Category: Pronunciation

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Etymology Linguistics Pronunciation

Why Oynest has an erl can

Q: When I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, people would say “earl” when they meant “oil,” or “turlet” when meaning “toilet.” I don’t hear it much anymore, except among older folks, but I’m curious about where this switching of “oi” and “er” comes from.

A: The pronunciation of “er” as “oi”—and the reverse, with “oi” pronounced as “er”—has long been associated with New York.

In this speech pattern, the sounds “er” and “oi” are swapped, so a sentence like “My girl likes oysters” becomes “My goil likes ersters.” (Or as one observer noted in the 1920s, “Ernest has an oil can” sounds like “Oynest has an erl can.”)

But this isn’t heard as much today as it was in the past. These days, as you point out, it’s used mostly by the elderly, and of course by TV and movie actors supposedly playing hard-boiled New Yorkers.

As Allan Metcalf writes in his book How We Talk: American Regional English Today (2000), “These famous pronunciations—‘oi’ where the rest of the country has ‘er’ and vice versa—have largely been shamed out of existence.”

Your question about where this pronunciation comes from will have to remain unanswered (at least by us). None of our research turned up any authoritative answers for the why or the how.

But it probably has something to do with all the dialects that once combined to make up “New Yorkese” more than a century ago. Here’s how Sam Roberts described it in the New York Times in 2010:

“The New York accent is a distinctive amalgam of Irish, German, Yiddish and Italian—now infused with black and Hispanic dialects and a Caribbean lilt—that was identified at least as far back as the early 19th century.”

Perhaps this kind of talk was “shamed out of existence” (to use Metcalf’s phrase) by the schoolteachers of yesteryear.

A 1921 article in The English Journal, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, provided teachers with a checklist of “gross mispronunciations” common in schools.

These “wrong sounds, generally rated ‘vulgar,’ ” included “erl” (for oil) and “goil” (for girl).

The article didn’t note where such mispronunciations were likely to occur, claiming they were “generally recognized as apparently universal difficulties.” (The author added, in a rather schoolmarmish tone, that attention was also needed for “such other matters as undesirable posture in class recitations.”)

However, most of us think of New York when we hear pronunciations like those.

A vowel sound written as “er,” “ur,” or “ir” is spoken as the diphthong “oi” (a diphthong is one vowel sound gliding into another). And vice versa—the diphthong written as “oi” is spoken like “er.”

Frank H. Vizetelly, writing in The Homiletic Review in 1922, said: “Only a few years ago the Board of Education of the City of New York issued a circular directing attention to the more common errors of pronunciation among high-school pupils.”

The circular, he wrote, paid particular attention to “the sounds heard in ‘join,’ ‘oil,’ ‘oyster,’ ‘third,’ ‘girl,’ ‘turn,’ and ‘lurch.’ ”

The school board said “that ‘oi’ was far too frequently rendered ‘er,’ and that ‘ir’ and ‘ur’ were far too often pronounced ‘oi.’” So the words “ ‘oil,’ ‘join,’ ‘oyster’ became ‘earl,’ ‘jern,’ ‘erster,’ while ‘third,’ ‘girl,’ ‘turn,’ and ‘lurch’ became ‘thoid,’ ‘goil,’ ‘toin,’ and ‘loich.’ ”

(Are we reminded here of Damon Runyon’s guys and dolls? Soitanly!)

Apparently this speech pattern was still heard in the mid-20th century. In a 1940 article in the journal American Speech, entitled “‘Curl’ and ‘Coil’ in New York City,” the Columbia University linguist Allan Forbes Hubbell discussed this “oi”/“er” swapping and some of the myths associated with it.

“The diphthongal form, despite the efforts of the schools and despite the ridicule to which it has been subjected, is employed by a majority of New York’s seven-and-a-half millions,” Hubbell writes.

“I am inclined to believe that it was once general in this area, and it is today by no means confined to the level of uncultivated speech, but is often found in the speech of the educated, especially among older people.”

But we shouldn’t overgeneralize here. As Hubbell adds, “The exact quality of the diphthong is somewhat variable,” so it doesn’t sound identical from group to group. He describes three or four different varieties.

In fact, to spell this diphthong as “oi” is perhaps a slight exaggeration. As Metcalf describes it in his book, “words like girl and learn are pronounced something like ‘guh-il’ and ‘luh-een.’ ”

And the substitution of this diphthong doesn’t happen with all “er,” “ir,” and “ur”-spelled words. For example, Hubbell writes, some variation of the diphthong might be heard in words like “first,” “third,” and “work,” but not in “stir” or “fur.”

Similarly, not all words spelled with “oi” or “oy” come out sounding like “er,” he writes. “In the speech of certain less-educated New Yorkers,” Hubbell says, these words sound much as they do in standard pronunciation.

Words spelled with “oi” or “oy” that stay pretty much the same, Hubbell says, include “all words in which the diphthong is final as, for example, toy, boy, enjoy, destroy, annoy, and the derivatives of such words,” as well as “loyal, royal; poise, noise; exploit, loiter, goiter.”

The “oi”- or “oy”-spelled words in which these same New Yorkers might use “an r-colored vowel or a diphthong whose first element is r-colored,” Hubbell writes, include “boil, toil, broil, foil, soil, spoil, oil, toilet; coin, join, loin; point, appoint, disappoint, joint, ointment; choice, rejoice, voice, Rolls-Royce; hoist, joist, moist, oyster, boisterous; void, avoid; poison, voyage.”

Again, however, we should emphasize that not all New Yorkers spoke extreme “New Yorkese,” even when Hubbell was writing. As he says, “Metropolitan speech is of course not uniform, but differs widely on different social levels.”

And 60 years later, as Metcalf writes, the “oi”/”er” swapping is fading away (though movie and TV producers are doing their best to keep it alive).

We can’t resist ending this post with something we found on Barry Popik’s “Big Apple” website. It’s from the chorus of a song written in the mid-1940s by Bobby Gregory (the last line is its title).

She wears a tight skoit right up to her knees. Instead of poifume she wears Limboiger cheese. Who leaves me limp when she gives me a squeeze? Moitle from Toidy Toid and Toid.

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Etymology Linguistics Pronunciation Usage

Worcester source

Q: You’ve written previously that the British habit of contracting the next to last syllable in words like “secretary” and “territory” is fairly recent. What about the contracted British pronunciation of place names like “Worcester,” “Gloucester,” and “Leicester”? I’m a curious Yank who wonders when and how this occurred.

A: As you say, we’ve written on our blog and in our books about the development of those speech characteristics we now associate with the modern British accent.

We’ve had several posts about the subject and we discuss it in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. The New York Times website includes a large excerpt from the chapter in Origins about differences between American and British English.

Many characteristics of modern British speech—like the syllable-dropping in “secretary”—developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But that’s not the case with the clipped pronunciation of “Worcester,” “Leicester,” and “Gloucester.” That abbreviated way of pronouncing place names ending in “-cester” is quite a bit older—old enough to show up in Shakeseare and to accompany the English-speaking Colonists to the New World.

As you know, the names of those English cities are much easier to say than to write. They sound like WOOS-ter (with the “oo” of “wood”), GLOSS-ter, and LESS-ter.

The standard pronunciations (and the only ones given in the Oxford English Dictionary) call for pronouncing the final “-cester” as “ster.”

The names of the corresponding counties—“Worcestershire,” “Leicestershire,” and “Gloucestershire”—are pronounced the same way, except that each has another syllable (“sher”) at the end.

The British aren’t the only ones who say the names that way. Massachusetts also has cities named Worcester, Leicester, and Gloucester, pronounced as if they were spelled “Wooster,” “Lester,” and “Gloster.”

The OED doesn’t give etymologies for these place names. But there are clues in the dictionary’s entry for “chester,” a long-defunct noun that originally meant a Roman encampment in ancient Britain.

This word, spelled ceaster in Old English writings, comes from the Latin castra (camp), and is “often applied to places in Britain which had been originally Roman encampments,” the OED says.

“This is one of the best ascertained of the Latin words adopted by the Angles and Saxons during the conquest of Britain,” the dictionary adds.

The oldest citation for the use of the word in writing is from the mid-800s. But it existed even earlier, before English was written. As Oxford notes, it’s been reconstructed as cæstra in the prehistoric Old English of the 400s to 500s.

The word still exists today in place names ending in “-cester,” “-caster,” and “-chester.” Those ending in “-caster” and “-chester” are pronounced as written, as in “Lancaster” and “Winchester.”

Why is “-cester” given a clipped pronunciation in place names? The OED says only that “the history of the form written -cester, of which only -ster is pronounced (in Worcester, Bicester, etc.), is obscure.”

It’s difficult to trace the pronunciations of place names, since we have only written records to go by, and many old pronouncing dictionaries don’t include place names.

Two that do, however, might lead us to believe that the “-ster” pronunciation developed  in the early 18th century.

Thomas Dyche, in A Guide to the English Tongue (1709), gives three-syllable pronunciations for the three cities, which he renders as “Wor-ce-ster,” “Lei-ce-ster,” and “Glou-ce-ster.”

Half a century later, William Johnston’s A Pronouncing and Spelling Dictionary (1764), in a table devoted to “Words With Quiescent Consonants,” says the “c” is not pronounced in “Worcester,” “Leicester,” and “Gloucester.” (This makes them two-syllable words.)

So it would seem at first glance that the “-ster” pronunciation established itself sometime between 1709 and 1764, assuming these lexicographers were in touch with local usage.

However, as a reader of the blog points out, the names “Worcester,” “Leicester,” and “Gloucester” appear dozens of times in the works of Shakespeare, and “scansion almost always requires two-syllable pronunciations of these words.” (Scansion is analysis of verse to show its meter.)

Here are some two-syllable examples from Shakespeare: “At worcester must his body be interr’d” (King John); “He is, my lord, and safe in leicester town” (Richard III); “As ’tis said, the bastard son of gloucester” (King Lear).

Well, that takes us back to square one. It won’t even help us to analyze the spellings of these words in Old English. The historical spellings of place names are hard to pin down with any certainty.

As Randolph Quirk and Sherman M. Kuhn pointed out in a 1955 article in the journal Language, Old English scribes tended to respell place names freely.

As an example, they wrote, “Four spellings of Worcester occur in two copies of a single document.” The spellings were Wigra Ceastre, Weogerna ceastre, Wegerna ceaster and Wigerna cestre.

“Obviously,” Quirk and Kuhn commented, “somebody altered something, and probably not all of the spellings cited represent local usage.”

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Sound bites: “envelop” vs. “envelope”

Q: Why do we have a choice in pronouncing the noun “envelope” while the verb “envelop” is so unforgiving?

A: We touched briefly on the “envelop/envelope” issue in a recent posting about heteronyms, words with identical spellings but different pronunciations and meanings.

As we said in that posting, some identically spelled words can be either verbs or nouns, depending on how they’re pronounced. For example, “record” (accented on the second syllable) is a verb, while “record” (accented on the first) is a noun.

Similarly, “conflict” (accented on the second syllable) is a verb, while “conflict” (accented on the first) is a noun. Some other words that follow this pattern include “permit,” “extract,” “addict,” “combat,” “compound,” “conduct,” “incense,” “insult,” “present,” “produce,” and “subject.”

[Note: A later post, on the pronunciation of “concept” as a verb, appeared in June 2019.]

But occasionally a spelling will change with a move in the stressed syllable, and this is what happened with the verb “envelop” (accented on the second syllable) and the noun “envelope” (accented on the first).

Here’s a little history.

The verb, “envelop” (from the Old French envoluper), came into English first.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” (1386): “For he is most envoliped in synne.”

The noun (from the Modern French French enveloppe) didn’t appear until the early 1700s.

The OED has this early citation from a memoir by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, written sometime before 1715:

“A letter from the King of Spain was given to his daughter by the Spanish Ambassador, and she tore the envelope, and let it fall.”

In modern usage, the verb is always spelled “envelop” and stressed on the second syllable (en-VEH-lup). Rhythmically, it’s similar to the verb “develop.”

And the noun is always spelled “envelope” and stressed on the first syllable (EN-vuh-lope or AWN-vuh-lope). The only variation is in the vowel sound of the first syllable, and both are accepted as standard English.

Why, you ask, do we have one pronunciation for the verb and two for the noun?

Well, the noun entered English in the 18th century, when many educated English speakers favored French pronunciations for words derived from French.

While the French-sounding AWN pronunciation isn’t wrong, it’s hard to justify.

As the OED says, “this pronunciation, or rather some awkward attempt at it … is still very frequently heard, though there is no good reason for giving a foreign sound to a word which no one regards as alien, and which has been anglicized in spelling for nearly 200 years.”

And as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) notes, the figure is more like 300 years by now, “plenty of time for it to become completely anglicized.”

Finally, if you’d like to read about an “envelope” that’s pushed, not posted, we had a posting a couple of years ago about “pushing the envelope.”

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Was the Founders’ English less than perfect?

Q: A coworker points out that the Founding Fathers used “insure” incorrectly. Of course no one wants to say Thomas Jefferson was wrong! And as you note, “ensure” and “insure” have much in common.

A: The Constitution and its Preamble were written in 1787, and the language, capitalizations, and spellings reflect the usage of the day. The Preamble reads:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

We’ve reproduced the original 1787 spellings, quoting from the document held in the National Archives. The spellings “defence” (still used in British English) and “insure” were common usage in the 18th century.

As we’ve written before on our blog, in current usage to “insure” is to issue or buy insurance against financial loss, while to “ensure” is to make certain of something.

That’s the usual practice, and the one recommended by usage guides, though dictionaries say the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

Meanwhile, in current usage to “assure” means to reassure or remove doubt, though the British sometimes use the term in the technical sense of to underwrite financial loss.

As you can see, English usage changes over time!

Thomas Jefferson used “insure” in the general sense in a memoir he wrote in 1825, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A recurrence to these letters now insures me against errors of memory.”

Jefferson, by the way, didn’t write the Preamble or any other part of the Constitution. He was ambassador to France at the time, and was out of the country during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

But he did write the Declaration of Independence in 1776, though a few touches were added by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

The authorship of the Preamble and much of the rest of the Constitution is credited to another of the Founders, Gouverneur Morris, who was a Pennsylvania delegate to the 1787 convention.

In the past, we’ve answered several other questions about the Preamble, in case you’re interested.

In 2011, we had postings in May and November about the phrase “We the People.” And in 2008, we had postings in January and November about the phrase “more perfect.”

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Biblical commentary

Q: I hear the possessives of “Jesus” and “Moses” pronounced two different ways: with or without an “uz” sound at the end. Are both pronunciations correct?

A: For many years, it was customary to add only an apostrophe in forming the possessive case of a biblical or classical name already ending in a sibilant sound, like “Jesus” or “Euripides.” The final possessive “s” was neither added nor pronounced.

So, for example, the traditional practice was to write “Achilles’ heel” (not “Achilles’s heel”); “Jesus’ sake” (not “Jesus’s sake”); “Hercules’ strength” (not “Hercules’s strength”); “Moses’ commandments” (not “Moses’s commandments”), and so on.

Most style guides still follow that tradition, but the practice is no longer universal. Increasingly in recent years, classical and biblical names have come to be treated more like modern ones—at least in the way they’re written.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), which is widely used in the publishing industry, now recommends that biblical and classical names form the possessive with both an apostrophe and “s,” even if they already end in “s,” “x,” or “z.”

Among the examples given are “Jesus’s adherents” and “Tacitus’s Histories.”

But what about pronunciation? Generally, the addition of the apostrophe and “s” adds a final syllable.

But the Chicago Manual makes an exception for certain classical name: those ending in an “eez” sound, like “Sophocles” and “Aristophanes.”

The editors write: “In a departure from earlier practice, Chicago no longer recommends the traditional exception for proper classical names of two or more syllables that end in an eez sound. Such names form the possessive in the usual way (though when these forms are spoken the additional s is generally not pronounced).”

The “eez” examples given in the style guide are “Euripides’s tragedies,” “the Ganges’s source,” and “Xerxes’s armies.”

So if you were following Chicago Manual style, you would write “Achilles’s heel,” but you would pronounce the possessive name without the extra syllable: a-KILL-eez heel.

However, this wouldn’t apply to a classical name like “Zeus,” which doesn’t end in an “eez” sound. So “Zeus’s wrath,” according to Chicago, would be pronounced with the extra syllable: ZOOSE-uz rath.

Keep in mind, though, that style customs are not written in stone; they change over time. And most style guides still recommend the old practice (an apostrophe without “s”) with biblical and classical names ending in a sibilant sound.

We just wanted to alert you to the fact that the ground here is slowly shifting.

However, it’s safe to say that if you add an apostrophe plus “s” when writing the possessive form of a name like “Jesus” or “Moses,” then you should add the extra syllable “uz” when pronouncing the name

But if you write the possessive forms in the traditional way (“Jesus’ name,” “Moses’ wisdom”), then don’t pronounce what’s not there.

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Heteronyms: linguistic chameleons

Q: The word “wind” has one spelling, but two different pronunciations and meanings: 1) “The wind is blowing”; 2) “Did you wind your watch?” Is there a classification for a word like this? What other words are in this category?

A: Many (if not most) words have dual or triple or even quadruple roles as different parts of speech.

As you point out, “wind” (with a short “i”) is a noun for a stiff breeze; “wind” (with a long “i”) is a verb meaning to twist or wrap.

Another such pair with differently pronounced vowels is “row” (the noun meaning a quarrel) and “row” (the verb).

Many other such pairs exist, in which identically spelled words can be either nouns or verbs, depending on how they’re pronounced. They’re heteronyms—words with identical spellings but different pronunciations and meanings.

Most such words have more than one syllable. Here are some examples:

“record” (accented on the first syllable) is a noun, while “record” (accented on the second) is a verb; “conflict” (accented on the first syllable) is a noun, while “conflict” (accented on the second) is a verb; “permit” (accented on the first syllable) is a noun, while “permit” (accented on the second) is a verb; and “extract” (accented on the first syllable) is a noun, while “extract” (accented on the second) is a verb.

Some of the other words that follow this pattern include “addict,” “combat,” “compound,” “conduct,” “incense,” “insult,” “present,” “produce,” and “subject.”

Occasionally a spelling will change with a move in the stressed syllable, as with “envelope” (noun, accented on first syllable) and “envelop” (verb, accented on second).

The word “heteronym,” by the way, entered English in the late 19th century, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest citation is from an entry in the first edition of the The Century Dictionary (1889-1991).

The OED defines the term as a “word having the same spelling as another, but a different sound and meaning: opp. to homonym and synonym.”

The dictionary says it was formed from an earlier adjective, “heteronymous,” which showed up in the 18th century and had a different meaning: “Having different names, as a pair of correlatives, e.g. husband, wife: opp. to synonymous.”

Both words are derived from the Greek heteros (different) and onoma (name).

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Why does “clerk” rhyme with “jerk” in the US?

Q: In Origins of the Specious, you discuss many words that Americans pronounce in a more traditional way than the British. You don’t mention “clerk,” but I wonder if it could have been included.

A: There’s some truth to what you say, but the phonological history of “clerk” is a bit more complicated than the histories of those words mentioned in Origins of the Specious.

As we write in our book about language myths and misconceptions, the American Colonists took the English pronunciations of the day with them when they came to the New World.

The Colonists preserved many of those pronunciations after the Revolution, but in the late 18th and early19th centuries educated Britons began “r”-dropping, “a”-stretching, adding or subtracting an “h,” and lopping off next-to-last syllables.

For anyone who hasn’t read Origins of the Specious, the New York Times website includes a large excerpt from Stiff Upper Lips, the chapter about differences between American and British English.

Now, let’s get back to your question.

During much of the Middle English period (1100 to 1500), “clerk” sounded something like cleirk, a pronunciation still heard in parts of Scotland and Ireland, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

An extensive pronunciation note in American Heritage explains that in Middle English the “e” of “clerk” was pronounced like the one in “pet,” and the “r” was sounded.

By the late 16th century, when people began leaving England for the Colonies, “clerk” had two principal pronunciations: klerk  (in areas where the future Colonists generally lived) and klark (in the south of England). The “r” was sounded in both pronunciations.

The “clerk” that accompanied English immigrants to the Colonies and the early United States rhymed with “jerk,” according to the AH note, while the one in southern England rhymed roughly with “spark” (though the “a” may have sounded like the one in “cat”).

In the 18th century, AH says, people began “r”-dropping in southern England and “clerk” came to be pronounced klak. This pronunciation spread to educated speakers elsewhere and you’re likely to hear it today on the BBC. (With a broad “a” and the “r” muted, it sounds almost like “clock.”)

Before filing “clerk” in our archive, we should mention that the noun didn’t refer to a clerk in an office or a retail store when it entered English around 1050.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it originally meant an ordained Christian clergyman. In fact, both “clerk” and “cleric” are derived from clericus, Late Latin for a clergyman.

But not long after “clerk” entered English, the OED adds, it took on a secular sense:

“In early times, when writing was not an ordinary accomplishment of the laity, the offices of writer, scribe, secretary, keeper of accounts, and the transaction of all business involving writing, were discharged by clerks.”

Here’s a 1377 example from Piers Plowman, the 14th-century allegorical poem by William Langland: “Hadde iche a clerke that couthe write.” (The “th” in “that” was actually a runic letter called a thorn.)

The use of “clerk” for an office worker first showed in print, according to OED citations, in a 1512 act of Parliament early in the rein of Henry VIII: “The said Collectours and Comptrollers and theire Clerkes.”

The use of the term for a shop assistant (the OED describes this usage as North American) first appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which was published in various versions after his death in 1790:

“He propos’d to take me over as his Clerk, to keep his Books (in which he would instruct me), copy his Letters, and attend the Store.”

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Priming the pump

Q: During Pat’s appearance on WNYC last month, someone said the sense of “primer” as a first coat of paint probably comes from the primary sense of the adjective “prime.” I think it’s derived from the preparatory sense of the verb “prime” (as in “to prime the pump”).

A: You’re right. The word “primer” (the kind you get at Home Depot, not at a bookstore) is indeed all about preparation.

On the air last month, Pat, Leonard Lopate, and a listener were discussing the two different words spelled “primer,” a subject we’ve written about before on our blog.

As you know, the word that rhymes with “trimmer” is an instructional book. The one that rhymes with “timer” is a first coat of paint.

Inspired by your question, we’ve decided to give the etymology of that second one a closer look.

This “primer,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is apparently derived from the verb “prime,” meaning “to cover (wood, canvas, metal, etc.) with a preparatory coat of paint, size, etc., esp. to prevent the absorption of subsequent layers of paint.”

Those two words, the noun “primer” and the verb “prime,” were first recorded in the 16th and 17th centuries.

However, another word, “priming” (defined as “the coating of wood, canvas, metal, etc., with primer, in preparation for painting”), happened to make its way into writing before the others, and was first recorded in the early 15th century.

So, not surprisingly, painters were priming with primers long before the word “primer” itself actually found its way into print.

Etymologists aren’t sure precisely how the verb “prime” came into English. The source, according to the OED, is either the adjective “prime” (first, foremost) or its earlier forms in Middle French (prime) or classical Latin (primus).

But the notion of preparing is perhaps buried somewhere in the word’s etymology.

The OED suggests a comparison with a post-classical Latin verb, primare, which meant “to prepare”—specifically, to prepare a surface for gilding. This Latin word appears in British sources in the early 14th century, the dictionary adds.

At any rate, the underlying idea is that “priming is usually preliminary to another operation (such as applying subsequent layers of paint, firing a gun, etc.),” Oxford explains.

This idea of a preliminary step is evident in many uses of the verb “prime.” Since the early 16th century, to “prime” something has meant to fill, charge, or load it.

This sense of the word has proved useful over the centuries. People have spoken about priming a firearm (that is, preparing it for firing by placing gunpowder in the touch-pan); priming a pump (by pouring water into it); priming a boiler; priming someone with drink; even priming the nostrils with snuff.

For an example of that last usage, here’s an OED citation from the satirist Henry Neville’s Newes From the New Exchange: Or, the Commonwealth of Ladies (1650): “She that with pure Tobacco will not prime Her Nose, can be no Lady of the time.”

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Clef notes

Q: Why is “roman à clef” pronounced ro-MAN-a-CLAY while the “f” is sounded at the end of neuf, the French word for nine?

A: The letter “f” is usually pronounced at the end of French words (oeuf, for example), but clef (key) is an exception.

In French, a key can be either a clef or a clé. Both terms are pronounced clay and both can refer to either musical notation or door opening.

Our blog is about English, not French, and a more intriguing question for us is why English speakers pronounce the “f” in “bass clef” (the musical term), but not the one in “roman à clef” (a novel in which real people or events are disguised).

English borrowed both the musical and the literary terms from French, but many years apart. The musical “clef” showed up in the 1500s, while “roman à clef” didn’t appear in print until the 1800s.

The ultimate source of “clef,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is clavem, Latin for key.

The earliest published English example of “clef” (spelled “cliffe”) in the OED is from The Schoole of Abuse (1579), Stephen Gosson’s puritanical attack against the theater: “How many keyes, how many cliffes, howe many moodes.”

(The dictionary notes that Gosson used the term here in the musical sense: a character that indicates the pitch on a line of musical staff.)

The earliest spellings of “clef” in English (“cliefe,” “cliffe,” “cleiffe,” etc.) suggest that the “f” was pronounced at that time.

We’ve read that the “f” in “clef” was pronounced in Old French, where speakers sounded many final consonants that aren’t heard in Modern French. We wonder if the “f” may have been sounded in Middle French (or Anglo-Norman) when English borrowed the word.

The OED suggests that the expression roman à clef (literally, a novel with a key) may be of relatively recent vintage in French as well as in English.

It dates the appearance of roman à clef in French at “1863 or earlier,” but then cites a 1690 French phrase, la clef d’un roman, which refers to the key character or passage that explains a novel.

The OED’s first English citation for “roman à clef” is from an 1882 book about Dickens by Sir Adolphus William Ward: “That art of mystification which the authors of both English and French romans a clef have since practised with so much transient success.”

And here’s a more recent citation, from a May 5, 2003, issue of New York Magazine: “The young dirt-disher reads from her thinly veiled roman-à-clef, The Devil Wears Prada.”

Why don’t English speakers pronounce the “f” in “roman à clef”? Probably because the French didn’t pronounce it when the expression entered English in the 19th century.

Note: Our Paris correspondent points out that a theory published in 1935 suggests clé arose as a back formation from the plural clés, which itself arose because the f + s combination in clefs looked odd. He’s skeptical, though, because both plurals, clefs and clés, are popular today.

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A bona fide boner

Q: Does “bona fide” require a hyphen? In Woe Is I, I read these two phrases: “a bona fide pebble” (on page 160) and “bona-fide adverbs” (on page 221). Is there a difference?

A: You found a style mistake in the new third edition of Pat’s grammar and usage book!

The adjectival phrase “bona fide,” according to standard dictionaries, should not have a hyphen.

When Pat gets a chance to do a fourth edition of the book, this error on page 221 will be fixed.

For readers of the blog who don’t have the latest edition of Woe Is I, “bona fide” first shows up in a section about the pronunciation of English words and phrases that come from foreign languages:

“BONA FIDE. This means ‘genuine’ or ‘sincere’ (it’s Latin for ‘good faith’). There are several ways to say it, but the most common is also the most obvious: BONE-uh-fied. Veronica owns a bona fide pebble from Graceland.’ ”

The second appearance is in “The Living Dead,” a chapter about bogus or dead rules. In the interest of laying them to rest, a tombstone is dedicated to each. Here’s the item with the surplus hyphen:

“TOMBSTONE: Don’t say ‘Go slow’ instead of ‘Go slowly.’

“R.I.P. Both slow and slowly are legitimate adverbs. In fact, slow has been a perfectly acceptable adverb since the days of Shakespeare and Milton.

“Adverbs can come with or without ly, and many, like slow and slowly, exist in both forms. Those without the tails are called ‘flat adverbs,’ and we use them all the time in phrases where they follow a verb: ‘sit tight,’ ‘go straight,’ ‘turn right,’ ‘work hard,’ ‘arrive late,’ ‘rest easy,’ ‘aim high,’ ‘play fair,’ ‘come close,’ and ‘think fast.’ Yes, straight, right, hard, and the rest are bona-fide adverbs and have been for many centuries.”

If you’d like to read more about flat adverbs, we had a posting about them on the blog last year.

And in case you’re curious about “bona fide,” it entered English in the 16th century as an adverbial phrase meaning “in good faith, with sincerity; genuinely,” according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s earliest citation, dated 1542-43, is from a parliamentary act during the reign of Henry VIII: “The same to procede bona fide, without fraude.”

The phrase, which comes from the adverbial Latin for “in good faith,” was first used adjectivally in a 1788 essay by John Joseph Powell: “Act not to extend to bona fide purchasers for a valuable consideration.”

Thanks for catching that error.

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A room with a view

Q: Let’s talk about pronunciation: ga-ZEE-bo or GAZE-bo, what do you think? Anxious to hear your thoughts on this.

A: The verb “gaze” may have something to do with the origin of “gazebo,” but not with its pronunciation. The word “gazebo” has three syllables, not two.

It can be pronounced as ga-ZEE-bo or ga-ZAY-bo, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives only one pronunciation: ga-ZEE-bo.

The OED’s earliest citation for the word is from a 1752 publication about the design of Chinese bridges, temples, arches, and so on. One example was described as “The Elevation of a Chinese Tower or Gazebo.”

But an enterprising word sleuth, Stephen Goranson, recently discovered an earlier citation, from 1741.

Writing on the American Dialect Society’s Linguist List, Goranson said he found the word in a poem by Wetenhall Wilkes. We’ll give an excerpt:

“Unto the painful summit of this height / A gay Gazebo does our Steps invite. / From this, when favour’d with a Cloudless Day, / We fourteen Counties all around survey. / Th’ increasing prospect tires the wandring Eyes: / Hills peep o’er Hills, and mix with distant Skies.”

In modern usage, a gazebo is a freestanding, roofed structure that’s generally open on the sides, similar to a summerhouse or belvedere.

But in the 18th and 19th centuries, a gazebo could also be a part of a house, like a projecting window or balcony, or a roof turret affording distant views.

Where did the word come from? One common theory is that “gazebo” is a quasi-Latin coinage. As the OED says, it’s “commonly explained as a humorous formation” on the verb “gaze.”

According to this theory, “gazebo” would be translated as “I shall gaze,” mimicking first-person future-tense Latin verbs ending in –bo, like videbo (“I shall see”), lavabo (“I shall wash”), placebo (“I shall please”), and so on.

But there’s another theory about the origin of “gazebo,” and that “Chinese Tower” mentioned above is a clue. Some of the early quotations, according to the OED, “suggest that it may possibly be a corruption of some oriental word.”

Ultimately, however, the true origin remains a mystery.

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Point counter point

Q: How did “peaked,” an adjective describing a high point, come to be an adjective describing a sickly person at a low point?

A: The sickly sense of the word “peaked” refers to the sharp, thin, pinched features (that is, the peak-like appearance) of someone who’s ill or poorly fed.

This sense of the word first showed up in print in the early 19th century, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest citation comes from an 1809 issue of the publication Transactions of the American Philosophical Society: “We say (in the United-States) of a person whose face is contracted by sickness, he looks peaked.”

The usage was preceded by several similar terms: “peakingly” (1611), “peaking” (1699), and “peakingness” (1727), but these are now considered either obsolete or regional.

However, the colloquial term “peaky” (1823) is still seen quite a bit, though “peakyish” (1853) shows up rarely these days.

“Peaked,” the adjective describing an actual peak, entered English in the mid-1300s. An etymology note in the OED says the adjective apparently comes from the noun “peak,” though the noun didn’t show up in print until the mid-1400s.

By the way, the sickly adjective is usually pronounced PEE-kid and the geographic one PEEKT, though some dictionaries give both pronunciations for both words.

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Rock the mic … or the mike?

Q: Is there a technical name for when a word is not pronounced as written because it’s a shortening of another word? For example, “mic” would normally be pronounced MICK, but it’s actually pronounced MIKE since it’s short for “microphone.”

A: If there’s a word for this, we don’t know what it is. (But never underestimate the English language. There may be a word lurking out there for just this purpose!)

The phenomenon you’re talking about is common when we abbreviate spoken words. For example, the first syllable of “microphone” is pronounced MIKE, so that’s how we say it when we abbreviate the spoken word.

The actual spellings of these abbreviated words are irrelevant when we say them. But when we write them, those spellings may look odd, so some people respell them to reflect the way they sound.

That’s why we sometimes see the short form of “microphone” spelled “mike” instead of “mic.”

Both spellings—“mic” and “mike”—are given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

In 2010, the linguist Ben Zimmer wrote columns in the New York Times magazine on July 11 and Aug. 1 about “mic” versus “mike.”

In the first column,  Zimmer wrote that “microphone” is “abbreviated in rap circles as mic, not mike,” but some readers took issue with him, prompting another column on the subject.

The respondents “fell evenly into two camps,” Zimmer wrote in the second column. Some “were unfamiliar with the shortening of microphone as mic,” while others “noted that mic is the prevailing form not just in rap circles but also among recording professionals more generally.”

But the “mike” spellers aren’t unreasonable. As Zimmer pointed out, the short form of “bicycle” is both pronounced and spelled “bike,” not “bic.”

We’ll let him have the microphone for the last word on the subject.

“We do occasionally allow a mismatch between the spelling of an abbreviation and how it looks like it ought to be pronounced,” he wrote. “Vegetable is shortened to veg, and Reginald to Reg, but the final g is not a ‘hard’ one as in peg or leg. So let the musicians and broadcasters have their mic, but as for me, I still like mike.”

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Our word for the day

Q: I grew up in rural Indiana and I’m accustomed to hearing “our” sound like “are” instead of “hour” (the way I say it). But I now hear the “are” pronunciation from many celebrities, even Hillary Clinton. Is this getting more common or am I overly sensitive?

A: We think you’re being overly sensitive to something you’ve only recently noticed.

The word “our” can properly be pronounced either way, according to both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and the Oxford English Dictionary.

In standard American pronunciation, these dictionaries say, the vowel in “our” can sound like the one in “mop,” or it can be a diphthong like the one in “out.” (A diphthong is a gliding pronunciation in which two sounds merge.)

But the lexicographers at The American Heritage of the English Language (5th ed.) take a narrower view. Their pronunciation key gives only one pronunciation, the one like “out.”

In our opinion, Merriam-Webster’s and the OED are right, and both pronunciations are legitimate. In Iowa, where Pat was born, and in other parts of the Midwest, particularly in rural areas, one is much more likely to hear “our” pronounced like “are” than like “hour.”

So the “are” pronunciation is not new or unusual, and it’s no surprise to us that you’re hearing it in the mouths of well-known speakers.

It’s our guess that you only recently became aware of this pronunciation, and now you seem to hear it everywhere.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the “recency illusion.” The linguist Arnold Zwicky came up with the term, which he has defined as “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

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Dog daze

Q: Help! My wife thinks “dog” and “log” rhyme. Our astute children agree with me that they do not. I have a neutral American accent and say “dog” with more of an “awe” sound. I look forward to your input.

A: Most standard dictionaries give only two pronunciations for “dog”—the same ones, more or less, that you AND your wife use.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for example, say the vowel in “dog” sounds either like the one in “paw” or like the one in “pot.”

But, as with a great many words, the actual pronunciation of “dog” varies much more widely in different regions of the US.

A cursory look at some of the research shows that linguists have identified at least four different vowel sounds in “dog,” and that pronunciations can vary even within a state or part of a state. We’ve noticed this within our own experience too.

Pat, who’s from Iowa, pronounces “dog” much the way your wife does, with an open “o” that more or less rhymes with the one in “log.”

Stewart was born in New York City, and his pronunciation of the vowel is closer to “awe,” with a distinct diphthong or gliding sound.

A neighbor of ours is from Louisiana, and in her pronunciation of “dog” we can almost hear a long “o,” similar to the one in “toad.”

And finally, some friends in Chicago pronounce the word almost as if it were spelled “daag.”

The analogies we’ve given here aren’t exact, but are rough approximations. Don’t think that any of these are mispronunciations. They’re just local accents. It’s a big country, and regional variations help keep things interesting!

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Historic article

Q: I cringe when a politician or news anchor uses “an” in front of “historic.” I was taught to use “an” before an “h” word when the “h” is silent. Am I right? I think I am, but I’m just a guy who drives the A train in NYC.

A: Yes, you are right. There’s no reason to use “an” before “historic,” unless you pronounce it without the “h” (an ’istoric). After all, we don’t say “an hippie” or “an hysterectomy” or “an hot dog.”

Here’s an example from a usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.): “a historic house.”  And here’s one from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.): “a historic occasion.”

The article “an” before a sounded “h” is unnatural in English and in fact is discouraged even by the British. (We regard it as an affectation.)

If you’d like a British authority, here’s an example from the Cambridge Dictionaries Online: “In a historic vote, the Church of England decided to allow women to become priests.”

Of course, it all depends on whether you actually pronounce the “h” in “historic.” Though all the dictionaries we’ve checked recommend pronouncing it, a lot of people don’t. And that’s why “an historic” shows up so much in speech and writing.

For any “h”-droppers out there, the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has this bit of advice: “A number of commentators prescribe a here, but you should feel free to use an if it sounds more natural to you.”

We had a blog entry on the subject a few years ago. And we touched on it sometime later in a posting about British vs. American English.

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Why is “t” often silent?

Q: I teach English at a high school in Wyoming. I was looking to justify my abhorrence of the word “oftentimes,” and I came across your piece about pronouncing the “t” in “often.” I usually point out to my students that we don’t pronounce it in “soften,” “hasten,” and “fasten,” so why do it in “often”? Do you have a good explanation?

A: The short answer is that the “t” in many words is silent because it’s too difficult or awkward to pronounce and has become assimilated into the surrounding consonants.

Let’s start with a little etymology. Some verbs with silent “t”—like “soften” and “moisten”—were created when the suffix “-en” was added to an earlier adjective ending in “st” or “ft.”

In the case of “fasten,” the ending was added even before the verb came into English from old Germanic languages. But the root is still the adjective “fast,” meaning stable or fixed.

A couple of similar verbs are special cases. “Listen” originally had no “t” (it was spelled lysna in Old English), but it acquired a “t” by association with the archaic synonym “list.” And “hasten” is merely an extended form of the old verb “haste,” formed by analogy with the other “-en” verbs.

As we said in our blog posting about “often,” the word can be properly pronounced either with or without a “t” sound. The “t” had long been silent but it came back to life in the 19th century with the rise of literacy, when people seemed to feel that each letter in a word should be sounded.

For some reason this didn’t happen with “soften,” whose “t” is always silent. And in the other verbs we mentioned—“moisten,” “fasten,” “listen,” “hasten” —the “t” is invariably silent, never pronounced. Similarly, the “t” disappears when we pronounce words like “castle,” “christen,” “epistle,” “glisten,” “nestle,” “pestle,” and others.

It’s a good bet that if a word ends in “-sten,” “-ften,” or “-stle,” the “t” will be silent. Why? We found an answer in a paper published more than a century ago.

The article, “On ‘Silent T’ in English,” by James W. Bright, appeared in the journal Modern Language Notes in January 1886.

As Bright explains, the “t” in these words is an acoustically “explosive” one, and to sound it after an “s” or an “f”—both of which expend “considerable breath”—is “especially difficult and obscure.” Consequently the “t” sound is assimilated into its surroundings and becomes silent.

However, the “t” sound persists in some other words spelled with “-stl” and “-ftl,” like “lastly,” “justly,” “mostly,” “shiftless,” “boastless,” and others.

Bright explains that such words “are, with most persons familiar with their use, conscious compounds; as they become popular words, and therefore subject to unstudied pronunciation, they conform to the regular rule. It is only after administered caution that we learn to make t audible in wristband.”

We’ve written before on our blog about silent letters: The thing to remember is that English words have varied in their pronunciations over the centuries. So letters that live on in our spellings may have fallen out of our pronunciations.

And if you’re still bugged by “oftentimes,” you might check out our posting about its history and legitimacy.

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Preppy pronunciation

Q: Why is there such a proliferation of “prepatory” schools these days? I thought the word was “preparatory.” I’ve even heard a spot on WNYC that uses “prepatory.” If my sons were still of school age, I certainly would not send them to that prep school!

A: We can’t tell you why this is showing up, only that it’s considered a mispronunciation and not yet listed as standard (or as any kind of variant) in any dictionary we can find.

What’s being dropped in this pronunciation is not just the second “r” but the entire second syllable. The five-syllable “preparatory” becomes the four-syllable PREP-a-tor-ee.

Standard American dictionaries include several five-syllable pronunciations. They can be stressed on either the first syllable (PREP-er-a-tor-ee) or the second (pre-PAR-a-tor-ee).

One of the references we checked, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), does accept a four-syllable pronunciation in which the first “r” is retained: PREP-ra-tor-ee.

By the way, the British pronounce the word as four syllables with the stress on the second syllable (pri-PAIR-a-tree), according to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

The adjective “preparatory,” meaning preliminary or introductory, entered English in the early 1400s, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. It was borrowed from Middle French, but its ultimate source was the Latin verb praeparare (to prepare).

The term “preparatory school” first showed up in the mid-1600s and the short form, “prep school,” in the late 1800s, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation for “prep school” is from an 1891 issue of the Cosmos, the student newspaper at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

“A prep school girl being told by her teacher to parse the sentence, ‘He kissed me,’ consented reluctantly.”

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Window shopping on FITH Avenue

Q: I have taught languages for almost 40 years and I am befuddled by two usages that seem to be accepted today in American English: (1) The pronunciation of words like “interstate” and “antiterrorist” as “innerstate” and “anniterrorist.” (2) The pronunciation of “fifth” as “fith.” Should I not instruct students in correct usage anymore regarding these examples? Please enlighten me.

A: The short answer is that most dictionaries consider these consonant-dropping pronunciations nonstandard. In other words, mispronunciations. So you’re safe in holding your ground here.

As you note, such pronunciations aren’t unusual. Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd. ed.) includes “fifth” and “interesting” in its list of frequently mispronounced words in American English. (They’re spoken as if they were spelled “fith” and “inneresting.”)

Common or not, all the dictionaries we’ve checked agree that the “t” is pronounced in words beginning with an “anti-” or “inter-“ prefix, as well as in “interesting.” (The “t” is often dropped here in unaccented syllables.)

But not all authorities agree about “fifth.” One source, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), accepts the pronunciations FITH and FIFT.

In accepting this latter pronunciation, M-W has ancient history on its side. In Old English, “fifth” was pronounced and written differently, as fifta. Similarly, the word had no final “th” sound in the other old Germanic languages.

So where did the “th” sound come from? The Oxford English Dictionary has the answer: “The normal form fift still survives in dialects; the standard form, which first appears in the 14th cent., is due to the analogy of fourth.”

So if “fourth” were “fourt” instead, we’d probably still be saying “fift.”

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A formidable subject

Q: “Formidable” used to be pronounced FOR-midable in the US, but I believe the
pronunciation was influenced after WWII by British speakers, who pronounced it for-MID-able. For some reason this latter pronunciation has taken hold in the US.

A: Let’s establish at the outset that in modern American usage “formidable” can be pronounced correctly with the accent on either the first or the second syllable (FOR-mid-able or for-MID-able).

Both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), among others, give the two pronunciations, in that order, as standard English.

We can’t find any evidence, though, that Americans acquired the for-MID-able pronunciation from the British, as you suggest. But the pronunciation does appear to be relatively new—both in the US and in Britain.

For one thing, older standard dictionaries in both countries—even those as recent as the mid-1980s—list only one pronunciation, FOR-mid-able.

And for another, usage guides didn’t begin noticing the word until the mid- to late-20th century, which suggests that its pronunciation wasn’t an issue before then.

Even now, the only pronunciation given in the Oxford English Dictionary is accented on the first syllable (FOR-mid-able). One would think that if for-MID-able were a well-established British pronunciation, and if in fact Americans had acquired it from the British, the OED would list it as a variant.

Yet another British reference book, the latest version of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed., 2004), has this to say:

“The standard pronunciation is with the main stress on the first syllable. Second-syllable stressing, though increasingly heard (a limited opinion poll by J. C. Wells, 1990, actually revealed a slight preference for for-MID-able), is not recommended.”

Later the editor of the new Fowler’s, R.W. Burchfield, includes “formidable” in a list of multi-syllable words with “unstable accents.”

Words in which the accent is moving from the first to the second syllable in British usage, he says, include “applicable,” “clematis,” “controversy,” “despicable,” “exquisite,” “formidable,” “harass,” “hospitable,” “integral,” “lamentable,” and others. (Obviously, some of these newer pronunciations have already established themselves in American usage.)

As far as we can tell, the for-MID-able pronunciation seems to be a mid-20th-century phenomenon. The first edition of Fowler’s (1926) doesn’t mention it, nor does our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition). But it does show up, among similar “unorthodox” pronunciations, in the second edition of Fowler’s (1965).

Despite that “unorthodox” label in the ’60s, several recent dictionaries, British as well as American, list both pronunciations as standard today. Macmillan, for example, publishes British and American editions, and both of them give the two pronunciations. When both are given, the one accented on the first syllable is invariably listed ahead of the other.

Clearly, however, this pronunciation is in flux. Cambridge Dictionaries Online gives for-MID-able as the standard British pronunciation and FOR-mid-able as the American.

As for why the for-MID-able pronunciation has taken hold, the original Fowler’s offers a clue. In a section about the “recessive accent,” Henry Fowler commented on “a repugnance to strings of obscure syllables.”

Some people’s tongues, Fowler explained, “cannot frame a rapid succession of light syllables hardly differing from each another.” In reaction, he said, they tend either to shift the stress to the second syllable or to drop a syllable.

Fowler used the example of “laboratory,” a five-syllable word (at least it was in his day). Its “orthodox” pronunciation, he said, is accented on the first syllable, but some people “find four successive unaccented syllables trying.”

So rather than accent the first syllable, he said, they accent the second (la-BOR-a-tor-ee) or drop the fourth (LAB-or-a-tree). And, as we know, some British speakers do both (la-BOR-a-tree).

Americans have no trouble accenting the first syllable, but they drop the second (LAB-ra-tor-ee), the usual pronunciation in the US. Fortunately, “lab” is standard English on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Gallows rumor

Q: It seems to me that the word “executor” has two pronunciations, one for the person who carries out the terms of a will, and another for the person who carries out the sentence in a capital crime. Am I right about this?

A: Yes and no. The use of “executor” for a hangman is now considered obsolete (we’ll get to this later), but there are indeed two different kinds of “executor” in modern usage, and most people pronounce them differently.

(1) The one we meet most often is accented on the second syllable (ig-ZEK-yuh-ter). It means a person who executes the terms of a will (as in “Mr. Beazley is my late father’s executor”).

(2) Less frequently we hear the one accented on the first syllable (EK-suh-kyoo-ter). This means a person who executes something else or gets it done (“The sculptor is both designer and executor”).

Those are the pronunciations assigned to the two meanings in almost every reference we checked—the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and half a dozen other dictionaries and usage guides.

Only one source, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), says the pronunciations are interchangeable. In our opinion, pronouncing “executor” indiscriminately is likely to raise a few eyebrows.

In both of those definitions, #1 and #2, something’s being executed, and here the verb “execute” means to carry out, produce, or put into effect.

But, as you know, to “execute” also means to put to death. And once upon a time, an “executor” (pronounced EK-suh-kyoo-ter) meant someone who executes a condemned prisoner. But this sense of “executor” has been replaced by “executioner.”

Our verb “execute” was first recorded in English in 1387, according to OED citations. Interestingly, it was recorded more than a century after “executor,” circa 1280.

Both words came into English from Anglo-Norman, but their ultimate source is the Latin verb exsequi, which is composed of ex plus sequi—literally “to follow out,” or pursue to the end.

Originally, to “execute” something was to perform its functions (as in “to execute the office”).

In the following century, the word acquired most of its other senses, including one first recorded in 1413 and defined this way in the OED: “To carry into effect ministerially (a law, a judicial sentence, etc.).”

The meaning of “execute” that we associate with the gallows came along 70 years later, in 1483. How did it gets its meaning? This remains a puzzle.

“It is not quite clear,” says the OED, whether the capital punishment usage grew out of the 1413 sense of the word (that is, to put a judicial sentence into effect), or whether it partly represents “the etymological notion of Latin exsequi ‘to pursue to the end.’ ”

With that, we’ve pursued this subject to the end.

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Hwat’s up with what?

Q: Please explain to me why some people, generally older and perhaps Southern, pronounce the word “what” in such a way that it sounds as if it’s spelled “hwat.” I hope my cumbersome explanation conveys what I’m asking.

A: In modern American usage, “what” can be pronounced with either a simple “w” sound at the beginning, or with a breathier “hw” sound

In standard American dictionaries, like The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), both of those pronunciations are acceptable.

This wasn’t always true. Formerly, the latter pronunciation—it sounds something like HWUT—was preferred. For example, our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition), gives that as the only pronunciation.

But today, while both pronunciations are acceptable, the “hw” sound is losing ground. Most Americans have dropped the “h” sound at the beginning of “what” and other such words (“which,” “why,” “when,” “whim,” “white,” and so on).

These days, as you suggested, the “hw” sound is more likely to be heard in parts of the South than elsewhere in the country.

This trend away from the “hw” sound isn’t restricted to American English. Modern British usage favors an “h”-less pronunciation of “what” that sounds something like WOT.

The online Macmillan Dictionary, which has both British and American versions, gives both “w” and “hw” pronunciations for American usage but only one, the “h”-less version, for British usage. The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, which also has US and UK pronunciations, agrees.

As you might suspect, the “hw” pronunciation is the much older one. In fact, when “what” first showed up in Old English in the 700s, the word was spelled with an “h” in front: hwaet or huaet.

The British began losing the “h” sound in “what” long before Americans did, and even before the Colonies existed.

We found an interesting perspective on all this in Kate Burridge’s book Weeds in the Garden of Words (2005).

Burridge, an Australian linguist, writes, “Over the years English has been simplifying the clusters of consonants it allows, in particular the clusters that occur at the beginning of syllables.”

“We know that the change in pronunciation from ‘hw’ to ‘w’ started in the south of England as early as the Middle Ages, but it couldn’t have been a big hit, since the ‘hw’ cluster went across to North America in the 17th century,” she goes on to say.

In 18th-century England, Burridge adds, “the pronunciation ‘w’ was clearly gaining ground. It had even begun to creep into the speech of the educated, who had earlier condemned it.”

“By 1800 which and witch and whether and weather had become homophones in Standard English pronunciation,” she writes. “The cluster is managing to hang in there in places like Scotland and Ireland, but everywhere else it’s well and truly on the way out.”

Update: A reader of the blog calls our attention to an episode of the animated TV show “Family Guy” in which Stewie, the precocious infant, asks for “Cool Hwip topping.”

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How do you say “double entendre”?

Q: How should an English speaker pronounce “double entendre”? Like French? Or like English? Or whatever?

A: Let’s begin with a little history.

English adopted “double entendre” in the 17th century from a now-obsolete French phrase that meant double understanding or ambiguity. But English speakers gave the expression a new, suggestive twist.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase this way: “A double meaning; a word or phrase having a double sense, esp. as used to convey an indelicate meaning.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from John Dryden’s 1673 comedy Marriage a-la-Mode: “Chagrin, Grimace, Embarrasse, Double entendre, Equivoque.”

And here’s a 1694 example from Dryden’s play Love Triumphant: “No double Entendrès, which you Sparks allow; / To make the Ladies look they know not how.”

Interestingly, there’s no exact equivalent in modern French to our expression “double entendre.” Two near misses, double entente and double sens, don’t have the suggestiveness of the English version.

So how should an English speaker pronounce our illegitimate offspring? Illegitimately, of course.

Dictionaries are all over the place on this, but we treat “double” as an English word (DUB-ul) and “entendre” as if it’s French (ahn-TAN-dr).

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Splatter proof

Q: I’m still getting over learning that I mispronounced “chimera” for over 60 years. I’d been saying SHIM-era. Who knew? Anyway, I was wondering about the relationship between “spatter” and “splatter”?

A: This will give us a chance to discuss one of our favorite words, “spatula.” (We know you’re eager, but you’ll just have to wait a bit.)

The word “splatter” means splash or spatter. It’s described by the Oxford English Dictionary as chiefly dialectal, and used mostly in the US.

The verb “splatter” dates from the late 18th century and the noun from the 19th. As for its source, the OED says it’s “imitative” in origin, meaning that its sound is an echo of what the word symbolizes.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology has another suggestion—that “splatter” is “perhaps a blend of spatter and splash,” which seems logical

Now, on to “spatter, which is much older than “splatter” and has Germanic origins. In Dutch and Low German, for example, spatten means to burst or spout, the OED says.

When the verb “spatter” was first recorded in English, in the late 1500s, it meant “to scatter or disperse in fragments,” says Oxford.

Early in the following century, it acquired the meanings familiar today—to splash or fall on something in scattered drops or particles.

The noun “spatter,” meaning a small splash or sprinkle, came along in the late 1700s.

You ask whether there’s a relationship between “spatter” and “splatter.” It’s possible. As we mentioned, Chambers speculates that “splatter” might be a blend of “spatter” and “splash,” but there’s a more solidly documented link.

In the late 1600s, men wore cloth or leather leggings to protect their trousers from spatters, especially while riding horseback. These were called, appropriately, “spatterdashes.” (Yes, this is the granddaddy of the later abbreviation “spats.”)

The old “spatterdashes” had several variants, including “splatterdashes” (18th century) and “spatter-plashes” (17th century).

What’s a “plash”? The noun “plash,” meaning something like a shallow pool or puddle, dates back to Old English and was altered in the 17th century to become “splash.”

OK, we’re now ready to discuss “spatula,” which we like simply for its combination of sounds.

It comes from Latin, in which spatula (or spathula) means a broad piece, but its ultimate source is the Greek spathe (a broad blade).

If you go back far enough, however, the words “spatula,” “spade,” and “spoon” share a prehistoric ancestor, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

In English, “spatula” has always meant a long, flat implement for mixing or spreading.

It entered the language in the 15th century but it has had some variant forms over the centuries. These include “spattle,” “spartle,” and (as you’ve probably guessed) “spatter” and “splatter.”

Books on etymology make very entertaining reading!

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Pronunciation Spelling Usage

When “e” is seen but not heard

Q: A patron at the library where I work wants to know why some words (“pronounce” and “like,” for example) retain their silent “e” when adjectivized.

A: The word “pronounce” keeps its silent “e” in “pronounceable” for the same reason that many other words ending in “ce” do. When a suffix is added, the presence of the “e” influences the pronunciation of the preceding “c”—keeping it soft instead of hard.

If that “e” were dropped, we’d end up with “pronouncable.” In English, the letter combination “ca” is pronounced with a hard “c” (as in “cable”) instead of a soft one (as in “certain”). The middle syllable would be NOWNK instead of NOWNSE.

Same with “peaceable” and “noticeable.” If they were spelled “peacable” and “noticable,” one would be tempted to pronounce each “c” like a “k.”

This is also true of words ending in “ge,” like “marriage.” If the adjective were spelled “marriagable,” the “g” would look as if it were hard (as in “girl”) instead of soft (as in “judge”). The letter combination “ga” is hard but “ge” at the end is usually soft, as in “garage.”

So with many words ending in “ce” and “ge,” the silent “e” is generally retained in a suffixed form to keep the consonant soft—in other words, to keep the sound as “s” instead of “k,” or as “j” instead of a hard “g.”

In the case of “like” and many other words that end in a silent “e,” the “e” is often a signal that the preceding vowel is long instead of short. We’ve written about this phenomenon before on our blog.

For example, “dim” has a short “i” but “dime” has a long one; “hat” has a short “a,” but “hate” has a long one; “lob” has a short “o,” but “lobe” has a long one.

And with many of these words, the silent “e” is retained in a suffixed form to keep the vowel from changing (“hateful” instead of “hatful,” for example).

With “like,” there are two accepted spellings of the adjective form: “likeable” is more common in Britain and “likable” is more common in the US, but both are correct.

The British spelling makes more sense to us, since “likable” looks as though it should be pronounced LICK-able. Besides, the silent “e” is retained in other suffixed forms: “likely,” “likelihood,” “likeness,” “likewise.”

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Chimera obscura

Q: I heard an interview with the historian Louis Henry Gates Jr. the other day and I swear he pronounced the first syllable of “chimera” like the beginning of “chicken.” Is it just me, or what? I must break off now and return to my chi-square calculations.

A: The word “chimera” begins with a “k” sound, as in words like “character,” “chasm,” and “Christian.” The accent is on the second syllable: ki-MIR-uh.

This is the only pronunciation given in standard dictionaries, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary.

The chimera, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “a fabled fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail (or according to others with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a serpent).”

The word in Greek means “she-goat,” and the fact that it comes from Greek accounts for its pronunciation.

In Greek writing, the word begins with X (the letter chi), which is pronounced like “k.” In English words that come from Greek, the “ch” letter combination is usually pronounced like “k.”

This is why the words “Christ” and “Christmas,” for example, begin with a “k” sound (for the Greek X).

In translating manuscripts from Greek, medieval scribes often substituted “X” for “Christ” in words like “Christmas” (“Xmas”) and “Christian” (“Xian”), as we wrote in a posting a few years back.

The word “chimera” was first recorded in English (spelled “chymere”) in the Wycliffe Bible of 1382. Back then, it meant the monstrous creature of mythology.

Later, it was used more loosely to mean any grotesque monster or phantasm.

And in the 16th century, the OED says, “chimera” acquired its modern meaning:

“An unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.”

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Comp time

Q: I’m an accountant in the office of the NYC Comptroller. When I look up the word “comptroller” in my dictionary, it simply says, “Variant of controller.” Isn’t “comptroller” a word?

A: Yes, “comptroller” is a word, but most dictionaries list it as a variant of “controller,” an officer who audits accounts and oversees the finances of a corporation or government agency.

In fact, the word “comptroller” began life as an illegitimate spelling back in the 15th century. Like many misspellings, it entered English through the back door, with a little help from meddlesome scribes.

We discuss this in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions.

The first English version of the word, borrowed in the 1200s from a French dialect, was “countreroullour,” someone who kept a counter-roll— a duplicate set of financial records against which the original figures were checked.

Over the next few centuries, we say in Origins, the word appeared in various forms, such as “conterroller,” “ counteroller,” “countrollour, “controwler,” and finally “controller.”

All those spellings had one thing in common: The first part of the word had something to do with a counter, or duplicate, set of records.

The beginning was derived from the Latin contra, meaning opposite or against, as in a copy that you check an original against.

In those days, however, scribes loved to tinker with English spellings at every opportunity, and the tinkerers often screwed up.

In this case, some misinformed scribblers thought the first part of the word had to do with counting rather than countering. So they decided to emphasize the numerical angle by beginning the word with “compt,” like the verb “count” in French (compter) or Latin (computare).

In 1486 a new spelling appeared: “comptroller.”

Some scholars believe the scribes were trying to Frenchify the word to make their bosses— the official auditors of the day— seem classier. Others think the intent was to make English more like Latin.

Either way, the scriveners were mistaken.

To this day, the word “comptroller” reeks of officialdom. Think Comptroller General, Comptroller of the Currency, Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. And, of course, Comptroller of the City of New York.

Although you can find “controllers” and “comptrollers” in both government and business, the more bureaucratic-sounding word seems at home in the public sphere.

Both words are legit. But if we had a choice, we’d go for “controller” (pronounced con-TRO-ler). Simpler is better.

If you work for a comptroller, though, you don’t have a choice. Or, rather, the only choice you have is how to pronounce your boss’s job.

COMP-tro-ler or comp-TRO-ler?

Either one is OK.

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SHTREET wise

Q: On one of Pat’s WNYC segments, she was asked about the pronunciation of “street” as SHTREET. She mentioned that you have a posting on the blog about this, but I wonder if the pronunciation may have been influenced by German.

A: You bring up a very interesting point.

In standard German, the letter combination “st” is pronounced SHT at the beginning of a syllable. You can hear this when a German speaker says a word like strahlen (to shine), or a compound like überstrahlen (to outshine).

The same thing is true, by the way, with the German “sp,” which sounds like SHP at the beginning of a syllable. You can hear this in words like sprechen (to speak) and besprechen (to discuss).

This shushing, as if an “h” had been inserted, wasn’t always part of standard German. It apparently developed as a regional pronunciation in Upper Saxony and spread to other German dialects several hundred years ago.

Like most language changes, this shift in pronunciation met resistance along the way. In fact, we found a 1935 article showing that the SHT and SHP pronunciations were being discouraged by German-language instructors as late as the mid-19th century.

The article, written by Charles T. Carr and published in the Modern Language Review, examined books on German intended for English audiences in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Several of the grammar books and readers said that “st” and “sp” should be pronounced just as written, and warned against the Upper Saxon pronunciations SHT and SHP.

Yet for some reason the pronunciation not only thrived but is now standard German. Could this happen in English? Ours is a Germanic language, so this is certainly a legitimate question.

Already, as we said in our blog posting on the subject, many American speakers pronounce “st” as SHT and this is considered fairly common. Research has shown that this speech pattern is not regional but widely spread.

Nevertheless, we won’t go out on a limb and say this pronunciation is likely to become the standard, as it has in German. But we’ve observed a couple of interesting things about it.

First, for a lazy tongue it’s easier to say SHT than ST. That’s no doubt why people who’ve had a bit too much to drink tend to slur words like “street” as SHTREET and “spell” as SHPELL and “history” as HISH-try.

Second, one is apt to slur these words when speaking through clenched teeth, tough-guy style, as in gangster movies of the ’30s.

Did those Saxons of long ago speak with teeth clenched or jaws tensed, and is this how the pronunciation crept into German? Like you, no doubt, we’d love to know the answer!

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Ode to schadenfreude

Q: During a recent appearance on WNYC, Pat committed one of her rare missteps: she pronounced the first syllable of “schadenfreude” as SHAY rather than SHAH.

A: Right you are. Pat did indeed misspeak on the air. The tongue and mind sometimes go their separate ways during a live radio broadcast.

We’ve written before on our blog about “schadenfreude.” The first syllable, as you point out, is pronounced like the “a” in “father.”

This is the only pronunciation given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word is a compound, from the German schaden (adversity) and freude (joy). The OED defines it as “malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the word in English is from On the Study of Words (1852), a collection of lectures by the philologist and Anglican clergyman Richard Chevenix Trench.

In the lectures, Trench points out a similar word in classical Greek: epikhairekakia. Aristotle uses the term in the Nicomachean Ethics to describe someone who takes pleasure in another’s ill fortune.

In discussing “schadenfreude,” Trench sounds more like a clergyman than a philologist:

“What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing.”

In our earlier posting about “schadenfreude,” we mentioned some of the more waggish takeoffs on the word.

An example is “blondenfreude,” for the glee we feel when a rich, powerful blonde gets her comeuppance.

We’d like to think that if Beethoven came back from the dead, he would compose an “Ode to Schadenfreude.”

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Routing slips

Q: A question came up on the Leonard Lopate Show about the pronunciation of “route.” Pat said either ROOT or ROWT is correct. I beg to disagree. I am English. And, as any Englishman will tell you, there is only one proper pronunciation: ROOT.

A: The word “route” can be pronounced either ROOT or ROWT in the US.

This is true for both the noun, meaning a course or path, or the verb, meaning to send something by a specific course or path.

In Britain, though, only the first pronunciation is common for the noun and verb. But the British once had both versions too.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the second (ROWT) disappeared from standard British English sometime during the 19th century, “but is still widespread in North America.”

The noun “route” is very old, and was probably first recorded around 1225, the OED says.

It came into English by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French (rute or rote or route). But its ultimate source is the Latin rupta, which the OED says is short for the phrase via rupta (a broken way, or a road opened by force).

The Oxford editors, in commenting on the etymology of the word, also note that the Latin verb rumpere means to break, and rumpere viam means to open up a path.

Our word “routine” is a relative of “route.” And the English word “rut,” which originally meant the track left by a wheel, may have begun as a variant of “route,” according to etymologists.

The figurative sense of “rut,” meaning a narrow, dull, and habitual course or life or action, came along in the mid-19th century, the OED says.

The verb “route” is a relative newcomer, first showing up in the 1880s, according to published references in the dictionary.

The first citation in the OED is from an 1881 guide for stationmasters on the London & North Western Railway:

“To other passengers the old set of tickets, routed via Caledonian Railway, is to be issued.”

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Some initial thoughts

Q: I live in acronym-crazy NYC (SoHo, Dumbo, TriBeCa, and so on). But what about abbreviations that are pronounced as letters, not words (NYC, for example). I’ve coined a word for them: “abbrevonym.” I look forward to your response.

A: We also like “abbrevonym,” a word that’s been suggested now and then by language types. But unfortunately, there’s already a word for this: “initialism.”

An initialism is an abbreviation that’s spoken as letters, like “FBI,” “PTA,” “NAACP,” and “NCAA.” Here’s a more detailed definition, courtesy of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.):

“An abbreviation consisting of the first letter or letters of words in a phrase (for example, IRS for Internal Revenue Service), syllables or components of a word (TNT for trinitrotoluene), or a combination of words and syllables (ESP for extrasensory perception) and pronounced by spelling out the letters one by one rather than as a solid word.”

An acronym, on the other hand, is usually defined as an abbreviation that’s spoken as a word, like “radar” ( for “radio detection and ranging”), “laser” (“light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation”), and “NATO” (“North Atlantic Treaty Organization”).

We had a posting on the blog a couple of years ago about acronyms and initialisms

The New York neighborhoods you mention are indeed examples of acronyms, because they’re spoken as words.

The craze for geographical acronyms in the city began with SoHo (for “south of Houston”), moved on to TriBeCa (“triangle below Canal”), and now includes such whimsies as NoHo (“north of Houston”), Dumbo (“down under Manhattan Bridge overpass”), NoLIta (“north of Little Italy”), and even NoMad (“north of Madison Square Park”). Some have suggested that last one should instead be known as SoMa (“south of Macy’s”).

We’ve also written about the “h” in “SoHo”—that is, why “Houston” is pronounced HEW-ston in Texas but HOW-ston in New York.

As for what to call an abbreviation spoken in letters, frankly we prefer “abbrevonym” to the boring “initialism.” Who knows? It could catch on. Until then, though, we’ll stick with the old stick-in-the-mud.

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It’s NYOOZE to us

Q: Your posting on pronouncing “news” as NYOOZE reminded me of my undergraduate music studies. As a voice student, I had to take a one-semester course in diction, where we learned that NYOOZE was the correct pronunciation. In fact, we learned that whenever a long “u” sound follows any of the consonants in the phrase “Daniel Sitteth,” it should be pronounced with a “y” sound. So words like “lute” and “tune” should be pronounced LYOOT and TYOON. This comes from  Madeleine Marshall’s book on diction for singers.

A: Thanks for the interesting footnote. We weren’t familiar with Marshall’s book, The Singer’s Manual of English Diction, which was first published in 1953. It’s still in print and widely used.

When she died in 1993, at the age of 93, her obituary in the New York Times described the work as “a standard guide on the subject.”

We found an online overview of the book that has this advice for choral singers (the “j” in the pronunciation key is a “y” sound):

“Syllables spelled with u or ew, where the u or ew comes after the consonants d, n, l, s, t, or th (mnemonic device: ‘Daniel Sitteth’) are pronounced [ju], e.g., duty, due, dew, during, new, knew, lute, prelude, suit, assume, tune, stupid, student, enthuse. (See Chapter 36 for these rules and further examples).”

Madeleine Marshall Simon, who was known professionally as Madeleine Marshall, was a singing coach and concert pianist. She taught diction to singers at Juilliard for more than half a century, from 1935 to 1986.

Her pupils, according to her obituary, included Lily Pons, Leontyne Price, and Lauritz Melchior. Her husband was Robert A. Simon, a writer, a librettist, and a longtime music critic for The New Yorker. He died in 1981.

Of course, there’s singing pronunciation and there’s spoken pronunciation.

We’re pretty sure that Marshall would not have advised students of speaking elocution to pronounce “lute” as LYOOT or “tune” as TYOON. But clarity and uniformity of pronunciation are especially important in vocal music.

In discussing the value of clarity, Marshall laments the singer who sounds “as if he had a hot potato in his mouth …. as if he had a mouthful of mush … as if his mouth were full of marbles.”

“One of the purposes of this manual,” she writes, “is to help singers remove the potatoes, mush, and marbles from their songs in English. … It’s a book about singing in English and isn’t tended as a guide to anything else.”

Her pronunciation manual, she says, also aims at uniformity. In performance, each word must be pronounced exactly the same way by every singer.

If different characters in an opera, for instance, say the same word differently, she writes, “This disparity in pronunciation is disconcerting to an audience.”

But she stresses that she’s not concerned with ordinary spoken English: “The recommendation of this English for singing is, of course, no criticism of the English spoken in any given area.”

“Your personal speech,” she says, “is your own prerogative.”

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Is a comma before “and” a serial crime?

Q: When I was in junior high in the ’40s, I was taught that an apostrophe in a word denoted a missing character and a comma in a series denoted a missing word. But I often see a comma before “and” in a series. Wouldn’t this mean “and and”?

A: We’ll discuss this comma business first. No, the comma doesn’t represent a missing or implied word.

Commas, like other marks of punctuation, bring meaning to strings of words, organizing them for readability and clarity.

As the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language puts it, commas “mark boundaries within a sentence”—boundaries between clauses and between words in a series.

When used in a series, commas separate each part from the next, as in these examples: “knives, forks, and spoons” … “eating, drinking, and making merry” … “rude, abrupt, and insensitive” … “quickly, politely, and accurately.”

Here we’ve used a comma before each “and.” This is sometimes called the “serial comma” or “Oxford comma,” and though it isn’t required, we think it’s a good idea.

As we’ve said before on our blog, a final comma before “and” can make a sentence clearer.

We used this sentence as an example of one that could use another comma for clarity: “The biggest influences on my career have been my sisters, Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey.”

But your email made us curious. Apparently there was once a belief that each comma in a series represented a missing “and.”

In “Certain Fashions in Commas and Apostrophes,” a 1945 article in the journal American Speech, Steven T. Byington called this a “popular misconception.”

“There exists a widespread belief that one of the functions of the comma is to take the place of an omitted word, especially of an omitted coordinating conjunction,” Byington wrote.

This belief “has had a very perceptible influence” on the debate about the use of the final comma in a series like “A, B, and C,” he said. “A good-sized minority will mentally argue, ‘The purpose of the comma after A is to take the place of the omitted conjunction; consequently it is illogical to use it also after B, where the conjunction is expressed.’ ”

Newspapers may have encouraged the belief that a comma was equivalent to “and.”

In a 1940 article in American Speech, “The Serial Comma Before ‘And’ and ‘Or,’ ” R. J. McCutcheon wrote:

“An author informs me that in newspaper work he observed that the comma between the last two members of a series was habitually omitted, probably on the theory that the word and took its place and that the use of both the comma and the word and was redundant. Many syndicated articles in newspapers, however use both in series constructions.”

American Speech surveyed several US newspapers, magazines, and publishing companies on the subject for McCutcheon’s article.

It found, McCutcheon wrote, that “the ‘serial comma’ is omitted by the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, the New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Sun, Times, and World-Telegram. The Boston Christian Science Monitor employs the comma.”

The magazines surveyed had differing opinions on the serial comma, as did book publishers.

In 1940, McCutcheon wrote, The Chicago Manual of Style recommended using the final serial comma. (It still does.)

“The University of Chicago Press, following its influential A Manual of Style, seems to be inflexible,” McCutcheon said. “They inform me that for material edited by them or bearing the press imprint they insist upon the comma before the final member of a series of three or more.”

Today the Chicago Manual, now in its 16th edition, says: “When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more, a comma—known as the serial or series comma or the Oxford comma—should appear before the conjunction. Chicago strongly recommends this widely practiced usage, blessed by Fowler and other authorities, since it prevents ambiguity.”

No one would dispute the presence of the last comma in this example from the Chicago Manual: “She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president.”

As for the apostrophe, it signifies a missing letter or letters only when used in a contraction (like “it’s” for “it is,” or “tho’ ” for “though”).

Byington, in his American Speech article, wrote that in newspaper punctuation, “the latest aberrant tendency is that of using apostrophes before monosyllabic words which are falsely supposed to be abridgments of forms with prefixes.”

As examples he cites words written as ’round, ’though, ’way, and ’til on the assumption that they’re short for “around,” “although,” “away,” and “until.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve discussed “until” & company on our blog.

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An ion for an ion

Q: I’m uncomfortable with the dictionary pronunciations of  “cation” and “anion” (with the accent on the second syllable). I inevitably accent the first syllable, but I find that somewhat choppy. Any ideas?

A: We doubt that many people are losing sleep over how to pronounce these specialized scientific words.

A “cation” (pronounced kat-EYE-un) is a positively charged ion; an “anion” (pronounced a-NYE-un) is a negatively charged ion.

In an electrolyzed solution, a “cation” migrates to the cathode and an “anion” migrates to the anode.

We don’t see much chance that their pronunciations will change. The words simply aren’t being bandied about enough in the general population.

So if you’re using them in scientific conversations and want to be taken seriously, we’d recommend going with the dictionary pronunciations.

If the pronunciations sound like Greek to you, it may be because both words come from the language of Homer, Socrates, and Aristophanes.

The Greek verb katienai means to go down and anienai means to go up. The Greek ion, meaning something that goes, is from ienai (to go).

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No NYOOZE is good NYOOZE

Q: In your posting about radio pronunciation, you suggest that few North Americans say NYOOZE for “news.” Actually, an increasing number pronounce it that way. I live in the San Francisco Bay area, and most people my age and younger (I’m in my ’30s) say NYOOZE. People who say NOOZE tend to be older or from the Eastern US.

A: We may have spoken a little hastily in that blog posting. You’re right—some Americans do indeed pronounce “news” as if it had a “y” in it: NYOOZE. But the number is not increasing.

Among ordinary speakers of the language, Americans who say NYOOZE are in the minority and their numbers are dwindling, according to people who study these kinds of things.

First, here’s what the dictionaries say.

The two standard dictionaries we use the most, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), give both pronunciations as standard English without comment—NOOZE and NYOOZE.

The Oxford English Dictionary says British speakers use NYOOZE but Americans use both pronunciations.

Macmillan, which publishes both British and American dictionaries, says speakers in the UK say NYOOZE and those in the US say NOOZE.

Our hunch is that NYOOZE has been regarded as a standard American pronunciation for only a few decades. Our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition) has only one pronunciation: NOOZE.

Why does “news” have two pronunciations anyway?

As it happens, “news” is part of a small class of words in which speakers in Britain, and many in the American South, insert an audible “y” sound (linguists call it a palatal glide).

Other examples include “tune,” “duke,” “due,” “tuna,” “Tuesday,” “avenue,” and “stew.” Some interesting scholarship has been done on the subject.

“The pronunciation of such words as tune, duke, and news, it turns out, is one of the most marked differences between Northern and Southern speech,” the linguist Betty S. Phillips wrote in 1981 in the journal American Speech.

In the North and North-Midland, Phillips wrote, “the words are generally pronounced without a glide” (that is, they sound like TOON, DOOK, and NOOZE). In those Northern regions, she said, pronunciation with the glide (i.e., NYOOZE) is limited to rural New England.

“Only in the South and South-Midland does the [YOO] pronunciation remain in general use,” she wrote, “and even there the older pronunciation with the glide is being gradually replaced.”

In a more detailed follow-up article in 1994, and with fresh data on Southern speech patterns, Phillips confirmed that the YOO pronunciation was indeed fading in the South, especially among younger speakers.

“We are indeed dealing with a sound change in progress,” she wrote. “That is, the younger speakers are further along in the sound change than are the older speakers.”

Another article in American Speech, this one written by Ann Pitts in 1986, also found a decline in what she called “the Southern glided variant” (as in NYOOZE and DYOOK and TYOON).

But Pitts noticed something very odd. While Southerners were gradually dropping the “y,” Northern broadcasters were picking it up.

“The only answer to this puzzle,” she wrote, “is that the old glided variant has acquired a new kind of prestige which is keeping it alive artificially in the broadcasting register.”

Northern announcers, she suggested, may have interpreted the “y” sound “not as a Southern feature, but rather as an elegant variant appropriate to the formal medium of broadcasting.”

The “y” sound in some words, Pitts speculated, may have been kept alive by “snob value,” by “association with the British accent,” or by “elocution instructors teaching elegant speech in the North as well as the South.”

But in some cases the adoption of the “y” glide results in unnatural speech. Pitts reported an anecdote about clueless speakers who unknowingly turned the phrase “noon news” into a mock-elegant monstrosity: NYOON NYOOZE.

She also mentioned some other broadcasting oddities—”y” sounds inserted into words like “capsule,” “consumer,” “suitable,” “assume,” “super,” “revolution,” and others (SYOO-per, re-vol-YOO-shun, and so on).

But to get back to your original point, if the number of Americans who say NYOOZE is increasing, we haven’t seen any evidence of it.

Pronunciation aside, here’s something that may be news to you.

We were once surprised to notice that Anthony Trollope, a favorite Victorian author of ours, used a plural verb with “news” (as in “And now, here are the news”).

Today, the plural noun “news” is normally used with a singular verb. But in fact “news” was used with plural verbs through the 19th century, and it’s still used that way in Indian English.

The word “news,” meaning recent information, dates back to 1417, the OED says. Here are three OED citations (note the plural verbs):

“Th’ amazing News of Charles at once were spread” (Dryden, 1685).

“There are bad news from Palermo” (Shelley, 1820).

“There are never any news” (Thackeray, 1846).

But from about the mid-1500s, “news” was also occasionally used with singular verbs, as in this 1828 citation from Sir Walter Scott: “Was there any news in the country?”

Eventually, the singular usage became more common, and now “news” is routinely accompanied with a singular verb. Among other things, it means an account, a report, a broadcast, or information in general.

Finally, in case you’re wondering about the history of the expression “no news is good news,” we can tell you it’s not new. Variations on the theme have existed since the 1500s.

In a 1574 collection of proverbs translated from Portuguese, it appeared as “Evill newes never commeth too late.” And in a 1616 letter written by King James VI, it was “no newis is bettir then evill newis.”

But perhaps we really owe the expression to the Italians. In 1647, the historian and political writer James Howell had this to say: “I am of the I[t]alians mind that said Nulla nuova, buona nuova, no newes good newes.”

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