Q: Please comment on this UK slang expression for suicide: “to top oneself,” usually in lieu of facing trial or dishonor or worse at the hands of villains.

A: Since the 13th century, people have used the noun “top” to refer to the head. And since the 18th century, the verb “top” has been used in one way or another to mean to behead or to put to death by hanging.

(In the 19th century, “topsman” was a slang word for a hangman.)

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for the use of “top” in the executioner’s sense is from Charles Hitchin’s crime exposé The Regulator (1718): “He being known to be an old Practitioner, will certainly be cast and top’d, alias hang’d for the same.”

Now, according to the OED, “to top someone” usually means to commit murder and “to top oneself” means to commit suicide.

The sense of topping oneself first showed up in the mid-20th century, according to the dictionary’s citations. Here are some suicidal examples:

“He also took my tie and belt so that I could not top myself” (from Frank Norman’s Bang to Rights: An Account of Prison Life, 1958).

“I have to try and get a key to it all, otherwise I’ll just top myself” (from the former BBC publication The Listener, 1983).

Let’s end this on a lighter note with an excerpt for the campaign season from Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”:

I’m the nominee of the G.O.P.
Or GOP!
But if, baby, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top!

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Q: Many years ago, I was flipping through a book at friends of my grandparents. It was a compendium of expressions and claimed bizarrely that “Tennis, anyone?” meant “Would you like to go for a walk in the rain?” Can you shed any light on this?

A: We doubt that “Tennis, anyone?” is—or ever was—another way of asking, “Walk in the rain, anyone?” The book you read might have suggested this as a joke, since only the most obsessive tennis obsessives are likely to play in the rain.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the tennis expression (which has lots of variants) as “a typical entrance or exit line given to a young man in a superficial drawing-room comedy.”

The phrase is also used adjectivally to describe someone or something reminiscent of this kind of comedy (as in “He used his tennis-anyone voice”).

The OED quotes John van Druten’s book Playwright at Work (1953) on the use of the expression:

“There is no average Mr. and Mrs. Blank at all. An attempt to draw one … will lead you into the pit of emptiness, and you will emerge with something as unreal as the juveniles in plays who come in impertinently swinging tennis rackets, and when the time for their exit arrives, make it with the remark: ‘Tennis, anyone?’ ”

The first to use an equivalent expression may have been George Bernard Shaw. In his play Misalliance (1914), a rich young man says flippantly, in mid-conversation, “Anybody on for a game of tennis?”

Shaw’s line is quoted in Fred A. Shapiro’s The Yale Book of Quotations, which goes on to say that “Tennis, anyone?” later became “a catchphrase associated with drawing room comedies.”

“Humphrey Bogart is often said to have originated that phrase, but no example of its use has ever been found in the plays in which he appeared,” Shapiro writes. “The earliest example to date of ‘Tennis, anyone?’ is in the Dixon (Ill.) Evening Telegraph, 5 May 1951.”

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Q: Why does the media insist on using “the tarmac” as a catchphrase for different areas of an airport: runways, aprons, taxiways? Tarmac is largely obsolete and hasn’t been used at airports for many years. For some reason this just bugs me.

A: You’re right technically, though it doesn’t pay to be too technical about this. English is a work in progress, and dictionaries are starting to accept “the tarmac” as the paved part of an airport where planes stop to take on or let off passengers.

But let’s back up a bit. In the early 1800s, a Scottish engineer named John Loudon McAdam developed a technique of road building using layers of small pieces of stone. This road surface was referred to as “macadam.”

In the early 20th century, an English surveyor named Edgar Purnell Hooley developed a technique for combining tar with macadam to produce a road-building material called tar macadam or tarmac.

Although tarmac was used extensively in the construction of airports during World War II, no major airport now uses it. The pavement at major airports is now usually asphalt or concrete.

(While we’re metaphorically waiting on the runway, check out our blog entries about “cement” and “concrete,” their meanings and their pronunciations.)

To get back to your question, a baggage handler or a language stickler would refer to the loading and unloading area at an airport as a ramp or an apron. But we think “the tarmac” is evolving and it’s not a crime for laymen to use it loosely for such an area.

Some dictionaries still restrict the term “tarmac” to paved areas made of tar macadam (or tarmacadam), but others now say it can refer generally to airport areas made of any kind of pavement.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “tarmac” as the “registered trade-mark of a kind of tar macadam consisting of iron slag impregnated with tar and creosote; also designating a surface made of tar macadam.”

However, the OED then notes that the phrase “the tarmac” is often used colloquially to mean an airfield or runway.

The British and American versions of the online Macmillan Dictionary go one step further and define “the tarmac” simply as “the part of an airport where the planes stop and that people walk across to get on a plane.”

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Q: Please enlighten me about this sentence: “He is favoring his left leg.” Does this mean the person in question is depending more on his left leg (presumably because his right one is injured)? Or does it mean he is giving special protective treatment to the left leg because it is the injured one?

A: “Favoring” one leg means treating it gently—that is, using it less than the other.

This use of the verb “favor” was first recorded in English in 1526, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED defines this sense of the word as “to deal gently with; to avoid overtasking (a limb); to ease, save, spare.”

Not surprisingly, many citations for this usage come from books on horsemanship.

The OED includes an early example from Gervase Markham’s Cavelarice, or the English Horseman (1607): “When a horse doth stand but firme upon … three feete … favoring the other.”

Late in the following century, William Augustus Osbaldiston wrote in The British Sportsman (1792): “He will set his foot on the ground warily, and endeavour to favor it.”

And here’s a human example. Samuel Pepys, who experienced severe pain while reading and writing, wrote in a 1668 diary entry about “walking in the dark in the garden, to favour my eyes.”

This sense of “favor” is perhaps a natural extension of the word’s original meaning.

When “favor” first entered English in the 1300s, the OED says, it generally meant to regard with favor or show favor to; to look kindly upon or to treat kindly; to have a liking or preference for; to encourage or patronize; to treat with partiality, and so on.

It’s not surprising that one—whether equine or human—should want to deal kindly with sore feet and sore eyes!

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Q: What does the word “arguably” mean? Does it mean “without a doubt” or “possibly”?

A: It usually means something in between those two definitions. In a sentence like “He’s arguably the best player in the National League,” we’re saying that one could make the case that he’s the best player in the league.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) says the adverb “arguably” describes something that “may be argued or shown by argument.” It gives these two examples: “an arguably effective strategy” and “arguably the greatest writer of his era.”

If you find that confusing, Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary, a guide for students of English as a second language, offers a clearer definition: “used to say that a statement is very possibly true even if it is not certainly true.”

Although some people are confused about whether “arguably” is negative or positive, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains that it “is used in a positive sense and that it is primarily a qualifier or hedge against too strong a statement.”

One reason for the confusion is that the adjective “arguable” can be either positive or negative. M-W Collegiate says it’s used for something that can be “open to argument” or “convincingly argued.”

In fact, the M-W usage guide also includes some examples of “arguable” used in what it considers a neutral sense. A 1982 book review in the New York Times, for example, refers to “an arguable issue that he does not pause to argue.”

The adverb “arguably” is relatively new. The earliest published reference for the word in the OED is from an 1890 issue of the Saturday Review: “His policy, if sometimes arguably mistaken, was almost always a … generous policy.”

Although the adjective “arguable” dates from the early 1600s, it doesn’t appear to have been widely used until the mid-1800s.

In an 1860 example, the English essayist Walter Bagehot writes that the Jacobites believed in “an hereditary family, which claimed the Crown, not on arguable considerations of policy, but on ascertainable claims of descent.”

As for the etymology of these words, both the adjective and adverb, as well as the verb “argue,” are ultimately derived from the Latin arguere (to make clear, prove, assert, accuse, blame).

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Q: Why are “foreign students” now called “international students”? Is political correctness to blame?

A: Students who study outside their home countries have been referred to as “foreign students” for nearly 300 years. But a somewhat newer term, “international students,” appears to be more popular on some campuses these days, if our cursory Google searches are any indication.

Spot checks show that a great many colleges and universities prefer “international students.” But some, like the University of Iowa, use both “foreign students” and “international students.” And some organizations and agencies (like the College Board and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) use both too.

Overall, the “international” version seems to be far more popular, outnumbering the “foreign” phrase well over three-to-one in our Google searches.

Of the two phrases, it’s not surprising that “foreign students” is older, if only because the adjective “foreign” dates from the 1200s while “international” didn’t show up until 1780, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Our Google searches turned up quite a few 18th-century references to “foreign student” (or “students”).

The earliest we found is from a 1734 translation of Pierre Bayle’s The Dictionary Historical and Critical. An entry about a controversial German professor of divinity says, “He had most of the Foreign Students on his side.”

An encyclopedic book published in 1743, partially titled A Description of Holland, includes a reference to “foreign Students, who come hither from all Parts of Europe.”

And Charles Este’s A Journey in the Year 1793, Through Flanders, Brabant, and Germany, to Switzerland (1795), has this passage: “For general philosophy, for the belles lettres, for experimental science, for medicine, a foreign student may almost every where be better—and cannot any where be worse.”

The use of “international student” (or “students”) didn’t begin appearing until the 19th century, as far as we can tell.

Here’s a passage from an article in the Medical Times and Gazette, published in London in 1876:

“Advantage was taken of the presence in Paris … of the foreign and provincial deputies to make some preliminary arrangements towards the institution of an international students’ society—I fear, however, without much success.”

Why is “international student” preferred by many institutions of higher learning?

Perhaps, as you suggest, political correctness has something to do with it. Dictionaries list abnormal, improper, unnatural, and irrelevant among the senses of “foreign” while the more neutral “international” simply describes something involving two or more nations.

Or perhaps the longer and newer phrase is more appealing to academics and other lovers of officialese.

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Q: On the BBC news site, I came across this quote about people switching accounts from banks to credit unions: “It would have to be a number way north of 40,000 to make an appreciable difference.” What is the history of using “north” and “south” to mean higher or lower numerically? And what about using “south” for a deteriorating situation?

A: We wrote a blog entry a while back on the use of “north” to mean up and “south” to mean down geographically—that is, on a map—as well as the use of “uptown” and “downtown.” In the same geographic vein, we once wrote a post about “upstate.”

But we haven’t yet written about the use of “north” and “south” to mean higher or lower numerically, or “south” to mean a deteriorating situation. Now is our chance to fill in the gaps.

Not surprisingly, financial writers were the first to record these usages. For some reason, in these senses “south” was used half a century before “north.” The story begins with the phrase “headed (or going) south.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for this pessimistic expression is from a 1920 issue of the weekly Elgin (Illinois) Dairy Report: “Meat, grains and provisions generally, are like Douglas Fairbanks, headed south—in other words, going down.” (The reference is to a Douglas Fairbanks movie called Headin’ South.)

The phrase is also used figuratively to mean “in or into a worse condition or position,” the OED says.

Although the dictionary has a citation from the 1970s that suggests this figurative use, the first clear-cut example is from Robert B. Parker’s novel Stone Cold (2003): “But your marriage went south and you had a drinking problem.”

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that people began using “north” to mean higher, higher than, or in excess of, according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a 1978 article in the Guardian Weekly: “Money supply growth for the past year has ended up quite a long way north of the target band—at 16¼ per cent.”

The movie producer Julia Phillips used the expression in her memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991): “So Spielberg tells me the budget’s going north.”

And a writer for the San Francisco Business Times used “north” in a similar way in 2001: “What’s your average deal size? It’s gone north of $250,000 per contract even as high as $300,000 per contract.”

Finally, this gives us a chance to put in a plug in for Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel North and South. The title refers to the contrast between the industrial north and agricultural south of England.

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Q: I often hear/read people using “resiliency” where I would use “resilience.” What’s up with that?

A: Both “resilience” and “resiliency” are legitimate nouns, and they have been for hundreds of years.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) define “resiliency” as “resilience.”

As for “resilience,” the two dictionaries give these meanings: (1) The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune. (2) The property that enables a material to return to its original shape after being bent, stretched, or compressed.

We’re not surprised, however, that you’re running across a lot of “resiliency” these days.

There’s been a sharp rise in the usage since the 1970s, though it seems to have fallen off a bit in recent years, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, which lets you track a word’s appearance in books over the years.

A regular Google search turned up 5.75 million hits for “resiliency.” That’s quite a lot, but small change compared with the 28.7 million hits for “resilience.”

A bit more googling left us with the impression that mental-health professionals are much more likely to use “resiliency” in sense #1 than the people who go to them for help. That’s not surprising, of course. Professionals of all sorts seem to prefer stuffier usages over common ones.

Both “resilience” and “resiliency,” as well as the adjective “resilient,” ultimately come from the Latin verb resilire (to jump back or rebound). All three words entered English in the 17th century (“resilience” is slightly older than the other two).

One last thought: resilire (the source of all this bouncing back) is related to the Latin verb salire (to jump or leap), which has given English the noun and verb “sally.” And now we’d better sally forth and check our mailbox for more questions.

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Q: During a pool tournament online, the commentator repeatedly used “fortunate” when I would have used “lucky.” Example: “He needs to get fortunate here.” To me, “fortunate” is a state of being and “lucky” is how you get to that state. Was the commentator just trying to sound intelligent?

A: One meaning of “fortunate” is “lucky,” and one meaning of “lucky” is “fortunate.” But that doesn’t mean they’re always interchangeable.

For instance, we often say that someone “got lucky.” But we’re less likely to say that he “got fortunate.” It’s not technically incorrect, just not a very common usage.

On the other hand, both “He was lucky” and “He was fortunate” are common usages and have identical meanings. The only difference is in their tone—“lucky” is less formal than “fortunate.”

Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines these two adjectives when used to describe people.

Lucky: “Having, or attended by, good luck. In early use often, Fortunate, successful, prosperous. Now with narrower meaning: Favoured by chance; successful through causes other than one’s own action or merit.”

Fortunate: “Favoured by fortune; possessed of or receiving good fortune; lucky, prosperous.”

They’re very much alike, aren’t they? So why does English have two words for this?

Because, like “augur” and “bode” (which we wrote about recently on the blog), we got one from each of the two great language streams that make up English—the Germanic (“lucky”) and the Latinate (“fortunate”).

“Lucky” was first recorded around 1503, but the noun it’s derived from, “luck,” was around in the 1400s. The noun, meaning “fortune good or ill,” is from old Germanic sources and probably came into English as a gambling term, the OED suggests.

“Fortunate,” from the Latin fortunatus, was first recorded in English in the late 1300s.

Why do people “get lucky” more often than they “get fortunate”? We can’t tell. Perhaps it’s just the way those adjectives have diverged in their usage.

For whatever reason, “get lucky” seems more natural and idiomatic to more people. The Google score: “get lucky,” 10.4 million hits; “get fortunate,” 162,000 hits.

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Q: Why isn’t the word “summer” capitalized in “Indian summer.” My grammar book says a proper noun “names a particular person, place, or thing.” Isn’t Indian summer a particular time of year? Thanks for your help!

A: The names of seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) are not considered proper nouns. This is a subject we’ve written about before on our blog.

But “Indian” is capitalized because it is a proper noun, so the phrase is properly written “Indian summer.”

We thought you might like to know more about this expression, which originated in late 18th-century America, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED defines “Indian summer” as “a period of unusually calm dry warm weather, often accompanied by a hazy atmosphere, occurring in late autumn in the northern United States and Canada; a similar period of unseasonably warm autumnal weather elsewhere.”

The phrase was first recorded in writing in the military journal of Ebenezer Denny, an officer in the Revolutionary and Indian Wars.

In an entry written near Presqu’ Isle, Maine, and dated Oct. 13, 1794, Major Denny wrote: “Pleasant weather. The Indian summer here. Frosty nights.”

From Denny’s journal entry, we can assume the phrase was already in use before he recorded it.

Why was this kind of fall called “Indian summer”? The OED says that “the origin of the expression is uncertain,” but adds that “it appears to have had nothing to do with the glowing autumnal tints of the foliage, with which it is sometimes associated.”

The dictionary speculates, however, that the term “Indian” may have been used here in the disparaging sense of suggesting something “substitute or ersatz.”

So, “an “Indian summer” might have implied a pretend summer. In similar phrases, the OED says, the adjective “Indian” was used in those days to mean “something other than that normally denoted.”

The phrase “Indian corn,” for example, is an example of this “substitute or ersatz” notion at work, as we’ve discussed before on the blog.

To the early English settlers, the term “corn” meant grain in general: wheat, rye, barley, oats, and so on. They used the phrases “Indian corn” and “Indian grain” to mean maize, because to them it was substitute grain or the Indians’ version of grain.

Consequently, in phrases like “Indian bread,” “Indian cakes,” “Indian flour,” and “Indian pudding,” the adjective meant that the dish was made of ground maize (which we now call cornmeal) instead of flour.

Something to keep in mind if, like us, you use cornbread stuffing in your Thanksgiving turkey.

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[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 20, 2021.]

Q: I’m wondering which of these is correct: “substitute A with B” or “substitute B for A”?

A: The sentences mean the same thing and both are accepted as standard English. But in our opinion, the “for” construction (as in “substitute B for A”) is preferable because it’s clearer. Here the preposition “for” means “in place of,” so you can easily tell which person or thing is being eliminated.

The “with” construction (as in “substitute A with B”), in which the verb “substitute” means “replace,” was once condemned by usage authorities but is now widely accepted. Here’s what Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has to say:

“In its oldest and still most common transitive sense, substitute means ‘to put or use in place of another.’ ” But MW adds that “substitute has also been used since the 17th century to mean ‘take the place of; replace,’ ” and despite criticism, it’s now “being used in this sense in standard writing on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The usage guide gives published examples that illustrate both senses of the verb: “substituted asceticism for beauty” and “substitute conjecture with facts.”

The British dictionary Lexico, among others, agrees, though it acknowledges the possibility of confusion: “Traditionally, the verb substitute is followed by for and means ‘put (someone or something) in place of another,’ as in she substituted the fake vase for the real one. From the late 17th century, substitute has also been used to mean ‘replace (someone or something) with someone or something else,’ as in she substituted the real vase with the fake one.”

As Lexico comments, “This can be confusing, since the two sentences shown above mean the same thing, yet the object of the verb and the object of the preposition have swapped positions. Despite the potential confusion, the second, newer use is well established … and is now generally regarded as part of standard English.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical usage, used to regard “substitute with” as incorrect but now treats it as standard. Oxford says that “substitute” as a transitive verb—that is, one with a direct object—can be accompanied by either “for” or “with.”

In “substitute for,” the dictionary says, the preposition points to “the person or thing being replaced.” And “substitute with” means “to fill the place of (a person or thing) with a replacement.”

That last use, in which “substitute” means “replace,” Oxford notes, “has been sometimes criticized … but is now generally regarded as part of normal standard English.” So the OED now accepts a sense of “substitute” that’s long been rejected by older and more conservative usage guides.

For instance, Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed., 2016) maintains its earlier view that “substitute” and “replace” are not interchangeable: “You substitute something for something else … but you replace something with something else.”

However, the newest edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2015), edited by Jeremy Butterfield, has accepted the shift.

The “substitute” entry in Fowler’s says that in its “normal uncontroversial sense” the verb is “construed with for” and means “to put (someone or something) in place of another.” But “beginning in the 17c., and running parallel to the normal sense, were transitive (often passive) uses in which the sense is ‘replace.’ ”  This sense of the verb, Fowler’s concludes, “has fully re-established itself.”

Now for some etymology. The English verb is derived from the Latin substituere, which meant to choose someone to fill another’s place. When the verb entered English in the 15th century, it mean to appoint someone to a role or position in place of another.

The first citation in the OED is from the Rolls of Parliament of Henry VI (February 1447) and refers to the appointing of schoolmasters: “Suche scole maistre … [he] may in his owne parich or place remove, and an other in his place substitute and sette.”

In the mid-16th century, people began using “substitute” for things as well as people. At first, it was used with such prepositional phrases as “in the place of,” “in one’s place,” “in one’s stead,” and so on. But it began appearing with “for” in the 17th century, as shown in the OED’s earliest example:

“Xylobalsamum is the Wood of the body, or of the branch, which the Shops sometimes substituted for the liquor” (The Valley of Varietie, by Henry Peacham, 1638).

However, a few decades later, transitive uses of the verb in the sense of “replace” began appearing. And the prepositions used with this sense, when was one needed, were “by” (late 17th century) and later “with” (mid-19th).

This is Oxford’s earliest citation for the “substitute with” usage: “I carried off a rabbit from the spit, and substituted it with the cat of my old aunt” (from The Barber of Paris, an 1839 translation of a French novel published by Charles Paul de Kock in 1826).

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Q: An NPR report on the death of the Indy driver Dan Wheldon while racing in Las Vegas last month said he “passed” rather than “died.” When did we begin to say the deceased “passed”? This seems rather quaint, but is it correct?

A: The subject of how we talk about death has been on our minds lately because we’ve been reading the collected letters of Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death (1963).

We had a posting a few years ago on the use of “pass” to mean “die,” but we’ll revive it here with an excerpt from the third edition of Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I.

As we wrote in the earlier posting, the verb “pass” passed into English in the early 13th century by way of England’s Norman rulers.

The English verb has been used in reference to dying since around the year 1230, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Many of the early published references cited in the OED use it in the verbal phrases “pass to God” or “pass to heaven.”  The verbal phrase “pass away,” which is more common today, dates from the 14th century.

The word “pass” has been used by itself since around 1340 as a verb meaning to die. The OED cites published references in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and many other writers.

Here’s an example from King Lear (1608): “Vex not his ghost, / O let him passe.” The OED says, however, that this use of “pass” alone for “die” is now primarily North American.

We too have noticed a resurgence of this usage in recent years (for example, “Uncle Julius passed a year ago”), and it’s not surprising. We’re very inventive about speaking of death without actually mentioning it.

Is the usage legit? Yes, especially in the US, but we prefer using plain old “die,” whch entered English in the early 12th century, when we mean “die.” This is what Pat has to say about it in Woe Is I:

“You’ve probably noticed that death is a favorite playground of clichés. This is too bad. In situations where people most need sincerity, what do they get? Denial. There’s no shame in saying somebody died, but the vocabulary of mortality avoids it. Think again before using expressions like passed away or passed on (sometimes reduced to just passed ), untimely end, cut down in his prime, called to his Maker, called away, great beyond, this mortal coil, bought the farm, hopped the twig (a variation on fell off his perch), kicked the bucket, gone to a better place, handed in his dinner pail, checked out, grim reaper, in the midst of life, irreparable loss, broke the mold, vale of tears, time heals all, words can’t express, tower of strength, or he looks like he’s sleeping.”

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