Category: Linguistics

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English English language Etymology Linguistics Usage Word origin

Slash talk

Q: What is your take on using the word “slash” when speaking of something with various attributes, as in “He is a husband slash father”? We don’t usually pronounce symbols, but it seems as if I hear “slash” spoken more often than I used to, maybe due to its use in Internet addresses.

A: Is “slash” in that example merely a lexical rendering of the / symbol? Or does it have a life of its own apart from the symbol? Or has the symbol itself come to represent an actual word, as the ampersand is a stand-in for “and”?

We’ve checked eight standard dictionaries and all but one of them describe the word “slash” as a lexical rendering of the diagonal symbol. Oxford Dictionaries online, for example, defines the noun this way:

“An oblique stroke (/) in print or writing, used between alternatives (e.g., and/or), in fractions (e.g., 3/4), in ratios (e.g., miles/day), or between separate elements of a text.”

The Oxford Guide to Style says the most common use for the symbol is “as shorthand to denote alternatives,” but adds that the symbol is “sometimes misused for and rather than or.”

The sentence you cite (“He is a husband slash father”) is an example of “slash” used for “and” rather than “or.”

Is the term, as the style manual suggests, “misused” in your example?

Well, most standard dictionaries don’t recognize this use of the term—or, for that matter, this use of the symbol itself. An exception is The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

American Heritage describes a “slash” as either a symbol used in the traditional way or an informal conjunction (represented by word or symbol) meaning “as well as” or “and.”

The dictionary gives these examples of the conjunction: “an actor-slash-writer; a waiter/dancer.” It adds that the symbol is often used in print.

We suspect that the appearance of “slash” in American Heritage is a sign of things to come. In fact, the usage isn’t all that new. The word has been used this way for more than a dozen years.

The linguist Brett Reynolds, who blogs about language at English, Jack, has found a couple of examples from the 1990s.

This one is from the Sept. 28, 1992, issue of Time magazine: “Meet urban planner Campbell Scott (‘a realist slash dreamer’).” And this one is from the script for the 1999 movie Mumford: “sexual surrogate slash companion.”

In an Aug. 27, 2010, posting, Reynolds compares “slash” to “cum” (a Latin preposition meaning “with” that is often used in the sense of “and” or “along with”).

Although most standard dictionaries still consider “cum” a preposition, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) recognizes it as a conjunction and has this example from George Bernard Shaw: “a credible mining camp elder-cum-publican.”

In an Aug. 27, 2010, post on the Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum discusses the use of “slash” in two sentences like yours: “There is also a study slash guest bedroom” and “We need a corkscrew slash bottle opener.”

In considering which part of speech this use of “flash” falls into, Pullum concludes that it’s a coordinator (also known as a coordinating conjunction) like “and” or “but.”

“We seem to have actually added a coordinator to the language,” says Pullum, the co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

(The scholarly Cambridge Grammar lists the parts of speech as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, determinative, subordinator, coordinator, and interjection. Cambridge includes what most people would call conjunctions among coordinators and subordinators.)

Pullum describes the coordinator use of “slash” as “a new discovery about English” and “a fairly surprising one.”

He points out that “the class of coordinators is thought of as an extremely small, closed category that has hardly ever expanded since the Middle Ages (when at some point the preposition buton, meaning ‘outside,’ turned into the modern-day coordinator but).”

As for the etymology of “slash,” it showed up as a noun in the 1500s, when the word meant a cutting stroke with a sword or whip, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED example for the noun is from A Panoplie of Epistles, a 1576 letter-writing manual in which Abraham Fleming translates works by Cicero, Pliny, and others into English:

“Because euery one was ready to cutte his throte as to haue a slash at his fleshe.”

English adopted “slash”—the noun as well as the verb—from esclachier, an Old French verb meaning to break.

The noun didn’t become a term for the symbol / until well into the 20th century. The OED’s earliest example is from a 1961 entry in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.).

Webster’s Third says “slash” and “slash mark” mean the same as a similar sense of the noun “diagonal,” which it defines as “the symbol / used especially to denote ‘or’ (as in and/or), ‘and or’ (as in straggler/deserter form), ‘per’ (as in feet/second), ‘in’ or ‘of’ (as in U.S. Embassy/Paris), ‘shilling’ (as in 6/8d),” and several other uses.

Of the various terms for the / symbol (“solidus,” “slash,” “slash mark,” “stroke,” “oblique,” “virgule,” “diagonal,” and “shilling mark”) the oldest is “solidus,” which dates from the late 1800s. (Some of the other terms appeared earlier, but not in the symbol sense.)

Here’s a 19th-century example for “solidus” from George Chrystal’s Introduction to Algebra (1898): “The symbols / (solidus notation) and : (ratio notation) are equivalent to ÷.”

The OED doesn’t have an entry for the word “slash” used as a coordinator. It has entries only for the noun or verb.

However, the lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, a former OED editor, has cited several examples of the usage from the dictionary’s files.

In commenting on Pullum’s Language Log post, Sheidlower listed these examples with multiple slashes:

“I’m a dishwasher slash cake maker slash cookie scooper slash and whatever else they want me to do,” from the Dec. 15, 2002, issue of the New York Times.

“Halcyon, the café-slash-restaurant-slash-record store, is closing its doors in April,” from the Feb. 25, 2004, issue of the Village Voice.

“I’m an actress-slash-model-slash-hostess,” from Beth Kendrick’s 2005 novel Fashionably Late.

Getting back to your question, we believe that “slash” is evolving as a part of speech—in writing as well as speech. In our opinion, it’s only a matter of time before more standard dictionaries accept its use as a coordinator/coordinating conjunction/conjunction.

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Not every “uu” is a “double-u”

Q: I’ve read your article about why a “w” is called a “double-u.” What puzzles me is why we still have words with “uu”—i.e., “vacuum,” “continuum,” and “triduum.” And why the “w” in “weltanschauung” is pronounced like a “v.” Just curious.

A: As we said in that 2011 post, English words were written in runic letters until the seventh century, when the Latin alphabet was introduced.

But the Latin alphabet of that time had no symbol for the sound of “w,” so such a symbol had to be invented.

At first the symbol used was “uu” or “double u.” But in the eighth century the runic letter ƿ (called a “wyn”) was borrowed for this purpose and was used in English writing for several centuries.

In the meantime, the old “uu”, the Oxford English Dictionary says, “was carried from England to the continent.”

There, the OED explains, it was used to represent the “w” sound “in the German dialects, and in French proper names and other words of Germanic and Celtic origin.”

It was Norman scribes who introduced a ligatured version of the old “uu,” forming the letter “w.” This new letter traveled from France to England in the 11th century, and by about 1300 it had replaced the old rune ƿ in English writing.

Although this new “w” was probably regarded as a single letter from the beginning, “it has never lost its original name of ‘double U,’ ” the OED says.

Now for your question about why some English words continue to be written with “uu.” The reason is that they have retained the “uu” spellings they had in Latin.

For example, “vacuum” is from the Latin noun spelled the same way: vacuum.

However, the “uu” combination in English does not sound like “w.” In the case of “vacuum,” it can sound like “yoo” or like “yoo-uh.”

The latter pronunciation is a diphthong—two syllables merged into one sound. This double sound is observable in the spelling of the word in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese: vacuo.

A handful of similar words spelled with “uu” also come from Latin words with identical spellings. And in these the “uu” is pronounced as a diphthong: “continuum,” “residuum,” and the uncommon “triduum,” meaning three days (or specifically the last three days of Lent).

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Editing the Editors

An “Open Book” interview with Patricia T. O’Conner in the New York Times Book Review

By JOHN WILLIAMS

This week, one grammar guru writes about another, as Patricia T. O’Conner reviews Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me.” Norris has been a copy editor for more than 30 years at The New Yorker, the notoriously fastidious magazine, and O’Conner, a former copy editor at the Book Review, has written several books about language usage, including “Woe Is I.”

In an email interview, O’Conner said her favorite book on writing is “The Reader Over Your Shoulder,” by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. “There’s no hand-holding, no coddling, no nonsense about ‘finding a voice,’ ” O’Conner said. It was first published in 1943, and O’Conner cautions readers to find early copies, since “some of the best parts are lost” in revised editions.

For the last word on grammar, she recommends “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,” by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. “It’s an awesome feat of scholarship, and it’s not for sissies — this book is dense, to say the least,” she said. “But it has all of the answers and none of the superstitions.”

Asked for a favorite obscure title on the subject, O’Conner cited “a little green book called ‘Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go,’ published in 1966 by the U.S. Government Printing Office,” given to her by a friend. “The author was John O’Hayre, an employee of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, and I hope he got a medal.”

Like Norris, O’Conner knows the hazards of writing about writing. (Norris started a recent Q. and A. on Reddit with a disclaimer: “Forgive the typos, it’s my day off.”) O’Conner said: “There are always people who will pounce and say, ‘Gotcha! You just broke your own rule!’ But my real feeling is that the world needs fewer writers and more readers.”

From the April 19, 2015, print edition of the New York Times Book Review.

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English English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage Word origin

Consider the Comma

A review of Mary Norris’s Between You & Me, from the New York Times Book Review

By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER

Copy editors are a peculiar species (I’ve been one myself, and at the very publication you are now reading). But those at The New Yorker are something else entirely, a species nova that mutated into existence in 1925 and would hurl itself off a cliff rather than forsake the dieresis in “coöperate.”

For the uninitiated, The New Yorker is a magazine that until 2003 spelled the word “deluxe” with a hyphen: “de-luxe.” It inserts periods into “I.B.M.,” though IBM itself dropped them long ago. It phonetically splits the word “England,” when it breaks at the end of a line, like this: “En-gland.” (One imagines a verb, “england,” meaning to provide with glands.)

A regular reader might be forgiven for wondering, “Are these people nuts?” In Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,” we have our answer: They most certainly are. And their obsessions, typographical and otherwise, make hilarious reading.

Norris, a pillar of the copy department for decades, is not crazy herself, or not entirely. For instance, she knows when to stay her hand and let the writer’s voice come through. She also admits occasionally doubting the sanity of The New Yorker’s storied grammar goddess, Eleanor Gould Packard: “I had the unsettling thought ‘What if Eleanor ever loses it?’ ” But what to do? “No one would enter the copy department and say to Eleanor, ‘Drop the pencil and step away from the desk.’ ”

“Between You & Me” is mostly a memoir, but it’s part usage guide, too. Norris shares her views on spelling, punctuation, dangling participles and troublesome pronouns, providing apt illustrations from an editing life. V. S. Pritchett, we learn, was “a terrible speller,” but “when Pauline Kael typed ‘prevert’ instead of ‘pervert,’ she meant ‘prevert.’ ” James Salter adds control to a word “by smacking it with a comma as one would put English on a cue ball.” And by judiciously placing a colon, “Kelefa Sanneh, writing about Scotch, can sound like Henry James.”

But the grammar advice is less illuminating. Norris defends a friend of hers who actually said, while looking for her sunglasses, “Are those they?” Mary, drop the pencil and step away from the desk. Yes, one may use “It is I” if one wishes, but “It is me” is faultless English. The old prescription requiring the nominative case after the verb “to be” has long been discredited as a Latin construction mistakenly applied to English.

Despite the extreme grammar, this book charmed my socks off. Norris tracks down the person responsible for the hyphen in the title of “Moby-Dick” (it wasn’t Melville). There’s a chapter about dirty words, suitably salty. And Norris is passionate on the subject of pencils, describing them as seductively as others write about wine. Her current love is the “delicious” Blackwing, with its soft lead and flat eraser. On a pilgrimage to a pencil sharpener museum in Ohio (yes), only a sign warning that patrons were under surveillance, she writes, “kept me from dancing.”

Norris is a master storyteller and serves up plenty of inside stuff. When Mark Singer wrote an article about the cost of going to the movies and buying refreshments, the editors cut his reference to Junior Mints. As one editor intoned, “A New Yorker writer should not be eating Junior Mints.” Norris tells of the night she mopped up after Lillian Ross’s poodle, Goldie. She was even propositioned by Philip Roth! Well, sort of. She made a good catch in one of his pieces, and he replied: “Who is this woman? And will she come live with me?” She’s been smitten ever since: “If he should ever read this I just want to say I’m still available.”

(Patricia T. O’Conner’s books on language include “Woe Is I” and, most recently, “Origins of the Specious,” written with Stewart Kellerman. They blog about language at Grammarphobia.com.)

From the April 19, 2015, print edition of the New York Times Book Review.

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English English language Etymology Linguistics Usage Word origin

That’s not us—it’s nature!

Q: My dictionary says nature is the entire physical universe. But for most of us, nature is what’s out there and not human. My question (which I don’t expect answered) is thus: When did we humans look around and say, “That’s not us—it’s nature”?

A: You’re right. We can’t tell you when the first human beings said, in whatever prehistoric language they were speaking, “That’s not us—it’s nature.”

But we can tell you when English speakers began referring to the physical world, as opposed to humans and their creations, as “nature.” It was around 600 years ago. Here’s the story.

English borrowed the noun “nature” in the 13th century from the Anglo-Norman and Old French word nature, but its ultimate source is Latin, where natura meant birth, constitution, character, the physical world, and many other things.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that natura and nature had many earthy meanings in Latin and Anglo-Norman.

In classical Latin, for example, natura could mean the genitals, while in medieval Latin, it could mean the need to urinate or defecate; in Anglo-Norman, nature could mean semen or menstrual discharge.

Those bodily senses carried over into English, where “nature” at one time or another meant excrement, semen, menstrual discharge, the female genitals, sexual desire, and female sexual secretions.

Those senses are now obsolete or rare, but one earthy meaning is still with us: the need to urinate or defecate, as in “the call of nature.”

When “nature” first showed up in English, according to the OED, it referred to the “vital or physical powers of a person; a person’s physical strength or constitution.”

The earliest example in the dictionary is from a Kentish sermon, written around 1275: “Þe nature of Man is of greater strengþe and of greater hete ine þo age” (“The nature of Man is of greater strength and greater promise in early age”).

A little over a century later, “nature” came to mean the “inherent dominating power or impulse in a person by which character or action is determined, directed, or controlled,” according to the OED.

The earliest Oxford citation for this sense is from “The Tale of Melibeus” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (circa 1390): “Nature defendeth and forbedeth by right that no man make hym self riche vn to the harm of another persone.”

Around the same time, “nature” took on the sense of the “innate or characteristic disposition of a particular person, animal, etc.,” the OED says.

In Confessio Amantis, a poem written by John Gower sometime before 1393, Morpheus is described as someone “whos nature Is forto take the figure Of what persone that him liketh.”

Rather than describe all the many meanings of “nature,” we’ll skip ahead to the sense you’ve asked about, which the OED defines as the “phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Cleanness, an anonymous  Middle English poem, written around 1400, about married life. The citation here refers to the infant Jesus:

“Þe ox & þe asse … knewe hym by his clannes for Kyng of nature” (“The ox and the ass knew him by his purity for the King of nature”).

We’ll end with a 20th-century example from The Age of Gods, a 1928 study by the British historian Christopher Dawson about prehistoric culture:

“Man was entirely at the mercy of nature—a mere scavenger who eked out a miserable existence as a food-gatherer and an eater of shell-fish.”

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A “thank-you,” and an appeal

We’d like to extend our thanks to those of you who contributed to the Grammarphobia Blog when we asked for help a few months ago, as well as to our long-time contributors.

One of our readers responded, “I really enjoy the blog, but I never thought about the business model (or lack thereof).”

Well, if we have a “business model,” this is it. The blog is free. We don’t have a paywall, we don’t charge for subscriptions, and we don’t accept ads.

Of course this means we don’t have any income, either! The two of us spend several hours a day researching and writing all our own content. We also answer many reader questions that don’t make it onto the blog.

We pay all our own expenses: Web hosting, tech support, maintenance, and so on. And we try to keep our standard dictionaries and other reference books up to date, besides covering our annual subscriptions to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and other online resources.

This is why your donations are important. Every reader who clicks the “Donate” button helps keep us blogging, and every donation makes a difference, no matter how small.

So bless all of you who have contributed in the past. And for those who haven’t, please consider supporting the Grammarphobia Blog with a donation.  But whether you contribute or not, thank you for reading and for continuing to send us your questions.

And now, back to work!

Pat and Stewart

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English English language Etymology Expression Linguistics Phrase origin Religion Usage Word origin

Let there be light

Q: After reading your post about the imperative use of “let,” I have a question. What is the function of “let” in the biblical command “Let there be light”? God can’t be addressing the light, since it doesn’t exist yet. So who or what is being addressed? And what purpose does “let” serve here?

A: The English expression “Let there be light” isn’t a literal translation of the Hebrew wording in Genesis: יהי אור. A word for word translation would be “exist light” or “light will be” or some variation.

So a literal translation of the full Hebrew text of Genesis 1:3, ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי־אור, could be “And God said, ‘Light will be,’ and light was.” (We’ve added capitalization and punctuation.)

However, let’s not get too literal. The usual English translation (“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”) accurately and elegantly reflects the sense of the Hebrew.

Although the Hebrew phrase יהי אור may literally mean “light will be,” it’s in the jussive mood, which in Semitic languages expresses a weak or an indirect command.

Biblical translators have generally felt that “Let there be light” is the best wording to represent the jussive mood of יהי אור in Genesis 1:3. And we can’t think of a better one.

The biblical scholar Nahum M. Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, discusses the use of יהי (“be” or “exist”) in Verse 3: “The directive yehi, found again in Verses 6 and 14, is reserved for the creation of celestial phenomena.”

In our opinion, you’re right that God isn’t addressing the light. He’s not addressing anyone or anything here. He’s simply creating light—that is, ordering that light exist.

In fact, it’s not clear that God is even speaking. The Hebrew verb אמר may mean “intend” as well as “say.” In this case, it may simply be a way to express divine will in human language.

(We won’t get into the old question of where the light came from, since the sun hadn’t been created yet. Biblical scholars have spent a lot of time on this already.)

What purpose, you ask, does “let” serve in the expression “Let there be light”?

When the imperative “let” is used in the sense of “allow” or “permit” or “cause,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can function as an auxiliary to the infinitive that follows—“be,” “bring forth,” and so on.

The OED gives several examples of the usage, including this one from The Mariner’s Magazine, a 1669 book by Samuel Sturmy about nautical navigation: “Let there be an hole about an Inch deep, which shall serve to Prime it with Powder-dust.”

The English scholar and clergyman William Tyndale is credited with introducing the expression “Let there be light” in his 1525 translation of the Bible.

His Bible was the first to appear in print in English, though John Wycliffe and others translated full or partial versions in English before the advent of printing.

Tyndale’s poetic biblical writing has given us such familiar phrases as “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “eat, drink, and be merry,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” and “my brother’s keeper.”

And his translation heavily influenced the King James Version. In The Social Universe of the English Bible (2010), Naomi Tadmor writes that “about 83 per cent of the New Testament is deemed to be based on Tyndale and 76 per cent of the Old.”

But Tyndale ran afoul of Henry VIII by opposing the king’s plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. As a result, Tyndale met a grisly end.

On Oct. 6, 1536, he was convicted of heresy and put to death at Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels by being strangled and burned at the stake.

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Paralinguistically speaking

Q: My wife and I were alone in our car and having a general discussion when she lowered her voice and said, “Everyone knows her husband is having an affair.” Has anyone studied this strange behavior in mentioning a sensitive topic?

A: Yes, language scholars have indeed looked into this behavior. The study of pitch, loudness, speed, hesitation, and similar qualities of speech is referred to as “paralinguistics,” and this aspect of communication is called “paralanguage.”

In his 1975 paper “Paralinguistics,” the linguist David Crystal says the “para-” prefix (meaning “beyond” or “outside of”) “was originally chosen to reflect a view that such features as speed and loudness of speaking were marginal to the linguistic system.”

However, Crystal writes, studies in social psychology, psychiatry, sociolinguistics, and other areas “suggest that the vocal effects called paralinguistic may be rather more central to the study of communication than was previously thought.”

“Certainly, observations of people’s everyday reactions to language suggest that paralinguistic phenomena, far from being marginal, are frequently the primary determinants of behaviour in an interaction,” he says.

Although “the most widely recognized function” of paralanguage is for emotional expression, he adds, a “far more important and pervasive” function “is the use of paralinguistic features as markers of an utterance’s grammatical structure.”

In other words, the use of paralanguage in speech replaces the punctuation and spacing that’s so important in making written language intelligible.

Crystal discusses several kinds of paralanguage. An extended low pitch, for example, may be used “as a marker of parenthesis (e.g. ‘My cousin—you know, the one who lives in Liverpool—he’s just got a new job’).”

A rise in loudness may be used “as a marker of increased emphasis (‘I want the red one, not the green one’).”

An increase is speed may indicate “that the speaker wishes to forestall an interruption, or to suggest that what he is saying need not be given careful attention.”

A sentence spoken with a noticeable metrical beat may “suggest irritation, e.g. ‘I really think that John and Mary should have asked.’ ”

The kind of voice-lowering you’re asking about could be considered a marker of parenthesis. Crystal doesn’t cite an example like yours, but other language researchers say a whispered or lowered voice may accompany confidential or embarrassing comments.

In Principles of Phonetics (1994), for example, the linguist John Laver writes that the paralinguistic use of whisper may “signal secrecy and confidentiality.”

And in Simultaneous Structure in Phonology (2014), the linguist D. Robert Ladd writes, “A speaker’s voice may be raised in anger or lowered to convey something confidential.”

The linguist Carlos Gussenhoven, writing in The Phonology of Tone and Intonation (2004), says people may raise their pitch “to express surprised indignation” and “lower it to suggest confidentiality.”

And in a study entitled “The Roles of Breathy/Whispery Voice Qualities in Dialogue Speech” (2008), Carlos Toshinori Ishi, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita say that a “more whispered and low-powered voice quality” may reflect embarrassment.

(The three authors, who specialize in robotics, attempt to apply paralinguistics to synthesized speech.)

We can’t end this without mentioning a book that we came across while researching your question.

In Playing With My Dog Katie: An Ethnomethodological Study of Dog-Human Interaction (2007), the sociologist David Goode discusses his embarrassing “over-reliance on paralinguistic features of vocalization” in relating to his pet.

As the owners of two young golden retrievers, we know what’s he’s ethnomethodologically talking about.

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When the subject is a dummy

Q: I’ve read your recent post on deconstructing “it” and I have one additional question. What does “it” refer to in sentences like “It is raining” and “It is snowing”? I’ve heard various explanations of this usage, but I’d appreciate your take on it.

A: English speakers have been using the pronoun “it” to talk about the weather since Anglo-Saxon days. The “it” that we use to denote weather conditions (“it was drizzling” … “it’s hot”) is often called a “dummy” or “empty” or “artificial” subject.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says the “it” here has no semantic meaning and serves “the purely syntactic function of filling the obligatory subject position.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes this “it” as “a semantically empty or non-referential subject” that dates back to Old English, where it was frequently used in statements about the weather.

The OED’s earliest recorded usage in reference to weather is from an Old English translation, possibly written around the 10th century, of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which he probably completed in Latin in 731.

In the relevant passage, “hit rine & sniwe & styrme ute” (“it rain & snow & storm out”), the verbs are in the subjunctive.

We’ll expand the OED citation and give a modern English translation: “as if you at feasting should sit with your lords and subjects in winter-time, and a fire be lit and your hall warmed, and it should rain and snow and storm outside.”

This Middle English example from around 1300 needs no translating: “Hor-frost cometh whan hit is cold.”

The  “it” we use in statements about the weather, according to the OED, is part of a broader category of usages in which the pronoun is “the subject of an impersonal verb or impersonal statement, expressing action or a condition of things simply, without reference to any agent.”

These usages would include statements about the time or the season (“it was about noon” … “it was winter”); about space, distance, or time (“it was long ago” … “it’s too far”); and about other kinds of conditions (“how is it going?” … “it was awkward” … “if it weren’t for the inconvenience”).

The Cambridge Grammar wouldn’t use the term “dummy subject” to describe most of these non-weather usages. In its view, a dummy subject “cannot be replaced by any other NP [noun phrase].”

So Cambridge regards the “it” in a sentence like “It is five o’clock” or “It is July 1” as a predicative complement rather than a dummy subject, because “it” could be replaced by “the time” or “the date.”

Some linguists, however, might argue that none of the “it” usages we’ve discussed are true dummy subjects, but we’ll stop here.

To quote Shakespeare (Macbeth, around 1606), “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twer well, / It were done quickly.”

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No problem at all

[Note: A May 30, 2022, post discusses “all,” “albeit” and “although.”]

Q: I’m struck by the strangeness of the phraselet “at all.” It seems to pop up everywhere, with a clear connotation but not much denotation at all. Is it shorthand for “at all events”? Seems to me it’s used in cases where the full phrase wouldn’t work at all.

A: “At all” is one of those phraselets (we like your term) that defy literal interpretation.

It functions as an adverb, but taken individually the words “at” and “all” don’t seem to add up to what the idiom means. And what exactly does “at all” mean?

The Oxford English Dictionary says “at all” has been used three ways since it showed up in the mid-1300s: in negative or conditional statements, in interrogative usages, and in affirmative statements (though this sense has generally died out).

When used in negative or conditional “if” statements, according to the OED, “at all” means “in any way,” “to any degree,” “in the least,” or “whatsoever.”

Examples date back to the 15th century and include “stryve not at al” (1476); “no peace at all” (1535); “If thy father at all misse me” (1611); “not at all visible” (1664); “If he refuses to govern us at all” (1849), and “no problem at all” (1975).

When used in questions, the OED says, “at all” has somewhat similar meanings—“in the least,” “in any way,” “for any reason,” “to any extent,” and “under any circumstances.”

Interrogative usages date back to the 16th century, and among the OED’s citations are “what power can it haue on you at all?” (1566); “shall I not vse Tabacco at all?” (1600); “why should he at all regard it?” (1683), and “Why should people care about football at all?” (2008).

But before these negative, conditional, and interrogative usages came into being, “at all” was used in affirmative statements to mean “in every way,” “altogether,” “wholly,” and “solely,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s earliest example, from about 1350, is  “I þe coniure & comande att alle” (I thee conjure and command at all).

The affirmative use of the phrase has died out in common usage, however, and now survives only in some regional dialects of American and Irish English.

A 1945 article in the journal American Speech says this affirmative use “lives on in Irish dialect and in colloquial speech in certain parts of America, especially after a superlative.”

The article, which gives “We had the best time at all” for an example, says the usage was reported in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, elsewhere in the South, and the Midwest.

The Dictionary of American Regional English has 20th-century examples of the affirmative usage from Virginia, Louisiana, West Virginia, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

In affirmative constructions in US regional English, “at all” means “of all” or “only,” according to the DARE.

The regional dictionary cites such examples as “He is the greatest man at all” (1916), “We had the best time at all” (1936), “She’s the finest girl at all” (1942), and “Use one statement at all” (1976).

As for the preposition in “at all,” the OED has this to say: “At is used to denote relations of so many kinds, and some of these so remote from its primary local sense, that a classification of its uses is very difficult.”

Well, we hope this sheds a little light on an idiomatic phrase (or phraselet) that today eludes a word-for-word interpretation.

Finally, a few words about “all,” an extremely useful word.

It functions as many parts of speech: adjective (“all day” … “we all went”); pronoun (“all you need” … “all is well”); noun (“he gave his all” … “the one versus the all”); and adverb (“all dirty” … “it’s all a dream”).

For many centuries, since the days of Old English, the adverb has been used with prepositions in interesting ways to emphasize, affirm, or otherwise modify a verb.

This is where “at all” comes in. But there are many other such phrases, too many to mention in all (there’s one now!).

For example, we use “all” with prepositions to mean “the entire way” or “fully.” The OED’s citations, dating back to early Old English, include quotations from Lord Nelson (“all round the compass,” 1795); Thomas Macaulay (“all down the Rhine,” 1849); and Bob Dylan (“all along the watchtower,” 1968).

We use both “all of” and “of all,” but for different purposes. Similarly we use “in all” and “all in” (as in “I’m all in”). And we often use “all” with “for” and “to”—as in “all to [or for] nought,” “all to hell,” “a free for all,” “all for it,” “all for one and one for all,” and many others.

“All” is also used with words that look like prepositions but are in fact adverbs: “I knew all along” … “they’re all alone” … “go all out” … “look all over” … “fall all round” … “lie all around,” hemmed all about,” and more.

“All” is such an ancient part of the language that its fossilized traces were evident in words from as far back as early Old English, when it appeared as ael– in compounds.

Remnants are seen today in words like “also,” “always,” “although,” “altogether,” “almighty,” and others.

We mentioned above that “all” can be an adjective, a pronoun, a noun, or an adverb. But once upon a time it was a conjunction as well.

The use of “all” as a conjunction is almost unknown today, but a trace of the old conjunction lives on in the word “albeit,” which is derived from the old phrase “all be it.”

With that, we’re all done.

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Andy Borowitz will be filling in for Leonard as guest host. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Goody goody

Q: I’m fascinated by reduplicatives, especially those whose segments have no particular meaning on their own: “bow-wow,” “choo-choo,” “flim-flam,” “helter-skelter,” etc. I’ve often wondered why we refer to them as “reduplicatives” rather than “duplicatives.”

A: We once wrote a post on the reduplicative copula (“the thing is … is”), a usage that bugs a lot of people. But we haven’t written about the kind of reduplicatives you’re talking about.

In their Dictionary of Linguistics (1954), Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor define “reduplication” as “the complete or partial repetition of an element or elements.” And “reduplicative words” are “words of recurring sound and meaning (e.g., chit-chat).”

In the 60 years since then, other linguists have defined “reduplication” in other ways. Some, for example, have drawn a distinction between repeated sounds and repeated meanings. But we won’t get into that.

Suffice it to say that “reduplication” is a technical term in linguistics, and that the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions for “reduplication” and “reduplicative” used in the linguistic sense are similar to those of Pei and Gaynor.

But as the OED says, “reduplication” in a more general, nonlinguistic sense simply means a doubling, repetition, or duplication.

So you ask a very good question—why do linguists use the “re-” prefix? If “duplication” means copying something once, then “reduplication” would imply copying something more than once, wouldn’t it?

Well, not necessarily, because “re-” doesn’t always mean “again” or “once more.” Sometimes it implies “back” or “backward,” as in words like “respect” (whose Latin roots mean to look back at), “revoke” (call back), “repay” (pay back), “remit” (send back), “remove” (move back), and others.

It could be that the “re-” of “reduplication” in the linguistic sense originally had this same meaning, implying “back” instead of “again.” Unfortunately, we can’t say for sure that this is the case; we can only suggest it.

The word ultimately comes from the classical Latin verb reduplicare, meaning to double. (The Latin verb duplicare also meant to double.)

In the Latin of the third century and later, reduplication– or reduplicatio came to be used as a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word, according to the OED.

But it’s difficult to tell how the Romans—classical or later—viewed the “re-” in these words, and whether it originally meant “back” or “again.”

As the OED explains, “The original sense of re– in Latin is ‘back’ or ‘backwards,’ but in the large number of words in which it occurs it shows various shades of meaning.”

“Even in Latin,” the dictionary continues, “the precise sense of re– is not always clear, and in many words the development of secondary meanings tends greatly to obscure its original force. This loss of distinct meaning is naturally increased in English, where a word has often been adopted in a sense more or less remote from its original sense.”

In English, “reduplication” has had several meanings since it first entered the language, perhaps as long ago as the early 1400s. Early on, it was used in anatomy and zoology, for instance, to mean a doubling over or folding.

The “reduplication” we’re talking about, the name we now use for words like “mishmash” and “namby-pamby,” came into English in the 16th century. It’s defined in the OED as the “exact or partial repetition of a word, phrase, etc.”

But in some early uses of “reduplication” in this linguistic sense, it meant something similar to “epanalepsis,” a rhetorical device in which a an earlier word or phrase is repeated at some later point. This might be interpreted as a looking backward. Here are two OED citations:

“Marke heere againe, how the Prophet resumeth his first admiration, by a Poeticall Epanalepsis or reduplication.” (From the undated Atheomastix, a posthumously published religious treatise by Martin Fotherby, 1560-1620.)

“Reduplication … is a figure in Rhetoric, when the same word that ends one part of a verse or sentence, is repeated in that which follows.” (From Thomas Blount’s dictionary Glossographia, 1656.)

So it’s reasonable to suggest that “reduplication” in poetry or rhetoric originally meant something like “backward duplication” instead of “repeated duplication.”

The modern linguistics terms “reduplication” and “reduplicative” are derived from those earlier literary and rhetorical uses. But though the words have been handed down intact, today the “re-” seems far removed from the “back” sense and apparently means simple repetition.

Here, for example, is a contemporary citation, from L. J. Brinton’s Structure of Modern English (2000): “In English, reduplication is often used in children’s language (e.g., boo-boo, putt-putt) … or for humorous or ironic effect (e.g., goody-goody, rah-rah).”

And this OED citation, for the adjective “reduplicative,” is from B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour (1959): “A fragmentary self-echoic behavior … may be shown in reduplicative forms like helter-skelter, razzle-dazzle, and willy-nilly.”

In the end, what we’re suggesting is that the “re-” in “reduplication” and “reduplicative” may have originally implied “back” or “backward.” And the modern terms in linguistics have preserved the “re-” prefix even though the meaning of it has changed. That would explain why today the prefix looks redundant.

In our readings about reduplication, we came across an interesting use of the term in art criticism to refer to a visual doubling.

In an essay on photography, the art critic Craig Owens uses the word “reduplication” to characterize a mid-19th-century “double portrait” of a woman who is seen alongside her reflection in a mirror:

“If we speak of this image, and of others like it, as reduplicative, it is because reduplication signifies ‘to reproduce in reflection,’ ” he says in his book Beyond Recognition (1994).

Owens seems to be using the term in the going-back sense to refer to an image seen in reflection. In fact, he draws a parallel to rhetorical reduplication.

“In classical rhetoric,” he writes, “reduplication was a species of repetition, distinguished by the reiteration of a word or phrase within the same part of a sentence or clause.”

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Deconstructing “it”

Q: I’m flummoxed by the word “it” in a sentence such as “I like it when you sing.” What in the world is “it” doing there?

A: The sentence that puzzles you, “I like it when you sing,” is a familiar construction, especially in spoken English. We find nothing grammatically wrong here, as we’ll explain later.

But you’re right—on close examination, this familiar old pattern seems curiouser and curiouser.

In sentences like this a verb, often one expressing a state of mind (“like,” “love,” “hate,” “appreciate,” etc.), has as its object the pronoun “it,” followed by a clause beginning with “when.” (A clause, as you know, is a group of words that has a verb and its subject.)

Here are some similar examples: “She loves it when he smiles” … “I hate it when people swear” … “Mom and dad appreciate it when you do the dishes” … “He always regrets it when he’s rude.”

All of these examples seem quite innocent on the surface. But what’s happening underneath?

As you can see, there are two clauses here. Using your original sentence as our model, the clauses are “I like it” and “when you sing.”

In the main clause, “it” is the direct object of the verb “like.” And to identify what “it” is, the speaker follows with a subordinate clause that begins with “when” and names an event or circumstance.

So the “when”-clause is an object too, in a sense. It explains what the object “it” refers to: an occasion on which someone sings. So in that sense the “when”-clause resembles a noun clause.

But it also seems to have an adverbial use, since it says when something happens. It describes the condition required for the main clause to be true. So instead of referring to a time, this “when” refers to a situation.

Often sentences like these can be reversed: “I like it when you sing” neatly corresponds to “When you sing, I like it.” In the second version, “it” refers back, instead of forward, to the explanatory “when”-clause.

But you wouldn’t want to move a “when”-clause to the front unless it’s fairly short and simple. Here’s a sentence that would sound clunky if flipped:

“I hate it when a birthday invitation says ‘No gifts, please’ and then everyone but you brings one anyway.” There’s no felicitous way to move “I hate it” to the end.

Linguists have interpreted this kind of construction in many different ways over the years. For example, they’ve used a variety of terms in discussing the role played by “it.”

In A Grammar of the English Language (1931), George O. Curme interprets this “it” as “an anticipatory object” that points forward to a fuller object clause.

In his book When-Clauses and Temporal Structure (1997), Renaat Declerck calls this a “cataphoric” or “anticipatory” pronoun, one that depends on the “when”-clause for its meaning. (A “cataphoric” pronoun is one that refers to a following word or phrase.)

Other commentators have described this “it” as an “expletive” or “pleonastic” pronoun—one with no meaning of its own, but merely a sort of placeholder required by the word order.

But we’ve also found arguments that the pronoun is not “pleonastic”: it’s not without meaning, since it refers to an event.

Linguists have also disagreed in their views of the “when”-clause in sentences like these—is it a relative clause, a noun clause, an adverbial clause, or perhaps some combination of those?

Declerck regards these clauses as adverbial. And when preceded by “it” acting as an object, he writes, they are “extraposed when-clauses.” (Essentially, an element is “extraposed” when the pronoun takes its place and shoves it aside.)

Without the “it” (as in “I don’t like when people argue”), the “when”-clause itself “fills the object position,” Declerck writes. So in that case the clause is not “extraposed.”

As we mentioned above, we find nothing grammatically wrong with sentences such as “I like it when you sing.” They seem natural and idiomatic, and they work well. But they do seem more at home in informal or spoken English.

No usage authorities, to our knowledge, have condemned the use of a “when”-clause to describe an event. And the use of “it” as an object that’s then echoed by the “real” object is also a common feature of English, as in “I like it, this movie,” and “He loathes it, that old eyesore.”

So we have no quarrel with these “when”-clauses in spoken or informal English, but if you prefer to avoid them you certainly can. Many constructions are similar, though in some cases they may be subtly different.

Declerck says, for example, that “I hate it when you talk like that” will generally be interpreted as similar to “I hate your talking like that.”

But the two don’t mean precisely the same thing. One refers to an occasion, the other to what could be habitual behavior. If the person you’re addressing always talks like that, then either construction would be appropriate.

Another kind of substitution comes to mind. You can often replace “when” by “that” and still make grammatical sense.

But again, your meaning may be changed. “I like it when you sing” isn’t the same as “I like it that you sing.” In the first sentence, the object of the liking—“it”—is not the fact that the person sings, but occasions when the person sings.

A few years ago we wrote a post on a similar subject, the use of “when”-clauses in definitions after forms of the verb “be.” (Example: “Despair is when you see no way out.”)

As we wrote then, this construction is common and has a long history, but it’s been considered colloquial since the mid-19th century. It’s common in speech and casual writing, but it’s generally avoided in formal English.

If you see “when”-clauses after the verb “be” in formal writing, it’s usually in reference to time, as in “Yesterday was when I heard the news” or “This is when you should change the oil.”

And now is when we should sign off.

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Have you got rhythm?

Q: Near the bottom of your home page, you ask, “Have you GOT rhythm?”  No, Simple Simon Babblers, I AIN’T GOT NO rhythm. I’m sick of YOU GOT. What ever happened to YOU HAVE? Correct English would be “Have you rhythm?”

A: Calm down.

The title “Have you got rhythm?” on our home page uses “got” quite correctly. “Have you got” here is the present-perfect form of the verb “get,” used in the second person.

The present-perfect of “get” has been used to denote mere possession (that is, to mean “have”) since the 16th century, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

The earliest example of the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, written in the late 1590s:

“What a beard hast thou got; thou hast got more haire on thy chinne, then Dobbin my philhorse hase on his taile.”

Merriam-Webster’s also cites examples from Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and others.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some language commentators objected to the usage, complaining that “got” was superfluous. However, contemporary usage guides accept “have got,” though some consider it informal.

There are two theories about why English speakers began using “have got” to mean “have.”

One is that the verb “have” began losing its sense of possession because of its increasing use as an auxiliary.

The other theory is that “got” was originally inserted because of the tendency to use contracted forms of the verb “have.” So a clunky sentence like “I’ve a cat” became “I’ve got a cat.”

Philip Boswood Ballard, writing in Teaching the Mother Tongue (1921), argues that the “have got” version “implies a stronger sense of possession”  than a simple “have.” We tend to agree.

In case you didn’t know, the headline on our home page was a play on words, a reference to the song “I Got Rhythm,” by George and Ira Gershwin.

Granted, the song title used “got” in a deliberately slangy, nonstandard way. The technically correct version would have been “I’ve Got Rhythm,” though as we’ve said before, song lyricists are allowed poetic license.

The title we wrote, however, is correct. In Teaching the Mother Tongue, Ballard dismisses the objection to “have got” as “a counterfeit invented by schoolmasters.”

Sir Ernest Gowers, writing in the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965), cites Ballard’s comment and adds, “Acceptance of this verdict is here recommended.”

Nobody objects, of course, to the use of “have got” to mean “have acquired,” though Americans generally use “have gotten” in this sense. The British once used “have gotten” too, as we pointed out back in 2006.

Keep in mind that “get” is an entirely separate verb from “have,” though some of its tenses use the auxiliary “have,” as we wrote on our blog in 2008 and 2010:

We’ve also examined the modern colloquial usage “I got this” (meaning something akin to “This one is mine” or “I’ll take care of this”).

And you may be interested in a comparison of two “have got” usages in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: “She has got a swimming pool” and “She has got to swim each day.”

In examples like the first, the Cambridge Grammar notes, “have got” appears “with an NP [noun phrase] object … expressing possession and similar relations.”

In examples like the second, according to Cambridge, it’s “a catenative verb with a to-infinitival complement  … where the meaning is of obligation or necessity, much like must.”

A catenative verb is one linked to another verb form—in this case, “has got” and “to swim” are linked in meaning “must swim.”

We’ll end with an example of the “have got” usage you asked about, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carroll:

“Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed?”

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: On Thanksgiving tables, New World foods with Old World names. If you miss the program, you can listen to the show  on Pat’s WNYC page.
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The imperative’s new clothes?

Q: I’ve searched all over the Internet for an explanation of the third-person imperative, but everybody seems to have a different opinion. I’m thoroughly confused. If you can help, I’ll be forever thankful.

A: Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the “third-person imperative.” But there are second-person imperatives that are addressed to third-person subjects, as we’ll explain.

The imperative mood is used for expressing commands, requests, and so on. So by its very nature an imperative is directly addressed to someone, and an imperative sentence typically has the second-person “you” as its implied subject.

This “you” is generally omitted, as in “Have a drink” … “Hurry up!” … “Look!” … “Be a pal.” But sometimes it’s present: “You be careful” … “Go away, you!”

At times, the implied “you” is represented by “someone” or “somebody” or some other subject that’s grammatically in the third person. Examples: “Someone please make coffee” …  “Dim the lights, somebody” … “Those with tickets form a line to the right” … “Passengers please remain seated.”

Those are examples of imperatives in which the people being addressed are expressed in the third person and not as “you.” But nevertheless, these are all second-person constructions, because the speaker directly addresses the subject.

As Otto Jespersen writes in his Essentials of English Grammar (1933), “Any imperative is virtually in the second person, even if seemingly addressed to a ‘third person.’ ”

Jespersen uses these examples: “Oh, please, someone go in and tell her” … “And bring out my hat, somebody, will you.”  He says that in such sentences, words like “someone” or “somebody” mean “one of you present.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language explains that when an imperative is addressed to “somebody” or “all those in the front row,” the subjects “are also interpreted as ‘somebody among you,’ ‘all those of you in the front row.’ ”

So don’t be misled by imperatives addressed to subjects expressed in the third-person. These are still second-person constructions.

We found another explanation in A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the English Imperative (2012), by Hidemitsu Takahashi.

The author says “an inherent feature of the imperative” is “the second person of the understood subject.”

This is true, Takahashi says, even when an imperative has an apparently third-person subject, as in (a) “Someone get the barf bag!” (b) “Everyone stand up!” and (c ) “All the boys come forward.”

As the author writes, “The form of imperative subjects such as someone and all the boys is clearly in the third person but their referent is in the second person.”

Those subjects, Takahashi says, are “only superficially in the third person” and “are conceptually in the second person, where the imperative is directed at non-individuated addressees”—that is, to no one in particular.

Even when you’re mentally speaking to yourself (“Where did I put my keys? Let me see. Stop and think now”), you’re addressing yourself from the outside, as if you were speaking to a second-person “you.”

In fact, the addressee doesn’t have to be a person at all—you could be swearing at your car: “Start, dammit!” The car may not be a person, but you’re addressing it as if it were—in the second person.

In short, there is no “third-person imperative.”

Many grammarians, however, recognize another kind of imperative. The Cambridge Grammar calls this the “1st person inclusive let-imperative”—as in the examples “Let’s open the window” and “Let’s borrow Kim’s car.”

Don’t misunderstand us here. This is not the same “let” as the one used to mean “allow,” as in “Let them go” or “Just let the baby cry.” Those are second-person imperatives addressed to an assumed “you.”

This “1st person inclusive let-imperative,” sometimes called the “let’s imperative,” has an implied “we” as its subject. The command, request, or whatever is addressed to the speaker plus one or more others, so it’s in the first-person plural. (Some grammarians, in fact, call it the “first-person plural imperative.”)

As Cambridge says, the verb “let” in sentences like “Let’s open the window” and “Let’s borrow Kim’s car” has been “bleached” of the old meaning (“allow”), and now “serves as a marker of this special type of imperative construction.”

Although all of this may seem complicated, the imperative form itself couldn’t be simpler—it’s always identical to the bare (that is, the “to”-less) infinitive. And it can be complete in itself, since an imperative sentence can consist of only a single word: “Eat!”

Imperatives are probably among the most primitive grammatical constructions, and they’re an indispensable feature of language. What would we do without them?

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The genitive wars

Q: I question the use of an apostrophe in “Seven Years’ War.” I assume that “Seven Years” is simply an adjectival phrase modifying the noun “War.” However, your “Sui Genitive!” post supports the apostrophe. I have a book on the subject due for publication next year, and I want the correct punctuation on the cover!

A: In our 2010 post, we say expressions like “a three weeks’ holiday” and “in three weeks’ time” have traditionally taken apostrophes.

If you used the noun phrase “a three-week holiday,” no apostrophe would be used; in that case, “three-week” is simply an adjectival phrase.

But “a three weeks’ holiday” is a different animal. Here “three weeks” is a what’s called a genitive construction—the equivalent of “a holiday OF three weeks.”

Similarly, note the apostrophe in such constructions as “he has five years’ experience,” which is equivalent to “experience OF five years, and “a four days’ journey,” which is equivalent to “a journey OF four days” (alternatively, you could use “a four-day journey”).

We’ll quote the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., p. 356) on the use of the apostrophe with genitives:

“Analogous to possessives, and formed like them, are certain expressions based on the old genitive case. The genitive here implies of: in three days’ time; an hour’s delay (or a one-hour delay); six months’ leave of absence (or a six-month leave of absence).”

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed., p. 647), has the same information. Periods of time and statements of worth are expressed with apostrophes. Garner’s gives these examples: “30 days’ notice (i.e., notice of 30 days), three days’ time, 20 dollars’ worth, and several years’ experience.”

Getting back to your question, “Seven Years’ War” generally takes an apostrophe for the same reason, though it’s sometimes seen without one. Ditto “Hundred Years’ War” and “Thirty Years’ War.”

It would be grammatically correct, of course, to refer to the three conflicts as the “Seven-Year War,” the “Hundred-Year War,” and the “Thirty-Year War,” but those aren’t their traditional names.

However, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War is often referred to as the “Six-Day War,” using an adjectival rather than a genitive construction.

In a 2013 post on our blog, we describe the difference between an adjectival phrase like “two-dollar word” and a genitive phrase like “Thirty Years’ War.”

As we note, “adjectival phrases consisting of a number plus a noun (like “thirty-year” and “two-dollar”) are normally formed with a singular noun (“year,” “dollar”).

In a genitive version of such a construction, the phrase becomes plural, loses its hyphen, and gains an apostrophe.

Our 2013 post includes a note about historical names, including the names of wars, which “develop through common usage, and not according to grammatical rules.”

“That accounts for why we see both ‘the Thirty Years’ War’ (a genitive usage for ‘a war of thirty years’), and ‘the Six-Day War’ (a simple adjectival phrase),” we write.

If you need a big gun as your authority, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the subject of your book this way: “Seven Years’ War, the third Silesian war (1756–1763), in which Austria, France, Russia, Saxony, and Sweden were allied against Frederick II of Prussia.”

The OED also has this citation, from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, an 1837 book in which the phrase “seven years” is used in the genitive case (though Carlyle uses a hyphen): “In that seven-years’ sleep of his, so much has changed.”

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The rise and fall of capital letters

Q: In rereading Emily Dickinson’s poems, I’m impressed by her use of midline capitals. Can you shed some light on the capitalization of common nouns in 19th-century America? Is it intended for emphasis?

A: When William Caxton introduced printing to England in the 15th century, “great uncertainty” surrounded the use of capital letters, according to the linguist David Crystal.

In The Stories of English (2004), Crystal writes that capital letters were “first used for proper names as well as for sentence and verse-line openings.”

Later, he says, capitals “were extended to any words thought to be important (such as titles, terms of address, and personification) as well as to words receiving special emphasis.”

“During the seventeenth century, virtually any word might be capitalized, if it were felt to be significant, and compositors—to be on the safe side—tended to over-capitalize,” he writes.

In the 19th century, he adds, “a reaction set in against excessive capitalization … and we find the present-day system emerging.”

“Then as now there were heavy and light capitalizers, as well as heavy and light punctuators,” Crystal says. “Indeed, this is one of the areas where standard English is still most unstable, as a glance at the ‘sometimes capitalized’ note in modern dictionaries suggests.”

In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Crystal expands on some of these points, noting efforts by John Hart, a 16th-century grammarian and spelling reformer, to bring some order to the language.

“Hart recommended his readers to use a capital letter at the beginning of every sentence, proper name, and important common noun,” he writes. “By the 17th century, the practice had extended to titles (Sir, Lady), forms of address (Father, Mistris), and personified nouns (Nature).  Emphasized words and phrases would also attract a capital.”

By the beginning of the 18th century, Crystal writes, “the influence of Continental books had caused this practice to be extended still further (e.g. to the names of the branches of knowledge), and it was not long before some writers began using a capital for any noun that they felt to be important.”

“Books appeared in which all or most nouns were given an initial capital (as is done systematically in modern German)— perhaps for aesthetic reasons, or perhaps because printers were uncertain about which nouns to capitalize, and so capitalized them all,” he writes.

Crystal says the use of capitals “was at its height in the later 17th century, and continued into the 18th. The manuscripts of Butler, Traherne, Swift, and Pope are full of initial capitals.”

“However, the later 18th-century grammarians were not amused by this apparent lack of discipline in the written language,” he says. “In their view, the proliferation of capitals was unnecessary, and causing the loss of a useful potential distinction. Their rules brought a dramatic reduction in the types of noun permitted to take a capital letter.”

We’ll end with “This Is My Letter to the World,” a poem in which Emily Dickinson uses capital letters liberally:

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me

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Grammar term limits

Q: What part of speech is “here” in the sentence “It is here”? In your post about “Here it is,” you say “here” is an adverb. But my understanding is that “to be” is a linking verb that takes an adjective or a noun as a complement, not an adverb. Yours confusedly.

A: You’ve put your finger on an important problem, one that has prompted linguists and grammarians to rethink the way words have traditionally been categorized.

Your question refers to a 2011 blog post in which we wrote that “here” is an adverb when it means “in this place.” So in the sentences “Here is the key” and “Here it is,” we said, the verb “be” is complemented by the adverb “here.”

It’s not true that “be” must always be complemented by either a noun (as in “He is a man”) or an adjective (“He is tall”).

The complement can also be a “locative” adverb (an adverb of location), like “here,” “there,” “everywhere,” “outside,” “inside,” “in,” “out,” “away,” and so on.

All standard dictionaries, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary, classify this use of  “here” as adverbial.

Oxford’s earliest written examples of “here” used with “be” are “Nys he her” (Old English for “He isn’t here,” circa 1000), and “Here he is and honen he nys” (Middle English for “Here he is and hence he isn’t,” 1175).

In his paper “Retrospective on the Verb ‘To Be’ and the Concept of Being,” published in the book The Logic of Being (1986), Charles H. Kahn discusses “copula” (that is, linking) uses of the verb “be.”

“Among the copula uses of be in a broad sense,” Kahn explains, “are what we may call locative uses, where the complement or predicate expression is not a noun or adjective but a local adverb (here, there) or a prepositional phrase of place (at home, in the marketplace).”

The Collins English Dictionary has a similar explanation. The copula “be,” the editors write, can be “used with an adverbial complement to indicate a relationship of location in space or time (Bill is at the office; the dance is on Saturday).”

You’ll notice that the adverbial complements in those Collins examples are prepositional phrases. This is significant, because “here” and other locative adverbs can be replaced by prepositional phrases.

In fact, some linguists believe that “here” and other locative adverbs used with “be” should be reclassified as prepositions. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is a good example.

The authors of the Cambridge Grammar, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, depart from what they call “the practice of traditional grammar (as reflected, for example, in the classification of words in dictionaries),” and categorize “here,” “there,” “outside,” “indoors,” “away,” “downstairs,” “ashore,” “overseas,” and many more as prepositions.

On the other hand, some language authorities have suggested that the difficulty doesn’t lie in calling “here” an adverb. Instead, it lies in our thinking that “be” is always a mere linking verb that can’t have attributes.

In his book Understanding Grammar (1954), Paul Roberts writes that sometimes “be” is more like the verb “exist”:

“A difficulty in analysis is illustrated by the sentence ‘He is here.’ Linking verbs are usually followed by subjective complements (nouns and adjectives) rather than by adverbs. But is in ‘He is here’ is best considered not a linking verb but a predicating verb, like exists in ‘He exists.’ It is true that is needs a following word to complete its meaning; ‘he is’ is not a finished statement. … If then we consider the is in ‘He is here’ as not a linking verb but a predicating verb with existential meaning, here may be construed conventionally as an adverb modifying a verb.”

That’s the story—so far. The way linguists and lexicographers look at language is always evolving.

So if you’re puzzled about how to pigeonhole the words in “It is here,” you can either change your view of adverbs like “here” and think of them as prepositions, or you can change your thinking about the verb “be,” and think of it as a predicating verb, rather than a linking verb.

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Transitive, intransitive, or both?

Q: I’m appalled by the intransitive use of transitive verbs such as “excite,” “engage,” “inform,” and “entertain.” Then there’s the transitive use of intransitive verbs, as in “grow the economy.” I gag on these, almost as much as “between you and I.”

A: In English, the line dividing transitive and intransitive verbs isn’t as distinct as you might think. Most English verbs—including the ones you mention—can be both.

As we’ve written before here, a verb is said to be transitive when it requires a direct object, as in “She raises the shade.” (The verb’s action is transmitted to an object.) And a verb is intransitive when it doesn’t require an object, as in “The shade rises.”

Some verbs are always one or the other—they’re either transitive (like “raise”) or intransitive (like “rise”). But such one-or-the-other verbs are the exceptions.

As Joseph M. Williams writes in Origins of the English Language (1986), “Most verbs in English are neither strictly transitive nor intransitive.”

It’s true that the verbs you mention—“excite,” “engage,” “inform,” “entertain,” and “grow”—are generally used in limited ways (except for “grow,” they’re mostly used with objects).

But none of them are exclusively transitive or intransitive, according to their entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s a brief summary:

● “Excite,” while usually transitive (used with a direct object, as in “don’t excite the children”), has also been used without one for almost two centuries.

As the OED says, “excite” is used in modern English to mean “to move to strong emotion, stir to passion; to stir up to eager tumultuous feeling, whether pleasurable or painful.” And in this sense it’s sometimes used intransitively.

An early 19th-century example in the OED suggests to us that the intransitive “excite” may have originated as fashionable London slang. Here’s the citation, from a footnote in Pierce Egan’s novel Life in London (1821): “If some of the plates should appear rather warm, the purchasers of ‘Life in London’ may feel assured, that nothing is added to them tending to excite.” (In his novel, Egan italicized slang words.)

The OED also gives this later example of the verb’s intransitive usage: “Last week’s legitimate television drama failed to excite” (from a BBC publication, the Listener, 1968).

● “Engage,” usually transitive, has had intransitive (or “absolute”) uses since the mid-17th century. The OED has a representative example from 1693: “When Beauty ceases to engage” (from a poem by Matthew Prior).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says that “engage” used intransitively can also mean, among other things, “to involve oneself” or “participate.”

● “Inform,” originally transitive, began acquiring intransitive uses in the 16th century. The OED’s examples include these: “They held that the Senses inform not alwaies truly” (from the classical scholar Thomas Stanley, 1656) …  “The basis of the patient’s claim is essentially the doctor’s failure to inform of risks” (the Modern Law Review, 1989).

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says that “inform” used intransitively means “to impart information or knowledge.”

● “Entertain,” which also started out as a transitive verb, has had intransitive senses since the 19th century. The OED has these early examples: “My favourite occupations … now cease to entertain” (Charles Lamb, 1828), and “We were in such confusion … that we could not entertain” (from Macmillan’s Magazine, 1880).

American Heritage says that when used intransitively, to “entertain” can mean “to provide entertainment.”

● “Grow,” an intransitive verb in Old English (as in “the corn grows”), has been used transitively (“he grows corn”) since the 18th century, according to citations in the OED.

In the transitive sense, to “grow” means to cultivate or cause to grow. Many people object, however, to uses that don’t involve living things (“grow the business” … “grow the economy”).

As we’ve written on our blog, you can feel free to object to this inanimate usage (we don’t particularly like it ourselves), but not on the grounds that “grow” is only intransitive.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) accepts without reservation the use of “grow” to mean “promote the development of” and gives as an example “start a business and grow it successfully.” So as far as M-W is concerned, this use of the verb is standard English.

There’s a much broader point to be made here. English verbs are very flexible in how they’re used, with transitive verbs taking on intransitive uses and vice versa. This has happened from the earliest times, and it’s likely to continue.

Origins of the English Language, which was mentioned above, notes that “starve” was originally always intransitive (“He starved”), but it took on a transitive sense in the 16th century (“Someone starved him”).

Williams, the author, argues that a sentence like “Someone starved him” probably sounded ungrammatical once upon a time. But such change is normal and to be expected.

In the end, he writes, the differences between transitive and intransitive senses “may not be in the meaning of the word but in whether the word occurs before an object, before a noun phrase.”

Another grammarian, Josephine Turck Baker, put it this way back in 1907: “The distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs is not an important one, for the reason, that most verbs are capable of either a transitive or an intransitive use.”

And in her book English Mediopassive Constructions (2007), the linguist Marianne Hundt notes that “the flexibility of using verbs both transitively and intransitively goes back to the Old English (OE) period. This tendency seems to have been strengthened through the following centuries.”

We’ve written before about verbs that change their spots, as with the newer uses of “disappear,” “bank,” “progress,” “consent,” “do,” “look,” “present,” and others.

There’s one more issue to consider here. Sometimes a verb’s alteration from transitive to intransitive has to do with its “voice”—that is, whether it’s being used in the active voice, the passive voice, or a “middle” voice (sometimes called the “mediopassive”) that’s somewhere in-between.

The German linguist Ekkehard König, writing in The Germanic Languages (2013), has this to say:

“In the so-called ‘middle’ voice, transitive verbs are constructed like intransitive ones and what is normally selected as object appears in subject position: Shakespeare does not translate, this bed folds up easily, this tent puts up in five minutes, this paint applies evenly.”

People use such constructions every day, in sentences like “My new silk blouse washes beautifully” … “Your house will sell in a week” … “The car drives smoothly.”

Note that the subjects (blouse, house, car) aren’t performing any action; they’re in fact the recipients of the action. Someone offstage presumably does the actual washing, selling, and driving.

In sentences like these, what would normally be the object of the verb disappears and becomes the subject. So the verb, even if it’s normally transitive and takes an object, must change its spots and become intransitive.

In our view, this flexibility between transitive and intransitive is a pretty nifty characteristic of English verbs. Sure, usages will emerge that make you gag. Some make us gag too.

But that’s the price we pay for speaking an exciting, engaging, and growing language.

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When the future is present

Q: I’ve noticed that people who write Dear Abby often say something like “I am being married in the fall” where I would say “I am getting married in the fall.” Is “being married” correct here?

A: The short answer is yes, but expressing the future in English can get (or be) as complicated as trying to predict it.

In fact, some linguists maintain that English doesn’t have a future tense per se. They argue that the word “will” in “We will marry in the fall” is an auxiliary of mood, rather than tense. But let’s not get sidetracked.

Whether English technically has a future tense or not, it certainly has a lot of ways to express the future.

One of them is what grammarians call the futurate, a usage in which the future is referred to without using a traditional future construction. The usual way to do this is with a multi-word form of the present tense.

The two sentences you ask about (“I am being married in the fall” and “I am getting married in the fall”) are examples of the present progressive futurate.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says the futurate “is subject to severe pragmatic constraints” and “must involve something that can be assumed to be known already in the present.”

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, authors of the Cambridge Grammar, say the most common uses of the futurate “involve cyclic events in nature, scheduled events, and conditionals.” Cambridge offers these examples:

Cyclic events of nature. “It’s going to rain soon.”

Scheduled events. “Australia meets Sweden in the Davis Cup final in December.”

Conditionals. “What happens if there is a power failure?”

As for your question, both “I am getting married in the fall” and “I am being married in the fall” are perfectly legitimate sentences.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “get” indicates that “getting” in a sentence like the first one means causing a “specified action to be performed upon (a person or thing).”

And the dictionary’s entry for “be” indicates that “being” in a sentence like the second is an “auxiliary, forming the progressive passive.”

The OED has examples of this use of “being” dating back to the 1700s. Here’s one from a 1795 letter by the English poet Robert Southey: “A fellow … whose grinder is being torn out by the roots.” (A grinder is a molar.)

Although the OED lists the “being” usage as standard English, it notes that some 19th-century commentators criticized it.

For example, David Booth, author of An Analytical Dictionary of the English Language (1830), is quoted as saying the usage “pained the eye and stunned the ear.”

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These ones and those ones

Q: “These ones” is never OK. Not here in the US, nor in my native UK. There is no “sometimes.” It’s simply wrong. The “ones” element is redundant. It’s “these” or “those” (for plurals), and “this” or “that” for singular items.

A: We assume your remarks were inspired by our post in 2010 about whether the phrase “these ones” is ever legitimate.

As we said then, we don’t like this usage. But we could find no authoritative evidence against it, and on the contrary there was reliable evidence in its favor.

In the earlier post, we note that the linguist Arnold Zwicky says the use of “these ones” and “those ones” apparently isn’t considered odd or nonstandard in Britain.

Zwicky cites the linguist Nicholas Widdows, who reports finding examples in the British National Corpus of “these” and “these ones” used in different senses. Here’s how Widdows explains the difference:

“Faced with an array of jelly babies I might point to a red one and say, ‘I like these ones.’  The fused head [plain these] could be misinterpreted as referring to all jelly babies; the ‘ones’ says more clearly ‘this type.’ ”

In the US, Zwicky writes on the Language Log, educated people seem to differ about the usage, and their opinions may depend on where they grew up.

”It’s possible that in North America ‘these/those ones’ is a variant in the gray area between standard and nonstandard—fully acceptable to educated middle-class speakers in some areas, but not fully acceptable, though not actually stigmatized, to such people in other areas,” he writes.

The fact that we dislike a usage doesn’t make it incorrect. Nor does the fact that some online language junkies claim it’s wrong, without offering any evidence to support their opinions.

You argue that “ones” is redundant in “these ones,” but do you really find “one” redundant in the phrases “this one” and “that one” for the same reason?

And what about if we add a modifier to “these ones” or “those ones”? Would you object to “these heavy ones,” “those black ones,” and so on?

The Cambridge History of the English Language indicates that “ones” here is an anaphoric pronoun—a pronoun that refers back to another word or phrase. In this case the pronoun is preceded by a determiner, a modifier like “these” or “those.”

Cambridge says “those ones” first showed up in the 19th century, and “these ones” in the 20th. However, we’ve found many formal and informal examples of “those ones” going back to the 1600s, and of “these ones” dating from the 1700s.

Here’s an example of “those ones” from Greenwich Park, a 1691 comedy by the English actor and playwright William Mountfort:

Reveler: “Madam, Men may divert themselves with several Women, but only one can make ’em truly happy.”

Dorinda. “And how many of those ones have you said this to?”

Reveler: “As I never was really in Love till now, I never had occasion for the Expression before.”

Here’s a more formal example from Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation (1805), by David Macpherson and Adam Anderson:

“The mercantile Venetian and Genoese galleys, which formerly resorted to England, were very probably of a more solid structure than those ones which are only fit for summer expeditions within the Mediterranean.”

Another example, from The British Cyclopedia (1836), edited by Charles F. Partington, says that only in Europe and Asia have falcons been trained to help humans “and therefore those ones of which specimens are obtained from remote countries are birds of little or no interest, except to mere collectors.”

And in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England (Vol. 2, 1807), William Cobbett and Thomas Curson Hansard write about 17th-century reforms in Britain that eased the burdens of taxation:

“The compulsion of the subject to receive the order of Knighthood against his will, paying of fines for not receiving it, and, the vexatious proceedings thereupon for levying of those ones, are, by other beneficial laws, reformed and prevented.”

As for “these ones,” here’s an example from An Exposition of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (1766), by John Brown:

“Our Mediator Christ being so excellent a person, his death was so full a price, and so satisfactory unto justice, for all these ones for which it was offered up, that it needeth not to be repeated, but once for all this sacrifice was offered: He died once.”

And here’s an example from “The Foreigner,” a story published in the June 1895 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine:

“It is not the colour only. It is that the whole room has neither expression nor character about it. You must surely have noticed that our English drawing-rooms were very different from these ones.”

Modern scholars, too, have used this construction. Here’s a recent example from Blooming English, a 2012 collection of observations by the British linguist Kate Burridge:

“These were just some of the nominees for the annual Doublespeak Awards—and these ones didn’t even win a prize.”

This modern example is from Emerging English Modals, a 2000 monograph on English auxiliaries by the linguist Manfred G. Krug: “Like previous maps, these ones too have to be taken with a good deal of caution.”

If you don’t trust the writing of linguists, here’s an example from The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Vol. 3, 2012), edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale:

“The effect produced by the epigrams in Rowe’s Lucan is indeed often one of dignity, but this can make them rather un-Lucanian. Take these ones, for instance, about the panic that grips Rome as Caesar approaches the city at the end of Book I.”

(The work is a study of how literary texts from the classical world were received by English writers from the Middle Ages to the present time.)

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“Rather than” is rather puzzling

Q: I have a question about the following sentence: “My mind still worships the idol of specialness rather than love God.” Is the word “love” correct, or should it be “loves”? The phrase “rather than” seems to be the decisive factor.

A: The word “love” in that sentence is an infinitive, so it doesn’t have to agree with the singular subject.

Although the wording is grammatically correct the way it is, we’d rearrange the sentence to make it a bit easier to understand:

“Rather than love God, my mind still worships the idol of specialness.”

Are you wondering how “love” can be an infinitive if it isn’t preceded by “to”? We’ve discussed bare (or “to”-less) infinitives several times on our blog, including in a post last year.

If you want to keep the current word order, we think readers would find a participle (“loving”) clearer than an infinitive (“love”):

“My mind still worships the idol of specialness rather than loving God.”

You’re right that “rather than” is the decisive factor here. This will take a bit of explaining, because “rather than” constructions can be confusing.

People commonly use “rather than” in comparisons, and generally the terms being compared are grammatically parallel.

For example, the two are both nouns (“adopted a dog rather than a cat”), adjectives (“orange rather than red tomatoes”), prepositions (“up the hill rather than down”), similar verb forms (“he floats rather than swims”), and so on.

But where verb forms are concerned, the terms being compared in a “rather than” construction aren’t always alike. This can happen when one of the verbs is an “-ing” form (a participle, like “loving”) or an infinitive (like “love”).

As The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language puts it (page 1,317), the terms in a “rather than” sentence are sometimes “clearly non-coordinative”—that is, they’re not parallel.

The book gives this example: “They obeyed the order rather than suffer torture or death.” The first verb (“obeyed”) is in the past tense; the second (“suffer”) is an infinitive.

As the Cambridge Grammar points out, when the terms aren’t parallel—or the “constituents are not syntactically alike”—you can easily move the “rather than” part to the front: “Rather than suffer torture or death they obeyed the order.”

In general, as Robert W. Burchfield says in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), “matching forms are best” in “rather than” constructions.

“The only snag,” adds Burchfield, “is that many kinds of English, including literary English, are more complex, and call for greater subtlety.”

Burchfield cites instances from published sources in which the terms don’t match—one of the verbs is either an “-ing” form or an infinitive (we’ll underline them in his examples):

● “the subject reveals its limitations, rather than providing a springboard for the author”;

● “Rather than dwell on this shortcoming he went off into half-baked musings.”

“Rather than” has long been in use in the kinds of comparative constructions we mentioned above—parallel and otherwise.

Here “rather” is a comparative adverb (meaning more properly, more readily or willingly), and “than” is a conjunction.

Since Old English, “rather” has had meanings associated with priority of some sort—that is, a sense of one thing coming ahead of another, whether in preference, in time, in importance, or for purposes of contrast.

One of its meanings was “earlier, sooner, previously,” the Oxford English Dictionary says (so “rather than” meant sooner or earlier than).

That old sense of “rather” is long gone, but interestingly the expression “sooner than” still carries the meaning “rather than,” as in “I’d sooner have this one than that.”

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: how World War I changed the English language. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Some words about the N-word

Q: In Origins of the Specious, you say the N-word is derived from Latin. I’ve read that it comes from the area of Africa called Niger. Slavers changed “Niger” to “nigger” as a form of humiliation.

A: “Nigger” dates back to the 16th century, when a group of words beginning with the letter “n” started showing up in English in reference to Africans or African Americans.

These words included “Negro,” “nigro,” “niegro,” “neger,” “neager,” “negar,” “niger,” and “nigger.” (Some of these terms were originally capitalized, but only “Negro” is today.)

All of these words, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, are ultimately derived from the classical Latin word for black, niger.

The OED says the N-word was spelled “niger” when it first showed up in the late 1500s, though “it seems likely that the form niger … is intended to represent the same pronunciation” as “nigger.”

The double-g spelling first appeared in the early 1600s, according to the dictionary, but “niger” was “the preferred form up to the end of the 18th cent.”

At first, Oxford says, the word “nigger” was used by whites “as a relatively neutral (or occas. positive) term, with no specifically hostile intent.”

It didn’t become a racial slur until sometime in the first third of the 19th century, according to Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, a 2001 book by the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy.

The earliest example of “nigger” in the OED (spelled “niger”) is from Edward Hellowes’s 1574 translation of a collection of Spanish epistles by Antonio de Guevara: “the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnesse.”

The reference to “the Nigers of Aethiop” here is simply an English translation of the original Spanish, “los negros en Ethiopia.”

The OED’s first example of the word with a double-g spelling is from a 1608 letter in the factory records of the East India Company: “The King and People [of ‘Serro Leona’] Niggers, simple and harmless.”

The dictionary says the comments in the letter, while “expressing patronizing views, reflect underlying attitudes rather than a hostile use of the word itself.”

Clearly derogatory uses began showing up in the early 1800s. Kennedy cites a comment from the abolitionist Hosea Easton about the negative usage.

In A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States: And the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837), Easton describes “nigger” as “an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race.”

Interestingly, the OED says the word “nigger” was initially “used by black people (esp. African Americans) as a neutral or favourable term.”

However, this statement is open to argument, since the dictionary’s early examples come from white writers describing the speech of African Americans, often in what would now be considered heavy-handed, if not racist, attempts at humor.

As for its etymology, the OED says that “nigger” (and the earlier “niger”) is “probably an alteration” of the even earlier “neger,” a term for a black person first recorded in writing in 1568.

This word “neger,” Oxford says, was adopted from nègre, a word first recorded in Middle French in 1516 as a noun meaning “black person.” The French nègre was adopted in turn from the Spanish noun negro. It was this Spanish noun, negro, that gave English the word “Negro.”

We can understand why you might think “nigger” comes from the geographic name “Niger,” but there doesn’t seem to be any documented evidence that would support this.

The area referred to as Niger is named for the River Niger in West Africa, but the origin of the river’s name is uncertain.

The ancient Greeks and Romans used similar names in referring to the River Niger, according to A Classical Dictionary: Containing an Account of the Principal Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors, an 1841 reference by Charles Anthon.

Ptolemy, for example, called what appeared to be the River Niger “the Nigeir,” while Pliny the Elder called it “the Nigris.” Herodotus didn’t mention a specific name, but he described what seemed like the same river.

“From all, then, that has been stated,” Anthon writes, “it will satisfactorily appear, that the great river of the Libya of Herodotus, the Nigris of Pliny, the Nigeir of Ptolemy, and the Niger of modern geography, are one and the same river.”

However, it’s uncertain whether those classical names for the Niger, the third-largest river in Africa, were references to the color black or to an African name for the river.

One theory is that the early names referred to the color of the river’s water. But unlike the Rio Negro in Brazil, whose water is dramatically dark, the Niger isn’t black or blackish, according to online images. (The 18th-century Scottish poet James Thomson wrote of “Niger’s yellow stream.”)

Another theory is that the river was named for the black soil on its banks. A third hypothesis is that the classical names refer to the “river of the blacks.”

And a fourth is that the names are derived from a Tuareg phrase for the river: egerew nigerewen or egerew n-igerewen (“river of rivers”).

But as we’ve said, there is no evidence to support any of these theories. No matter how the classical names originated, English writers have been referring to the river as the “Niger” since around 1600, according to the OED.

The dictionary doesn’t have a citation for the usage, but here’s an example from Sylva Sylvarum or a Natural History in Ten Centuries, a posthumously published 1627 collection of scientific writings by Francis Bacon:

“And the confines of the River Niger, where the Negroes also are, are well watered.” (Was Bacon suggesting a connection between “Niger” and “Negroes”? It’s hard to say.)

Getting back to the derogatory nature of “nigger,” we wrote in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, that the word “is now the most bitterly resented racial slur a white person can utter.”

However, we noted that “young rappers now treat it as an honorific of the ’hood—repackaged as ‘nigga,’ ‘niggahz,’ etc.—to the dismay of some of their elders who have painful associations with the original.”

In a 2009 item on our blog, we mentioned that “nigger” (or “nigga”) had been reclaimed as a positive or neutral term by some African Americans. We explained that attempts to neutralize words of abuse or turn them to positive ends are examples of semantic bleaching.

We also directed readers to an interesting paper on the subject by Arthur K. Spears, a linguist and anthropologist at the City University of New York. His paper, published in the book African-American English (1998), discusses sexism in gangsta rap.

You might be interested in another post we ran a few years ago about the mythology of  blackness, and how lightness and darkness came to be identified with goodness and badness.

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English English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Usage Word origin

Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: soccer and hooliganism. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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English English language Expression Grammar Linguistics Usage

Deconstructing sports talk

Q: I have been annoyed at sports commentators who seem to ALWAYS put the subject at the end of the sentence. Example: “Since he returned from injury he is a different player, Smith.” Please advise.

A: The construction you mention is very common in live sports commentary. The speaker puts the subject at the end of the sentence almost as an afterthought.

Sometimes there’s a pronoun mentioned first, but sometimes not: “He came up from the  minors like a rocket, Jones,” or  “Up at bat now, Brown.”

It’s as if the speaker assumes at first that the audience will know who “he” is, or will mentally supply the subject. But just to be sure, a name is added.

It could even be that the speaker consciously delays mentioning the name to give himself time to think. (Lots of names to remember!)

In the case of your example, the subject (Smith) is reinserted by name at the end to identify who’s meant by “he.”

This kind of thing is sometimes heard in casual conversation outside the broadcast booth as well.   

A mother might say, “He’s a good boy, Johnny,” just as a sports reporter would say “It was brilliant, that catch.”

The examples are parallel. When an informal sentence has a pronoun (“he,” “it”) as its subject, the speaker sometimes names the subject at the end for clarification.

In elliptical constructions, the verb might be omitted completely: “A good boy, Johnny” … “Brilliant, that catch.”

Or the verb might be repeated: “He’s a good boy, Johnny is” … “It was brilliant, that catch was.”

Here’s another kind of casual sentence, one you might hear at the playground: “Interesting, watching children play.”

The subject is “watching children play,” and the verb (“is”) is missing. Full sentence, transposed and with verb added: “Watching children play is interesting.”

More often, the pronoun “it” is used up front as a dummy subject: “It’s interesting, watching children play.” The true subject—“watching children play”—identifies the mystery pronoun.

As we said, such sentences are common in informal speech. But the habitual use of such constructions—especially when there’s no original pronoun or when the verb is missing—is a hallmark of live sports commentary.

In the broadcast booth, speakers use a telegraphic style in which loose sentence fragments are strung together, often without explicit grammatical connections.

Some linguists call this “parataxis,” a term from Greek in which it means “placing side by side.” In the parataxis of sports commentary, “Outbursts of short, snappy, loosely connected clauses are typical,” Kersti Borjars and Kate Burridge write in their book Introducing English Grammar (2nd ed., 2013).

Sometimes pronouns, conjunctions, even verbs may be missing, as in “Strong bullpen, the Twins.” Or “Needs a walk, Anderson.” It’s almost stream-of-consciousness.

And the faster the live action, the more telegraphed the commentary. And yet the listener understands perfectly—even though the things we ordinarily consider crucial to the English sentence aren’t there.

One bit of commentary given by Borjars and Burridge is certainly elliptical. It consists of a single word, “Unbelievable.” But there’s isn’t a listener alive who wouldn’t understand.

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Linguistics Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: sports talk—the language of the broadcasting booth and the bullpen. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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English English language Expression Grammar Linguistics Usage

Like to read? Or like reading?

Q: Is there a reason why some verbs are followed by gerunds and some by infinitives?  I’ve seen lists created to help non-native speakers, but I haven’t seen a rule that explains what’s going on.

A: In the kind of construction you’re referring to, when a verb has an action as its object, that action can be expressed either as a gerund (an “-ing” word like “skating”) or as “to” plus an infinitive (“to skate”).

Some verbs, like “adore,” use only gerunds in such a situation: “She adores skating.” Others, like “wish,” use only “to”-infinitives: “She wishes to skate.”

And still other verbs, like “prefer,” can use either one: “She prefers skating” … “She prefers to skate.”

So for many verbs there’s a division of labor between the gerunds and the infinitives. But for other verbs, either one is possible.

This state of affairs has evolved over time, and native speakers of English don’t have to stop and think about which to choose—gerund or infinitive. It’s largely a problem for foreign learners.

Anyone who’s puzzled can consult one of the many verb lists on the Internet, but those merely tell which complement goes with which verb—they don’t say why.

There’s a good reason for this. In fact, there’s no easy way to explain why some verbs are followed by gerunds, some by “to”-infinitives, and some by either one (but often with different meanings).

A great many academic linguists have written about this subject, but no one, to our knowledge, has come up with a simple formula—perhaps because no simple formula is possible.

For purposes of experiment, let’s make up a test. We’ll look at two different sets of verbs and the typical object (gerund or infinitive) that goes with them.

● verbs followed by a gerund: “She enjoys/practices/finishes/resumes skating.”

● verbs followed by a “to”-infinitive: “She decides/prepares/plans/intends to skate.” 

Is there a pattern here that would explain why some verbs go one way and some another? We’ve come across three general views.

(1) Some linguists suggest that the gerund constructions refer to actions that are habitual or have happened in the past, while “to”-infinitives are about potential or future actions.

(2) Others suggest that gerunds represent actions that are “real” or fulfilled, while infinitives represent actions that are hypothetical or yet to come.

(3) Still others see gerund constructions as conveying sensation or actual experience, while infinitive constructions convey volition—that is, a general inclination toward something.

All three make good points, but taken together what do they add up to? Perhaps that gerunds often look back (to an action that’s completed or in progress), while “to”-infinitives tend to look ahead—literally “to” or toward something.

Yet even that statement has holes in it. For example, verbs like “contemplate,” “recommend,” and “advise” all take gerunds and yet refer to unfulfilled actions. You can see what a slippery eel we’re trying to grasp here. 

And how to explain verbs that go either way?

With some of these verbs, the choice of gerund versus infinitive can make little or no difference in meaning: “She likes skating” versus “She likes to skate.”

But with some other two-way verbs, the choice can make a marked difference.

The verb “try” is a good example of the latter. It can take both complements: “He tried skating” … “He tried to skate.” But the meanings are different. The first refers to skating in general, while the second refers to a particular act.

Or consider the verb “stop”—”I stopped thinking” means just the opposite of “I stopped to think.”

The verb “remember” is another interesting example. “He remembers washing” is very different from “He remembers to wash.” In the first, he recalls an occasion when he washed (in the past); in the second, he’s reminded to perform the act (in the present or near future).

This answer is a bit rambling, but you can perhaps get the drift. This is a very broad and complicated subject, one that many linguists of our time (and earlier) have wrestled with.

As Randolph Quirk wrote in The Linguist and the English Language (1974): “There ought to be a big award for anyone who can describe exactly what makes him say ‘I started to work’ on one occasion and ‘I started working’ on another.”

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