th century.

To “break news” then was simply to make something known, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest citation for this usage in the OED is from Up the Rhine (1840), by the British humorist Thomas Hood: “Now, however, I have some news to break.”

A search of the America’s Historical Newspapers database reveals many 19th-century examples of the usage, including at least one that would indeed meet your criteria.

In a letter published in the Feb. 7, 1836, issue of the Rhode-Island Republic, an American writes to “break the news” to his family that he is about to be executed in Mexico.

The OED doesn’t have an entry for “breaking news,” but it does have one for “newsbreak,” which we suspect is the source of the noun phrase you’re asking about.

The dictionary defines “newsbreak” as “orig. U.S. a newsworthy item; spec. a story that has just broken, a newsflash.”

The first OED citation for the usage is from a Nov. 18, 1936, letter by Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind: “They all look to me for news-breaks on everything connected with my business.”

Getting back to the expression “breaking news,” we think it should be used to introduce important news, especially news in the making, not to pump up the ratings of a tired newscast.

But as we said, we don’t watch much TV. If we did, we’d hope the talking heads would give us a break.

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Q: In browsing The Devil’s Dictionary, I noticed that Ambrose Bierce’s entry on “Satan” describes the Prince of Darkness this way: “One of the Creator’s lamentable mistakes, repented in sashcloth and axes.” What is “sashcloth and axes”?

A: The journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) was famous for his irreverent plays on words, and this one is a typical example.

When he wrote that the mistake was “repented in sashcloth and axes,” he was making a pun on the biblical phrase “sackcloth and ashes.”

“Sackcloth,” a word dating from the late 1300s, meant a coarse material from which rough sacks or bags were made, rather like our modern burlap.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, sackcloth was known as “the material of mourning or penitential garb … as the coarsest possible clothing, indicative of extreme poverty or humility.”

The phrase “in sackcloth and ashes” meant “clothed in sackcloth and having ashes sprinkled on the head as a sign of lamentation or abject penitence,” the OED says.

The phrase appears in the Tyndale Bible of 1526: “They had repented longe agon in sack cloth and asshes.”

In modern times, the phrase is sometimes used to mean that a person strongly regrets some past action and is now suffering the consequences.

A favorite author of ours, Anthony Trollope, often used the phrase this way. In the following passage from Phineas Finn, Lady Laura says she regrets her unfortunate marriage to Robert Kennedy:

“Of course I was wrong to marry him. I know that now, and I repent my sin in sackcloth and ashes.”

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Q: In a 2009 posting (yes, I’m a little behind), you say “again” is only an adverb now, though it used to be a preposition as well. But surely the preposition is still with us in the dialect word “agin,” as in, “If you ain’t with us, you’re agin us!” Just a thought.

A: The word “agin” is described in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) as a dialectal or regional variant of the preposition “against.”

American Heritage labels “agin” as a “chiefly Upper Southern US” regionalism.

But there’s more to the story. In their speech, some people commonly pronounce the adverb “again” uh-GIN, so it sounds as if it were spelled “agin.”

This widespread pronunciation isn’t dialectal or regional, in the opinion of Merriam-Webster’s editors. They include it among the standard pronunciations of the word. (American Heritage does not; it lists only uh-GEN.)

So the chances are that when you hear someone say “agin,” it’s either a regional version of the preposition “against” (as in “You’re either for us or agin us!”), or it’s just the way that person pronounces the adverb “again” (as in “They’ve done it agin!”).

What you’re probably NOT hearing is a surviving remnant of the defunct preposition “again.”

As we said our 2009 posting, “again” was once used for both the preposition and the adverb. But the old preposition “again” was replaced several hundred years ago by “against.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says that since the early 16th century, “again” has been used only as an adverb and “against” as a preposition in standard English.

Thus the prepositional use of “again” is now labeled obsolete or dialectal in the OED, and “again” survives in standard English only as an adverb.

(“In Scots and north English where against was not adopted,” the OED says, “again still retains all its early constructions.”)

The OED has two entries for “agin,” and both are labeled “dialectal” variants.

In one entry, the meaning is “again” (the adverb), a usage dating from 1815. In the other, the meaning is “against” (the preposition), a usage dating from 1768 and termed “widespread.”

Here are a couple of 19th-century examples, first the adverb and then the preposition:

“Blame my skin if I hain’t gone en forgit dat name agin!” (from Mark Twain’s The American Claimant, 1892).

“I’m unpleasant to look at, and my name’s agin me” (from W. S. Gilbert’s lyrics to H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878).

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Q: I am a professional mariner with two decades under traditional sail. Despite your doubts, I feel that the nautical use of “bitter end” must be the source of its common usage. In days of old, when a ship in danger of being blown ashore got to the bitter end, the holding power of the anchor could be increased no more. If the hook did not hold, one would likely be on the way to a watery grave.

A: We appreciate your belief that the nautical “bitter end” led to the everyday usage, but until further evidence turns up, we’ll stick with what we wrote in our posting last May.

There are two uses of the phrase, the nautical and the everyday, and it appears that the similarity between them is a matter of coincidence, or serendipity.

(1) Nautical use: As we said in our posting, a “bitter” is a single turn of the line around the bitts. And the “bitter end” is the end of the line that’s attached to the ship. In the 17th century, we quoted one seafarer as calling this “the bitters end,” meaning the line had reached the end of the bitters. It’s true, as you say, that a ship in this position might be in great peril and might indeed meet a bitter end in the everyday sense of the word.

(2) Everyday use: As the OED says, this sense of the phrase means “to the last and direst extremity” or “to death itself.” But it was first recorded IN THIS SENSE in the 19th century in other than nautical contexts, and might instead have been a reference to biblical citations. In the final analysis, the OED says the expression’s “history is doubtful.”

So, as we said, until further written evidence—from old books, diaries, letters, ship logs, or whatnot—surfaces, we can’t say more than this.

You may be right that the first use of the phrase led to the second, but unfortunately there’s no solid evidence at the moment.

Lexicographers take a very scientific approach in tracing etymological histories, and speculation or intuition has to give way to written evidence.

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