Category: Linguistics

Q: I’m sick of hearing the verb “curate” used loosely, as in “I’m going to curate my next garage sale … closet cleanout … laundry sorting.” AAUGH! (Forgive me, Charlie Brown.) Please do what you can to set these “curators” straight.

A: Let’s start with the noun “curate,” a word that entered English in the mid-14th century with the meaning of a clergyman.

Later, in the 16th century, the term came to mean an assistant to a parish priest in the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

The noun “curate” comes from the medieval Latin word curatus, an adjective meaning “of, belonging to, or having a cure or charge,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

(Here “cure,” from the Latin cura, or care, means “the spiritual charge or oversight of parishioners or lay people,”  the OED says.)

Shortly after “curate” entered English, so did another noun, “curator.” This word came from the Latin curator or curatorem (meaning overseer, guardian, or agent).

When “curator” first appeared in English, in 1362, it meant a curate. But by the early 1400s it was used in a more secular way, to mean a legal guardian.

In the 17th century, it acquired a few more meanings: a manager or steward, an officer of a university, or a person in charge of a museum, art gallery, library, or the like.

This last meaning gave rise to the verb “curate,” which the OED describes as a back-formation of “curator.”

We’ve written before about back-formations, which are new words formed by dropping prefixes or suffixes from older ones.

Other examples of back-formations include “diagnose” (from “diagnosis”), “escalate” (from “escalator”), “enthuse” (from “enthusiasm”), and “surreal” (from “surrealism” and “surrealist”).

But back to the verb “curate,” which is defined in the OED this way: “to act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.); to look after and preserve.”

The OED’s first printed citation is from the 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed.), but no doubt earlier examples will come to light.

We say this because the gerund “curating” was known much earlier. Here’s a quotation by the naturalist W. E. Hoyle that appeared in 1906 in The Museums Journal:

“I think it will be generally admitted that the business (or may I say ‘profession’) of museum ‘curating’ is one which demands … a special technical training.”

“Curating” is defined in the OED as “the supervision of a museum, gallery, or the like by a curator; the work of storing and preserving exhibits.”

Lately, however, the verb “curate” has been bandied about pretty freely (not to mention pretentiously), and has come loose from its museum moorings.

As Alex Williams wrote in the New York Times in an Oct. 4, 2009, article,  stores now “curate” their merchandise, nightclubs “curate” an evening’s entertainment, and websites “curate” their content.

“Curate,” Williams wrote, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.”

Back in more “print-centric” days, the reporter added, “the term of art was ‘edit’—as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully.”

How long will this new use of “curate” last?  We suspect it will go away once it’s no longer on the cutting edge.

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Q: I’ve noticed a proliferation of “What happen?” (instead of “Excuse me?” or “Come again?”) among younger friends in NYC (I’m 42). Also worth noting, it’s often collapsed into “Wha’ happen?” I suspect a Hispanic or Caribbean influence.

A: A teacher once emailed us to report that his students in the Bronx would say, “What happened?” or “Wha’ happen?” when they failed to hear something he’d said. Some of their parents would say it too.

A search of the Internet finds only a sprinkling of examples, probably because the expression is more common in speech than in writing.

We can’t say where or when this usage first happened, what influenced it, or whether it will have staying power.

But we can discuss expressions like these that a listener uses to ask a speaker to repeat or elaborate on something just said.

The linguist Dwight L. Bolinger coined a name for the usage: “reclamatory questions.”

In his 1989 book Intonation and Its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse, Bolinger discusses the rising and falling tones in such questions.

We’ve written before on the blog about the practice of saying “What?” when you didn’t quite catch what somebody said.

This usage is occasionally criticized (mostly by our elders) as rude, though it has a long history.

We have lots of ways of saying “Huh?” Some of our 19th-century ancestors used “What say?” or “How?” when their ears didn’t catch some bit of conversation.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says “What say?” and “How?” emerged in 19th-century America as synonyms for “What?” or “What did you say?”

“What say?” might be seen as a shorter version of “What did you say?” And it seems likely that “How?” is a shorter form of  “How’s that?” or “How’s that again?”

Now we apparently have a new variation on the theme, “What happened?” or “What happen?” or the even shorter “Wha’ happen?”

None of the slang reference sources we use include this usage.

But Cassell’s says three similar questions with another meaning (“What happen?” … “Wha’appen?” … “What happening?”) originated in the 1950s among Black speakers in the West Indies and the UK.

These questions, according to Cassell’s, are used as “a general form of greeting, hello, how are you?”

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the use of “What’s happening?” as a greeting originated among Black Americans in the 1950s.

These slang dictionaries no doubt will catch up with the reclamatory usage.

Meanwhile, we can add “What happened?” and “What happen?” and “Wha’ happen” to “What?” and “What say?” and “How?” and “Huh?” and “Eh?” and “Mmm?” and “Yo?” and “Come again?” and “Whazzat?” and “Say what?” and all the rest!

Our hearing may occasionally be faulty, but fortunately there’s no shortage of reclamatory questions.

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Q: I’m careful to observe the distinction between “less” and “fewer,” but I wonder why this distinction developed in the first place and why we still have it?

A: We observe the distinction too, but we may be in the minority.

We’ve written before on our blog about the decline of “fewer,” a word that seems to be occurring fewer and fewer times.

As we point out in that blog entry and others, the traditional distinction between “fewer” and “less” is that “fewer” means a smaller number of things (“fewer ice cubes”) while “less” means a smaller amount of something (“less ice”).

However, that explanation doesn’t do justice to “less,” which has many other usages besides. It’s used with percentages and fractions, and in expressions like “one less,” “no less than twenty,” and others.

But on to their development. Both “less” and “few” were derived from old Germanic languages, and they were first recorded in Old English writings in the 700s or 800s.

“Fewer,” the comparative form of “few,” came along later, and was first recorded in writing around 1340, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Less” originally was a comparative form of “little,” the OED says. Its meaning was “smaller” or “of not so great size, extent, degree,” and so on.

“Few,” meaning “not many,” is just as old as “less.” It was recorded in such sources as Beowulf (perhaps as early as the 700s), the Vespasian Psalter (circa 825), and the Venerable Bede (c 900).

Keep in mind that the line between “less” and “fewer” was not always as distinct as it is in modern usage guides.

In fact, the OED has examples from the year 888 to modern times of “less” used to mean “fewer”—that is, a smaller number of things.

This isn’t surprising, of course, since “fewer” wasn’t even available until the 14th century.

At any rate, people happily used “less” to mean “fewer” for some 900 years before anybody minded.

In 1770, the grammarian Robert Baker suggested that “fewer” would be “not only more elegant … but more strictly proper” than “less” in a phrase like “no less than a hundred.”

And that, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, is how the “rule” for using these words was born.

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Q: I hear “nonchalant” used all the time to mean unconcerned, but I never hear “chalant” used to mean concerned. Is there such a word in English?

A: No, there’s no “chalant,” just “nonchalant.” Only the negative form of the word has found a home in English.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “nonchalant” was borrowed from French sometime before 1734.

It’s defined as meaning “calm and casual; (deliberately) lacking in enthusiasm or interest; indifferent, unconcerned.”

In French, nonchalant is the present participle of the verb nonchaloir (the earlier form was nonchaler), meaning to neglect or despise.

Its roots are the negative prefix non and the verb chaloir (earlier chaler), meaning to interest or to be important.

Those French verbs came from the classical Latin verb calere, which the OED defines as “to be warm, to be roused with zeal or anger, to be active.”

But though we don’t have “chalant,” we once had an adjective derived from that Latin verb: “calent.”

It’s no longer used, but back in the 1600s and 1700s it meant  warm or hot.

We’ve written before on the blog about words like “disgruntled” and “inscrutable” that seem to have only negative forms.

The third edition of Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I includes a section about words like these. We’ll quote the passage:

“Some words are sourpusses. They’re negative through and through, and have no positive counterparts. I’m thinking of words like unkempt, inept, disgruntled, and uncouth. We might joke about looking ‘kempt’ or being ‘couth,’ but in fact the negatives have no opposite forms—they’re either obsolete rarities or whimsical inventions.

“Other negatives with nonexistent or obscure opposite numbers include debunk, disappointing, disconcerting, disconsolate, disheveled, dismayed, immaculate, impeccable, inadvertent, incapacitated, inclement, incognito, incommunicado, incorrigible, indefatigable, inevitable, indomitable, insipid, misnomer, mistake, nonchalant, noncommittal, nondescript, nonpareil, nonplussed, unassuming, unbeknownst, ungainly, and unwieldy.

“Some similar words without opposite versions may look like negatives, but they aren’t. Their negative-looking prefixes (im and in) emphasize or intensify instead. Actually, intensify and instead are among these words, and so are insure, impromptu, inscribe, and inflammable.”

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Q: I heard Garry Wills say on the radio that “oxymoron” got its present meaning (a pair of contradictory words) because William F. Buckley misunderstood its actual meaning (sharply foolish) and used it incorrectly in the National Review. Can you clear this up for me?

A: We didn’t hear Wills on the radio, but he did write in The Atlantic last year that Buckley liked to use “big words for their own sake, even when he was not secure in their meaning.”

“One of his most famous usages,” Wills wrote, “poisoned the general currency, especially among young conservatives trying to imitate him.”

These conservatives began using “oxymoron” in the sense Buckley gave it, he said, “though that was the opposite of its true meaning.”

Here’s how Wills explained Buckley’s thinking about “oxymoron”:

“He thought it was a fancier word for ‘contradiction,’ so young imitators would say that ‘an intelligent liberal’ was an oxymoron. But the Greek word means ‘something that is surprisingly true, a paradox,’ as in a shrewd dumbness.”

What do we think? We’re with Buckley on this and we’d say Wills’s etymology here is an example of dumb shrewdness.

To begin with, the word apparently didn’t exist in Greek, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though English writers coined an ersatz Greek version of it (using Greek letters) in the 17th century.  

The Romans coined oxymorum in the 5th century from the Greek roots oxus (sharp, keen, or pointed) and moros (foolish).

But the word never meant “sharply foolish” (or “shrewd dumbness”) either in Latin or in English.

To claim that as the word’s original meaning would be overly literal. A closer interpretation would be “pointedly incongruous.”

In modern English “oxymoron” has two meanings. The first is the one it’s had since it entered English in 1640, quite a few years before Buckley used it in the National Review.

Here’s how the OED defines this traditional sense of the word: “A figure of speech in which a pair of opposed or markedly contradictory terms are placed in conjunction for emphasis.” (This is also the definition in Latin.)

Here’s an example from the Quarterly Review of 1890: “Voltaire … we might call, by an oxymoron which has plenty of truth in it, an ‘Epicurean pessimist.’ ”

And that’s pretty much how Buckley uses the word in Miles Gone By: A Literary Biography (2004), when he refers to “martial Quakerism” as an oxymoron.

A newer, more general meaning is “a contradiction in terms,” which the OED says originated in 1902.

A couple of quotations from food writing are good illustrations of this looser usage:

“ ‘Healthful’ and ‘Mexican food’ need not be an oxymoron” (Texas Monthly, 1989);

“This opened up an oxymoron too dreadful to contemplate: affordable caviar” (The Guardian, 1993).

You can see the difference. In the newer usage, the contradictory terms aren’t deliberately juxtaposed for emphasis; they’re merely contradictory. And sometimes the contrariness is humorous, as in “jumbo shrimp.”

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