Q: You say on the blog that the idiomatic use of “the” in “the half of it” isn’t acceptable in formal English. However, I’ve found this usage in the King James version of the Bible, where the Queen of Sheba tells Solomon: “Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.”

A: In our 2009 posting, we discussed many of the idiomatic uses of “the.” Among others, we talked about the expressions “the both of us” and “the half of it.”

We said those two constructions, while acceptable in speech and informal writing, wouldn’t be appropriate in formal written English in the US.

But perhaps we were a bit shortsighted about “the half of it.” After doing some additional research, we’ve decided to fill in the other half of the story. So here goes.

A search of the Early English Books Online database shows that respectable writers—and not just writers of Bibles—have been using phrases like “the half” and “the half of it” for centuries.

Examples in the ordinary sense (that is, half of something) are numerous: “the half of my kingdom,” “the half of their goods,” and so on.

But we also found many examples of negative or ironic constructions built around the phrases “the half of” and “by the half.”

These are early versions of such modern expressions as “you don’t know the half of it” and “he’s too clever by half.”

Here’s a sampling from the 16th and 17th centuries.

1571: “Excuse if I writ euill [evil], ye may gesse the halfe of it” (from George Buchanan’s condemnation of Mary Queen of Scots).

1587: “If men but knew, the halfe that he did write” (from a eulogy on the death of Sir Phillip Sidney).

1652: “O, quoth the Goat-Heard, I doe not yet know the half of the Adventures succeeded to Marcela‘s lovers” (from a translation of Don Quixote).

1655: “Is it not as well to have it [money] without blows?” “Not by the half” (dialogue from The Passionate Lovers, a tragicomedy by Lodowick Carlell).

1667: “few of the Laity know the half of them” (from an anti-papist treatise by Jeremy Taylor).

1677: “But truly I have not come to the half of that which I intended” (from a London minister, Thomas Wadsworth).

1685: “report of the Glory was true, but the half of it was not told” (from a theological treatise by George Keith).

1686: “it was too little by the halfe” (from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland).

1686: “the half of it is not mentioned” (from Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury).

1690: “I found that the half was not told you then of what is commonly known in this place” … “They have not done the half of what will be necessary to save them” (sentences from a theological work by Thomas Morer).

1696: “It were tedious to number the half of its omissions” (a comment on the Litany by a Presbyterian minister, Richard Baxter).

We could go on, but you get the idea.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s citations for “the half of it” (meaning “a significant or more important part of something” and generally used “in negative contexts”) don’t begin until the 20th century.

The OED’s first citation is from Hot Water (1932), a novel by P. G. Wodehouse.

Since we never pass up an opportunity to quote Wodehouse, here’s the relevant passage: “It makes me sick. And that’s not the half of it. … She told me I’ve got to be American Ambassador to France.”

Here’s another OED citation, from Minute for Murder (1947), by the pseudonymous Nicholas Blake (actually Cecil Day-Lewis): “ ‘We’ve not seen the half of it yet,’ said the Messenger darkly.”

The OED’s citations for “by half” (meaning “by a great deal; much, considerably, far”) go back much further—to before the year 1000.

The first quotation—which translates into Modern English as “sweeter by half”—is from the Metres of Boethius, an Old English adaptation from the Latin of the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius.

We’ll give a few more lines of the poem for context: “The comb of the honey cannot but seem / To each son of men sweeter by half, / If he have tasted before the honey / Aught that is bitter.”

A 1780 citation in the OED—“Oh, he’s too moral by half”—is from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The School for Scandal.

And  later comes “too clever by half,” from George John Whyte-Melville’s novel The Interpreter (1858). The OED says the phrase means “trying too hard to be clever.”

And with that, we’ll stop. We don’t want to be too wordy by half.

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Q: In an appearance on WNYC, Pat mentioned the “cat’s-paw” fable of La Fontaine. As an attorney and an ailurophile, I might add that “cat’s paw” is the name of a legal theory of employer liability for discrimination. In a recent Supreme Court opinion, Justice Scalia explained the fable in footnote 1.

A: We’re ailurophiles (or cat lovers) ourselves, and we found your comment an interesting footnote to Pat’s discussion on the radio about feline expressions.

As Pat said on the show, a “cat’s-paw” (now often “catspaw,” but usually “cat’s paw” in employment law) is a dupe, someone used as a tool.

The term, first recorded in the mid-17th century, is an alteration of the earlier phrase “cat’s foot,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED explains that it’s a “reference to the fable or tale of a monkey (or a fox) using the foot or paw of a cat to rake roasted chestnuts out of the burning coals.”

The dictionary adds parenthetically that some versions of the story say the monkey belonged to Pope Julius II (1503-13). Depending on the version, the cat is either tricked or forced into letting the monkey use its paw.

The earliest citation in the OED for “cat’s-paw” is from a political pamphlet, Killing Is Murder, written by Michael Hawke in 1657: “These he useth as the Monkey did the Cat’s paw to scrape the nuts out of the fire.”

The earliest reference to a “cat’s foot” used in this sense comes from a 1623 translation of The Spanish Rogue, a picaresque novel by Mateo Alemán that was published in Spanish the year before.

The English version of the Alemán quotation: “To take the Cat by the foote, and therewith to rake the coales out of the Ouen.”

As for the fable that gave rise to these terms, it was “current in the sixteenth century, but varying considerably in details,” according to John S. Farmer’s Slang and Its Analogues (1890).

“The earliest printed version,” Farmer writes, “occurs in John Sambucus’ Emblemata (Plantin, Antwerp, 1564), where the sufferer is a dog, and not a cat. There is, however, a story of the same kind told … of Pope Julius II.”

Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) also notes that the monkey was said to have belonged to Pope Julius II.

And a contributor to the journal Notes and Queries wrote in 1884 that he had found an account written in 1600, stating “that the occurrence took place while the chamberlains of Julius II were waiting for the Pope to retire to rest, and that the monkey held the cat with his left arm and took the paw in his right.”

Pope or no pope, the definitive version of the tale is the one written by Jean de La Fontaine in the 17th century.

La Fontaine’s “Le Singe et le Chat” (“The Monkey and the Cat”) first appeared in a collection of fables published in 1679.

This version of the tale is less violent than some earlier ones, because La Fontaine’s cat is persuaded by flattery, not wrestled by force, into sticking a foot into the hot coals.

As the cat blisters his paws to claw the chestnuts out one by one, the monkey gobbles them up.

The footnote in Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion says La Fontaine’s fable was “conceived by Aesop.”

Though the idea has often been attributed to Aesop, we haven’t found any positive evidence of this. Perhaps Justice Scalia knows something we don’t.

We can’t close without explaining the etymology of “ailurophile,” which comes from the Greek roots ailouros (cat) and phile (one who loves).

Despite its ancient connections, the word is a relative newcomer, coined in the 20th century.

The OED’s first citation is from 1931, but a Google Books search turned up one from a 1927 issue of Scribner’s Magazine:

“You are really an ‘ailurophile,’ or ‘lover of cats.’ I think ailurophile is a beautiful word, is fluent, and rolls trippingly on the tongue with catlike fluency.”

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Q: The other day an Irish friend wished “bad cess” to the bankers responsible for Ireland’s economic woes. Is that “cess” as in “cesspool”? Too bad this is too late for St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe next year.

A: Why wait for St. Patrick’s Day to come around again? In fact, tax day (yes, today is the deadline for filing) may be just as appropriate. More on this later.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “bad cess to” as an Anglo-Irish phrase meaning “bad luck to” or “evil befall.”

The OED’s first published reference for the usage is from Punch in 1859: “Carlisle and Russell—bad cess to their clan!”

But a Google Books search turned up a much earlier example.

In a story published in 1833 in the Dublin University Magazine, a character named Barny O’Reirdon says, “Whist, whist! and bad cess to you both.”

And the busy scanners at Google have also provided us with several 19th-century appearances of “good cess,” meaning good luck.

Here’s an 1857 example from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art: “Oh, he’s a curious crayther, tho pig, an has his own ways, good cess to him!”

How did “cess” come to mean luck or fortune? The etymology here is a question mark, though the OED offers two suggestions:

(1) It could be short for “success.” This seems unlikely to us, since “good success” is redundant and “bad success” is an oxymoron.

(2) It could have something to do with taxes—a timely subject today, even if we’re too late for St. Patrick’s Day!

A “cess” has meant an assessment, tax, or levy since at least as far back as the 16th century. It’s an aphetic (or shortened) form of  “assess.”

(While the proper etymological spelling of the shortened term would be “sess,” the word generally appears as “cess.”)

“Cess” seems to have  been a product of English officialdom.

The OED’s first citation is from an act of Henry VIII in 1531 that makes reference to “divers and sundry Cesses, Scots, and Taxes.” (A “scot” is an assessment.)

Jonathan Swift in the 18th century refers to a “parish cess,” or church tax. Similar usages spread to other parts of the Empire.

In Scotland, for example, a “cess” referred to a land tax in the 17th and 18th centuries.

And in 19th-century India, a journalist wrote of “the road cess, the irrigation cess, the public works cess, and the education cess.” (Today all taxes in India are subject to an education cess of 3 percent.)

In Ireland, “cess” is still the official term for a local tax. But it once had another and more sinister meaning, and we think this is where “bad cess” comes from.

The OED defines this meaning of “cess,” first recorded around 1571, as “the obligation to supply the soldiers and the household of the lord deputy with provisions at prices ‘assessed’ or fixed by government.”

In other words, the Irish populace was arbitrarily forced to support the occupying soldiers and the personal needs of the lord deputy.

At any rate, to wish someone “bad cess” would be a curse indeed. A contributor to the Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland had this to say in 1889:

“Before barracks were commonly built in Ireland, it was usual to quarter soldiers permanently upon the inhabitants, and this was called ‘cessing’ them. It was possible that the soldiers thus quartered might be well conducted and respectable men, but if (which was more than probable) they were not very desirable persons to have the run of a man’s house and premises, this might  be reasonably called a ‘bad cess’; and a few things can be imagined to have been more disagreeable.”

As for “cesspool,” the OED says the word is “of uncertain origin,” though the dictionary offers several theories.

The most likely, in our opinion, is that the English term is somehow related to the Italian word for privy, cesso, which is derived from the Latin secessus, a secluded place.

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Q: Your posting on the idiomatic use of prepositions with “odd” and “even” left me to wondering how these two little words got their numerical meanings.

A: And now we’ve been wondering about the conventions of “odd” and “even” numbering.

Let’s begin with “even” and save the odder history of “odd” for later.

The adjective “even” has had several related meanings over its more than 1,000-year history.

Among other things, it has meant level, equal, alike, uniform, straight, direct, parallel, exact, precise, balanced, and equable (that is, unruffled).

In the mid-16th century, the Oxford English Dictionay says, “even” acquired a numerical meaning: “divisible integrally into two equal parts.” 

“Even” first appeared this way, according to OED citations, in Robert Record’s The Whetstone of Witte (1557): “Euen nombers are those, whiche maie be diuided into equalle halfes.”

It’s easy to see how a word that meant equal could evolve over a few hundred years into one that meant dividable into equal parts.

The adjective “odd,” however, didn’t have to evolve to get its numerical sense.

It’s been used for numbers since it showed up in a Middle English religious poem in the late 13th century, according to OED references.

The original meaning of “odd” in English was one in addition to (or one shy of) an even number.

“Odd” got this meaning from associations it had in early Scandinavian.

For example, oddi in Old Icelandic meant a triangle, and later a third or an odd number. Here’s how the OED explains it:

 “The senses ‘odd,’ ‘odd number’ in early Scandinavian apparently developed by metaphor from ‘triangle’ (as being three-cornered), and thence by extension from the third or unpaired member of a group of three, to any single or unpaired member of a group, and from three as the primary ‘odd number,’ to all numbers containing an unpaired unit.”

Meanwhile, a century of so after it entered English, “odd” started taking on non-numerical meanings: left over, unpaired, irregular, strange, and generally the opposite of “even.”

So “even” developed its numerical meaning because of an earlier sense of evenness, while “odd” developed its sense of oddness because of an earlier numerical meaning.

Now isn’t that odd!

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Q: Why does the word “bangs” refer to a fringe of hair cut straight across the forehead?

A: The use of “bangs” (or “bang”) for that short fringe of hair originated in the US in the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the usage has its roots in “bangtail,” an equine term seen on both sides of the Atlantic. So let’s start our investigation in the stables.

The word “bangtail” is defined in the OED as “a (horse’s) tail, of which the hair is allowed to grow to a considerable length and then cut horizontally across so as to form a flat even tassel-like end.”

The dictionary notes that the term has also been used in Australia for cattle with tails cut that way, and in the US as slang for a horse, especially a race horse.

The earliest citation for “bangtail” in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from a Scottish journal, suggesting that the term may have first reared its head in the British Isles.

Green’s cites an 1812 issue of the Edinburgh Review that mentions a stud horse named Bangtail, but the name surely came from an even earlier use of the term.

Through a Google search we found a comic British story about fox-hunting, published in 1851, in which “bang-tail” appears least seven times in reference to tails as well as horses.

The story, “Turning Out a Bagman,” by a writer signed “B.P.W.,” is about two London greenhorns who are on vacation and want to hire a pair of hunters.

The showily groomed horses they hire are called “bang-tails,” and are described as having “such flowing bang-tails as at once stamped them in the eyes of our friends as ‘out-and-out’ thorough-breds.”

The story is chockfull of slang (like “bagman” to mean “fox”), which may explain the repeated use of “bang-tail” instead of “horse.”

Apparently it didn’t take long for “bang” to graduate from horse tails to human hair.

We found an 1844 travel book, Revelations of Russia by Charles Frederick Henningsen, that mentions a man’s hair cut “somewhat in the fashion of a thorough-bred’s ‘bang-tail.’ ”

In another travel book we came across an 1849 entry that describes a woman whose hair was braided in back and “cut in bang style” in front.

The OED’s earliest citation for the human usage is from a letter written in 1878 by Frances M. A. Roe, author of Army Letters From an Officer’s Wife: “It had a heavy bang of fiery red hair.” (The “bang” was on a face mask in a shop window in Helena, in the Montana Territory.)

Another American, William Dean Howells, also used the word in his book The Undiscovered Country (1880): “His hair cut in front like a young lady’s bang.”

A Google search turned up a plural reference in an 1883 article from the New York Times. A Catholic priest, lecturing Sunday school children, “condemned the fashion of wearing ‘bangs’ in severe terms.”

A matching adjective (as in “banged” hair) and verb (to “bang” or cut the front hair straight across) also emerged in the 1880s, according to citations in the OED.

Here are a couple of examples: “He was bareheaded, his hair banged even with his eyebrows in front” (from the Century Magazine, 1882), and “They wear their … hair ‘banged’ low over their foreheads” (from Harper’s Magazine, 1883).

So it would appear that the verb “bang” (to cut hair straight across) emerged after the hairstyle and not before, unless there are earlier verb references we haven’t found.

That still leaves us with a question: Why did “bang” mean bluntly cut?

Both Green’s and the OED indicate that since the late 1500s the verb “bang” has meant to hit or thump, and the noun “bang” has meant a blow or a thump.

And “bang” has been used adverbially since the late 18th century, the OED says, to mean “all of a sudden,” or “suddenly and abruptly, all at once, as in ‘to cut a thing bang off.’ ”

Since the bangs on a person’s forehead, like a horse’s banged tail, end abruptly—you might say with a  “bang!”—perhaps the word is simply a case of creative English.

A collection of humor pieces, Wit and Humor of the Age (1883), takes the creativity a step further. In a story by  Melville D. Landon, one chambermaid asks another “if she banged her hair.”

“Yes, Mary,” the first chambermaid says. “I bang my hair—keep a banging it, but it don’t stay bung!”

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[A May 30, 2022, post discusses “ ’til,” “till,” and “until.”]

Q: Can you tell me the origin of the expression “no money in the til”? I looked up the word “til,” but couldn’t find a definition related to purse or money box or anything other than time.

A: The phrase is “no money in the till.” The noun “till” here is spelled with a double “l.”

The word “till” has three principal meanings:

(1) It’s a noun for a cash drawer or money-box.

(2) It’s a verb meaning to work the soil.

(3) It’s a preposition or conjunction with much the same meaning as “until.”

By the way, the preposition/conjunction is not a shortening or contraction of “until.” And it’s not etymologically correct to spell it with one “l,” though the misspelling is so common that many dictionaries list it separately as a variant.

In case you’d like to read more on the preposition and conjunction, we wrote a blog post several years ago about the convoluted history of “ ’til,” “till,” and “until.”

But getting back to your original question, the Oxford English Dictionary has no citations that include the phrase “no money in the till.” (However, it does have a mention of the “no”-less phrase “money in the till,” used in the literal sense.)

We also can’t locate “no money in the till” in slang sources or collections of idioms, but a Google search comes up with more than 900,000 hits.

An unscientific sampling of the Google results suggests that most people use the expression figuratively in the sense of being broke. It’s another way of saying the cupboard is bare or the cookie jar is empty.

The expression is used literally, however, in the earliest example in a Google Timeline search (from the Nov. 12, 1862, issue of the Daily Southern Cross newspaper in Auckland, New Zealand).

In a report about the trial of a man charged with stealing money from the Yew Tree Inn, the innkeeper is quoted as saying: “There was no money in the till when I saw it again.”

By the late 19th century, though, the expression was being used loosely. An April 12, 1882, item in the New York Times includes this quotation:

“Six days before election the Chairman of the General Committee discovers that he has four wards left to ‘take care’ of, and no money in the till.”

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Q: Why aren’t white people included in the expression “people of color”? This has bothered me for a long time. White is a color too, isn’t it?

A: You make a very good point. All people are really “people of color,” since no one’s skin is colorless.

But the description “of color” strikes us as better than “nonwhite,” which describes people in a negative way—that is, in terms of what they lack or what they are not.

And we’re not especially satisfied with “minority,” which is often inaccurate or meaningless.

The term “people of color” has surged in popularity in the last couple of decades, but it’s not as new as you might think.

Citations in the Oxford  English Dictionary show that the phrase was in use during the 18th century.

The OED’s earliest citation is from An Historical Survey of St. Domingo (1797), by Bryan Edwards, a planter and politician:

“The inhabitants … were composed of three great classes: 1st, pure whites. 2d, people of colour, and blacks of free condition. 3d, negroes in a state of slavery. … The class which, by a strange abuse of language, is called people of colour, originates from an intermixture of the whites and the blacks.” (The italics are Edwards’s.)

And here are two more early appearances of the phrase: “The Bermudian pilots are men of colour” (from  an 1803 issue of The Naval Chronicle), and “She is a woman of colour” (from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, 1883).

The OED says that in phrases like these, “color” means “the hue of the darker (as distinguished from the ‘white’) varieties of mankind,” and “in America, esp. a person of black descent.”

Obviously, today the term “of color” doesn’t necessarily mean racially mixed, as it sometimes did in the 18th century.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) has an interesting Usage Note on the subject:

“Dissatisfaction with the implications of nonwhite as a racial label has doubtless contributed to the recent popularity of the term person of color and others, such as woman of color, with the same construction. In effect, person of color stands nonwhite on its head, substituting a positive for a negative. It is interesting that the almost exclusive association in American English of colored with Black does not carry over to terms formed with ‘of color,’ which are used inclusively of most groups other than those of European origin.”

You might be interested in a posting we wrote some time ago about how blackness and darkness came to have negative associations (as in in such phrases as “black sheep” and “dark day”).

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Q: The origin of “the cat’s pajamas,” a subject that came up while Pat was on WNYC, is nicely told in Tad Tuleja’s The Cat’s Pajamas. Meow!

A: We assume you’re writing this with tongue in cheek, since Tuleja’s book is a humorous compilation of imagined origins—or “fakelore,” as he puts it—and not serious etymology.

As for “the cat’s pajamas” (or “pyjamas”), the expression was coined by the cartoonist T. A. (Tad) Dorgan (1877-1929), according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

Dorgan is also credited with coining “the cat’s meow,” though not “the cat’s whiskers.” All three expressions mean someone or something that’s outstanding.

(An early “whiskers” example is from a 1923 item in the St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press that plugs the paper’s want ads as “the ‘cat’s whiskers,’ which, being translated for college presidents means they are o k—they get quick results.”)

These “caticisms” are examples of zoological whimsy from the flapper era that we discussed in a blog posting in 2009.

Similar feline phrases include “the cat’s cuffs,” “the cat’s lingerie,” “the cat’s mac,” and “the cat’s spats,” according to Green’s Dictionary.

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Q: Do you have any insight into the saying “invest is a code word for spend”? How has it been so rapidly placed in the brains of so many people? Is Frank Luntz lurking? Was it created as a kind of poison pill in advance of President Obama’s State of the Union speech?

A: We checked out various combinations of “spend” (or “spending”) + “code word” (or “codeword”) + “invest” (or “investing” or “investment”) and got millions of hits on Google.

Although many of the hits appeared just before or after the  president’s Jan. 25 State of the Union Address (in which he called for investing in the future), the saying originally showed up long before that 2011 speech.

A cursory Google search came up with a version of the expression in a July 11, 1988, Time magazine article that appeared the year Mr. Obama entered law school.

In commenting on Michael Dukakis’s presidential platform, Walter Shapiro and Michael Duffy wrote in Time: “Read invest as the new Democratic code word for spend.”

Did the political consultant, pollster, and self-described word doctor Frank Luntz have anything to do with it? Not as far as we can tell.

The use of the phrase “code word” in the sense of a secret word has been around since the 19th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED doesn’t mention the newer sense we’re discussing, but both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) include euphemism as a meaning of “code word.”

For an example of the usage, American Heritage cites the New Republic: “The Democrats’ ‘populism’ is a code word for bigger farm subsidies and protectionism.”

We don’t know exactly when this usage first showed up, but it appears to go back at least as far as the 1960s.

A June 27, 1969, column by C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times, for example, says, “Vietnam has become a code word for everything that is wrong or vulnerable in American life.”

Update: After this entry was posted, we got this email from Walter Shapiro, the former Time magazine writer mentioned above:

“Just a brief note to say that I wrote the 1988 Time magazine story that called ‘invest’ the new Democratic code word for ‘spend.’ (My then-colleague Michael Duffy provided the reporting in that old-fashioned news-magazine division of responsibility).

“While my precise memory has, of course, faded with the years, I am pretty certain that this was my observation based on the prevalence of the word ‘invest’ in Democratic rhetoric coming out of the Reagan years. This linguistic sleight-of-hand by the Democrats was an obvious response to the way that Ronald Reagan had demonized government spending. And, as a long-time political reporter (and Jimmy Carter speechwriter), I can testify that political consultants in both parties were tinkering with rhetoric before Frank Luntz was born.”

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Q: You say in your March 7, 2011, posting that you don’t know a female equivalent of male interjections like “man oh man” and “boy oh boy.” Our legendary Nebraska broadcaster, the late Lyell Bremser, had a signature phrase to introduce key plays: “Man, woman and child!” It became probably THE most beloved phrase in the state during Lyell’s long reign on radio station KFAB—and it does seem to use “woman” in the “boy oh boy” sense.

A: You’re right. Bremser did use “woman” that way, though most people use the phrase “man, woman, and child” as an expression of universality or in its literal sense, not as an interjection.

For any Husker fans too young to remember Bremser, here’s an excerpt from his 1973 broadcast of a Nebraska-Minnesota football game:

“OOHHH, MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD WHAT A THROW THAT WAS BY DAVE ‘THE DEALER’ HUMM! He faked his hand-off into the middle, Frosty Anderson went down the left side on a fly pattern, Humm RIFLED that ball, he had to throw that 45 to 50 yards in the air!!!….here’s the try for the point, the kick is up, and Sanger’s kick is good!…But believe me, he threw that absolutely a TON!!! Frosty Anderson NEVER broke stride! He had his man beat! He was in behind Kevin Keller, #42, flying down the left sideline … he had him beat by a couple of steps. And that ball was laid right on his FINGER TIPS! He never broke stride, and you knew that was TOUCHDOWN ALL THE WAY!! … ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PASS PLAYS YOU’LL EVER WANT TO SEE!!!”

The transcript (including the creative punctuation and capitalization) comes from the website HuskerMax.com, which notes that Bremser nicknamed the quarterback David Humm “The Dealer” because Humm was from Las Vegas.

(Humm went from Nebraska to the Oakland Raiders, Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Colts, and Los Angeles Raiders.)

By the way, we got nearly a million hits when we googled the phrase “man, woman, and child,” including more than 400 from Bremser, but most of the hits we looked at used the phrase in its universal sense.

President Obama, for example, said in his Jan. 20, 2009, Inaugural Address that “America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity.”

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for the phrase “man, woman, and child,” but it has six citations that include it, all of them in the universal or literal sense.

An 1806 citation in the entry for the verb “drag” is the earliest published reference in the OED: “Having dragged the whole neighbourhood for every man, woman and child.”

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Q: I’ve always believed that “elite” is a collective noun, both singular and plural. I’m aware the word “elites” emerged during the George W. Bush years, generally in a pejorative sense. Is there in fact such a word as “elites”?

A: The use of “elites,” especially in a negative sense, may have increased during the Bush years, but it had been around for decades before then.

A May 27, 1982, article in the New York Times, for example, mentions “a trenchant critic of the power of unbridled elites in a pluralist society.”

And a June 13, 1982, piece in the Times discusses “confronting local power elites locked into quid pro quo relationships with the ruling party” in India.

OK, the usage has a history, but is the word “elites” legit?

The short answer is yes. However, the use of the noun “elite” in English often seems arbitrary. Here’s the story.

The  word, borrowed directly from the French élite, comes ultimately from the Latin verb eligere (to choose). It’s the same source that gave us “elect.”

In English, “elite” refers to the choice part of something—the most respected, skillful, or influential members of a society or class or body.

With the Latin verb eligere in mind, we might refer to the elite as the chosen.

Although the term is often used in a negative way, as you point out, that sense hasn’t made its way yet into standard dictionaries.

Both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say “elite” has two plurals, “elite” and “elites.”

But the two dictionaries aren’t as clear as we’d like about when to use “elite” as a singular and when to use each of the plurals.

In fact, the AH and M-W entries give the impression that it would be hard to go wrong in using these terms.

As for us, we’d use “elite” as a singular noun if we were emphasizing the group as a whole: “The Washington elite has lost touch with Middle America.”

We’d use “elite” as a plural if we were thinking of members of the group: “The Wall Street elite are reeling from the banking scandal.”

And we’d use “elites” as a plural if we were speaking of two different groups: “The political and literary elites are at odds over support for public broadcasting.” 

We think “elites” is overused today and unnecessary if “elite” could just as easily be used. But that’s only our opinion. And maybe it’s an elitist attitude.

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Q: A poster at my local hospital in Idaho uses the term “securement devices” for bandages, Band-Aids, and Velcro-like wraps that the techs put around my arm (along with gauze or a cotton ball) when I get blood drawn. This is a new one on me.

A: This use of “securement” is new to us too. But then “securement” is a noun that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “rare” even in its recognized meanings.

The noun generally means “the action or an act of securing,” according to the OED, but that broad definition includes two more precise meanings.

One of them, now obsolete, is “making safe from or against”; the other is “ensuring or making sure.”

There are only a handful of OED citations for this second sense (“ensuring or making sure”), all from the 17th to the 19th century.

The first is from William Foster’s The English Factories in India 1622-23, a calendar of historic events. In this entry from 1622,  the OED provides the missing language in brackets:

“[Willoughby has also been furnished with money, and left to take his choice of means] for his best securmentt.”

The most recent OED citation is from an 1883 issue of the Century Magazine: “Liberty, however, is so highly prized that society condemns the securement in all cases of perpetual protection by means of perpetual imprisonment.”

However, a Google Timeline search finds examples dating up to the present. Most of these seem to use “securement” in its established senses, but there are also extended meanings in the mechanical sense—to fasten or make secure.

We found a lot of references relating to the security of freight being transported (“cargo securement systems,” for example).

But we also found medical usages. Recent phrases from medical literature include “securement straps” for wheelchairs, “intravenous catheter securement techniques,” and “sutureless securement devices.”

Our guess is that “securement” will remain in specialized technical language, but that it won’t cross over into everyday usage.

Why should it, when in most cases we could just as easily use “security” or “securing”?

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Q: I saw an ad for a bank—I can’t remember which one—that said: “XYZ banks me and my business.” If Mr. Murray were still putting together the OED, I’d add a slip to his pigeonhole for the word “bank.”

A: The verb “bank” in the money sense has a couple of well-established meanings.

It’s commonly used as an intransitive verb—that is, one without an object—meaning to have a bank account, as in “Where do you bank? I bank with First National.”

“Bank” is also used as a transitive verb—one with an object—in the sense of “deposit,” as in “I banked my paycheck,” or “He banks the receipts every week.”

But the usage you mention is a less familiar one. Here, “bank” is a transitive verb meaning “provide banking services to.” Examples: “Who banks you? First National banks me.”

It was noted recently by a subscriber on the American Dialect Society’s online mailing list that the word “bank” (or, rather, “unbank”) was used this way in a Jan. 5 article in the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper said banks were looking for new fees to charge customers, replacing  old charges that had been disallowed by government regulators.

It quoted a spokeswoman for J.P. Morgan Chase as saying, “We don’t want to raise fees on our customers, but unfortunately, regulation is forcing us to do it, and as a result, some customers may end up unbanked.”

By “unbanked” she meant “unprovided with banking services.”

In using this inverted form of expression, you’ll notice, she was able to avoid saying WHO was pulling the plug. “You may end up unbanked” is another way of saying, “We may unbank you.”

A second ADS list subscriber pointed out that the usage dates back to the 1980s.

A third subscriber pointed out a different use of “unbank.” Credit unions use the term to differentiate themselves from banks. An ad for the credit union Connex, for example, says: “Unbank with us.”

We’ve found many similar usages ourselves. A financial services center in Minnesota, for instance, calls itself “The Unbank Company.” It even offers “unloans,” but presumably discourages “unpaying.”

So far, odd transitive uses of “bank” seem confined to corporate and advertising language. We haven’t found any examples of real people using “bank” this way in the real world.

The word “bank” entered English around 1200 as a noun meaning a ridge or mound or other raised area of the ground, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. There are similar words in Old Norse and Old Icelandic.

The verb “bank” showed up in the late 1500s in the transitive sense of to form a border and the intransitive sense of to border upon something.

The verb was first used in a financial sense in the 18th century. Initially, it was an intransitive verb meaning to run a bank or act as a banker, but that usage isn’t seen much now.

The OED’s first financial citation is from Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (2nd ed., 1738): “Banker, a person who banks, that is, negotiates, and trafficks in money.”

In the 19th century, the verb “bank” took on another intransitive sense: “to deposit money or keep an account with a banker.”

The earliest OED cite for this sense is from Harriet Martineau’s novel Berkeley the Banker (1833): “A man who brings a splendid capital, and will, no doubt, bank with us at D——.”

As a transitive verb meaning to deposit, “bank” appeared slightly later. The first OED citation is from an 1838 issue of a stage journal, Actors by Daylight, in which a writer refers to theater managers “having ‘banked’ their cash.”

The word that the Chase spokeswoman used (“some customers may end up unbanked”) hasn’t made it into James Murray’s OED or any other published dictionaries.

Frankly, we think it smacks of corporate gobbledygook and wouldn’t bank on it.

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