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Winsome evangelism

Q: I’ve noticed that preachers on television and the radio are using “winsome” in a new way—capable of winning people over to Christ. As a curmudgeon, especially about words, I find this new usage highly annoying. Have you encountered it?

A: We hadn’t noticed it before, but “winsome” does seem be used in evangelical circles to mean capable of spreading the Gospel and winning converts to Christ. This usage isn’t all that new, however.

Winsome Evangelism is the title of a book published in 1973 by Ponder W. Gilliland, the author of Witnessing to Win and other books about “multiplying discipleship”—that is, training people to spread the Gospel and gain converts.

Some evangelicals even use a play on words: be winsome to win some (or words to that effect). And many of them use “winsome” itself with a double meaning—one must be pleasant and gracious (that is, winsome) to win some souls.

Are you right to be annoyed by this evangelical usage? Well, it’s not standard English. Dictionaries recognize the first meaning (pleasant and gracious), but not the second (capable of winning).

However, we’re not annoyed. We like a clever play on words. And in this case the usage can even be defended on etymological grounds, if we go back far enough.

Let’s begin by being clear about one thing: the “win” in the adjective “winsome” is not derived from the verb “win”—or vice versa.

The two words—“win” and “winsome—have had separate family trees ever since they entered English. Despite a common prehistoric ancestor, “winsome” has never had anything to do with winning.

“Winsome” entered the language many centuries ago, when it was spelled wynsum. It’s found in Beowulf, which the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology dates to about 725.

In Old English and Middle English, “winsome” meant pleasant, delightful, kindly, or gracious, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But in general, the word’s modern meaning, which emerged in the 1600s, is pleasing or attractive in one’s appearance, character, disposition, or manners.

“Winsome” is derived from an extremely old noun, originally spelled wyn and later “win,” that first showed up in Beowulf with the meaning of pleasure or delight. (The suffix “-some” is used to create adjectives from nouns.)

That old noun is long dead now, but it survived into the 17th century, when it appeared in benedictory phrases like “God give thee win,” according to OED citations.

This defunct noun came into English from old Germanic sources. Its English relatives include “wish” and “wine,” an obsolete word for a friend or protector (it’s unrelated to the drink, and was an element in old names like Eadwine, now Edwin).

In Old English, wyn was also a word element in poetical compounds such as wynland (pleasant land) and wynbeam (tree of joy).

And the element wyn showed up briefly as a separate adjective in Middle English, where the OED says it appeared only in verse and meant delightful or pleasant.

As for the familiar verb “win” (to obtain, succeed, overcome, or gain a victory), it has a quite different history. It’s also Germanic in origin, and was first recorded in Old English (as wynnan) in the 800s.

Originally, to “win” was to work or labor, but it also meant to strive, contend, or fight, the OED says. Most of the modern meanings—to seize or obtain, to be victorious, to overcome an adversary, and others—emerged in the 12th through 14th centuries.

As we’ve said, “winsome” has never had anything to do with winning on a literal level. However, the verb “win” has had a touch of winsomeness.

In the 14th century, the OED says, the verb developed a new meaning: “to overcome the unwillingness or indifference of.”

The new sense, Oxford explains, was used “with various shades of meaning: to attract, allure, entice; to prevail upon, persuade, induce; to gain the affection or allegiance of; to bring over to one’s side, party, or cause, to convert.” (Note the mention of “convert”!)

This meaning of the verb “win” gave us the adjective “winning” in the late 16th century. It originally meant persuasive, the OED explains, but now means alluring or attractive. Not so very dissimilar from “winsome,” is it?

Here’s an example from Benjamin H. Malkin’s 1809 translation of Alain-René Lesage’s Adventures of Gil Blas: “You have very winning ways with you; you make me do just whatever you please.”

And this later example comes from Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880): “There is a friendly something about the German character which is very winning.”

Taking all this into account, one would think that there has to be a connection between the adjective “winning” (from the verb “win”) and the adjective “winsome” (from the noun “win,” meaning pleasure or delight). And in fact there is, as we hinted above.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (2nd ed.) says the prehistoric ancestor of the verb “win” and of the “win” in “winsome” are the same—a root that’s been reconstructed as wen-.

This root also gave us “wish,” as we mentioned, as well as “wont” (custom or habit), “wean” (originally to accustom or train), and “ween” (an archaic verb meaning think or hope, which survives today in the adjective “overweening”).

American Heritage defines this root as meaning to desire or strive for, and the OED adds another definition: to love. All in all, a winning combination.

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Beyond the pale

Q: I’ve seen many examples of “beyond the pail” on the Internet. In fact, I googled the phrase and got many thousands of hits. I’d always thought the phrase was “beyond the pale,” a reference to the Russian Jewish ghetto.

A: You’re right that the correct phrase is “beyond the pale.” You’re also right that “beyond the pail” shows up a lot on the Internet.

However, many of the Google hits are from punsters or people pointing out the error.

The language writer Michael Quinion has a great quip about this on his website World Wide Words. When asked about the meaning of “beyond the pail,” he joked, “Isn’t that where you go when you kick the bucket?”

As for “beyond the pale,” it refers to something that’s improper or exceeds the limits of acceptability.

The other phrase you refer to, about the isolation of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, is the “Pale of Settlement.”

But the two expressions have little to do with one another, beyond their common use of the noun “pale” in the sense of a boundary or a limit.

“Beyond the pale” isn’t a reference to the other phrase, since it’s 170 years older. It was first recorded in 1720, while the first reference to the Pale of Settlement was recorded in 1890, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

We briefly discussed these expressions on our blog five years ago, but they’re worth another look.

When the noun “pale” was first recorded in the 1300s, it referred to a wooden stake meant to be driven into the ground.

At that time, “pale” was a doublet—that is, an etymological twin—of the much earlier word “pole,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

Both “pale” and “pole” once had the same meaning and came from the same source, the Latin word palus.

As the OED explains, in classical Latin a palus was a stake or a “wooden post used by Roman soldiers to represent an opponent during fighting practice.”

In post-classical Latin, palus also meant a palisade (originally a fence or enclosure made with wooden stakes), or a stripe (as in heraldry).

The noun “pale” was first recorded in writing in the mid-14th century. Its original meaning, the OED says, was a stake or “a pointed piece of wood intended to be driven into the ground, esp. as used with others to form a fence.”

In the late 14th century, “pale” was also used to mean the fence itself.

In the following century, “pale” acquired a couple of new meanings.

It could be “an area enclosed by a fence,” or “any enclosed place,” to quote the OED. It could also mean “a district or territory within determined bounds, or subject to a particular jurisdiction.”

Here’s where our two expressions come in. “Beyond the pale” came first, as we said, dating from the early 18th century.

Originally the phrase was followed by “of” and it meant “outside or beyond the bounds of” something. For example, here are the OED’s three earliest citations:

“Acteon … suffer’d his Eye to rove at Pleasure, and beyond the Pale of Expedience.” (From Alexander Smith’s A Compleat History of Rogues, 1720.)

“Nature is thus wise in our construction, that, when we would be blessed beyond the pale of reason, we are blessed imperfectly.” (From Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of the World, 1773.)

“Without one overt act of hostility … he contrived to impress me momently with the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favour.” (From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 1847).

But late in the 19th century the prepositional phrase fell away, according to Oxford, and “beyond the pale” was used by itself to mean “outside the limits of acceptable behaviour; unacceptable or improper.”

That’s how it’s been used ever since, as in these two OED citations:

“Unknown, doubtful Americans, neither rich nor highly-placed are beyond the pale.” (From the 1885 novel At Bay, written by “Mrs. Alexander,” the pen name of Annie Hector.)

“If you pinched a penny of his pay you passed beyond the pale, you became an unmentionable.” (From a 1928 issue of Public Opinion.)

Now for our other “pale” expression. As we mentioned above, the use of “pale” to describe a region or territory subject to a certain control or jurisdiction dates from the mid-1400s.

When first used, the reference was to English jurisdiction, and over the centuries “the pale” (sometimes capitalized) has been used to refer to areas of Ireland, Scotland, and France (that is, the territory of Calais) when they were under England’s control.

But this sense of “pale” is perhaps most familiar in the phrase “Pale of Settlement,” which the OED says is modeled after the Russian certa osedlosti (literally, “boundary of settlement”).

Oxford defines the phrase as “a set of specified provinces and districts within which Jews in Russia and Russian-occupied Poland were required to reside between 1791 and 1917.”

The OED’s earliest citation for the use of the phrase in writing comes from Russia and the Jews: A Brief Sketch of Russian History and the Condition of Its Jewish Subjects (1890), written by an author identified as “A. Reader”:

“The Jews … as soon as the contract was completed … had to return within the ‘pale’ of settlement.”

This more contemporary example is from the Slavic and East European Journal (1999): “Deeply depressed by Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, Gershenzon struggled to escape the ‘darkness’ and reach the light.”

As for the relationship between the two expressions, the OED has this to say:

“The theory that the origin of the phrase [‘beyond the pale’] relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale … or the Pale of Settlement in Russia … is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization.”

By the way, the adjective “pale,” dating from the early 1300s, has nothing to do with the noun. It comes from another source altogether, the classical Latin pallidum (pale or colorless), from which we also get the word “pallid.”

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Look out below!

[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 17, 2020.]

Q: Lately I’ve noticed that people are placing the word “below” in front of a noun or at the head of a sentence. Examples: “Click on the below link” instead of “Click on the link below” and “Below are the fixes” instead of “The fixes are below.” Is this at all proper?

A: Most authorities will tell you that “below” is not properly used as an adjective. So your first example (“the below link”) is not a universally accepted use. But the second (“Below are …”) is fine. Let’s look at them one at a time.

Nearly all standard dictionaries say that “below” functions exclusively as either an adverb (“they bought the apartment below”) or a preposition (“they bought the apartment below ours”). What’s the difference? They classify the word as an adverb if it doesn’t have an object, and as a preposition if it does.

In the sentence “Click on the below link,” the word “below” is an adjective modifying the noun “link.” While “above” is commonly used this way, “below” and “beneath” are not.

The usual order is “Click on the link below,” an arrangement in which “below” is traditionally classified as an adverb.

[Note: As we write in a later post, academic linguists have broken with tradition here. They consider “below” a preposition, whether it has an object (as in “click on the link below the picture”) or not (“click on the link below”). It’s a transitive preposition if it has an object, and intransitive if not. Dictionaries have not yet adopted this view.]

However, we can’t say the adjectival use is wrong. At least one publisher of standard dictionaries accepts it without comment.

Merriam-Webster classifies “below” as an adjective when it premodifies a noun and means “written or discussed lower on the same page or on a following page.” The example given is “the below list.” The more extensive Merriam-Webster Unabridged has a nearly identical definition and example. 

The adjectival usage is also found in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence. And it’s similarly defined.

The OED’s earliest example is from an 1822 issue of the Philosophical Magazine: “According to the below observations, the thermometer falls one degree for every ascent of 224 feet.” (Oxford adds, however, that this use of “below” is rare in comparison with the similar use of “above.”)

However, aside from M-W, the standard dictionaries we usually consult do not recognize the use of “below” as an adjective. 

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, for example, has no such adjectival usage. It says “below” is an adverb when used, among other things, to indicate “farther down” or “in a later part of a given text: figures quoted below.”

The OED would agree with that classification of “below” as an adverb in the sense of “lower on a written sheet or page; hence, later in a book or writing; at the foot of the page.” Two OED citations for this usage are “Read what’s below” (1784) and “The forms subjoined in the note below” (1863).

The OED says that in cases like these (and this would also apply to the American Heritage example, “figures quoted below”), the adverb has no expressed object. In other words, the sentence doesn’t explicitly say below what.

As we mentioned above, when an object is present, “below” is traditionally classified as a preposition: “figures quoted below the dotted line” … “below zero” … “below par” … “below average,” and so on.

When “below” is used as an adverb, the word it modifies (whether adjective or verb) isn’t always implied.

All 10 standard dictionaries, as well as the OED, would classify “below” as an adverb in examples like “offices on the floor below” … “in the valley below” … “a grade below”… “a temperature of 40 below,” and so on.

We realize that in examples like those, “below” does not look like an adverb. In understanding the dictionaries’ rationale, it sometimes helps to imagine an unstated word like “located” or “positioned” in there somewhere: “the offices on the floor [located] below.”

Now let’s turn to your second example, “Below are the fixes.”

Here again, “below” would traditionally be classified as an adverb. The sentence is parallel to “The fixes are below.” (While we think “are below” at the end of the sentence is more graceful than “Below are” up front, the two versions are grammatically equivalent.)

One last point: the word “below” wasn’t either an adverb or a preposition when it first showed up in English in the 14th century. It was a verb meaning to make low or to humble.

William Langland used the verb in 1377 in Piers Plowman, his Middle English allegorical poem, but the OED says this usage is now obsolete or rare.

In case you’re wondering, the adverb first showed up around 1400 and the preposition around 1565, according to OED citations.  

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Donkey’s years

Q: Recently I read the phrase “donkey’s years” in one of Lawrence Block’s books. Given the context, I assume that he was referring to a long period of time. I’d never heard of this phrase and I hope you can shed some light on its history.

A: The mystery writer Lawrence Block has used the expression several times in his works, including this example from Telling Lies for Fun & Profit (1994), a book about writing fiction:

“I don’t write many short stories these days and I haven’t perpetrated a poem in donkey’s years.”

The phrase “donkey’s years,” meaning a long time, originated in the early 20th century, apparently as a pun on the long ears of a donkey.

In fact, the first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary uses the phrase “donkey’s ears.” Here’s the citation, from The Vermillion Box, a 1916 novel by E. V. Lucas:

“Now for my first bath for what the men call ‘Donkey’s ears,’ meaning years and years.”

It’s not certain, though, which came first: “donkey’s ears” or “donkey’s years.”

We found “donkey’s years” in another 1916 book, With Jellicoe in the North Sea, by Frank Hubert Shaw:

“This isn’t a battleship war at all; it’s a destroyer-submarine-light cruiser show. They’ll never come out in donkey’s years, not they. They know jolly well we shall scupper ’em if they so much as dare to show their noses outside the wet triangle.”

The OED defines “donkey’s years” (also “donkeys’ years”) as a colloquial usage meaning a very long time.

It describes the phrase as a “punning allusion to the length of a donkey’s ears and to the vulgar pronunciation of ears as years.”

Gary Martin’s Phrase Finder website speculates that the usage originated as rhyming slang.

In rhyming slang, the last word of a short phrase is rhymed with a word that the phrase stands for. So an expresson like “trouble and strife” (“trouble” for short) stands for “wife.”

The earliest OED citation for the actual phrase “donkey’s years” may indeed be, in the dictionary’s words, an example of “a vulgar pronunciation of ears as years.”

In Hugh Walpole’s 1927 novel Wintersmoon, Mrs. Beddoes tells Mr. Hignett about a wedding she attended:

“I was at the wedding, you know, Mr. ’Ignett, ’ad a special card all to myself, ’aving worked for Miss Janet and her sister donkey’s years.”

The most recent OED citation is from a March 19, 1961, article in the Observer: “American influence and financial participation have been strong here for donkeys’ years.”

Although we occasionally hear Americans use the expression, all of the OED citations are from British writers, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) describes the usage as chiefly British.

We recently sighted the “y”-less version, “donkey’s ears,” in Jutland Cottage, a 1953 novel by the British writer Angela Thirkell.

In the novel, one of Thirkell’s Barsetshire books, Mr. Wickham, an estate agent, interrupts a toast by asking a fellow naval veteran, Tubby (a k a Canon Fewling), for his first name:

”Well, here’s to Horatio Nelson coupled with the name of—what the hell is your name, Tubby? I’ve known you for donkey’s ears, but we always said Tubby.”

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Supporting language

Q: I’ve been hearing a new usage in Jersey City for things that support us. People are using “chair” for anything they sit on (seat, sofa, bench, stool, pew, etc.) and “floor” for anything they stand on (ground, pavement, street, sidewalk, lawn, etc.). Have you noticed this?

A: We haven’t encountered this general use of “chair” to mean any kind of seat—stool, bench, sofa, car seat, and so on.

The Oxford English Dictionary isn’t (yet) aware of this usage either. The OED’s general definition of “chair” is a seat for one person, a “movable four-legged seat with a rest for the back.”

Perhaps the wider use of “chair” that you’ve noticed is a regional usage peculiar to the Jersey City area. In that case, don’t assume it’s a sign of a change in the language.

Although there are exceptions, regional differences tend to stay regional and don’t necessarily influence English as a whole.

On the other hand, sometimes very old usages survive as regionalisms. This could be the case with “floor” as a general term for the ground, a subject we once discussed on our blog.

Back in 2009, we promised to write more if we found out anything new, but there isn’t a whole lot to add.

American dictionaries still don’t consider “floor” and “ground” interchangeable. Both are words for bottom surfaces, but usually a “floor” is inside and the “ground” is outside (except in phrases like “the ocean floor” and “the forest floor”).

But as we pointed out in our blog posting, “floor” was a word for “ground” centuries ago. And at least one modern British dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, says that even today one definition of “floor” is “the earth; ground.”

However, the OED describes that usage as obsolete, except in dialects.

Here’s one of Oxford’s citations for the now obsolete usage. It comes from Morte Arthure, a Middle English romance written in the 1300s:

“With the drowghte of the daye alle drye ware thee flores!” (We’ve replaced the letter thorn with “th” in this example.)

Here’s another, from John Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil’s Pastorals (we’ve expanded the OED citation to give more of the context):

“Two Satyrs, on the ground, / Stretch’d at his Ease, their Syre Silenus found. … / His rosie Wreath was dropt not long before, / Born by the tide of Wine, and floating on the floor.”

But as we said, the OED describes the use of “floor” for “ground” as dialectal in modern usage. One of Oxford’s citations, from an 1865 issue of the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, reported that in the Cornish dialect “floor” was used to mean “a grass meadow.”

There’s a chance, we suppose, that the interchangeable use of “floor” and “ground” by some Americans could be a dialectal survival from days of old.

But this tendency among other Americans has nothing to do with Middle English.

In a 1959 article in the journal American Speech, George Yost Jr. noted that Syrian and Lebanese immigrants often confuse the words “floor” and “ground” because one Arabic noun (ard) serves for both.

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Sufferin’ succotash!

Q: Your posting about the difference between “quash” and “squash” raises another question: Is there a connection between the “squash” that means to crush and the “squash” that you eat?

A: This question came up recently during one of Pat’s appearances on Iowa Public Radio. The caller wondered what the two words had to do with each other.

The answer is nothing. The two “squashes” aren’t even remotely related.

As we wrote in that earlier post, the verb “squash” (to crush) ultimately comes from exquassare, a popular Latin derivative of quassare, one of the ancestors of “quash.”

When the verb entered English in the 16th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant to “squeeze, press, or crush into a flat mass or pulp; to beat to, or dash in, pieces, etc.”

But the “squash” that’s a gourd—the British would call it a “marrow”—is a short form of asquutasquash, a word in Narragansett, an Algonquian language spoken by native Americans in Rhode Island.

In the word asquutasquash, the OED explains, asq means “raw, uncooked,” and “-ash is a plural ending, as in succotash.”

Roger Williams, who is generally accepted as the founder of Rhode Island colony, was the first person to use this “squash” in writing.

The OED’s earliest citation is from A Key Into the Language of America (1643), Williams’s study of native American languages:

“Askutasquash, their Vine aples, which the English from them call Squashes, about the bignesse of Apples, of severall colours, sweet, light, wholesome, refreshing.”

To some early settlers, the Narragansett word asquutasquash sounded like “squanter-squash,” and that was an early name for the gourd, first recorded in 1634. It’s no longer used; the OED calls it obsolete and rare.

Now how’s this for confusing? The word “quash” was also sometimes used to mean a squash or pumpkin

The OED says that some examples of this usage “may be based on misunderstanding by early naturalists, others may represent misreadings of manuscripts by later editors.” OK, now let’s forget all about it.

One more thing. We probably shouldn’t let that fleeting reference to “succotash” pass without an explanation. After all, we’ve recently celebrated Thanksgiving and food, as well as our country’s Native American heritage, has been on everybody’s mind.

“Succotash” too is derived from a Narragansett word, msiquatash, a plural with “divergent explanations,” the OED says.

We do know what “succotash” meant to colonists in 18th-century New England. The OED defines the English word as “a dish of North American Indian origin, usually consisting of green maize and beans boiled together.”

Oxford’s earliest example of its use in writing comes from a letter written in 1751 by James MacSparran, a Church of England clergyman in early America:

“Mor dined with us upon Suckatash and Ham.” (The superscript “r” probably indicates that first word was an abbreviation.)

This later example is more redolent of the wilderness. It’s from Jonathan Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America (1778):

“This [dish] is composed of their unripe corn … and beans in the same state, boiled together with bears flesh. … They call this food Succatosh.”

And here’s a literary example, from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826): “The wise Huron is welcome … he is come to eat his ‘suc-ca-tush’ with his brothers of the lakes!”

We’ll conclude with an example from Sylvester the Cat: “Sufferin’ succotash!”

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Nose piece

Q: Why isn’t there a word that by itself means blow the nose? This is such a common act that there ought to be one word to take the place of three. You agree? I suggest “honk.”

A: There is such a word, or at least there was (and it wasn’t “honk”). The unlovely word “snot” was once a verb meaning to blow one’s nose. Really!

The verb “snot,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was derived from the noun, which has roots in old Germanic languages.

In the early 1400s, when the noun was first recorded, it meant both “the burnt part of a candle-wick” and “the mucus of the nose.”

What’s the connection here? As John Ayto writes in the Dictionary of Word Origins, there was “possibly a perceived resemblance between an extinguished candlewick and a piece of nasal mucus.” His words, not ours.

The verb “snot,” the OED informs us, was first recorded in English at about the same time as the noun. When it originally appeared, it meant “to snuff (a candle),” Oxford says. So to “snot” a candle meant to put it out.

In the 1500s, according to the OED, the verb was first recorded with the other meaning—“to blow or clear (the nose).” So to “snot” one’s nose was to blow it.

The earliest use in writing for the nasal meaning comes from a 1576 translation of Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo, a treatise on manners:

 “They spare not to snot their sniueld noses vppon them.” (The word written as “sniueld” is “sniveled”; to “snivel” originally meant to run at the nose.)

The OED also has two 17th-century citations from old dictionaries.

This one is from an Italian-English dictionary dated 1611: “Smozzicare … to snot ones nose.” And this is from a French-English dictionary dated 1632: “To snot (or blow) his nose, se moucher le nez.”

Sometimes the nose-blowing was involuntary, if this 1653 example, from a translation of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, is any indication: “Then he … sneezed and snotted himself.”

Since the subject is noses, you might be interested in knowing that many English words that start with “sn-” have something to do with the nose, and in the languages they came from, they probably echoed the sound of air passing noisily through the nostrils.

Words thought to have imitative or onomatopoeic origins include “snot,” “snore,” “snort,” “snout,” “schnoz,” “sneeze,” “snoot,” “snooty” (in the sense of looking down one’s nose), and the 20th-century word “snorkel” for a breathing tube. Also “snuff” and “snuffle,” “sniff” and “sniffle,” and the aforementioned “snivel.”

As we’ve written before on our blog, words like these have origins in prehistoric Germanic roots that are believed to echo nasal sounds and are associated with breathing, blowing, or sneezing.

We can’t end this treatise on nose-blowing without mentioning that old snot joke from childhood. Pat’s version: “I thought it was a booger, but it’s snot.” Stewart’s: “It looks like mucus, but it’s snot.”

And here’s an even sillier version we found online: “Don’t kiss your honey when your nose is runny. You may think it’s funny but it’s snot.”  

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Disorganized crime

Q: I am having a hard time finding the real difference between “disorganized” and “unorganized,” but I know you can make this clear to me.

A: We can see why you’re confused. There’s a lot of overlap between the terms “disorganized” and “unorganized.” They’re often defined in terms of one another.

In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for instance, one definition of “disorganized” is “not organized,” while one definition of “unorganized” is “disorganized.”

But there are differences, too. And as far as the differences go, something that’s disorganized is usually worse off than something that’s simply unorganized.

A committee that’s “unorganized” could be one that hasn’t yet been formed, while a committee that’s “disorganized” is in disarray.

The definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary mention the chaos that can characterize the “disorganized” state.

The OED defines “disorganized” as “deprived or destitute of organization; having lost, or being without, organic connection or systematic arrangement; thrown into confusion, disordered.”

But the OED entry for “unorganized” doesn’t entail confusion and disorder. It defines the term this way: “Not formed into an orderly or regulated whole.”

The dictionary adds that “unorganized” can also refer to workers or to companies that aren’t unionized.

Interestingly, the terms “disorganized” and “unorganized,” as well as the verb “organize,” are ultimately derived from organon, a Greek term for a tool, a musical instrument, and a body part, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

The Greek organon has given English the words for a pipe organ as well as a body organ.

When the noun “organ” showed up in early Old English, the OED says, it referred to “any of various ancient musical, esp. wind, instruments.”

By the late 1300s, the term was being used for a pipe organ. And in the early 1400s, it took on the sense of a body organ.

When the verb “organize” entered English in the 1400s, according to the OED, it was a medical and biological term.

As John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins explains, “This originally denoted literally ‘furnish with organ so as to form into a living being,’ and hence ‘provide with a co-ordinated structure.’ ”

The verb didn’t take on its modern meaning (“to become organized; to assume an organized structure”) until the late 1800s, according to the OED.

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A sense of wonder

Q: I was typing out dialogue for a play, and wrote this sentence: “I wonder who they’ll move into Mr. Anderson’s cubicle?” I see dialogue like this all the time, written as if the speaker is asking a question. But then it struck me; is this truly a question? Should it be punctuated with a question mark or a period?

A: Obviously, someone who wonders about something has a question on his mind.

But a sentence beginning “I wonder” is a statement, not a question, and a statement should end with a period: “I wonder who they’ll move into Mr. Anderson’s cubicle.” (In case any readers are wondering, we’ll discuss “who” versus “whom” later.)

This is an example of an indirect question, and as The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) says, “An indirect question never takes a question mark.”

The Chicago Manual gives these examples of indirect questions: “He wondered whether it was worth the risk” and “How the two could be reconciled was the question on everyone’s mind.”

This is a subject we touched on in 2010, but it’s worth mentioning again.

Sometimes a mini-question (like the single word “who,” “when,” “how,” or “why”) is embedded within a statement. Here, too, no question mark is used, though the word may be italicized.

The Chicago Manual illustrates this with two examples: “She asked herself why” and “The question was no longer how but when.”

Similarly, as Chicago says, “A request disguised as a question does not require a question mark.”

A typical example: “Would you kindly respond by March 1.”

So much for indirect questions. But as conscientious language mavens, we should mention one other point about your sentence, “I wonder who they’ll move into Mr. Anderson’s cubicle.”

A purist would remind you that technically, the grammatical construction calls for “whom” instead of “who.” But we believe that “who” can be defended here.

As we’ve written before on our blog, in speech or in casual writing it can seem stuffy and unnatural to begin a sentence or clause with “whom.” So in what appears to be an informal office conversation, you can certainly justify your use of “who” instead.

By the way, the verb “wonder” is very old, dating back to
Anglo-Saxon days. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from King Alfred’s translation of Boethius into Old English, circa 888, when “to wonder” meant to be struck with surprise or astonishment.

The noun “wonder” is even older, according to OED citations, first appearing in “Caedmon’s Hymn,” an Old English poem from around 700, when it referred to something that causes astonishment.

The noun (wunder in Old English) is similar to words in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and other Germanic languages.

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Why does “fridge” have a “d”?

Q: Who put the “d” in “fridge”? If it’s short for “refrigerator,” why isn’t it “frig”?

A: Although most dictionaries list “fridge” as the only spelling for this abbreviated version of “refrigerator,” a few do indeed include the “d”-less version “frig” as a variant spelling.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, has only the “fridge” spelling, while Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) includes “frig” as a variant.

Some American dictionaries describe the “frig” spelling as British, but all the British dictionaries we’ve checked (Macmillan, Collins, Longman, etc.) list only “fridge” for the short form of “refrigerator.”

Interestingly, the earliest written example for the term in the Oxford English Dictionary uses the “frig” spelling (plus an apostrophe). In fact, five of the eight OED examples spell the term without the “d” (some with and some without the apostrophe).

The first “frig” citation in Oxford is from E. F. Spanner’s 1926 novel Broken Trident: “Best part of our stuff here is chilled, and with no ’frig plant working, the mercury will climb like a rocket.”

However, a reader of the blog has informed us of earlier examples of “frig” and the plural “friges” as shortened forms of “refrigerator.”

S. Wilding Cole uses both terms several times in “The Cleansing of a Brewery,” a paper presented on March 13, 1916, at a meeting in London of the local chapter of the Institute of Brewing.

In a section on the maintenance of refrigerators, for example, Cole says “most brewers know that unless ‘friges’ and mains are kept thoroughly clean, trouble is bound to ensue.”

The earliest “fridge” cite in the OED is from Frame-Up, a 1935 crime novel by Collin Brooks: “Do you mean that you keep a dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?”

The OED has examples of “frig” from as recently as 1960. Here’s one from The Quiet American, the 1955 novel by Graham Greene: “We haven’t a frig—we send out for ice.”

Although “fridge” is either the only spelling or the preferred one in the eight US or UK dictionaries we checked, a bit of googling finds that “frig” is not exactly cooling its heels today. Here are just a few of the many examples posted over the last year:

“Frig not cooling, freezer is fine” … “Looking for built-in frig with crushed ice / water dispenser” … “Frig not cold anymore. What can i do?” … “Freezer works but frig not cold” … “Freezer Semi Cold, Frig Warm.”

A similarly spelled verb, “frig,” which most dictionaries describe as vulgar slang, has more to do with heating than cooling. It means to have sexual intercourse or masturbate. (The present participle, “frigging,” is often used as an intensifier.)

How are all these frigging words pronounced? Well, the verb “frig” rhymes with “prig,” but the nouns spelled “frig” and “fridge” both rhyme with “bridge.” And “frigging” rhymes with “digging,” though it’s often spelled and pronounced friggin’.

The OED describes “fridge” as a colloquial abbreviation for “refrigerator,” a much older term that showed up in the early 1600s. It suggests that the ‘frig’ spelling may have been influenced by the brand name “Frigidaire” (a play on “frigid air”).

“Oxford, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, also notes that an 1886 edition of John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms includes the short form “frigerator.”

We’d add that the company now known as Frigidaire was called the Guardian Frigerator Company when it was founded in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1916.

The company adopted the name “Frigidaire” in 1919, three years after “frig” and “friges” were used in the brewery paper cited above. So the brand name “Frigidaire” may have influenced the usage, but it couldn’t have been the source.

We can’t tell from the published examples in the OED (or some earlier ones in Google Books) who originated the “frig” and “fridge” spellings. But we can speculate about why “fridge” has become the dominant spelling.

First of all, the natural pronunciation of “fridge” matches the way the second syllable sounds in “refrigerator.”

Although “frig” is pronounced the same way as “fridge” when it means a refrigerator, the natural pronunciation of “frig” would be like that of the naughty verb we mentioned above.

Our guess is that English speakers generally prefer the “fridge” spelling because they instinctively pronounce it the way the letters f-r-i-g sound in “refrigerator.”

We’ll end with a few lines from Ray Charles’s recording of Louis Jordan’s blues hit “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town”:

“Let me tell you, honey
We gonna move away from here
I don’t need no iceman
I’m gonna get you a Frigidaire.”

[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 3, 2019.]

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We’re not stymied

Q: I heard a word the other day that I hadn’t heard in years—“stymie.” I also seem to remember that Stymie was a Kentucky Derby winner. Is the horse the source of the word?

A: No, the word “stymie” doesn’t come from the name of the chestnut that won quite a few races in the 1940s (though not the Derby). However, “stymie” does have a sporting pedigree.

In golf, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), a “stymie” refers to a situation “in which an opponent’s ball obstructs the line of play of one’s own ball on the putting green.”

When the word entered English in the early 1800s, it referred to a now-defunct rule in golf. This is how the original “stymie” is described in the Oxford English Dictionary:

“An opponent’s ball which lies on the putting green in a line between the ball of the player and the hole he is playing for, if the distance between the balls is not less than six inches.”

In singles match play, according to the old rule, a golfer had to putt around (or perhaps over) a stymie. The old rule was abandoned in 1952, allowing a golfer to pick up the obstructing ball regardless of distance.

The OED’s earliest citation for the noun is from the 1834 rules of the Musselburgh Golf Club in Scotland: “With regard to Stimies the ball nearest the hole if within six inches shall be lifted.”

The verb, which showed up two decades later, originally meant to “put (one’s opponent or oneself) into the position of having to negotiate a stymie.”

Oxford’s first citation for the verb is from an 1857 monograph about golf: “The ball stimying may be lifted if within six inches of that of the player, until the stroke is done.”

By the early 1900s, the OED says, the verb was being used figuratively in the sense of to “impede, obstruct, frustrate, thwart (a person, an activity, or a project).”

The first citation for “stymie” used this way is from The Girl Proposition, a Bunch of He and She Fables (1902), by George Ade: “In about 8 minutes he had the Regular Fellow stymied and Hazel was leaning against him.”

Where does “stymie” come from? The OED suggests that it’s derived from the Scottish term stymie, meaning “One who does not see well.”

American Heritage adds that it might ultimately come from another Scottish term, styme, as in the phrase “to se nocht ane styme, not to see a glimmer (of something).”

We’ll end with an example from Mulliner Nights, a 1933 collection of short stories by one of our favorite writers, P. G. Wodehouse: “There came the shrill cry of a Hunting Bishop stymied by a hat-stand.”

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Equatorial currents

Q: When did “Ecuadoran” become “Ecuadorian”? Why do we need “Ecuadorian”? It sounds illiterate, Bushlike.

A: We’re sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but we checked half a dozen dictionaries and none of them consider “Ecuadoran” the preferred  English adjective or noun for Ecuador and its citizens.

Most of the dictionaries list “Ecuadorian” as the standard noun and adjective. The most common alternative given is the spelling variant “Ecuadorean.”

The two standard dictionaries we consult the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—don’t include “Ecuadoran” as a variant. Neither does the Oxford English Dictionary.  

We could find only two standard dictionaries that consider “Ecuadoran” a variant spelling: the Collins English Dictionary and Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.).

In the OED’s entry for “Ecuadorian,” the earliest example of the adjective (defined as “of, belonging to, or characteristic of Ecuador”) is from an 1860 issue of The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London.

The earliest example of the noun (“a native or inhabitant of Ecuador”) is from an 1861 issue of the same journal.

Though the spellings do vary a bit in the OED’s earliest examples (“Equatorian,” “Ecuatoreans,” etc.), the number of syllables is consistent, and all entries end in either “-ian” or
“-ean.”

As the OED explains, the suffixes “-ian” and “-an” are used to form adjectives and nouns that convey the meaning “of or belonging to.” Some words have the extra letter (“Parisian,” “Bostonian,” “Italian”) and some use the shorter “-an” suffix (“American,” “Ohioan,” “Roman”).

Not surprisingly, the word ecuador is Spanish for “equator,” the imaginary circle that divides the earth into northern and southern hemispheres. And Ecuador is one of 14 countries through which the equator passes.

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Why is a turkey leg a drumstick?

Q: I have a Thanksgiving question: Why is a turkey leg called a “drumstick”? Why not a “club” or a “bat” or a “bowling pin”?

A: You’re right. The leg of a turkey isn’t as long and skinny as a real drumstick. Even the bone alone isn’t quite like a drumstick—it has big knobs at each end instead of a single knob or padded head.

So calling this part of the bird a  “drumstick” seems to be stretching a metaphor. But why use a metaphor at all?

Etymologists think that people started calling this part of a fowl the  “drumstick” because the word “leg” wasn’t polite table talk in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Neither were the words “thigh” and “breast,” so discreet (OK, prudish) diners referred to them as “dark meat” and “white meat.”

Sometimes the breast of the turkey was referred to as—ahem—the “bosom.” And occasionally the term “upper joint” was used instead of “thigh,” and “lower joint” or “limb” instead of “leg.”

Yes, really. There actually was a time when “leg,” “breast,” and “thigh” were considered too coarse for the ears of ladies and unfit for mixed company.

The word “drumstick,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was first used in the mid-18th century  to mean “the lower joint of the leg of a dressed fowl.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from Samuel Foote’s play The Mayor of Garret (1764): “She always helps me herself to the tough drumsticks of turkies.”

Our fellow word maven Hugh Rawson recently discussed
dinner-table euphemisms like these on the Cambridge Dictionaries Online blog.

As he writes, “By the end of the eighteenth century, drumstick was being used by the authors of cookbooks, and it eventually was lumped in with other dinner-table euphemisms.”

Rawson cites a lecture, “The Laws of Disorder,” by the Unitarian minister and speaker Thomas Starr King, who died in 1864: “There are so many that love white meat, so many that can eat nothing but dark meat, two that prefer a wing, two that lie in wait for drumsticks.”

Such terms, particularly in America, made table talk easier for everyone, Rawson explains: “Polite guests at American tables knew that asking a poultry-serving hostess for white meat instead of ‘breast meat,’ dark meat instead of a ‘thigh’ and a drumstick in place of a ‘leg’ saved embarrassment all around.”

The 19th-century British novelist and naval captain Frederick Marryat pokes fun at this kind of squeamishness in Peter Simple (1834). In one episode, Rawson points out, the novel’s hero describes a dinner party on the island of Barbados.

“It was my fate to sit opposite a fine turkey, and I asked my partner if I should have the pleasure of helping her to a piece of breast. She looked at me very indignantly, and said ‘Curse your impudence, sar, I wonder where you larn your manners. Sar, I take a lily turkey bosom, if you please. Talk of breast to a lady, sar! – really quite horrid.’ ”

The OED cites another example from Marryat’s works as an example of “limb” as a euphemism for “leg,” a usage it describes as “now only (esp. U.S.) in mock-modest or prudish use.”

In his book A Diary in America: With Remarks on Its Institutions (1839), Marryat says a young American woman told him that “leg” was not used before ladies; the polite term was “limb.” She added: “I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte.”

That example, like several others from the OED, seems to have been used with humorous intent.

For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his novel Elsie Venner (1861), has this bit of dinner-table conversation: “A bit of the wing, Roxy, or the—under limb?”

And John S. Farmer, in his Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present (1885), uses this illustration: “Between you’n me, red stockings ain’t becomin’ to all—ahem—limbs.”

Euphemistic language has proven itself useful, not just at the dinner table. It comes in handy for swearing, too.

We’ve written before on our blog about euphemistic oaths like “doggone it,” and “gosh a’mighty,” milder substitutes for “God damn it” and “God almighty.”

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Putting an adverb in its place

Q: An über-editor at the New York Times recently criticized the placement of “also” in this sentence from the paper: “Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware.” He wrote on a Times blog that “it’s smoother to place the adverb between parts of the verb: ‘which have also redesigned.’ ” Always? Your thoughts?

A: Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, made his comment on the paper’s After Deadline blog, which is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique he oversees.

What do we think of the advice he offers in his Oct. 2, 2012, posting?

Well, it’s true that “also” often sounds better between the parts of a verb phrase (“have also redesigned”). But there’s no rule that says “also” can’t come first (“also have redesigned”).

In fact, many writers deliberately put “also” and other adverbs before both the auxiliary and main verb in a misguided effort to avoid splitting a verb phrase.

As we say on our Language Myths page, the belief that it’s wrong to split the parts of a verb phrase is a byproduct of the infamous myth against splitting an infinitive.

However, the question of where to place “also” in a sentence like the one cited on the Times blog can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”

In an informal survey of Google Books, scholarly journals, and general writing on the Web, we found no single pattern for the placement of “also” in relation to verb phrases.

Educated writers use “also” before verb phrases, in the middle of them, and even at the beginning of sentences.

In our opinion, the best place to put “also” is where it seems most natural and makes the most sense.

The linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum say that “only rather broad and approximate flexible generalisations” can be made about the placement and order of adverbs.

“There is a great deal of variation in use,” Huddleston and Pullum write in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, “and features of context, style, prosody, and euphony play a role in some decisions.”

They say that adverbs like “always,” “usually,” “often,” “sometimes,” “never,” “possibly,” “probably,” and “certainly” tend to precede a single verb (as in “they probably go”) and to follow an auxiliary (“they have probably gone”).

But they note that these adverbs can sometimes precede the auxiliary in verb phrases (as in, “they probably have gone”).

The position of the adverb here affects its “emphatic polarity”—that is, the part of the sentence that the adverb influences.

As for “also,” Huddleston and Pullum describe it as a “focusing modifier” because it can focus on different parts of the sentence.

Sometimes, however, it’s not clear which part “also” is focusing on. The Cambridge Grammar illustrates this ambiguity with the example “Jill had also attended the history seminar.”

As the authors point out, that sentence can be interpreted in different ways. Does it mean Jill, as well as other people, attended? Or that she attended other seminars too? Or perhaps that she did other things besides attending a seminar?

In that example, “also” is unavoidably ambiguous. It wouldn’t have helped much to move it around. But sometimes the placement of “also” makes a difference.

Take, for instance, the phrases “also have worked” and “have also worked.” We can imagine sentences in which one might be preferred over the other:

(1) “I have traveled in Italy, and I also have worked there.” (Here, “also” focuses on the entire verb phrase “have worked” rather than on the main verb, “worked.” As a result, the two verb phrases, “have traveled” and “have worked” are parallel.)

 (2) “I have worked in Greece, and I have also worked in Italy.” (Here, “also” focuses on the main verb “worked,” emphasizing that the writer has worked in two different countries. So the two phrase “worked in Greece” and “worked in Italy” are parallel.)

We’re talking about subtle differences. And other writers might prefer “also” in different places in those sentences. The point is that moving “also” can change its focus, its orientation to one part of a sentence or another.

As we noted above, the use of “also” with a verb phrase is often ambiguous. And it’s ambiguous in that sentence from the Times: “Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware.”

Have companies OTHER than Facebook and Google redesigned their hardware? Or have Facebook and Google redesigned things OTHER than their hardware?

Here’s the entire paragraph, from a Sept. 22, 2012, article about how Internet data centers pollute the environment:

“A few companies say they are using extensively re-engineered software and cooling systems to decrease wasted power. Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware. Still, according to recent disclosures, Google’s data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and Facebook’s about 60 million watts.”

Sometimes context can help clear up an ambiguity. But in this case, the context doesn’t help. We still can’t tell where the emphasis of “also” belongs.

If the reporter means that Facebook and Google, like some other companies, have revamped their software and cooling systems, that sentence could simply read “Among them are Facebook and Google.” Period.

But you know what? At some point, questions like this make us cross-eyed. And that point has been reached!

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Did Winston want discipline?

Q: I was listening to a Churchill biography in which someone older says Winston wants discipline. In fact, that’s the last thing he wanted. But the context suggests that “wants” here means both “lacks” and “needs.” Is this a British usage?

A: We think so, and so do two of the UK dictionaries we checked (Collins and Macmillan), which describe it as “mainly British.”

Collins, for example, gives this example of the British usage: “your shoes want cleaning.”

However, all the US dictionaries we consulted include, without qualification, “need” and “lack” among the definitions of the verb “want”—that is, they consider those meanings standard American English.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives this example: “the motor wants a tune-up.”

And The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) gives this one: “ ‘Your hair wants cutting,’ said the Hatter” (Lewis Carroll).

Of course that American Heritage example is from a British writer. And we see the “need” and “lack” senses of “want” a lot more in British writing than in American.

In fact, all but one of the 14 citations in the Oxford English Dictionary for the “lack” sense are from British writers. And all of the OED’s 21 citations for the “need” sense are British.

“Etymologically,” John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “to want something is to ‘lack’ it (a sense still intact in the noun want).”

As Ayto explains, the common contemporary sense of the verb (to desire to have or do something) “is a secondary extension” of the earlier “lack” usage.

He says English adopted “want” from vanta, an Old Norse verb meaning to lack, which in turn came from a prehistoric Germanic word reconstructed as wanaton (lacking).

The ultimate source of “want,” according to Ayto, is the prehistoric Indo-European root wan, which has also given English the verb “wane.”

The OED says the verb “want” entered English around 1200 with the “lack” sense, which the dictionary defines this way: “Not to have; to be without, to lack; to have too little of; to be destitute of, or deficient in; to fail to have, or get.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from the Ormulum, a collection of Middle English homilies explaining biblical texts: “All thatt wannteth cristess hald / All sinnketh inn till helle.” (We’ve changed the runic letter thorn to “th.”)

The OED defines the “need” sense, which appeared in the late 1400s, this way: “To suffer the want of; to have occasion for, need, require; to stand in need of (something salutary, but often not desired).”

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3 (circa 1591): “Oh welcome Oxford, for we want thy helpe.”

Although Americans sometimes say things like “The house wants cleaning,” they usually say “The house needs cleaning” or “The house needs to be cleaned.”

We wrote a post on the blog some time ago about a related regional usage in the US: “The house needs cleaned.”

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Not for the squeamish?

Q: A colleague and I are debating whether “of” is a proper preposition to follow “squeamish.” I believe a subject can be “squeamish of” an object. He thinks it should be “squeamish about” it. Thoughts?

A: You’re both right. The Oxford English Dictionary says “squeamish” is normally used with “about,” “as to,” “at,” “of,” “to,” or “toward.”

The adjective began life in the early 1300s as “squeamous,” adopted from the Anglo-Norman escoymous, which the OED describes as “of obscure origin.”

The word with the “-ish” suffix first showed up in the 1400s.

Although both the “-ous” and “-ish” suffixes coexisted for several centuries in various spellings of the word, the versions with “-ous” are now considered obsolete or dialectal.

The adjective meant disdainful or fastidious when it entered English, but it took on the additional sense of easily shocked or prudish in the 1500s.

Here’s the earliest OED example for “squeamish” used with each of its prepositions:

1608: “If we would … not be so squeamish as to refuse those wholesome medicines which are easie to be had.” (From Edward Topsell’s Historie of Serpents; Or, the Second Booke of Living Creatures.)

Before 1625: “If you please sir; I am not squeamish of my visitation.” (From The Womans Prize, a comedy by John Fletcher.)

1654: “Squemish towards the present, and longing for Innovation.” (From Zootomia, a treatise by Richard Whitlock.)

1676: “When they are nice, curious, and squeamish about undetermined circumstances in forms of administration.” (From a speech about religious nonconformists, by William Allen.)

1784: “We found that he was too squeamish to drink turtle’s blood.” (From A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, by James Cook and James King.)

1843: “But now the uneasy stomach of the time / Turns squeamish at them both.” (From “A Glance Behind the Curtain,” a poem by James Russell Lowell.)

We get many questions, both from native speakers of English and from newcomers to the language, about the sometimes perplexing use of prepositions.

The book Words Into Type (3rd ed.), familiar to journalists, has a handy section called “The Right Preposition,” consisting of a long list of words together with the prepositions they usually take. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include “squeamish.”

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Did you early vote?

Q: President Obama “early voted,” or that’s how he put it, rather than “voted early.” And he’s not the only one. A distinction without a difference? Or do we have a new, and rather awkward, phrasal verb crafted out of the noun phrase “early voting”?

A: As you’ve noticed, President Obama isn’t the only person to say he “early voted” after casting a ballot well ahead of the big day. The verb phrase to “early vote” (past tense “early voted”) was all over the airwaves this fall.

As a contributor to the American Dialect Society’s mailing list recently noted, the MSNBC commentator “Rachel Maddow used the verb ‘to early-vote’ and the past participle ‘early-voted’ many times in the week leading up to the election.”

But this wasn’t the first election cycle for the verb “early vote.” The subject came up in the fall of 2008 as well.

Back then the linguist Arnold Zwicky, writing on both the Language Log and the ADS list, commented on usages like “We early voted Friday” and “Thousands line up to early vote.”

Zwicky also noted a few instances of “to absentee vote” (as in “You can also absentee vote this week”) as well as some for “to advance vote.”

What goes on here?

“These formations look to me not like an unusual placement of the modifiers ‘early’ and ‘absentee,’ ” Zwicky wrote in 2008, “but rather like back-formations” from noun phrases like “early voting,” “early voter,” “absentee voting,” and “absentee voter.”

(A back-formation is a new term formed by dropping part of an old one.)

Zwicky explains why he thinks the verb “early vote” makes sense: “There’s a clear advantage to having such a unit, since ‘vote early’ could refer to voting early on election day, while ‘early vote’ refers specifically to institutionalized procedures for voting before election day.”

We agree with Zwicky about the origin of to “early vote”— that it’s a back-formation from the nouns “early voting” and “early voter.”

Since writing about “early vote,” Zwicky has written about similar formations, which he calls “two-part back-formed verbs.”

In a 2009 post on his own blog, he gave dozens of examples, some familiar and some more recent, including “to gay marry” (from “gay marriage”); “to spellbind” (from “spellbinding”); “to bartend” (from “bartender”); “to fence-sit” (from “fence-sitting”); “to air-condition” (from “air-conditioner”); “to offshore drill” (from “offshore drilling”); “to substitute teach” (from “substitute teacher”), and others.

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Vet noire

Q: When did “vetrin” replace “veteran” and “vetrinarian” replace “veterinarian”? This drives me crazy. I hear it on NPR as well as TV news programs. I hope misusage hasn’t corrupted two perfectly good words.

A: Sorry! The title of this post doesn’t make much sense, but we couldn’t resist the pun.

As for your question, those pronunciations may drive you crazy, but they’re not incorrect. Both “veteran” and “veterinarian” have clipped alternate pronunciations that are standard English.

In each case, the word has a longer and a shorter pronunciation, and the shorter loses the second syllable.

So “veteran” can properly be pronounced as three syllables or as two. “Veterinarian” can properly be pronounced as six syllables or as five.

These pronunciations are given as standard in both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

By the way, “veteran” and “veterinarian” sound as if they have something in common, and it turns out that they may be distantly related.

The word for an old or experienced soldier came into English in the early 16th century via the Latin adjective veteranus (old), a derivative of vetus (old).

The word for an animal doctor dates back to the mid-17th century and comes from the Latin adjective veterinarius (pertaining to cattle or beasts of burden), which in turn comes from veterinum, the noun for such an animal.

What’s the connection?

Veterinum, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, is “perhaps derived from vetus” (old). Connecting the two notions, Chambers says veterinum probably referred to “a beast one year old; possibly also, experienced, or used to work as a draft animal in plowing or pulling.”

Another source, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, speculates that “perhaps” the connection with vetus was “as if the orig. ref. was to animals past work.”

If all this is true, it may be that the original veterinarians got the name because they treated veteran—that is, old or experienced—animals.

One final aside. In case you’re interested, we wrote a post six years ago about the use of “vet” to mean examine or check out. Yes, there’s a connection.

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At the end of the day

Q: The expression “at the end of the day” grates on my ears. I hear it constantly, even from my own lips. At the end of the day, it is what it is: too damn useful to ignore. Perhaps you could say a word about where it comes from and why it’s so prevalent.

A: As a matter of fact, we’ve mentioned “at the end of the day” on the blog a couple of times in discussions about expressions used to death in the media.

As we said in a posting in 2008, a survey in Britain found that “at the end of the day” was the most annoying cliché in the opinion of those polled.

It seems to have aced out its chief competitors in the
summing-up category, “in the final analysis” and “when all is said and done.”

However, we’ve never looked into the origins of this prepositional phrase, which is close to 200 years old, so here goes.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “at the end of the day” as a “hackneyed” expression meaning “eventually” or “when all’s said and done.”

The OED has several citations for the published use of the phrase, all dating from the 1970s and ’80s.

The earliest is from Henry McKeating’s book God and the Future (1974): “Eschatological language is useful because it is a convenient way of indicating … what at the end of the day we set most store by.” (The italics are McKeating’s.)

Oxford’s citations also include this one, from Bill Beaumont’s Thanks to Rugby (1982): “But, at the end of the day, it is an amateur sport and everyone is free to put as much or as little into the game as he chooses.”

However, we’ve found several earlier citations, many from the 20th century but a few extending back into the 19th.

This passage comes from an autobiographical sketch written in 1889 by the scientist Thomas H. Huxley:

“The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say at the end of the day whether I think I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are.”

We wouldn’t describe this example of the usage as hackneyed. Huxley, who died in 1895, seems to be using the expression to sum up his life’s work.   

We also found a couple of examples from religious writings published earlier in the 19th century. In both of them, “at the end of the day” seems to be used figuratively in the sense of “when all is said and done,” though it’s possible that the authors may have been using it in a more literal way.

An essay entitled “An Interpretation of the Fourteenth Chapter of the Apocalypse,” published in an 1832 issue of The Morning Watch, a theological quarterly, includes this passage:

“And thus it is that Christ at the end of the day will have his own will in the church … and all the carnality and bondage which hath been in the church shall be proved to be not of him, but of Antichrist. … Ah me! how I long to see it.”

And this one comes from a sermon by the Rev. Ebenezer Erskine, published in 1826:

“Christ’s flock is but a little flock, comparatively considered. … They are but little in respect of their numbers. Indeed abstractly considered, at the end of the day, they will make an ‘innumerable company, which no man can number’; but, viewed in comparison of the wicked, they are but few.”

We’re sure that even earlier examples will come to light as old books and other documents are digitized.

Why is this expression so common today? We can’t say. But generally as phrases are used to death, they lose their novelty and new ones spring up to take their places. Perhaps “at the end of the day” will find that its days are numbered. 

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Must a love affair include sex?

Q: I wrote to the New York Times the other day concerning the Sept. 16 obituary of the actor-playwright Jerome Kilty, who wrote a play based on the correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. I pointed out that the obit spuriously described their platonic relationship as an affair. A Times editor responded that an affair does not necessarily have to involve sex. Your thoughts, please?

A: The short answer is that you’re both right. There are good arguments to be made on both sides of this dispute, which we can’t settle one way or the other because dictionary definitions of “affair” disagree on whether sex is involved.

Technically the Times editors are correct, if having the Oxford English Dictionary on your side makes you right.

The OED defines an “affair” in this sense as “a romantic or sexual relationship, often of short duration, between two people who are not married to each other.”

So the OED would agree with the Times that Shaw’s passionate yet nonsexual liaison with Mrs. Campbell, described in Kilty’s play Dear Liar, was an “affair.”

In its definition of the word, the OED adds that specifically the relationship is “(a) one that is carried on illicitly, one or both partners being involved in a relationship with another person; (b) an intense sexual relationship.”

The dictionary adds that the word can mean “a sexual encounter of any of these types.”

However, we must say that most if not all of the OED’s citations for the published use of the word sound as if something is going on between the sheets. You can judge them for yourself.

Oxford’s earliest example is from William Congreve’s play The Way of the World (1700): “I got a Friend to … complement her with the Imputation of an Affair with a young Fellow, which I carry’d so far, that I told her the malicious Town took notice that she was grown fat of a suddain.”

When a woman’s “affair” results in sudden weight gain, one suspects sex was involved.

Here are the OED’s other citations:

1732: “In our Dialect a vicious Man is a Man of pleasure … a Lady is said to have an affair, a Gentleman to be gallant, a Rogue in business to be one that knows the World.” (From George Berkeley’s philosophical dialogue Alciphron.)

1762: “Why, then, do you pursue your affair with Araminta; and not find some honourable means of breaking off with her?” (From William Whitehead’s play The School for Lovers.)

1825: “Ovid … discovered some incestuous affair in the imperial family, and was banished from Rome for life.” (From the Encyclopedia Londinensis.)

1888: “I shall let the liaison run its course—it will be very amusing & not as costly as an affair with a regular horizontale.” (From a letter by the English poet and novelist Ernest Dowson, describing a singer he had picked up in a music hall.)

1933: “We could carry on a backstairs affair for weeks without saying a word about it.” (From Noel Coward’s play Design for Living.)

1965: “The story of his affair with Mother. … It’s hot stuff, as we used to say at school.” (From David Lodge’s novel The British Museum Is Falling Down.)

2005: “What kind of a sophisticated guy in his fifties doesn’t have an affair? It’s basically mandatory.” (From Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty.)

You see what we mean. The bulk of those references appear to be sexual rather than romantic.

The use of “affair” to mean a romantic or sexual relationship was preceded by the longer phrase “affair of love,” described by the OED as now somewhat archaic.

“Affair of love,” first recorded in 1574, is defined as “(a) a matter or experience connected with love,” usually used in the plural, or “(b) a romantic or sexual relationship between two people in love.” It can also mean “a sexual encounter.”

A term first recorded in 1710, “affair of the heart,” is defined in the OED as “a matter concerning romantic love; a love affair.”

And “love affair,” dating from 1767, is defined as “a romantic or sexual relationship between two people in love.”

By the way, the faux-French phrase “affaire d’amour” would be meaningless in France, where an affaire is a business deal, not a romance.

As we write in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths and misconceptions, “affaire d’amour” is simply a froufrou version of “love affair.”

Getting back to your question, an “affair of the heart” does sound as if it could be an innocent romance, conducted fully clothed. But we think most people would assume an “affair” or a “love affair” has a sexual component.

However, we can’t support this with solid evidence; it’s mere intuition, which doesn’t count for much.

Standard dictionaries are split on the issue of whether the principals in an “affair” are actually having sex.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “affair” in its romantic sense this way: “A sexual relationship between two people, especially when at least one of them is married or in another committed romantic relationship.”

The Macmillan Dictionary, in both its American and British editions, agrees: “A sexual relationship between two people, especially when one of them is married to someone else.”

But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has this broader definition: “A romantic or passionate attachment typically of limited duration.”

And Webster’s New World College Dictionary (the Times’s house dictionary) also takes a broader view: “An amorous relationship between two people not married to each other; an amour.”

So the word “affair” will have to be allowed to retain some of its mystery.

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A recipe for success

Q: I recently became hooked on Downton Abbey, where I heard the word “receipt” used for a cooking “recipe.” I looked the words up online and learned that a “receipt” was once a “recipe.” When and how did “receipt” become “recipe”?

A: You’re right that a “receipt” was once a “recipe,” but the relationship between these two words isn’t as simple as that.

When the word “receipt” entered English sometime before 1349, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, it simply meant the act of receiving something.

Although English adapted the word from Anglo-Norman and Old French, it’s ultimately derived from the Latin recipere (to receive).

By the 1390s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “receipt” referred to “the amount, sum, or quantity of something received.” That “something” could be money, food, or medicine.

Before the end of the 1390s, the word “receipt” (spelled “resceyte”) was being used in the sense of a medical prescription.

The OED’s earliest citation for this usage is from John Trevisa’s 1397 translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopedia written in Latin by Bartholomeus Anglicus:

“In alle goode resceytes and medicyns amomum is ofte y-do.” (“In all good receipts and medicines amomum [an aromatic plant] is often put.”)

It wasn’t until 1585, according to OED citations, that “receipt” was recorded in a new sense—a “written or printed acknowledgement of receiving something, esp. of the payment of money.”

Ten years later, Oxford says, “receipt” took on the meaning you ask about: “A statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish or an item of food or drink.”

The dictionary has written examples of the word used in this sense from 1595 to 1993, but the last few citations seem to be referring to a usage from the past, and the OED says this meaning is now considered historical.

The two most recent published references that clearly use “receipt” to mean a contemporary recipe are from the early 20th century.

Henry James, in his 1903 novel The Ambassadors, writes: “It’s such an order, really, that before we cook you the dish we must at least have your receipt.”

And an article in the Feb. 14, 1903, issue of the Lancet refers to “a new receipt for a ‘special beef-tea,’ in which the nutritious elements are preserved, and reinforced as far as possible.”

As for the word “recipe,” which comes from the same Latin root as “receipt,” it referred to a medical prescription when it entered English in the early 1500s.

The OED’s first citation for “recipe” is from Thomas Paynell’s 1533 translation of De Morbo Gallico: A Treatise of the French Disease,  a book by Ulrich von Hutten about his struggle against syphilis:

“This phisition whan I was wrytinge these thynges, and takyng my iourney from Frankeford, wher he was wrytynge his recipe, was asked … what he thought of Guaiacum.” (Guaiacum is a plant that has been used to treat syphilis and other diseases.)

So in the 1500s, the words “recipe” and “receipt” could mean a medical prescription. Although “recipe” is sometimes still used that way, that sense of “receipt” is now considered archaic.

By the 1600s, according to OED citations, “recipe” was being used more broadly to mean a “statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making something.”

But it wasn’t until the mid-1700s that the word came to mean the instructions for preparing food. The OED’s first citation for this sense comes from a 1743 letter by Horace Walpole: “You’ll find as soon … recipes for pastry-ware.”

So when, you ask, did “recipe” replace “receipt” in the kitchen?

Well, the two words coexisted in this sense for more than a century and a half, but “recipe” became the dominant term in the early 20th century.

How, you ask, did this happen? Simply put, more people preferred “recipe” to “receipt” in the food sense. And in language, the majority rules. Whether language mavens like it or not, that’s the etymological recipe for success.

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Side effects

Q: I was reading a description of Lord Bingham, a British judge who died two years ago, and came across this sentence: “He had no side to him at all, and he would be surprised to hear me saying these things about him.” I’m thinking this means he was not haughty or pompous, but I’d like to hear it from you!

A: In British usage, “to put on side” is to give oneself airs, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And someone who has “no side” is modest and unpretentious.

Here, the OED adds, “side” is a slang term meaning “pretentiousness, swagger, conceit.”

Oxford’s earliest citation for this sense of the word is from the Nov. 26, 1870, issue of Punch: “Swagger a bit, and put on ‘side’ in the streets of the gay Versailles.”

Another citation, from Joseph Hatton’s novel Cruel London (1878), uses “side” the same way: “Cool, downy cove, who puts side on.” (In British slang, a “downy cove” is a knowing fellow.)

We’ve found this sense of “side” in only one American dictionary, the unabridged Webster’s Third New International, which defines it as “swaggering manner” or “arrogant behavior.”

But British dictionaries know the usage well. They define it as meaning insolence, arrogance, a proud attitude, pretentiousness, and so on.

Where does it come from? “Origin unceetain,”  the OED says. But it does mention a possible connection with the game of billiards, in which “side” means the spin or “direction given to a ball by striking it at a point not directly in the middle.” (An American would say such a stroke puts “English” on the ball.)

The OED’s earliest example of this sense comes from Billiards (1858), a book written by Walter White: “I do not feel satisfied of any writer being able to convey in diagrams the amount of side to put on a ball for canons when the side stroke is required” 

On the other hand, the OED invites readers to look at another use of “side”—an old adjective meaning haughty or proud. This usage dates to the 1600s and perhaps to the early 1500s.

Among the OED’s citations is this one from Sidney Oldall Addy’s A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (1888): “I met Mrs. —— in the town, and she was very side.”

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Robot talk

Q: I was watching a video in which Isaac Asimov pronounces “robot” as ROH-but instead of the way it’s pronounced today: ROH-bot. When did his pronunciation arise and why did it vanish?

A: Asimov’s pronunciation didn’t vanish.

We checked four American dictionaries and three of them list both ROH-bot and ROH-but as standard pronunciations of “robot.” Most British dictionaries, though, list only one pronunciation: ROH-bot.

We can’t tell you exactly when Asimov’s pronunciation of “robot” arose, but it’s not in our 1956 edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition).

Webster’s Second lists two pronunciations: ROH-bot and ROB-ott. However, we haven’t seen ROB-ott in any other dictionary, including Webster’s Third.

In that YouTube video you mention, the science fiction writer discusses the Three Laws of Robotics, which were introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround”:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

However, the noun “robot” originally had nothing to do with science fiction.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it first showed up in English in the early 19th century in reference to  a “central European system of serfdom, by which a tenant’s rent was paid in forced labour or service.”

The OED’s earliest written example is from an 1839 book by John Paget about Hungary and Transylvania: “The system of rent by robot or forced labour … is a direct premium on idleness.”

However, Oxford says this sense of the word is now historical—that is, used to refer to events in the past.

The dictionary says the term was resurrected in the early 20th century in its science fiction sense: “An intelligent artificial being typically made of metal and resembling in some way a human or other animal.”

Oxford’s earliest example of the new usage is from the Oct. 10, 1922, issue of the New York Times: “A Robot that fails to raise goose flesh does dire sabotage against its dramatic inventor.”

The OED says this usage originated in the Czech writer Karel Capek’s 1921 science fiction play RUR (the title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots). In fact, the Times citation is from a review of the English translation of the play.

Capek, at the suggestion of his brother Joseph, extracted the Czech word robot from robota (Czech for forced labor or drudgery), according to the OED.

The dictionary says the English word was soon being used figuratively to refer to a “person who acts mechanically or without emotion.”

The first OED citation for this usage is from the June 22, 1923, issue of the Westminster Gazette: “Mr. G. Bernard Shaw defined Robots as persons all of whose activities were imposed on them.”

In a few years, the word was being used to refer to a “machine capable of automatically carrying out a complex series of movements.”

The first OED example is from the Oct. 17, 1927, issue of the Syracuse (NY) Herald: “A ‘televocal’ electrical robot, which … can answer the telephone, tell the height of water in a reservoir, open doors, switch on lights and perform other mechanical services.”

Now, that’s a jack of all trades!

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When Ireland was Scotland

Q: In a recent posting, you cite a study entitled “The Scotch-Irish Element in Appalachian English.” There is no such thing as “Scotch-Irish”! There is Ireland and Scotland. The inhabitants of the former are Irish whilst the inhabitants of the latter are Scots or Scottish, not scotch, a variety of whiskey. I submit these observations for your comment. Full disclosure: I am a Canadian of English birth.

A: No such thing as Scotch-Irish? We beg to differ. The linguist who wrote the study we cited in our post about “everwhat” and “everwhere” was perfectly correct to use the term “Scotch-Irish” in his title.

In fact, we briefly mentioned this term in a blog item we wrote a couple of years ago about the use of the adjectives “Scot,” “Scotch,” and “Scottish.”

In that posting, we noted that “Scotch-Irish” is commonly used on this side of the Atlantic to refer to the descendants of Scots who migrated to Ireland, and later to North America.

These people are also sometimes referred to as “Scots-Irish” or “Ulster Scots.” But in the US and Canada, the preferred term is “Scotch-Irish.”

You needn’t take our word for it. You’ll find “Scotch-Irish” defined similarly in standard dictionaries as well as the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the term “Scotch-Irish,” when used in this sense, is “chiefly” North American. It has citations for the published use of the term from Colonial documents dating back to the late 1600s.

The OED defines “Scotch-Irish,” which is both a noun and an adjective, as “designating Ulster Scots settlers in North America; of, belonging to, or descended from these settlers; (occas.) designating the Ulster Scots themselves. Also: of mixed Scottish and Irish ancestry.”

The term “Scotch-Irish,” the OED adds, is “usually preferred in the United States and Canada over Scots-Irish. Historically, the term was sometimes used more widely in North America to designate any Irish Protestant immigrants, as well as those from southern Scotland and the English-Scottish borderlands.”

The OED has many citations for this sense of the term. We’ll quote one each from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

This example is from a colorful affidavit—”sworn,” you might say, in more senses than one—found in the judicial records of Somerset County, Maryland (1690): “I will give you full satisfaction to your own Content. You Scotch Irish dogg it was you.”

From the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society comes this entry in the journal of Witham Marshe (1744): “The inhabitants [of Lancaster, Pa.] are chiefly High-Dutch, Scotch-Irish, some few English families, and unbelieving Israelites.”

And this example is from George Bancroft’s A History of the United States (1876): “Its convenient proximity to the border counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia had been observed by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and other bold and industrious men.”

Besides those US and Canadian senses of “Scotch-Irish,” the phrase has had several earlier meanings in Celtic history, according to the OED.

For instance, the terms “Scotch-Irish,” “Scots-Irish,” “Scoto-Irish,” and “Irish-Scots” have been used at various periods—though rarely today except in history books—to refer to Irish settlers in what is now western Scotland.

And “Scotch-Irish” has been used to mean the “Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands and Islands considered collectively,” Oxford says.

In fact, in very early Old English the term “Scot” itself, both the noun and the adjective, referred to the Gaelic people of early medieval Ireland. Yes, Ireland!

As the OED explains, this Old English term applied to “a member of the Gaelic people inhabiting early medieval Ireland; spec. a member of the people of Dalriada who began settling in what is now the west of Scotland from about the 5th cent. a.d.”

This modern citation, from William Ferguson’s The Identity of the Scottish Nation (1998), refers to “Scot” in this sense: “Buchanan meant the ancient Scots of Dalriada, who were … the root stock from which the Scottish nation developed.”

(Dalriada was an ancient kingdom “originally located in the far north-east of Ireland,” the OED says. This kingdom “expanded into parts of what is now western Scotland (esp. Argyll) from at least the 5th cent. a.d. During the 9th cent., alliances between Dalriada and the Pictish kingdoms led to the formation of the kingdom of Alba, the forerunner of the medieval kingdom of Scotland.”)

The ultimate origin of the word “Scot” is something of a mystery. It comes from a post-classical Latin word, Scottus, which in the late 4th century denoted the inhabitants of Ireland. The word Scot in Early Irish is probably from the Latin Scottus.

But the origin of the Latin term is described by the OED as uncertain: “There is no evidence that it represents the indigenous name of any Irish-speaking people.” (The classical Latin name for Ireland was Hibernia.)

Both the post-classical Latin word Scotia and the English name “Scotland” were first recorded as ancient names for Ireland.

In those days, and until about the 800s, Ireland “was probably understood to include the areas of Irish settlement in northern Britain,” the dictionary adds. And from about this time, the word “Scot” began to appear in reference to inhabitants of Scotland.

“The emergence of Scotland as the name exclusively denoting a part of northern Britain is probably linked to the consolidation of the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th cent.,” Oxford says.

If the ancient Irish (that is, the first “Scots”) hadn’t moved east, what would Scotland be called today? Perhaps “Pictland,” after the Picts who occupied the lands north of the Firth and Clyde rivers and who eventually merged with the immigrants from Dalriada.

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“In” a paper vs. “on” the Net

Q: Why is something “in” a newspaper but “on” the Internet, or “in” a movie” but “on” television?

A: The prepositions “in” and “on” have had many different meanings since they showed up in Anglo-Saxon times, though they were sometimes used interchangeably in Old English.

In the simplest terms, “in” refers to being within a given space while “on” refers to being on top of it. However, these two words are often used idiomatically—that is, in unusual or distinctive ways.

H.W. Fowler, in The King’s English, says there are so many idiomatic uses of prepositions that it would be impossible for dictionaries, grammar books, or usage guides to cite all of them.

We won’t use Fowler, though, as an excuse to avoid answering your question.

When the preposition “in” entered English sometime before the year 700, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to being within an actual place, such as a house, a forest, a cave, and so on.

By the late 800s, though, people began using “in” more loosely to refer to being within things like a book or the writings of an author. The preposition is being used in this sense when we say something is “in” a movie or an article or a newspaper.

But why, you ask, do we say something is “on” the Internet or “on” television?

In early Old English, according to the OED, the preposition “on” meant to be on the upper surface of a physical thing.

Over the years, though, people began using the preposition figuratively to refer to a judge “on the bench,” a truant “on the carpet,” a job applicant “on tenterhooks,” and so on.

In the late 19th century, English speakers started using “on” to refer to a medium of communications—the telephone at first, then radio, television, and the Internet.

The earliest written example of this usage in the OED is from Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary (1882): “Telephonist, a person versed in telephony, or who operates on the telephone.”

The next OED citation, from a 1929 letter by the English artist Roger Eliot Fry, refers to being on the radio: “I have still two ‘talks’ hanging over me—one at the Athenaeum Club and one on the wireless.”

And here’s a television example, from Up Your Banners, a 1969 novel by Donald E. Westlake: “The beautician hollered from the living room, ‘Leona, come quick! You’re on the TV!’ ”

In case you’d like to read more, we had a post in 2009 about “on” television versus “at” a movie house. And we had an item in 2008 about some of the idiomatic use of prepositions.

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Pat in NY Times on Web. 3 furor

Read Pat’s review in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review on the furor over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. She’s reviewing The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, by David Skinner.

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Something for the weekend?

Q: Before 1945, there was, in effect, no “weekend.” My father worked Saturday and half Sunday up to the late ’40s. Also, my memory is of a hyphenated “week-end.” It must have changed over the late ’50s and early ’60s.

A: The two-day weekend break (three or more days on holidays) may be relatively new, but the word “weekend” isn’t. It dates back to the 17th century.

As for that hyphen, “weekend” evolved like most compound words: they usually begin life as two separate words, are later hyphenated, and finally become one solid word, though this process can be a bit messy.

We checked nine standard dictionaries in the US and the UK, and all of them now list “weekend” without the hyphen.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary still hyphenates the word in its main entry (“week-end”), though the term is hyphen-free in all OED citations from the 1970s onward.

What is a “weekend”? Well, some dictionaries consider it Saturday and Sunday, others include Friday night, and still others describe it as the period between the end of one workweek and the start of another. (A “long weekend” is one extended by adjacent days.)

When the word entered English nearly 400 years ago, it simply meant the end of the week—at least, that’s the apparent sense in the OED’s earliest citation, a 1638 quotation reproduced in the Victoria County History of Yorkshire:

“The greatest weight of the said exaction will fall upon very poor people … who making every week a coarse kersey and being compelled to sell the same at the week end … are nevertheless constrained to yield one half penny apiece.” (Kersey is a heavy wool or wool and cotton fabric.)

In the next OED citation, from The Journal of the Rev. William Bagshaw Stevens (1793), the author seems to be using the word “weekend” in the sense of a period of leisure between two workweeks.

In a journal entry, Stevens, headmaster of the Repton School in Derbyshire, notes his plans to visit a friend, the Rev. John D. Dewe, a master at the Appleby School:

“Wrote to Dewe that I would put on my seven league boots next weekend and stretch my course to Appleby.”

(The excerpt comes from a version of the journal edited by Georgina Galbraith and published in 1965. The editing may account for this early appearance of “weekend” as a solid word.)

The next two OED citations, from the 19th century, are more specific about the meaning of the term.

Here’s an example from the Food Journal (1870): “ ‘Week-end,’ that is from Saturday until Monday,—it may be a later day in the week if the money and credit hold out,—is the season of dissipation.”

The journal Notes and Queries printed this passage in 1879: “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so.”

But the fun begins on Friday in this example from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel The Day Will Come (1889):

“Theodore and his friend betook themselves to Cheriton Chase on the following Friday, for that kind of visit which north country people describe as ‘a week end’.”

As we’ve said, none of the OED citations for “weekend” since the 1970s have hyphens. Here are a few examples, with “weekend” used attributively—that is, as an adjective:

“Lieutenant Mark Phillips, on weekend leave from Germany, went hunting on Saturday with Princess Anne.” (From the Guardian, 1973.)

“A weekend bag packed with scent, toothbrush and so forth.” (From Julia O’Faolain’s novel The Obedient Wife, 1982.)

“Humphrey Brooke was only a weekend gardener until … he decided to retire.” (From Harper’s and Queen, 1974.)

“Weekending French families setting out in their saloons for the countryside.” (From Anthony Grey’s novel Some Put Their Trust in Chariots, 1973.)

In Western countries, the week is typically divided into a workweek of Monday through Friday, and a weekend of Saturday and Sunday.

However, the usual workweek is often longer in other parts of the world. And the weekend can fall on other days, depending on the predominant religion in the area.

We won’t get into a detailed history of the two-day weekend, except to note that Henry Ford began giving his auto workers Saturday and Sunday off in 1926, the year the American Federation of Labor set a five-day, 40-hour week as one of its goals.

By the summer of 1929, according to a report by CQ Researcher, from one-half to three-quarters of a million American wage earners had a five-day week.

We should note, though, that many Americans don’t have a traditional workweek. When we were journalists, for example, we often worked on Saturday and Sunday, and had our days off on weekdays.

We’ll close this with a usage that was new to us. The phrase “something for the weekend” is a British euphemism for a condom (and sometimes for another sexual aid, like an aphrodisiac).

The OED explains the origins of this colloquialism: “Traditionally, as part of a question that barbers were said to have put to their customers.”

According to a 1987 citation in the Sunday Times of London, “Barbers would ask our fathers: ‘Anything for the weekend, sir?’ ”

This would seem to give a whole new meaning to the question, “How was your weekend?”

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English language Etymology Phrase origin Usage

Frankenly speaking

Q: I keep hearing the recent weather disaster on the East Coast referred to as “Frankenstorm.” I assume this just means it was a monster storm. But how does a usage like that get started and spread so fast?

A: The name has caught on because it’s both catchy and appropriate.

Not only was this a monstrous storm, but like Frankenstein’s monster it was cobbled together from disparate parts—an Atlantic hurricane moving up from the tropics, a cold front from the west, a blast of arctic air from the north, and high tides.

We can almost imagine Mother Nature, like the scientist Victor Frankenstein, looking upon her creation and shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

During the recent storm, it was widely reported that “Frankenstorm” was coined on Oct. 25, 2012, by Jim Cisco, a weather forecaster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as Hurricane Sandy was heading up the coast.

But in fact the term “Frankenstorm” had cropped up a couple of years earlier, in January 2010, when scientists in California were studying the potential impact of a monster storm.

As the Associated Press reported, the scientists at Cal Tech stitched together data from earlier disasters and dubbed their hypothetical model a “Frankenstorm.”

No matter who came up with the name, it’s certain to be resurrected again.

In fact, the combining form “Franken-” has been used for at least several decades to form words for unnatural creations.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example is “Frankenfood,” a term that first showed up in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1992. Writing in response to an article about genetically engineered crops, Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College, wrote:

“Ever since Mary Shelley’s baron rolled his improved human out of the lab, scientists have been bringing just such good things to life. If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.”

A bit of googling, however, finds several earlier examples, including Franken Berry (1971), a monster-themed cereal, Frankenweenie (1984), an animated short about a boy who brings his dog back to life, and Frankenhooker (1990), a film about a medical-school dropout who raises his girlfriend from the dead.

The OED says the word element “Franken-” is used to form nouns that convey the sense of “genetically modified” or “relating to genetic modification.”

Besides “Frankenfood,” the OED cites the use of terms like “Frankenfruit,” “Frankenplants,” and “Frankenscience.” (Sometimes the words are capitalized and sometimes not.)

Oxford notes an earlier usage, “Frankenstein food,” first used in 1989 and meaning food that’s genetically altered or irradiated.

Now, of course, “Franken-” is used more broadly for things put together in odd, unnatural, or monstrous ways. We’ve seen “Frankenbike” (a bicycle made of scavenged parts), “Frankenbite” (a patched-together sound bite), and “Frankenstrat” (Eddie Van Halen’s guitar, a Stratocaster body plus miscellaneous parts).

A contributor to the American Dialect Society’s discussion group recently quipped that if you were to create a senator from Minnesota out of senatorial body parts, you’d get a “Frankenfranken.”

The OED naturally traces all this to the noun “Frankenstein,” which comes from “the name of Victor Frankenstein, the title-character of Mary Shelley’s romance Frankenstein (1818), who constructed a human monster and endowed it with life.”

Shelley’s book didn’t refer to the creature itself as “Frankenstein.” But the name, according to the OED, is “commonly misused allusively as a typical name for a monster who is a terror to his originator and ends by destroying him.”

The  British Prime Minister William Gladstone was the first to use the name for the monster and not its creator, according to Oxford. In speaking of mules, which are a cross between a donkey and a horse, Gladstone was quoted as saying in 1838, “They really seem like Frankensteins of the animal creation.”

The term has been used that way ever since, as in this OED citation from London’s Daily Telegraph (1971): “There are now growing indications that the Nationalists in South Africa have created a political Frankenstein which is pointing the way to a non-White political revival.”

But what’s really kept the wider used of “Frankenstein” and “Franken-” alive are the many films inspired by Shelley’s book, beginning with the Universal Studios original, Frankenstein (1931), starring Boris Karloff.

After that, the deluge. Sequels included Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and so on for decades to come.

Our favorite adaptation is Mel Brooks’s hilarious Young Frankenstein (1974), in which Gene Wilder, playing a descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein, has a dance number with the monster and insists that his name be pronounced FRONK-en-steen.

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English language Etymology Phrase origin Usage

Like a hole in the head

Q: Do you have an explanation of the saying, “I need this like I need a third armpit”? Where does it come from?

A: The expression is new to us. We couldn’t find that exact wording online, though we came across dozens of references to a website called “I Need This Like a Third Armpit.”

We also found many similar expressions on the Web, including “I need this like I need a tooth pulled,” “I need this like I need another pair of legs,” and “I need this like I need a heart attack.”

All of them are variations on a theme—the old saying “I need this [or whatever] like a hole in the head.” (The expression is often seen with the verb repeated: “I need this like I need a hole in the head.”)

The expression is a jocular way of describing something that you don’t need and don’t want. In fact, you could make up your own variation to describe something useless: “I need [fill in the blank] like a [fill in the blank].”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the phrase “to need (something) like a hole in the head” is “applied to something not desired at all or something useless.”

The OED compares the expression to a similar one in Yiddish, “Ich darf es vi a loch in kop” (I need it like a hole in the head).

While the dictionary doesn’t actually say the English version is derived from the Yiddish, we’re willing to bet that it is.

Oxford has several written examples of the usage, with the earliest dating from 1951. Here are the first two citations:

“A smart operator needs a dame like he needs a hole in the head.” (From Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, 1951.)

“The Disciples … were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.” (From J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.)

However, we found many older references dating from as much as 30 years earlier.

For example, this passage is from The Heritage (1921), a collection of stories by Viola Brothers Shore: “ ‘He needs a car,’ commented her husband, ‘like I need a hole in the back of my head to let out the steam.’ ”

A character in Clifford Odets’s play Awake and Sing! (1933) remarks, “I need a wife like a hole in the head.”

And these lines, spoken by a character named Mrs. Levine, come from Arthur Kober’s story collection Thunder Over the Bronx (1935): “ ‘I need a dug in house like I need a hole in head. I need a hole in head?’ she asked rhetorically.”

Apparently Kober liked that passage. Here’s a reprise from another story collection, My Dear Bella (1941):

“ ‘He needs a britch table like I need a hole in head! I need a hole in head?’ he asked rhetorically.” In fact, Kober uses the expression “like I need a hole in head” at least twice in this book.

Those three writers—Shore, Odets, and Kober—were Jewish.

Shore supposedly descended from the first Kosher butcher in New York. Her stories were about Jewish Americans and their lives.

Odets was the son of Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrants, and Awake and Sing! is about an impoverished Jewish family in the Bronx.

Kober was a humorist known for his comically stereotypical portrayals of Jewish characters, some of whom spoke English haltingly.

It seems likely that these authors were adapting a familiar Yiddish usage, and that the “hole in the head” expression came to America with Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants.

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Why is a top 10 song a hit?

Q: What is the origin of “hit” as a positive term, as in “hit song”?

A: When we say a movie or an album is a “hit,” we aren’t implying that it got there by physical violence, even when the movie or album has a lot of rough stuff in it.

So why do we use such a pugilistic word to refer to a popular success? There’s a good reason, as it turns out.

The noun “hit” began life pretty violently—as a blow, a stroke, a collision, or an impact. But that kind of “hit” eventually gave us a successful stroke in any kind of endeavor, especially in the entertainment field.

Here’s how the word evolved.

The noun “hit” is derived from the earlier verb “hit,” which was nonviolent when it showed in English nearly a thousand years ago, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The verb is believed to have come into English from Old Norse, where hitta meant “to come upon, light upon, meet with, get at, attain to, reach one’s aim, succeed, and the like.”

This sense of getting at or attaining something is what the verb “hit” originally meant when it was first recorded in English sometime before 1075.

It wasn’t until two centuries later, around 1275, that “hit” got its more violent meaning—“to get at or reach with a blow, to strike,” the OED says.

Both senses of the verb are still with us today.

The original Old Norse meaning survives in phrases like “hit the road,” “hit the trail,” “hit my meaning,” “hit a happy medium,” “hit upon an idea (or fact),” “hit it off,” “hit the mark,” “hit the truth,” “hit the sack” (to get to bed), and so on.

All these senses of the verb are nonviolent. They don’t mean crashing or colliding into something, but rather reaching or attaining or getting at it.

The newer and more violent sense of the verb “hit” is the one that’s more familiar today, and it’s the one that gave us all senses of the noun “hit”—including the one you ask about.

The noun “hit” came along in the mid-15th century, and boy was it violent in the beginning!

The OED’s earliest citation is from Ludus Coventriae (circa 1450), an anonymous English miracle play:

“To hym wyl I go, and geve hym suche an hete / That alle the lechis of the londe his lyf xul nevyr restore.” (“To him will I go, and give him such a hit that all the leeches of the land his life shall never restore.”)

Yikes! It’s hard to tell what would be worse—the hit or the leeches.

Many uses of the noun are violent, of course—some more than others. For instance, a “hit” came to mean a killing, perhaps for hire, in the mid-20th century.

And this sense of the noun has been used attributively—that is, as an adjective—in phrases like “hit man” and “hit squad.”

But “hit” has more peaceful meanings as well. For instance, a “hit” can be a stroke of good luck or a stroke of a ball on the playing field.

We’re not sure, though, how to list a “hit” of drugs: violent or nonviolent?

More pertinent to your question is a usage that the OED dates to the early 19th century: “a successful stroke made in action or performance of any kind; esp. any popular success (a person, a play, a song, etc.) in public entertainment.”

This sense of the noun has also been used attributively in phrases such as “hit parade” and “hit song,” the OED adds.

The earliest recorded use of this sense of “hit” is from a letter written in 1811 by the comedian Charles Mathews:

“Maw-worm was a most unusual hit, I am told.” (Mathews played the role of Mr. Mawworm in The Hypocrite, by the Irish playwright Isaac Bickerstaff, on the London stage in 1809.)

And since we like quoting from mysteries, here’s a citation from Fredric Brown’s Murder Can Be Fun (1951): “She had big blue eyes that would have been a hit on television.”

We’ll end with the use of the noun “hit” in computing to mean a match in a processing task or a connection with a website.

The OED’s first citation for this usage, from Charles J. Sippl’s Computer Dictionary and Handbook (1967), defines the term “hit” in digital file maintenance as “the finding of a match between a detail record and a master record.”

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English language Punctuation Usage

Quote du jour

Q: I grew up learning and practicing that single quotes belong within double quotes, or sometimes in headlines. But everybody seems to be using single quotes now. Have double quotes gone the way of the buggy whip?

A: We haven’t noticed an increase in the use of single quotation marks—at least not in American usage. Could it be that you’ve been reading a lot of British authors lately?

In the American system of punctuation, double quotation marks are used to enclose quoted material. Any interior quotations—that is, words quoted within a larger quotation—are enclosed in single quotation marks.

The British convention is just the reverse. The British generally use single quotation marks, while the interior quotations are enclosed within double quote marks. That’s why novels and other materials published in the UK can look startling to an American reader.

So if you’re seeing more single quote marks in writing by Americans, you’re seeing something unusual. However, as you say, single quote marks are used in most newspaper headlines.

Here’s how the same sentence would be punctuated in the US and UK systems.

American: As Professor Witherspoon told us, “The word ‘fructify’ means to bear fruit.”

British: As Professor Witherspoon told us, ‘The word “fructify” means to bear fruit.’

However, The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) points out that there are exceptions in some specialized kinds of American writing.

In linguistic and phonetic studies, a definition is often enclosed in single quotation marks.

And in horticultural writing, the names of cultivars are sometimes enclosed in single quotation marks.

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English language Etymology Usage

Is “lectitude” a word?

Q: I looked up “lectitude” after coming across it online, but I couldn’t find the word in my dictionary. It sounds like a real word, perhaps a relative of “lecture” or “lectern” or even Hannibal Lecter. But is it really a word?

A: If we had to guess, we’d say you were googling and saw “lectitude” in the search results for a scanned book.

The word shows up in hits for a lot of 19th-century books scanned into the Google Books database. But on closer inspection the actual word turns out to be “rectitude” with the first letter scanned incorrectly. Fooled again!

You’re right that “lectitude” sounds like a real word. But you won’t find it in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and other standard dictionaries.

Was it ever a word? Well, you won’t find “lectitude” in the Oxford English Dictionary either, so it’s safe to say it never existed, period. But let’s be creative.

If the word “lectitude” did exist, it would probably have something to do with reading. (Sorry, Hannibal!) Many English words starting with “lect” are related to the Latin verb legere (to read), a word whose descendants in Latin generally begin with lect.

The OED says, for instance, that “lectory” (from the Latin lectorium) is an obsolete word for a reading place. So a really great place to read might be described as rich in lectitude.

The English “lector” (borrowed from the Latin word for a reader) originally meant a church official whose duty was to read the “lessons” at the service, the OED says. What quality does a good lector need? Lectitude, of course!

There are other words that, with a little imagination, could be sources of lectitude.

The noun “lectern” (lectrum in Latin) once meant a desk for reading or singing from in a church. And “lecture” (lectura) originally meant the act of reading. So a very long lecture could give the listener an earful of lectitude.

“Lection” (from lectionem) is a rare and obsolete word for the act of reading, or a lecture, or a lesson to be learned, the OED says.

And back in the 13th century, “lesson” (also from lectionem) had two meanings, Oxford says: “a portion of Scripture or other sacred writing read at divine service,” or something for a pupil to read, study, and learn.

So we might say that students who are diligent about doing their homework should get an A in lectitude.

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English language Etymology Phrase origin Usage

A lick and a promise

Q: My mom, who is nearly 90, says things like this: “The kitchen floor needs to be waxed, but I only have time to give it a lick and a promise.” Where does the phrase “a lick and a promise” come from?

A: The expression “a lick and a promise” is at least 200 years old. Why “lick”? The Oxford English Dictionary says one meaning of the word is “a slight and hasty wash.”

In this sense, according to the OED, “lick” usually appears in the phrase “a lick and a promise.” (The “promise” signifies an intention to do a better job sometime later.)

The dictionary’s earliest recorded use of “a lick and a promise” is from Walter White’s travel book All Round the Wrekin (1860): “We only gives the cheap ones a lick and a promise.” (The Wrekin is a hill in Shropshire, England.)

However, the word sleuth Barry Popik has found almost half a dozen earlier examples of “a lick and a promise.” Here’s the earliest, from the December 1811 issue of The Critical Review, a journal founded by Tobias Smollett:

“The Prince Regent comes in for a blessing, too, but as one of the Serio-Comico-Clerico’s nurses, who are so fond of over-feeding little babies, would say, it is but a lick and a promise.”

The “lick” in the expression was originally used by itself, to mean “a dab of paint” or the like, “a hasty tidying up,” or “a casual amount of work,” the OED says.

The earliest example in writing of this sense of “lick,” Oxford says, comes from James Maidment’s A Packet of Pestilent Pasquils (circa 1648), a collection of Scottish literary oddities: “We’ll mark them with a lick of tarre.”

Why is a cursory slap of paint or a casual attempt at a job called a “lick”? There could be a connection with another meaning of the word, which the OED defines as “a small quantity, so much as may be had by licking.”

This usage dates back to the 17th century and is often used in negative constructions: “he hain’t worked a lick” … “couldn’t cook a lick” … “didn’t have a lick of sense” … “couldn’t read a lick,” and so on.

While we’re on the subject, there’s another kind of “lick” altogether, the one that means “a smart blow,” in the words of the OED. This use of “lick” dates back to the late 17th century.

Oxford’s earliest example comes from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s A Collection of Several Relations & Treatises Singular and Curious (1680): “[He] gave the Fellow half a dozen good Licks with his Cane.”

And finally (since we seem to be on a roll here) comes the “lick” that means a short solo, usually improvised, in jazz or dance music. This one is of a much younger vintage.

The OED’s first example is from a weekly music newspaper once published in London, the Melody Maker (1932): “They manage to steal a ‘lick’ from an American record.”

This more recent example is from the Toronto Globe and Mail (1970): “The blues riff is even better, full of Charlie Parker-like bebop licks.”

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English language Etymology Linguistics Usage

A transformative vision?

Q: This book title makes me uncomfortable: Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. I associate “transformative” with mutation, not necessarily in a good way, and “transformational” with improvements. I wonder what the experts say.

A: The words “transformative” and “transformational” have slightly different meanings, according to some of the dictionaries we consulted, though not in the way you think.

The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) recognize a difference, but The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) regards the two words as synonyms.

With lexicographers divided, it’s not surprising that many people use these words interchangeably. So it’s probably not worth lying awake nights trying to remember which is which.

The OED and Merriam-Webster’s say something that has the power to transform is “transformative” while something that’s simply concerned with or characterized by transformation is “transformational.” A couple of examples might help:

● “Sheila’s trip to Rome was transformative, since she left home a shrinking violet and came back a confident woman.”

● “The garden is in a transformational stage, halfway between wilderness and civilized landscape.”

More to the point, though, neither word should be interpreted as exclusively positive or negative.

These adjectives—like “transform,” the word they come from—merely have to do with change, and change can be for better or for worse. A magic spell, for instance, might transform a subject into a frog or a prince.

Ian Refkowitz used “transformative” in a positive sense when he subtitled his book A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity.

To quote from the book, Refkowitz discusses whether President Obama can succeed in “transforming our national identity,” so that America’s “many ethnic groups can truly become one people.”

The verb that’s at the bottom of all this change, “transform,” comes from the Latin transformare, which is composed of the prefix trans– (through) and formare (to form). In Latin, the noun forma means “form.”

The verb was first recorded in English in about 1340, according to the OED. It means to change, whether in form, character, condition, function, or nature.

The noun “transformation” came along in the 1400s and generally means “the action of transforming or fact of being transformed,” the OED says.

As for the adjectives, “transformative” means “having the faculty of transforming; fitted or tending to transform.” But the lesser-used “transformational” merely means “of or pertaining to transformation.”

Of the two, “transformative” is the older, and was first recorded in the late 17th century, according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from John Flavell’s religious tract The Fountain of Life Opened (1673): “The light of Christ is powerfully transformative of its subjects.”

“Transformational,” which came along in the late 19th century, is often used in a technical sense.

It was first recorded, the OED says, in an 1894 article in a London literary magazine, the Athenæum: “The distinction between ‘combinational’ and ‘transformational’ theories of experience.”

However, no more citations for “transformational” appear in the OED until the mid-1950s, when the term became identified with Noam Chomsky and his work in theoretical linguistics.

In 1955, the OED says, Chomsky used the term “Transformational Analysis” in the title of his Ph.D dissertation.

The adjective has since become well-known among linguists and others interested in what’s become known as “transformational” grammar, a theory about how the brain processes language.

Among the OED’s citations for “transformational” is this one from the New York Times in 1965: “Transformational grammar grew in part from M.I.T. computer experiments to produce mechanical translations of foreign languages.”

A related adverb, “transformationally,” is also used in linguistics, as in this OED citation from the journal Dædalus:

“If the interrogative sentence ‘Are the men here?’ is derived transformationally from the phrase structure underlying the declarative sentence ‘The men are here,’ it would seem to imply that a speaker first thinks of the declarative sentence and then transforms it into the interrogative form.”

Of course, “transformational” is also used by non-linguists. And a cursory survey of the usage in Google shows that many people who do use “transformational” generally use it in the “transformative” sense—that is, not merely having to do with transformation, but able to bring it about.

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