Category: Linguistics

Q: How did the verb “repair” come to mean to move to another place as well as to fix something?

A: The verbs “repair” (to fix) and “repair” (to go) are two distinct words that have evolved from two different Latin terms.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the mending sense ultimately comes from the classical Latin reparare (to put back in order) while the going sense ultimately comes from the post-classical Latin repatriare (to return to one’s country).

Middle English borrowed the two terms in various spellings, meanings, and forms from Anglo-Norman, Middle French, and Old French.

The OED’s earliest English citation for “repair” to mean “go, proceed, set out, make one’s way” is from Sir Tristrem, a Middle English romance believed written sometime before 1300. Here’s an expanded version:

“Tristrem þouȝt repaire, / Hou so it euer be / To bide: ‘Þat cuntre will y se, / What auentour so be tide’ ” (“Tristrem thought to repair [to proceed], / Howsoever it might be / To abide [endure the giant Beliagog]: / ‘What country will I see, / What adventure so betide?’ ”).

The dictionary’s first example for “repair” used to mean “restore (a damaged, worn, or faulty object or structure) to good or proper condition” is from a Middle English translation of a Latin chronicle of world history:

“At þe repayrynge of Seynt Petres chirche, he wente to wiþ a mattok and opened first þe erþe” (“At the repairing of Saint Peter’s Church, he went forth with a mattock [an ax-like digging tool] and opened first the earth”). From Polychronicon, John Trevisa’s translation, dated sometime before 1387, of an earlier 14th-century work by Ranulf Higden.

Standard dictionaries now recognize both the fixing and going senses of “repair,” but the going sense (as in “Let us repair to the boudoir”) is now considered old- fashioned and sometimes used humorously.

Merriam-Webster online, for example, describes the use of “repair” to mean “go to (a place)” as “old-fashioned + formal,” and has this example: “After dinner, the guests repaired to the drawing room for coffee.”

The dictionary adds that the going sense is “sometimes used humorously,” and has this example: “Shall we repair to the coffee shop?”

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Q: With the recent fall of Bashar al-Assad, the ousted Syrian leader’s name has been in the news a lot. Sometimes it’s rendered as “Assad” and sometimes as “al-Assad.” Is the “al-” a form of nobiliary particle? Are there rules that govern its use? And how is it alphabetized?

A: The “al-” in English renderings of Arab names is not a nobiliary particle, a preposition that originated as a mark of noble rank, like the French “de” in Simone de Beauvoir or the German “von” in Wernher von Braun.

This “al-” is an English transliteration of the Arabic definite article ٱلْـ, though it’s sometimes used to indicate distinction. Bashar al-Assad, for example, means “Bashar the Lion,” à la Richard I’s sobriquet, “Cœur de Lion” or “the Lionheart.”

The article is usually written as “Al” (capital “A,” sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not) in English versions of the Arabic names of universities, newspapers, mosques, etc., as in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram (The Pyramids).

And the “Al” (capital A, no hyphen) in English forms of some Arab names represents the Arabic term آل (“family” or “clan”). It’s often used much like a nobiliary particle to indicate a member of a noble or distinguished family. Prince Turki bin Mohammed Al Saud, for example, is a member of the Saudi royal family.

The rules that govern the use of “al-” in English versions of Arab names differ in the style guides followed by various publishers. Some, for example, recommend dropping the “al-” on second reference, while others favor keeping it.

As for indexing such names, here’s the advice in The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.), 15:83:

“Arabic surnames prefixed by al or el (the) are alphabetized under the element following the particle; the article is treated like de in many French names.”

The Chicago Manual gives as examples “Hakim, Tawfiq al-”  and “Jamal, Muhammad Hamid al-” but adds this advisory:

“Context and readership may suggest cross-references. For example, in an index to a work likely to have readers unfamiliar with Arabic names, a cross-reference may be useful (e.g., ‘al-Farabi. See Farabi, al-’).”

Finally, we should mention the “al” (no hyphen) in some English words derived, often in a roundabout way, from Arabic, such as “alchemy,” “alcohol,” “alcove,” “algebra,” and “almanac.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the “al” here is “found from the Middle English period [about 1100 to 1500] onwards in borrowings ultimately from Arabic, originally and chiefly via French and Latin.” Here are a few of these words:

• alchemy: al plus kīmiyāʼ (“the art of transmuting base metals”). In early use, the OED notes, “the terms chemistry and alchemy are often indistinguishable.”
• alcohol: al plus kuḥl (“kohl,” the eye makeup). The intoxicant sense came later.
• alcove: al plus qubba (“the dome, pavilion, cupola, or vault”).
• algebra: al plus jabra (“the restoration”). In algebra, symbols represent numbers.
• almanac: al plus manāḵ (“the calendar”).

[Note: We published a post on July 16, 2010, on nobiliary particles.]

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Q: I’ve just begun The Age of Deer, a book by Erika Howsare that explores the connections between deer and humans. Are the words “dear” and “deer” also related, or merely two different words with the same pronunciation?

A: The short answer is that “dear” and “deer” may very well be etymologically related, not just homonyms, but the evidence isn’t conclusive.

In Old English, the language spoken from roughly 450 to 1150, the noun “deer” (spelled dior or deor, and occasionally dear) meant something like “beast” and referred to wild animals in general, especially four-legged ones. The usual word for the animals with antlered males was heort or heorot, ancestor of “hart.”

Meanwhile, the adjective “dear” came in two versions: deore (beloved or valuable) and deor (brave, ferocious, savage, or wild, an obsolete sense apparently associated with the noun “deer”).

Linguists have disagreed over whether deore and deor were two separate adjectives or one adjective with two senses. If Old English had just one adjective, then the modern words “dear” and “deer” would probably be related.

The Oxford English Dictionary says both deore and deor come from prehistoric Germanic, an ancient language reconstructed by linguists, but it adds that deor is “of uncertain etymology.”

However, the linguist Anatoly Lieberman argues in a May 19, 2021, post on the blog of Oxford University Press, publisher of the OED, that the two terms come from the same ancient source:

“Some good authorities hesitatingly (very hesitatingly!) admit that Old English dēor(e) and dēor are two senses of the same word. In my opinion, both their hesitation and the common statement ‘origin unknown,’ applied to dēor ‘savage, fierce,’ are groundless.”

Liberman says, “it is probably reasonable to assume that the most ancient meaning of the adjective dear was ‘requiring a strong effort’; hence ‘fierce, wild; hard to obtain; costly; precious,’ and of course ‘dear,’ whether ‘expensive’ or ‘priceless.’ ”

“According to what we know about the Old Germanic ethos,” he adds, “monsters and heroes were believed to be endowed with similar qualities, but what was ‘noble, valorous, praiseworthy’ in the hero was ‘ferocious, deadly’ in his enemy.”

If Lieberman is right—and we hesitantly agree with him—then “dear” and “deer” are related.

In the first OED citation for the noun “deer,” it’s spelled dear and means a large beast: “Se camal þæt micla dear” (“The camel that great deer”). From an interlinear Old English gloss, or translation, of the Latin in the Lindisfarne Gospels, Luke 18:25.

Here’s a full version of the verse, in Early Modern English, from the King James Version: “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the noun “deer” used in its modern sense (as the horned animal that’s often hunted) is from Layamon’s Brut, a chronicle of Britain written in Middle English sometime before 1200: “To huntien after deoren.”

The OED notes an earlier Old English passage that mentions hrana (reindeer) among a large group of wild animals: “syx hund. Þa deor” (“those 600 hundred deer”).

As for the adjective “dear,” the dictionary says the affectionate sense gradually evolved in Old English from “esteemed” to “beloved,” but “the  passage of the one notion into the other is too gradual to admit of their separation.”

The OED’s first citation (with “dear” describing Jesus) is from Juliana, an Old English poem by Cynewulf about the martyrdom of Saint Juliana of Nicomedia. In this passage, Juliana asks all of humankind to pray for her:

“meotud bidde þæt me heofona helm helpe gefremme, meahta waldend, on þam miclan dæge, fæder, frofre gæst, in þa frecnan tid, dæda demend, ond se deora sunu” (“pray to the creator that the guardian of heaven, the wielder of powers, the father, the holy spirit, the judge of deeds, and his dear son may help me in that time of terror, on that greatest of days”).

Moving on to the costly sense of the adjective, the first OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from an entry for the year 1044 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

“On ðisum gere wæs swyðe mycel hunger ofer eall Englaland and corn swa dyre swa nan man ær ne gemunde  swa þæt se sester hwætes eode to LX pen” (“In this year there was very great hunger over all England and corn [grain] so dear as no man remembered before so that a sester [a dry measure] of wheat went for 60 pence”).

Over the years, the adjective has taken on many other uses, including to fondly or respectfully address someone (circa 1250), to mean scarce (before 1330), to address the recipient of a letter (c. 1402), and to describe money that can be borrowed only at a high interest rate (1878).

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Q: “Wicked,” which used to mean evil only a few decades ago, now also seems to mean cool, mischievous, or so bad it’s good. How did it get these polar opposite connotations?

A: This phenomenon you’re noticing is an example of the loss or reduction of meaning in a word, but the weakening of “wicked” isn’t a recent phenomenon—it dates back to Shakespeare.

When “wicked” appeared in the 12th century, the Oxford English Dictionary says, it referred to people “bad in moral character, disposition, or conduct; inclined or addicted to wilful wrongdoing; practising or disposed to practise evil; morally depraved.”

As if that’s not strong enough, the OED adds that “wicked” in its original sense is a “term of wide application, but always of strong reprobation, implying a high degree of evil quality.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, is from Layamon’s Brut, a chronicle of Britain written in Middle English sometime before 1200. In this passage, Rowena is about to poison her stepson, King Vortimer:

Herne ou ȝeo tock an; þes wickede wifman.
In hire bosome ȝeo bar bi-neoþe hire tyttes.
one ampulle; of hatter ifulled.

(Harken, take heed of this wicked woman.
In her bosom, she carried beneath her tits
an ampoule filled with poison.)

In the late 16th century, the OED says, the adjective took on a “weakened or lighter sense” that was “usually more or less jocular” and could mean “malicious; mischievous, sly.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the weakened sense is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, believed to have been performed in 1599 but not published until the First Folio of 1623. In this expanded passage, Rosalind describes Cupid as wicked:

“No, that same wicked Bastard of Venus, that was begot of thought, conceiu’d of spleene, and borne of madnesse, that blinde rascally boy, that abuses euery ones eyes, because his owne are out, let him bee iudge, how deepe I am in loue.”

In the early 20th century, the OED says, “wicked” took on the sense of  “excellent, splendid; remarkable.” This expanded citation is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel This Sde of Paradise:

“ ‘Tell ’em to play “Admiration”!’ shouted Sloane. ‘You two order; Phoebe  and I are going to shake a wicked calf.’ ”

As we noted in a  2021 post, it’s not uncommon for the sense of a usage to weaken over time, a development that linguists might refer to as “semantic weakening,” “semantic bleaching,” “semantic loss,” or “semantic reduction.”

As for the word’s earlier etymology, the OED says “wicked” is apparently an expanded form of the now-obsolete adjective “wick,” which was apparently an adjectival use of the Old English noun wicca (wizard), the masculine version of wicce (witch).

We’ll end with a few wicked words from the Second Witch in Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

By the pricking of my Thumbes,
Something wicked this way comes:
Open Lockes, who euer knockes.

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Q: When you rewind to older states of the language, such as Middle English, most words are unrecognizable and some letters too. Granted, back then French also looked different from Modern French, but the letters were the same.

A: You’ll find Old English even more unrecognizable than Middle English. Here are the first few lines of the epic poem Beowulf from a manuscript at the British Library:

Buona pulcella fut eulalia. Bel auret corps bellezour anima
Voldrent la veintre li deo Inimi. Voldrent la faire diaule seruir

Here’s the passage in modern French:

Une bonne jeune-fille était Eulalie. Belle de corps, elle était encore plus belle d’âme.
Les ennemis de Dieu voulurent la vaincre. Ils voulurent la faire servir le diable.

And here’s an English translation:

Eulalia was a good girl. She had a beautiful body, a soul more beautiful still.
The enemies of God wanted to overcome her. They wanted to make her serve the devil.

(The poem is from a manuscript at La Médiathèque Simone Veil in Valenciennes, France. The anonymous author describes the death of Eulalia de Mérida, an early Christian martyr from Spain. Each line includes a couplet separated by a punctus.)

You’re right, though, that Old and Middle French are written in Roman letters while Old and Middle English have some runes among the Roman letters. Here’s a very simplified explanation of why early English has those runes and early French doesn’t.

Both English and French are ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European, a prehistoric language that has been reconstructed by linguists and that is the ancestor of most European and some Asian languages.

English comes from Indo-European’s prehistoric Germanic branch, the source of those strange characters, while French comes from the prehistoric Italic branch, the ancient ancestor of Latin and the Romance languages.

In the early centuries AD, the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic people used various versions of the runic alphabet (called the Futhark), before adopting the Latin alphabet under the influence of Roman occupation and the spread of Christianity.

However, the Latin alphabet at that time didn’t include letters representing some sounds used by Germanic speakers. So writers of Old English (roughly 450 to 1150) and Middle English (1150 to 1450) supplemented the Roman letters with several runes:

• æ (called an ash), which sounded like the “a” of “cat”;
• þ (thorn), which could sound like the voiceless “th” of “thing” or the voiced “th” of “the”;
• ð (eth), which was used more or less interchangeably with the þ (thorn) for those “th” sounds;
• ƿ (wynn), an early “w”;
• ʒ (yogh), which could sound like “y” or like the “ch” of the German ich. (For instance, “niȝth,” a Middle English spelling of “night,” sounded like “nicht.”)

Here’s an inscription, probably dating from the eighth century, written in the Anglo-Saxon Futhark. It’s carved on the Ruthwell Cross, a stone cross in the Scottish village of Ruthwell, which used to be in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria:

ᛣᚱᛁᛋᛏ ᚹᚫᛋ ᚩᚾ ᚱᚩᛞᛁᚻᚹᛖᚦᚱᚨ ᚦᛖᚱ ᚠᚢᛋᚨ ᚠᛠᚱᚱᚪᚾ ᛣᚹᚩᛗᚢ ᚨᚦᚦᛁᛚᚨᛏᛁᛚ ᚪᚾᚢᛗ.

This is the inscription, transliterated into Old English script, with several thorns:

krist wæs on rodi hweþræ þer fusæ fearran kwomu æþþilæ til anum ic þæt al bih[eald]

And here it is in Modern English:

Christ was on the cross. Yet the eager came there from afar to the noble one that all beheld.

The term “Futhark,” by the way, comes from a transliteration of the first six letters of Elder Futhark, the oldest version of the runes:  ᚠ, ᚢ, ᚦ, ᚨ, ᚱ, ᚲ (f, u, th, a, r, k). The ᚦ (called a thurisaz) in Elder Futhark is an early version of the þ (thorn) used in Old English.

Interestingly, inscriptions in Gaulish, the Celtic language spoken in ancient Gaul before Old French, used the Greek alphabet until the Roman conquest in the first century BC, when the Roman alphabet replaced it. Here’s an example from the Musée Lapidaire d’Avignon of a votive offering to Belesama (Bηλησαμα), the Gaulish Minerva:

σεγομαρος
ουιλλονεος
τοουτιουϲ
ναμαυσατις
ειωρου βηλη-
σαμι σοσιν
νεμητον

And this is an English translation by Pierre-Yves Lambert, a French linguist and scholar of Celtic studies:

Segomaros, son of Villū, citizen of Nîmes, offered this sacred enclosure to Belesama.

(Βηλησαμι in the inscription is the dative, or indirect object, of Bηλησαμα.)

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Q: It seems to be getting more and more common lately, particularly among younger English speakers, to use “whenever” in place of “when,” as in this example: “Whenever I got up this morning, it was still dark outside.” Is this a developing usage? Is it valid?

A: You could use “when” or “whenever” in that sentence, but the meaning would change. “When I got up this morning, it was still dark outside” indicates that you got up once and it was dark. “Whenever I got up this morning, it was still dark outside” suggests you got up more than once and it was dark each time.

In standard English, “when” here is a conjunction meaning “at the time that” something happens or “as soon as” something happens, while “whenever” is a conjunction meaning “every time that” something happens.

We should note that “whenever” is also used as an adverb meaning “at whatever time” (as in “At about 6, or whenever I got up this morning, it was still dark outside”).

But in various English dialects, “whenever” is often used as a conjunction in the sense of plain old “when.” As the Dictionary of American Regional English explains, in parts of the US (the South, South Midland, and western Pennsylvania) as well as in Scotland and Ireland, “whenever” is used dialectally “in contexts where when would be expected.”

Used in reference to “a single punctual event,” the dictionary says, this dialectal “whenever” means “at the same time that” or “as soon as” the event occurred.

DARE’s earliest American example for the regional “whenever” cites the “as soon as” usage: “The Pennsylvanians use the word whenever to signify ‘as soon as.’ Thus it will be said that, ‘whenever the carriage came, the lady got in’ ” (“The Dialects of Our Country,” by the Rev. N. C. Burt, Appletons’ Journal, November 1878).

The dictionary’s next example is from Virginia: “Whenever … As soon as; ‘He will go whenever he gets ready’ ” (Word Book of Virginia Folk-Speech, 1912, by Bennett Wood Green).

And here’s a citation from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee: “Whenever … When. ‘What did they do with you whenever you killed that man some two or three years ago?’ ” (a 1939 field report in the Joseph Sargent Hall Collection in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University).

The linguists Michael B. Montgomery and John M. Kirk use the term “punctual whenever” in referring to “the subordinating conjunction whenever, especially when used for a onetime, momentary event.”

In a paper, “ ‘My Mother, Whenever She Passed Away, She Had Pneumonia’: The History and Functions of Whenever,” the linguists cite “eighteenth-century Ulster migrants mainly of Scottish heritage as the most likely trans-Atlantic source” of the usage in America (Journal of English Linguistics, September 2001).

Montgomery (University of South Carolina) and Kirk (Queen’s University, Belfast) add that “the available evidence indicates remarkably little difference in how whenever is used today in Ulster English and Appalachian English, two historically related varieties.”

The sentence used in the paper’s title is from a speaker in Tennessee; it was reported at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference at the University of Oklahoma in 1978.

Interestingly, the usage was first recorded in England, not Scotland or Northern Ireland. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an English translation, published in London in the mid-17th century, of a French satirical novel:

“He gave me a good supper last night when ever I came within his doors” (The Comical History of Francion, 1655, an anonymous translation of Charles Sorel’s  L’Histoire Comique de Francion, 1623).

The next OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from a list of Scotticisms: “We will go to our dinner whenever the clock strikes two, when translated into English, means, We shall go to dinner when the clock strikes two” (from a letter to The Monthly Magazine; or British Register, London, May 1, 1800).

As you can see, the use of “whenever” in the sense of “when” has been around for hundreds of years. We’ve seen no evidence that it’s more common now than in the past, but it’s possible that the regional usage may be heard more widely because of modern travel and communications.

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

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