Category: Word origin

Q: Does the expression “last ditch” come from trench warfare during World War I?

A: It does indeed come from the excavated defensive positions used in warfare, but the fighting that inspired the phrase “last ditch” took place hundreds of years before World War I.

The usage can be traced back to William of Orange’s vow to fight to the death in the 17th century rather than see the Dutch Republic conquered by invading French and British forces.

William, the Dutch stadtholder, or steward, was the son of the previous stadtholder and Princess Mary, daughter of King Charles I of Britain. He later became King William III of Britain.

On July 5, 1672, an envoy from Charles II, then the ruling British monarch, met with William in southern Holland and offered to make him sovereign prince of Holland if he surrendered to the British and French.

If he refused, the envoy said, William would witness the death of the Dutch Republic.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites two versions of  William’s reply. The first is in Jure Divino, a 1706 poem by Daniel Defoe, but we prefer this one, written sometime before 1715, from Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time:

“There was a sure way never to see it lost, and that was to die in the last ditch.” (Burnet was a philosopher, historian, and Anglican bishop of Salisbury.)

The OED defines the noun phrase “last ditch” as “the innermost or only remaining defensive entrenchment, the last line of defence; often fig. and in figurative contexts.”

The dictionary defines the expression “to die in the last ditch” as “to die still fighting to defend something, to resist to the last.”

When the adjective “last-ditch” showed up in the late 19th century, according to the Oxford, it described “fighting, resistance, or opposition to the very last; maintained to the end.”

The first OED citation for the adjective is from Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army (1888):

“It was said … the French intended to die to the last man before giving up that city. But this proved all fudge, as is usual with these ‘last ditch’ promises.”

In the 20th century, the adjective came to describe something done “at the last minute in an attempt to avert disaster; resulting from desperation.”

The earliest OED example for this new sense is from Death in the Desert: The Fifty Years’ War for the Great Southwest (1935), by Paul I. Wellman:

“It was a last-ditch law, dictated by the fear which death from the north had engendered in every Mexican heart.”

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Q: I’ve been thinking about “locked and loaded” since President Trump used it last week to warn North Korea. Why is it “locked and loaded” when the logic of it is “loaded and locked”? Where did this begin?

A: We think “locked and loaded” makes sense, especially when used literally on the firing range. But like many expressions, it’s strayed quite a bit when used figuratively.

We’ve seen a couple of early examples, one from the late 1700s and the other from the early 1800s, of “locked and loaded” used to describe firearms, but the expression may have been used in different ways.

In the first example, it apparently refers to a flintlock musket, loaded with ball and powder, and with its firing mechanism at half-cock, or locked.

Why was “locked” mentioned before “loaded”? Probably because the cock, or hammer, was locked first to prevent an accidental discharge while the weapon was being loaded from the muzzle, or open end, of the barrel.

To fire a flintlock weapon, the hammer must be at full cock when the trigger is pulled. The cock holds a piece of flint that strikes the steel frizzen, creating a spark that falls into the pan, igniting powder and causing the weapon to fire, as in this illustration.

The earliest written example we’ve seen for “locked and loaded” is from a document in the archives of the New Brunswick Historical Society. It describes a dispute on Aug. 6 and 7, 1793, over the possession of a house and lot in what was then the British colony of Nova Scotia.

When a disputant “brought in two musquets and justice Hubbard asked him if the guns were well locked and loaded,” according to the document, he replied, “One of them is.” We assume “well locked” here meant “safely locked.”

The Wiktionary contributor who tracked down the 1793 example has suggested to us that “locked and loaded” may ultimately come from the language of gun crews on British warships. However, he hasn’t found evidence to support this.

It’s unclear in the second example whether “locked and loaded” is being used for a half-cocked or fully cocked pistol. In Lord Roldan, an 1836 novel by the Scottish writer Allan Cunningham, Davie Gellock, a young man posing as a commissioned officer, is asked to show his commission:

“Davie, snatching a pistol from his pocket, and cocking it at the same moment; ‘There is my commission, steel mounted, inlaid with gold, locked and loaded.’ ”

The next example we’ve seen, from a July 20, 1940, US War Department training manual for the M1 rifle, makes clear that the safety should be set, or locked, before the M1 is loaded.

“The instructor, after announcing the range and the position to be used, commands: 1. With dummy cartridges, lock and load; 2. Ready on the right; 3. Ready on the left; 4. Ready on the firing line; 5. Cease firing; 6. Unload. At the first command the rifles are locked and loaded. At the fourth command the safety on all rifles is set in the forward position. When the target is exposed, pupils take position rapidly and simulate firing 16 rounds, reloading from the belt.” (The M1 safety is off when set in the forward position, and on when pulled back.)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to lock and load” as “to prepare a firearm for firing by pulling back and ‘locking’ the bolt and loading the ammunition (frequently in imperative, as an order).”

The dictionary’s earliest example, from the Nov. 19, 1940, issue of the New York Times, uses the expression in the imperative: “Lieut. Col. Joseph T. Hart, range officer, boomed through his microphone, ‘Lock and Load.’ ”

The OED says the expression has also been used figuratively as “to ready oneself for action or confrontation.” The first figurative example is from the September 1990 issue of Snow Boarder: “He was locked and loaded in the starting gate, completely focused and obviously amped for his final run.”

Although “locked and Loaded” is the usual expression now, we’ve also found quite a few older examples for “loaded and locked,” as in this one from a Feb. 18, 1912, article in the Dallas Morning News about a rifle shoot: “Competitor stands at the order of trail, piece loaded and locked.”

And here’s one from the Sept. 15, 1911, article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a rifle match in Essington, PA: “The men were to take their rifles and carry them at the position of trail arms, loaded and locked.”

But as we said at the beginning, we think the expression “locked and loaded” makes sense, especially on the firing line.

By the way, a linguist would refer to two words paired together in an idiomatic expression (like “locked and loaded,” “fish and chips,” “quick and dirty”) as a binomial pair or an irreversible binomial, as we say in a 2016 post.

Many factors determine the choice of which word comes first in the pair, such as meaning, rhythm, chronology, length, and vowel position.

We think “locked” comes before “loaded” because of chronology or rhythm, but a reader of the blog suggests that it’s because a word pronounced with the tongue in front often comes before one with the tongue in back.

We’ll end with a definition of the term from Soldier Talk, Frank A. Hailey’s 1982 book about military language:

“Lock and load. A firing range command for soldiers to place safety levers of weapons in the ‘save’ position and load ammunition. Soldiers frequently used the expression when in a group and a brawl or confrontation was imminent.”

[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 16, 2017.]

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Q: “Courtesy” as a verb? This is from a local Fox News employee in Austin, TX: “We would courtesy you.”

A: It’s not just Fox News in Austin. We’ve found many examples of the identical wording from broadcasters around the country in offering people credit for using their online videos.

Here’s a request by an assignment editor at KTLA News in Los Angeles for consent to use a rock-climbing video on Facebook:

“I am writing to request permission to use your video ‘The Dawn Wall Push Day 08’ in our newscast. we would courtesy you.”

And here’s a request from NY1 News in New York City on a website about Yaks: “We are seeking permission to use this video during a news piece on Yak Meat. We would courtesy you of course.”

This example on Twitter is from a sports producer at a Fox station in Oakland, CA: “Can we use your Mark Davis sound on air and social media. We would courtesy you.”

Finally, the ESPN assignment desk added this comment to a YouTube video of someone doing a backflip over water on a modified snowmobile:

“ESPN would like permission to use this video on our TV and web platforms. We would courtesy you if approved.”

A media executive who reads our blog informs us that “courtesy you” is shorthand in the media business for “provide you with a courtesy credit.” As he explains, a courtesy credit in television “is one that is not contractually mandated, as when material is licensed for a fee (say, from Getty Images).”

“Sometimes a credit will read ‘by courtesy of’ in connection with licensed material for stylistic reasons, as when a producer wants to emphasize that the material was used in a friendly manner,” he says. “But generally, a ‘courtesy credit’ is one which a producer or broadcaster has no obligation to provide.”

In programming covered by one of the guilds, such as the Screen Actors, Directors, or Writers Guilds, there are explicit crediting provisions, he says. But for “non-guild programming (much of ‘non-scripted’ basic cable), credits are more discretionary: there are certain credits established by contract (executive producers, for instance or high-level talent) which must be included on a program, and certain credits established simply by custom (production or network personnel), which are considered expendable.”

“Since non-tabloid news programming frequently has a policy of not paying sources, the courtesy credit is provided in lieu of compensation, as an inducement to provide the material,” he writes.  “Without seeing the actual licenses, this latter arrangement is how I’d interpret all the examples cited in your post. And, since for any contract to be valid, it must contain the phrase ‘for good and valuable consideration, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged,’ the ‘valuable consideration’ offered and received here is publicity. Which, for some people, is priceless.”

The media use of “courtesy” as a verb meaning to provide a courtesy credit hasn’t made its way into the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult or the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence.

Interestingly, the word “courtesy” has occasionally been used over the centuries as a verb meaning to bow before a superior. (The word in this sense was later shortened to “curtsy.”)

Here’s an example from The History of Sir Charles Grandison, a 1753 novel by Samuel Richardson: “Beauchamp, in a graceful manner, bowed on her hand: She courtesied to him with an air of dignity and esteem.”

In fact, we’ve found several recent examples, including a reader comment last month on the website of the Sunday Express that criticized Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, for curtsying before Queen Elizabeth II:

“May courtesied? Disgraceful. No human is superior to another, certainly not by an accident of birth.”

As it turns out, “courtesy” (and “curtsy”) is related to “courtesan,” “cohort,” and “court,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins. All are ultimately derived from cohors, classical Latin for an enclosed yard. [Update: we wrote more extensively on the history and the various meanings of “court” in 2020.]

“By extension it came to stand for those assembled in such a yard—a crowd of attendants or company of soldiers; hence the meaning of cohort familiar today,” Ayto writes.

He traces the judicial sense of “court” to “an early association of Old French cort [a judicial tribunal] with Latin curia [a legal tribunal or sovereign’s assembly].”

[Note: This post was updated on Feb. 26, 2020.]

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Q: If someone referred to as “She Who Must Be Obeyed” becomes the object of a preposition, should it be “She” or “Her”?

A: We’d treat the noun phrase “She Who Must Be Obeyed” as any other noun. We’d use it as a subject or an object, just as we’d use “Queen Victoria,” “Catherine the Great,” or “Aunt Hilda.”

George Bernard Shaw, for example, uses it as an object in his 1911 play Getting Married. When asked whether he’s staying for breakfast, Hotchkiss replies: “How do I know? Is my destiny any longer in my own hands? Go: ask She Who Must Be Obeyed.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed” (it uses hyphens) as a colloquial, usually mildly depreciative noun for “a strong-willed or domineering woman, esp. a wife or female partner.”

The earliest example in the OED (from H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel She) uses the noun phrase as a subject. Here it refers to a powerful queen: “ ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’ commands thy presence, my Baboon.”

Oxford also cites a TV script by John Mortimer, who uses it as an object in an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey that was aired in 1978, the year the British series had its debut.

In the script, Horace Rumpole says, “Hoping to turn a bob or two which won’t be immediately grabbed by the taxman, or my clerk Henry, or by She Who Must Be Obeyed.”

(Hilda Rumpole, the barrister’s wife, is often referred to as “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” not only throughout Mortimer’s TV scripts, but in the short stories and books that followed.)

The noun phrase is also an object in the most recent OED citation, from the Nov. 18, 2007, issue of the Sunday Mail in Brisbane, Australia:

“The groom [was] wearing his future mother-in-law’s corsage. He had picked up the flowers but didn’t realise the beautiful buttonhole was meant for she-who-must-be-obeyed.” (In British English, a “buttonhole” can be a “boutonnière.”)

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Q: I have long used “keyboard grabber” for the person who organizes the creative, smart, or silly ideas generated at a meeting of hand-waving academics or lawyers. But I heard only derision when I used the term recently and had zero hits when I googled it. What term can you recommend for this concept?

A: It’s a good thing you’re looking for an alternative, since “keyboard grabber” brings to mind “keyboard capturing,” which usually refers to the covert recording of computer keystrokes by hackers. The term is also called “keystroke logging” and “keylogging.”

What should one call the person who organizes the clutter of silly, smart, and creative ideas from a meeting of academics or lawyers?

Terms such as “arranger,” “coordinator,” “developer,” “facilitator,” “orchestrator,” and “organizer” would do, but they lack a certain je ne sais quoi, while éminence grise may have too much of it.

Our choice would be “synthesizer,” which can refer to someone who organizes ideas, as well as to the electronic keyboard instrument that combines simple wave forms into complex sounds. Both could be described as “keyboard grabbers,” we suppose.

When the word “synthesizer” showed up in the mid-19th century, it meant someone or something that synthesizes, or combines things into a complex whole.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the January-April, 1869, issue of the Contemporary Review:

“Then for the next ten, twenty, or more years, the competent synthesizer, designer, prescriber, writer, statesman, theorist, is found.” We’ve expanded the citation.

In the 20th century, the term came to mean “one of various types of instrument for generating and combining signals of different frequencies; esp. a computerized instrument used to create music electronically.”

The first OED example is from the 1909 supplement to The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: “Synthesizer, in acoustics, an instrument for the production of complex tones of predetermined composition.”

The term “synthesizer” is derived from the earlier verb “synthesize” (1830) and noun “synthesis” (1611).

All three terms ultimately come from the classical Latin synthesis (a collection, a set of dishes, a medicinal combination, or a suit of clothes), and the Greek sunthesis, a combination or a putting together.

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Q: I recently saw Kenneth Branagh on the Stephen Colbert show. When Shakespeare’s Henry V came up, Colbert referred to it as “Henry Five,” Branagh as “Henry the Fifth.” Are both correct?

A: The customary way to pronounce Henry V is “Henry the Fifth,” though some people think it’s creative or cute to say “Henry Five,” while others who say it that way may perhaps be unfamiliar with the usual pronunciation.

We suspect that Colbert was being cute. A creative example would be Dancing Henry Five, the title of a mixed-media work in which the choreographer-writer-director David Gordon deconstructed and reconstructed Shakespeare’s play.

Shakespeare apparently pronounced it “Henry the Fifth” (or, rather, “Henry the Fift,” as the name was written on the title page of the 1600 quarto of the play). The earliest texts of Shakespeare’s plays were printed in quarto format, with each printed sheet folded into four leaves.

The numbers following the names of monarchs in other Shakespeare plays are similarly spelled out on the title pages, as in these examples from the 1596 quarto of Edward III, the 1597 quarto of Richard III, and the 1598 quarto of Henry IV, Part 1.

When Roman numerals are used to differentiate monarchs, popes, and others with the same name and position, the custom is to pronounce them as ordinal numbers. (Ordinal numbers, like “first,” “third,” and “fifth,” indicate place or order in a sequence, while cardinal numbers, like “one,” “three,” and “five,” indicate how many.)

Customarily, Roman numerals are also spoken as ordinals when used to identify family members with the same name (Adlai E. Stevenson III), but spoken as cardinals on clock faces (I, II, III, etc.) and in movie sequels (The Godfather, Part III). Roman numerals can go either way in sports events: Super Bowl XLVI (cardinal, “forty-six”) and  XXIV Olympic Games (ordinal, “twenty-fourth”).

Although the Anglo-Saxons had their own Germanic names for numbers, they used lowercase Roman numerals for the figures. So the Roman numeral v was the figure that represented the Old English word fíf (five) or fífta (fifth). In fact, the two usages were sometimes combined in the same passage.

The entry for the year 900 in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, says King Ælfred died “syx nihtum ær ealra haligra mæssan” (“six nights before the All Hallows mass”) after ruling his kingdom “oþrum healfum læs þe .xxx. wintra” (“a year and a half less than thirty winters”).

Roman numerals were generally used for calculations in Old English (roughly 450-1150) and Middle English (1150-1500). Arabic numerals were introduced in Europe during the Middle Ages, but took centuries to replace most uses of Roman numerals in English.

A search of the Early English Books Online database suggests that the use of ordinal numbers to identify English monarchs showed up in the early 1500s, with the numbers sometimes written as Roman numerals and sometimes spelled out.

For example, The Statutes Prohemium Iohannis Rastell, a 1527 compilation of public general acts, by the English writer and printer John Rastell, has numerous references to numbered kings, including “The vi. yere of henry viii” …  “kynge Edwarde the thyrde” … “The .ij. yere of. Richard .ii.” (The letter “j” was sometimes used for the final “i.”)

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Q: When did expressions like “rising sophomore” start? It’s new to me, a great-grandmother who was last in college 20 years ago.

A: It was new to us too, but not to the lexicographers at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.).

In addition to defining the adjective “rising” as ascending, developing, and increasing in power, American Heritage includes this sense: “About to begin a certain grade or educational level: rising seniors.”

Several other standard dictionaries describe “rising” as a preposition or an adverb with a similar sense.

Cambridge, for example, defines the preposition as “about to become,” and gives this example: “The school accepts children who are rising five years old.” And Collins defines the adverb as “approaching the age” and gives this example: “he’s rising 40.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, includes the use of “rising” as an adjective “designating a student about to enter a specified year of high school or college.”

The first OED citation is in the July 1893 issue of the Kappa Alpha Journal: “Mr. Young is a rising Sophomore and was asked to join us the first of the year.”

We’ve found an even earlier example from another fraternity publication, a report on the 51st annual convention of Beta Theta Pi on Aug. 25-30, 1890, at Wooglin-on-Chautauqua, NY:

“ ‘Did you say that the Lakewood girls like to come to the clubhouse?’ asked the undergraduate, who is a rising sophomore.”

The OED defines this sense of “rising” as “U.S. Educ. Designating a student about to enter a specified year of high school or college.”

The dictionary has three other examples—the latest is an April 22, 2001, advertisement in the New York Times Magazine: “Your rising senior or high school graduate can earn two college credits.”

When the word “rising” showed up in the early 1200s, it was a noun meaning “return to life” or “rising from the dead,” according to the OED. When the adjective showed up in the late 1300s, it meant increasing, advancing, or growing.

Both the noun and the adjective are derived from the verb “rise,” which the Anglo-Saxons inherited from Germanic, a prehistoric language reconstructed by linguists.

In Old English, the verb (spelled risan) originally referred to getting up in the morning or rising from the dead.

Getting back to your question, the educational use of “rising” may have evolved from a much earlier sense of the adjective as moving toward a position of higher social status, greater wealth, or increased power.

The earliest Oxford example for this sense is from The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex, a 1570 play by the English writers Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville:

“Who seeth not now how many rising mindes / Do feede their thoughts, with hope to reach a realme?”

The adjective has also been used to describe a horse or person approaching a specified age. The first OED citation is from John Cheny’s 1730 history of horse racing in England and Wales: “All the rising five Years Old, 200 Guineas each, Half forfeit.”

[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 10, 2023.]

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Q: Our local public radio station advertises that it broadcasts “digital.” This doesn’t sound right to me. I would say that it broadcasts “digitally.” Am I correct?

A: It doesn’t sound right to us either. A radio station broadcasts “digitally,” not “digital.”

We’ve checked eight standard dictionaries and all of them of say “digital” is solely an adjective and “digitally” is the adverb. The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, agrees.

And a search of the News on the Web Corpus, a database of billions of words from newspapers and magazines on the internet, shows that contemporary publications use the two terms that way.

As you know, a verb is generally modified by an adverb, not an adjective, which is why a radio station broadcasts “digitally,” not “digital.”

However, adjectives are used with linking verbs (or copulas) like “be,” “become,” “feel,” “look,” and “seem.” Linking verbs convey a state or condition, rather than an activity.

In fact, a good example of this usage is “to go digital” (to become digital, or computerized), as in “The film business has gone digital.” The word “go” in this case is a linking verb because it means “become.” We’ll have more to say about “go digital” later, but let’s look now at some “digital” etymology.

English adopted the word “digital” in the 15th century from digitālis, classical Latin for “measuring a finger’s breadth.” The Latin for “finger” or “finger’s breadth” is digitus.

In English, the word “digital” was originally a noun and an adjective referring to a digit, a whole number less than 10.

The first examples in the Oxford English Dictionary for both the noun and the adjective are from The Art of Nombryng (circa 1450), an anonymous treatise based on a work by the 13th-century French scholar Alexander de Villa Dei.

The noun is now obsolete so we’ll cite only an adjectival example: “Neither of the subtraccioun, tille it come to the first figure vnder the whiche is a digitalle nombre to be founde” (from The Earliest Arithmetics in English, 1922, edited by Robert Steele).

In the mid-17th century, people began using the adjective “digital” in senses “relating to fingers or finger-like structures,” according to the OED. The dictionary’s first example is an entry from Glossographia, a 1656 dictionary by Thomas Blount: “Digital, pertaining to a finger.”

Here’s a modern example of this sense from The Horrors of the Half-Known Life, a book written in 2000 by G. J. Barker-Benfield about the attitudes of men, especially male doctors, toward women in the 19th century:

“He could emulate ‘the finger of God’ by digital examination and repair of reproductive organs.”

The modern technological senses of “digital” began showing up in the 1940s. Here are the most common technical areas where the adjective is used and the earliest Oxford citations:

Signals, information, or data: “In the transmission of direct current digital impulses over a long line the characteristics of the line tend to mutilate the wave shape” (from a 1940 patent for an electrical communications system).

Computers and calculators: “Description of the ENIAC and comments on electronic digital computing machines” (from a 1945 report by the Applied Mathematics Panel, a US agency dealing with mathematical problems during World War II).

Other electronic measurement devices: “Digital voltmeter or potentiometer” (from An Introduction to Electronics, 1964, by Bernard Vincent Rollin).

Audio, video, and other recorded works: “The limb appears in … a few real-time digital A-camera frames” (from the Oct. 3, 1969, issue of Science).

Musical instruments: “A digital electronic organ wherein a digital representation of an organ pipe waveshape is stored in a memory” (from a 1970 patent for a digital electronic organ).

Clocks, watches, and other timepieces: “Digital clock covers a 24-hour period” (from an ad in the Jan. 10, 1958, issue of Science).

Computer culture, on the internet: “The worldwide digital revolution” (from the July 28, 1983, issue of Electronics).

As for “to go digital,” the first example in the OED is from the May 18, 1964, issue of Electronics: “A comparison of factors that influence the decision to go digital or analog.” And if you’d like to read more about linking verbs like “go” here, we discuss them in items #4 and #5 of our Q&A about English.

We’ll end with some other “digital” expressions  and the earliest OED dates: “digital calculator” (1946), “digital TV” (1959), “digital camera” (1961),  “digital audio” (1969), “digital signature” (1976), “digital art” (1978), “digital video disk” (1978),  “digital money” (1984), “digital photo” (1986), “digital rights” (1990), “digital economy” (1994), and “digital footprint” (1995).

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Q: I have never been able to parse the expression “turn state’s evidence.” Does the witness turn himself into evidence for the state, or turn over evidence to the state?

A: A convicted or accused criminal, as you know, “turns state’s evidence” by testifying in court against former accomplices.

Why “turn” evidence? We don’t know, though we suspect that the usage may have been influenced by both the “turn over” and “turn against” senses of the verb “turn.”

In fact, “turning state’s evidence” indicates both turning against accomplices and turning over evidence.

When the courtroom expression showed up in writing in the early 1700s, it was simply to “turn evidence.”

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Colonel Jack, a 1723 novel by Daniel Defoe: “One of the Gang, who to save his own Life, has turn’d Evidence.”

In modern British usage, the expression now refers to “King’s” or “Queen’s” evidence, as in this citation from The Hillyars and the Burtons, an 1865 novel by Henry Kingsley: “I hate a convict who turns Queen’s evidence.”

Here’s a figurative “King’s” example from the Dec. 25, 1889, issue of the Daily News in London: “The Bishop might have been better employed than in turning King’s evidence against the Sermon on the Mount.”

In the US, such testimony is called “state’s evidence,” as in this OED example from a Dec. 24, 1886, issue of Science: “Mr. Bartlett Channing Paine comes into court, and, as state’s evidence, gives the following testimony.”

Finally, here’s a more recent example for “state’s evidence” from the Oct. 16, 1976, issue of the National Observer: “He fired up his investigators, offered deals to suspects who would turn state’s evidence, and played off the knowledge of one suspect against the other.”

When the verb “turn” showed up in late Old English, it meant to “cause to move round on an axis or about a centre; to cause to rotate or revolve, as a wheel,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, believed to have been written in the late 990s: “Þa tyrndon þa hæðenan hetelice þæt hweowl” (“then the bloodthirsty heathens turned the wheel savagely”).

By the 1300s, people were using the verb in the expressions “turn against” (change from friend to foe) and “turn one’s back” (abandon someone or something).

Here’s an OED example, dated around 1300, from Thomas Wright’s Political Songs of England (1839): “turnden hem aȝeynes with suerd ant with launce” (“turned against them with sword and with lance”).

And here are a couple of later “turn one’s back” examples from Shakespeare:

“The shame Of those that turnd their backes” (from Henry IV, Part 2, 1600) … “To turne thy hated backe Vpon our kingdome” (from King Lear, 1608).

In the 1500s, people began using the expression “turn one’s coat” to mean change one’s principles or party.

The term “turncoat,” which is more common today, showed up soon after. Here’s an example from a 1570 church history by John Fox:

“I will beleue none of you all, for you be turne coates, and chaungelinges, and be wauering minded.”

Around the same time, the expression “turn over” came to mean to transfer or hand over. The first OED example is from Richard Huloet’s 1552 dictionary, Abcedarium Anglo Latinum:  “Turne ouer, transuerto.”

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Q: I saw “good grief” used in a story recently, and first encountered it as a child from Charlie Brown. Is it a euphemism for something else?

A: Yes, “good grief” was originally a mild oath. It’s “a euphemism for ‘good God,’ ” according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (2d ed.), by Christine Ammer.

Ammer describes it as an “exclamation expressing surprise, alarm, dismay, or some other, usually negative, emotion. For example, Good Grief! You’re not going to start all over again, or Good Grief! He’s dropped the cake.”

Although the noun “grief” is quite old, showing up in the Middle Ages, the exclamation “good grief” is relatively new.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The English Dialect Dictionary, a six-volume opus by the philologist Joseph Wright, published from 1898 to 1905:

“Good grief, a mild imprecation.” We’ve expanded the Oxford citation to add the definition (from the extensive entry for “good” in the 1900 second volume of the dialect dictionary, covering D to G).

The OED notes in an entry for “good” that it’s used “with another word euphemistically substituted” for “God” in such expressions as “good golly,” “good gravy,” “good land,” “good me,” “good gracious,” and “good grief.”

The oldest of these “good” euphemisms in the dictionary, the obsolete exclamation “good lack,” showed up in the early 1600s. (The word “lack” here comes from the archaic interjection “alack,” used to express grief, criticism, surprise, etc.)

The second citation for “good grief” in the OED is from a 1918 issue of Dialect Notes (a publication of the American Dialect Society) that includes the euphemism in a long list of exclamations.

A few exclamations that caught our eye are “good Godfrey,” “holy gumdrops,” “great goldfish,” “golly Moses,” and “gosh all hemlock.”

The first OED example for “good grief” used in popular writing is from a 1937 short story by Raymond Chandler:

“ ‘Good grief,’ De Spain said. ‘He’s up there right now.’ ” (The only version of that quotation that we could find was in a 1938 story by Chandler, “Bay City Blues.”)

However, we’ve found many earlier examples from mainstream publications, including this one from a 1915 issue of Good Housekeeping:

“ ‘Good grief!’ gasped Mannering Hitchcock, and he sank palely into a chair. ‘Are there really three of you?’ ”

We’ll end with a “good grief” example from Laughing House, a 1920 novel by the London-born American writer Meade Minnigerode:

“Good grief!” Isabelle remarked involuntarily, and Newell gave her a quick look.

“What do you mean, ‘good grief’?” he asked.

“I mean ‘good grief,’ ” she explained vaguely. “Good meaning good, and grief meaning grief …” and she refused to say anything more.

(In case you missed them, we’ve had several posts on the blog about euphemisms as mild religious oaths, including one in 2015 that discusses “by jove” and has links to some of the other posts.)

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Q: Please talk about the origins of the word “pot,” as in “pot luck,” “melting pot,” “potboiler.” Does it refer to mixing things together?

A: Almost all uses of “pot” are derived in one way or another from the word’s original sense: a cylindrical container to hold or heat liquids and other substances.

“Pot” comes from ancient Germanic, a reconstructed prehistoric language that preceded Old English and other Germanic languages.

In Old English, the word for the container was pott. Old Icelandic, Old Swedish, and Old Frisian, had similar words.

The term also showed up in medieval Latin and the Romance languages, suggesting an earlier, shared ancestor. We’re now getting into speculative territory, so we’ll let the Oxford English Dictionary do the speculating for us:

“The word in the Germanic and Romance languages and in post-classical Latin perhaps ultimately shows a loanword from a pre-Celtic language (perhaps Illyrian or perhaps a non-Indo-European substratal language), although a number of other etymologies have also been suggested.” (A substratal language influences one that replaces it.)

The dictionary adds that similar words in Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic apparently came from English rather than the other way around, as some word sleuths have suggested.

The earliest example for the term in the OED is from Old English Leechdoms (also known as Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England), an 1864 collection of Anglo-Saxon medical remedies and prayers edited by Thomas Oswald Cockayne:

“Nim readstalede harhuna, & ysopo, & stemp & do on ænne neowna pott, an flering of ða harhuna & oðer of ysopo … forð þæt se pott beo full” (“Take red-stalked horehound, and hyssop, and pound, and put in a new pot, one layer of horehound, and another of hyssop, and a third of fresh butter, and again the herbs, and then the butter, until the pot is full”).

This recipe was for a remedy used to treat a pain in the chest. The mixture was boiled and wrung through a cloth, then taken cold in the morning and hot at night in beer or broth or water.

The OED notes that the use of “pot” for such a container was “rare in Old English, the more usual word being crocc,” or crock. The term “pot” was more common after the Norman Conquest, probably reinforced by pot in Anglo-Norman or Old French.

Most of the later uses of “pot” come from the early sense of a cylindrical container for holding or heating things. We won’t discuss all the dozens of “pot” usages, but here are some more common ones, and the first OED examples for them:

“Chamber pot,” a bowl usually kept in a bedroom for one to urinate or defecate in. The first OED citation is from a 1540 inventory (“Item a chamber potte”), but we prefer this later example about someone too lazy to get out of bed: “He will nocht rys to the pott bot pischis amang the strais [straw bedding]” (from a 1568 literary anthology compiled by the Scottish merchant George Bannatyne).

“Go to pot,” originally to be cut in pieces and cooked, but later to deteriorate or be ruined: “Poor Thorp, Lord Chief Justice, went to Pot, in plain English, he was Hang’d” (from The History of Wiggism, circa 1680, by Edmund Hickeringill).

“Potluck,” a meal without special preparation: “That, that pure sanguine complexion of yours may neuer be famisht with potte-lucke” (from Strange Newes, 1592, by the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe). Later, a communal meal at which guests bring dishes to share: “their pot-luck and their ponies” (from the Aug. 13,1867, issue of the New York Times).

“Pot belly,” a large, protruding stomach: “A great pot Belly, a broad Back, and huge Legs and Arms, enough to squeeze one to pieces” (from The She-Gallants, a 1696 comedy by the English poet and playwright George Granville Lansdowne).

“Potboiler,” a creative work produced to make money by catering to popular taste: “Some others … in great measure compensate for the heaps of inconsequential trash, or pot-boilers (as they are called) which are obtruded upon the public view” (from a 1783 account by the Irish painter James Barry of an art exhibition in London).

“Potpie,” a pie filled with meat and other ingredients: “The snow birds are flying round your own door, where you may … shoot enough for a pot-pye, any day” (from The Pioneers, an 1823 novel by James Fennimore Cooper). The non-meat ingredients were originally fruit and later vegetables.

“Chimney pot,” the pipe at the top of a chimney to improve draft: “Why a church is with a steeple built; / And a house with a chimney-pot?” (from “The ‘How’ and the ‘Why,’ ” in Alfred Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 1830).

“Pot shot,” a random or easy gunshot: “Major Swayne … kept them under hedges firing pot shots, on which the enemy reoccupied the position” (from an 1843 Afghan journal by Florentia Wynch Sale, the wife of a British army officer). Earlier, it had meant shot for a cannon or a shot to kill food for the pot. And later, it came to mean random, easy, or unfounded criticism: “But I don’t think much of the pot-shot method of refutation” (from the November 1926 issue of the Forum, a New York magazine).

“Pot of gold,” a fortune or jackpot, real or imagined: “It is the barbarous old legend of the ‘pot of gold’ repeated in ten thousand new forms” (from the Feb. 16, 1847, issue of the New York Times).

“Pot,” the betting pool in poker and other gambling games: “He won the first twenty ‘pots,’ that is to say, the stake” (from Gambling Unmasked, 1847, by Jonathan H. Greene, an ex-gambler who campaigned against gambling).

“Pot roast,” meat, typically beef, cooked slowly in a covered pot or dish: “Sour Braten, or a Sour Pot-roast” (from the April 11, 1880, issue of the New York Times).

“Pot holder,” a pad for holding hot cooking implements: “the grimy apron was stuffed out with the dish-towel, pot-holder, red handkerchief, etc.” (from the March 1888 issue of Harper’s magazine).

“Pothole,” a depression from a defect in the surface of a road: “The surface of the bottom land that they were crossing was here and there broken up by fissures and ‘potholes,’ and some circumspection in their progress became necessary” (from A Waif of the Plains, an 1889 novel by Bret Harte). The potholes here were on a prairie trail.

“Melting pot,” a place where people of different races and cultures assimilate: “The French Canadians had a misgiving that if they too were cast into the American melting pot they would yield to that mysterious force which blends all foreign elements into one homogeneous mass” (from the Sept. 2, 1889, issue of the New York Times). Originally, it referred to a container in which metals or other materials were melted and mixed.

We’ll end with the “pot” that’s smoked: “She made him smoke pot and when he got jagged … she put him out on the street” (from a 1938 story in Black on Black, a 1973 collection of Chester B. Himes’s writings). “Jagged,” an old adjective for “drunk,” means “stoned” here.

Oxford says the marijuana sense of “pot” is of “uncertain and disputed” origin. It debunks the “most popular theory”—that it comes from potiguaya or potaguaya, “supposed Mexican Spanish words” for marijuana leaves, or from the phrase “potación de guaya, lit. ‘drink of grief,’ supposedly denoting a drink of wine or brandy in which marijuana buds were steeped.”

The dictionary says “no corroborating evidence has been found to support the use of any of these terms in Spanish.”

Alternatively, the OED adds, the use of “pot” for marijuana may somehow be connected to the original sense of “pot” or to the noun “pod,” though it doesn’t offer any evidence for such connections.

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Q: I don’t hear “common day occurrence” a lot, but the expression does crop up from time to time, and the other day I found myself using it. A friend questioned me and I couldn’t recall where I’d picked it up. Any idea where or when this phrase originated?

A: The expression “common day occurrence” showed up in the late 19th century, probably as a conflation of “common occurrence” and “everyday occurrence,” two more common expressions that mean the same thing.

In fact, we’ve found an even earlier example in The Book of Family Prayer for the United Church of England and Ireland (1856) that uses both  “common” and “everyday” together to modify “occurrence”:

“Have we been separated for a time from our families, and has God brought us together in health and safety? and because this is a common every-day occurrence, shall we hesitate to acknowledge in it God’s protecting arm?”

The earliest example we’ve found for “common day occurrence” is from an 1897 British review of On Many Seas: The Life and Exploits of a Yankee Sailor, a memoir by Capt. Frederick Benton Williams:

“To be jailed for mutiny was a common day occurrence, but then mutiny covered a great many offenses” (from the Review of Reviews, a London journal edited by William Thomas Stead).

The expression “everyday occurrence” dates from the early 19th century. The first example we’ve seen is from a May 17, 1819, debate in the House of Commons: “It was well known that, among officers, the sale and exchange of commissions were matters of every day occurrence.”

And the expression “everyday’s occurrence” dates from the early 18th century. The oldest example we’ve found is from Of the Law of Natur and Nations (1729), an English translation by the Oxford scholar Basil Kennett and others of a Latin work by the German political philosopher Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf:

“It is therefore necessary to appoint certain Magistrates, as Substitutes or Delegates, who, by the Authority of the whole People, may dispatch Business of every Day’s Occurrence.”

The expression “common occurrence” is even older. The oldest example we’ve seen is from God the Author of Reconciliation (1699), by the English Puritan clergyman Stephen Charnock:

“The illustration should, if possible, be a matter of common occurrence, and the more common the occurrence the more sure it will be not to fix attention upon itself, but serve as a medium through which the truth is conveyed. ”

Although the expression “common day occurrence” has been around for a while, it isn’t all that common, as you’ve observed. We’ve found only a couple of hundred examples in Google searches.

And we couldn’t find the expression in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, or in any of the standard dictionaries we usually consult.

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Q: I was reading a free 1904 translation of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education on my Kindle, but it was so klutzy that I downloaded Helen Constantine’s 2016 translation. For example, “the road-metal grated” (1904) versus “the macadam squeaked” (2016).

A: Helen Constantine’s translation is very close to le macadam grinçait, the original French wording in L’Éducation Sentimentale. The French verb grincer can mean creak, squeak, grate, and more.

But the anonymous translator of that 1904 version isn’t as far off as you may think. The term “road metal” here refers to the layers of broken stone used in making macadam roads.

When Flaubert published the novel in 1869, a macadam road was made with layers of broken stone, the largest pieces at the bottom and the smallest at the top.

The process, developed by the Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam, was modified in the early 20th century, to handle automobile traffic, by adding tar to the surface.

Today, “road metal” refers to broken stone and similar material used to make or repair roads or rail beds. The term is in US dictionaries, but it’s much more common in the UK, according to searches of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

So how did “metal,” a word for a material like gold, silver, iron, copper, and brass, come to mean broken stone?

English adopted the noun “metal” in the early 1200s from Anglo-Norman and Old French, but the ultimate source is the classical Latin metallum and Greek métallon (mine, quarry, and substance obtained by mining).

When the noun showed up in early Middle English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant “hard, shiny, malleable material of the kind originally represented by gold, silver, copper, etc., esp. as used in the manufacture of objects, artefacts, and utensils.”

The earliest example in the OED is from Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous guide for monastic women that probably dates from sometime before 1200:

“Beo neauer se briht or. Metal. gold. seoluer. Irn. stel. þet hit ne schal drahe rust of an oþer þet is irustet.” (“For neither gold, nor silver, nor iron, nor steel, is ever so bright that it will not draw rust from a thing that is rusty, if they lay long together.”)

The use of “metal” for broken stones to make roads showed up first in Scottish English in the late 1700s. The earliest OED example is a 1782 citation from the Scottish National Dictionary: “The mettle for the road is not to be got but at the south end of the road.”

The next Oxford example, from a 1795 book by John Francis Erskine about Scottish agriculture, spells “metal” the usual way: “The weight of stones (or metals, as they are generally termed by the Scotch road-makers).”

However, that early Scottish spelling leads us to the noun “mettle,” which began life as an alternative spelling of “metal.”

As the OED explains, “The form mettle was a variant spelling used in all senses in the 16th and 17th centuries.”

In the early 1500s, writers began using both “mettle” and “metal” figuratively to mean “a person’s character, disposition, or temperament; the ‘stuff’ of which one is made, regarded as an indication of one’s character,” according to the dictionary.

The earliest Oxford example describes the biblical Adam as “Not lyght of metall but heuy and sad” (from Pylgrymage of Man Kynd, William Hendred’s early 16th-century translation of  a 14th-century allegorical poem by Guillaume de Deguileville).

“The first dictionary to record the figurative senses under the spelling mettle separately from metal is Kersey’s New Eng. Dict.(1702),” the OED says. (John Kersey was the author of A New English Dictionary.)

By the mid-1700s, the dictionary adds, “the form mettle becomes very rare in non-figurative senses,” and is used “now chiefly in to show one’s mettle.”

We also discussed the history of “metal” and “mettle” in a 2014 post about a pun in which the two words were switched in the expression “pedal to the metal.”

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Q: I’ve been struck by how often the prefix “post-” has been used lately: “post-religion,” “post-truth,” “post-contemporary,” and of course “postmodern” as well as “post-postmodern.” What do you think?

A: Yes, the prefix “post-” gets a workout these days, but it’s been a workhorse for centuries. A lot of the early uses are now obsolete, though, and we wouldn’t be surprised if many of the new ones joined them.

English borrowed the prefix in the late 14th century from Latin, where post- was attached to verbs, participles, and other verbal derivatives, as in postpōnere (to put off), postpartor (heir), and postgenitus (begotten).

The earliest English example for the prefix in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a manuscript, written in the middle to late 1300s, about the life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux:

“God … enspired him of an orisoun, / To seyn at his post-comoun” (“God … inspired a prayer for him to say at his post-communion”). The post-communion is a prayer that follows communion.

The use of “post-” is apparently more popular with English speakers than it was with ancient Romans.

“In English,” the OED says, “the prefix is used more generally than in Latin, especially in the prepositional relation” (that is, as used in terms like “post-puberty,” “post-Elizabethan,” and “post-Chomskyan”).

Originally, “post-” was used with words of Latin origin, such as “post-communion” (from commūnio, sharing), but the prefix broke away from its classical roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the appearance of such terms as “post-talmudical” (1659), “post-law” (1663), “post-noon” (1686), and “post-breakfast” (1791).

The usage grew in popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to OED citations, with hundreds of the prefixed terms showing up. Here’s a small sample:

“post-Kantian” (1812), “post-resurrection (1839), “post-election” (1851), “post-Hegelian” (1865), “post-Christmas” (1871), “post-Renaissance” (1874), “post-conquest” (1880), “post-flu” (1918), “post-surrealist” (1938), “post-crash” (1930), “post-game” (1934),  “post-bop” (1955), “post-cold war” (1962), “post-partisan” (1962), “post-pill” (1968), “post-orgasm” (1973),  “post-everything” (1976), and “post-glasnost” (1987).

Is “post-” used more now than in the past? Not according to a search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks n-grams (character sequences that represent words or strings of words) in material printed from 1500 to 2008.

A search for the term “post” used as a prefix suggests that it’s being used notably less now than in the middle and late 1800s, though more than a few decades ago.

In fact, the examples you cite aren’t all that new either, with the oldest dating back to the mid-19th century: “post-modern” (1865), “post-contemporary” (1917), “post-religion” (1972), “post-truth” (1989), and “post-postmodern” (1991).

In case you’re interested, we wrote a post in 2012 that mentions the recency illusion, which the linguist Arnold Zwicky defines as “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.”

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Q: I was listening to an Oliver Sacks book on my commute and was struck by his repeated use of “the matter,” as in “What seems to be the matter?” and “There’s nothing the matter.” I’m curious as to the history of this usage.

A: Let’s begin with the word “matter,” which comes via Anglo-Norman and Old French from the classical Latin noun māteria.

In Latin, the word originally referred to building material, especially wood, but Roman writers later used it figuratively to mean material for discussion or consideration.

When “matter” showed up in English in the Middle Ages, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to “an event, circumstance, fact, question, state or course of things, etc., which is or may be an object of consideration or practical concern; a subject, an affair, a business.”

The earliest example of “matter” in the OED is from Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous guide for monastic women that probably dates from sometime before 1200:

“Of þis ilke Materie ich spec Muchel þer uppe” (“I spoke much of this same matter above”).

The dictionary says this sense of “matter” inspired several idiomatic expressions (“there is something the matter,” “what is the matter?” and so on) in which “the matter” refers to “the condition of or state of things regarding a person or thing, esp. as a subject of concern or wonder.”

The first OED example for the usage comes from Andria, an English translation, dated around 1520, of a Roman comedy adapted by Terence from a Greek play by Menander: “What is the matter now.”

Oxford also cites Shakespeare’s Othello (circa 1603): “What is the matter here?” And this citation is from Daniel Defoe’s The Family Instructor (1715), a guide to good conduct: “I beseech you what is the Matter with you!”

The OED says “what is the matter with—?” can mean “what is wrong with—?” or “what is the objection to—?” or “what is there to complain of in—?”

“In recent colloquial use,” the dictionary explains, the noun “matter” is “sometimes interpreted as a predicative adjective in the sense ‘wrong, amiss.’ ”

Interestingly, the word “matter” can be traced to māter-, the same reconstructed prehistoric base as “mother,” according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. The dictionary adds that māter- is “based ultimately on the baby-talk form mā-, with the kinship term suffix -ter-.”

How, you may be wondering, did that ancient Indo-European root give Latin both māter (“mother”) and māteria (“wood”)?

The OED says the “wood” sense of māteria is “usually explained as originally denoting the trunk of a tree regarded as the ‘mother’ of its offshoots.”

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