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English English language Expression Grammar Language Linguistics Usage Writing

‘I bet’ or ‘I’ll bet’?

Q: What are your thoughts about using “I bet” versus “I’ll bet” to introduce a statement? I prefer “I’ll bet,” but I can’t explain why.

A: The verb “bet” has several meanings in addition to its usual gambling sense:

1. to agree (“I was bummed out” … “I bet you were”); 2. to disagree (“I’ll really stick to my diet this time” … “Yeah, I bet”); 3. to mean certainly (“You bet I’ll be there”); 4. to say you’re fairly sure (“I bet she felt crummy,” “I bet he’ll forget,” “I’ll bet you come late tomorrow,” “I’ll bet they’re late again”).

In #4, the usage you’re asking about, “I bet” or “I’ll bet” introduces a subordinate construction. You can find examples in standard dictionaries for both “I bet” and “I’ll bet” used in this sense, though “I bet” is more common.

In our opinion, “I bet” (present tense) sounds more natural when the subordinate construction is in the past tense (“I bet she felt crummy”) or the future tense (“I bet he’ll forget”).

But “I’ll bet” (future tense) seems more idiomatic when the complement uses the present tense to express the future, either with a time element (“I’ll bet you come late tomorrow”) or without a time element (“I’ll bet they’re late again”).

A few years ago, we wrote a post about the futurate—a usage that expresses the future with a tense not normally used for it, as in “He arrives Saturday.”

Something similar is at work when we use “bet,” “wager,” and “hope” to talk about the future. These verbs, according to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, often introduce “subordinate constructions allowing pragmatically unrestricted futures.”

For example, the underlined complements of “bet” in “I’ll bet you come late tomorrow” and “I’ll bet they’re late again” express what the Cambridge Grammar calls a “deictic future time.” The sense of a deictic expression depends on how it’s used.

As the authors, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, explain, “The construction generalises to the deverbal nouns bet, wager, hope.” In other words, “I’ll bet they’re late again” is another way of saying “My bet is that they’re late again.”

Getting back to your question, we’ve generally (though not always) used “I’ll bet” or “we’ll bet” with complements that indicate the future but aren’t expressed in the future tense.

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We were sat … or were we?

Q: Do all British people say “sat” instead of “sitting,” as in this example from a Brit’s blog: “we were sat around the coffee table”?

A: No, not all British people would say something like “we were sat around the coffee table.” That usage isn’t considered standard English in either the UK or the US.

However, quite a few people in the UK do indeed use “sat” that way, and the usage shows up once in a while in the US too.

In an Oct. 3, 2012, post on the Oxford Dictionaries blog, the lexicographer Catherine Soanes notes the increasing nonstandard use of the past participles “sat” and “stood” for the present participles “sitting” and “standing” in British English.

She reports hearing several instances of the usage on the BBC, including “She’s sat at the table eating breakfast” and “we were stood at the bar waiting to be served.”

Soames, editor or co-editor of several Oxford dictionaries, says the use of “sat” and “stood” for “sitting” and “standing” in continuous, or progressive, tenses is “regarded as non-standard by usage guides.”

“So are we witnessing a general decline of continuous tenses?” she asks. “Thankfully, no: this error predominantly seems to crop up with ‘stand’ and ‘sit.’ ”

So why do so many people, primarily in the UK, say things like “She’s sat” and “we were stood”?

“The answer’s not clear,” Soames says, “but my research shows that this usage (which used to be restricted to some regional British dialects) is becoming more widespread in British English, and is even appearing in edited writing such as newspapers and magazines.”

She reports finding over 3,000 instances of this construction in the Oxford English Corpus, including these two examples from the database:

“It is 2pm and I am sat in my parents’ living room, talking to one of the cats.”

“Three hooded kids are stood around the corner drinking alcopops and it’s raining.”

Although the usage is uncommon in US English, she says, it “isn’t completely unknown there, with around 340 examples (11% of the total)” in the Oxford corpus, including this example:

“My Mom and Alison were stood in the hallway watching me as I limped down the stairs.”

She also reported finding examples in the Oxford corpus from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and India.

We suspect that in some cases “sat” is being used in place of “seated” (that is, as the past tense of the verb “seat”) rather than in place of “sitting.” So “we were sat around the coffee table” may be another way of saying “we were seated around the coffee table.”

Our own searches of the News on the Web corpus generally confirm Soames’s findings, though we’ve found the usage more overwhelmingly British now than she found it five years ago. Here are a couple of recent examples from London newspapers:

“We were sat in a pub having a drink” (from the Oct. 7, 2017, issue of the Telegraph).

“We were sat there for two and a half hours just studying it, watching it flying around the sky” (from the Sept. 21, 2017, issue of the Sun).

When the usage shows up in an American publication, a British citizen is often being quoted, as in this example from the July 9, 2017, issue of the Washington Post, about tennis fans living in a tent city near the Wimbledon tournament:

“And so all we had was a rucksack and an umbrella, and it started to rain, so we were sat up leaning against somebody’s garden wall, and it poured down with rain.”

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The ‘hey’ in ‘heyday’

Q: Did the word “heyday” originally refer to a day when hay is harvested?

A: No, “heyday” isn’t etymologically related to either “hay” or “day.” In fact, it’s probably related to the exclamation “hey,” used to call attention, express surprise, and so on.

“Originally, the word was heyda, an exclamation roughly equivalent to the modern English hurrah,” John Ayto says in his Dictionary of Word Origins. “Probably it was just an extension of hey, modelled partly on Low German heida ‘hurrah.’ ”

When “heyday” first showed up in English writing in the early 1500s, it was an “exclamation denoting frolicsomeness, gaiety, surprise, wonder, etc.,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from Magnyfycence, a 1530 morality play by the English poet laureate John Skelton: “Rutty bully Ioly rutterkyn heyda.”

The central character in the play, Magnificence, is tempted by such political evils as Crafty Conveyance, Courtly Abusion, and Cloaked Collusion.

That line of dialogue, a comment by Courtly Abusion to Cloaked Collusion, comes from a medieval song. It’s apparently a satire on the gibberish supposedly spoken by drunken Flemish visitors in England.

The next Oxford example is from Abcedarium Anglo Latinum (1552), an English-Latin dictionary by Richard Huloet: “Heyda or hey, euax.” (The Latin exclamation euax means good.)

And here’s an expanded OED citation from Ralph Roister Doister, a comic play by Nicholas Udall, written around 1550: “Hoighdagh, if faire fine Mistresse Custance sawe you now, Ralph Roister Doister were hir owne I warrant you.”

As for the noun “heyday,” it referred to a “state of exaltation or excitement of the spirits or passions” when it first appeared in the late 1500s, Oxford says.

The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from Sir Thomas More (circa 1590), a play written and revised by several writers (a three-page, handwritten revision is said to be by Shakespeare):

“And lett this be they maxime, to be greate / Is when the thred of hayday is once spoun, / A bottom great woond vpp greatly vndoun.” (The word “bottom” here refers to a ball of thread.)

Ayto, in his etymological dictionary, says “the influence of the day-like second syllable did not make itself felt until the mid-18th century, when the modern sense ‘period of greatest success’ began to emerge.”

The OED defines the modern sense as the “stage or period when excited feeling is at its height; the height, zenith, or acme of anything which excites the feelings; the flush or full bloom, or stage of fullest vigour, of youth, enjoyment, prosperity, or the like.”

The earliest Oxford example is from The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, a 1751 novel by Tobias Smollett, who refers to Peregrine as an “imperious youth, who was now in the heyday of his blood.”

As for the old interjection “hey,” the OED defines it as a “call to attract attention; also, an exclamation expressing exultation, incitement, surprise, etc.; sometimes used in the burden of a song with no definite meaning; sometimes as an interrogative.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from an account of the life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria, written sometime before 1225: “Hei! hwuch wis read of se icudd keiser!” (“Hey! What wise counsel from such a well-known emperor!”)

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My plastic blue new nice truck

Q: If, as a child, I said, “That me truck,” someone would have corrected me. But if I said, “my plastic blue new nice truck,” I don’t think anyone would have told me the order was wrong. So how do such conventions get passed on?

A: We’ve already written about the order of adjectives in noun phrases. A post in 2010 explains why we say “a perfect little black dress,” not “a black perfect little dress.” And a 2017 post discusses the lack of commas in such a phrase.

However, we haven’t written about how children become aware of the conventions for using premodifiers.

Entire books and countless papers have been written about the order of premodifiers. But we haven’t found a definitive answer as to how this apparently “natural” order is passed on.

As you suggest, a toddler who says “my plastic blue new nice truck” is probably not corrected to say, “my nice new blue plastic truck,” yet somehow the conventional order eventually becomes automatic.

How does this happen? We can offer a couple of possibilities.

As children become more articulate, either (1) they imitate what they hear around them, with adults consistently placing adjectives in a given order, or (2) they intuitively grasp that there’s a natural hierarchy of English adjectives.

We lean toward #2, though #1 may play a role. If #2 is the answer, and there’s a natural hierarchy, it may be organized roughly like this:

The adjectives closest to the noun reflect qualities that exist in the noun (like “blue” or “plastic”), while those further from the noun reflect subjective opinions or evaluations (like “nice” and “new”).

This seems to be the pattern when linguists and grammarians write about the order in which English premodifiers appear.

For example, English Grammar Today, by Ronald Carter et al., divides them into 10 categories, beginning with those that are always first in line—that is, farthest from the noun (the head of the phrase):

“1. opinion (unusual, lovely, beautiful); 2. size (big, small, tall); 3. physical quality (thin, rough, untidy); 4. shape (round, square, rectangular); 5. age (young, old, youthful); 6. colour (blue, red, pink); 7. origin (Dutch, Japanese, Turkish); 8. material (metal, wood, plastic); 9. type (general-purpose, four-sided, U-shaped); 10. purpose (cleaning, hammering, cooking).”

In A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Randolph Quirk and his co-authors suggest that “a subjective/objective polarity” accounts for the order of premodifiers in English:

“That is, modifiers relating to properties which are (relatively) inherent in the head of the noun phrase, visually observable, and objectively recognizable or assessible, will tend to be placed nearer to the head and be preceded by modifiers concerned with what is relatively a matter of opinion, imposed on the head by the observer, not visually observed, and only subjectively assessible.”

It’s interesting to note that English isn’t unique in the ordering of modifiers before a noun. In his book Linguistic Semantics (1992), William Frawley writes:

“English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Hindi, Persian, Indonesian, and Basque all order value before size, and those two before color: Value > Size > Color.”

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Not on my watch

Q: I see the expression “not on my watch” all over the place these days. I assume it began life as a naval usage. Right?

A: The noun “watch” has been used for hundreds of years by soldiers, sailors, and officers of the law to mean a period of vigil on land or at sea. It’s unclear whose usage inspired “not on my watch.”

The earliest example we’ve seen for the expression cites a sailor, but he uses it figuratively to mean “no way” or “absolutely not.” A few years later, a police officer on a night watch uses it literally in the sense of “This won’t happen while I’m on duty.”

That early figurative example, tracked down by the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter, is from the March 17, 1907, issue of the Duluth (MN) News Tribune. It appears in an account of a brawl at a Bowery bar in New York City:

“Jack had started to meander on his way, but Tom pinched him and stung him a fifty for the bunch of busted glass. ‘Not on my watch,’ says Jack, and the two mixed it.”

(Jack Rollings, a sailor on shore leave from the USS Alabama, had broken a mirror and refused the demand of Tom Sharkey, the owner, for restitution.)

The earliest literal example that we’ve found (from the May 29, 1911, issue of the San Francisco Call) describes the response of Capt. Steve Bunner, night chief of detectives at the city’s central station, when a man threatened to commit suicide:

“ ‘Not on my watch,’ said Bunner. He pushed the button and two large policemen appeared. ‘Take this man to the detention hospital,’ he said.”

The usage is quite popular now, as you’ve noticed. The Kentucky Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan Grimes, used it recently in commenting on the presidential voter fraud commission’s request for registration information:

“There’s not enough bourbon here in Kentucky to make this request seem sensible. Not on my watch are we going to be releasing sensitive information that relates to the privacy of individuals.” (From the June 30, 2017, issue of the Hill.)

Another version, “not under my watch,” is also popular. The first example we’ve found is from the Sept. 15, 2000, issue of the Globe and Mail (Toronto).

John Hayter, chairman and chief executive officer at Vickers & Benson, explains why he supported the sale of the struggling Canadian advertising agency to Havas Advertising of Paris:

“There is absolutely no glory in overseeing the slow demise of Vickers & Benson. We have been a proud Canadian agency for 76 years, and not under my watch was I going to see it slowly, slowly fade away.”

When the noun “watch” showed up in Anglo-Saxon times (spelled wæcce or wæccan in Old English), it referred to wakefulness, especially keeping awake for guarding, observing, and the like, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The first OED example is from King Ælfred’s translation (circa 888) of De Consolatione Philosophiæ, a sixth-century treatise by the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius:

“Hu micele wæccan & hu micle unrotnesse se hæfð þe ðone won willan hæfð on þisse worulde” (“How great the watch and how great the grief of someone with wicked desires in this world”).

This Middle English example is from Confessio Amantis (1393), a long poem by John Gower about the confessions of an aging lover:

“So mot I nedes fro hire wende / And of my wachche make an ende” (“So I must needs go from her and make an end of my watch”).

Over the next two centuries, the noun “watch” came to mean people on guard or observation, as well as their period of duty, especially at night. The term was used for watches in towns, on military posts, and aboard ships.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, first performed in the early1600s: “As I did stand my watch vpon the Hill / I look’d toward Byrnane, and anon me thought / The Wood began to moue.”

This biblical example is from the King James Version of 1611: “I will stand vpon my watch, and set mee vpon the towre, and will watch to see what he will say vnto me.”

And here’s a nautical example from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), by Capt. John Smith:

“When we had run 30. leagues we had 40. fadom, then 70. then 100. After 2. or 3. Watches more we were in 24. fadoms.”

The OED suggests that the observation sense of “watch” evolved from the periods “into which the night was anciently divided.” The Israelites divided the night into three periods, the Greeks into four or five, and the Romans into four, according to Oxford.

Interestingly, “in my watch” and “upon my watch” showed up in English before “on my watch.” All three expressions originally meant to be on duty as a watchman or sentinel.

The oldest of these phrases in the OED comes from the Coverdale Bible of 1535:

“Whyle they are yet stondinge in the watch, the dores shall be shut and barred. And there were certayne citesyns of Ierusalem appoynted to be watch-men, euery one in his watch” (from Nehemiah 7:3).

The dictionary’s first example for “upon my watch” is in the passage from the King James Version of 1611 cited above.

The OED doesn’t have an example for “on my watch.” The earliest we’ve found is from the March 1733 issue of the London Magazine:

“I was on my Watch in the Temple that Night the Murder was done; and nothing past but Gentlemen going to their Chambers” (from an account of the trial of Sarah Malcolm, a laundress hanged for three murders).

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Nonbinary thinking

Q: The company I work for has hired a person who identifies as gender nonbinary, and prefers to be referred to as “they” rather than “he” or “she.” Our new hire adds that a simple, sensitive, and inclusive solution would be to use plural pronouns for everyone. At the risk of sounding like Archie Bunker, geez Louise, this is counter to my 50-plus years of English education! Am I wrong?

A: No, you’re not wrong. It’s silly to use “they” for someone who’s happy to be called “he” or “she.” And the binary majority might not consider the usage simple, sensitive, or inclusive. (We’ll discuss the nonbinary use of “they” later in this post.)

Several months ago we wrote about changing views on the use of the plural pronoun “they” in reference to an indefinite, unknown person.

A sentence like “Someone forgot their umbrella” is now considered standard English, even though “they” is plural and an indefinite pronoun like “someone” is technically singular—that is, it takes a singular verb: “someone is.”

The indefinite singular use of “they” is not new, as we wrote in that post. It’s been common in English writing since the early 1300s, and was considered perfectly normal until 18th-century grammarians took exception to it.

In spite of the admonitions, however, English speakers have continued to use “they” (along with “them,” “their,” and “theirs”) in reference to an unknown “someone,” “everybody,” “anybody” and the rest.

As we’ve said many times, common usage will out! Those old prohibitions are no longer recognized by linguists and lexicographers, and we accept their view (though we prefer to reword our own writing to avoid the plural “they” for indefinite pronouns).

Your question, however, leads us to a different singular use of “they.” Because it is gender-neutral, “they” has recently been adopted as the pronoun of choice by many people who identify as nonbinary—that is, neither male nor female.

We’ll invent an office-type example of this usage, with “Robin” as our nonbinary person: “If Robin is at their desk, please ask them to come to the meeting, since they expressed an interest.”

This nonbinary “they” (we’ll call it #2) is very different from the indefinite “they” (call it #1) that we discussed above.

The #1 “they” represents an unknown person (as in “Someone forgot their umbrella”), but the #2 “they” is a known person who doesn’t want to be referred to as a “he” or a “she.”

As of today, all the major dictionaries recognize the #1 “they” as standard English, but the #2 “they” is mentioned by only one. This is to be expected, since #1 has been around for 700 years while #2 is still unfamiliar to many English speakers.

The only standard dictionary to tackle the subject—at least so far—is The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). Its entry for “they” includes this definition: “Used as a singular personal pronoun for someone who does not identify as either male or female.”

American Heritage doesn’t label the usage as nonstandard. But it adds this warning in a usage note: “The recent use of singular they for a known person who identifies as neither male nor female remains controversial.”

In fact, the dictionary says a majority of its usage panel was against this new “they” at last report:

“As of 2015 only 27 percent of the Panelists accepted Scout was born male, but now they do not identify as either traditional gender. With regard to this last sentence, the Panel’s responses showed a clear generational shift: the approval rate was 4 percent among Panelists born before 1945 and 40 percent among Panelists born later.”

Dictionaries may lag, but the nonbinary use of “they” has been accepted by the Associated Press and the Chicago Manual of Style, which are looked to as guides by many news organizations and book publishers.

Last March both announced new policies on “they,” allowing its use in reference to a known person who doesn’t identify as either male or female.

AP said in its announcement that the change was “spurred in large part by expanding journalistic coverage of transgender and gender-nonbinary issues.”

The new AP Stylebook recommends using “the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible,” but adds: “If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun. Be sure that the phrasing does not imply more than one person.”

The newly published 17th edition of the Chicago Manual has this: “For references to a specific person, the choice of pronoun may depend on the individual. Some people identify not with a gender-specific pronoun but instead with the pronoun they and its forms or some other gender-neutral singular pronoun; any such preferences should generally be respected.”

Oddly, both AP and the Chicago Manual only grudgingly accept the use of “they” for an unknown person, a usage that is no longer questioned in dictionaries.

When used in reference to an unknown person, Chicago says, “they and their have become common in informal usage, but neither is considered fully acceptable in formal writing.”

Yet they thoroughly embrace the nonbinary usage, a much newer, potentially confusing, and more grammatically radical use of “they.” And, as we’ve said, a use that has made it into only one standard dictionary so far—with a warning.

What’s our advice? Well, as things stand, the nonbinary use of “they” for a known person is accepted by some usage authorities and not by others. Only time will tell whether it will become common in ordinary English.

In the meantime, companies that want to be sensitive to the wishes of nonbinary employees might follow the examples of AP and the Chicago Manual.

If a pronoun is necessary, use “they,” “them,” and “their” for an employee who has that preference. But clarity is just as important as sensitivity. Be sure to make clear when “they” refers to only one person and when it refers to several people.

And when “they” is the subject of a verb, the verb is always plural, even in reference to a single person: “Robin says they are coming to the lunch meeting, so order them a sandwich.”

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When commas are uncommon

Q: I give up. How can I tell when to drop the commas in a string of adjectives before a noun?

A: The key here is the kinds of adjectives you’re combining and whether their order makes any difference. Here’s what you need to know.

  • If you can put “and” between the adjectives and make sense, use commas: “Daisy is a healthy, happy, outgoing puppy.” (It would be wordy, but you could say “healthy and happy and outgoing puppy.”)
  • If you can’t use “and” between the adjectives, drop the commas: “Daisy’s favorite toy is a big old blue velvet rabbit.” (You wouldn’t say “big and old and blue and velvet rabbit.”)
  • If the adjectives always occur in a certain order don’t use commas. “Her favorite playmates are two elderly black poodles that live down the block.” (You wouldn’t say “black elderly two poodles.”)

Some adjectives appear in a certain order when combined with dissimilar ones. These include adjectives for number (“two,” “three”), size (“little,” “tall”), age (“young,” “new”), color (“black,” “red”), and composition (“brick,” “leather”).

These adjectives always appear in a particular order. This explains why someone wears a “perfect little black dress,” not a “black little perfect dress,” as we wrote in 2010.

Here’s a parting sentence. It’s a mouthful, but we don’t feel a need to pause between adjectives when reading it aloud. And we didn’t feel a need for commas between adjectives when writing it.

“An overactive young terrier wearing a shiny new pink leather collar came out of an impressive red brick building and walked to the refurbished off-leash dog park to play with three aging French bulldogs in stunning white wool sweaters.”

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Is ‘trialed’ a trial?

Q: I recently read a British news report in which the word “trial” was being used as a verb meaning to test. Has this become a common usage? It sounds clunky to me.

A: Although the use of “trial” as a verb showed up in the US about a century and a half ago, it’s more common now in the UK.

The earliest example we’ve found is from Bessie and Her Friends, an 1868 novel in a series of children’s books by the American writer Joanna Hooe Mathews:

“Oh! we are very much trialed; are we not, Maggie?” (Bessie and Maggie were thwarted in their plans to pay for the medical treatment of a blind boy.)

The verb “trial” here is being used intransitively (without an object) in the sense of being tried or troubled.

The next example we’ve found (from the March 1888 issue of Wallace’s Monthly, an American sporting magazine) uses “trial” intransitively in the sense of competing in a horse race:

“She is a substantially put-up mare of well proportioned conformation and shows pure trotting-action, having trialed in 2:48 in her three-year-old form.”

And here’s an account of a dog field trial in the May 8, 1891, issue of the Fanciers’ Journal, a Philadelphia magazine:

“They would not put much pace on, and I don’t think Master Sam is nearly the dog at trialing as he was a couple of years ago.”

The earliest example for the verb in the Oxford English Dictionary uses “trial” transitively to mean “submit (something, esp. a new product) to a test or trial.” Here’s the quotation:

“Several distribution models are already being trialled in the United Kingdom,” from Computers in Education (1981), by Robert Lewis and Eric Donovan Tagg. (The past tense and past participle are usually spelled with a single “l” now.)

The OED is an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence. Oxford Dictionaries Online, a standard dictionary, says “trial” can also be an intransitive verb in reference to a horse, dog, or other animal that competes in trials (as in our 1888 example, cited above).

We compete with our golden retrievers in obedience trials, and sometimes hear “trial” used as an intransitive verb by handlers. But the intransitive use of “show” seems more common at US trials, as in “We showed in Utility B last weekend.”

A search of the News on the Web corpus, a database from newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters on the Internet, indicates that the use of “trial” as a verb is significantly less common in the US than in other English-speaking countries.

Here’s a Commonwealth example: “Researchers from the University of South Australia have successfully trialed the use of drones to remotely measure heart and breathing rates” (from a Sept. 28, 2017, article on New Zealand Doctor Online).

And here’s one from the US: “This is the first time that Walmart had trialed a service where delivery personnel would directly enter a customer’s home” (from a Sept. 21, 2017, article on TechCrunch).

The NOW corpus also has some examples for the verb “trial” used in the sense of trying out for a sports team.

An Oct. 25, 2017, article in the Connaught (Ireland) Telegraph, for example, refers to “all of the players who trialed and trained” for the Irish team in an International Rules football competition with Australia.

When the noun “trial” showed up in English in the early 16th century, it referred to the “action of testing or putting to the proof the fitness, truth, strength, or other quality of anything,” according to the OED.

The earliest example in the dictionary is from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 treatise by William Bonde, a priest-brother at Syon Abbey in England: “The tryall of our faythe, & examynacion or proue of our hope.”

The OED says the legal sense (“the examination and determination of a cause by a judicial tribunal”) showed up half a century later.

The first citation is from De Republica Anglorum: The Maner of Gouernement or Policie of the Realme of England (1583), by Thomas Smith:

“The Clarke asketh him howe he will be tryed, and telleth him he must saie, by God and the Countrie, for these be the words formall of this triall after Inditement.”

We’ll end with an example from Shakespeare’s Richard II (circa 1595). Here Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, responds when Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, accuses him of treason:

“Ile answer thee in any faire degree, / Or chiualrous designe of knightly triall.”

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All fixed for some pie

Q: I just read your “All the fixings” article about using the verb “fix” to mean “get ready” or “be ready.” It reminded me of a phrase my father used when he didn’t get a treat he was hoping to have: “I had my mouth all fixed for some pie.”

A: Your father was using the expression “all fixed for” in the sense of wanting something very much or longing for it.

This dialectal usage is sometimes followed by a gerund (“all fixed for eating some pie”) or, as in your father’s case, the treat itself (“I had my mouth all fixed for some pie”).

As far as we can tell from our searches of newspaper databases, the usage showed up in the late 19th century. In many of the examples, the person all fixed for something is disappointed—similar to your father’s use of the expression.

The earliest example we’ve seen is from the July, 4, 1895, issue of the Phillipsburg (KS) Herald: “Win Bissell got his mouth all fixed for a big feast of roasting ears on the Fourth, but a cow got in and cleaned up the patch Sunday night.”

And here’s one from the Oct. 21, 1909, Hammond (IN) Times: “Christ Brookham of 3619 Elm street reports to the police that duck thieves are abroad in the land, and that he is shy two nice fat ones, and was compelled to eat a third one when he had his mouth all fixed for chicken.”

In this example from the Jan. 16, 1915, Coronado (CA) Eagle and Journal, the person’s face, not his mouth, is “all fixed for” something good to eat:

“Did you ever get your face all fixed for a turkey dinner and find that the turkey supply was exhausted and all you could get was hamburger?”

And here’s a “throat” example, minus the word “all,” from the Aug. 25, 1917, issue of the Loveland (CO) Daily: “We had our throat fixed for trout, but they wan’t nothin’ come of it.”

But most of our sightings were of the “mouth all fixed for” variety. Here are a few more.

From the Nov. 4, 1921, Mohave County (AZ) Miner and Our Mineral Wealth: “J. H. Smith is short two fat ducks that were nabbed in back yard under the guise of a Halloween prank. Hubert says he would rather they had taken his chicken coop as his mouth was all fixed for a duck dinner.”

From the June 27, 1924, Clare (MI) Sentinel: “Oh, say! We are going to be invited out to supper this week and we have our mouth all fixed for chicken; but don’t mention it, as we are telling you this in confidence and wouldn’t like it to reach the ears of our expected hostess.”

And finally, from an advertisement for Junket in the April 3, 1947, San Bernardino (CA) Sun: “I had my mouth all fixed for that rennet-custard dessert you’re givin’ to Daddy! ’Course, Daddy likes it too—who wouldn’t? But you know rennet custards are my dish from ’way back. So how about it?”

This sense of “all fixed for” as longing for something is apparently derived from the use of the verb “fix” to mean be prepared or get ready, a usage that dates back to the early 1700s.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1715 entry in The Early Records of Lancaster, Massachusetts (1884), edited by Henry S. Nourse: “We’d fix things directly; I’ll settle whatever you please upon her.”

By the early 1800s, the verb was being used in the sense of preparing a drink or a meal, as in this OED example from Frances Trollope’s notes for Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): “You must fix me a drink.” Frances Trollope was the mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope.

And later in the 19th century, the expression “all fixed for” was being used in the sense of ready for a meal.

This example is from an ad for Platt’s buckwheat flour in the Nov. 6, 1871, issue of the Hartford (CT) Daily Courant: “Now we are all fixed for a good breakfast.”

The verb “fix,” which meant to make firm or stable when it showed up in English in the 1400s, is ultimately derived from fīxus, the past participle of fīgĕre, classical Latin for to fix or fasten.

The earliest OED example is from a collection of 15th-century songs and carols edited by Thomas Wright in 1847: “I thouȝt in mynd / I schuld ay fynd / The wehle of fortunat fyxyd fast.”

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Who put the ‘dis-’ in ‘dissent’?

Q: I’ve told my students that “dis-” is a prefix in “dissenter.” But now I’m being told in grad school that a prefix isn’t a prefix if the rest of the word doesn’t exist. So can I still refer to “dis-” as a prefix in “dissenter”?

A: The “dis-” in “dissent” and “dissenter” is indeed a prefix, especially if you go back to their etymological source, dissentīre, a classical Latin verb meaning to differ in sentiment.

Dissentīre was formed by adding the prefix dis- (in different directions) to the verb sentīre (to feel or think).

The Latin sentīre is also the source of “assent,” “consent,” “resent,” “sentiment,” and other English words, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Can a lexical element at the beginning of a word be called a “prefix” if the rest of the word isn’t found by itself in standard dictionaries?

Well, some dictionaries do indeed define “prefix” in a restrictive way as an element added to the front of a word to change its meaning.

However, the two dictionaries we rely on the most, the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Unabridged, define “prefix” more broadly as an element added to the front of either a word or a stem.

The “sent” in “dissenter” is a lexical stem or base referring to the sense of feeling. You can find the same stem in all the words cited above from Ayto’s etymological dictionary.

The OED defines “dissenter” as “one who dissents in any matter: one who disagrees with any opinion, resolution, or proposal; a dissentient.”

The earliest Oxford citation is from Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651), by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

“If any one will not consent … the City retaines its primitive Right against the Dissentour, that is the Right of War, as against an Enemy.” Hobbes had published the work in Latin in 1642 as De Cive (On the Citizen).

The dictionary says “dissenter” was formed by adding the suffix “-er” to the verb “dissent,” which it defines as “to withhold assent or consent from a proposal, etc.; not to assent; to disagree with or object to an action.”

The first OED citation for the verb is from The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, a work of history written around 1425 by the Scottish poet Andrew of Wyntoun: “Fra þis he dyssentyd hale” (“From this he dissented wholly”).

The noun “dissent,” which showed up more than a century later, is defined in the dictionary as “difference of opinion or sentiment; disagreement.”

The first Oxford citation for the noun is from The Faerie Queene, an epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first three books were published in 1590 and the next three in 1596.

Here Artegall, the hero of book five, tries to resolve a dispute: “Did stay a while their greedy bickerment, / Till he had questioned the cause of their dissent.”

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Pre-, post-, and ante- position

Q: In addition to the grammar term “preposition,” is there such a thing as a “postposition” or an “anteposition” as a part of speech? Or am I mistaking “pre-” as a prefix in “preposition”?

A: Yes, “postposition” and “anteposition” are grammatical terms, though they aren’t among the terms for the traditional parts of speech.

And yes the “pre-” in “preposition” is a prefix—or rather was a prefix in its Latin source.

All three terms are etymological cousins. They’re ultimately derived from three related classical Latin verbs:

“preposition” comes from praepōnere (to put in front of), “postposition” from postpōnere (to put after), and “anteposition” from antepōnere (to put before).

As you know, a “preposition” is a term that’s typically put in front of a noun or noun phrase to position it in relation to other words, as “by” is used in “the house by the creek,” or “in back of” in “the copper beech in back of the house.”

“Postposition” refers to the placement of a term, or to a term that’s placed, after a grammatically related word or phrase. For example, “-ward” is a postposition in “homeward,” and “royal” appears postposition in “battle royal.”

“Anteposition” refers to the placement of a word or phrase before another, especially if that position is unusual. Examples: “fiddlers” in “fiddlers three” and “echoed” in “echoed the thunder.”

The first of the three terms to show up in English was “preposition,” according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED example, dated around 1434, is from the writings of John Drury, a canon of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle:

“With what case xal þe [shall the] comparatif degre be construid with be cause of his degre? With an ablatif case of eyþer nownbre [either number] with oute a preposicion.” (The dictionary also cites two earlier uses of the Latin noun praepositiō in Old English.)

The first Oxford citation for “postposition” (from a 1736 English translation of a French history of China) says the prepositions in two Chinese phrases “are Postpositions, because they are put after the Nouns.”

And the earliest OED example for “anteposition” is from a 1728 Italian-English dictionary by Ferdinando Altieri: “The Position, or Anteposition causes the o to be pronounced open.”

By the way, the traditional parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, though modern grammarians and linguists often use more precise classifications.

In Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I, she includes a sentence that uses all the traditional parts of speech:

“But [conjunction] gosh [interjection], you [pronoun] are [verb] really [adverb] in [preposition] terrible [adjective] trouble [noun]!”

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There, their, they’re

Q: Can you give me a very simplified way to remember how to use “there,” “their,” and “they’re”? I know “there” is a place or shows ownership, and “their” is more figurative, but I still sometimes get them wrong. HELP!

A: First of all, “there” does not show ownership, and “their” is not figurative. But like you, many people are confused by these sound-alike words.

Pat wrote a limerick about the various “there/their/they’re” words for her grammar and usage book Woe Is I, and it might help you to keep them straight. Here it is:

THE DINNER GUESTS

They seem to have taken on airs.
They’re  ever so rude with their stares.
They get there quite late,
There’s a hand in your plate,
And they’re eating what’s not even theirs.

Here’s the accompanying explanation:

● They’re is shorthand for “they are”: They’re tightwads, and they always have been.

● Their and theirs are the possessive forms of “they”: Their money is theirs alone.

● There (meaning “in or at that place,” as opposed to “here”) isn’t even a pronoun, unlike the others. Neither is there’s, which is shorthand for “there is.” But there and there’s frequently get mixed up with the sound-alikes they’re, their, and theirs.

We hope this helps.

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Is Angelina a celeb or a sleb?

Q: Is “sleb” a word you would find useful?

A: No, we don’t use “sleb,” and don’t expect to. If we want a short, informal version of “celebrity,” we use “celeb,” an older and far more popular term.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “sleb” as a British colloquial “alteration of celeb n., reflecting a monosyllabic pronunciation in rapid speech.”

The earliest example for “sleb” in the OED is from the title of a May 1, 1996, posting to the Usenet newsgroup alt.showbiz.gossip: “Sleb sighting.”

All the other Oxford citations are from British sources, as are most examples in the News on the Web corpus, a database from online newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters.

The earliest OED example for “celeb” is from the December 1907 issue of the Smith College Monthly: “She is a Senior Celeb and I’m just any Freshman.”

When “celebrity” showed up in English in the late 1300s, it meant the “state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed,” according to Oxford.

The first citation is from Chaucer’s Middle English translation, dated around 1380, of De Consolatione Philosophiae, a sixth-century Latin work by the Roman philosopher Boethius:

“þat is ryȝt clere and ryȝt noble of celebrate of renoun” (“that is right worthy and right noble of celebrity of renown”).

It wasn’t until the early 1800s that the word “celebrity” came to mean “a well-known or famous person,” according to the dictionary.

The first OED example is from the August 1831 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (London): “How will the new Chamber be composed? Of mayors, and notaries, and village celebrities.”

Now, according to Oxford, the term usually refers to “a person, esp. in entertainment or sport, who attracts interest from the general public and attention from the mass media.”

Finally, for American readers who may not have seen “sleb” in the wild, here’s an example from the May 10, 2017, issue of the Spectator (London):

“It’s an open secret that the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh are none too comfortable with all the emoting and the sleb mingling.”

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Iteration and its iterations

Q: My latest pet peeve is people saying “iteration” when they could easily say “version.” It’s quite a fad in Washington journalism.

A: We’ve written a post about the meaning of “iterate” and “reiterate” (they mean the same thing), but we haven’t discussed the use of “iteration” for a version of something.

Although this usage is relatively new, standard dictionaries are beginning to accept it. Some define an “iteration” broadly as any kind of version, while others define it as a version of computer hardware or software.

We’re not particularly bugged by the new use of “iteration” for “version,” though we’re not surprised that such a stuffy-sounding word would insinuate its way into the officialese spoken in Washington.

When “iteration” showed up in English in the 1400s, it referred to the act of repeating. The ultimate source is iterāre, classical Latin for “do a second time” or “repeat.”

For hundreds of years, as “iteration” appeared in writings on alchemy, religion, medicine, mathematics, computer science, and so on, it meant either the act of repeating or a repeated action.

The earliest example of “iteration” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Ordinall of Alchymy, a 1477 illuminated manuscript by the English poet and alchemist Thomas Norton: “The multitude of their Iteration.”

The OED says the term was often used for “readministering a sacrament,” as in this example from The Apology of Iohan Bale Agaynste a Ranke Papyst (circa 1550): “the iteracyon of baptysme.” (John Bale, a Carmelite friar, converted to Protestantism during the reign of Henry VIII.)

By the late 1600s, according to citations in the dictionary, “iteration” was being used to mean a specific repetition. The first example is from Pharmacopœia Bateana (1694), a six-volume work by the English physician and medical writer William Salmon:

“For the three or four Iterations, the Regulus becomes apparently more bright and pure.” (In medieval Latin, regulus referred to metallic antimony.)

In the early 20th century, “iteration” came to be used in mathematics as “the repetition of an operation upon its product, as in finding the cube of a cube,” according to the OED.

The dictionary says this sense is especially used for “the repeated application of a formula devised to provide a closer approximation to the solution of a given equation when an approximate solution is substituted in the formula, so that a series of successively closer approximations may be obtained.”

If that left your head your head spinning, here’s a simpler definition from Merriam-Webster Unabridged: “a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result.”

The first Oxford example for the mathematical sense is from The Calculus of Observations, a 1924 treatise by Edmund Taylor Whittaker and George Robinson:

“In 1674 a method depending on a new principle, the principle of iteration, was communicated in a letter from Gregory to Collins.” We went to the source to expand on the citation, but gave up after being bogged down in a Grimpen Mire of equations.

A computer sense developed in the mid-20th century.

In programing, according to M-W Unabridged, “iteration” refers to “the repetition of a sequence of computer instructions a specified number of times or until a condition is met” or to “one execution of a sequence of operations or instructions in an iteration.”

The earliest computer example in the OED  is from Numerical Methods for High Speed Computers, 1960, by Godfrey Newby Lance:

“Whichever criterion is used to determine the end of the iteration, it is clear that the orders to evaluate f(xr) and f(xr + 1) are identical except that xr + 1 is used instead of xr. This kind of modification is made extremely simple on high-speed computers.”

The citations in M-W Unabridged suggest that this technical computer usage may have led to the looser use of “iteration” for a version of something, first in reference to versions of software, and then more broadly.

A citation from the March 10, 1998, issue of PC Magazine, for example, uses “iteration” for a version of an operating system: “Current iterations of Windows 95 and Windows NT are far from perfect, but they’re easier to use and more stable.”

The word is used similarly in this citation from the winter 2000 technology issue of Fortune: “No one cares much about the latest iteration of a spreadsheet program or word processor.”

Finally, the term breaks free of computers in this M-W example:

“The scene, and hundreds of others from the first five seasons of ‘The Sopranos’ (as well as its current, sixth iteration), are in the process of being edited ever so slightly by the A&E Network” (from the May 9, 2006, issue of the New York Times).

We’ll end with a recent Washington sighting that we found online:

“Civil and Human Rights Coalition Denounces Latest Iteration of Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban” (from a Sept. 24, 2017, news release by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights).

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I came, I seen, I conquered

Q: Greetings from the OC, where “I seen” is a fairly common regionalism among people of all ages, socioeconomic levels, and walks of life. As in, “I seen him in concert.” I even heard it in a radio commercial. Has “I seen” gone mainstream?

A: The use of “seen” for “saw” isn’t just an Orange County, CA, regionalism. This dialectal usage is heard in much of the US, as well as in England, Scotland, and Ireland, though it’s not at all mainstream.

The Dictionary of American Regional English describes the usage as “widespread” in the US, tersely adding that it appears “esp freq among rural speakers and those with little formal educ.”

We’ll add that some formally educated speakers—rural, urban, and suburban—may be slurring the expression “I’ve seen” so that it sounds like “I seen.”

DARE has examples from across the country or, in the words of Woody Guthrie, “From California to the New York Island, From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters.”

Similarly, the English Dialect Dictionary has many regional examples from England, as well as a few from Scotland and Ireland.

In fact, the use of “seen” as the past tense of “see” is often found in the news media. We saw several thousand examples in a search of the News on the Web corpus, a large database of reports from online newspapers, broadcasters, and magazines.

However, most mainstream examples were quoting people in the news, as in this recent one from the Oct. 16, 2017, issue of the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “After I seen what I seen, you know I called the police.”

And here’s an example from an Oct. 9, 2017, broadcast on the local CBS TV station in New York City: “I seen where it was going, and my friends too.”

The earliest American example in DARE is from an 1818 letter by Henry Cogswell Knight, an Episcopal clergyman in Massachusetts, about his travels in the South and West:

“Some words are used, even by genteel people, from their imperfect educations, in a new sense; and others, by the lower classes in society, pronounced very uncouthly, as … I seen.” (Knight was writing about local speech in Kentucky.)

And here’s a citation from Widow Rugby’s Husband and Other Tales of Alabama, an 1851 collection of short stories by the American humorist Johnson Jones Hooper: “That’s the last time I seen my face.”

The most recent DARE example is from a 1997 report on “coal speak” in eastern Pennsylvania: “Seen: Commonly used instead of ‘saw.’ ‘Don’t tell me yiz wasn’t dere, I seen yiz wit my own eyes!’ ”

The earliest EDD example from the British Isles cites Tom Brown at Oxford, an 1861 novel by Thomas Hughes: “I seen em.” (The novel appeared serially two years earlier in Macmillan Magazine.)

Here’s a Scottish citation from the April 3, 1899, issue of the Glasgow Herald: “Dod aye, I seen him hanged.” And this Irish example is from Mrs. Martin’s Company and Other Stories (1896), by the Irish writer Jane Barlow: “She that seen it took.”

In addition to “seen,” DARE has examples for “see” and “seed” used in place of “saw” as the past tense of “see”:

“I see him yesterday, or I see him last week, for I saw him” (from the May 16, 1781, issue of the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, Philadelphia).

“List of Improprieties … Seed for Saw” (from The Columbian Grammar, 1795, by Benjamin Dearborn).

EDD includes many other regional British dialectal past tenses for “see,” including “saigh,” “seed,” “seigh,” “zeed,” and “zid.”

We’ll end with a “zid” example from Desperate Remedies, an 1871 novel by Thomas Hardy: “When I zid ’em die off so.” (The novel, published anonymously, was Hardy’s first to appear in print. A rejected earlier novel was never published.)

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Mother, can I?

Q: God only knows how many times my parents corrected me for using “can” instead of “may” to ask permission. I probably corrected my own children just as often, but I finally gave up. I assume this is a lost cause.

A: Yes, it’s a lost cause, as you learned from struggling with your children, and it was probably a lost cause when your parents were struggling with you.

The old rule is that “can” means “able to” and “may” means “permitted to.” For example, “Jesse can run fast” and “May I go for a jog, Mom?”

However, dictionaries now accept the use of both “can” and “may” as auxiliary verbs for asking permission, though some suggest that “can” here is informal.

As Merriam-Webster Unabridged explains, “The use of can to ask or grant permission has been common since the 19th century and is well established, although some commentators feel may is more appropriate in formal contexts.”

The M-W lexicographers suggest that the permission sense of “can” evolved from the use of both auxiliaries to express possibility, “because the possibility of one’s doing something may depend on another’s acquiescence.”

Although the use of “can” to indicate permission became more popular in the 19th century, the usage actually showed up hundreds of years earlier, initially as to grant permission.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye, William Caxton’s 1489 translation from the French of a work by Christine de Pisan:

“Þe lawe saithe suche a man can not make noo testament nor mary himself nor entre in to religyon.” (The term “can not” here means “is not permitted to.”)

The first OED citation in which “can” is used to ask for permission, rather than to grant it, is from a 1677 French-English dictionary by the Swiss-born English writer Guy Miege:

“Y a-t-il moien que je lui parle? Can I speak with him?” (Literally, Y a-t-il moyen que je lui parle? means “Is there any way I can talk to him?”)

Although “may” has been used in the sense of granting permission since Anglo-Saxon times, it wasn’t used to ask for permission until the 17th century, according to citations in the OED.

At first it was used indirectly in parenthetical expressions, as in this example from Conjectura Cabbalistica, an essay by the English philosopher Henry More on cabbalistic views of Moses:

“Justice did but, if I may so speak, play and sport together in the businesse.”

As it turns out, the earliest Oxford citation for “may” used in the direct sense you’re asking about showed up two centuries after the dictionary’s first citation for “can” used that way:

“May we take your coach to town? I saw it in the hangar” (from The History of Henry Esmond, an 1852 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray).

Thus both etymology and common usage support using “can” to ask for permission.

So where did the old rule come from? Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says Samuel Johnson was one of the first language authorities to draw “a strict line of demarcation” between “can” and “may.”

The “can” entry in Johnson’s 1755 dictionary says: “It is distinguished from may, as power from permission; I can do it, it is within my power; I may do it, it is allowed to me: but in poetry they are confounded.”

The M-W usage guide says Johnson’s “definition of can shows that he was ignorant of the origin of the word” and didn’t know its earliest senses, “although such uses may have been the ‘confounded’ ones he found in poetry.”

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

She’ll be on Talk of Iowa today from 10 to 11 AM Central time (11 to 12 Eastern) to discuss the English language and take questions from callers.   Today’s topic: the latest changes in the English language.

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On teens and teenagers

Q: In his 1910 novel Daisy’s Aunt, E. F. Benson writes that Daisy’s parents died “when she was quite young, and not yet halfway through the momentous teens.” I’m shocked that people were using “teens” so long ago.

A: Prepare yourself for another shock. People have been using “teens” for the teenage years since the mid-1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

And here’s one more shocker. The OED has a British citation from the early 1800s for “teens” used to mean teenagers—more than a century before the word “teenager” showed up in American English.

The OED defines the “teens” as the “years of the life of any person (rarely, of the age of anything) of which the numbers end in -teen, i.e. from thirteen to nineteen; chiefly in phrases in, out of one’s teens.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from The Cheats, a 1664 comedy by the English playwright John Wilson: “How often have I told you, she was in her Teenes?”

The first Oxford citation for “teen” used to mean an adolescent is from the title of an 1818 guidebook by Isaac Taylor, an English clergyman: “Advice to the Teens; or, Practical Helps to the Formation of Character.”

Despite this early and apparently rare British example, the dictionary says the use of “teen” for a “young person in the teens” is “now chiefly N. Amer. and apprehended as short for teenager.”

The earliest American citation is from the July 30, 1951, issue of the Deseret News (Salt Lake City): “Doing something fun like redecorating your room … is really interesting biz for a teen who loves being busy.

The noun “teenager” showed up (with a hyphen) in the early 1940s, according to OED citations. The first example is from the April 1941 issue of Popular Science Monthly: “I never knew teen-agers could be so serious.”

The adjective “teenage” showed up two decades earlier. The first Oxford citation is from the March 11, 1921, issue of the Daily Colonist (Victoria, BC):

“All ‘teen age’ girls of the city are cordially invited to attend the mass meeting to be held this evening.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the adjective “teenaged” is from a 1953 entry in The American Thesaurus of Slang (1954), by L. V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark: “The teenaged set … a teenaged person.”

We’ll end with an expanded OED citation for “teenager” from a section on American advertising in The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947), a poem by W. H. Auden:

Definitely different. Has that democratic
Extra elegance. Easy to clean.
Will gladden grand-dad and your girl friend.
Lasts a lifetime. Leaves no odor.
American made. A modern product
Of nerve and know-how with a new thrill.
Patriotic to own. Is on its way
In a patent package. Pays to investigate.
Serves through science. Has something added
By skilled Scotchmen. Exclusively used
By upper classmen and Uncle Sam.
Tops in tests by teenagers.
Just ask for it always.

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How unique is ‘unique’?

Q: When I was in knee pants, I was taught that something “unique” is “one of a kind.” But when I wasn’t looking, the uniqueness of “unique” was apparently lost. Do I have to accept that it’s now merely “unusual”?

A: We were also taught that “unique” means “one of a kind,” and that’s the way we use it. You can use it that way too.

But while you weren’t looking, the lexicographers who put together dictionaries acknowledged what most English speakers already believed: “unique” can mean “unusual” as well as “one of a kind.”

Nevertheless, many usage authorities still insist on the traditional view, so feel free to use “unique” the way you were taught. But don’t criticize the people who use the term loosely. They have the dictionaries on their side.

English speakers borrowed “unique” in the early 1600s from the French, who got it from the Romans.

In Latin, unicus means “one and only,” and that’s how “unique” was used in English for more than two centuries.

At first, “unique” was mainly used by scholars and others aware of its Latin roots. For them, “unique” was an absolute term (like “infinite” or “eternal”), so there were no degrees of uniqueness. Nothing could be very or almost or sort of “unique.”

But as the word became more popular in the 1800s, it began losing its uniqueness in everyday usage.

As we say in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, writers who didn’t know or care about the word’s history began using it for the merely “unusual” or “remarkable” or “uncommon.”

The watered-down “unique” was often propped up with intensifiers—modifiers like “thoroughly,” “absolutely,” and “totally.” Before long, we had all kinds of uniqueness, from “rather” to “somewhat” to “very” to “most.”

For more than a century, usage guides have complained about the weakening of “unique” and berated “the illiterate” (Henry Fowler’s term) for emasculating it.

The latest version of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a fourth edition by Jeremy Butterfield, notes that there’s still a “certain amount of hostility” toward the looser usage, and advises readers “to use it with caution.”

However, millions of people have ignored the usage gurus, and dictionaries have joined them. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged, for example, says:

“Many commentators have objected to the comparison or modification (as by somewhat or very) of unique, asserting that a thing is either unique or not unique. The objections are based chiefly on the assumption that unique has but a single absolute sense—an assumption contradicted by information readily available in a dictionary.”

The Unabridged lists many modern example of “unique” used to mean “unusual, notable,” including a 1956 comment by Arthur Miller at a news conference in London with his wife, Marilyn Monroe. Here’s an expanded version:

When Miller was asked how he saw Monroe, he responded: “Through two eyes. She’s the most unique person I ever met.”

In Origins of the Specious, published eight years ago, we acknowledged that “the horse is out of the barn here,” but we hoped that “it would come back home.”

That was wishful thinking. It’s clear today that “unique” means “unusual” as well as “one of a kind.” Thus does language change.

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The noisome origins of ‘noisy’

Q: “Noisome” and “noisy” look alike, despite their different meanings. Are they linguistically related?

A: No, “noisome” (smelly or disgusting) and “noisy” (making a lot of noise) aren’t etymologically related, though “noisy” very likely had smelly origins.

“Noisome,” which showed up in the 14th century, was derived from the combination of “noy,” an archaic form of “annoy,” with the suffix “-some”.

“Noisy,” which also appeared in the 1300s, is derived from “noise,” a word that English borrowed from Anglo-Norman in the 12th century.

Although “noisy” isn’t etymologically related to “noisome,” the noun “noise” probably had noisome origins in classical times, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the classical source of “noise” is likely nausea, Latin for sea sickness. That literal sense apparently evolved in the Romance languages to “upset, malaise,” then “disturbance, uproar” and finally “noise, din.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “noisome” is from the Wycliffe Bible of 1382: “foolys þoo thyngis þat ben noȝesum to þem shul coueiten” (“fools shall covet those things that be noisome to them”).

The first OED example for “noisy” is from The Country-Wife, a 1675 comedy by the English playwright William Wycherley: “Your noisy pert Rogue of a wit, the greatest Fop, dullest Ass, and worst Company as you shall see.”

Finally, the dictionary’s earliest citation for “noise” is from Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous guide for monastic women that probably dates from sometime before 1200:

“Þe prude beoð his bemeres; draheð wind inward worltlich hereword, and eft wið idel ȝelp puffeð hit utward as þe bemeres doð, makieð noise” (“The proud are his trumpeters; they draw in the wind of worldly praise, and then, with vain boasting, puff it out again, as the trumpeter doth, to maketh noise”). We’ve expanded the OED citation to add context.

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Biggity: too big for one’s britches

Q: An example in your piece about “ungrateful” and “uppity” uses “bigity,” as in “too big for one’s britches.” Did it originate among African Americans? I’ve heard it only from black folks in in the South.

A: The word “biggity” may indeed have originated in the 19th century among African Americans in the South, though a somewhat similar dialectal term, “bigotty,” showed up a bit earlier in England.

The Dictionary of American Regional English defines “biggity” (also spelled “bigity,” “biggaty,'” “biggedy,” etc.) as “exhibiting a sense of superiority or self-importance; arrogant, insolent, uppity.”

The earliest DARE example for “biggity” is from Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1881), by Joel Chandler Harris: “Dey er mighty biggity, dem house niggers is, but I notices dat dey don’t let nuthin’ pass.”

Many African Americans have criticized the portrayal of Uncle Remus, the narrator, as demeaning, patronizing, or racist. But others have said the characterization, with its Gullah dialect, is accurate.

In the foreword of a 1987 retelling of the Brer Rabbit stories, for example, the black folklorist Julius Lester writes:

“There are no inaccuracies in Harris’s characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer’s Project of the 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold.”

DARE has citations for “biggity” used by whites as well as blacks, in the American South and Midwest, from the late 19th to the early 21st century.

The states include Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and a Northeast outlier, New Jersey.

The latest example is a 2015 Louisiana entry from the dictionary’s Internet files: “I thought that everyone in a highschool band would be biggity and cocky towards freshman. It wasn’t the case though.”

DARE notes that the English Dialect Dictionary has an entry for “bigotty,” meaning “bumptious, overbearing, self-willed,” and suggests that both “biggity” and “bigotty” may have been derived from the noun “bigot.”

In support of this notion, DARE editors point readers to a 1902 citation from Dialect Notes, a journal of the American Dialect Society: “Bigoted or bigoty … Conceited; proud; haughty.”

The earliest citation for “bigotty” in the English Dialect Dictionary is from an 1873 issue of the journal Notes and Queries: “Maayn beg·utee luyk, id-n ur [very bumptious (like), is he not?].” The EDD adds: “Nothing suggestive of religious intolerance is implied.”

The idea that “biggity” originated among African Americans is supported by an example we’ve found in “Negro English,” an article by the American linguist James A. Harrison in the January 1884 issue of Anglia, a German quarterly devoted to English linguistics.

The article, written in English, has a glossary entitled “Specimen Negroisms” that includes this example: “To talk biggity = to talk big, to order.”

Harrison’s work “is believed to be the first linguistic study of ‘Negro English,’ ” according to the Oxford Handbook of African American Language. However, modern scholars have challenged some of Harrison’s ideas, such as his view that “Negro English” would eventually fade away.

In Figures in Black (1987), for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes Harrison’s prediction that African American Vernacular English (the term linguists now use), would become, as Gates says, “a mere relic of the slave past.”

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Is it all relative … or academic?

Q: What is the difference between “it’s all relative” and “it’s all academic”? It seem to me that there’s something hypothetical about both of them.

A: The two usages, which showed up in the early 1800s, have a sense of uncertainty about them. “Relative” here means indefinite or indeterminate, while “academic” means impractical, theoretical, or inconsequential.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to be relative” as “to be evaluated differently depending on a person’s perspective; to be incapable of definitive or absolute evaluation. Frequently in it’s all relative.”

In other words, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, a usage that showed up in the early 1600s.

The earliest example for “it’s all relative” in the OED is from an 1804 case report by Christopher Robinson, a judge on the High Court of Admiralty:

“It may be difficult to lay down the precise bounds, where ordinary commerce ends, and extraordinary speculation begins. It is all relative.”

The dictionary defines “academic” in the sense you’re asking about as “not leading to a decision; unpractical; strictly theoretical or formal. Now also in weakened sense: of no consequence, irrelevant.”

The dictionary’s first example is from an 1812 issue of the Monthly Review, a British literary journal:

“His erudition must be worked into the edifice, not exhibited in lumpish disconnection. He must preserve the epic form, without sliding into academic discussion.”

The OED doesn’t have a citation for “it’s all academic.” But examples aren’t hard to find.

The earliest example we’ve found is from the February 1892 issue of Books, a publication of the Denver (CO) Public Library: “It is all academic to the last degree. It is perhaps the airiest of suspicions.”

In a recent example, Richard Posner, who had just retired as a federal judge in Chicago, said in a Sept. 14, 2017, interview that he was ordinarily polite in court but found it irritating when lawyers were unprepared or talkative or went off the point:

“So I do get annoyed; I’m criticized for that. I should control myself, but of course now, it’s all academic. I’m not a judge. Too late to correct me.”

As for the etymology, “academic” is ultimately derived from the classical Latin acadēmicus, describing the ancient Academy of Athens or its philosophy, while “relative” ultimately comes from the classical Latin relātus, past participle of referre (to refer).

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A political groundswell

Q: In The Heir of Redclyffe, an 1853 novel, Charlotte M. Yonge describes a “ground-swell” (she hyphenates it) as “a continuous low moan, or roar, far, far away.” How did it become a political term?

A: When the word showed up in the early 19th century, it referred to a “deep swell or heavy rolling of the sea, the result of a distant storm or seismic disturbance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the term was also used figuratively “with reference to mental or political agitation,” the dictionary says, though it doesn’t have any political examples.

In fact, the earliest citation in the OED is a figurative usage from Zapolya: A Christmas Tale (1817), a verse play by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “It is the ground-swell of a teeming instinct.”

The dictionary’s first literal example is from The Heart of Midlothian (1818), the seventh of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels: “The agitation of the waters, called by sailors the ground-swell.”

Interestingly, this literal example was used to describe the agitated state of a crowd. (The novel was originally published as Tales of My Landlord, under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham.)

By the way, the OED uses a hyphen for “groundswell,” but the dictionary’s entry hasn’t been fully updated. Standard dictionaries now list the term as one word.

Although Oxford doesn’t have any citations for “groundswell” used politically, perhaps the most common sense today, we’ve found several from the 19th century.

For example, a July 12, 1872, headline in the New York Herald sums up reaction to the nomination of Horace Greeley as the Democratic candidate for president as “The Groundswell After the Political Storm at Baltimore.”

And the Aug. 25, 1898, issue of the Minneapolis Journal has this headline on page one: “A GROUNDSWELL / What Senator Davis Predicts for the Republican Party. / Full Control of the Senate and House Is Anticipated.”

Finally, a June 17, 1902, editorial in the Morning Herald (Lexington, KY) comments on “a ground-swell of dissatisfaction against the system” for managing the state’s charitable institutions.

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Uppity language

Q: What’s up with “up”? Why is it used in so many phrases where it’s not necessary or doesn’t appear to add any information? Examples: “rise up” … “shut up” … “set up” … “clean up” … “give up” … and so on.

A: This is an interesting topic, and a much bigger one than you might think. In fact, you’ve opened (or “opened up”) a Pandora’s box here.

Let us say right away that we don’t agree that “up” is redundant when used in phrasal verbs like “shut up,” “clean up,” “give up,” and many others.

On the contrary, it often enhances verbs, not merely by adding emphasis but by contributing specific kinds of information. Telling someone to “shut” a door, for example, isn’t the same telling someone him to “shut up.”

As you probably know, “up” is an adverb as well as a preposition.

In phrasal verbs it’s an adverb, and it can have any number of functions.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it can mean “so as to raise a thing from the place in which it is lying, placed, or fixed.” This sense of “up” is illustrated in such familiar phrasal verbs as “take up,” “pick up,” “raise up,” and “lift up.”

Or it can add the sense of “from below the level of the earth, water, etc., to the surface,” as Oxford says. We see this sense of “up” in phrases like “dig up,” “grub up,” and “turn up” (as in turning earth with a spade).

“Up” can add the notion of “upon one’s feet from a recumbent or reclining posture; spec. out of bed,” the OED notes, or “so as to rise from a sitting, stooping, or kneeling posture and assume an erect attitude.”

This gives us such familiar phrases as “get up,” “sit up,” “rise up,” “stand up,” “help up,” and “leap up,” as well as the old expression “knock up,” meaning to wake someone by rapping on the door.

Figurative uses of the adverb are many and varied. For example, the OED says, “up” can mean “so as to sever or separate, esp. into many parts, fragments, or pieces.” We see this sense in “break up,” “cut up,” “chop up,” “tear up,” and so on.

And, Oxford says, “up” can imply “to or towards a state of completion or finality,” a sense that frequently serves “merely to emphasize the import of the verb.”

Consequently we have phrases like “eat up,” “sold up,” “done up,” and “swallow up.” (Certainly we could say simply that the whale swallowed Jonah, but how much more evocative to say it swallowed him up!)

In the sense of “denoting progress to or towards an end,” the OED says, we have phrase like “buy up,” “finish up,” “dry up,” “heal up,” “clear up,” “beat up,” “pay up,” “firm up,” and others.

Frequently, the OED says, “up” is used with verbs that have to do with “cleaning, putting in order, or fixing in place.”

Thus we have “clean up,” “polish up,” “brush up,” “do up,” “fix up,” “dress up,” “fit up,” “make up,” “rig up,” “trip up,” and a verb we’ve written about on our blog, “redd up.”

When used with some verbs, “up” can mean “by way of summation or enumeration,” the OED says. We see this in phrases like “add up,” “count up,” “reckon up,” “total up,” “sum up,” and “weigh up.”

In addition, “up” can mean “into a close or compact form or condition; so as to be confined or secured.” This usage is found in “truss up,” “bind up,” “bundle up,” “fold up,” “tie up,” “gird up,” “huddle up,” and “draw up.”

Yet another sense, “into a closed or enclosed state; so as to be shut or restrained,” is evident in phrase like “close up,” “shut up,” “dam up,” “pen up,” “pent up,” “nail up,” “seal up,” and so on.

“Up” can also mean “so as to bring together,” as the OED notes. We see this in “knit up,” “gather up,” “stitch up,” and others. And it can imply “toward,” as in “come up,” “bring up,” and “ride up.”

It can also mean something like “to completion,” as “fill up,” “top up,” “cloud up,” and other phrases.

In a post earlier this year, we wrote that there are many idiomatic phrases in which an uppity stickler might say the adverb is unnecessary: “face up,” “meet up,” “divide up,” “hurry up,” and others.

But as we said then, “There’s a fine line between an emphatic use and a redundancy.” And sometimes an apparent redundancy adds just the right emphasis.

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The ploy’s the thing

Q: When troops are deployed, does that mean that they were previously ployed?

A: In technical military writing, the verbs “deploy” and “ploy” have sometimes been used in contrasting ways.

“Deploy” has meant “to spread out (troops) so as to form a more extended line of small depth” while “ploy” has meant “to move (troops) from line into column,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, only two of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult, Collins and Dictionary.com, have entries for the verb “ploy,” and both describe it as an archaic military term.

(The OED is an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence; standard dictionaries focus on language as it’s used now.)

The US Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (November 2021), doesn’t have entries for “ploy” or “ployment,” and it defines “deployment” as the “movement of forces into and out of an operational area.

Here’s the earliest OED citation for the old military sense of the verb ploy:

“In the march by echellons, the battalions may be ployed into columns with deploying intervals, as in a full line” (Army and Navy Chronicle, March 17, 1836).

And this is the first Oxford citation for “deploy” used in its old military sense:

“His columns … are with ease and order soon deploy’d” (“Progress of War,” a poem in The European Magazine, 1786, by an officer identified as “Lieutenant Christian”).

The two old military terms were undoubtedly influenced by the earlier French use of ployer and déployer in the same sense in a treatise on military tactics, Essai Général de Tactique (1772), by Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert.

When “deploy” entered English in the 15th century, it briefly meant the same thing as the earlier word “display”—to unfold or spread out. In fact, “deploy” was merely a different way of spelling “display.”

So if either “deploy” or “display” had an etymological opposite based on the same Latin roots, it would be “ply” (to fold or layer).

Both words come ultimately from the Latin displicare, which is composed of the negative prefix dis– (un-) and plicare (fold).

This is also the ancestor of “ply,” “apply,” “comply,” “complicated,” “employ,” “imply,” “pleat,” and “splay,” according to the OED and John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

So why did we once, very briefly, have these two words for the same thing? You might call it a printer’s idiosyncrasy.

The Latin verb displicare made its way into Old French (as desplier, later desployer), and from Old French it passed into Middle English in the 1300s as desplay (later spelled “display”).

In the late 1400s, the printer William Caxton chose to spell this word in the Parisian fashion: “deploye” and “dysploye.”

But Caxton’s variations, credited with being the first uses of “deploy,” didn’t really establish the word in English. As the OED explains, the actual adoption of “deploy” in a specific sense didn’t take place until the end of the 18th century.

That’s when “deploy” acquired its original military meaning (“to spread out (troops) so as to form a more extended line of small depth”).

So we might think of a line of “deployed” troops at that time as being unfolded or spread out.

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 5, 2023.]

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The elephant in the room

Q: I’m trying to track down the origin of “elephant in the room.” My fading memory recalls something about a play from the first half of the 20th century in which the curtain opens on a living room with a body on the floor. Ring a bell?

A: When we use the expression “elephant in the room” today, the elephant we’re usually talking about is something that’s too obvious to go unnoticed but uncomfortable to mention.

For example, all the relatives attending the wake for filthy-rich Great Aunt Beatrice wonder what’s in her unopened will, but none of them bring it up. It’s the elephant in the room.

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition for this sense of “elephant in the room” and variants thereof:

“A significant problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but ignored or avoided as a subject for discussion, usually because it is more comfortable to do so.”

The OED’s first published reference for this usage is the title of a 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics, by Marion H. Typpo and Jill M. Hastings.

Here’s a more illustrative citation, from a 2004 issue of the New York Times: “When it comes to the rising price of oil, the elephant in the room is the ever-weakening United States dollar.”

In short, the OED’s citations for this use of the phrase go back only about 30 years. And we haven’t found any evidence of a connection to an earlier “body in the room,” in either a theatrical or a real crime scene.

However, there’s an older “elephant in the room” with a different meaning—roughly, something huge yet irrelevant, or perhaps unprovable. Here’s the OED’s definition of this one:

“The type of something obvious and incongruous, esp. (in Logic and Philos.) in discussions of statements which may or may not correspond to observable facts.”

The OED credits the philosopher Harry Todd Costello with the first recorded use of this sense of the phrase.

In an essay published in 1935, Costello wrote: “It is going beyond observation to assert there is not an elephant in the room, for I cannot observe what is not.” (The essay was published that year in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, by Horace Meyer Kallen and Sidney Hook.)

Did the philosophical use of the phrase lead to the more familiar usage that’s common today? Perhaps, but before committing ourselves we did a bit more searching. And we came across yet other kinds of elephants.

For example, here’s a quotation in which the elephant is too big to ignore, but not necessarily off-limits in conversation. It comes from a 1961 issue of the Appraisal Journal, a real-estate industry publication:

“To continue to pretend that the American economy is thriving in an isolated vacuum would be like trying to ignore the presence of an elephant in the living room.”

And in a 1969 essay entitled “Elephants in the Living Room,” David Aspy used the term “elephant experience” to mean one that’s just too much to cope with—like coming home to find a you-know-what standing you-know-where.

We’ve also found the phrase “pink elephant in the room,” an apparent reference to hallucinating or waking up with a hangover.

This example is from a collection of anecdotes called Gridiron Nights (1915), by Arthur Wallace Dunn: “ ‘It reminds me of the fellow who woke up in the night and found a pink elephant in the room.’ ‘How did he get rid of it?’ ‘Oh, it backed slowly out through the keyhole.’ ”

Even before that, Mark Twain wrote a very funny story, “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), about something too big to miss yet impossible to find.

In the story, which caricatures detective fiction, a large white elephant, freshly imported from Siam, disappears while quarantined in Jersey City.

But if the Twain story inspired the phrase “elephant in the room,” why did it take so long?

As you can see, in searching for the roots of the expression that’s popular today, it’s hard to determine which of these elephants might have suggested it.

But we suspect that white elephants and pink elephants are mere red herrings in this case. The clue to the origin of our particular “elephant in the room” probably lies with Harry Costello, the philosopher mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

Elephants are familiar presences in philosophy and logic. For instance, many philosophers have commented on the Indian parable of the blind men who attempt to describe an elephant by touch, each “seeing” and hence defining it differently. The fable is often used to make a point about language, experience, and deniability.

The fable would have been familiar to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. The two had an argument at Cambridge University in 1911 about the certainty of knowing that there is no rhinoceros in the room (in some versions of the story, it was a hippopotamus).

Their argument was much discussed and long influential in philosophical circles. It was probably what Costello had in mind in his 1935 comment on the assertion that “there is not an elephant in the room.”

So can we trace the popular sense of the phrase back to Wittgenstein in the days before World War I? That’s our guess. But, as Wittgenstein would caution, we can’t know it with empirical certainty.

Finally, we should mention that there are earlier “elephant” expressions in other languages, but none of them have the usual metaphorical meaning of “elephant in the room” in English. And we’ve seen no etymological evidence that any of them influenced the English usage.

For example, “The Inquisitive Man” (1814), a seven-paragraph short story by the Russian writer Ivan Krylov, describes a man who looks at the beasts, birds, and bugs in a museum of natural history, and tells a friend, “I saw everything there was to see and examined it carefully.”

When the friend asks if he saw the elephant, the man says: “Elephant? Are you quite sure that they have an elephant?” When told that there was one, he adds “Well, old man, don’t tell anybody—but the fact is that I didn’t notice the elephant!”

Dostoevsky, in his novel Demons (1871-72), refers to Krylov’s elephant with a literal, not metaphorical, expression: “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum, but gave all his attention to French socialist bugs.”

[Note: This post was updated on April 27, 2020.]

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On holy days and holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we still recognize these different senses and spellings.

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

And happy holidays to you!

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Is government the issue?

Q: I’m a reporter in the Midwest. The other day I did a story about local people in the military. I wanted to say the term “GI” is short for “government issue,” but the copy editor insisted it’s an abbreviation of “galvanized iron.” In the end, we took it out. Who’s right?

A: Both of you, depending on how the abbreviation is used. Here’s the story.

In the early 20th century, “GI” was a semiofficial US Army abbreviation for “galvanized iron.”

The term, dating back to 1907, was used in military inventories to describe iron cans, buckets, and so on, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

By 1917, however, “GI” began to take on a wider meaning.

In World War I, it was used to refer to all things Army, so military bricks became GI bricks and military Christmases became GI Christmases. Before long, we had GI soap and GI shoes and, eventually, plain old GIs.

A lot of people apparently felt this new usage needed a new family tree. So in the minds of many, “galvanized iron” became “government issue” or “general issue.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says “GI” can be an abbreviation for all three, depending on how it’s used:

It stands for “galvanized iron” when used in a phrase like “GI can” (an iron trash can or a World War I German artillery shell). It’s short for “government issue” or “general issue” when referring to American soldiers or things associated with them.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) also list all three as as the longer forms of “GI.”

The entry for “GI” in American Heritage sums up the etymology this way: “From abbreviation of galvanized iron (applied to trash cans, etc.), later reinterpreted as government issue.”

[Note: This post was updated on Nov. 11, 2018.]

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We are not bemused

Q: When I was growing up in the Jurassic period, I was taught that “bemused” meant confused. And that’s how I still use it. But everyone else uses it to mean amused. This leaves me bemused. But maybe I’m just a dinosaur who should lighten up and be amused.

A: Most of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult agree with you, but three of them now include amused as well as confused as standard meanings for “bemused.”

Merriam-Webster has three senses: (1) marked by confusion or bewilderment; (2) lost in thought or reverie, and (3) having or showing feelings of wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing.”

Merriam-Webster Unabridged and Dictionary.com, based on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary, have similar definitions. American Heritage includes the amused sense, but labels it a “usage problem.”

We’d like to side with American Heritage, but Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, and Dictionary.com seem to have their fingers on the pulse of the language.

Our sense, like yours, is that “bemused” is rarely used in the traditional way these days, and anyone using it that way is almost certain to be misunderstood.

However, we can’t bring ourselves to use it to mean amused. We’d rather retire “bemused” and fill the gap with other words—“puzzled,” “bewildered,” “confused,” and so on.

But before we abandon the subject, here’s a little history.

For nearly three centuries, “bemused” has meant confused, muddled, or lost in thought, as in this 1735 couplet from Pope: “Is there a Parson, much bemus’d in beer, / A maudlin Poetess, a rhyming Peer?”

An earlier noun, “muse,” has meant a state of thoughtfulness since about 1500. And the verb “muse,” meaning to be absorbed in thought, has been around since 1340.

Both come from the Old French muser (to ponder or gape in wonder) and have nothing to do with the nine Muses of antiquity.

Interestingly, when “amused” first appeared in the 1600s, it meant to be in a muse— that is, absorbed, preoccupied, or distracted (not all that different from “bemused”).

It wasn’t until the next century that “amused” came to mean entertained, thanks again to our friend Pope. By the early 1800s, the two words had gone their separate ways. “Bemused” meant befuddled or lost in thought, while “amused” meant having fun.

And so things remained until the late 20th century, when newspaper and magazine writers, broadcasters, and Internet pundits started using “bemused” to mean amused.

Why? Our guess is that they were bored with “amused” and thought “bemused” would be more amusing.

[This post was updated on Feb. 18, 2022.]

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Can one make a concerted effort?

[Note: This post was updated on June 10, 2020.]

Q: Can a single person make a concerted effort? The dictionaries I’ve checked say a “concerted effort” is something done collectively. But I often hear the phrase being used for an effort by one person.

A: Traditionally, “concerted” has meant done in concert—that is, jointly.

However, the adjective had an earlier meaning of organized, coordinated, or united. And since the 19th century people have used “concerted” without any collective sense to mean purposeful and determined.

The newer usage can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence. The entry for “concerted” (updated September 2015) includes this definition: “Of an effort, attempt, etc.: characterized by purpose and determination.”

Standard dictionaries, too, are now recognizing this more recent sense. So a determined effort can be described as “concerted” whether it’s made by one person or many.

Six of the ten standard American and British dictionaries we usually consult accept this use without reservation.

The definitions in American Heritage, for example, include these senses: #1, “planned or accomplished together,” and #2, “deliberate and determined.” Similarly, Lexico (formerly Oxford Dictionaries Online) includes #1, “jointly arranged or carried out,” and #2, “done with great effort or determination.”

While “concerted” is most often used to modify “effort” or “efforts,” it’s seen with other nouns too. A cursory internet search finds it paired with “movement,” “action,” “approach,” “measure,” “struggle,” and “activity,” as well as plural versions.

The earliest recorded sense of “concerted” dates from the mid-17th century and is defined in the OED as “showing coordination, organized, united.”

In the first citation, the well-organized parts of a sentence are said to have “the insinuating harmony of a well-concerted period.” From Thomas Urquhart’s Εκσκυβαλαυρον, 1652. (The Greek title means “gold from garbage,” but the book is often referred to as The Jewel).

Similar examples of this coordinated sense include “concerted Reasoning” (1659) and “concerted Falshoods” (1716).

By the late 1600s, however, people were also using “concerted” in what are now considered the traditional senses. These are defined by the OED as “united in action or purpose; working or acting in concert,” and “jointly arranged or carried out; agreed upon, prearranged; planned, coordinated.”

This is apparently the first OED example in reference to people working together: “that which opposed the sending the concerted Troops into Tuscany and making further attempts, being the disturbance which rose from the Duke of Parma.” The History of the Republick of Venice (1673), Robert Honywood’s translation from the Italian of Battista Nani.

Later OED examples that imply more than one person or force working together include “the concerted powers” (i.e., sovereigns of Europe, 1793); “a concerted scheme” (1785); “a concerted opposition” (1834); “a concerted front” (1948); “concerted attack” (1968); “concerted practices” (1999), and “a concerted group” (2009).

Finally, the more recent sense of “concerted”—determined, purposeful, strenuous—emerged in the 19th century. It can involve one person or more than one. In the dictionary’s first example, many people are involved:

“We have but to make a vigorous and concerted effort throughout the State to effect a complete overthrow of Locofocoism in Alabama.” (The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party of the 1830s and ’40s.) From the Mobile Daily Advertiser, July 23, 1844.

In this OED example, from the late 19th century, a single country is involved:

“He says that Germany should make a concerted effort to have an exhibit that would photograph the magnitude of its manufacturing industries.” From the Anglo-American Times, London, Oct. 9, 1891.

And in this example, the effort is made by a single person:

“When Horace Abbott … was chairman of this committee he made a concerted effort to get some graduate schools to work out a plan for study in absentia.” From the Extension Service Review, Washington, June 1938.

As for its etymology, the OED says the adjective “concerted” was formed within English, derived partly from the verb “concert” (to work jointly; to mutually agree or arrange) and partly from the noun “concert” (agreement or harmony; a working together; a public performance).

The verb “concert” (accented, like the adjective, on the first syllable) was first recorded in 1581 and came into English through several routes. As the dictionary explains, it was borrowed partly from Spanish (concertar), partly from French (concerter), and partly from the ultimate source of them all, Latin (concertare).

The noun “concert” was first recorded in 1578, the OED says, borrowed partly from French (concert, originally an agreement, accord, or pact), and partly from Italian (concerto, a group of musicians performing together).

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What’s the skinny?

Q: Are you aware of any references to “the skinny” prior to 1967? I was in the US Air Force then and provided an information sheet to briefers on data like runway length, aircraft, equipment, etc. The four-inch-wide sheet was known as “the skinny sheet,” and one of the briefers referred to its information as “the skinny.”

A: The earliest example we’ve found for “the skinny” used in this sense is from the 1932 Lucky Bag, the yearbook of the US Naval Academy:

“If you don’t get the skinny of things, Eddie can usually set you right” (from the entry for Harold Edward Baker, a cadet from Yakima, WA).

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Rolling World, a 1938 autobiography by the adventurer and writer Richard Matthews Hallet:

“Had she really given me the skinny of an actual legend from the archives of her race, or was she wafting me the native poetry of her soul?”

The OED defines the expression this way: “slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.). With the. Detailed and esp. confidential information about a person or topic, ‘the low-down’; (also more generally) news, gossip.”

The dictionary has one other pre-1967 citation for the usage, from The Big War, a 1957 novel by Anton Myrer: “I’ll cut you in on some hot skinnay.”

There’s no reliable explanation for the origin of this sense of “skinny,” as we wrote in a brief blog item on the subject in 2006.

But it’s been speculated that “to get down to the skinny” (that is, to get the essential information about something), was like getting down to the skin of an issue.

For what it’s worth, the Old Icelandic word skinna (a cousin of our “skin”) referred to a piece of parchment or vellum, perhaps influencing a couple of English usages related to information.

The old word may have given us “skin book,” a term that entered English in the 19th century with the meaning of a manuscript made of parchment or vellum.

And though it’s quite a stretch, an imaginative wordie might also see flakes of skinna in the 20th-century slang sense of “skin book” as a pornographic work.

The word “skinny,” by the way, didn’t refer to a scrawny person or animal when it entered English as an adjective around 1400.

The earliest citations in the OED use “skinny” to mean covered with skin, affecting the skin, looking like skin, and perhaps even having beautiful skin.

The colloquial sense of “skinny” as thin or lean didn’t show up until the early 1600s when Shakespeare used it in Macbeth: “Each at once her choppie finger laying Vpon her skinnie Lips.”

[Note: This post was updated on June 9, 2021.]

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Scot, Scotch, or Scottish?

Q: In your remarks about the verdict “not proven” in Scotland, you refer to “Scottish law.” I hate to contradict you, but the proper expression is “Scots Law.” And as an aside, I wonder if you realize that in Scotland’s courts, the word “proven” has a long-O sound, as in “woven.” My father was a judge in Scotland, and I had to listen to the long O since I was … oh, 36 months old! Even today, after 40 years in Canada, I still can’t get used to the PROO-ven pronunciation.

A: Thanks for your interesting comment. We could plead “not proven,” and argue that we were simply referring in a general way to the laws in Scotland. But why quibble? We’ve updated the blog item to add a reference to Scots Law.

This also gives us a chance to write about the three adjectives “Scot,” “Scotch,” and “Scottish.”

In Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, the adjective was Scyttisc or Scottisc. In Middle English, about 1100 to 1500, it was written all sorts of ways (Scottysc, Scottisc, Scottissh, etc.), often depending on where you lived.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, for example, it was pronounced like “Scottish” (with various spellings) in the south of England, and “Scottis” in the north as well as in Scotland.

Writers in England began contracting “Scottish” to “Scotch” in the late 16th century, while writers in Scotland began shortening “Scottis” to “Scots” in the early 18th century.

But language is a messy business, and some Scottish writers, notably Robert Burns (1759-96) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), regularly used “Scotch” as an adjective.

By the late 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, there was “uncertainty among the educated classes in Scotland concerning the relative ‘correctness’ of the three competing terms”—“Scots,” “Scottish,” and “Scotch.”

And by the mid-19th century, there was “a growing tendency among educated speakers to favour the more formal Scottish or (less frequently) the more traditional Scots over what was perceived as the more vulgar Scotch,” the OED says.

In England, “Scotch” was the “the prevailing form” from the late 17th century until the 19th century, according the OED, though “Scottish” was used in more formal writing.

“By the beginning of the 20th cent.,” Oxford notes, “disapproval of Scotch by educated Scots was so great that its use had become something of a shibboleth (much to the bafflement of speakers outside Scotland for whom this was the usual word).”

And “during the 20th cent. educated usage in England gradually began to adapt in deference to the perceived Scottish preferences.”

Nevertheless, the adjective “Scotch” survives in a few phrases like “Scotch whisky,” “Scotch broth,” and “Scotch barley.” Although “Scotch pine” has survived in the US, the tree is “Scots pine” in the UK, where it’s the national tree of Scotland.

So which adjective should a writer use today? A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) suggests that “forms involving Scotch are best avoided in reference to people; designations formed with Scots are most common (Scot, Scotsman, or Scotswoman), but those involving the full form Scottish are sometimes found in more formal contexts.”

The dictionary notes that “Scotch-Irish is the most commonly used term for the descendants of Scots who migrated to North America, but lately Scots-Irish has begun to gain currency among those who know that Scotch is considered offensive in Scotland.”

“There is, however, no sure rule for referring to things,” the AH usage note concludes, “since the history of variation in the use of these words has left many expressions in which the choice is fixed, such as Scotch broth, Scotch whisky, Scottish rite, and Scots Guards.”

So if in doubt, look it up in the dictionary!

[Note: This post was updated on Jan. 3, 2021, and May 19, 2022.]

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Collective bargaining

Q: Please tell me which verb is correct in this sentence: “Ninety percent of the team is/are men.” The plural “are” sounds correct, but “team” is singular.

A: Our choice is “Ninety percent of the team are men.” Here’s why.

“Percent” is used with both singular and plural verbs. It usually takes a plural verb when followed by “of” plus a plural noun, and takes a singular verb when followed by “of” plus a singular noun.

Example: “Sixty percent of the cookies were eaten, but only twenty percent of the milk was drunk.”

With your sentence, the question is whether the noun “team” should be treated as singular or plural. This isn’t a black-and-white question!

“Team” is a collective noun: a singular noun that stands for a number of people or things that form a group.

A collective noun takes either a singular or a plural verb, depending on whether you’re talking about the group as a unit (singular) or the individuals (plural).

In this case, the tip-off that we’re talking about individuals is the word “men,” a plural noun.

So we’re talking here about the players who make up the team, not the group as a single unit. This calls for a plural verb: “Ninety percent of the team are men.”

A similar case can be made for the noun “band.” Like “team,” it’s a singular collective noun. But we would say, “Fifty percent of the band are vocalists.”

The singular verb “is” would be dissonant here because the plural “vocalists” indicates that we’re talking about the members of the band, not the group as a whole.

On the other hand, if we’re talking about the group as a single unit, we use a singular verb: “The team [or band] is playing in Pittsburgh.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has a good explanation of all this. It says in part that collective nouns “have had the characteristics of being used with both singular and plural verbs since Middle English.”

Most of the time, nouns and their verbs agree in number: singular nouns with singular verbs, and plurals with plurals. This is what grammarians mean when they talk about “agreement.” But with collective nouns, what’s at work is “notional agreement.”

As Merriam-Webster’s says, the principle of notional agreement “is simple: when the group is considered as a unit, the singular verb is used; when it is thought of as a collection of individuals, the plural verb is used.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written blog items on other collective words, including “couple,” “majority,” and “none.”

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Black (or African) American?

Q: I was reading an article in the New York Times that used “Black American” and “African American” interchangeably. Is there a proper time for using one term or the other?

A: In general the terms “Black American” and “African American” are synonymous.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, defines “African American” as a “Black American of African ancestry.”

The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) have similar definitions.

Definitions aside, debates about the nomenclature of race are nothing new. How accurate, or appropriate, is the term “African American”? How meaningfully connected to Africa are most Black Americans anyway?

The linguist John McWhorter, for instance, has argued in The New Republic that the “African” part should be dropped. He is, he says, a Black American.

But you don’t have to look hard to find other opinions. Keith Boykin of The Daily Voice, a Black news organization, has this to say:

“I don’t care if you call yourself Negro, colored, African American or black (in lower case or upper case). … The true diversity of our people cannot be fully represented by any one term.”

We recently came across an interesting and fairly exhaustive analysis of this subject by Tom W. Smith, whose article “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African American’ ” ran in The Public Opinion Quarterly in 1992.

Smith (who, by the way, capitalizes all racial terms throughout his article) sets out to discuss “changes in the acceptance of various labels, not the creation of new terms.”

He notes that “colored,” “Negro,” “Black,” and “African” were all “established English terms for Blacks when America was first settled. ‘African American’ was in use at least as early as the late 1700s.”

The dominant label in the mid- to late-19th century, he writes, was “colored,” which was accepted by both Whites and Blacks. But “colored” was too inclusive, because it covered “not only Blacks but Asians and other non-White races.”

Consequently “Negro” began to replace “colored” as the favored term in the late 19th century, in a movement that Smith says was “led by such influential Black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.”

By the 1930s, he says, “Negro” had supplanted “colored,” which had begun to seem antiquated.

“But as the civil rights movement began making tangible progress in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” Smith writes, “the term ‘Negro’ itself eventually fell under attack.”

Thus “Black,” like “Negro” before it, according to Smith, was seen as “forward-looking” and “progressive,” besides appearing to promote “racial pride, militancy, power, and rejection of the status quo.”

So “Black” became ascendant in the 1970s, though it briefly competed with “Afro-American,” which was popular among academics.

But for the most part, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, “the position of ‘Black’ was virtually unchallenged,” Smith writes.

This all changed in December 1988, when the National Urban Coalition proposed that “African American” replace “Black” as the preferred term.

The goal “was to give Blacks a cultural identification with their heritage and ancestral homeland,” Smith writes.

“Furthermore,” he says, “it was seen as putting Blacks on a parallel with White ethnic groups.” By using a term based on culture and homeland, Blacks were redefined “as an ethnic group rather than a race.”

This distinction – race versus ethnic group – is important, because “racial differences are viewed as genetically based and thus as beyond the ability of society to change,” Smith writes.

“Racial prejudice and discrimination have greatly exceeded ethnic intolerance,” he adds. “On balance, America has a better record of accepting and fairly treating ethnic groups than it does racial groups.”

Smith also touches on the criticisms of the “African American” label, which many people feel “calls for identification with a culture to which almost no actual ties exist.”

In addition, the term “has the classic ‘hyphenated American’ problem.” Whether or not there’s an actual hyphen, he notes, ethnic compounds like “German-American” sometimes have been “regarded as symbolizing divided loyalties.”

Smith, who was writing in 1992, says that “among those with a preference, ‘African American’ has grown in acceptance although ‘Black’ still is preferred by more Blacks.”

A usage note in American Heritage (the fourth edition was published in 2000) points out that “African American,” despite its popularity, “has shown little sign of displacing or discrediting black, which remains both popular and positive.”

[Update, Sept. 5, 2021: American Heritage dropped the usage note from later editions. “African American” is now overwhelmingly more popular than “Black American,” according to our searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the News on the Web corpus, a database of articles from online newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, the capitalization of “Black” has now become widely established.]

Does  any of this really matter? Smith quotes DuBois as saying: “The feeling of inferiority is in you, not in a name. The name merely evokes what is already there. Exorcise the hateful complex and no name can ever make you hang your head.”

“Yet names do matter,” Smith says. “Blacks have successively changed their preferred term of address from ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ and now, perhaps, to ‘African American’ in order to assert their group standing and aid in their struggle for racial equality.”

“While symbolic, these changes have not been inconsequential,” he adds. “For symbols are part and parcel of reality itself.”

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“Disc” vs. “disk”

Q: My dictionary says “disk” and “disc” are simply variant spellings of the same word. But I’ve run across a technical article from Apple that asserts “disc” refers to optical media while “disk” refers to magnetic media. Have you ever heard of this distinction?

A: It’s true that “disc” is a variant spelling of “disk,” but Apple is technically right. Each spelling has marked out its own territory in the technological wilderness, though many non-techies seem to be unaware of the distinction.

As Apple’s support site says, discs are “optical media, such as an audio CD, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, or DVD-Video disc,” while disks are “magnetic media, such as a floppy disk, the disk in your computer’s hard drive, an external hard drive.”

If you’re like us, you may find the optical-vs.-magnetic distinction hard to remember. When in doubt, we go to a dictionary or usage guide. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has a helpful entry:

“Use disc in references to phonograph records (disc jockey, discography), optical and laser-based devices (compact disc, laser disc, videodisc), farm implements (disc harrow), and brakes (disc brakes). Use disk in references to the magnetic storage devices used with computers (floppy disk, hard disk) and to the fiber and cartilage between the vertebrae (slipped disk).”

In ordinary usage, as we mentioned, many people don’t follow the distinctions found in dictionaries, style manuals, and technical articles.

Experts do prefer “disc jockey” to “disk jockey,” and a comparison with Google’s Ngram viewer shows that “disc jockey” is considerably more popular than “disk jockey” in published books.

The word was spelled “disk” when it entered English in 1665 and referred to either the discus that athletes throw or the flat, circular form of a celestial object like the sun or moon. It’s ultimately derived from the Latin discus and the Greek δίσκος (diskos).

Standard dictionaries, like American Heritage and Merriam-Webster, generally say “disc” is a variant spelling of “disk.” The  Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, gives “disk” as a variant of “disc.”

The OED, under its entry for “disc, disk,” adds that “disc is now the more usual form in British English,” except in the computing sense, “where disk is commoner as a result of US influence.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has this as one definition of “disk”: “a round flat plate coated with a magnetic substance on which data for a computer is stored.” But it says that an “optical disk” (like a “videodisc” or a “CD”) is usually spelled “disc.”

And The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), under its entry for “compact disk,” has an extensive usage note that we’ll quote in its entirety (we’ll add paragraphing to make it easier to read):

“When new words come into the language, they often have different forms for a period until one form wins out over the others. There are occasions when competing forms remain in use for a long time. The word disk and its descendant compound compact disk represent good examples of this phenomenon.

“Disk came into English in the mid-17th century and was originally spelled with a k on the model of older words such as whisk. The c-spelling arose a half century later as a learned spelling derived from the word’s Latin source discus. Both disc and disk were used interchangeably into the 20th century, with people in Britain tending to use disc more often, and Americans preferring disk.

“The spellings also began to be sorted out by function. Late in the 19th century, for reasons that are not clear, people used disc to refer to the new method of making phonograph recordings on a flat plate (as opposed to Edison’s cylindrical drum). In any case, the c-spelling became conventional for this sense, which is why we listen to disc jockeys and not disk jockeys.

“In the 1940s, however, when American computer scientists needed a term to refer to their flat storage devices, they chose the spelling disk, and this became conventionalized in such compounds as hard disk and floppy disk. When the new storage technology of the compact disk arose in the 1970s, both c– and k-spellings competed for an initial period. Computer specialists preferred the familiar k-spelling, while people in the music industry, who saw the shiny circular plates as another form of phonograph record, referred to them as compact discs.

“These tendencies soon became established practice in the different industries. This is why we buy compact disks in computer stores but get the same storage devices with different data as compact discs in music stores. Similarly, the computer industry created the optical disk, the format that the entertainment industry used to create the videodisc.”

[Note: This post was updated on March 9, 2022.]

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