Category: Etymology

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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Q: There’s a debate on an editors’ listserv about the use of “dear” in salutations for business letters. Is it too intimate to address a client as “Dear Mr. Smith”? And what is the history of this word in correspondence?

A: We’ve had a small flurry of questions about letter-writing lately, including one about indenting the salutation and the following paragraphs. Maybe the epistolary tradition is having a comeback!

There’s nothing wrong with using “dear” in letter salutations, even in business correspondence. The use of “dear” doesn’t necessarily imply an intimate or affectionate connection, as we’ll explain.

The adjective “dear” is an ancient word. It was recorded (as deoare) in Old English as far back as around 725, when it meant precious, valuable, or costly.

But it has even older cousins in other Germanic languages. The ancestor of them all is a prehistoric Proto-Germanic word that scholars have reconstructed as deurijaz (costly), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The word “dear” (or its Old English equivalents) was applied to people early on, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest meaning was esteemed or valued, not loved, the OED says, “but the passage of the one notion into the other is too gradual to admit of their separation.”

In addressing one another, English speakers have been using “dear” since the Middle Ages. And then, as now, the word could be used either intimately or formally.

For example, the OED has citations for its use “in addressing a person, in affection or regard,” dating back to the 1300s or perhaps earlier (as in “Father dear,” or “my dear friend”).

But the “dear” that we use in letters (and, if we’re so inclined, in emails) can be regarded as either intimate, friendly, or formal, depending on the context.

The tradition of using “dear” in letters dates from the mid-15th century.

It was first recorded, according to OED citations, in a letter beginning “Right dere and welbeloved,” written in 1450 by Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI.

As the OED says, uses of “dear” in letters—as in “Dear Father,” “Dear John,” and so on—“are still affectionate and intimate, and made more so by prefixing My.”

But, Oxford continues, “Dear Sir (or Dear Mr. A.) has become since the 17th c. the ordinary polite form of addressing an equal.”

And not just equals.

Our handy copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by Judith Martin, recommends that letters to dignitaries include greetings like “Dear Governor Stately,” “Dear Mr. President,” “Dear Mayor Tuff,” and (to a corporate bigwig) “Dear Mr. Pious.”

Who would dare argue with Miss Manners?

By the way, people still occasionally use “dear” in the old sense of pricey, as in “This Hermès ‘Kelly’ bag is gorgeous, but at $10,000 it comes very dear.”

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Q: I was thumbing through my M-W 11 for the fun of it (I’m easily entertained) when I noticed  that the first definition of “deadline” in the dictionary is “a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot.” Whoa! I thought a deadline was when something must be done. Why is that only the second definition?

A: The next time you thumb through your dictionary, take a moment to look at the explanatory notes at the beginning. This may not be the most entertaining part of the dictionary, but it has its attractions.

You’ll learn, for example, that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists its definitions in historical order, not in order of popularity.

We’ve written about “deadline” in our book Origins of the Specious. It’s in a section about old words that have lost their original meanings and are now used figuratively.

The original deadline, it turns out, was a four-foot-high fence that defined the no-man’s-land inside the walls around the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, GA, during the Civil War.

Any captive Union soldiers who crossed the deadline were shot.

The word first appeared in an inspection report written in August 1864 by a Confederate officer, Lieut. Col. D. T. Chandler: “A railing around the inside of the stockade and about 20 feet from it constitutes the ‘dead-line,’ beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass.”

After the war ended in 1865, Capt. Henry Wirtz, the commandant of the camp, was tried and hanged for war crimes.

Not until the early 20th century did “deadline” come to mean a time limit. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation is in the title of a play about the newspaper business, Deadline at Eleven (1920).

This usage may have been influenced by a somewhat earlier sense of the word: a guideline marked on the bed of a printing press.

These days, as we all know, journalists aren’t the only ones with deadlines to meet.

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Q: I’m an American living in Norway. My Norwegian wife wonders why “I” is the only English pronoun that’s capitalized. Is this an ego thing?

A: English pronoun usages are interesting, to say the least! But there’s no egocentric reason why we capitalize the first-person pronoun “I.”

It’s written this way only because in a wilderness of letters, a small “i” might get lost or overlooked.

But this wasn’t always the case. In its earliest forms, the Old English pronoun was ic, ih, or ich.

Citations in the Oxford English Dictionary show that as the word developed, it had a great many spellings, some starting with “h” or “y” in addition to “i,” but these were eventually shortened to a single, lowercase letter (i).

The capitalized “I” first showed up about 1250 in the northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn’t become established in the south of England “until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time).”

Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus “avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, offers an interesting historical note: “Essentially all the Indo-European languages share the same first person singular pronoun, although naturally it has diverged in form over the millennia.”

“French has je, for example, Italian io, Russian ja, and Greek ego,” Ayto continues. “The prehistoric German pronoun was eka, and this has produced German ich, Dutch ik, Swedish jag, Danish jeg, and English I. The affirmative answer aye ‘yes’ is probably ultimately the same word as I.”

And, as we’re sure you know, “I” is jeg in Norwegian.

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Q: In one of the scenes from Mad Men, purportedly set in a bar in 1964, some guy says, “Can I get a Dewar’s with water?” Now, I don’t remember people saying “Can I get” a drink back then. It sounds more 21st century to me.

A: It may sound 21st century to you, but people have been using “Can I get” that way since at least the late 19th century.

For example, an article in the June 20, 1880, issue of the Daily Arkansas Gazette includes this example of the usage:

“A footstep didn’t arouse the young lady. It was a voice that said: ‘Can I get a drink of water?’ Two arms and the chin of a tramp leaned on the fence.”

For a boozier example, a brief item in the Oct. 12, 1889, issue of the Knoxville Journal has this presumably fictional exchange:

“Traveler (from Kentucky): ‘Madam, can I get a drink here?’

“Lady of the House: ‘Certainly, there’s the well.’

“Traveler (with a courtly gesture): ‘Madam, you misunderstand me. I don’t want to wash my hands; I want a drink.’ ”

From what we can gather, the expression has been in steady use since then, so there’s nothing anachronistic about hearing it on Mad Men.

In case you’re interested, we wrote a blog item not long ago about a similar usage, “I’ll do a” (as in “I’ll do a Dewar’s with water”).

As you probably know, finding linguistic anachronisms in Mad Men has become something of an indoor sport among the show’s fans.

The linguist Ben Zimmer wrote an entertaining column on the subject a year ago in the New York Times Magazine.

Zimmer spoke with Matthew Weiner, the creator, executive producer, and head writer of the AMC show, who acknowledged that goofs do indeed slip into Mad Men.

For example, the character Joan used the saying “The medium is the message” in the first season, set in 1960, four years before Marshall McLuhan introduced it in print.

You’ll enjoy this YouTube video featuring Mad Men excerpts mentioned in Zimmer’s column.

Cheers!

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Q: I was wondering why newscasters (mostly) have begun using the term “home invasion.” Why isn’t it called a “break-in” any longer?

A: The phrase “home invasion” isn’t just another way of saying  “burglary” or “break-in.”

A “burglary” or a “break-in” refers to the act of entering a building with the intent to commit a crime. This crime can be committed when nobody’s home.

But in a “home invasion,” the house is occupied at the time. And often it involves the use of weapons and some kind of assault on the residents.

Several states have legally defined the crime of “home invasion,” though the definitions of the crime and its severity (first degree, second degree, and so on) vary.

The expression has been in use since 1973, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. It originated in the US and is chiefly used in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

The OED defines “home invasion” as “an act of entering a private dwelling while it is occupied, with the intention of committing a crime (usually burglary, often while threatening the resident); the action or offence of doing this.”

In the US, Australia, and New Zealand, the dictionary adds, “home invasion is a legally defined offence. Entry need not be forced, and may even be under invitation, if the offender later remains on the premises when requested by the resident to leave.”

The OED’s first citation for the use of the term is from a 1973 article in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Wilmette police were seeking the robbers in an apparently unrelated home invasion that occurred early Thursday.”

The phrase, as you’ve noticed, is becoming more widely used in the media these days.

For example, we found a news report from KFDM-TV in southeast Texas about armed men who broke into a home, locked the family in a laundry room, ransacked the house, and stole a car.

The report begins, “A home invasion has disturbed the peace in a West Beaumont neighborhood.” It ends with “If you have any information about the home invasion, call ….”

We hope this answers your question. And keep your door locked!

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Q: During a recent appearance on WNYC, Pat used two phrases that caused my wife and me some consternation: “a lot of” and “sort of.” Shouldn’t that have been “many” and “similar to” or “almost” or “possibly”?

A: Yes, Pat does say “sort of” and “a lot of” on the air, but we see nothing wrong with this.

On the radio show, she and Leonard Lopate are conversing, and consequently their style is informal or colloquial.

We wouldn’t use these phrases in the most formal writing (say, an article for a scholarly journal), but we’d use them in casual or informal writing (like this, for example) and of course in speech.

When the two of us speak, we use “sort of” in the sense of “rather” or “somewhat.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this adverbial use of the phrase as meaning “in a way or manner; to some extent or degree, somewhat; in some way, somehow.”

By the way, this usage isn’t a modern interloper. It dates back to the late 1700s.

Oxford describes the phrase as “colloquial,” a label that it defines elsewhere as meaning “characteristic of or proper to ordinary conversation, as distinguished from formal or elevated language.”

The OED also says the phrase “sort of” has passed into use “as a parenthetic qualifier expressing hesitation, diffidence, or the like, on the speaker’s part.”

The phrase “a lot of” dates back to the late 1500s, says the OED, which defines it this way:

“A number of persons or things of the same kind, or associated in some way; a quantity or collection (of things); a party, set, or ‘crew’ (of persons); also, a quantity (of anything). Now only colloq., except with reference to articles of commerce, goods, live stock, and the like. Often with some degree of depreciation, either implied, or expressed by an epithet.”

Both “sort of” and “a lot of” are standard in spoken English. They are NOT grammatically incorrect or substandard. However, they’re informal in style and, like any other phrase, they shouldn’t be used monotonously.

We’ve had several items on the blog about “sort of” and “a lot of,” including postings in August, September, and November of 2008.

Here it might be helpful to insert a note about formal versus informal English. Never confuse the informal (or colloquial) with the ungrammatical!

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, the word “colloquial” is not a pejorative label, and “was probably a poor choice of term for describing ordinary everyday speech.”

For that reason, most standard dictionaries and usage guides now use the word “informal” instead. And informal English is not substandard or grammatically incorrect.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), which now uses the label “informal” rather than “colloquial,” says:

“Speakers of standard varieties of the language use both formal discourse and informal or conversational discourse.”

The dictionary classifies both “sort of” and “a lot of” as “informal.”

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Q: I’m bewildered by all those T-shirts that proclaim, “I ♥ ME.”  Why is “me” capitalized? And why isn’t it “myself”? I’m from Maine, and to me the message is “I love Maine.”

A: We can’t believe that you’re REALLY bewildered by the uppercase “ME” in that message.

Nobody with an Internet connection could be. We’ve been driven virtually deaf by now from all the capital letters that scream at us for emphasis in cyberspace.

Is there too much of it? Yes. Can we do anything about it? No, except perhaps to show a little restraint ourselves.

As for “I ♥ ME,” you can find it on hats, bags, compacts, valentines, stickers, cards, lighters, etc., in addition to T-shirts.

You can also find a lot of “I ♥ Maine” items. Most of them spell out “Maine” in upper- and lower-case letters, though some use all caps and others refer to the state as “ME.”

You may be interested in a posting we had a few years ago about the use of the word “heart” in place of the ♥ symbol. It turns out that the use of “heart” as a verb isn’t a modern phenomenon.

In fact, the first published reference for the verbing of “heart” dates from around 897, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Anglo-Saxon days, to “heart” meant to give heart to or inspire someone.

Last January the online OED added a draft entry on the colloquial use of “heart” as a verb meaning to love or be fond of.

The dictionary says the usage is of US origin, and adds, “Originally with reference to logos using the symbol of a heart to denote the verb ‘love.’ ”

The first OED citation for this sense of the word is from a Nov. 16, 1983, Associated Press article:

“From Berlin to the Urals, teen-agers wear T-shirts reading, ‘Elvis,’ ‘Always Stoned,’ and ‘I (heart) New York.’ ”

As for “me” versus “myself,” we’ve written about this business several times on the blog, beginning with a posting in 2006.

It would be OK to use either “me” or “myself” on the T-shirt you’ve asked about, though the shorter one is punchier and could do double-duty Down East.

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Q: There’s a debate in my home that’s getting tiresome: Is the word that means yippee and often precedes “team” spelled “yay,” “yea,” or “yeah”? There are conflicting answers on the Web, but I’ll trust you with the definitive answer.

A: This is something we’ve often wondered ourselves: How do you spell the joyous interjection that starts with a “y” and rhymes with “day”?

The answer is “yay.” That’s the word from the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

American Heritage says the interjection is “used as an exclamation of pleasure, approval, elation, or victory.” The OED describes it as a slang “exclamation of triumph, approval, or encouragement.”

The spelling evolved, American Heritage says, as an alteration of the old word “yea,” which goes back many centuries to the Old English gea or gæ.

The older “yea” is pronounced like “yay” but it’s not a mere interjection. It can be an adverb or a noun, according to American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

As an adverb, “yea” can mean “yes,” “aye,” “truly,” or “indeed.” And as a noun, it can mean either an affirmative statement or vote, or the person casting such a vote.

Example: “He hurried, yea, galloped to the poll to cast his yea vote, and as a result the yeas outnumbered the nays.”

The third member of the trio, “yeah,” is classified as an adverb meaning “yes.”

There are three common pronunciations of “yeah,” all of which include a diphthong (two vowels elided into a single syllable). The diphthong begins with a vowel sound like that in “pet” or “pat” or “pate,” followed by “uh.”

There’s some disagreement about the origin of “yeah.”

American Heritage says “yeah” developed as a variant of the old “yea,” but Merriam-Webster’s and the OED say it’s an alteration or casual pronunciation of “yes.”

Now for some chronology.

As we said, the old “yea” is by far the oldest of the three. The earliest form of the word was recorded in writing in the year 731, according to the OED, which makes it nearly 1,300 years old!

By comparison, “yay” and “yeah,” which appear to be American inventions, are practically brand-new.

The OED’s earliest citation for “yay” is from 1963, and its first example of “yeah” is from 1905 (Merriam-Webster’s has a slightly earlier date, 1902).

But we’ve found what look like 19th-century usages of both words. We’ll cite just one instance of each.

There are some jubilant examples of “yay” in Mary W. Watts’s introduction to her book Nathan Burke, a fictionalized biography of the Mexican war general.

Her introduction is dated 1908, but in it she records the cheers she heard at a military parade 40 years earlier as a child in Ohio: “Yay, Yay, Yay! Fighting Burke! Fighting Nat Burke! Yay, Yay, Yay!”

And we found many examples of “yeah” in an 1863 adventure novel by Edward Sylvester Ellis, On the Plains, which is set in the Black Hills.

Here’s a  brief bit of dialogue: “ ‘I’ve done you some good turns, hain’t I?’  ‘Yeah, and I’ve allers felt good’eal of gratertude fur it.’ ”

We found other uses as well, thanks to the miracle of digitization. Is it a boon to research? Yeah!

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Q: I use the verb “indignify” in the sense of to insult or disgrace, but I can’t find it in my dictionary and whenever I type it in an MS Word document a red line pops up under it indicating a misspelling or a nonexistent term. Am I wrong to use it?

A: If you don’t mind sounding a bit quaint, go right ahead and use the verb “indignify.” You may get puzzled or even indignant looks, however.

Such a word does exist, but it hasn’t been used much since the 19th century. We found a few hundred examples in a recent Google search, but many of them were on language sites.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “indignify” means “to treat with indignity; to dishonour; to represent as unworthy.” The dictionary says the word is now obsolete.

It was coined in the 16th century, but not in the way you might expect—by adding the negative prefix “in-” to the verb “dignify.” Instead, it was formed from the suffix “-fy” and the Latin adjective indignus (unworthy).

The verb “dignify” also entered English in the 16th century. It was borrowed from Old French (dignefier or dignifier), which in turn came from the medieval Latin word dignificare (to honor or make worthy).

So “dignify” and “indignify” made their way into the language independently, though they’re related through a common Latin ancestor, dignus (worthy).

In fact, English once had two related adjectives, “digne” (worthy or honorable) and “indign” (unworthy or undeserving), from that same Latin ancestor. But those words, which were older than “dignify” and “indignify,” are now obsolete or archaic.

The OED’s first citation for “indignify” is from a long pastoral poem by Edmund Spenser, Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe (1595):

“I deeme it best to hold eternally / Their bounteous deeds and noble fauours shrynd, / Then by discourse them to indignifie.”

(We’ve gone to the original to expand on the citation. The word “shrynd” here means venerated. In later printings of the poem, “then” is changed to “than.”)

The OED’s last citation, dated 1743, is from Edward Poston’s The Pratler, a collection of essays and letters: “The very Idea … is greatly indignified, even by our aiming or pretending to understand it.”

However, we’ve found some 19th-century usages, and even a few strays in 20th-century writing, aside from the more recent sightings on Google.

Today, you’ll find “indign” in many contemporary standard dictionaries (labeled “archaic” or “obsolete”), but “indignify” is a rarity. The only entry for it we find is in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, where it’s listed as obsolete.

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Q: What are the rules on one-sentence paragraphs? I tend to see the regular use of them as a sign of tabloid journalism.

A: Many people seem to have been told, sometime during their school careers, that a one-sentence paragraph is not legitimate. It’s this belief, however, that’s not legit.

Modern dictionaries define a paragraph as a piece of writing consisting of one or more sentences devoted to a single point or topic. It begins on a new line and is usually indented.

(We don’t indent the beginning of paragraphs on our blog. We start them flush left, with a line of white space between them. This seems to be a common convention of online writing.)

As for how many sentences in a paragraph, the writer can use as many—or as few—as the topic requires.

Quite often, as you’ve probably noticed if you read much fiction, a paragraph consists of one speaker’s quoted words. In fact, it might have just a single word:

“Right!”

There are no “rules” of English grammar about the number of sentences per paragraph. This is a matter of style, not grammar.

On our blog, for example, we often use one- or two-sentence paragraphs, confining ourselves to just a few items of information per paragraph.

We think this is easier for people to read, especially in a format consisting of a narrow vertical column with other matter abutting on either side.

But our book Origins of the Specious, with its vacant margins and roomier format, has a more classic style of paragraphing. We used as many sentences per paragraph as we needed to complete a particular point or thought.

Personally, we don’t like extremely long paragraphs, since the eye tends to get lost without a few geographical landmarks as reference points. It’s fatiguing to read a paragraph that takes up page after page, even if it’s legitimately devoted to a single argument.

Many famous writers—Samuel Johnson among them—have written paragraphs of only one or two sentences.

In The History of the English Paragraph (1894), Edwin Herbert Lewis scrutinized dozens of famous writers, examining several hundred paragraphs from the works of each.

For the works he studied, he calculated the percentage of single-sentence paragraphs in Defoe at 62 percent; Bunyan, 61; Laurence Sterne, 55; Spenser, 48; Scott, 45; Dickens, 43; Fielding, 38; Hobbes, 35; Bacon, 32; George Eliot, 27; Johnson, 27. The writers Locke, Lamb, Swift, De Quincey, Addison, Ruskin, Dryden, Sidney, and Milton were in the 18 to 10 percent range. (The novelists among these writers were in some cases using one-sentence paragraphs to quote speakers.)

Paragraphing itself is very old. Lewis said that indented sections of writing can be found in some of the oldest English manuscripts.

“In a manuscript of the sixth century,” he wrote, “quotations are written as in modern paragraphs,—carried in evenly from the marginal line.”

One-sentence paragraphs are found in “every period in English Literature,” Lewis said, but they were more common in the 18th than in the 19th century.

Reading between the lines, it appears that prejudice against the one-sentence paragraph came from 19th-century writers on rhetoric and composition.

Lewis quotes a contemporary of his who believed that “a paragraph is to a sentence what a sentence is to a word.”

And this hierarchy—from word to sentence to paragraph—may have encouraged the belief that a paragraph must be a group of sentences.

Lewis notes that most of the multiple-sentence definitions he found in books of rhetoric and composition “were framed primarily for purposes of pedagogy.”

“This,” he said, “may explain why so much stress is laid upon the idea of a paragraph as a sentence group.”

Teachers, he suggested, wanted to discourage pupils from simply making each new sentence a paragraph.

It seems, though, that they taught their pupils too well.

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Q: Is the expression “I will have none of it” acceptable when referring to someone’s behavior or actions? For example, “His excessive praise is a thinly veiled attempt to jinx my research project and I will have none of it.”

A: Yes, it’s fine to use the expression that way. People have been doing it for more than a century and a half.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the expression as “to refuse or reject something outright.” And that something can be someone’s behavior or actions.

In the earliest example cited, Henry David Thoreau rejects friendship with someone who disagrees with him about right and wrong.

Here’s the citation from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849): “If Friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to darken the day, I will have none of it.”

And we never miss an opportunity to quote P. G. Wodehouse. This is from Very Good, Jeeves! (1930): “Her name was Maudie and he loved her dearly, but the family would have none of it. They dug down into the sock and paid her off.”

The most recent OED example of the usage is from Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), a novel by Jeff Torrington: “I tried to coax the old woman into her apartment but she was having none of it.”

The pronoun “none” is one of the oldest words in English. We’ve written several times on the blog about the myth that it always means “not one” and always is singular.

If you disagree and are having none of it, take a look at our latest posting on the subject.

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Q: The NYC parks commissioner considers a “concrete boardwalk” an oxymoron, but he argues that the usage is OK because the word “boardwalk” had become eponymous. As I see it, he’s using the words “oxymoron” and “eponymous” incorrectly. If I’m wrong, you can bet I won’t tell anyone I consulted you!

A: Thanks for sending that New York Times article about the fight to keep the boards in the boardwalk at Coney Island.

In the article, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, is quoted as saying last year that a concrete boardwalk is an “oxymoron.”

He’s also quoted as saying  that “boardwalk has become eponymous, in the way Kleenex is for paper tissue. It is a generic term for an elevated oceanfront walkway, and other communities use concrete.”

We think the parks commissioner is being a little loose with his terms, misusing both “oxymoron” and “eponymous.”

The phrase “concrete boardwalk” may be a misnomer, though that’s debatable, but it’s not an oxymoron.

The word “oxymoron,” as we’ve said before on our blog, is a figure of speech with a pair of opposite or markedly contradictory terms. Wood and concrete are different building materials, but they aren’t opposites or markedly contradictory.

And it may be true that “boardwalk” is now a generic term, as the parks commissioner says, but it’s definitely not eponymous.

The adjective “eponymous,” which we’ve also written about on the blog, refers to the person something is named for. For example, Hamlet is the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Perhaps the parks commissioner meant that “boardwalk” is ubiquitous—that is, found everywhere. Many people confuse the words “eponymous” and “ubiquitous,” but as we’ve also pointed out on the blog, they’re not synonymous.

One thing we can say for “boardwalk” is that it’s an all-American word. We associate it with Coney Island, Atlantic City, and similar American vacation spots, and as it turns out the word was born in the USA.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “boardwalk” is from a letter written in 1872 by Frances M. A. Roe, author of Army Letters From an Officer’s Wife:

“We reached a narrow board-walk that was supposed to run along by her side fence.”

Notice that the word wasn’t originally associated with waterfronts. But a 1906 citation from a story by Abby Meguire Roach in Harper’s Magazine has a whiff of salt air:

“A few days later, on the board walk at the seashore, she came face to face with Hugh Wilberding.” (A later version of Roach’s story, collected in a book, has “on the board-walk at Atlantic City.”)

As for what a boardwalk should be made of, the word was—and still is—defined by the OED as “a footway or walking-path constructed of boarding.”

Though the OED doesn’t say so, boardwalks these days are sometimes built of things other than wooden boards.

Perhaps if Coney Island’s boarding continues to be replaced with concrete, the OED will revise its definition.

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