Category: Linguistics

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English English language Expression Grammar Linguistics Usage

Not that big of a deal?

Q: It sounds wrong to me, but just about everybody inserts an unnecessary “of” in an expression like “It’s not that big of a deal.” How big a deal is this? Is it incorrect?

A: This “of a” usage is a subject that readers of our blog have often raised, and it’s one that we wrote about in 2007.

Back then, we were pretty dismissive of the usage, which some linguists have called the “big of” syndrome.

But this is such a common American colloquialism that it deserves a closer look, so we’ll expand on what we wrote before.

We’ve often said (as we did in a post last summer) that not all redundancies are bad. An extra word can be justified if it serves an emphatic or supportive purpose, as in “first time ever” or “three different times.”

But as we noted in 2007, the unnecessary “of” in “not that big of a deal” doesn’t seem to add any particular emphasis or color (though it might add informality).

We speculated that this usage could have been influenced by phrases like “a whale of a good time,” “a monster of a party,” and so on.

In those constructions, with a noun described in terms of another noun, the “of” is standard English: “a prince of a man” … “a devil of a time” …“that rascal of a boy” … “a little jewel of a cottage”  …“a hell of a mess.”

This is a time-honored English usage. Among literary examples, the Oxford English Dictionary cites “his little concubine of a wife,” from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).

And evidence in the OED shows that noun phrases with “hell of a …” and “devil of a …” have long been part of the language, dating back to the 1680s and 1740s, respectively.

So that construction—noun + “of a” + noun—is standard English, acceptable even in the best writing.

However, when an adjective is part of the pattern—adjective + “of a” + noun—some usages are standard and some aren’t.

In standard English, we commonly use certain adjectives of quantity—“much,” “more,” “less,” “enough”—in this way, as in “enough of a problem” and “too much of a drive.”

 But with adjectives of degree—“good/bad,” “big/small,” “long/short,” “old/young,” “hard/easy,” “near/far,” and so on—the “of a” pattern is not considered standard English.

With that class of adjectives, the “of”-less versions are regarded as standard: “not that big a problem,” “too long a drive,” etc. But the “of” versions are regarded as dialectal: “not that big of a problem,” “too long of a drive.”

While this dialectal usage is nonstandard, it shouldn’t be called incorrect—just inappropriate in formal English.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage summarizes this dialectal construction as “a fairly recent American idiom that has nearly a fixed form: that or how or too, or sometimes as, followed by an adjective, then of a and a noun.”

The usage guides traces its appearance to the early 1940s, but says it’s probably “somewhat older.”

M-W cites examples from television interviews involving sports figures, newscasters, mayors, and others: “that difficult of a shot” … “that long of a speech” … “that big of a mess” … “too good of a loser” … “how good of a shape,” and so on.

“This current idiom,” M-W says, “is just one of a group of idioms that are characterized by the presence of of a as the link between a noun and some sort of preceding qualifier.”

What’s different about this more recent usage is that the preceding qualifier is one of degree, as we said above, rather than quantity.

The linguist Arnold M. Zwicky commented on this difference in a 1995 paper entitled “Exceptional Degree Markers.”

“This use of of,” Zwicky noted, “is presumably an extension of the rule for NPs [noun phrases] with quantity (rather than degree) modifiers like more, less, enough, and a bit, in combination with singular count nouns: more of a liar, enough of a linguist, a bit of a charmer.”

Kenneth G. Wilson, writing in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English in 1993, made much the same point. He wrote that although “how hard of a job” is nonstandard English, it’s analogous to “how much of a job,” which is “clearly idiomatic and Standard.”

Wilson also suggested—two decades ago—that nonstandard “of a” usages “could achieve idiomatic status before too long, despite the objections of many commentators.”

Until then, he said, they should be left out of “your Planned and Oratorical speech and your edited English.”

Has that time arrived? Well, these dialectal “of a” usages are becoming acceptable idioms in casual speech and informal writing. However, we still wouldn’t recommend them in formal English, written or spoken.

In fact, this dialectal construction—like “how long of a drive”—isn’t found much in print anyway, except in the most casual writing.  

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) calls it an informal oral usage that’s confined, so far, to American English.

Merriam-Webster’s says the same: “Our evidence shows the idiom to be almost entirely oral; it is rare in print except in reported speech.”

As M-W concludes: “The only stricture on it suggested by our evidence is that it is a spoken idiom: you will not want to use it much in writing except of the personal kind.”

It would be an understatement to call this idiom common in American speech. One linguist has written that for lots of speakers, it’s more than common—it’s preferred. 

“Many speakers of American English would never say too big a tree but rather too big of a tree,” Edward L. Blansitt Jr. wrote in his paper “Non-Constituent Connectives” (1983).

For such speakers, Blansitt wrote more than 30 years ago, “of is simply a boundary marker between the preceding descriptive adjective and following indefinite article.”

Since spoken English is the English that’s quoted in print and heard on the news, you can expect  to encounter “that big of a deal” for many years to come.

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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: “lost” words—words that once had a literal meaning but are now used only in their metaphorical senses.  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

A perfect infinitive

Q: I wonder if  Lara Logan’s grammar was correct when she apologized on 60 Minutes for using a questionable source: “It was a mistake to include him in our report.” Should she have said “to have included”? I’ve been studying modern Greek for several years, and deciphering another language makes me question my understanding of my own. Do you answer emails or should I check your blog for an answer?

A: Yes, we do directly answer the emails sent to us by readers like you. Later, we edit these questions plus our responses, and publish them on our blog. (The questioners remain anonymous.)

Now, on to your question about Lara Logan’s apology for her Oct. 27, 2013, report on 60 minutes about the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, the year before.   

What she said in her Nov. 10, 2013, apology—“it was a mistake to include him in our report”—was grammatically correct. There was no need say “to have included” instead of “to include.”

The phrase “to have included” is a perfect infinitive, a construction that’s used in tandem with the main verb of a sentence. The perfect infinitive generally refers to an action that has happened earlier than the action of the main verb.

But in this case, the two actions were simultaneous: making the mistake and including him in the report. They amounted to the same thing.

Since there was no difference in the timing of the actions, the simple infinitive “to include” is appropriate.

The infinitive is an interesting creature. It’s a form of verb, but it functions like a noun because it refers to an action as a thing in itself.

A simple infinitive (like “to include”) is sometimes called a present infinitive, and a perfect infinitive (like “to have included”) is sometimes called a present-perfect infinitive.

But those labels are misleading because they sound like tenses. And strictly speaking, infinitives have no tense.

Infinitives do, however, take on a sense of time in relation to the main verb in the sentence.

A simple infinitive refers to an action that coincides in time with the action of the main verb. Here are some examples, with the timing indicated in brackets:

● She likes [now] to study [now].

● She liked [then] to study [then].

● She had always liked [then] to study [then].

● She would have liked [then] to study [then].

Note that the simple infinitive (“to study”) is appropriate in each sentence because the  timing of the actions referred to—the studying and the liking—are simultaneous.

A perfect infinitive, on the other hand, is appropriate when the timing of the actions is different, as in these examples:

● She appeared [then] to have studied [earlier].

● She would like [now] to have studied [then].

● She is believed [now] to have studied [then].

● She will want [later] to have studied [earlier].

● She intended [then] to have studied [at some point before now].

So in nearly all cases, the timing of the perfect infinitive and the main verb are dissimilar.

The timing matches, however, when a perfect infinitive is the subject of the sentence and the verb is what linguists call a “past counterfactual conditional”—a “would have” verb referring to an action that never happened. Here’s an example:

● “To have studied would have been wiser for her.”

Patrick J. Duffley describes the peculiar relationship between perfect infinitives and “would have” verbs in his paper “The Gerund and the to-Infinitive as Subject,” published in the Journal of English Linguistics (2003).

Here, he suggests, the perfect infinitive is used to describe “nonreal” actions “in order to situate hypothetical events before the present moment.”

We use the conjunction “if” in a similar way, he says. In effect, a perfect infinitive like “to have studied” signals a meaning similar to “if she had studied.” 

Now let’s return to Logan’s sentence on 60 Minutes: “It was a mistake to include him in our report.”

The two actions—making the mistake and including him in the report—are clearly one and the same.

They not only happened at the same time, but they’re placed in apposition (that is, they’re the equivalent of one another).

We’ve written about apposition before on our blog, including posts in 2011 and 2013.

Since for all practical purposes the two actions coincided, there was no need to use a perfect infinitive (“to have included”).

However, Logan would have been justified in using a perfect infinitive in a sentence like this: “It was wrong [in the past] to include his comments and not to have confirmed [earlier] them beforehand.”

A perfect infinitive would also have been justified if the mistake never happened: “To have included him in our report would have been wrong.”

There are a couple of other points to be made about a sentence like “It was a mistake to include him in our report.” 

Although the nominal subject is the pronoun “it,” the logical subject is the infinitive phrase “to include him in our report.”

Sometimes “it,” as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, is “placed before the verb as anticipatory ‘dummy’ subject, with the logical subject of the sentence as complement.”

Logan’s sentence is a perfect example. The word order places the logical subject—the infinitive phrase—in the position of complement. As a result, the slot of the subject must be filled, and “it” serves the purpose.

One might also write the sentence this way, putting the subject before the verb: “To include him in our report was a mistake.”

Many people don’t realize that an infinitive or infinitive phrase can function as a noun. As such, it can be the subject of a sentence—or, as we’ve written before on the blog, the object of a verb.

The OED notes that a sentence with the dummy subject “it” can have an infinitive phrase as its logical subject. Here are a few of the examples that Oxford cites:

“It was necessary to make a choice.” (From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England From the Accession of James II, 1849.)

“It has been found possible to render voting perfectly secret and to provide for a scrutiny.” (From the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., 1875.)   

“It is important to get Wheatsworth Crackers with your bowl of milk or ‘half and half.’ ” (From an ad in the New York Times, 1923.)   

“It’s hard to reconcile the control-freak in his nature with the hyper-adrenalinated kid in front of the camera.” (From a London newspaper, the Independent, 1997.)

Here are a few more examples of our own (without the “dummy” subject). 

Infinitival subjects: “To do the right thing is my ambition” … “To leave was not polite.”

Infinitival objects: “My hope was to do the right thing” … “I never intended to leave.”

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

Using “one” for “a” or “an”

Q: At a drugstore here in Hawaii we often hear over a loudspeaker the word “one” used in place of “a” or “an.” For example, “We need ONE manager in the photo department.” Is this pidgin English or does it have a basis in historical English?

A: It’s not surprising that a person living in Hawaii would hear “one” used in place of the indefinite article “a” or “an.”

This regionalism is characteristic of what linguists call Hawaii Creole English, and at least one scholar has attributed it to the influence of Cantonese.

We should mention that the dialect you’re hearing isn’t properly a pidgin—a dialect that has no native speakers, like a trading jargon used for business purposes.

Instead, linguists call it a creole because it has expanded, stabilized over time, and become a native tongue learned by children. So what was once a pidgin developed into a creole about a century ago. 

The roots of Hawaii Creole English extend back into the late 18th century, as Hawaii began to emerge as a trading and plantation center.

We won’t attempt to explain the development of this dialect, a subject much debated by linguists over the past 40 years.

It’s enough to know that many tongues besides native Hawaiian have been spoken on the islands in the last two centuries—the South Seas jargon of early sailors plus many varieties of pidgin English brought by traders and plantation workers from China, Japan, Europe, and other Pacific islands.

The feature you’ve noticed—the use of “one” as the indefinite article—was first recorded in Hawaii in 1838, according to the Australian linguist Jeff Siegel.

In his paper “Substrate Influence in Hawaii Creole English,” published in the journal Language in Society in 2000, Siegel notes that “the use of one as an ‘indefinite article’ was one of the features of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) brought to Hawaii.”

“Pidgin Hawaiian, spoken by most Chinese in Hawaii in the 19th century, also used the numeral one (akahi) as an indefinite article (in contrast to Standard Hawaiian),” Siegel writes.

He traces this usage to Cantonese, which “optionally uses the word yat ‘one’ ” in indefinite noun phrases.

“It is likely that this feature of Cantonese accounts for the origin of the corresponding use of one in CPE [Chinese Pidgin English],” he writes, “and it could have been responsible for reinforcing its continued use in Hawaii as well.”

Two earlier scholars, John E. Reinecke and Aiko Tokimasa, have also written about “one” in place of “a” or “an” in Hawaii.

“In careless speech, one is used as the indefinite article,” they wrote in “The English Dialect of Hawaii,” published in the journal American Speech in 1934.

You also asked whether the Hawaiian usage has any basis in historical English.

As a matter of fact, there was a time when “one” served a double purpose in our language, too—it was both the number and the indefinite article.

That changed in the Middle Ages when the uses of the word were separated and the article (“a,” “an”) was split off.

You might even say that English is unusual in this respect.

In many languages the word for “one,” as John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins points out, “is used as the indefinite article, but in English the numeral one has become differentiated from the article a, an.”

“An,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, originated as an unstressed form of “one,” and “a” developed in the 1100s as the form used before a consonant.

But the differentiation between “an” and “a” didn’t become universal for quite some time.

“An” was still used before “y” and “w” (as in “an woman”) until the 1400s, Chambers says. In addition, “an” was “used before h in a stressed syllable (an hundred) down to the 1600s and is still affected occasionally before h today,” Chambers adds.

“One,” meanwhile, has three general senses in modern English:

(1) It’s an adjective meaning either the number or undivided (“one apple” … “with one voice” … “we are one”). 

(2) It’s a pronoun meaning a single person or thing (“one never knows” … “I’ll take that one” … “one of us”).

 3) It’s a noun for the number (“odds of four to one” … “one o’clock” … “chapter one”).

However, the adjective “one” is also sometimes used colloquially, the OED says, “as a more emphatic substitute for the indefinite article.”

Examples of this emphatic usage include “He’s one tough customer” and “It’s one hell of a blizzard.”

But nowadays “one” isn’t used in the ordinary sense of “a” or “an,” except in regional pockets.

The OED says it’s chiefly found in the English spoken in India, the Caribbean, and parts of the United States—namely South Carolina, Georgia, and, as you already know, Hawaii.

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Linguistics Phrase origin Usage

Let’s do the mashed potatoes

Q: My husband was riding his bike slower than normal when a friend asked, “Did you have too much mashed potatoes last night?” That got him wondering: too much, too many, too much of? What is the correct methodology of inquiring if someone has overindulged in mashed potatoes?

A: A noun phrase like “mashed potatoes” can be confusing. Does it refer to the individual potatoes that have been mashed? Or to the dish produced by mashing them?

In technical terms, is “mashed potatoes” a countable or an uncountable noun phrase? Are we thinking of individual potatoes that can be counted, or a dish made from an indeterminate number of potatoes?

Well, there’s one thing we’ve learning after writing this blog for seven years. No job is too big or too small for academic linguists. They’ll take on anything.

Stephanie Solt, a researcher at DAS, a linguistics institute in Berlin, discusses the ambiguity of “mashed potatoes” and similar dishes in a paper entitled “Q-Adjectives and the Semantics of Quantity.”

In a footnote, she points out the difficulty in choosing between the adjectives “many” and “much” when modifying “anomalous plurals such as refried beans, mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs.”

She writes that these phrases “syntactically show at least some of the characteristics of plural count nouns, but semantically denote noncountable substances or portions of matter.”

“These items are at least marginally acceptable with both many and much, but with a difference in meaning,” she adds.

She gives two Q-and-A examples concerning “scrambled eggs” to make her point:

“Q: How many scrambled eggs do you want?

“A: Three

“Q: How much scrambled eggs do you want?

 “A: A lot/a little/a scoopful/about half the amount you gave him.”

She also offers this hodgepodge of an example: “These/this mashed potatoes/refried beans/scrambled eggs are/is cold.”

Interestingly, the dishes that Americans call “mashed potatoes” and “scrambled eggs” are often referred to as “mashed potato” and “scrambled egg” by British speakers.

Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex in England, discusses this in a post published a few years ago on her blog Separated by a Common Language.

“These kinds of prepared food are substances more than individuable things,” she writes. “You can’t see the boundaries of the individual eggs or potatoes once they are scrambled or mashed.”

She points out that the British “forms reflect this—they’re singular just as other ‘substance’ food names,” but the American forms “reflect the state of the food before mashing/scrambling.”

“Does this mean that Americans think more about the origins of their food?” she adds. “I can’t think of much other evidence for that.”

We agree. In fact, the American usage seems to be gaining ground in Britain. We’ve checked four standard British dictionaries and half of them list “mashed potatoes” as the primary entry with “mashed potato” as an also-ran.

Another way of looking at “mashed potatoes” is through the lens of notional agreement—that is, agreement based on meaning to the writer or speaker rather than on formal textbook grammar.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage gives this example of notional agreement from Ecclesiastes: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Here a compound subject (“time and chance”) takes a singular verb (“happeneth”).

And here’s one from a Jan. 20, 1938, letter by James Thurber: “I don’t think the barricades is an answer.”

Merriam-Webster’s has many more, but we’ll stop with this example from the Declaration of Independence:  “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”

In the 18th century, the usage guide says, grammarians “undertook to prune the exuberant growth of English” and began insisting on formal agreement.

“Modern grammarians are not so insistent,” M-W says, noting that George O. Curme and Randolph Quirk have recognized that when compound nouns form a “collective idea” the “singular verb is appropriate—notional agreement prevails.”

Getting back to your question, we think of “mashed potatoes” as a dish, not the components of the dish. So we’d use “too much,” not “too many,” to modify “mashed potatoes.”

However, Google searches indicate that “too much mashed potatoes” is only slightly more popular than “too many mashed potatoes,” and “too much mashed potato” is a distant third. The expression “too much of the mashed potatoes” barely registers.

By the way, the earliest example of the dish in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, a 1747 cookbook by Hannah Glasse:

“Mashed Potatoes. Boil your Potatoes, peel them, and put them into a saucepan, mash them well; To two Pounds of Potatoes put a Pint of Milk, a little salt; stir them well together, take care they do not stick to the bottom; then take a quarter of a pound of butter, stir it in, and serve it up.”

The OED’s entry, which is listed under the singular “mashed potato,” includes both singular and plural citations for the side dish.

Here’s a singular citation from the Guardian’s Oct. 15, 1994, weekend supplement: “My ribeye of beef with mashed potato.”

The entry also includes references to the dance (called the “mashed potato,” “mash potato,” or “mashed potatoes”) that was popular during the early 1960s.

The OED’s earliest citation for the dance is a 1959 reference to the James Brown song “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes,” which became a Top 10 rhythm-and-blues hit in 1960.

This one, from the March 6, 1963, issue of Punch, includes two other dance crazes from the ’60s: “The Mashed Potato … remains as much of a mystery as the Hully-Gully and the Loco-Motion.”

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English English language Expression Linguistics Pronunciation Usage

Empire State-ments

Q: Why do we (OK, New Yorkers) pronounce the “Empire State Building” with emphasis on “State,” while we emphasize “Empire” when the words are just “Empire State”?

A: We’ve had this thought ourselves. When people (and not just New Yorkers) say the “Empire State,” they emphasize the first word over the second: “EMPIRE State.”

Similarly, residents of Connecticut refer to the “NUTMEG State,” Californians to the “GOLDEN State,” New Jerseyans to the “GARDEN State,” and so on.

So why does the principal stress shift to the second word when people say “the Empire STATE Building”?

In 2006, on the building’s 75th anniversary, the novelist Benjamin Kunkel wrote a small piece for the New York Times commenting on “our curious pronunciation of those four words.”

“Let’s say you had a building named, as ours would seem to be, after the Empire State, New York,” Kunkel wrote. “In that case, the usual way for a native speaker of American English to pronounce the two middle words of the name would be as a dactyl: ‘EM-pire state,’ you’d say. But we don’t say it like that. Instead we employ what in prosody is called an anapest: ‘em-pire STATE,’ with the accent, that is, on the word ‘state’ rather than on the word ‘empire.’ Say it and see for yourself: it’s ‘em-pire STATE build-ing,’ not ‘EM-pire state build-ing.’ ” 

But Kunkel didn’t offer a good reason why.

Generally, when an identifying adjective modifies “building,” the adjective is emphasized over the noun (“office building,” “apartment building,” etc.).

The same is true when a building has a proper name—the modifier gets the emphasis: “CHRYSLER Building,” “FLATIRON Building,” “WOOLWORTH Building,” “SEAGRAM Building,” and so on.

When “Building” is preceded  by a compound, then the principal emphasis falls on the word that’s normally emphasized in that compound: “Time-LIFE Building,” “LEHMAN Brothers Building,” “New York LIFE Insurance Building,” “Manufacturers Hanover TRUST Building,” “WARNER Brothers Building,” “Universal PICTURES Building,” “New York TIMES Building.”

So if we emphasize the first word in the phrase “EMPIRE State,” why don’t Americans call it the “EMPIRE State Building”? 

We have to admit that we don’t have an answer. And neither, apparently, does anyone else.

We did find a discussion of this subject on a respected language website, but it wasn’t much help.

The linguist Mark Lieberman, writing on the Language Log, noted that when “Building” is modified by a compound,” the main stress generally falls on the expected main stress” of that compound.

“Thus,” he wrote, “what used to be the Field Building in Chicago is now the LaSalle National Bank Building—and I assume (without ever having heard it pronounced) that the main stress ought to be on bank.”

He went on to say that “since New York is the Empire State—with main stress on state—it follows that the Empire State Building ought also to have main stress on state.”

But as we’ve said, and as some readers of the Language Log pointed out, the stress in the two-word phrase “Empire State” is on “Empire,” not on “State.” So that leaves us back where we started.

Of course, “Empire STATE Building” is easier to say than one strong syllable followed by five weak ones: “EM-pire-state-build-ing.” And yet, a string of unaccented syllables doesn’t seem to bother people who say (or used to say) “LEH-man-broth-ers-build-ing.”

Dictionaries aren’t much help here, either. The Collins English Dictionary says the phrase “Empire State Building” is pronounced with accents on the first syllables of “Empire” and “Building.” Well, perhaps by some English speakers, but not by Americans.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online gives “Empire STATE Building” for both the British and the American pronunciations.

If we do find an answer to this mystery, you’ll be the first to know!

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Texicography

Q: Your July 9 blog about how to pronounce “texted” inspires me to write about a ubiquitous and annoying pronunciation of the past tense of “text” here in Cincinnati. Young people almost exclusively pronounce the present as “tex” and the past as “text.” Maybe the past would be spelled “texed,” but that doesn’t change the pronunciation. Have you heard this in your area?

A: No, we weren’t aware of the usage until you mentioned it.

But on looking into this we find that quite a few people consider to “tex” the infinitive, with “tex” or “texes” the present, and “text” the past.

Others consider “tex” or “texes” the present, and “texed” (pronounced TEXT) the past tense. And still others use “text” or “texts” for the present and “text” for the past.

Interestingly, these usages aren’t confined to speech. We got more than half a million hits in Google searches for “tex” and “texed” used in place of “text” and “texted.”

And the linguist Arnold Zwicky, in searches for past tenses and past participles, found roughly one example of “text” for every five of “texted.”

This isn’t an overnight phenomenon, either, and it’s not limited to Cincinnati.

A July 25, 2005, article in the Modesto Bee, for example, reported that a friend sent this text message to the cell phone of a California teenager killed in a car crash:

“Tex me when u get to heaven.”

(Family members found the message on 16-year-old Stephanie Blevins’s phone.)

In standard English, as you know, the infinitive or root verb is “text,” the present tense is “text” or “texts,” and the past tense (as well as the past participle) is “texted.”

Why all the variants? We think pronunciation has a lot to do with this.

Some people hear the verb “text” as if it were spelled “texed,” and assume it’s a past tense. Naturally, the present tense would be “tex” or “texes.” (Think of “fax,” “faxes,” and “faxed.”)

The phonetician John Wells notes on his blog that the confusion here apparently lies with the consonant cluster at the end of “text.”

“The final cluster [kst] is highly susceptible to losing its final consonant, particularly when followed by a consonant sound,” Wells writes.

In words with similar-sounding endings (like “next,” “boxed,” and “mixed”), he says, “it’s usual for the final [t] to be elided (lost) except in very careful (over-enunciated) speech.”

The linguist David Crystal, however, finds “nothing intrinsically difficult about the consonant cluster at the end of text.”

“But adding an -ed ending alters the pronunciation dynamic,” he writes on his blog. “We now have two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence, as we had in broadcasted.”

Although it’s “very unusual to find a new irregular past tense form in standard English,” Crystal says, it “does happen, as we see with the preference for shorter broadcast.”

He predicts that lexicographers will one day recognize “texed” as a legitimate past tense. We’re not so sure, but we’ll let Crystal have the last word.

“Whatever the reasons, we do now find forms such as texed and tex’d being used with increasing frequency,” he writes. “I think it’s only a matter of time before we find it being treated like broadcast in dictionaries, and given two forms.”

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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: New words and back-to-school words. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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English English language Etymology Expression Linguistics Phrase origin Politics Usage Word origin

Can the White House talk?

Q: Quick question. What is the term for a statement like “the White House replied” or “the Mayor’s office said” or “the record company claimed”? In other words, what is it called when inanimate objects make statements?

A: It’s amazing how many of the quick questions that pop up in our inbox aren’t so quick to answer.

There are several terms for giving inanimate objects human attributes. But do the phrases “White House,” “mayor’s office,” and “record company” refer strictly to inanimate objects?

We don’t think so, and many dictionaries agree with us.

Let’s look at “White House” first. Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it: “The popular name for the official residence of the President of the United States at Washington; hence, the President or his office.”

So the term “White House,” according to the OED, can refer to the president’s residence, the president himself, or the presidency.

We’d expand on that, as the online Macmillan Dictionary does, to include “the people who work at the White House, including the President.”

Many standard dictionaries also offer expansive definitions of the term “office.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, says it can refer to “the administrative personnel, executives, or staff working in such a place.”

The online Collins English Dictionary says it can mean “the group of persons working in an office” while Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.) says it can mean “all the people working in such a place.”

The word “company” has been people oriented since it first showed up (spelled compainie) around 1250, according to the OED.

It originally meant companionship, and etymologically refers to people sharing bread. In Latin, com- means “with” and panis means “bread.”

In modern English, the word “company” still has that sense of companionship, as in having “company” over for dinner or keeping “company” with someone.

In the commercial sense, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), it refers to “an association of persons for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise.”

What, you ask, is the technical term for the phenomenon that occurs when a building or an office or a company issues statements?

Well, one possibility is “personification,” a figure of speech in which inanimate objects are given human qualities. For instance, “The house welcomed us back after our long vacation.”

Another possibility is “metonymy,” which refers to substituting a word or phrase for a related one. For example, the use of “Hollywood” to stand for the American film industry, including the people in it.

Still another possibility is “pathetic fallacy,” a literary term for giving human feelings to a natural phenomenon, like “somber clouds” or “nasty wind.”

The 19th-century British critic John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy” in attacking sentimentality in poetry.

No matter what you call it, we suspect that the usage originated as newspaper shorthand. Why waste all that ink and paper on “Whosis Q. Whatsis, a spokesman for the president,” when “the White House” gets the point across?

The earliest examples we could find were in newspaper articles from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Here’s a “company” example from a March 3, 1888, article in the New York Times about  a strike against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad: “Local freights, the company says, are being moved in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.”

And here’s one from an Aug 6, 1889, article in the Deseret News in Salt Lake City about a dispute between the postmaster general and Western Union about telegraph rates:

“The company says the Postmaster-general has thus been able to occupy and use streets in large cities regardless of local authority, and almost regardless of the public opinion.”

A Nov. 23, 1912, article in the Boston Transcript has 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue mum about an offer by Andrew Carnegie to provide pensions for American presidents:

“The White House is silent, for obvious reasons, but close friends of the President are confident that Mr. Taft would not accept a pension from this source.”

An Oct. 9, 1913, article in the New York Times about a confrontation between the White House and the Senate notes that “what the White House said appeared to mollify those senators who had let their angry passions rise.”

As for “office,” here’s an example from an Oct. 30, 1938, article in the Pittsburgh Press about a proposed agreement to end a strike by retail clerks against 35 department stores:

“The Mayor’s office said that the pact was a ‘tentative agreement’ which must obtain approval of both the union and the retailers’ council.”

If you’d like to read more about personification, we had a post on the blog some time ago about referring to countries and ships as “she.”

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“This this” and “that that”

“Q: What do you call those constructions where the same word is repeated? Specifically: “I can see that that is going to be a problem” or “I received this this morning.” I’ve used a few in writing recently, but I’m puzzled at whether they require punctuation to make the reader realize they aren’t typos.

A: When a sentence has two words back to back, like “that that” or “this this,” we hear an echo. But there’s not necessarily anything wrong. Unless it’s a typo (as when we type “the the”), the words are doing different jobs.

If there’s a special term for back-to-back words used legitimately, we haven’t been able to find it. But your sentences are good examples; both are grammatically correct and neither requires any special punctuation.

Let’s look at them one at a time.

(1) “I can see that that is going to be a problem.”

Here we have two clauses (a clause is part of a sentence and includes both a subject and its verb). The first “that” is a conjunction—it introduces a subordinate clause that’s the object of the main clause (“I can see”). The second “that” is a demonstrative pronoun and the subject of the subordinate clause (“that is going to be a problem”).

(2) “I received this this morning.”

Here the first “this” is a demonstrative pronoun and the direct object of the verb (“received”). The second “this” modifies the noun “morning,” and you can call it a demonstrative adjective or (as many grammarians prefer) a “demonstrative determiner.” The phrase “this morning” is adverbial because it tells when.

Examples of back-to-back repetition—especially with “that”—are not uncommon, even in great literature.

For instance, you can find them in the King James Version of the Bible: “for that that is determined shall be done” … “What is that that hath been done?”

And they’re abundant in Shakespeare: “Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues” (Merry Wives of Windsor); “Who is that that spake?” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona); “Who’s that that bears the sceptre?” (King Henry VIII).

Finally, here’s another, in a passage from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653): “it is that that makes an angler: it is diligence, and observation, and practice, and an ambition to be the best in the art.”

As we said, such repetitions are perfectly good English. But if the echo bothers you, the repetition can easily be avoided.

Going back to sentence #1, the first “that” could be deleted (“I can see that’s going to be a problem”). Or the second one could be replaced with another pronoun (“I can see that this [or it] is going to be a problem”).

In sentence #2, either “this” could be replaced: “I received it this morning” … “I received this in the morning.”

We’ve written before about another kind of repetition—the double “is.” This formation is sometimes grammatical (“What this is is an enigma”), and sometimes not (“The problem is is he’s too young”).

The nongrammatical usage does indeed have a name—actually, several names. The two most common are “double copula” and “reduplicate copula.” (A copula is a linking verb that joins the subject and predicate of a sentence.)

And just in case one “that” after another isn’t enough for you, we’ve written about a sentence with five of them in a row.  

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Hear Pat on Iowa Public Radio

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

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How “terror” gave us “terrific”

Q: I assume “horror” gave us “horrible” and “horrific.” How then did “terror” give us “terrible” and (with a positive twist) “terrific”? Is “terrific” not rooted in “terror”? Or am I comparing apples and oranges?

A: No, you’re not comparing apples and oranges, but the etymology here isn’t quite as simple as you think. English borrowed these six words at different times from various versions of French.

Ultimately, all these words can be traced to Indo-European roots describing the way our bodies respond to fear.

The words “horror,” “horrible,” and “horrific” have their roots in the Indo-European base ghers- / ghrs- (to become stiff), according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

(We discussed these “horrendous” words in a brief posting back in 2007.)

The terms “terror,” “terrible,” and “terrific,” Chambers tells us, are rooted in the Indo-European base ters- / tres- (to shake).

Those Indo-European roots gave Latin the verbs horrere (to bristle with fear) and terrere (to fill with fear), which inspired the Old French, Middle French, Anglo-Norman, and Modern French words that gave English such frightening language.

The meanings of all six words reflected their scary or hair-raising roots when they entered English from the 1300s to the 1600s, according to written examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Horrific” hasn’t changed over the centuries. It was first recorded in English in 1653, the OED says, and still has its original meaning: “causing horror, horrifying.”

But “terrific” is a different story. This adjective originally meant “causing terror, terrifying; terrible, frightful; stirring, awe-inspiring; sublime.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “terrific” in this sense is from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which describes the Serpent in Paradise as a subtle beast “with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific.”

In less than a century, Oxford says, “terrific” took on a weakened sense: “Of great size or intensity; excessive; very severe.”

The earliest example of this new usage in the dictionary is from a 1743 translation of Horace’s lyric poetry: “How cou’d … Porphyrion of terrific size … stand against the Warrior-goddess?”

It took another century, according to the OED citations, for “terrific” to take on the modern sense of “an enthusiastic term of commendation: amazing, impressive; excellent, exceedingly good, splendid.”

The first example of this sense is from an advertisement in the Oct. 21, 1871, issue of The Athenaeum, a journal of science and the arts:

“The last lines of the first ballad are simply terrific,—something entirely different to what any English author would dream of, much less put on paper.”

So “terrific” evolved from “terrifying” to “excessive” to “amazing” in a little over two centuries.

Meanwhile, much the same thing happened with “terribly,” the adverbial form of “terrible.” A very negative 15th-century word meaning severely or painfully had evolved by the mid-19th century into a general adverb meaning “very” or “greatly” (as in “greatly amused”).

How did all this happen? We can’t say for certain, but English is a work in progress, as we pointed out in 2012. Words take on new meanings or revive old ones; new words are born and old ones die; a slang word becomes standard; a standard word takes on a slang meaning.

The evolution of “terrific” is an example of “amelioration,” a term for when a word’s meaning is elevated. The word “pretty,” for instance, meant cunning or crafty in Old English, and didn’t come to mean attractive until the 1400s.

The term “pejoration” refers to the opposite process, when a word’s meaning is degraded. The word “crafty,” for example, meant skillful or clever in Old English, and didn’t come to mean cunning in an underhanded way until the late 1300s.

[Update. A reader sent this comment about “terrific” on Jan. 15, 2014: “Oftentimes older Irishmen would use this word only in describing a tragedy such as a ‘terrific storm.’ My Polish uncle used to relate a humorous anecdote of trying to compliment his Irish immigrant future mother-in-law by telling her ‘the meal was terrific.’ As you might imagine, confusion, hurt feelings, explanations, and apologies ensued.”]

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Let’s do “do”

Q: I’m wondering how “do” has universally replaced almost all specific verbs: “do Italy,” “do quiche,” “do tennis,” “do the mail,” and on. I was in a diner with a friend who asked the Greek waiter, “Did you do the broccoli yet?” He had no idea what she meant. I interceded, “Did you cook the broccoli?” I’m an English teacher and it drives me crazy.

A: You might as well make peace with this usage. It may be overdone, but it’s not new, and it’s not likely to go away.

We’ve all heard it for years now, from “Let’s do lunch” to the eternal refrain of cleaning people everywhere: “I don’t do windows.”

In fact, from a historical standpoint, this kind of construction—“do” followed by a noun as direct object—isn’t unusual.  For more than a thousand years, English speakers have used it to mean achieve, perform, bring about, carry out, accomplish, and so on.  

We still use “do” this way, as in “do honor to one’s country,” “do the work,” “do nothing,” “do one’s duty,” “do justice,” “do evil,” “do penance,” “do your best,” etc.

We also use “do” plus an object to mean prepare, arrange, clean, put in order, deal with, work on, or make ready.

Your example “do the mail” falls into this category, and it’s not unusual. Similar examples include “do the flowers,” “do the room,” “do housework,” “do one’s hair [or makeup],” “do his homework,” “do the accounts,” “do your taxes,” and so forth.

“Do” is extremely useful in this way. As the Oxford English Dictionary remarks, “Since every kind of action may be viewed as a particular form of doing, the uses of the verb are as numerous as the classes of objects which it may govern.”

We’ve written before on the blog about usages like “do a burger,” “do lunch,” and so on. As we noted, “do” has been used to mean consume (as in “do a couple of pints” or “do a chop”) since the mid-19th century.

A related sense, “to eat or drink, esp. habitually,” dates from the 1970s, Oxford says. The dictionary’s citations include “do booze” (1970), “do sushi” (1987), “do coffee” (1989), and “do alcohol” (1994). We might add your example “do quiche” (as in “Does he do quiche?”). 

As we also mentioned in that earlier post, “do lunch” is vintage 1970s. This expression (sometimes it’s “do dinner”), was first recorded in Ladies’ Man (1978), a novel by Richard Price:

“ ‘Kenny, whata you doin’ now?’ ‘Now? I was gonna do lunch; you wanna do lunch?’ ”

The OED defines the phrase as meaning “to meet for the specified meal, esp. with a view to conducting business.”

This more businesslike exchange of pleasantries is from Marc Blake’s novel 24 Karat Schmooze (2001): “ ‘And if you come up with something more, do get in touch.’ ‘I will.’ ‘We must do lunch.’ ”

Let’s look at the other usages you mention: “do Italy,” “do tennis,” and “do the broccoli.”

It was 19th-century tourists, the OED says, who began using “do” to mean to visit a site.

Oxford’s citations include “do the Rhine” (1817), “done North and South America” (1830), “ ‘did’ a bit of continent” (1844), and “ ‘do’ Cologne Cathedral” (1854).

The fact that the writers sometimes used quotation marks or italics probably indicates that they considered  this usage a colloquialism.

Phrases like “do tennis” are more recent. The OED has citations since 1990 for “do” used to mean “to (be able to) partake of or engage in,” mostly in negative constructions.

The dictionary’s examples include “he didn’t ‘do’ relationships” (1990), “can ‘do intimacy’ ” (1994), “he doesn’t do boyfriends” (1999), and “doesn’t do small talk.”

As for “do the broccoli,” the OED says that since the 1600s “do” has been used to mean “to prepare or make ready as food; to cook.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1660): “We had … a carp and some other fishes, as well done as ever I eat any.” (He’s using “well done” here in the sense of “well prepared.”)

In another citation for the usage, an advertisement from the 1890s seeks a young woman “capable of doing pastry.”

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the verb “do” in our language.

For example, we use “do” with a pronoun as object, in both questions and statements: “What has Jack done?” … “That does it!” … “What does your brother-in-law do?” … “This just isn’t done.” 

As auxiliary forms, “do”/”do not” and “did”/”did not” are especially handy.

We use the auxiliary “do” plus an infinitive to form an emphatic imperative, as in “Do tell!” … “Do be quiet” … “Do stay.”

In addition, the auxiliary “do” is often used with an infinitive to form a question: “Do you smoke?” … “Did they drive?” … “Does he love her?” Without this flexibility, we’d have to resort to the clumsy “Smoke you?” … “Drove they?” …”Loves he her?”

And in negative sentences, as Oxford points out, “do not” and “did not” allow “the negative to come after the auxiliary, instead of following the principal verb: e.g., ‘We did not recognize him’ instead of ‘We recognized him not.’ ”

In short, forms of “do” have helped English no end! We could go on, but for now this will do.

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Sentence interruptus

Q: Is there a word for making a habit of finishing someone else’s sentences?

A: Annoying? Bothersome? Irritating? Exasperating? We’ve known people who do this, and it bugs us mightily.  Before we can finish a sentence, they break in and finish it for us.

Is there a word for this? Not that we know of. But sociolinguists who specialize in conversational analysis have used various phrases to describe the phenomenon.

Some phrases we’ve seen are “interruptive conversational transitions,” “interruptive turns in talk-in interaction,” “aberration from the turn-taking rules,” “relaxation of turn-taking practices,” and “anticipatory completion of a speaking turn by another speaker.”

Language scholars who study the organization of conversation have offered various explanations for what a lay person would consider violations in the accepted turn-taking rules.

Gene Lerner, a sociologist who studies conversational analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says one reason listeners break in and finish sentences is to guide conversations in a desirable direction.

In “Finding ‘Face’ in the Preference Structures of Talk-in-Interaction,” a 1996 paper in Social Psychology Quarterly, Lerner puts it this way:

“The anticipatory completion of a speaking turn by another speaker can be used to preempt an emerging dispreferred action and change it into the alternative preferred action.”

Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, sees two kinds of interruptions in conversation: dominating and supportive.

In an introduction to “Interpreting Interruption in Conversation,” an essay in her 1994 book Gender and Discourse, Tannen distinguishes between interrupting and overlapping in conversation.

She says “high involvement style” conversation involves a lot of “cooperative overlap,” which she describes as “a listener talking along with a speaker not in order to interrupt but to show enthusiastic listenership and participation.”

Tannen says men often interrupt and dominate women in conversation, but she’s reluctant “to jump on the ‘men dominate women by interrupting them’ bandwagon.”

She writes that her research into the workings of conversation has shown that “one cannot simply count overlaps in a conversation, call them interruptions, and assign blame to the speaker whose voice prevails.”

We’ve seen many explanations for the finishing of another person’s sentence. Some language commentators believe that it’s a sign of intimacy; others that it’s a putdown.

And some chronic interrupters believe they have psychic powers that give them an uncanny ability to finish other people’s sentences.  

We find that finishing someone else’s sentences often involves impatience. The listener simply wants to hurry a slow talker along.

That reminds us of an old Bob and Ray routine in which Ray Goulding interviews Bob Elliot in the role of president and recording secretary of the Slow Talkers of America.

As Bob pauses between words, Ray jumps in with the next word, but Bob then changes his responses to make Ray’s guesses wrong.

We’ll finish this now before someone with psychic powers finishes it for us.

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Whosetrionics

Q: In your post last May about “who” and “which,” you use (deliberately?) a “who”-related word for things (“clauses whose information”). If “who” is used exclusively for people, why is “whose” used for both people and things?

A: Yes, we deliberately used “whose” to refer to things. It’s a myth that “whose” shouldn’t be used in reference to inanimate things, as in “a company whose CEO is 22 years old,” or “an idea whose time has come.”

For more than a thousand years, “whose” has been used—and quite properly—for both people and things. Yet the belief that “whose” is only for people is one of the most stubborn misconceptions about English grammar.

We’ve referred to this hoary old myth before on our blog, but we’ve never devoted an entire post to it. 

The fiction persists because many people associate “whose” with “who.” They assume that because “who” applies to people and not things, the same must be true of “whose.”

But as dictionaries and usage guides will tell you, “whose” is the genitive (or possessive) case of both “who” and “which.”

(The genitive case, as we’ve written before, is for relationships much wider than simple possession or ownership. It indicates “of or relating to” as well as “belonging to.”)

So “whose” can apply to a person or a thing; it can mean “of whom” or “of which.” 

“Whose” was first recorded in the late 800s, when it was written in Old English as hwæs, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In those times, it was the genitive case of both “who” (hwa) and “what” (hwæt), the OED says.

During the Middle English period (roughly 1100-1500), the spelling of “whose” shifted a lot, from hwas to the later hwos and whos. During this same period—in the 1300s—people began using “whose” as the genitive form of “which” as well as “who.”

That’s how it’s been used ever since, and that’s how standard dictionaries define it. Yet because of its similarity to “who,” many people think its use for things is taboo.

In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Henry Fowler vigorously condemned the taboo against using “whose” for things:

“Let us, in the name of common sense, prohibit the prohibition of whose inanimate; good writing is surely difficult enough without the forbidding of things that have historical grammar, & present intelligibility, & obvious convenience, on their side, & lack only—starch.”

The current Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), by R. W. Burchfield, says the notion that “whose” is limited to people is a “folk-belief.”

The editors of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage use even stronger language: “The notion that whose may not properly be used of anything except persons is a superstition.”

“The force that has always worked against acceptance of whose used of inanimate things is its inevitable association with who,” the usage guide says.

But “whose,” Merriam-Webster’s adds, is commonly used in reference to things, even in writing characterized by “formality and solemnity.”

The OED says that “in reference to a thing or things (inanimate or abstract),” the pronoun “whose” was “originally the genitive of the neuter what … in later use serving as the genitive of which.”

And as the OED’s citations prove, “whose” has been used this way for centuries by the best of writers. Here are some examples:

“I would a tale vnfold, whose lightest word / Would harrow vp thy soule.” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1603.)

“Mountains on whose barren brest / The labouring clouds do often rest.” (John Milton, L’Allegro, 1645.)

 “A newspaper of sound principles, but whose staff will persist in ‘casting’ anchors.” (Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 1906.)

“She looked down … and saw a little house, with a blue door whose colour delighted her.” (Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel, 1927.)

“Toby … marvelled at this light which is no light … and whose strength is seen only in the sharpness of cast shadows.” (Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 1958.)

“There were pictures whose context she understood immediately.” (Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, 1981.)

Merriam-Webster’s has many more examples, from the Bible, Milton (Paradise Lost), Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Stephen Spender, Lewis Mumford, and John Updike.  

Yet, some people still doubt the propriety of “whose” in cases like these. They’d rather substitute “of which,” though the result is often a clumsy monstrosity.

Take the examples we used in our opening sentence: “a company whose CEO is 22 years old,” and “an idea whose time has come.”

Without “whose,” they’re stiff and ungainly: “a company the CEO of which is 22 years old,” and “an idea the time of which has come.”

“Of which” isn’t wrong here—just starchy, as Fowler would say. But “whose” isn’t wrong either, so why avoid a perfectly good usage?

We’ll let the Merriam-Webster’s editors have the final word: “The misinformation that passes for gospel wisdom about English usage is sometimes astounding.”

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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 is filling in for Leonard. Today’s topic: What would Jane say? Jane Austen’s contributions to the English language. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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How cool is coolth?

Q: My late mother’s family lived in suburban Philadelphia long before air conditioning. She and her relatives had a word, “coolth,” to describe the opposite of “warmth.” Did they make this up or has it existed before?

A: No, your mother’s family didn’t make it up. The word “coolth” (meaning coolness) has been around since the 1500s. And the high point of its popularity, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, was in the mid-20th century.

Interestingly, it’s been having a bit of a revival lately, according to Google searches, often in a newer, colloquial sense of the word.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “coolth” was formed “chiefly after warmth,” which first showed up in the 1100s. The OED points out a similar word in Old Dutch, cuolitha.

The earliest Oxford citation for “coolth” is from a 1547 Welsh-English dictionary in which oerfel, Welsh for cold, is defined as “coulthe” in English.

The OED, which describes “coolth” as chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous now, has examples of the usage from the 16th to the 21st century, including citations from Rudyard Kipling, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, and Seamus Heaney.

Here’s a literary example from Heaney’s poetry collection Electric Light (2001): “The older I get, the quicker and the closer I hear those labouring breaths and feel the coolth.”

In recent decades, “coolth” has taken on a colloquial sense that the OED defines as the “quality of being relaxed, assured, or sophisticated in demeanour or style.”

The earliest example of this newer usage, which the dictionary describes as chiefly humorous, is from the May 26, 1966, issue of the San Antonio (Texas) Express: “In this marathon role she has wit, poise, warmth and a very taking coolth.”

The most recent citation is from Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker (2003), James McManus’s book about the poker championship in Las Vegas:

“My albeit progressive-bifocal shades suggest not feeble nearsightedness but its opposite—penetrating 20/20 vision to go with impenetrable coolth.”

We’ve found “coolth” in only a few standard dictionaries, defined as a pleasantly cool temperature or the quality of being fashionable.

We couldn’t tell from the OED examples of “coolth” in the thermometer sense whether the writers were using the word humorously or seriously.

However, Philip Durkin, writing in The Oxford Guide to Etymology, feels that some of these citations “are self-consciously humorous, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards.”

Although “coolth” has been used since the 16th century, Durkin says, the record of the usage is “rather patchy” and may be the result of repeated inventions of the word.

“There is probably not a continuous history of the usage, but rather a succession of separate formations of the word,” he writes.

R. Harald Baayen, in his 2003 paper “Linguistic Approaches to Morphology,” discusses “coolth” in writing about whether the English word ending “-th” is alive, dead, or something in between as an affix to form new words.

Baayen, whose paper was published in the book Probabilistic Linguistics, writes that the use of the affix “-th” in “coolth” points out the difficulty in judging whether a word element is, in linguistic terminology, productive, nonproductive, or semiproductive.

He says “coolth,” a term that was “once a nonce word made on analogy with warmth,” is now alive and well in both jocular and literal senses, “even though -th is one of the well-worn examples of a supposedly completely unproductive suffix in English.”

And if you’d like to read about a popular cousin of “coolth,” check out our “Birth of the cool” posting from 2010.

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Is the present a gift?

Q: A friend posted this on Facebook: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a GIFT. That’s why they call it the present.” Is there a connection between “the present” and “a present”?

A: That saying, which is often mistakenly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, A. A. Milne, and others, is merely a play on words.

The “present” that means now and the “present” that means a gift are two separate nouns, though they have a common source.

Both of them originated in the notion of presence—of being at hand or on the spot. They can be traced to the Latin noun praesens (presence) and adjective praesentem (present or at hand, not absent).

In these Latin words we find the prefix prae- (before, in front of) and a participial form of the verb esse (be). So the original notion was of being before (in the presence of) a person or thing.

Derivatives of the Latin words came into English in the Middle Ages by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French.

And it was in Old French that the noun present first came to mean a gift, a sense that was passed along into English.

As John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The use of the related word present for ‘gift’ originated in Old French in the concept of ‘bringing something into someone’s presence,’ and hence of giving it to them.”

The other sense of the noun “present”—the time at hand—was also influenced by French, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it developed separately from the “gift” sense.

And the English adjective “present” is from French as well, in its usual senses related to place (here) and time (now).

It’s difficult to sort out which English words came first.

For example, the OED says the English adjective “present” was first recorded in writing in 1340, but that it may have influenced various noun usages, some of which were recorded more than a century earlier.

The etymology of these words helps explain why the English verb “present” has so many meanings.

The OED says that when first recorded, around 1300, to “present” meant “to bring or place (a person) before or into the presence of; to bring to the notice of another; to introduce, esp. formally or ceremonially; spec. to introduce at court or to society, or before a sovereign or other distinguished person.”

Today “present” can mean, among other things, to introduce someone or something (like a person, a product, a performer); to put before the public (a play, exhibition, etc.); to hold vertically in salute (as in the phrase “present arms”); or to lay before a court or other authority (as a lawyer offers documents to a judge).

That last meaning explains the use of the term “these presents” in legal language, a usage the OED says dates back to 1379. In the legal sense, “presents” means the  present documents, writings, words, or statements. (No, they’re not gift-wrapped.)

Here’s an example from the preamble to the Articles of Confederation (1781): “To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.”

As you’ve probably gathered, the verb “present” is almost always transitive—that is, it has a direct object, the something that’s being presented.

But as we noted in a blog posting a few years ago, there’s an exception. In medicine, to “present” means to appear before a doctor. It’s one of the rare cases in which the verb is intransitive and doesn’t have an object.

The examples we used: “The patient presented in my office with symptoms of fibromyalgia” … “The head of the fetus is presenting.”

The OED has examples of this medical usage going back to 1719. So it may be odd, but it’s presentable.

As for that saying your friend posted on Facebook, it’s been cited in print in one form or another since at least the 1990s, and it may have originated in a Hallmark greeting card, according to the language sleuth Barry Popik.

In an entry on his Big Apple website, Popik traces the saying to an Aug. 31, 1994, installment of “The Family Circus,” a comic strip by Bill Keane: “Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a GIFT. That’s why it’s called the present.”

Popik, who had help on his posting from the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter, says an earlier version of the saying that doesn’t connect the two senses of “present” appeared in the July 11, 1967, issue of the Altoona (PA) Mirror:

“You must forget the past. Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery. Follow the AA philosophy of quitting one day at a time and seeking divine guidance.”

A partial version of the saying showed up in the Aug. 2, 1993, issue of the Galveston (TX) Daily News, in a typo-ridden ad that suggested a greeting-card connection:

“Today is a gift, thats why its called the present
“MAINLAND FLORAL, INC.
“Hallmark.”

A citation from The Ten Habits of Naturally Slim People, a 1998 book by by Jill H. Podjasek with Jennifer Carney, also suggests a greeting-card origin of the saying:

“I read the following wisdom in a greeting card years ago: ‘Yesterday is history; tomorrow is mystery; today is a gift; that is why they call it the present.’ ”

If any readers of the blog have one of the greeting cards up in the attic, please send us a photo of it!

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Mistresses and other women

Q: I’m surprised that the term “mistress” is still used in the New York Times, as in this recent example: “Jimmy Goldsmith was an inveterate keeper of mistresses.” It’s a very antiquated notion. Care to weigh in?

A: You’re right that the word “mistress” shows up a lot in the Times. A search of the newspaper’s archive turns up nearly 70,000 examples since 1851, including almost 1,500 over the last 12 months.

Many of the older examples refer to a woman who has power, authority, or ownership (a schoolmistress, postmistress, pet’s mistress, mistress of a household, and so on).

However, nearly all the newer examples refer to the sense you’re asking about—a woman who has a sexual relationship with a married man who’s not her husband, often involving material support.

When “mistress” entered English around 1330, derived from words in Anglo-Norman and Middle French, it referred to a governess, but that sense is now obsolete.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “mistress” soon came to mean either “the female head of a family, household, or other establishment” or “a woman holding such a position in conjunction with a male counterpart.”

By the end of the 1300s, according to OED citations, the term could also refer to “a woman who employs others in her service” or “a woman who has authority over servants, attendants, or slaves.”

We’ll skip the many other senses of “mistress” and get to the one that strikes you as antiquated.

When “mistress” took a disreputable turn in the 1400s, it initially referred to “a woman notorious for some act,” but the OED describes this sense of the word as obsolete.

By the 1600s, according to the dictionary, it was being used to mean “a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship.”

Here’s an early example from a sermon (written sometime before 1631) by John Donne: “Those women, whom the Kings were to take for their Wives, and not for Mistresses, (which is but a later name for Concubines).”

Getting back to your question, we don’t find “mistress” a particularly “antiquated notion.” Yes, the word has been around for quite a while, but so have mistresses.

Is there a better term for them? We can’t think of one. “Girlfriend”? “Concubine”? “Paramour”? “”Other woman”? “Fancy woman”? We’ll stick with “mistress.”

A more interesting subject may be the disparity in the number of pejorative sexual words for women and men.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language discusses this subject in a  usage note in its fourth edition (the usage note doesn’t appear to the fifth edition).

“English has no shortage of terms for women whose behavior is viewed as licentious,” the dictionary says, “but it is difficult to come up with a list of comparable terms used of men.”

AH notes that Julia Penelope, a language researcher, “stopped counting after she reached 220 such labels for women, both current and historical, but managed to locate only 20 names for promiscuous men.”

Another researcher, Murial R. Schultz, “found more than 500 slang terms for prostitute but could find just 65 for the male terms whoremonger and pimp,” the dictionary adds.

“A further imbalance appears in the connotations of many of these terms,” AH says. “While the terms generally applying only to women, like tramp and slut, are almost always strongly negative, corresponding terms used for men, such as stud and Casanova, often carry positive associations.”

The usage note points out that “many of the negative terms used for women derive from words that once had neutral or even positive associations.”

“For instance, the word mistress, now mainly used to refer to a woman who is involved in an extramarital sexual relationship, originally served simply as a neutral counterpart to mister or master,” AH says. “The term madam, while still a respectful form of address, has had sexual connotations since the early 1700s and has been used to refer to the owner of a brothel since the early 1900s.”

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Wooder, wooder, everywhere?

Q: I’ve noticed that the word “water” is pronounced wooder in Central Jersey, but not in South Jersey or North Jersey. Are you familiar with this pronunciation? Is it heard elsewhere?

A: In areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania that are part of the Delaware Valley region—particularly in Philadelphia—the word “water” often sounds like wooder or wooter (the first vowel is pronounced as in “put”).

This may be the best-known feature of what’s sometimes called “Philly-speak.” There are many others: “towel” may sound like tal, “bagel” like beggle, “dentist” like dennis, and “go” like gow.

But the familiar sounds of this dialect are changing as the years go by, according to language scholars. Some features—like wooder—are weakening while others are getting stronger.

In an interview with the Associated Press in April, the linguist William Labov said the first syllable of the Philly-ism wooder is moving toward an ah sound. A similar evolution is happening with the Philly version of “coffee.”

“That sound is moving toward ‘ah’ so instead of ‘cawfee’ more Philadelphians are saying ‘coffee,’ ‘wooder’ becomes ‘water,”’ Labov said. “As people become aware … they tend to reverse them. They say, ‘Oh we shouldn’t talk that way.’ ”

As for another feature of Philadelphia speech, pronouncing “go” as gow, Labov said that “it got stronger and stronger, until people born around 1950, 1960, when it turned around and it went the other way.”

Labov, who has been studying Mid-Atlantic accents for 40 years, published a paper in the March 2013 issue of the journal Language about changes in Philadelphia speech.

In the paper, “One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia,” Labov and two colleagues, Ingrid Rosenfelder and Josef Fruehwald, discuss the speech patterns of 379 Philadelphians who were born between 1888 and 1991.

The three University of Pennsylvania linguists turned decades of recordings into computerized voice spectrographs that let them track sound changes over time.

The paper can be hard going for a non-linguist, but the University of Pennsylvania issued a news release that summarizes the findings in simpler English.

The paper, according to Penn News, attributes many of the changes to the linguistic “Northernization” of the Philadelphia region:

“The traditional Southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are increasingly being displaced by Northern influences.”

The news release says the three linguists looked for an explanation of the changes “in the relation of Philadelphia to its geographic neighbors.” Here’s a brief description of the paper’s conclusions:

“In the earlier period, many Philadelphia features resembled those found in Southern dialects, and these are the changes that have reversed direction.

“Those that have not are movements towards patterns heard in the Northern dialects of western New England, New York state and the Great Lakes Region.”

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Bilingual education

Q: My Danish stepmother is completely bilingual, with one exception: she uses the phrase “not that I know to” instead of “not that I know of” when speaking English. It would be interesting to understand where this usage comes from.

A: There’s a verbal phrase in Danish, kende til, that means to “know about.”

But someone attempting a literal translation into English might render kende til as “know to.” That’s because the Danish verb kende means to “know” and the preposition til frequently means “to.”

Louise Møhl, a cultural officer with the Danish Consulate in New York, provided us with a couple of Danish-to-English examples of these terms used in the first-person singular:

Jeg kender ham fra mit arbejde. = “I know him from work.”

Det kender jeg ikke noget til. = “I don’t know anything about that.”

As for til, Ms. Møhl said, it “has many meanings in Danish depending on the situation.”

When it’s not part of the expression kende til, the preposition til can mean “to” (perhaps its most frequent sense), “of,” “for,” “about,” “toward,” “from,” or “at.”

Incidentally, the Danish til has a similar-sounding cousin in English, “till.” The Old Norse preposition til (“to”) is the ancestor of both the Danish til and the English prepositions “till” and “to.”

We’ve written on our blog about the English words “till” and “until” (you may be surprised to learn which came first).

Sorry that we can’t be more definite about why your Danish stepmother says “know to” instead of “know of,” but here’s a suggestion: ask her why she does it.

You might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Or, as a Dane would put it, lige fra hestens mund.

Why a horse’s mouth? We had a brief posting back in 2006 that says there are two theories about the origin of the English expression, one involving horse racing and the other horse trading.

The most likely explanation is that it originated in the early 20th century in reference to inside information from a racing tipster that was supposedly as good as if it came straight from the horse itself.

We’ll end with an example from “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald,” a 1928 short story by one of our favorite writers, P. G. Wodehouse. The wooer (and eavesdropper) here is Archibald Mulliner:

“It might be an ignoble thing to eavesdrop, but it was apparent that Aurelia Cammarleigh was about to reveal her candid opinion of him: and the prospect of getting the true facts—straight, as it were, from the horse’s mouth—held him so fascinated that he could not move.”

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The rhubarb phenomenon

Q: Is there a term for the phenomenon of a word sounding completely nonsensical when you say it over and over again? That happens for me with the word “only.” I’d be interested if you folks have had the same experience.

A: Yes, we too have had this experience. After we repeatedly think, speak, or look at a word—say, “rhubarb”—it becomes gibberish.

This phenomenon isn’t new. James Boswell wrote about it in the 18th century, Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th, and James Thurber in the 20th.

In his memoir My Life and Hard Times (1933), Thurber recalls lying in bed, racking his brain in an attempt to remember the name Perth Amboy, the city in New Jersey:

“I fell to repeating the word ‘Jersey’ over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into.”

A common term for this experience is “semantic satiation,” a phrase used by the psychologist Leon Jakobovits James in his 1962 doctoral dissertation. Other terms are “semantic saturation” and “verbal satiation.” (We might add “the rhubarb phenomenon.”)  

In his paper,  “Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behavior: Some Experiments on the Phenomenon of Semantic Satiation,” James describes experiments testing subjects’ responses to repeated words, numbers, concepts, and so on.

He concludes, among other things, that “Repeated presentation of verbal stimuli results in a decrease of their meaning.”

What this means is that with enough repetition, “rhubarb”  becomes a meaningless collection of letters or sounds.

In 2010, many years after writing his dissertation, James contributed a few comments to a discussion of semantic satiation on the website Language Hat.

James wrote that his dissertation “was the first objective demonstration of a measurement of the intensity of reduction of meaning with repetition.”

“I demonstrated that this meaning reduction was a general cognitive and perceptual and temporary process, e.g., it slowed down our computing time for simple arithmetic when numbers were repeated first,” he said.

He said the paper also showed “that this meaning reduction process occurs at the macro or societal level, e.g., reduction of popularity of hit songs as a function of the number of times they were played on the radio.”

“I note from a Google search that the phrase and idea of semantic satiation has been applied to new areas in the past forty years (e.g., advertising, music, neurosemantics, etc.),” he added. “Today I still think that semantic satiation operates at several levels: universal, general, specific, and particular.”

He predicted that research “in the next forty years will uncover many of these effects produced by cumulative repetition or exposure (words, topics, issues, objects, tastes, experiences, colors, etc.).”

“Further,” he said, “there will be connection made to personality traits which I discuss in my dissertation as ‘semantic satiability’—people who for instance like to hear the same song over and over again (movie, etc.), vs. people who vary their way home because they get bored, etc.”

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A “media” event

Q: My college professor took points off my term paper because I used “media” as a singular noun in the phrase “the impact media has on society.” He insists that “media” is plural. I disagree and I hope you can help me with my predicament.

A: Your professor hasn’t kept up with current usage.

The word “media” has been in transition in recent years. Lexicographers (that is, dictionary editors) now accept its use as a singular collective noun that can be accompanied by either a singular or a plural verb, depending on the context.

It’s singular when “media” refers to the communications industry as a whole. But it’s plural when “media” refers to communications outlets or forms of expression (that is, radio, TV, print, and so on).

That might be a good rule of thumb for you to use. If you mean “media” in the sense of “industry,” use it with a singular verb; if you mean “media” in the sense of “outlets,” use it with a plural verb.

Here’s how Pat explains this in the new third edition of her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“As for media, it’s singular when you mean the world of mass communications, which is most of the time. The media was in a frenzy. But it’s occasionally used as a plural to refer to the individual kinds of communication. The media present were TV, radio, newspapers, and the blogosphere. The singular in that sense is medium. The liveliest medium of all is the blogosphere.”

And here’s a passage from Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions:

“The term ‘media,’ incidentally, can be either singular or plural. Any purists who claim it’s only plural should take a look at an up-to-date dictionary. ‘Media’ is singular when it refers to the world of mass communication as a whole (‘The media is obsessed with celebrity trials’). It’s plural for the people in this world (‘The media are packed into the courtroom like sardines’) or for the types of communication (‘The media at the trial include radio, TV, and the blogosphere’). Who are the holdouts who insist that ‘media’ is strictly plural? Ironically, many of them are members of the media who haven’t heard the news.”

We might add that the evolution of “media” is similar to that of other words derived from Latin plurals. Among the words that were considered plural when they entered English but have become accepted over the years as singular nouns are “ephemera,” “erotica,” “stamina,” “agenda,” “trivia,” “insignia,” “candelabra,” and more recently “data” (as we noted in a post two years ago). 

Now “media” has joined the club. So “media has” is correct in the context of that sentence from your term paper.

As we wrote on our blog three years ago, “Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) recognize that ‘media’ can be treated as either singular or plural.”

We’ve checked more recent versions of each dictionary—the fifth edition of American Heritage and a later printing of Merriam-Webster’s.

Merriam-Webster’s says that “media” is plural when it means “members of the mass media,” but that it can be either singular or plural in construction when it means “mass media.” It says the singular usage has been around since the 1920s and originated in the field of advertising. 

American Heritage has this usage note about “the media” as a singular noun:

“Media also occurs with the definite article as a collective term that refers to the communities and institutions behind the various forms of communication. In this sense, the media means something like ‘the press.’ Like other collective nouns, it may take a singular or plural verb depending on the intended meaning. If the point is to emphasize the multifaceted nature of the press, a plural verb may be more appropriate: The media have covered the trial in a variety of formats. Quite frequently, however, media stands as a singular noun for the aggregate of journalists and broadcasters: The media has not shown much interest in covering the trial.”

Nevertheless, the dictionary adds, “many people still think of media predominantly as a plural form,” and consequently “it will be some time before the singular use of media begins to crowd out the plural use in the manner of similar Latin plurals, such as agenda and data.”

Your professor is among those who still regard “media” as exclusively plural. But in fact, usage has changed.

We’re not sure, though, that we can help you with your predicament. By all means, show him our answer. But sticklers tend to stickle, never mind evidence to the contrary.

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“Other” wise

Q: A colleague and I are arguing over this quote: “An 88-year-old man was killed and three others injured.” I say “others,” as a pronoun, must refer to 88-year-old men in this construction. My colleague says it effectively means three other people. The injured were not all 88-year-old men. Which of us is right?

A: Your colleague is right. In cases like this, “others” doesn’t mirror its exact antecedent (“88-year-old men”). Here the plural pronoun simply means additional people.

Among its various functions, the word “other” can be an adjective. Examples: “other charges” … “other drivers” … “other 88-year-old men.” As an adjective, “other” modifies the noun that follows.

But “other” can also be a pronoun, in which case it stands alone instead of modifying a noun. Examples: “Who is the other?” (singular) … “Let’s wait for the others” (plural) … “Others were injured” (plural).

The Oxford English Dictionary says that as a pronoun, “other” (or “others” in the plural) can mean “another person, someone else, anyone else” as well as another person “of a kind specified or understood contextually.”

In the example you mention (“An 88-year-old man was killed and three others injured”), the writer is obviously using “others” in the looser sense of other people.

The OED has written examples of this usage going back to early Old English, but here are a few more recent ones:

“Others indeed may talk.” (From the philosopher George Berkeley’s Alciphron, 1732.)

“If one has too much in consequence of others being wronged, it seems to me that the divine voice which tells us to set that wrong right, must be obeyed.” (From George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, 1872.)

“He had always worked in places where others had established the English corner before he came.” (From Graham Greene’s novel England Made Me, 1935.)

Your question points up a possible usage problem. If “others” can refer to people in general as well as people of a specific kind, it can sometimes be misunderstood.

If all the victims in your example are indeed 88 years old, the writer should be more precise in the wording: “Four 88-year-old men were victims—one was killed and the others were injured.”

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A loaded question

Q: I recently came across this quote from the Mormon lawman Porter Rockwell: “I never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot! He’s still alive, ain’t he?” That got me to thinking. You shoot an arrow, not the bow, but you shoot a gun, not the bullet. A friend of mine says he shoots targets. I’m confused.

A: The verb “shoot” has a lot of flexibility. It can be used intransitively—that is, without a direct object. Example: “He likes to go into the woods and shoot.”

But “shoot” can also be used transitively—with a direct object. When we’re talking about weapons, the transitive verb “shoot” can mean to discharge, to let fly, or to hit.

Consequently, it can have a variety of objects. You can “shoot” (that is, discharge) a gun, bow, slingshot, or catapult. You can “shoot” (let fly) a bullet, arrow, spear, javelin, or similar projectile. And finally, you can “shoot” a target.

All of these senses of the verb are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary and have been around for hundreds of years.

By the way, that last sense of the word—to “shoot” a target—implies that the target was hit. But “shoot at” means only to fire in a particular direction.

We’ll have something to say later about Orrin Porter Rockwell, a colorful and controversial Mormon figure from the Wild West.

But first let’s look at the life of “shoot,” a verb with an interesting history, and not just in weaponry.

Its ancestors were old Germanic words that meant to go swiftly or suddenly, to rush or fly—yes, like an arrow from a bow.

It was first recorded in Old English in the ninth century in reference to the shooting of arrows, according to citations in the OED.

But other Old English examples use the term in a wider sense that reflects its earlier Germanic roots—to dart swiftly from one place to another.

So at the root of the word is the sense of moving quickly, and this ancestry explains the many ways in which “shoot” is used today.

For example, meteors “shoot” across the night sky, rafters “shoot” the rapids, and a toboggan “shoots” down a slope. A racehorse “shoots” from the gate, then “shoots” ahead of the pack.

A golfer “shoots” a birdie,” while a basketball player “shoots” a basket. Grownups “shoot” pool or dice, and children “shoot” marbles. If the kids are growing fast, they’re said to “shoot” up.

Plants in spring send out new “shoots” (a noun usage). Rays of the sun “shoot” through the clouds, and on a more prosaic note, product sales “shoot” up.

An indiscreet person “shoots off” his mouth or “shoots” himself in the foot, while an ambitious colleague “shoots” for success.

To lock a door a night, we “shoot” a bolt into its fastening. And if we don’t look where we’re going, our feet “shoot” out from under us (after which we experience “shooting” pains).

With that, we’ve “shot our bolt.” In case you’re curious (even if you’re not), the “bolt” in this old proverb is a thousand-year-old word for a short, blunt arrow fired from a cross-bow.

In olden days, there was a similar expression, “a fool’s bolt is soon shot.” The lesson: conserve your ammunition.

In case any readers are wondering about that quote you mention, Porter Rockwell was, among other things, a gunfighter, a deputy US marshal, and a bodyguard to the Mormon leader Joseph Smith Jr.

Rockwell was arrested in St. Louis in March of 1843 in connection with an attempt to kill Lilburn Boggs, a former governor of Missouri, the year before. (In 1838, as governor, Boggs issued an executive order evicting Mormons from the state.)

A grand jury found that there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment on the charge of attempted murder, but Rockwell was tried in December of 1843 for trying to escape.

He supposedly made his comments at that trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to five minutes in jail, according to Enemy of the Saints, a biography of Boggs by Robert Nelson.

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Yeah, no

Q: We North Queenslanders are considered rednecks even by Australian standards. I thought I’d pass on an example of English usage in this part of the world: Yeah, no, as in “Yeah, no, they should’ve won in the last quarter.”

A: We’ve written on the blog about “yeah,” but we haven’t looked into “yeah, no” until now.

Others, however, have studied this conversational response, which is used by both Americans and Australians.

In fact, Australians may use it, more—at least there’s been more written about “yeah, no” by language scholars in Australia.

A 2004 article in The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, quoted the Australian linguist Kate Burridge as saying, “It’s not going to disappear. It’s always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase.”

The author of the Melbourne article, Bridie Smith, pointed out that English speakers aren’t alone in this usage, since “Germans use a similar ‘ja nein’ and the South Africans ‘ya nay.’ ”

“In Australia,” Smith wrote in 2004, “where the phrase has become entrenched in the past six years, ‘yeah no’ can mean anything from ‘yes, I see that, but can we go back to the earlier topic’ to an enthusiastic ‘yes, I can’t reinforce that point enough.’ ”

The meaning of “yeah, no” depends on its context, Smith says. She quotes Dr. Burridge, the linguist, as saying: “It can emphasise agreement, it can downplay disagreement or compliments, and it can soften refusals.”

Burridge and a colleague, Margaret Florey, published a paper in the Australian Journal of Linguistics in 2002 entitled “ ‘Yeah-no He’s a Good Kid’: A Discourse Analysis of Yeah-no in Australian English.”

An abstract of the paper said that as of 2002, “Yeah, no” was relatively new in Australian English and served many functions. It kept a conversation rolling, helped with “hedging and face-saving,” and indicated agreement or disagreement.

Since then, American linguists and language watchers have taken note of “yeah, no” in the US.

Linguists have discussed it on the American Dialect Society’s mailing list. And articles have been written by Stephen Dodson for Language Hat, by Mark Liberman for the Language Log, and by Ben Yagoda for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Even presidents of the United States aren’t immune. When a radio interviewer in 2011 asked Bill Clinton how he felt about being spoofed on TV comedy shows, Yagoda writes, “The former president replied, ‘Oh yeah, no I thought a lot of the Saturday Night Live guys were great.’ ” 

Liberman surveyed the speech databases in the Linguistic Data Consortium, and found that “in all the cases that I looked at, the yeah and the no seem be independently appropriate in the context of use, even if the sequence seems surprising when viewed in merely semantic terms.”

In one comment on the ADS list, the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter quoted a former New York City police detective as saying on CNN: “Yeah, no, you’re right!”

Lighter added: “There it seems to mean, ‘Yes indeed, and no, I wouldn’t think of contradicting you.’ ” 

But it can also mean disagreement, as in this tweet a few months ago about horror movies: “yeah no i hate blood and guns and stuff like that.”

PS: Readers of the blog have reported sightings (or, rather, hearings) of the usage in New Zealand, in South African English as well as Afrikaans, and in Danish.

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Is “offshore of” off-putting?

Q: Several times recently I’ve come across the usage “offshore of” in copy I’m editing. It sounds dead wrong to my ears, but I’m having difficulty explaining why to my client. Can you clarify?

A: You’re right in thinking that the “of” is unnecessary in a phrase like “offshore of Cuba.”

But we don’t think this redundancy is a hanging offense, since the use of “offshore” as a preposition is relatively new, and many people seem to be uncomfortable with it.

When “offshore” is used as a preposition, it means “off the shore or coast of,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. So the “of” is already built in.

As we’ve written before on our blog, “offshore” has been used as both an adverb and an adjective since the great seafaring days of the 18th century.

The use of the word as a preposition, however, dates from only the 1960s, according to published examples in the OED.

Here are Oxford’s citations, and note that “offshore” is not accompanied by “of” in any of them.

1967: “Atlantic refining and Phillips Petroleum have announced the first discovery of natural gas in the Gulf of Sirte offshore Libya.” (From the journal Ocean Industry.)

1988: “This year’s Fireball Nationals … were held offshore Durban over Easter.” (From a South African journal, Sailing Inland & Offshore.)

1995: “A ground ice ridge or stamukha off-shore Sakhalin Island.” (From the Lamp, a magazine for Exxon shareholders.)

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the first known use of the preposition is from 1965, but it doesn’t give the source. M-W similarly defines the preposition “offshore” as meaning “off the shore of.”

Although “of” is unnecessary with the preposition “offshore,” many people prefer to tack it on anyway.

A Google search turned up hundreds of thousands of such usages—“offshore of San Diego,” “offshore of Nome,” “offshore of Captiva Island,” “offshore of Plymouth, MA.,” “offshore of the Bahamas,” and so on.

This isn’t surprising. To many ears, the use of “offshore” as a freestanding preposition— “The plane crashed offshore Nantucket”—may seem uncomfortably abrupt.

English speakers are more used to a construction like “off the coast of Nantucket” or “off the shore of Nantucket.”

Perhaps that’s why “offshore of Nantucket” feels more natural to many speakers.

Update [May 22, 2013]: After we posted this entry, the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer reported several earlier uses of “offshore” as a preposition, including one that beats the OED and Merriam-Webster’s sightings by a decade.

Writing on the American Dialect Society’s discussion list, Zimmer reported this finding, from the December 1955 issue of Gas Age:   “… the company has filed an application with the FPC for a certificate of necessity to build a submarine gas pipe line offshore the Coast of Louisiana from the Sabine River to the coast of  the state of Mississippi.”

Then another contributor to the ADS list, Garson O’Toole, unearthed this World War II usage from a June 1942 issue of the State Times in Baton Rouge, La: “Lt. (j. g.) Robert Connel Taylor son of Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Taylor of this city, is recuperating at the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor from wounds received during the bombing of Midway preceding the great air-naval battle offshore the island, a letter received by his parents today disclosed.”

Thanks, Ben and Garson!

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Parsing the Preamble

Q: I’m puzzled by this phrase from the Preamble: “in order to form a more perfect union.” What part of speech is “in order to”? It looks like a preposition. But how can the verb “form” be an object of a preposition? I struggle with this.

 A: You’ve raised an interesting Constitutional question. The short answer is that “in order to” is an idiomatic phrase that might be translated “so as to” and is followed by a verb.

As to what parts of speech are in play here, we think you can regard “in order to form” and similar constructions in two different ways:

(1) “In order to” is a compound preposition that has a bare infinitive (“form”) as its object.

(2) “In order” is a compound preposition that has a “to” infinitive (“to form”) as its object. The “to” here isn’t actually part of the infinitive, as we’ve written before on the blog.

In our opinion, arguing for one view over the other would be splitting hairs.

“In order” may not look like a preposition, but it functions like one, resembling “so as.” And as we’ll explain later, an infinitive can indeed be the object of a preposition.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language has an explanation that agrees with our option #2 above. Cambridge describes “in order” as a preposition followed by either a “to” infinitive or by a clause starting with “that.”

The “in order that” construction, according to Cambridge, “is somewhat more formal and considerably less frequent” than one with the “to” infinitive. 

And “in order that” requires the use of more words. As Cambridge notes, it often calls for “a modal auxiliary,” such as “might” or “can.”

Take a sentence like “I left work early in order that I might go to the gym.” It’s much wordier than “I left work early in order to go to the gym.” (In fact, as we’ve written before on the blog, you can often drop “in order” and be even less wordy!)

The Cambridge Grammar adds that the subjunctive mood is sometimes used with “in order that,” giving this example: “The administration had to show resolve in order that he not be considered a lame-duck president.” (Note the subjunctive “be.”)

But getting back to “in order to,” we were surprised to find only one standard dictionary that analyzes how the phrase functions as a part of speech.

The Collins English Dictionary calls “in order to” a preposition that is followed by an infinitive. Collins defines the phrase as meaning “so that it is possible to.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English language (5th ed.) simply say the phrase means “for the purpose of.”

But that definition is problematic on a literal level, since you can’t swap one expression for the other.

“For the purpose of” is followed by a gerund, like “forming,” while “in order to” is followed by an infinitive, like “form.” (A gerund ends in “-ing” and acts like a noun.)

The Oxford English Dictionary says “in order to” is used “with infinitive expressing purpose.” It defines the phrase as meaning “so as to do or achieve (some end or outcome).”

The OED’s first example of the usage is from the 1609 Douay translation of the Bible: “These are they that speak to Pharao, king of Egypt, in order to bring out the children of Israel from Egypt.”

A less lofty example is this caption from a 1994 issue of Food and Wine magazine: “True risotto must be stirred continuously in order to develop its unique texture.”

You expressed some doubt as to whether a verb can be the object of a preposition.

As we wrote on the blog in 2010, an infinitive as well as a gerund can be a direct object. We’ve also written about bare versus “to” infinitives several times, including posts in 2009 and 2013. 

We’ll add here that it’s not unusual for an infinitive—bare or not—to be the object of a preposition. For example, in all of these sentences, infinitives (both bare and with “to”) are the objects of prepositions:

“He can do everything but cook” … “She had no choice except to lie” … “I’d rather starve instead of steal” …  “We have better things to do than to argue” …”They were about to leave” … “He opened his mouth as if to speak.” (When used in this way, “as if” has a prepositional function, according to Cambridge.)

Finally, a Constitutional footnote. In case you’re bothered by the Founders’ use of  “more perfect” in that passage from the Preamble, take a look at our post on the subject.

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On the lam

Q: Some time ago I wrote you to recommend an essential book for someone in your trade: How the Irish Invented Slang, by Daniel Cassidy. There you will find, among many hundred entries, his view of the derivation of “lam” from the Irish word leim. Alas, Danny has since died, and his extraordinary achievement has not been properly recognized. I feel sure that if you look through his book you will be inspired to extend at least his scholarly life.

A: You won’t like what we have to say. This book sounds like a lot of fun, but perhaps there’s more fun in it than truth.

Cassidy’s book, which won an American Book Award for nonfiction in 2007, maintains that American slang is teeming with words of Irish origin—“jazz,” “spiel,” “baloney,” “nincompoop,” “babe,” and “bunkum,” to mention only a few.

But many of his claims have been disputed by linguists and lexicographers because they’re based merely on phonetic similarities.

The critics include Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and dictionary editor who specializes in slang, and Mark Liberman, a linguist who has called Cassidy’s book an “exercise in creative etymology.”

Cassidy himself has acknowledged that he based his etymologies on phonetic similarities. A New York Times interviewer wrote in 2007 about the inspiration that led to the book:

 “Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having ‘unknown origin.’ ”

 The article continues: “He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word ‘gimmick’ seemed to come from ‘camag,’ meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.”

 “Buddy,” as Cassidy told the interviewer, sounded like bodach (Irish for a strong, lusty youth); “geezer” resembled gaosmhar (wise person); “dude” was like duid (foolish-looking fellow), and so on. He thus compiled lists of American slang words that sounded as if they came from Irish, and based his book on them.

But in doing serious etymology, one has to do more than show that words in one language sound or look like those in another. A superficial resemblance might provide a starting point, but it shouldn’t be the conclusion.

A more authoritative approach would be to apply the academic standards that a lexicographer or a comparative linguist would use, supporting one’s case with documented evidence from written records. 

Let’s focus on the phrase you mention—“on the lam.”

Cassidy suggests an etymology of “lam” in a passage about an Irish-American gambler named Benny Binion: “Benny went on the lam (leim, jump), scramming to Vegas with two million dollars in the trunk of his maroon Cadillac.”

So Cassidy is proposing that “lam” in this sense is derived from the Irish leim. But other than that parenthetical note, he offers no evidence for the suggested etymology.

It’s true that leim (pronounced LAY-im) is Irish Gaelic for “jump” or “leap.” It’s similar to nouns with the same meaning in other Celtic languages (llam in Welsh, lam in Breton and Cornish, lheim in Manx Gaelic, leum in Scottish Gaelic), and it shows up in many Irish place names.

But we haven’t found a single other source that connects the Irish leim with the American slang term “lam,” meaning to run away. Not one.

If there were any truth in Cassidy’s assertion, etymologists and lexicographers would have picked up on it by now. 

Slang scholars still describe the origin of the “lam” in “on the lam” as unknown, and they would be only too happy to discover it.

Several theories have been proposed over the years: (1) that “lam” is short for “slam”; (2) that it’s from “lammas,” a mid-19th century British slang word meaning to run off; and (3) that it’s from the verb “lam” (to beat), used like “beat” in the older phrase “beat it.”

The last theory is the most commonly proposed—that the slang “lam” comes from the verb meaning to beat.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “lam” has had this meaning (to “beat soundly” or “thrash”) since Shakespeare’s day. The earliest citations in writing come from the 1590s.

In the late 19th century, the OED says, this verb “lam” acquired a new meaning in American slang—“to run off, to escape, to ‘beat it.’ ”

Oxford’s earliest citation for the slang verb is from Allan Pinkerton’s book Thirty Years a Detective (1886), in a reference to a pickpocket:

“After he has secured the wallet he will … utter the word ‘lam!’ This means to let the man go, and to get out of the way as soon as possible.”

The following year, the OED says, the word started appearing as a noun to mean “escape” or “flight.” Oxford’s earliest example here is from an 1897 issue of Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly: “To do a lam, meaning to run.”

Over the next few decades, according to slang dictionaries, to run or escape was to “lam,” “do a lam,” “make a lam,” “lam it,” “go on the lam,” “take a lam,” “take it on the lam,” and “be on the lam.”

Similarly, the OED says, a fugitive or somebody on the run was called a “lamster” (1904; also spelled “lamaster” and “lammister”).

It’s not hard to see how the “lam” that means to beat it might have descended from the “lam” that means to beat.

Since Old English, as the OED says, to “beat” has been “said of the action of the feet upon the ground in walking or running.”

This use of “beat,” according to Oxford, has given us phrases like “beat the streets,” “beat a path,” “beat a track,” and so on. In the 17th century, to “beat the hoof,” or “beat it on the hoof,” was to go on foot. 

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the phrase “beat it” (to clear out, go in a hurry), was first recorded in 1878, when it appeared in A. F. Mulford’s Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry:

“The Gatling guns sang rapidly for a few seconds, and how those reds, so boastful at their war dance the night before, did ‘beat it!’ ”

So the slang use of “beat it” was around before “lam” (to beat) acquired its extended slang meaning (to run or beat it).

But we haven’t discussed where the earlier “lam” came from. Etymologists believe it’s derived from the Old Norse lemja (to flog or to cripple by beating). However, an even earlier source has been suggested, one that’s older than writing.

The linguist Calvert Watkins, writing in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, identifies the source of “lam” and “lame” (both verb and adjective) as an Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as lem-, meaning “to break in pieces, broken, soft, with derivatives meaning ‘crippled.’ ”

This Indo-European root developed into prehistoric Proto-Germanic words that have been reconstructed as lamon (weak limbed, lame) and lamjan (to flog, beat, cripple), according to Watkins and to the lexicographer John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Other authorities, including the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, say the Indo-European lem– also has descendants outside the Germanic languages, including an adjective in Old Irish and Middle Irish, lem (“foolish, insipid”).

The modern Irish equivalent, leamh, is similarly defined (“foolish, insipid, importunate”) in An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, by Alexander McBain. 

This is a different word entirely from the Irish leim (jump), which McBain says was leimm in Old Irish.

We mentioned above that leim can be found in many Irish place names.

To mention just a few, there are Limavady (the Irish name is Leim an Mhadaidh, or “leap of the dog”); Lemnaroy (Leim an Eich Ruaidh, “leap of the reddish horse”); and Leixlip (Leim an Bhradain, “leap of the salmon”).

This last one is an interesting case. Leixlip is on the river Liffey, which is rich in salmon. The town’s original name came from Old Norse, lax hlaup (“salmon leap”).

In the 1890s, when Leixlip adopted an Irish name, it chose Leim an Bhradain (“leap of the salmon”), a direct translation of the Old Norse. Of course, the Vikings who settled there in the Dark Ages may have used a Norse translation from Irish. Who knows?

Some etymological questions may never be settled for sure. That doesn’t mean scholarly methods can’t be used to make an educated guess. Still, uneducated guesses are made all the time because people are so eager to know.

Woody Allen once satirized this desperate need to know. In a humorous essay called “Slang Origins,” from his book Without Feathers (1972), he wrote:

“How many of you have ever wondered where certain slang expressions come from? Like ‘She’s the cat’s pajamas,’ or to ‘take it on the lam.’ Neither have I. And yet for those who are interested in this sort of thing I have provided a brief guide to a few of the more interesting origins. …

“ ‘Take it on the lam’ is English in origin. Years ago, in England, ‘lamming’ was a game played with dice and a large tube of ointment. Each player in turn threw dice and then skipped around the room until he hemorrhaged. If a person threw seven or under he would say the word ‘quintz’ and proceed to twirl in a frenzy. If he threw over seven, he was forced to give every player a portion of his feathers and was given a good ‘lamming.’ Three ‘lammings’ and a player was ‘kwirled’ or declared a moral bankrupt. Gradually any game with feathers was called ‘lamming’ and feathers became ‘lams.’ To ‘take it on the lam’ meant to put on feathers and later, to escape, although the transition is unclear.

“Incidentally, if two of the players disagreed on the rules, we might say they ‘got into a beef.’ This term goes back to the Renaissance when a man would court a woman by stroking the side of her head with a slab of meat. If she pulled away, it meant she was spoken for. If, however, she assisted by clamping the meat to her face and pushing it all over her head, it meant she would marry him. The meat was kept by the bride’s parents and worn as a hat on special occasions. If, however, the husband took another lover, the wife could end the marriage by running with the meat to the town square and yelling, ‘With thine own beef, I do reject thee. Aroo! Aroo!’ If a couple ‘took to the beef’ or ‘had a beef’ it meant they were quarreling.”

We think there’s a lesson here—and some lessons come with a laugh. The human mind abhors a vacuum. When the most advanced methods of scholarship can’t (or haven’t yet) come up with definitive answers, then answers will be invented. 

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Should we watch our language?

Q: My question concerns your recent article about the origins of “Johnny-come-lately.” How is this grammar? You should watch your language!

A: As the banner on our website indicates, we answer questions on “grammar, etymology, usage, and more.”

Many of our readers write in to ask about the origins of various expressions and slang terms.

Others ask about problems in grammatical structure—sequence of tenses, problems with pronoun case, and so on.

Still others write us with questions about spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, and plural formation, and ask about how such usages developed.

A reader of the blog once asked us why we use the term “grammarphobia,” not “grammarphilia,” in the name of our website.

As we said in a posting six years ago, the name of the website comes from the subtitle of Pat’s 1996 book, Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

The website, like the book, tries to explain grammar (and other language issues) in terms that won’t intimidate grammarphobes, and won’t turn off grammarphiles.

By the way, we can’t take credit for coining either “grammarphobe” or “grammarphobia.”

Steven Pinker uses “grammarphobe” in his 1994 book The Language Instinct: “And who can blame the grammarphobe, when a typical passage from one of Chomsky’s technical works reads as follows?”

(The passage that follows includes terms like “L-markers,” “chain coindexing,” and “head-head agreement.”)

As for “grammarphobia,” we’ve found examples of the usage in two words (“grammar phobia”) or hyphenated (“grammar-phobia”) dating back to the 1920s and ’30s.

The single-word version (“grammarphobia”) showed up in print in the mid-1990s, about 10 years before we began using it on our website.

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Is there a “their” there?

[Note: An updated post on this same subject was published on May 22, 2017.]

Q: I love your Language Myths page. It’s so refreshing to see language mavens allow English some wiggle room! However, I still cringe at some current trends, like the use of the plural pronoun “they” with a singular subject. I don’t have the heart to recalibrate my internal editor to accept this change. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

A: This is a tough one, but you shouldn’t recalibrate your inner editor just yet (but stay tuned).

Almost everyone it seems (especially in speech, if not in writing) uses “they/them/their” at some time or another in reference to a singular, indefinite someone. We occasionally catch ourselves in the act.

What’s indisputably true is that anyone who uses these plurals in this way is using at best casual, informal English. In formal, grammatically correct English, these are third-person plural pronouns, inappropriate in reference to a singular. 

We’ve written about this subject many times on our blog, including a post in 2008 and another in 2011. We’ve also written an article about it for the New York Times.

The plural pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” were often used as indefinite singulars centuries ago, and are quite commonly used that way today in informal (some would say substandard) English. But in formal English, they’re restricted to the plural.

And anyone who wants to be correct without resorting to “he/she” or some variant can always recast the sentence and make the antecedent plural. Instead of “Every parent loves his or her (or their) child,” make it “All parents love their children.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) labels “they” as a “usage problem” when “used to refer to the one previously mentioned or implied, especially as a substitute for generic he.”

The dictionary gives this sentence as an example: “Every person has rights under the law, but they don’t always know them.”

In an excellent usage note, American Heritage explains that the “use of an ostensibly plural pronoun such as they, them, themselves, or their with a singular antecedent dates back at least to 1300.”

Over the years, the dictionary says, “such constructions have been used by many admired writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray (‘A person can’t help their birth’), George Bernard Shaw (‘To do a person in means to kill them’), and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (‘When you love someone you do not love them all the time’).

“The practice is so widespread both in print and in speech that it generally passes unnoticed,” AH continues. “Forms of they are useful as gender-neutral substitutes for generic he and for coordinate forms like his/her or his or her (which can sound clumsy, especially when repeated frequently). Nevertheless, many people avoid using forms of they with a singular antecedent out of respect for traditional pronoun agreement.”

The dictionary says most of its usage panel “still upholds the practice of traditional pronoun agreement, but in decreasing numbers.”

“In our 1996 survey, 80 percent rejected the use of they in the sentence A person at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in,” AH adds. “In 2008, however, only 62 percent of the Panel still held this view, and by 2011, just 55 percent disapproved of the sentence Each student must have their pencil sharpened.”

In 2008, the dictionary notes, a majority of the panel “accepted the use of they with antecedents such as anyone and everyone, pronouns that are grammatically singular but carry a plural meaning. Some 56 percent accepted the sentence If anyone calls, tell them I can’t come to the phone, and 59 percent accepted Everyone returned to their seats.”

American Heritage’s conclusion:

“The trend, then, is clear. Writers who choose to use they with a singular antecedent should rest assured that they are in good company—even if a fair number of traditionalists still wince at the usage. For those who wish to adhere to the traditional rule, one good solution is to recast the sentence in the plural: People at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in.”

In other words, write around the problem. We hope this helps, though it’s probably not as clear-cut an answer as you’d like.

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About that “Donate” button …

If you’re a regular reader of The Grammarphobia Blog, you may have noticed that “Donate” button over there on the right. Yes, we’re asking for your help.

The two of us, besides writing all our own content for the blog, bear the expenses of web design, support, and maintenance.

We also pay the costs of doing our research, including keeping our standard dictionaries and other reference books up to date, and paying for annual subscriptions to the Oxford English Dictionary and other online resources.

We consider what we do a form of journalism and we value our objectivity, so we don’t accept advertising. If you like what we do and would like to help support the blog, please click the “Donate” button. No contribution is too small!

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Thank you.

And now, on to our question of the day, about the phrase “Play ball!”

Pat and Stewart

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Just sayin’

Q: Do you have any comment as to why so many people add “Just sayin’ ” at the end of a comment, especially a nasty one? Is it just a little cutesy thing like kids’ saying “just kidding” after a snide remark?

 A: As you’ve noticed, the expression “Just sayin’ ” follows an irritating or annoying or otherwise unpleasant observation. The speaker seems to imply that simply adding “Just sayin’ ” makes everything all right.

Well, it doesn’t.

We briefly referred to this stand-alone expression in a post we wrote a year ago on a similar usage sometimes referred to as a “false front,” “wishwasher,” “but head,” or “lying qualifier.”

This is a qualifying statement that comes BEFORE an unwelcome remark. Examples are all too familiar: “Nothing personal, but …,”  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …,” “No offense, but….”

When someone opens a conversation that way, look out! What’s coming isn’t something you want to hear. The speaker is anticipating your response and trying to head it off at the beginning.

“Just sayin’ ” is the same kind of rhetorical device, but it comes at the other end, AFTER the bomb has landed. (We suggested in our post that it might be called “postcatalepsis.”)

An example would be “You really shouldn’t wear that color. It makes you look dead. Just sayin’.” The speaker seems to mean, “Don’t blame me—I’m merely stating the obvious.”

In 2009, a CNN news segment called “Just Sayin’ ” was widely criticized (notably by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show.

In the segment, the anchor Carol Costello inserted the expression into the network’s coverage of a news event or important issue.  An example: “Are we too wired? Just sayin’.”

(CNN likes contemporary slang so much that it also initiated segments called “Are you Kidding Me?” and “What the …?”)

How old is the stand-alone expression “Just sayin’ ” or “I’m just saying”? (It sometimes appears with “only” instead of “just.”)

Well, it’s a difficult question to research, since so many literal examples get in the way. But the usage we’re talking about has a German cousin dating from at least as far back as the 19th century. And a longer version was known a century ago in Irish English. 

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “just saying” and “only saying” originated as clipped versions of fuller phrases that are used in the same way: “I was just saying,” “I am only saying,” etc.

The dictionary says these expressions—both the originals and the shorter “just saying, only saying”—are “used to indicate that a previous statement or assertion is not intended to be combative or provoking, or should not be taken too personally or seriously.”

It suggests a comparison with the German ich sag’ ja nur  (“I’m just sayin’ ”), which it dates from the “late 19th cent. or earlier.”

The dictionary’s first English example is from Juno and the Paycock (1925), by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey: “Sure, I know—I was only sayin’.”

And this “just” version is also found in dialogue: “I’m not knocking. I’m just saying” (Tucker’s People, a 1943 novel by Ira Wolfert).

But the clipped versions are more recent. We’ve mentioned a few examples from the early 2000s. Oxford’s earliest is a quotation in an Illinois newspaper: “It’d be a hard pill for Boehner to swallow. … Just sayin’ ” (The Pantagraph, Bloomington, June 30, 2013.)

As we recently noted in a posting to our blog, “Just sayin’ ” was spotted in an episode of the period drama Downton Abbey.

That was clearly an anachronism, since the clipped version would have been “out of place in 1916,” according to the linguist Ben Zimmer.

Another linguist, Mark Liberman, has written on the Language Log that “I haven’t seen any clear examples from before WWII.”

[Note: This post was updated on Dec. 12, 2022.]

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