Categories
Etymology

A myth with a silver lining

Q: I was reading a book review in the Weekly Standard that said “sterling” (as in “pound sterling”) is an abbreviation of “Easterling,” a reference to the Byzantine empire and its stable gold coin, the solidus. Is this true? Or too good to be true?

A: It’s too good to be true; “sterling” didn’t come from “Easterling,” and “Easterling” didn’t refer to Byzantium. But the truth is pretty good too. Here’s the story, which reaches back into medieval history.

Until recently, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sterling” was believed to be short for “Easterling,” but Byzantium wasn’t involved and this belief has now gone the way of the sixpence.

The word “sterling” entered English in Anglo-Norman times, when it was the name given to the English silver penny first coined after the Norman Conquest.

In its earliest appearance in writing, in the late 11th or early 12th century, the word is spelled in the French manner, “esterlin,” and an Anglo-Latin version, sterlingus, was recorded in 1180.

The current form (originally spelled “sterlynge”) first appeared in 1297.

The word’s origin is uncertain, but the OED suggests it was derived from the Old English steorra (“star”) plus “-ling,” a suffix added to nouns to form new and sometimes diminutive versions.

Some of the new Norman pennies had a small star on them, and since steorra was Old English for “star,” a late Old English word steorling (literally “little star”) could have meant “coin with a star.”

The OED calls this the “most plausible” explanation for the word’s etymology.

A couple of earlier theories have been abandoned, including one that the Old English staer (“starling,” the bird) is the source.

Some older pennies, from before the Conquest, did carry the image of four birds, but this explanation is not taken seriously anymore.

And the “Easterling” theory?

The belief arose because antiquarians in the 16th and 17th centuries assumed the coin was originally minted by “Easterling moneyers”—that is, German and Baltic money coiners.

This explanation, says the OED, has also fallen by the wayside.

As for Byzantium, we find no reliable source that says it was ever referred to as “Easterling.”

(A classical scholar, P. E. Easterling, has written about the Byzantine period.  And J. R. R. Tolkien used the term for people from the east of his fictional Middle-earth.)

Back in the real world, the Norman silver penny was highly respected, and was used as currency on the Continent as well as in Britain.

As the OED says, “Continental examples are frequent in the 13th cent., the excellence of the English penny having procured for it extensive currency in foreign countries.”

Thus there were words in many other languages for the “sterling” coin.

In 13th-century Britain, a “pound of sterlings” (later simply “pound sterling”) was originally a pound’s weight of silver pennies—or about 240 pence.

This is the source of “pound” as a British monetary unit.

In the 15th century, people began using the adjective “sterling” to describe silver as pure as the standard penny. In later usages, “sterling silver” meant silver of a particular quality.

In the 16th century, “sterling” also came to mean money as good as the standard silver penny. It also meant, more generally, genuine English money (or English as opposed to foreign money).

Later, “sterling” was also used figuratively to describe something fine or pure.

Here’s an early example, from a 1647 letter by the historian and political writer James Howell: “ ’Twas your judgement, which all the world holds to be sound and sterling, induced me hereunto.”

Finally, here’s a more poetic example, from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896): “Then the world seemed none so bad, / And I myself a sterling lad.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Is crack addictive or addicting?

Q: Is the proper word “addictive” or “addicting”? I can find only “addictive” in my dictionary.

A: Both adjectives are OK, though “addictive” is older and more popular with speakers of English as well as the lexicographers who put together dictionaries.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) have entries for “addictive,” but not “addicting.”

(AH does include the participle “addicting,” minus a definition, in its entry for the verb “addict.”)

However, the Oxford English Dictionary has adjectival entries for “addicting” as well as “addictive.”

And some googling suggests that a lot of people are addicted to both: “addictive,”  58.7 million hits, versus “addicting,” 22.7 million.

The adjective “addictive,” according to published references in the OED, first showed up in the late 19th century.

In its original, pharmaceutical  sense, the dictionary says, it refers to “a drug or other psychoactive substance: capable of creating addiction or dependence.”

The first citation is from an 1891 issue of the Medical Temperance Journal, a publication of the National Temperance League in London: “Narcotic—Addictive—Opium—Alcohol—Cocaine.”

In the early 1960s, according to OED references, the meaning of “addictive” widened to include anything “regarded as capable of creating a dependence likened to that of addiction.”

Here’s an example from a 1962 issue of Film Quarterly: “Critical debates seem to be addictive as well as contagious.”

As for “addicting,” it first showed up in print in a 1932 issue of Science News-Letter (now called Science News): “Morphine, for instance, is strongly addicting.”

The OED says it means the same as “addictive.”

Both words were formed by adding suffixes to a much older word, the verb “addict,” which first appeared in English in the 16th century.

To “addict” originally mean to hand over someone or something in accordance with a judicial decision. The OED says this sense, which comes from Roman law, is now historical.

It was soon used in the sense of to “bind or attach oneself to a person, party, or cause” as well as to “devote oneself to as a servant, adherent, or disciple.”

This sense is now obsolete, but here’s an example from Trollope’s 1857 novel Barchester Towers (which we’ve recently reread):

“He had addicted himself to a party in religion, and having done so had received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such a cause.”

Most of the other senses in the OED entry for the verb “addict” are now archaic, rare, or obsolete.

Today, of course, the verb usually means to be hooked (or to hook someone else) on a habit-forming drug or other compulsion—like video games, politics, or fries.

The noun “addict,” by the way, didn’t appear until the late 19th century. Here’s the first citation in the OED, from an 1899 issue of the Illinois Medical Journal:

“Indulgers in stimulating food, gluttonous feeders, tea and coffee addicts, are much more prone to beget degenerate and inebriate offspring than are the moderate users of alcohol with generally temperate habits.”

Yikes!

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

A do or a don’t

Q: My wife and I run a cheese shop where we make sandwiches to order. Lately, people come in to order a sandwich and say, “I’ll do a ham and cheese.” I don’t care to know if our customers are going to do something besides eat the sandwich. I think this is poor manners in ordering. I’d like to know what you think.

A: We too have overheard this usage, mostly in delis and other takeout places, though occasionally in sit-down restaurants as well.

It’s certainly casual, but we wouldn’t call it ill-mannered. Then again, we don’t have to listen to it all day, unlike you and your wife!

The verb “do” has been around for more than a thousand years, and this usage seems to be a variation on a theme.

People have been using “do” to mean consume (as in “do a couple of pints” or “do a burger”) since the mid-19th century.

The three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang has examples dating from 1862 and the Oxford English Dictionary from 1867.

Here’s the OED’s first citation, from James S. Borlase’s story collection The Night Fossikers: “I asked him to come to Poole’s shanty and do a chop and a nobbler [a drink] with me.”

Here’s a more modern-sounding example, from a 1987 issue of the Sunday Telegraph: “An invitation to lunch might be pitched as, ‘Come on, let’s do sushi,’ or ‘We have to do some Korean.’ ”

“Do” can also mean to habitually eat or drink something, as in “You still, ah, do coffee?” (from William Deverell’s novel Mindfield, 1989), or “Ellis doesn’t do alcohol any longer” (from the Denver Post, 1994).

I’m surprised you didn’t say that you and your wife “do” sandwiches at your shop, since that use of “do” has been around for a while, too.

In this case, the OED says, “do” means “to provide or offer (esp. meals) commercially.” Oxford gives two citations for this colloquial usage:

“[Farmers’] wives are encouraged to take visitors and ‘do teas’ ” (from the Observer, 1966), and “The Marina doesn’t do meals other than breakfast” (from William John Burley’s novel To Kill a Cat, 1970).

Then there’s the ubiquitous “let’s do lunch,” which has been around since the 1970s.

The OED describes “to do lunch (also dinner, etc.)” this way: “to meet for the specified meal, esp. with a view to conducting business.”

Here’s Oxford’s first citation, from Richard Price’s novel Ladies’ Man (1978): “I was gonna do lunch; you wanna do lunch?”

And here’s a later one, from Nelson DeMille’s novel The Gold Coast (1990): “This is better than doing dinner or some beastly Easter thing with lamb parts and a house full of paesanos.”

Over the centuries, the verb “do” has had scores of food-related meanings, most of them slang or colloquial—that is, more representative of common speech than formal English.

The one you mention is slightly different from the others discussed here.

At a take-out shop, “I’ll do a ham and cheese” is just another way of saying “I’ll order …” or “I’ll have …” or “I’d like a ham and cheese sandwich.”

For an ancient and endlessly versatile verb like “do,” it’s all in a day’s work.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

What have we wrought?

Q: My dictionary says “wrought havoc” is an acceptable variant of “wreaked havoc.” But it adds that “wrought” is a past tense of “work,” not “wreak.” It seems to me that the only reason the “wrought” variant has come into common usage is that it sounds like the past tense of “wreak.” After all, no one says “work havoc.”

A: Actually, quite a few people say “work havoc,” though a lot more prefer “wreak havoc.”

In fact, both expressions have been around since at least the late 19th century, according to Google Timeline searches.

A Dec. 17, 1894, report by the House Committee on Banking and Currency, for example, comments on how easy it is for speculators to “work havoc in the market by withdrawing gold for shipment.”

And a Dec. 5, 1898, article in the New York Times has this headline about a fire that wrecked an insurance company’s offices in Manhattan: “Flames Wreak Havoc in the Home Life Building.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the verbs “work” and “wreak” in the two expressions mean pretty much the same thing: to cause or to effect something, to bring it about.

Published references in the OED suggest that the “work” version may have been more popular in the early days.

The dictionary has five citations for each expression, but the “work” examples begin much earlier than the “wreak” ones.

Although both expressions have a history, “wreak havoc” is much more popular today, with nearly 4.8 million hits on Google compared to somewhat more than 33,000 for “work havoc.”

As for the past tenses, “wreaked havoc” gets more than a million hits versus only 198,000 for “wrought havoc” and a mere 12,000 for “worked havoc.”

(The OED notes that many people assume “wrought” here is the past tense of “wreak,” rather than “work.”)

“Wrought” was the original past tense and past participle of “work.” As the OED explains, “worked” didn’t become established until the 15th century but is now the normal form.

However, “wrought” is still used in some “senses which denote fashioning, shaping, or decorating with the hand or an implement,” Oxford says.

As for their etymologies, “work” and “wreak” aren’t directly related, though both have origins in old Germanic languages.

By the way, we had a blog item a few years ago about the “havoc” part of “wreak havoc.”

In the earlier posting, we also discuss “wreck havoc” (a common misuse) as well as confusion over “rack” and “wrack.”

 Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

As far as we’re concerned

Q: What do you make of this sentence: “The chapter is concerned to trace the trajectory of the process”? The author seems to be using “is concerned” in the sense of “intends,” but none of the dictionaries I’ve consulted has this meaning.

A: This is a new one on us, though people have written to complain about the use of “concerning” as an adjective meaning “of growing concern” (as in “The high water levels are concerning”).

In a posting on the blog a few years ago, we said “concerning” isn’t normally used this way as an adjective meaning “worrying” or “alarming.”

But “concerned” (as an adjective or a verb), can mean the same as “worried” or “alarmed.”

And “concerned” has another meaning as well—“involved” or “having an interest.”

No matter how “concerned” is used—whether to mean anxious or merely involved—it can be used with or without a preposition.

Here are preposition-free examples:

“We were extremely concerned” … “The concerned parties were gathered” … “The meeting concerned campaign strategy.”

And here are examples with prepositions:

“We aren’t concerned in the matter” … “He’s concerned with accounting but not with budgeting” … “Mom and dad are concerned about you” … “The doctor isn’t concerned by the lump.”

But what about “to,” the preposition in the sentence you’ve ask about?

When “concerned” means troubled, it’s often followed by “to” plus an infinitive.

Examples: “The doctor wasn’t concerned to find a lump” … “I was concerned to hear you were ill” … “We were concerned to learn you’d been fired.”

However, the “to”-plus-infinitive construction is less common when “concerned” has to do simply with involvement—having a responsibility or obligation to do something, having it as one’s business, or caring about it.

The Oxford English Dictionary has many examples of this less common usage, but most of them are centuries old. We’ll give a few and insert the meaning in brackets.

1652: “Princes are concerned [obligated] to bee warie and careful” (from a translation of Marchamont Nedham’s Of the Dominion or Ownership of the Sea).

1659: “That gentleman will be concerned [make it his business] to name them in a fitter season” (from Thomas Burton’s Diary).

1735: “I shall think myself concern’d [responsible] to pursue my Thoughts upon this Subject” (from John Price’s Some Considerations … for Building a Stone-bridge Over the River Thames).

1876: “I am not concerned [don’t care] to tell of the food that was eaten in that green refectory” (from George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda).

In modern English, we don’t see this usage much. And there’s a good reason—it’s sometimes ambiguous.

Take the sentence “The doctor wasn’t concerned to find a lump.”

Most of us would interpret this as meaning the doctor wasn’t worried. But a 17th-century interpretation could mean the doctor didn’t make it his business to look for a lump.

If there’s no worrying involved, as in the example you cite, modern writers would avoid using “concerned” plus “to” plus an infinitive.

We’d rewrite the sentence using “with” as the preposition: “The chapter is concerned with tracing the trajectory of the process.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
English language Grammar Linguistics Usage

Is it racist to “stereotype” a language?

Q: Some friends called me a racist for saying, “Hebrew looks like a horizontal line with squiggly writing across it.” And other friends were offended when I said, “English is insane, given its bizarre and sometimes arbitrary rules.” Am I insensitive for “stereotyping” these languages? Don’t be afraid to tell me I’m wrong.

A: No, we don’t think it was insensitive of you to describe Hebrew and English the way you did. It may have been wrongheaded, but not insensitive! You were describing languages, not people.

Your description of Hebrew (we assume you’re referring to script) would apply to handwriting in just about any unfamiliar language: Arabic, Swahili, Vietnamese, even English, though some languages can be written vertically.

As for your comment about English, we don’t think it was poor form, but we disagree with you that the rules of English are “bizarre and sometimes arbitrary.”

In fact, the rules of English are quite sensible, and stretchy when a little flexibility is required.

If a “rule” doesn’t make sense or puts you in a straitjacket, it’s probably not a rule at all.

The prohibition against “splitting” an infinitive, for example, is a perfect example of a bogus rule.

Two other phony no-noes: beginning a sentence with a conjunction and ending one with a preposition.

If any readers of the blog disagree with us about these “rules,” take a moment to look at the Grammar Myths page on Grammarphobia.com.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Hats off to the bowler

Q: The French word for bowler (the hat) is melon, which also means what you’d think it does in France. I assume that English speakers similarly call the hat a “bowler” because it resembles an upside-down bowl?

A: The French aren’t the only ones to name the hat for a round object. In Dutch, it’s bolhoed (globe hat), in Spanish hongo (mushroom), in German melone, and in Italian bombetta (little bomb—think of a cartoon bomb).

It may seem logical, therefore, that the English word comes from “bowl,” and many people make that assumption, but there’s another kind of logic at work here.

The bowler was created in 1850 for William Coke II, later the earl of Leicester, who wanted a snug hat with a hard, rounded crown to protect his gamekeepers from branches as they rode on horseback.

His purveyors of headgear, James and George Lock of No. 6 St. James’s Street, London, designed the hat and had it produced by their chief suppliers, Thomas and William Bowler of Southwark.

The hat took its name from the Bowler label inside and not from its bowl-like shape.

The bowler has also been called a “derby,” especially in the United States, apparently because of its association with horseback riding and races, or “derbies.”

(Americans say DUR-bee, by the way, and the British say DAR-bee.)

The original Derby, run in 1780 at Epsom Downs in Surrey, was named after Edward Stanley, 12th earl of Derby.

He had earned the right to name the race by winning a coin toss with Sir Charles Bunbury, but Sir Charles got the last laugh when his horse Diomed won.

We’ve written in more detail about the bowler in Origins of the Specious, our book about English myths and misconceptions.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Was the Joplin tornado surreal?

Q: I’m disappointed that “surreal” has become the adjective of choice for disasters. Example: “The Joplin tornado was surreal.” Argh! I can’t stand the loss of what was once a beautiful, subtle word for the dreamlike worlds of Jung and Dali.

A: You’re right that the word “surreal” got a real workout last month as people struggled for words to describe the death and destruction in Joplin, Missouri.

And, yes, the word was probably overused (we got more than 1.2 million hits when we googled “surreal” and “Joplin”), but we don’t think it was necessarily misused.

The adjective “surreal” broke away from its artistic and psychoanalytic roots quite a few decades ago. It has long been a favorite of newspaper headline writers looking for a way of describing something weird, unreal, incongruous, etc.

A 1970 headline in the New York Times, for example, used it to describe Vice President Spiro Agnew’s efforts to support Republican candidates for Congress: “For Agnew, a Surreal Campaign.”

A 1972 headline in the Los Angeles Times used the term to describe the presentation of fashion awards: “Surreal Theatrics at Coty Ceremony.”

And a 1982 headline in the Montreal Gazette used it to describe an interview with the Libyan leader: “Khadafi gives ‘surreal’ interview.”

More in line with the usage that bugs you, here’s a headline from the San Jose Mercury about a 1985 earthquake in Mexico: “WITNESSES DESCRIBE SURREAL, SPECTACULAR SCENE.”

We had a blog item a couple of years ago when a reader complained about the use of “surrealistic” for “surreal.”

Both words are 1930s offshoots of two earlier ones, the noun “surrealism” (1917) and the adjective “surrealist” (1918), coined by the French painter Guillaume Apollinaire (originally as surréalisme and surréaliste).

The French words were immediately absorbed into English, where “surrealist” became a noun (meaning an adherent of surrealism) as well as an adjective.

Surrealism refers to works of art, literature, film, or theater that seek to express the world of the subconscious mind by using techniques like juxtaposing realistic images in an irrational way.

As the poet André Breton explained in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), the aim was to transmute “those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak.”

These days, as you’ve observed, “surrealism” and company are used both inside and outside the worlds of art, literature, film, and so on.

In everyday language, both “surreal” and “surrealistic” can simply mean dreamlike, unreal, strange, and so on. In our opinion, though, they’re a bit overused.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

Advocacy English

Q: Do you “advocate” something? Or do you “advocate for” something?

A: If you rally round a cause, you “advocate” it; you don’t “advocate for” it (“He advocates universal free health care”).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says the verb means to “speak, plead, or argue in favor of” something.

So a prepositional sense (“in favor of”) is part of the verb and no additional preposition or prepositional phrase is necessary.

However, “advocate” is also a noun meaning a supporter or defender (“He is an advocate of universal free health care”).

Although the verb shouldn’t be followed by a preposition (like “for”)  or a prepositional phrase (like “in favor of”), the noun is another matter.

It can stand alone (“She is an advocate”) and it can be followed by a prepositional phrase (“She’s an advocate of free school lunches” … “He’s an advocate for the underprivileged”).

Perhaps that last usage (to be an “advocate for” something) leads people to use “advocate for” as a verb phrase.

But using “advocate” as part of a verb phrase (as in “We advocate for cheaper prescription drugs”) isn’t considered standard usage.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “Advocate the verb is used almost entirely as a transitive verb and usually takes no preposition at all.” (A transitive verb is one that needs a direct object to make sense.)

The noun “advocate” (pronounced AD-vuh-kut) was first recorded in English in the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It came into the language from the Old French avocat, which in turn came from the Latin advocatus. The Latin meaning was “one summoned or ‘called to’ another, especially one called in to aid one’s cause in a court of justice,” the OED explains.

In 14th-century England, the noun “advocate” had both a legal meaning (one who pleads in court) and a more figurative or general sense: “one who pleads, intercedes, or speaks for, or in behalf of, another; a pleader, intercessor, defender.”

The verb in its modern sense (pronounced AD-vuh-kate) came much later, in the mid-1700s, the OED says. And Benjamin Franklin, for one, didn’t like it.

In a 1789 letter to Noah Webster, Franklin complained about several new words, including the use of “advocate” as a verb.

“If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these innovations,” Franklin said, “you will use your authority in reprobating them.”

Webster apparently felt differently. In An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), he described the verb as transitive, with the meaning “to plead in favor of; to defend by argument, before a tribunal; to support or vindicate.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

For “instance”

Q: I read your post on “incident” vs. “incidence,” and it made me curious about whether “instance” is related? All three words seem to have a lot in common.

A: Like “incident” and “incidence,” the word “instance” was borrowed from French and ultimately comes from Latin.  But “instance” is derived from a different Latin root. Here’s the story.

When “instance” first showed up in English in the 14th century, it referred to urgent pressure exerted in trying to get someone to do something.

That’s understandable, since the French instance then meant, among other things, eagerness, anxiety, and solicitation, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s first citation for this sense of the word (circa 1340) is from a Middle English treatise by the religious writer Richard Rolle: “At the prayere and instaunce of other.” (The “th” in “the” and “other” was represented by a runic letter called a thorn.)

Although this urgent sense of the word is now considered obsolete, we do have a similar sense: instigation, urging, or request. Example: “I’m writing you at the instance of my client.”

Over the years, “instance” has taken on a lot of other meanings: an occurrence, a fact used to make a point, the present time, and so on.

The word “instance” is ultimately derived from the Latin instantia (presence or urgency), while “incident” and “incidence” come from the Latin incidere (to fall into, fall upon, happen).

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Linguistics Usage

Does the prefix “re-” have a dark side?

Q: Why do so many negative words begin with the prefix “re-”? For example: “reprehensible,” “reprove,” “reproach”?

A: Is there something evil lurking in the heart of the prefix “-re”? No, not really. And it doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning from word to word.

In Latin, the original sense of “re-” was “back” or “backwards,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But in English, the OED adds, “in the large number of words in which it occurs it shows various shades of meaning.”

Here are those various senses, and you’ll notice some overlapping.

(1) Back from a point reached, or back to or towards a starting point. This meaning can be seen in “reproach” which in Anglo-Norman meant “to recall (something disagreeable to someone),” the OED says.

This sense is also in “reflect,” “reduce,” “recede,” “recur,” “refer,” “resilient,” “reluctant,” “refuge,” “retract,” “revoke,” “recall,” “resonate,” “repel,” “recuse,” “rescind,” “remove,” “respect” (literally, to look back), “remit” (to send back), and “reclaim.”

(2) Back to the original position. This sense is present in “restitution,” “receive,” “redeem,” and “resume.”

(3) Again or anew. This meaning is reflected in “recreate,” “renovate,” “reform,” “regenerate,” “retract,” and the many words that have to do with repetition (like “repeat,” “rearrange,” “reignite,” and many more).

(4) An undoing of some previous action (much like the negative prefix “un-”). Thus we have words like “resign,” “reveal,” “reprove” and “reprobate” (both of those last two are descended from the Latin reprobare, to reject or disapprove).

(5) Back in a place. This sense, the OED says, can be seen in words like “reprehend” (and “reprehensible”), “retain,” “relegate,” “refrain,” “reserve,” “remain,” “reside,” “relinquish,” and even “rest” (from the Latin restare).

As the OED points out, the meaning of “re-” isn’t always clearly defined, and in many cases new meanings have arisen and obscured the originals.

That’s only to be expected, because words with the “re-” prefix have been in English since the early 1200s. And words can undergo lots of changes in 800 years.

Some of the earliest “re-” prefixed words include “recluse” (adjective), “remission,” “recoil,” “record” (verb), “relic,” “relief,” “religion,” and “religious.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

When the subject is an object

Q: Pat writes in her grammar book Woe Is I that it’s OK to say “that’s him” and “that’s her” in all but the most formal writing. I don’t know how this could be true. The pronouns are nominative case. This means they should be “that’s he” and “that’s she.”

A: You’ve raised an issue that’s been argued among English grammarians for the last 250 years.

The question: After the use of the verb “be,” should a subject or an object pronoun be used?

In other words, must we always say, “It is he”? Or is “It is him” just as good?

The thinking among modern grammarians and writers on usage is that a subject pronoun (“That is he,” “This is I,” etc.) is appropriate in formal English.

But an object, these language writers say, is fine in informal English (“That’s him,” “This is me”).

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has an excellent discussion of this in its entry for “it’s me.”

“The venerable argument over the nominative versus the objective case after the verb to be is a memorable part of our linguistic heritage,” M-W says.

The arguing began in the 1760s, with the two great warring camps led by Robert Lowth (nominative) versus Joseph Priestly (objective).

The remnants of those 18th-century arguments are still with us. But today “the grounds have been shifted,” as M-W puts it.

Now the difference between the two camps is no longer one of correct versus incorrect or standard versus nonstandard, but of “formal versus colloquial styles.”

“So instead of the old choice between right and wrong,” M-W explains, “we are now choosing a style; it is a choice that is much closer to the reality of usage than the old one was.”

It’s also worth mentioning that this “nominative-after-be” rule is a convention of Latin grammar, a convention the isn’t even observed by all Latinate languages (witness c’est moi).

And why should English be expected to adhere to a convention of Latin grammar? After all, English is not Latinate but Germanic.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

How “sooner” came to mean “rather”

Q: I used “sooner” in the sense of “rather” the other day, and it suddenly struck me as an odd choice of words. Is this meaning somehow related to the phrase “sooner rather than later”? Any insight into the origin of this usage will be gratefully received.

A: Why, you ask, do we use the word “sooner” in a sentence like “Elizabeth would sooner be an old maid than marry Mr. Collins”?

Let’s begin with the adverb “soon,” which entered English around 825 with the same principal meaning that it has now: in a short time, before long, quickly.

The word, spelled sona in Old English, was related to similar words in Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German, and other Germanic languages, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The comparative form “sooner” showed up in the early 13th century in the sense of “within a shorter time; more quickly; with less delay; at an earlier time or date.”

At about the same time, the OED says, “sooner” (chiefly in the phrase “sooner than”) took on the sense of “more readily or easily.”

Eventually, in the mid-15th century, this meaning gave us the one that struck you as odd: “More readily as a matter of choice; preferably, rather.”

Here’s an example from Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749): “I wou’d sooner swopp her to a Tobacco plantation.”

And here’s one from Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her? (1864): “I’d sooner it should be you than me; that’s all I can say.”

We don’t see any connection between this sense of “sooner” and the temporal expression “sooner rather than later,” which apparently arrived on the scene a lot later.

The earliest example of the expression in a recent Google search is from the April 2, 1869, issue of a Scottish newspaper, the Glasgow Herald:

“The man who has only himself to please finds soon or late, and probably sooner rather than later, that he has got a very hard master.”

The expression “sooner or later” (meaning at some time or other) is much older, dating from the 16th century, according to published references in the OED.

The earliest citation is from a 1577 translation of a Latin book on farming: “The stones, stickes, and suche baggage … are to be throwen out sooner or later.”  

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Probability theory

Q: I have been busy writing a requiem for an old, well-used word: “probably.” Its three syllables have been reduced to two, “prolly” or “probly,” by practically everyone, including my grandchildren, most of whom have had obscene amounts of money spent on them at top-notch universities. RIP, “probably.”

A: You’re not the first person to worry about the fate of “probably.” Just stick “prolly” and “probly” in your search engine—and stand back!

However, the demise of “probably” is much exaggerated, so don’t count it out just yet.

When they write, most people give “probably” its full complement of syllables and letters. In speech, though, it sometimes gets shortchanged, and comes out sounding like “probly” or “prolly.”

But in all probability, its full spelling will remain the standard. A quick Google search of the various spellings shows “probably” is far and away the winner and still champion.

As you might suspect, the adverb “probably” was formed from the adjective “probable.” It was first recorded in writing in the mid-1400s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1600, “probably” was first used as a sentence adverb—that is, one modifying an entire statement rather than an individual verb—and that’s the way it’s normally used today.

The OED does have an entry for “prolly,” which it says represents “a colloquial pronunciation” of the adverb “probably.” By “colloquial,” the OED means more likely to be encountered in common speech than in formal English.

Of course, writers have used “prolly” now and then to quote people, fictional or real, who pronounce the word that way.

The OED’s first citation for “prolly” is from H. G. Wells’s novel Christina Alberta’s Father (1925): “Prolly thiswe sitting on my beawawd.” And what that means we cannot tell you.

Now for a more intelligible citation, with “prolly” representing a dialectal pronunciation.

This is from a mystery by the British crime novelist Kenneth Giles, Death Cracks a Bottle (1969): “I don’t know wot ’appen to it. The mice prolly.”

Our advice: don’t worry  about “probably.” It’s more than probably here to stay.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

We not know

Q: In your posting about why “you not know” is ungrammatical, you say “not” always follows a verb in a negative statement. Not that I care, but is this always the case?

A: You have a very good eye! We should have said it generally follows the verb, and we’ve changed the post to read as such.

When “not” serves to negate a verb, it usually comes afterward, but it can come first in the following cases:

(1) in infinitive phrases (“I asked the children to not shout, not throw food, and not hit each other”);

(2) in gerund phrases (“Not graduating was a big mistake”);

(3) in participial phrases (“Not knowing his strength, he broke the axe” … “She has lovely hands, not spoiled by gardening”).

In addition to modifying verbs, “not” can modify other elements—a word, a phrase, a clause, or an entire sentence—and it can precede them.

We’ll supply a few examples:

“Not until I’d seen him did I realize he was coming” … “You can have dessert, but not till you finish your peas” … “Not once did he offer to pay” … “Not everybody likes him” … “Elizabeth refused Mr. Collins, not unkindly.”

As we all know, “not” can introduce a sentence fragment or a sentence whose verb is understood: “Not bad!” … “Not I!” … “Not now, thanks” … “Not on your life!”

And finally, as you say, “not” is used at the head of introductory phrases like “not that,” “not but that,” “not but what,” and so on. Such phrases date back to the late 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s a familiar example, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (written in the late 1500s or early 1600s): “Not that I lov’d Cæsar lesse, but that I lov’d Rome more.”

And this example is from Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766): “Not but that we sometimes had those little rubs.”

Not that this covers every possible contingency, but we think we’ve hit the highlights. Meanwhile, thanks for keeping us on our toes, not that we need it.*

*Actually, we DO need it! We appreciate your comment.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Here’s to the graduate!

Q: We often hear someone raise a glass of champagne and say, “Here’s to the newlyweds” or “Here’s to the graduate” or “Here’s to victory.” But exactly what does “here” mean here?

A: “Here’s to” has been a common way of introducing a toast since at least the late 16th century, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s short for “here’s a health to.” A “health,” the OED says, is a “salutation or wish expressed for a person’s welfare or prosperity.” In other words, a toast.

The dictionary says the “here’s” formula is echoed in other drinking expressions like “here’s looking at you,” “here’s luck,” “here’s hoping,” and “here’s how.”

The dictionary’s first “here’s to” citation is from none other than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597): “Here’s to my love!”

Jonathan Swift used it in his A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1653): “Come, Madam; here’s a Health to our Friends, and hang the rest of our Kin.”

And convivial types have been toasting each other with “Here’s to …” ever since.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

Is “safer”more safe than “safe”?

Q: My dictionary defines “safe” as meaning without risk or danger, but it includes the comparative “safer” and the superlative “safest.” If there’s no risk or danger when one is safe, how does one get safer?

A: You’re right that “safe,” in this sense, means free from harm or risk or danger. And if one is truly safe, of course, one can’t be any safer.

But “safer” doesn’t mean safer than “safe.” And “safest” isn’t necessarily safe at all.

“Safer” simply means more safe, and “safest” most safe.

One can be safer than someone else and still be in danger. And the safest of three people may be in a lion’s den, though not in its mouth.

During a tornado, for example, someone in an interior room of a house is safer than someone in a car. And someone in a basement shelter is safest of the three. But none of them are truly safe!

Similarly, the term “safe sex” refers to sexual activity in which safeguards are taken to reduce the chance of getting or spreading disease.

But some people prefer the term “safer sex” to emphasize that the risks are reduced but not eliminated. In this case, “safer” suggests sexual activity that’s less safe than “safe.”

When the adjective “safe” (originally spelled “sauf”) entered English in the late 13th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it meant free from harm or damage.

English borrowed the word from French, but its roots are in the Latin salvus (uninjured or entire).

The adjective “safe” took on the sense you’re asking about (free from danger) in the late 14th century, according to citations in the OED.

Here’s a late 16th-century example from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew: “Whil’st thou ly’st warme at home, secure and safe.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Punctuation Usage

An inner-office memo?

Q: I recently came across a person who uses “inner-office mail” as opposed to “inter-office mail.” When I questioned her usage, she informed me that many colleges use “inner” instead of “inter,” and that both are acceptable. Can you please shed some light?

A: A bit of googling reveals that it’s not uncommon to see such things online as “inner-office mail,” “inner office dating,” and “inner office relationships.” But Google helpfully (and correctly in these cases) suggests: “Did you mean: ‘interoffice.’ ”

Our cursory searching did indeed find quite a few examples of the misuse on academic websites. We won’t embarrass the colleges and universities by mentioning them, but they might consider sending around an interoffice memo on the subject.

“Inter” and “inner” mean different things. “Inter” means between or among. But “inner” (or “intra,” which is the more common prefix) means something quite the contrary: within.

That’s why “interstate” commerce is business conducted between states or across state lines, while “intrastate” (not “inner-state”) commerce is confined to a single state.

In a corporate or academic setting, an “interoffice” memo would be one between or among offices. An “intra-office” memo would be one sent around within the same office.

An “inner-office” memo could refer to one sent around within the same office, but “intra” is generally used in such compounds to mean within.

Besides, the noun phrase “inner office” has a special meaning—the chief or primary office, or one located inside another.

So an “inner-office” memo (if such a phrase were used) might mean one sent from, or within, the boss’s inner office.

One more word, about hyphenation. Most adjectives formed with “inter” and “intra” don’t have hyphens (“intercollegiate,” “intravenous”).

Adjectives formed with “inner” are sometimes hyphenated (“inner-city,” “inner-directed”) and sometimes not (“innerspring,” “innermost”).

When in doubt, check your dictionary.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Pronunciation Usage

Talk radio: naturalness vs. clarity

Q: Most people don’t pronounce the “d” in “Raymond James.” Yet there’s an announcer on WNYC who makes sure to pronounce every letter. The result sounds awkward, as if there’s a little trip-up between the names. Is there a right way to pronounce this?

A: Normally, one wouldn’t separately articulate the “d” at the end of one name and the “j” at the beginning of the next. As you suggest, that would require a distinct separation of the names, which would created an audible bump.

In natural-sounding speech, these two letters would be somewhat elided, sounding like the “dg” in “fudge.” So the name would sound like “Raymon Djames.”

Similarly, in speaking a phrase like “broad jump,” one would normally elide the “d” and the “j” (as in BRAW-djump). Pronouncing each of those letters distinctly would require an exaggerated separation of the words, with a marked space in between.

When we speak normally, we don’t always insert a space between words, as we do when we write. Phrases are connected, even when we speak slowly.

Some abutting consonants simply don’t want to be pronounced separately. (A phonetician would give you a better explanation, having to do with tongue placement and so on.)

That radio announcer’s pronunciation wasn’t wrong, just a bit forced or unnatural. This isn’t a matter of correctness. Announcers don’t always use what most of us would consider natural speech. (How many Americans really say NYOOZE for “news”?)

In this case, naturalness was sacrificed for clarity, and that may not be a bad thing. No doubt the intention was to make the name as clear as possible. And in that, the announcer certainly succeeded.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Is our posting toast?

Q: I have a question about your posting that Bill Murray introduced the expression “you’re toast” in Ghostbusters (one of my favorite films). It’s not for me to dispute your source, but I wonder how thorough the OED is in its monitoring of American slang. I’m certain I heard the phrase long before the 1984 movie.

A: We said in our posting that Bill Murray is responsible for phrases like “you’re toast,” but what he actually said in the film was “All right, this chick is toast.”

Never mind. You make a good point. From the available evidence, we have Murray to thank for the usage. But with the digitalization of almost everything, earlier examples may eventually come to light.

And now that the Oxford English Dictionary is online and constantly updated, we’re sure that it will be on the case.

The lexicographers at the OED do indeed monitor American slang, though in the early days slang in general wasn’t given nearly the attention—or respect—that it now enjoys at the dictionary.

Of course not all slang locutions make it into the OED, only those that its lexicographers think are likely to last.

Slang dictionaries are another matter. The lexicographers who compile them watch street language very closely, and they record even passing obscurities. Permanence isn’t an issue.

We checked the huge three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang (which only recently came out) and here’s what we found.

The adjective “toast,” meaning “facing serious problems; esp. in phr. you’re toast,” is credited to the film script of Ghostbusters by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

This we know to be untrue. As we say in our posting, the phrase wasn’t in the script as written by Aykroyd and Ramis. Green’s should have credited Bill Murray’s ad-lib during the filming (which the OED does).

Green’s also credits the journal Campus Slang, edited by Connie Able, as reporting that the phrase showed up on college campuses in 1986—two years after the film.

We did several searches in the Google and NewsBank archives, but the earliest examples we found of “you’re toast” used in this sense were from 1987.

One more comment. Green’s is full of other, different slang uses of “toast.”

In 1984, for example, Campus Slang reported that the phrase “bad as toast” meant amazingly good or shocking. And as far back as 1971 “toast” was used adjectivally to mean excellent.

What’s more, a reader has written to us to point out that T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958) has an even earlier reference: “ ‘You run a grave risk, my boy,’ said the magician, ‘of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.’ ”

But those are worlds away from the meaning we’re talking about.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

“Look” in its quasi mode

Q: In my dictionary, “look” is listed as an intransitive verb. How then would you explain the following sentences? “He looked me in the eye.” (Isn’t “me” an object?) “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.” (Same question for “a gift horse.”)

A: “Look” is indeed an intransitive verb—most of the time. By “intransitive” we mean it doesn’t require an object. Examples: “Don’t look now” … “Look before you leap” … “Try to look interested.” 

But in statements like “look me in the eye,” “look a gift horse in the mouth,” “look death in the face,” “look the part,” and “look one’s age,” the verb is what the Oxford English Dictionary calls quasi-transitive.

“Look” is fully transitive (no quasi-ness here) when it means “to quell or overcome by one’s looks,” the OED says. An example: “When the bully confronted me, I looked him down.”

And it’s also transitive when it means “to cast one’s eyes over; to scrutinize; to examine (papers, or the like),” says Oxford. Example: “Please look the manuscript over.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Usage

Equal treatment

Q: Please forgive this ignorant foreigner’s frustration with the intricacies of your bewildering American English. I don’t understand why people say things like “Our federal debt is equally as bad as our federal deficit.” Isn’t “equally as” overkill?

A: Yes, we think it is, and many usage authorities agree with us.

Henry Fowler, in the original 1926 edition of Modern English Usage, says the use of “equally as” instead of “equally” or “as” by itself “is an illiterate tautology.”

R. W. Burchfield, in the 2004 revised third edition of the usage guide, quotes Fowler’s original comment and says “the echoes of his condemnation rumble on.”

If we were writing that sentence about the debt and the deficit, we’d use “as bad as” or “equally bad as” or (for more emphasis) “just as bad as,” “quite as bad as,” or “every bit as bad as.”

To be fair, though, we should mention that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage considers “equally as” an acceptable idiomatic way of adding emphasis.

“Equally as is certainly not ‘illiterate,’ and its redundancy is more apparent than real,” M-W says. “We would describe it as an idiomatic phrase that is equivalent to just as and that is widely regarded as redundant.”

In the end, though, the usage guide suggests that writers avoid using “equally as” because of the phrase’s bad reputation among language commentators:

“This innocuous phrase has drawn more vehement criticism than is warranted, but you may well want to prefer just as in your writing or to use equally by itself for emphasis where your construction permits it.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

What’s up in headlinese?

Q: A recent headline in the Jersey Journal: Gunfire erupts in Jersey City after exchange of “What ups?” My question: What’s up here?

A: We’re not surprised that the headline caught your attention!

This might have been a better headline: Gunfire erupts in Jersey City after exchange of “What’s up?” Or maybe this: Gunfire erupts in Jersey City after “What’s up?” exchange.

There’s always a way!

(Like you, we didn’t put the headline within quotes so we wouldn’t have a pileup of quotation marks at the end.)

For the rest of our readers, here’s the key part of the story, courtesy of nj.com:

“The 19-year-old victim said he was walking east on Wegman Parkway near Ocean Avenue shortly after midnight when he was approached by two men wearing hoodies, according to police.

“The two men said, ‘What’s up?’ to the man, who responded with, ‘What’s up?’ police said.

“When the victim was about 20 feet away from the two men, the taller of the two suspects started shooting at him with a handgun, hitting him once in the left calf, according to police.”

Granted, each of the parties—the victim and the shooters—said, “What’s up?” But the headline writer made a mess by trying to pluralize the quotation.

There’s no correct way to do this, though. Or, rather, the “correct” way would be a monstrosity like “What’s up?”s. See what we mean?

But don’t be too hard on the headline writer. We’ve been in the newspaper business, and these things happen.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

Movie ad-libs: New and improv

Q: In Pat’s May 11 discussion on WNYC of movie ad-libs, she said the lines “I’m walkin’ here!” and “You talkin’ to me?” were improvised. They may not have been scripted, but they weren’t “improvised.” They’re everyday street talk in WNYC.

A: By “improvised,” Pat meant unscripted—in other words, lines that either deviated from the script or that actors were directed to supply on the spot, impromptu.

This is a legitimate use of the verb “improvise,” which the Oxford English Dictionary says can mean “to utter or perform extempore.”

An improvised or ad-libbed line is one supplied by the actor on the spot. It’s not necessarily original and never-before heard.

An ad-lib CAN be original, though, as with Bill Murray’s line in Ghostbusters (1984): “All right, this chick is toast.”

That line was not only improvised (that is, it deviated from the script), but was the first recorded example of this usage, according to the OED.

As we wrote on the blog last month, what Murray apparently invented was the use of a form of the verb “be” + “toast”—as in “I’m toast,” “you’re toast,” and so on.

This has come to be a common expression when stated in a proleptic way (that is, said of something before the fact), and it apparently originated with Bill Murray’s ad-lib.

Another ad-libbed line that Pat mentioned on the Leonard Lopate Show seems to have been original too. It’s Roy Scheider’s remark in Jaws (1980): “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

As one WNYC listener called in to say, Scheider’s expression has become a popular catch-phrase (sometimes as “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”) for people who find themselves in over their heads.

However, most of the ad-libs that came up during the show were not original material. Two, in fact, were deliberate allusions to earlier sources.

For example, there’s Jack Nicholson’s unscripted line in The Shining (1980): “Heeere’s Johnny!”

Nicholson improvised the line on the spot, but it wasn’t original. It was a deliberate allusion to Ed McMahon’s nightly introductions of Johnny Carson.

Another example is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991): “I need a vacation.”

It was a deviation from the script, done on the spot as a joke. It was a line Schwarzenegger had delivered the year before in Kindergarten Cop.

Then there’s the “You talkin’ to me?” speech ad-libbed by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976). As De Niro himself has said, the line, though improvised, wasn’t original with him.

Various sources have said he got it from a stage line delivered by either Bruce Springsteen or a stand-up comic. But, as you say, it was probably popular street talk long before that.

And we agree with you that pedestrians had probably said “I’m walkin’ here!” in self-defense long before Dustin Hoffman used the line in Midnight Cowboy (1969).

We can’t say for sure that it was Hoffman’s ad-lib, however, since Hoffman and the producer, Jerome Hellman, tell different stories.

There’s similar disagreement about a line that brought the house down in When Harry Met Sally (1989): “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Of course, actors have been ad-libbing since talkies were invented.

In the very first feature-length film with synchronized speech, The Jazz Singer (1927), Al Jolson says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

It’s the first speech in the movie. And while it was impromptu (that is, unscripted), he had used similar lines before on stage.

The term “ad-lib” comes from the Latin phrase ad libitum (at one’s pleasure). Originally used as an adverb, the full phrase first appeared in English in 1610 and the abbreviation in 1811.

Through the 19th century, the term in both long and short forms was often used in music, as the opposite of “obbligato” (that is, obligatory).

But it was used in general ways, too, as in “to marry wives ad libitum,” a line from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1848 novel Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings.

The use of “ad-lib” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, however, was a 20th-century American show-biz invention.

Here are a couple of early examples, courtesy of the OED:

“ ‘Easy money, friends,’ Miss Hoag would ad lib. to the line-up outside her railing” (from Fannie Hurst’s short-story collection Humoresque, 1919).

“ ‘Can the ad lib!’ which means, politely, ‘Will you be good enough to hush!’ ” (from a 1925 article in the journal American Speech about stage slang.)

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Grammar Usage

Purple prose, part 2

Q: I’m puzzled by your posting about the color purple. In the sentence “Jack painted his old jalopy purple,” I’d say “purple” is a noun, not an adjective.  Isn’t “purple” a noun in the sentence “Jack painted his old jalopy two different purples” (meaning two different shades of purple)? If it’s a noun there, why isn’t “purple” a noun in your posting?

A: In sentences like “Jack painted his old jalopy two different purples,” or “He painted it a purple that would knock your eyes out,” or “She turned two shades of purple,” the word for the color is a noun.

But it’s an adjective in “Jack painted his old jalopy purple.”

Here, “purple” is a predicate adjective, modifying “jalopy.” It’s analogous to the adjective “happy” in “He made Susan happy.” (The adjective modifies the noun “Susan.”)

There’s a temptation to label “purple” an adverb (modifying the verb “painted”), along the analogy of “He painted it quickly.”

There’s also a temptation to label “purple” a noun. But here’s a test. What possible noun could be substituted in that spot?

The only appropriate words are other adjectives of color (“green,” “blue,” “black,” etc.), or else adverbs/adverbial phrases (“quickly”/“in a hurry”).

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Punctuation Spelling

Vowel language

Q: The vowels are reversed in “fuel” and “feud,” but they’re pronounced the same. Is it because “fuel” comes from French and “feud” from Scottish? Is it that simple?

A: Your instinct is right, but it’s not that simple.

“Fuel” and “feud,” which have similar sounds that are spelled differently, do come from different branches of the family tree.

Ultimately, “fuel” comes from Latin and “feud” from old Germanic sources. But their ancestries apparently don’t account for the difference in their spellings.

Of the two words, “fuel” has the more straightforward history.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the precursor to “fuel” was the Anglo-Norman word fuaille, derived from the medieval Latin focalia. The ultimate source is the classical Latin focus (hearth, fire).

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, in the mediaeval Latin of France and England, focalia occurs frequently “in charters with reference to the obligation to furnish or the right to demand supplies of fuel.”

When the noun “fuel” came into English sometime before 1200, the Middle English spelling was fewaile, and the word was probably pronounced something like that.

Subsequent spellings, the OED says, included “fewall,” “fewel,” “fewell,” “fowayle,” “fowaly,” “fowel,” “fowell,” “fwaill,” “fuell,” “fuelle,” “feuel,” and finally “fuel.”

Why did the vowels end up as “ue” and their pronunciation as YOO?

Your guess is as good as ours, but you can see from the spellings above that the two vowels (or their sounds) seesawed a bit over the years.

By comparison, “feud” has a much more convoluted history.

Its probable ancestor is a prehistoric Germanic word reconstructed as faikhitho, which roughly means a state of “foe”-hood. The root of this same ancestor, faikh (hostility or enmity), gave us “foe.”

The word showed up in the early 14th century in Scottish English, where it was spelled “fede, feide, or something phonetically equivalent,” says the OED.

But the Scots didn’t get “feud” from Germanic sources, at least not directly. They borrowed it from the Old French fede or feide, which had been borrowed in turn from a word in Old High German, fehida.

In the 16th century, the word was adopted in England “with an unexplained change of form,” says the OED. The changes of spelling included “food,” “foode,” “feood,” “fuid,” “fewd,” and finally “feud.”

But don’t lose sight of the old “foe” connection. In the 17th century “the word was occasionally altered into foehood,” the OED says.

Now here’s the convoluted part.

That Old High German word that was borrowed by the French, fehida, had a cousin in Old English—fæthu (enmity), which apparently died out in Anglo-Saxon days.

Thus during the Middle English period the Scots had to re-borrow the word by the back door, as it were, by way of French.

As for the eventual spelling, Ayto comments, “It is not clear how the original Middle English form fede turned into modern English feud.”

It’s also not clear how the YOO pronunciation of the vowels in “feud” became the  dominant one.

So in the end we can’t account for the different spellings of the similar sounds of “fuel” and “feud.”

As we’ve said before (more or less), language isn’t Euclidean geometry.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology

Scandalous to the bitter end!

Q: I enjoyed your posting about “taken aback,” but I’m surprised that you didn’t mention two other usages with nautical origins: “scandalize” and “bitter end.”

A: We’re glad you enjoyed that posting, but we must disagree with you about “scandalize” and “bitter end.” There’s no evidence that their ordinary senses have seafaring origins.

It’s true that there’s a verb spelled “scandalize” that means (in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary) “to reduce the area of (a sail) by lowering the peak and tricing up the tack.”

We’ll take Oxford’s word for it, since that explanation is Greek to us! The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia defines it as “to trice up the tack of the spanker,” which sounds pretty scandalous to us.

Anyway, the nautical term, which isn’t in any of the modern standard dictionaries we checked, is no relation to the “scandalize” that means to shock someone.

In fact, the nautical word “scandalize” originated as a misspelling, an alteration of an earlier verb, “scantelize,” meaning to shorten or curtail.

In the 1500s, “scantle” (or “scantlet”) was a noun meaning a piece or portion of something. And the verb “scantle” meant to stint on, cut down, or diminish.

The etymology of “scantle” is a question mark (there’s no evidence that it’s related to the adjective “scant,” which comes from Old Norse).

But going back to the seafaring use of “scandalize,” it was first recorded in the 19th century. The OED has only two citations.

Here’s the first, from an 1862 book on yachting: “Keep your peak standing, or scandalise the mainsail.”

In the second, a contributor to the journal Notes & Queries in 1867 said that “scandalising a sail” was a phrase “in common use among Cornish sailors fully forty years ago.”

The original “scandalize,” on the other hand, dates back to 1490, when the OED says it meant “to bruit abroad, make a public scandal of (a discreditable secret).”

The modern meaning, “to horrify or shock by some supposed violation of morality or propriety,” was first recorded in 1676, according to citations in the OED.

So both meanings were recorded long before those 19th-century writers spelled the nautical “scantelize” as “scandalize.”

And now (you asked for it!), on to the “bitter end.”

In our opinion there’s no connection between the nautical meaning of the phrase and its more ordinary meaning in everyday usage. The similarity appears to be coincidental.

Let’s look at the expression first from the sailor’s point of view.

The posts that a ship’s cables are wrapped around, both on board ship and at the pier, are called “bitts,” a word first recorded in the early 1600s. Bitts generally come in pairs so the line can be wrapped around them in a figure-eight.

A “bitter” is a single turn of the line around the bitts. And the “bitter end” is the end of the line that’s attached to the ship.

The OED has this quotation from A Sea Grammar by Capt. John Smith (1627): “A Bitter is but the turne of a Cable about the Bits, and … the Bitters end is that part of the Cable doth stay within boord.”

And here’s a quotation from The Sailor’s Word-book, by William Henry Smyth (1867): “A ship is ‘brought up to a bitter’ when the cable is allowed to run out to that stop. … When a chain or rope is paid out to the bitter-end, no more remains to be let go.”

In its everyday sense, the phrase “to the bitter end” has a very different meaning: “to the last and direst extremity” or “to death itself,” in the words of the OED. And, it adds, the expression’s “history is doubtful.”

The OED’s two earliest citations for the phrase in this sense are from the mid-19th century. But in both cases, the writers enclosed the phrase in quotation marks as if they were quoting an earlier source.

Here are the two quotations, both from the Congressional Globe (precursor to the Congressional Record):

“I am unfortunately among those who voted for the gentleman from Indiana, even ‘to the bitter end’ ” (1849);

“Our defence is a just one, and will be maintained by us to the ‘bitter end’ ” (1850).

Why the quotation marks? It’s possible the reference was biblical. Here’s Proverbs 5:3-4 (King James Version, 1611):

“For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.”

The British wordsmith Michael Quinion has found several examples of “bitter end” in works from the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, all predating those OED examples.

And he notes on his website, World Wide Words, that many come from sermons and religious tracts, which suggests they were biblical allusions.

So our guess is that any connection between the two “bitter ends” is at best doubtful, and probably accidental.

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Pronunciation Spelling Usage

Puce abuse

Q: The word “puce” came up recently and everyone (with varying degrees of certainty) thought it was a shade of purple. But there was a lingering doubt in at least one mind that it might be a shade of green. A Google search turned up enough “puce green” references to suggest this is a common error. What’s the story?

A: “Puce” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a dark purple brown or brownish purple colour.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), has a similar, not very attractive-sounding definition: “a deep red to dark grayish purple.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) calls it “a dark red.”

Where do we stand on puce? We say it’s the color of an eggplant.

But you’re right that a bit of googling turns up lots of references to “puce green,” including many photos of objects in various shades of green (like a VW bus that’s lime green).

Where does this green business come from? Beats us.

A few people have speculated online about the supposed similarity of the words “puce,” “puke,” and “pus.” But we can’t find any reliable source that has commented on this heady issue.

By the way, the etymology of “puce” isn’t very enticing. Literally it means flea-colored.

In French, puce means “flea,” and the French expression couleur puce means “the colour resembling that of a flea,” the OED says.

We’ve never gotten close enough to a flea to determine its color. But apparently the French have, so we’ll take their word for it.

In the OED’s earliest citation for the word in English, it’s used as a noun.

Here’s the quotation, from Thomas Holcroft’s 1781 translation of the Comtesse de Genlis’s Theatre Education : “I love none but gay colours, I cannot endure the prune de Monsieur, and the puce.”

Oxford’s first recorded use of the adjective is from a 1787 account in the Daily Universal Register, as the Times of London was then known: “A broad embroidered border on puce sattin.”

The OED’s most recent citation for the word, used in a compound phrase, is from a 2005 issue of the British Cosmopolitan:

“Vibrators have been known to actually fly across the departure-lounge floor … only to be picked up by staff and returned to the puce-coloured proprietor.”

Aren’t you glad you asked?

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Grammar Usage

A gender-bending world view

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

Q: I’ve been told that it’s now acceptable to use “their” when referring to a single person (to avoid the awkwardness of “his/her” and the like). Example: “What beliefs does a student have embedded in their own world view?” Please tell me if this is correct.

A: In our world view, it’s best avoided. We’re not alone in this. Using the plural pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” in reference to singular antecedents is considered a misusage by sticklers.

However, this is a convention that is widely ignored, even by competent, educated writers. Why? Obviously, there’s a gap in English, and people feel the need for a pronoun that’s not only gender-free but number neutral as well.

With that in mind, it’s important to know that historically “they” & company were in fact used for centuries as all-purpose pronouns, and nobody made a fuss about it until the mid-18th century.

We had a posting on the blog a few years ago about this very subject.

More recently, we wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine that went much deeper into the history of all this.

The problem is usually easy enough to avoid. In a sentence like the one you give, for example, just write, “What beliefs do students have embedded in their own world views?”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Pronunciation Spelling Usage

Why do dictionaries accessorize the alphabet?

Q: Why aren’t the 26 unadorned letters of our alphabet enough for the people who write dictionaries? What bothers me is looking up a word and finding foreign accents or funny pronouncing squiggles. Of course, I’d like to have every dictionary bend to my will. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest!

A: Consider it off your chest! But we have to stick up for the dictionaries here.

In spelling words derived from foreign languages (mostly French), some dictionaries retain the accent marks and some do not, based on prevalent practices in common usage. Most of the time, alternative spellings are offered.

In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for instance, you’ll find “chateau, also château,” but later you’ll find “cliché, also cliche.”

The “also” means the second spelling is less common although both are correct. So the lexicographers at American Heritage think “cliché” is clinging to its accent (at least for now), but not “chateau.”

Over time, you can expect that most borrowings into English will become thoroughly Anglicized and lose their accent marks.

If you’d like a quick reference to the most frequently used accent (or “diacritical”) marks, we did a recent blog entry on the subject (go to the end of the post).

There are tables on the Internet that can show you how to type in accented letters on your PC or Mac. (Sometimes the fastest way to reproduce an accented word is to copy one from another document.)

As for the unusual-looking symbols that dictionaries use to give pronunciations of words, there’s a reason those are there, too.

The editors feel that these symbols provide a tidy, economical, and consistent system for advising readers how words are pronounced.

And it’s easy enough to tell how the symbols sound.

Just glance at the pronunciation key that appears in the lower-right corner of every right-hand page in American Heritage (or in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.).

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

“Eight Elvises” and “100 Soup Cans”

Q: If it’s “Victoriana,” is it “Warholiana”? Or is it “Warholana”?

A: Our vote goes to “Warholiana.” It’s the usual term for Andy Warhol memorabilia.

The suffixes “-ana” and “-iana,” when added to proper names, form nouns meaning things associated with the original word.

“Warholiana” is the choice here because “Warholian” is the commonly used adjective.

And when an adjective ends in “-ian” (like “Warholian”) the noun for the memorabilia merely adds an “a” (“Warholiana”).

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “-iana” is a form of the suffix “ana” that is “added to nouns whose adjectival suffix is, or would be, -ian.”

So a noun like “Africa,” with “African” as its adjective, has “Africana” as the word for things associated with it. We get “Americana” the same way.

But “Shakespeare,” with “Shakespearian” as its adjective, has “Shakespeariana.” Similarly, “Warhol” has the adjective “Warholian” and thus “Warholiana” for the stuff associated with him.

By the way, the memorable things associated with a person, place, or period aren’t necessarily physical items.

“Victoriana,” for instance, can mean artifacts or collectibles of the Victorian era. But it can also mean anecdotes, notable quotations, gossip, publications, fashions of the day, and so forth.

So, “Warholiana” might refer to Warhol’s paintings, prints, and films; gossip about Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, and the rest of his retinue; coffee mugs and T-shirts with his image, and things he collected—his cookie jars, Fiesta ware, World’s Fair souvenirs, and so on.

Here’s an example: “The ‘Warholiana’ in the exhibition included the silkscreen painting ‘Eight Elvises,’ the underground film ‘Poor Little Rich Girl,’ and an obituary of Andy’s brother, John Warhola, from the New York Times.”

Check out our books about the English language

Categories
Etymology Usage

When Pat was taken aback

Q: Pat was asked on WNYC about the origins of “taken aback” and she seemed taken aback. It’s an old sailing term. The sails are taken aback when the wind suddenly changes and blows them against the mast.

A: Several nautical listeners wrote us about “taken aback” after Pat’s appearance on the Leonard Lopate Show.

You’re correct in thinking that the expression began life as a nautical term. But before examining the history of the phrase, let’s begin at the beginning, with the word “aback.”

In its first incarnation, about a thousand years ago, “aback” was a simple adverb of motion.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it meant “in a direction backwards, to the rear, towards that which is behind,” or merely “back.”

It was also used figuratively, according to the OED, to mean “from the front, or scene of action, off, away, to a distance.”

The word was first recorded in the West Saxon Gospels (circa 1000), the earliest complete translation of the four Gospels into Old English.

The OED has two citations from the Gospels, with “aback” then written on bæc or on-bæc.

Since the Old English looks pretty bewildering, we’ll attempt a literal translation: “Go thou aback, devil!” (Matthew iv.10), and “Many of his learning-knights [i.e., disciples] turned aback, and went not with him” (John vi.66).

“Aback” became a nautical term in the 17th century, the OED says, when it was used to describe sails “laid back against the mast, with the wind bearing against their front surfaces.”

A ship with its sails in that condition was also described as “aback.”

Here are some examples from various nautical accounts:

“I braced my main topsails aback” (1697); “brace the foremost yards aback” (1762); “The Revenge was necessitated to throw her sails all aback” (1790); “We instantly hove all aback to diminish the violence of the shock” (1847).

It’s this use of “aback,” that led in the 18th century to the nautical term “taken aback.”

A ship is “taken aback,” the OED says, “when through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the masts, instantly staying the ship’s onward course.”

Here’s the OED’s first citation, from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1756): “If they luff up, they will be taken aback, and run the hazard of being dismasted.”

Before long, this evocative term for being stopped in one’s seafaring tracks made the leap from ship to shore.

Since the 19th century, the OED says, “to take aback” has meant “to surprise or discomfit by a sudden and unlooked-for check.”

Here are the first two citations for this sense:

“The boy, in sea phrase, was taken all aback” (from Thomas Hood’s Up the Rhine, 1840);

“I don’t think I was ever so taken aback in all my life” (from Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation, 1842).

Check out our books about the English language