She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show this month on the third Tuesday instead of her usual appearance on the third Wednesday. Pat will be on the air around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. If you miss a program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Q: Can you tell me who Pete is and why do we do things for his sake? As a Pete, I’m curious for my own sake.
A: The phrases “for Pete’s sake” and “for the love of Pete” are mild oaths. They originated as substitutes for something stronger—“for Christ’s sake,” “for God’s sake,” “for the love of God,” and so on.
The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the name “Pete” in these exclamations is chiefly “a euphemistic replacement” for God.
The phrase “for Pete’s sake” was first recorded in 1903, according to OED citations, followed by “for the love of Pete” in 1906, and “in the name of Pete” in 1942.
The intent, in case you didn’t already know, is to express “exasperation or annoyance,” the dictionary says.
Why “Pete” rather than “Phil” or “Fred” or “Percy”?
We don’t know, though the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins speculates (without offering any evidence) that whoever coined “for Pete’s sake” may have had St. Peter in mind.
These “Pete” expressions belong to a large class of euphemistic phrases that developed as substitutes for more irreverent oaths.
As we wrote in 2008 in Dec. 6 and Nov. 4 postings, phrases like “doggone it,” “gol dang it,” “gosh darn it,” and “dag nab it” are euphemistic variations on “God damn it.” And “gosh a’mighty” is a variation on “God almighty.”
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Q: In my dotage, I’ve finally gotten around to reading The Innocents Abroad. A few things jumped out at me. Spelling differences: “staid” for “stayed,” “ancles” for “ankles,” etc. And strange usages, especially a reference to the Emperor of Russia “rusticating” at a watering hole. I know rusticate as an architectural term, but what was the Emperor doing at that watering hole?
A: One of the pleasures of reading 19th-century writing—British as well as American—is watching language change from generation to generation.
The spellings you found in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s 1869 travel book, show just how fluid the conventions of English orthography can be.
Usage, too, changes over time. In 150 years, someone reading a 2011 newspaper will no doubt find a lot that looks odd, just as Twain’s use of “rusticating” looked odd to you.
In American English, we don’t use the verb “rusticate” much these days. But in the 18th and 19th centuries it had several meanings, some of which are still alive today in Britain, if seldom heard in the US.
For instance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, one meaning of “rusticate” is to “stay or sojourn in the country,” as the Emperor did.
Here’s an example from an 1886 letter by the English artist Charles Samuel Keene: “I went and smoked a pipe with Challoner the other evening, and heard from Mrs. C that you were going to rusticate on some riverside.”
And in British usage, to be “rusticated” can mean to be sent to the country, or to be dismissed or suspended from a university as punishment. This is the OED’s definition of “rusticate” in its academic sense: “to dismiss or send down (a student) from university on a temporary basis, as a punishment; to suspend.”
Here it is in Trollope’s 1858 novel Doctor Thorne: “This son had been first rusticated from Oxford and then expelled.” Later OED examples extend into the 21st century.
“Rusticated” can also mean “countrified” or “rendered rustic in manners.”
In Washington Irving’s 1822 novel Bracebridge Hall, for example, a squire was “rusticated a little by living almost entirely on his estate.”
And, as you say, the term is still used in the architectural sense of giving masonry a rustic appearance by marking it with sunk joints or roughened surfaces.
John Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice (1851), alludes to this technique when he asks whether “Nature rusticates her foundations,” and answers himself by saying “She does rusticate sometimes” by crumbling foundations and leaving ripple marks.
A variation on this sense of the word has made its way into the art world. Since the 1930s, potters have used it to describe pottery deliberately roughened to look rustic.
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Q: I was speaking with Russian friends about “up” and “down.” As I understand it, Russians would never go down to New Orleans or up to Chicago. They would go south or north. This led to “uptown” and “downtown.” From my small-town perspective, I use the words interchangeably. As I think back, though, I seem to have gone uptown more as a kid and downtown more in my mature years. I would be interested in your thoughts.
A: Idiomatic English is particularly rich in odd uses of prepositions. The use of “up” and “down” in geographical references is an interesting case.
Take, for example, the words “uptown” and “downtown.” In New York City, “uptown” is north and “downtown” is south, but that’s not necessarily the case in other towns.
The Oxford English Dictionary and other sources say “downtown,” which originated in American English in the 19th century, has at least four meanings.
It can mean a part of town that’s at a lower elevation, or that’s southerly, or that’s geographically central, or that’s devoted to business.
And “uptown” is sometimes used in different ways in British and American English.
In both countries, it can mean at a higher elevation. But in the US, it can also mean northerly, or more residential or more prosperous than “downtown.”
The prosperous usage probably reflects the tradition of wealthier neighborhoods being built on higher ground.
In the US, “up” and “down” are commonly used to mean higher or lower on a map—hence, north or south. But there are exceptions.
For example, it’s not unusual for residents of New Jersey to drive “up to Maine” or “down to Florida.” But, as one of our readers tells us, “In New Jersey dialect we almost never go to the beach or to the ocean. We always go ‘down the shore,’ whether we live in north, south, or central New Jersey.” We’ve written about this before on our blog.
Oddly, the OED has no entries for “up” meaning north or “down” meaning south—that is, at the top or the bottom of a map.
In fact, the British uses of “up” and “down” can be downright bewildering to an American reader.
The two of us enjoy 19th-century British novels, and used to wonder why a young man who was kicked out of Oxford was always “sent down,” even if his home was to the north.
And Londoners going to points north always traveled “down” to get there.
As the OED explains, “down” in Britain can mean “from the capital to the distant parts of a country,” or it can mean “away from a university.”
And the reverse is true with “up.” That’s why an incoming student goes “up” to Oxford, even if it means traveling south to get there. And a Londoner coming back from the north travels “up” to get home.
There’s a certain class consciousness at work here, with “up” and “down” used to mean superior or inferior—upper or lower—in importance.
In other words, someone would go “up” to sophisticated London and “down” to the provincial countryside.
In these more democratic times, though, such usages aren’t universal in Britain. But they live on in old fiction.
In Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), for example, Lizzie Eustace often travels between London and Scotland. The phrase “down to Scotland” appears 12 times in the novel and “down in Scotland” 10 times, all from the perspective of points to the south, mostly London.
As we said, this isn’t the way all Britons speak nowadays. But they still use “up” and “down” in reference to the “upper” and “lower” houses of Parliament.
And both Britons and Americans use them in speaking of “upper” and “lower” courts.
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Q: I was at a meeting of my southern New Jersey quilting club when the newsletter editor asked, “Do any of yins have an article to put in?” I was not the only one who stopped the meeting right then and there and asked if she’d really said “yins.” What’s the story here?
A: “Yinz” is Pittsburghese. Sometimes spelled “yins” or “yunz,” it’s a plural form of “you.”
This puts it in the same category as “you-uns,” “yous,” “y’all,” “you guys,” and other terms that have been described as attempts to reestablish a separate plural of “you.”
As we’ve written before on the blog, “you” once had four forms in English: the singulars “thou” (subject) and “thee” (object), and the plurals “ye” (subject) and “you” (object).
From 1300 to 1600, these were gradually combined into one all-purpose “you.”
But for some people, one “you” just isn’t enough, and nonstandard plural forms have emerged over the last couple of hundred years.
A linguist would call them dialectal variants of the personal pronoun “you,” used with a plural inflection.
Does the persistence of these terms mean that people somehow feel the need to differentiate the plural “you” from the singular, and re-establish a separate plural form?
Some linguists have suggested as much.
For whatever reason, plural forms of “you” are familiar in many dialects of English, and not just in the US. They’re also heard in British, Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and Australian English.
Most of these colloquial forms were first recorded in the 19th century, but some are undoubtedly older.
Colloquialisms—that is, usages more common in speech than in writing—take a while to show up in published works. Many times, they first appear in the speech of fictional characters.
We’ll examine these plural “you” forms one at a time, concluding with “yinz.”
(1) “You-all” and “y’all” (we’ve written about them before on the blog): This usage is associated with the American South, but at least one linguist has suggested it could be an Irish import.
Alan Crozier, writing in the journal American Speech in 1984, pointed out that this use of “all” with pronouns is characteristic of Ulster.
He suggested it may have been brought to the Colonies by Ulster Scots—that is, Scots who settled in Ireland and later immigrated to the US in the 18th century.
(2) “Yez” (also spelled “yees,” “yeez,” and “yiz”) originated in Anglo-Irish, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
But a little poking around finds that it’s also used in Liverpudlian and other British dialects, as well as in Australia, the US, and Canada’s Maritime Provinces. We have a hunch this is a variation on “yous” (read on).
(3) “Yous” (also spelled “youse”) is familiar in dialects of American, Australian, and Irish English.
Crozier calls “yous” a “characteristic Hiberno-English plural form” and suggests that it was brought to this country by 19th-century Irish immigrants.
He says that while one researcher claims the American usage “is restricted to eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey,” it may be more widespread than that.
In explaining the possible Irish origins of “yous,” Crozier says the usage “seems to have arisen when speakers of Irish switched to English,” mostly in the 19th century, and “felt a need for a plural second person pronoun like Irish sibh.”
But “yous” has been used in a singular sense too, according to the OED.
For example, there are both plural and singular usages in Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893): “Youse kids makes me tired,” and “Ah, Jimmie, youse bin fightin’ agin.”
Among Irish examples of the usage, the OED cites this one from a drama, The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge: “Is it mad yous are?”
And here’s an Australian example, from My Brilliant Career (1901), by the novelist Miles Franklin: “Ye and Lizer can have a little fly round. It’ll do yous good.” (In the same novel, she writes, “have the table laid out for both of yez.”)
(4) “You-uns” (also seen as “youns,” “yuns,” and “yunz”) was first recorded in Ohio in 1810, the OED says. But it’s also heard in Pittsburgh and other parts of Pennsylvania, as well as in the Ozarks and the Appalachians.
Crozier and another linguist, Michael Montgomery, suggest “you-uns” was introduced into the Colonies by the Scotch-Irish. The plural “you ones,” the source of “you-uns,” is known to be of Scotch-Irish origin.
(5) We come at last to “yinz,” which some regard as another variant of “you-uns.” The linguist Barbara Johnstone has called it “a form of you ones.”
It should also be noted that “one” was (and sometimes still is) written as “yin” in dialects of Scotland, Ireland, and the north of England. The plural, of course, is “yins.”
Here’s a singular example from a Scottish poet, Robert Tannahill (1807): “A third yin owns an antique rare.”
And here’s a plural example from another Scot, the writer William McIlvanney (1975): “You young yins think ye inventit men an’ women.” (Quotations courtesy of the OED.)
But any Steelers fan will tell you that “yinz” is pure Pittsburghese.
Johnstone and another linguist, Dan Baumgardt, wrote in American Speech in 2004 that “the second person plural pronoun yinz (in any of its spellings: yunz, younz, yins, and so on) is the most salient and iconic lexical feature of ‘Pittsburghese.’ ”
The word “appears in every dictionary-like list of local words,” the two linguists write, and it’s so strongly associated with Pittsburgh that “a local term for a local person is yinzer.”
With that, we’ll—or, rather, we-all will—stop.
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Q: NYC Mayor Bloomberg habitually says things like this: “We’ll find a ways to do that.” Why?
A: You’re right. Mayor Bloomberg uses the word “ways” a lot, often in a surprising way. He’s especially fond of finding “a ways” to do things.
On his weekly radio show last summer, for example, he said New York State judges “should have found a ways to interpret the law … to accomplish what’s good for society.”
A Google search finds several dozen other examples.
Why, you wonder, is the Mayor using “a ways” here to mean a manner or method, when the singular “a way” would be appropriate?
He may be confused by a similar usage in which “a ways” is considered standard English: “The Mayor has a ways to go to balance the New York City budget.”
Here, “a ways” roughly means “a distance” or a “way.”
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes that “ways” has been used as a synonym for “way” in expressions like “a long ways off” since at least 1588.
“Such usage is standard American English,” the usage guide says. “In British English, on the other hand, it appears to have died out.”
Merriam-Webster’s notes that some commentators frown on the usage and label it colloquial or informal.
But the guide lists a half-dozen examples of the usage from American publications, including these two:
From a 1972 issue of Barron’s: “the downturn still has a ways to go.”
From Wilfrid Sheed’s 1973 novel People Will Always Be Kind: “Casey’s idea of fund-raising was quite a ways from mine.”
Not surprisingly, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) lists this singular use of the plural “ways” as standard English without any qualification.
But the more conservative editors at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) add a caveat: “The usage is acceptable but is usually considered informal.”
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Q: Pat’s discussion of “that that” on WNYC reminded me of a classic sentence—I forget who originated it—with five consecutive appearances of “that”: “I told him that that ‘that’ that that editor had deleted, was not that ‘that’ that I had marked.”
A: We think that that “that” sentence is pretty ingenious!
It reminds us of a punctuation puzzle popularized by Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keys’s 1966 science fiction novel, and Charly, a 1968 movie based on it:
that that is is that that is not is not is that it it is
Here’s one solution: That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.
We wrote a blog post a few years ago about the sometimes optional use of “that,” but you’ve inspired us to be expansive here and write about “that” in its many guises.
The word “that” is very old. It appears in Beowulf, which may be as old as the early or mid-700s.
(And incidentally, “that” is much older than “who,” and contrary to popular opinion it’s quite legitimate to use “that” to refer to a person, as we’ve written before on the blog.)
“That” has many functions in English. So let’s do a “that” roundup.
Demonstrative pronoun. Here, “that” can refer to a thing, a person, a fact or circumstance, and so on. Examples: “That was excellent” … “That’s a good boy!” … “That’s the question” … “After that, we went to bed” … “Take that!” … “Is that so?” … “That’s him all over.”
Demonstrative adjective. Here, “that” can modify a word for a person, a thing, a time, and so on. Examples: “That boy will be the death of me” … “I’ve never forgotten that one” … “Where’s that money you owe me?” … “By that time she was gone.”
Demonstrative adverb. Here, “that” means “to that extent or degree.” Examples: “It’s not that cold” … “I’ve known him since he was that high.”
Relative pronoun. Here, “that” refers to or adds to something already mentioned. It can introduce a clause or be the object of a preposition. “Is this all that you have to say?” … “The dress that she wants is red” … “It’s a fact that you can’t deny” … “Pittsburgh is the town that he came from” … “Fool that I was!”
Conjunction. Here, “that” introduces a clause that’s dependent on the main clause. Examples: “I was certain that she’d gone” … “It was for this that I studied” … “We had hoped that you would stay” … “It was so cold that I had to come inside” … “I said that I was sorry.”
With those last two usages—relative pronoun and conjunction—it’s often hard to tell which is which. And in both of them, the use of “that” is sometimes optional.
A final note: Like any other word, “that” can be a noun if it refers to the word itself, as in “Is ‘that’ the right word here?”
Now let’s go back to your original sentence: “I told him that that ‘that’ that that editor had deleted was not that ‘that’ that I had marked.”
It has eight examples of “that,” which we’ll identify in order of appearance.
(1) Conjunction; (2) demonstrative adjective; (3) noun; (4) relative pronoun; (5) demonstrative adjective; (6) demonstrative adjective; (7) noun; 8) relative pronoun.
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Q: I hear the word “handsome” applied to men and women, but in somewhat different ways. A handsome man, according to Wiktionary, is attractive, dignified, and in good taste. A handsome woman, on the other hand, is striking, impressive, and elegant, though not typically beautiful. Why the difference?
A: Comeliness (now there’s a handsome old word!) is always an interesting subject.
The two standard dictionaries we consult the most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—have unisex definitions of “handsome” in this sense: pleasing, dignified, beautiful.
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t mention sex either, defining a “handsome” physical appearance as beautiful, dignified, stately, fine.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.) , edited by R. W. Burchfield, agrees that “handsome” can be “applied equally to men and women of striking appearance.”
But Burchfield adds that “now, when applied to women, tending to be used only of such as are middle-aged or elderly.”
As an example, he cites Sherman McCoy’s thoughts about his wife in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. (We’ve gone to the original to expand the quotation, which includes the ellipses.)
“Still a very good-looking woman, my wife … with her fine thin features, her big clear blue eyes, her rich brown hair … But she’s forty years old! … No getting around it … Today good-looking … Tomorrow they’ll be talking about what a handsome woman she is.”
We think that Burchfield (a male lexicographer) may have gone a bit far in emphasizing the age angle here, but we agree that the adjective does indeed seem to be applied somewhat differently to men and women in modern times.
To begin with, it seems to be used much more often to describe men than women. And though a handsome man and a handsome woman may both be hunks, the woman tends to be hunkier (in the sense of being especially imposing or impressive).
The adjective “handsome” has had many meanings since it entered English in the 15th century, but it’s not certain why some have tended to attach themselves to men and others to women.
When the word first showed up around 1440, according to the OED, it meant easy to handle or manipulate. The adjective was formed (with the addition of the suffix “-some”) from the noun “hand.”
The dictionary’s first citation is from the Promptorium Parvulorum, an early Latin-English dictionary: “Handsum, or esy to hond werke.”
Over the years, it has meant, among other things, handy or convenient (1530); apt or clever (1547); moderately large (1577); considerable, as in a sum of money (1577); proper, decent, seemly (1583); polite, gracious, generous (before 1625); and gallant or brave (1625).
The OED’s earliest citation for the word’s use in the sense you ask about (beautiful, dignified, stately, etc.) is from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590): “A handsom stripling.”
It’s been used for both men and women since then.
In Shakespeare’s Othello (1616), Emilia describes Ludovico as a “very handsome man,” while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes in a 1718 letter of a woman who “appear’d to me handsomer than before.”
As we said above, the adjective “handsome” is derived from the noun “hand,” a word that appears in various forms in Old English and other Germanic languages.
John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says “hand” has “no relatives outside Germanic, and no one is too sure where it comes from.”
Ayto speculates that it might be related to early Germanic words for seizing, pursuing, and hunting, “and that its underlying meaning is ‘body part used for seizing.’ ”
By the way, the OED also has entries for “handsome” as an obsolete verb (meaning to make handsome) and as a rare old adverb (that is, in a handsome manner).
The dictionary says the adverbial usage survives in the proverb “handsome is as handsome does,” which uses “handsome” in two senses: you’re handsome (attractive) if you act handsomely (in a decent way).
The earliest known appearance of the proverb in writing, the OED says, is from a collection of fables, Philip Ayres’s Mythologia Ethica (1689): “Our English Proverb answers very aptly: He handsome is that handsome does.”
Since Ayres refers to it as “our English proverb,” the expression was obviously around long before he wrote his book of fables. [Update: We discuss “handsome is as handsome does” in 2021 and cite earlier examples.]
But perhaps an even earlier version of the proverb (minus the word “handsome”) may be seen in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written at the end of the 14th century.
In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the old hag lectures the Knight on gentility: “To do the gentil dedes that he kan; taak hym for the grettest gentil man.” (In Middle English, gentil means noble, refined, or excellent.)
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Q: Why is it that statements with “anymore” are usually negative? For example, we say “No one compromises anymore” when it’s just as logical to say “Everyone insists on his own way anymore.”
A: The use of “anymore” in a positive statement is something we’ve written about before on the blog, but it’s worth a closer look.
The adverb “anymore” is generally used in four ways:
(1) In negative statements: “We don’t date anymore.”
(2) In questions: “Do you go to the opera anymore?”
(3) In conditional statements: “If you shout anymore, I’ll scream.”
(4) In positive statements that suggest the negative: “He’s too partisan to trust anymore.”
No one raises an eyebrow over these uses, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.
But Merriam-Webster’s notes that some usage writers respond with “consternation and perplexity” when “anymore” is used in a clearly positive context like the one you cite (“Everyone insists on his own way anymore”).
M-W says this positive use of “anymore” to mean now or nowadays is dialect that’s widely heard in all regions of the US except New England.
The usage guide says it seems to be “of Midlands origin—the states where it is most common appear to be Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and Oklahoma.”
The guide adds that it “has spread considerably to such other states as New York, New Jersey, Iowa, Minnesota, California, and Oregon.” (Pat recalls hearing it when she was growing up in Iowa.)
Although M-W describes the positive usage as “predominately a spoken feature,” it gives nine examples that have appeared in print, some as “anymore” and some as “any more.” (The usual American spelling for the adverb is “anymore.”)
Here’s a comment by Harry S. Truman that’s quoted in Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s 1973 oral biography of the 33rd president: “It sometimes seems to me that all I do anymore is go to funerals.”
The Oxford English Dictionary describes the positive usage as “Chiefly Irish English and N. Amer. colloq.”
The earliest OED citation is a Northern Ireland reference from Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898): “A servant being instructed how to act, will answer ‘I will do it any more.’ ”
The Dictionary of American Regional English has US examples of the usage dating to 1931, and mentions what may be a related usage dating to 1859.
The 1931 example is a comment from West Virginia cited in the journal American Speech: “People used to shop a lot in the morning, but any more the crowd comes in about three o’clock.”
So what is the status of the usage in the US today?
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) say it’s widespread in regional usage, especially in speech.
And DARE says it’s “in use by speakers of all educ levels.”
But Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) rejects it as dialectal and cites a linguistic study that found the usage “well-established, though controversial” in Missouri.
“That means that the informants were all familiar with it, but many didn’t like it,” Garner’s says. “The findings would probably hold throughout most of the United States.”
As widespread as the usage is, we’d recommend against using it in formal writing. It’s OK in speech and informal writing, though, as long as your audience has a positive attitude about “anymore.”
One last point: Don’t confuse the adverb “anymore” (“We don’t eat out anymore”) with the phrase “any more” (“Do you want any more pizza?”).
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Q: Any idea when teenagers starting using “like” and “you know” in place of “um”? I’m an author working on a story set in 1978 and I’m trying to get it right.
A: You’re safe putting “you know” into the mouths of 1970s characters. It’s been a common verbal tic for centuries. (We’ve written several items on the blog about the empty expressions that litter our speech, including a posting last year.)
As for “like,” there are two colloquial usages of the word, and one of them may be too recent for your purposes.
(1) The first (and earlier) usage has been a part of American slang since the 1950s. Here, “like” is used as an interjection, either for emphasis or to hedge a statement. Examples: “He’s, like, a hunk!” … or … “This weighs, like, a ton” … or … “You’re, like, the best.”
(2) In the second usage, the verbal phrase “be like” introduces quotations (real or approximate), as in “She’s like, ‘Who’s that?’ ” … or … “I’m like, ‘You gotta be kidding!’ ”
This “quotative like,” as it’s sometimes called, is the one that was popularized in the 1980s in Valley Girl speech.
So your characters might be expected to use “like” No. 1, but not “like” No. 2.
We’ve written about “like” in our book Origins of the Specious, and Pat has done an On Language column on the subject for the New York Times Magazine.
In case you’d like to know more, read on.
“Like” No. 1, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, was first recorded in 1950. The quote, from Neurotica magazine: “Like how much can you lay on me?”
This use of “like,” according to Random House, was originally associated “with jazz musicians, later with beatniks, hippies, and teenagers.”
Interestingly, some usages very similar to “like” No. 1 (if not indistinguishable from it) have a history dating back nearly 500 years, according to entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In these cases, “like” is used parenthetically to qualify a preceding statement, or before an adjective. Its meaning is roughly “in a way,” “so to speak,” “as it were,” or “in the manner of one who is” (with adjective following), the OED says.
The dictionary cites scores of examples. We’ll give just a few here, along with their dates.
1513: “Yon man is lyke out of his mynd,” from a poem by William Dunbar. (We love this one!)
1596: “All looking on, and like astonisht staring,” from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
1778: “Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship’s taking offense,” from Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina.
1801: “Of a sudden like,” from the novel Mysterious Husband by Gabrielli (the pseudonym of Mary Meeke).
1815: “In honour of the twelve apostles like,” from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering.
1838: “If your Honour were more amongst us, there might be more discipline like,” from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Alice.
1840: “Why like, it’s gaily nigh like to four mile like,” from an essay on style by Thomas De Quincey in which he ridicules the overuse of “like.”
1911: “He hasn’t passed his examinations like. … He has that Mr. Karkeek to cover him like,” from Arnold Bennett’s novel Hilda Lessways.
Perhaps the most common pairing of “like + adjective” is “like mad,” which has been going strong since the 17th century.
The earliest citation is from Henry More’s An Antidote Against Atheism (1655): “For she was then seen … in her fetters, running about like mad.”
Samuel Pepys, in his famous Diary, used the expression in 1663: “Thence by coach with a mad coachman that drove like mad.”
And Samuel Richardson used it in his novel Pamela (1741): “Several Harlequins, and other ludicrous Forms, that jump’d and ran about like mad.”
Here we’ll stop, lest we drive you, like, mad.
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Q: Is it OK to use “close to” instead of “nearly”?
A: We all know that it’s fine to use “close to” in place of the preposition “near,” as in “They live close to Baltimore.” So what about using it in place of an adverb like “nearly” or “almost” (“We drive close to 50 miles to get there”)?
That’s OK too, and here’s why.
Modern grammarians describe “close to” as a complex preposition, meaning that it’s a preposition that consists of more than one word.
There are scores of complex prepositions in English. In the Oxford English Grammar, Sidney Greenbaum lists some of them, including these:
“close to,” “according to,” “as opposed to,” “away from,” “in connection with,” “outside of,” “next to,” “except for,” “instead of,” “contrary to,” “regardless of,” and “up to.”
Some of these are used in prepositional phrases that include numbers or quantities of some kind. “Close to” is often used this way in the sense of “nearly” or “almost.”
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, gives the numerical example “close to a hundred tickets” and a similar one, “up to twenty minutes.”
So we can correctly write or say things like “Every day, I drive close to 50 miles,” or “She sold close to a hundred tickets,” or “We waited close to 20 minutes.”
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Q: Why do we say “cat got your tongue” (or variations thereof) when someone is at a loss for words?
A: Many English idioms involve the word “tongue” and have to do with being too quiet, too talkative, speaking too soon, speaking too harshly, and so on.
When someone clams up, we say “the cat has got his tongue” or “cat got your tongue?”
The Oxford English Dictionary has several citations for the phrase, which is surprisingly recent, perhaps no older than the 20th century.
The earliest OED citation is from Henry Howard Harper’s novel Bob Hardwick (1911). The narrator is at a loss for words when a woman speaks to him during a meal at a boarding house.
“Presently she said, ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’
“ ‘No,’ I said; ‘I ain’t seen any cat’; whereupon they all tittered.” (We’ve gone to the original to expand the OED’s quotation.)
Some reference books say the phrase may go back to the 19th century, but they don’t cite the sources.
Why a cat? Nobody knows.
Theories have been suggested from time to time, but none have been substantiated. For example, there’s no evidence that liars in ancient times had their tongues cut off and fed to cats.
The OED doesn’t offer any explanation. Of course, cats tend to steal any tidbit that takes their fancy, irrespective of property rights, so why not a tongue? If your tongue’s been stolen, you can’t speak.
Interestingly, there’s a similar idiom in French, je jette (or donne) ma langue au chat (literally, “I throw (or give) my tongue to the cat”).
Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, edited by Paul Beale, says the French idiom is the equivalent of “I give up; I can’t guess (the riddle or conundrum); I have nothing to say.”
Here are a few more idiomatic phrases having to do with the tongue, along with their meanings and the earliest dates given in the OED.
To “hold (or keep) one’s tongue,” meaning to shut up, dates back to Old English (circa 897).
A man who “hath two tongues” (1484) can’t be trusted.
If “thy tounge runth before thy wit” (1562), then you should think before you speak.
An eloquent person has the right phrase “ever on his tongues end” (1607).
If you lived in the 19th century, anger might have caused you to give someone “a lick with the rough side of my tongue” (1820).
When you’re at a loss for words, you’ve “lost your tongue” (1870).
Sly or contemptuous humor is often described as “tongue in cheek” (1748).
The expression was apparently first recorded in Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random (1748): “I signified my contempt of him, by thrusting my tongue in my cheek.”
With that, we’ll hold our tongues.
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Q: I was watching “Law & Order: UK” the other day when the Crown Prosecutor (or perhaps a barrister) ended a sentence by saying “full stop.” This reminded me that the British use “full stop” where Americans say “period.” I’d be interested in the history of these punctuation terms.
A: The terms “full stop” and “period” date back to Shakespearean times. Although both were once used in Britain for the punctuation mark, the Oxford English Dictionary describes “period” as now chiefly North American.
The OED’s earliest citation for “period” in this sense is from Arte Brachygraphie, a 1597 book about shorthand, by the English calligrapher Peter Bales: “The first is a full pricke or period.” (Here, “pricke” means a dot or spot.)
We haven’t seen the text of the Bales book, but the OED says the word “period” here refers to “the single point used to mark the end of a sentence.”
The dictionary has an even earlier citation that uses “period” for the full pause at the end of a sentence, rather than for the punctuation mark itself.
Here’s the citation, from Penelope’s Web, a 1587 collection of tales by the English writer Robert Greene: “She fell into consideration with her selfe that the longest Sommer hath his Autumne, the largest sentence his Period.”
The dictionary’s first citation for “full stop” to mean the punctuation mark is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600). In urging Salanio to get to the end of a story, Salarino says, “Come, the full stop.”
And here’s an example using both “period” and “full stop,” from Micrographia, a 1665 book by the English polymath Robert Hook about his observations with a microscope: “A point commonly so call’d, that is, the mark of a full stop, or period.”
The use of “period” for the punctuation mark is derived from the Medieval Latin periodus (spelled peri[o]dos in Aelfric’s Grammar, a text in Latin and Old English from the early 11th century).
And with that, we’ll come to a full stop.
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Q: I found this sentence in a book I’m reading: “Stop, lest someone hears you.” Shouldn’t this read “Stop, lest someone hear you,” which I believe is the subjunctive? Or would it be more correct to write “Stop, lest someone were to hear you”? However, this seems stilted for dialog,
A: The word “lest” is normally used with a verb that’s in the subjunctive mood or that’s accompanied by “should.”
As we’ve written before on our blog, the subjunctive is used for only three purposes in modern English:
(1) To express a wish: “I wish I were there.”
(2) To express an “if” statement about a condition that’s contrary to fact: “If I were a carpenter, I’d fix it myself.”
(3) To express that something is being asked, demanded, ordered, suggested, and so on: “I demand that I be released.”
But, as we pointed out, the subjunctive was once much more common than it is today.
Some archaic usages have survived in the case of certain words and phrases, like “God forbid,” “come what may,” “suffice it to say,” and others.
One of these survivors is the continued use of “lest” with the subjunctive.
A few examples: “He was quiet, lest he wake the baby” … “I hurried, lest I be late” … “She’s always on time, lest she lose her job.”
Any of those could be written instead with “should,” as in “lest he should wake the baby.”
“Lest” is an interesting word etymologically, a living antique. Its meaning is “for fear that” or, roughly, “in order not that” such-and-such happen.
It developed from an Old English phrase first recorded around the year 1000: thy laes the (“whereby less that”).
During the Middle English period (about 1100-1500), the first part of the phrase was dropped, and it was written as les the (“less that”), then les te, then leste, and finally “lest,” though other spellings continued into later times.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that “lest,” which is a conjunction, is used in two senses.
First, it’s “a negative particle of intention or purpose, introducing a clause expressive of something to be prevented or guarded against.”
Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1797, used the word in that sense: “Nobody scarcely will venture to buy or draw bills, lest they should be paid there in depreciated currency.”
And here’s an example of that sense of “lest” used with the subjunctive (without “should”), from Cornwall magazine (1855): “Look to the Purser well, lest he look to himself too well.”
Second, the OED says, the word is “used after verbs of fearing, or phrases indicating apprehension or danger, to introduce a clause expressing the event that is feared.”
The mountaineer Frederick Clissold used the word in that sense in The Ascent of Mont Blanc (1823): “I felt a strong inclination to sleep, and feared lest I should drop down.”
And here’s an example of that sense of “lest” used with the subjunctive (without “should”), from Ralph Austen’s Treatise of Fruit Trees (1653): “All the danger is least we take too much liberty herein.” (Here, “least” is a variant spelling of “lest.”)
As you can see, the sentence “Stop, lest someone hear you” could also be written as “Stop, lest someone should hear you.”
The other version you mention ( “Stop, lest someone were to hear you”) uses the subjunctive correctly but it’s needlessly wordy.
We’ll stop now, lest we be needlessly wordy too.
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Q: I’ve been trying to find a reliable etymology for “drag” in reference to men who wear women’s clothes. The ones I’ve read seem fanciful only.
A: This sense of “drag” originated in the 19th century as a theatrical term, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
The slang dictionary, edited by Jonathan E. Lighter, says the term originally referred to women’s clothing worn on the stage by a male actor.
Random House doesn’t explain why “drag” was first used in this context, but Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says the original theatrical use “stressed the drag of a long dress along the floor, as opposed to tight-fitting trousers.”
Although the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t directly support Cassell’s here, its citations for this sense of “drag” are in a section referring to “something that drags, or hangs heavily.”
The OED defines “drag” in this sense as “feminine attire worn by a man; also, a party or dance attended by men wearing feminine attire; hence gen., clothes, clothing. slang.”
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) use the term more broadly to include men’s clothing worn by women.
Interestingly, the earliest citation for the usage in the OED refers to men dressing in women’s clothes for a party, not for a play, raising questions about the theatrical origin of the term.
We’ve expanded on the citation, which comes from the May 29, 1870, issue of Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper: “We shall come in drag, which means men wearing women’s costumes.”
Although most of the OED citations refer to men dressing in women’s clothing, some use “drag” in reference to wearing odd or unusual clothing.
For example, a 1966 citation from The Listener, a defunct BBC magazine, describes Laurence Olivier as “doing his Othello voice and attired painstakingly in Arab drag.”
By the way, Cassell’s says “drag” wasn’t used “in a homosexual context” until the 20th century, and published references in the OED support this.
The first OED citation that suggests a gay link is from the Feb. 13, 1927, issue of the Sunday Express: “A drag is a rowdy party attended by abnormal men dressed in scanty feminine garments, singing jazz songs in high falsetto voices.”
(The etymologist Michael Quinion has tracked down some evidence of an earlier gay sighting, but we’ll stick with the OED for now. If you’d like to decide for yourself, check out his research.)
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Q: I recently viewed the Coen brothers’ film True Grit and noticed that Mattie and the other main characters don’t use contractions. Was this the “educated” or acceptable practice of the period (the 1880s)?
A: Ethan and Joel Coen were asked this very question in a Dec. 14, 2010, interview with Newsweek magazine.
“We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period,” Ethan said.
We saw True Grit a couple of days ago and noticed that contractions do pop up once in a while, though not to the degree we hear them now.
We haven’t read the 1968 Charles Portis novel that the film is based on, but a discussion on the Language Log indicates that contractions show up at times in the book too.
Were contractions considered a no-no in the late 19th century? The answer is yes and no.
As we’ve written in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths, writers have been using contractions in English since Anglo-Saxon days.
Old English contractions include nis from ne is (“is not”), naes from ne waes (“was not”), nolde from ne wolde (“would not”), naefde from ne haefde (“did not have”), and nat from ne wat (“does not know”).
Contractions were an accepted part of the language for hundreds of years. In Elizabethan times, for instance, Shakespeare used them in dialogue (“But he’s an arrant knave”—Hamlet), in titles (All’s Well That Ends Well), and in sonnets (“That’s for thyself to breed another thee”).
“In fact,” we write in Origins of the Specious, “there were many more contractions in olden days than there are now, including such quaint old dears as ha’n’t, sha’n’t, ’tis, ’twere, ’twill, ’twon’t, ’twouldn’t, and a’n’t, the father of ain’t.”
Throughout the 17th and much of the 18th centuries, contractions were normal in speech and respectable in writing, even scholarly prose. It wasn’t till the early 1700s that anybody thought to question them.
Addison, Swift, Pope, and others began raising questions about their suitability in print, even though educated people routinely used them in conversation.
By the late 18th century, contractions were in disgrace, tolerated in speech but considered by language authorities an embarrassment in writing.
Contractions remained in the doghouse until well into the 20th century, when opinion makers started coming to their senses.
In the 1920s, for example, Henry Fowler used contractions without comment in his famous usage guide, indicating he saw nothing wrong with them.
But what about the suitability of contractions in True Grit?
Both the movie and the novel open in 1928, when Mattie tells about her adventures as a 14-year-old in the early 1880s.
In 1928, as we’ve said, contractions were coming back into favor, though some usage gurus still frowned on them until late in the 20th century.
But in the 1880s, when Mattie hired Rooster Cogburn to avenge her slain father, contractions were considered a no-no by usage authorities.
It’s unlikely, though, that Mattie, Rooster, or any other character in the book would have paid much attention to usage guides, especially in speech.
Contractions may have been condemned by the language mavens of the 19th century, but they were alive and well among the people using the language.
In the Language Log posting, for example, the linguist Mark Liberman points out the prevalence of contractions in Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer, which was published in 1876, just a few years before Mattie hired Rooster.
Liberman writes that that there are 58 instances of “won’t” and just one of “will not” in the novel, as well as 223 instances of “don’t” and just one of “do not.”
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Q: What is the Indo-European root for “harmony”? Is it older than the root for “gnosis”?
A: The Indo-European root for “harmony” has been reconstructed as ar-, meaning to fit together.
This is the prehistoric origin of the Greek words harmos (joint, shoulder) and harmonia, which means a concord of sounds but also has a more general sense: concord, joining, or agreement.
The word traveled from Greek to Latin (harmonia) to French (harmonie) and finally to English in the late 14th century.
The earliest use of “harmony” in English is in its musical sense. In The Hous of Fame (circa 1384), Chaucer wrote of “Songes ful of Armonye.”
The word was first used in English in its more general sense (agreement, concord, etc.) in the 1500s.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense as “combination or adaptation of parts, elements, or related things, so as to form a consistent and orderly whole; agreement, accord, congruity.”
The prehistoric root that gave us “harmony” (ar-) is also in the genes of such words as arm, armada, armature, armoire, army, article, alarm, disarm, gendarme, art, artisan, and words starting with the arthro– prefix.
An entirely separate Indo-European root, gno-, is responsible for the Greek gnosis (knowledge). In English, “gnosis” refers to the esoteric knowledge sought by the ancient Gnostics.
The gno- root is also responsible (through proto-Germanic) for the Old English cnawan (know) as well as the modern words know, knowledge, ken, kith, kin, cunning, and others.
Some other descendants of gno– came into English through Latin and Greek: notice, notion, cognition, recognize, ignore, noble, gnostic, diagnosis, narrate, normal, and others too numerous to mention.
These two Indo-European roots, ar- and gno-, were independent of one another, so it makes no sense to ask which came first. Remember that this is prehistory we’re talking about, before there was writing.
We can recommend, if you’re interested, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, edited by Calvert Watkins. It’s in paperback.
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Q: I recently started a list of words that seem to be conglomerates of smaller words (e.g., albeit, heretofore, nonetheless, and whatsoever). I’m attaching the list. I’ve always liked this kind of word, albeit under the level of my consciousness. Can you tell me anything about them, as a group?
A: What a great list! These are compound words, made up of two or three smaller ones. Many of these got their start in Middle English, though some weren’t written as one word until a later period.
Compounds aren’t unusual in English. In fact, compounding is an important way that English forms new words, like “plainclothesman” and “counterclockwise” (both triple compounds).
Most of the ones on your list, like “aforementioned” and “heretofore,” are the kind we associate with the language of legislative acts, contracts, wills, and other legal documents. And not everybody likes them.
A recent New York Times article about the economist Alfred E. Kahn, who died in December, quoted him on this very subject. Kahn, a devotee of plain English, once wrote this in a memo to the lawyers and economists on his staff:
“Every time you’re tempted to use ‘herein’ or ‘hereinabout’ or ‘hereinunder’ or, similarly, ‘therein,’ ‘thereinabove’ or ‘thereinunder,’ and the corresponding variants, try ‘here’ or ‘there’ or ‘above’ or ‘below,’ and see if it doesn’t make just as much sense.”
Here (we won’t say “hereinunder”) is a look at some of the words in your collection, plus a few more. We’ll stick with the triple compounds.
“albeit” and the archaic “howbeit”: These were originally three-word phrases, “all be it” (circa 1385) and “how be it’ (1398). The first means something like “even though it be that” or “although.” The second means “however it may be” or “be that as it may.”
“inasmuch”: When it originated (before 1300), this was three separate words, “in as much.” But it’s been written as one word for most of its history. It’s generally followed by “as.” The phrase “inasmuch as” means “in view of the fact that” or “to the extent that” or “because.”
“insofar”: This was originally three words, “in so far” (1596), and it’s also followed by “as.” The meaning of “insofar as” is “to such an extent that” or “in such measure or degree as.”
“hereinafter”: This compound (1590) means “after this point in the document” or “hereafter.” The words “hereinbefore” (1687) and “hereinabove” (1768-74) are its cousins.
“heretofore”: This one (c. 1350) means “before this time” or “formerly.” It includes the obsolete compound “tofore” (before 900), which once meant “to the front of” or “before.”
“nevertheless”: This familiar combination dates from before 1382 and means “despite that” or “all the same” or “nonetheless” (see below). And yes, it once had an opposite number, “neverthemore,” an obsolete word that meant “not at all” or “definitely not.”
“nonetheless”: This one dates from 1533 and means the same as “nevertheless.” It was preceded by earlier forms that combined “no” + “the” + “less” or “nought” + “the” + “less” and were written as “natheless,” “netheless,” “noutheless,” and so on.
“notwithstanding”: This isn’t really a triple compound, because the “with” of “withstand” is technically a verbal prefix instead of a word. But who cares? It dates back to before 1400 and means “in spite of” or “all the same.” The similar “noughtwithstanding” is even earlier, but it didn’t last.
“whatsoever”: This combination (c. 1250) means the same as “whatever.” Then why the “so”? Because “whatsoever” incorporates an earlier, archaic compound, “whatso” (“what” + “so”), which also meant “whatever,” and which survived in poetic usage into the early 20th century. (Example: “Despatches, sermons,—whatso goes / Into their brain comes out as prose,” from a 19th-century poem by the pseudonymous Sylvanus Urban.)
“wherewithal”: This one (1535) combines “where” with an archaic compound, “withal” (“with” + “all”), which once meant “in addition” or “along with the rest” or “moreover.” Today the triple compound “wherewithal” is a noun for “necessary means,” as in “He didn’t have the wherewithal to pay his rent.”
Having written the aforementioned, we will hereinafter sign off.
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Q: I looked up the word “tousle” in my dictionary today and was surprised to find that it’s pronounced TAU-zul. I always thought it was TAU-sul. I asked a couple of other people, one American and the other British, and there was no tussle. We all pronounce it TAU-sul. What is your ruling on this?
A: We assume you’re referring to the verb “tousle,” which means to rumple or dishevel. The less common noun refers to a tangled or disheveled mass of something, such as hair.
Both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) list two acceptable pronunciations of the verb: TAU-zul and TAU-sul. (The first syllable rhymes with “now.”)
However, Merriam-Webster’s gives only one pronunciation for the noun: TAU-zul. American Heritage has the same two for verb and noun.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists only the TAU-zul pronunciation for verb and noun, and it includes “touzle” as well as “tousle” as spellings.
The verb showed up in English in the 15th century, several hundred years before the noun.
In addition to the verb’s usual meaning of to rumple, the OED lists one that’s new to us: “to handle (esp. a woman) rudely or indelicately.”
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Q: We’re wondering when the word “dick” (slang for the sexual organ) came to mean a stupid or obnoxious person, as in, “Don’t be such a dick.”
A: First things first. The term “dick” has been a euphemism for the penis since at least as far back as the 19th century.
Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang dates the “penis” sense of the word to the mid-19th century.
Two other sources, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, give citations from 1891 and 1888, respectively.
But sexual slang, with its euphemistic character and its tendency to show up in speech long before it appears in print, is hard to pin down.
Though there’s no solid evidence that “dick” meant “penis” before the 19th century, one scholar has suggested that the usage might have been around much further back, in the 14th century.
Gordon Williams, in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, cites the Chaucer scholar Haldeen Braddy on a possible verbal source of the usage.
Braddy suspected, according to Williams, that the sexual use of “dick” may have originated in an old verb, dighte, which Chaucer used in The Canterbury Tales “in reference to copulation.”
In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” the narrator says she goes out at night to “espye wenches that he dighte.” Later, she mentions wives who let their lovers “dighte hire [them] al the nyght.”
We don’t know why “dick” came to mean a penis, but the OED includes this “coarse” slang sense of the word within its entry for the nickname “Dick.”
The dictionary notes that the “familiar pet-form of the common Christian name Richard” has been used generically, much like “Jack,” to mean “fellow,” “lad,” “man,” and so on.
It’s no stretch to imagine a generic masculine name being used for the preeminent masculine body part!
But how long, you ask, has “dick” been used to mean a stupid or contemptible person? Only since the 1960s, according to Cassell’s and Random House.
The earliest Random House citation is from Norman Bogner’s 1966 novel Seventh Avenue: “He’s a dick. I don’t know from respect, except for my parents.”
But why “dick” instead of, say “ralph” or “herbert”? We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that this sense comes from the sexual meaning of the word.
The usage follows several negative verbal senses of “dick” that showed up in the mid-20th century, such as “dick around” (1948, waste time), “dick off” (1948, shirk one’s duties), and “dick up” (1951, spoil).
You may be wondering how “Dick” came to be a nickname for “Richard.” The fact is that nobody knows for sure.
But if you’d like to read more, we wrote a blog entry a while back on nicknames and another on the expression “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”
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Q: If I were to ask one of my Irish relatives how much is left over after spending half a euro, they would reply “50 cent” while I (an American) would say “50 cents.” I would appreciate any enlightenment you could provide.
A: This usage does indeed sound odd to an American. We would use the conventional English plural and say the euro has 100 cents, or two euros have 200 cents.
However, your Irish relatives can justify using “cent” and “euro” as plurals. They could also justify adding “s” and using “cents” and “euros.” Here’s the story.
It all depends on which official European Commission document you consult.
For example, the commission has standardized the way these monetary units are referred to in legislation from country to country.
This is explained in a document entitled “Spelling of the Words ‘Euro’ and ‘Cent’ in Official Community Languages as Used in Community Legislative Acts.”
The column devoted to English gives the singulars as “euro” and “cent” and the plurals as “euro” and “cent.”
A footnote for each plural says: “This spelling without an ‘s’ may be seen as departing from usual English practice for currencies.”
But another official manual, “English Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors and Translators in the European Commission,” says otherwise.
The handbook, published by the European Commission Directorate-General for Translation, has this to say:
“Like ‘pound,’ ‘dollar’ or any other currency name in English, the word ‘euro’ is written in lower case with no initial capital. Where appropriate, it takes the plural ‘s’ (as does ‘cent’): This book costs ten euros and fifty cents.”
Why have one standard for legislation and another for ordinary usage? Maybe you can figure it out; we can’t.
In fact, the legislative standard isn’t even consistent. Singulars and plurals change in some languages, including Spanish and French, while they stay the same in others, including German and Italian.
As of January, 17 countries have adopted the euro, including Ireland. The UK, which includes Northern Ireland, has “agreed an ‘opt-out’ clause in the Treaty” that exempts it from participation, the European Commission says.
The euro symbol looks like a capital “C” with two horizontal strokes through it, and was inspired by the Greek letter epsilon.
The European Commission says that “on many computers the euro symbol can be obtained with the <ctrl>+<alt>+e keystrokes.” (Doesn’t work in our email program, though.)
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Q: With some regularity, I catch people rejecting something by making the ridiculous statement “I don’t accept the fact that….” If it ain’t a fact, don’t call it one.
A: We agree with you that it doesn’t make much sense to say, “I don’t accept the fact that…” in such cases. If you acknowledge something to be a fact, then you’ve accepted it as the truth.
But language isn’t mathematics, and words are sometimes used less than literally. They also change over time.
The phrase “the fact that” has been around since the early 19th century, and it’s often used to mean “the circumstance that,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In fact (if you’ll pardon the expression), the OED’s earliest published reference for “the fact that” uses the phrase in just the way you object to.
Here’s the citation, from a diary entry in Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (1803): “I would not agree to the fact that ennui prevailed more in England than in France.”
Although the usage has a history (more on this later), we find it a bit sloppy, especially in writing. We’d say we didn’t agree that such-and-such WAS a fact.
But on to the word “fact,” which once had a meaning somewhat different from today’s.
It comes from the Latin factum (“thing done”), a past participle of the verb facere (“do”).
This explains why the word meant simply an action, a deed, or a “feat” (another word from the Latin factum) when it entered English in the mid-1500s.
“Fact” retained some of its original flavor for centuries. In the early 1800s, people were still using the phrase “caught in the fact” the way we now use “caught in the act.”
And when Jane Austen, in her novel Emma (1815), described the people of Enscombe as “gracious in fact if not in word,” she was contrasting words with deeds.
Like most words, “fact” has gone through some changes in its lifetime.
In modern English, a “fact,” according to the OED, is “something that has really occurred or is actually the case … hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a conjecture or fiction.”
This meaning was first recorded in 1632 in James Hayward’s translation of Eromena, a novel by Giovanni Francesco Biondi: “They resolved that the Admirall should goe disguised … to assure himselfe of the fact.”
Here’s a later use, in Tobias Smollett’s 1749 translation of Alain René Le Sage’s novel Gil Blas: “Facts are stubborn things.”
We can’t argue with that.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t had your fill of facts, you might be interested in a blog item we wrote last year about the word “factoid.”
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Q: I was fascinated to learn from your posting on “amen” that this affirmation was originally a verb meaning to confirm. Similarly, I’ve heard that the noun “belief” was originally a verb meaning to know.
A: The word “belief” originally meant trust or faith or confidence in something, but it has evolved into a different meaning: the mental acceptance of something as true.
As far as we can tell, however, the noun “belief” has never meant knowledge, just as the verb “believe” has never meant to know.
Nevertheless, we believe that you may be interested in some unusual characteristics of the noun “belief.”
The prefix “be-,” for example, is not a natural part of English nouns. So how did it end up attached to “belief”?
As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the prefix was added to the Old English noun leafa, influenced by the verb, where “be-” functions as an intensifier.
Another interesting point is that the noun and the verb had similar-sounding endings for a time.
The two parted ways in the 16th century, when the noun changed from “beleeve” to “beleefe,” probably influenced by pairs like “grieve”/“grief” and “prove”/“proof.”
“Belief” was first written as leafa (or geleafa) in Old English in the 10th century, and meant faith or trust.
It came into English from old Germanic languages, but it can be traced ultimately to prehistoric times and the ancient Indo-European root leubh.
This same Indo-European root also gave us the word “love.”
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Q: Are you aware of any references to “the skinny” prior to 1967? I was in the US Air Force then and provided an information sheet to briefers on data like runway length, aircraft, equipment, etc. The four-inch-wide sheet was known as “the skinny sheet,” and one of the briefers referred to its information as “the skinny.”
A: The earliest example we’ve found for “the skinny” used in this sense is from the 1932 Lucky Bag, the yearbook of the US Naval Academy:
“If you don’t get the skinny of things, Eddie can usually set you right” (from the entry for Harold Edward Baker, a cadet from Yakima, WA).
The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Rolling World, a 1938 autobiography by the adventurer and writer Richard Matthews Hallet:
“Had she really given me the skinny of an actual legend from the archives of her race, or was she wafting me the native poetry of her soul?”
The OED defines the expression this way: “slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.). With the. Detailed and esp. confidential information about a person or topic, ‘the low-down’; (also more generally) news, gossip.”
The dictionary has one other pre-1967 citation for the usage, from The Big War, a 1957 novel by Anton Myrer: “I’ll cut you in on some hot skinnay.”
There’s no reliable explanation for the origin of this sense of “skinny,” as we wrote in a brief blog item on the subject in 2006.
But it’s been speculated that “to get down to the skinny” (that is, to get the essential information about something), was like getting down to the skin of an issue.
For what it’s worth, the Old Icelandic word skinna (a cousin of our “skin”) referred to a piece of parchment or vellum, perhaps influencing a couple of English usages related to information.
The old word may have given us “skin book,” a term that entered English in the 19th century with the meaning of a manuscript made of parchment or vellum.
And though it’s quite a stretch, an imaginative wordie might also see flakes of skinna in the 20th-century slang sense of “skin book” as a pornographic work.
The word “skinny,” by the way, didn’t refer to a scrawny person or animal when it entered English as an adjective around 1400.
The earliest citations in the OED use “skinny” to mean covered with skin, affecting the skin, looking like skin, and perhaps even having beautiful skin.
The colloquial sense of “skinny” as thin or lean didn’t show up until the early 1600s when Shakespeare used it in Macbeth: “Each at once her choppie finger laying Vpon her skinnie Lips.”
[Note: This post was updated on June 9, 2021.]
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Q: I was reading David Crystal’s blog the other day and I noticed his post “On me/my being right.” He said either “me” or “my” could be correct. “The non-possessive one highlights the verb phrase,” he wrote, “whereas the possessive one highlights the noun phrase.” Strunk and White would insist on “my” here. Who’s right, Crystal or S&W? Is this a US-vs.-UK thing? Please clarify.
A: No, this isn’t an American-vs.-British issue. We think Crystal (a linguist and a Brit) is right. As for Strunk and White, its strong suit is style, not grammar.
It’s true that a noun or pronoun modifying a gerund (an “–ing” word acting as a noun) should be in the possessive case: “Dick’s [or his] skiing has improved.” We’ve written about this subject before on our blog.
But as we write in that entry, not every “-ing” word is a gerund. It could be a participle (as in “I saw Dick skiing yesterday”).
The difference is one of emphasis: a gerund functions as a noun, while a participle functions as a verb. So if the “-ing” word could be replaced with a noun, then it’s a gerund.
We could say either “Dick’s athleticism [noun] has improved” or “Dick’s skiing [gerund] has improved.” In both cases, the modifier is in the possessive case.
Here’s another example. Say a singer and a record producer are talking. The producer might say either (1) “I’ve heard you singing” or (2) “I’ve heard your singing.” Both are correct, but the statements have different meanings.
In #1, “singing” is a participle; the speaker is emphasizing the verb (the act of singing).
In #2, “singing” is a gerund; the speaker is emphasizing the noun (the singing itself).
To use another example, the word “standing” can be either a participle or a gerund.
Participle: “I saw you standing on the cliff.”
Gerund: “I was alarmed by your standing on the cliff.”
We hope this makes things a bit clearer.
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Q: It seems to me that the phrase “fall on one’s sword” has been overused and watered down to the point of meaninglessness. At one time it meant to commit suicide, but it’s now used to describe a minor mea culpa. The public editor at the New York Times, for example, recently referred to the sports editor’s acknowledgement of a mistake as “falling on his sword.”
A: The practice of committing suicide by running oneself through with a sword is thousands of years old—probably as old as swords themselves.
The English expression “to fall on one’s sword” is much younger, naturally, but it’s difficult to say just when it first showed up. We do know that it appeared in the first English translation of the Bible, in the late 14th century.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that in Bible translations, to “fall on” a sword means “to throw oneself upon” it.
The OED gives an example from the 1382 Wycliffe translation of the Bible: “So Saul caught his swerd and felle vpon it.” A 1611 version of the Bible has “Therfore Saul tooke a sword, and fell upon it.”
In Virgil’s Aeneid, written in Latin in the first century BC, the lovelorn Dido, queen of Carthage, does away with herself in this grisly manner, stabbing herself with Aeneas’ sword as her horrified attendants look on.
When Sir William Mure translated Dido and Aeneas (the early books of the Aeneid) into English in about 1614, he wrote: “Her Dams attending see their mistris fall / On piercing sword.”
Here’s another 17th-century citation, from Sir Robert Stapylton’s 1647 translation of Juvenal’s Sixteen Satyrs: “He converted his fury upon himself, and … fell upon his own sword.”
Similarly, Plutarch’s Lives has a passage describing how Brutus handed his sword to his friend Strato, then “he fell on the point, and died.” (From an 1832 translation by John and William Langhorne.)
For a later example, here’s Richard Le Gallienne, writing in From a Paris Garret (1936), a collection of columns written for the New York Sun:
“Vatel … committed suicide by falling on his sword … because the ‘roti’ at the twenty-fifth table was wanting.” (The reference is to a 17th-century chef who took his job too seriously.)
These days, “to fall on one’s sword” doesn’t necessarily mean to commit suicide. It can mean to sacrifice one’s career and livelihood in admitting an error, like an executive or other public figure who resigns in shame.
A more watered-down usage—meaning simply to accept the blame or responsibility for something—has recently emerged.
That’s how Arthur S. Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, used the expression in his Dec. 26, 2010, column.
It’s our opinion that with this new usage, the phrase loses a lot of its edge (no pun intended).
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Q: Why does the expression “a piece of cake” refer to something easy, while baking a cake (at least for me) is anything but?
A: The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t comment on the difficulties of cake-making, but it agrees with you that the colloquial phrase “a piece of cake” refers to “something easy or pleasant.”
How did cake get this reputation?
As the OED explains, cake is associated figuratively, especially by children, “as a ‘good thing,’ the dainty, delicacy, or ‘sweets’ of a repast.”
Cake comes off as highly rated in other phrases as well.
The expression “you can’t have your cake [that is, keep your cake] and eat it too” dates back, in various forms, to the 1500s.
Here’s its earliest incarnation, from John Heywood’s Proverbs and Epigrams (1562): “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?”
The phrases “cakes and ale” (in England) and “cake and cheese” (in Scotland) have been used since the early 1600s as metaphors for the good things in life.
Similarly, the 19th-century American expression “to take the cake” means “to carry off the honours, rank first,” the OED says, adding that it’s “often used ironically or as an expression of surprise.”
And of course, any extra trimmings in the way of good luck will inevitably be described as “the icing on the cake” (1969).
But back to “a piece of cake.” The OED’s first citation comes from a collection of light verse by Ogden Nash, The Primrose Path (1935): “Her picture’s in the papers now, / And life’s a piece of cake.”
And here’s a later usage, from Terry McLean’s Kings of Rugby (1960): “They took the field against Canterbury as if the match were ‘a piece of cake.’ ”
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Q: In a recent blog post, you wrote: “Interestingly, there may be a connection here (however, tenuous) with the verb ‘schmooze.’ ” The word “interestingly” could be replaced by “happily,” “sadly,” “frankly,” etc., and no one would complain. But if it were replaced by “hopefully,” hackles would be raised. I’m interested in your thoughts.
A: The adverb “hopefully” has been hotly debated among usage authorities for the last 60 years or so. We devoted a section of our book about language myths, Origins of the Specious, to the subject.
There are two schools of thought here:
The first school believes that “hopefully” should modify only a specific verb, and that it should have the meaning “in a hopeful manner.” (Example: “He wished hopefully for rain.”)
The second believes that “hopefully” can modify an entire sentence, and that it can have the meaning “it is to be hoped that.” (Example: “Hopefully it will rain.”)
We’re in the second camp. And so is Merriam-Webster, which notes that the use of “hopefully” as a sentence adverb is “grammatically sound” and dates back to the mid-17th century.
This is the dictionary’s earliest example:
“This Discourse hath fully approved itself unto the Judgement of all those that have seen it hitherto, and hopefully it would have wrought some effect upon those that mannage the Affairs of this State, if the Danger of this last Commotion, had not employed all their strength and Attention, to save us from sudden Shipwreck.” From Samuel Hartlib’s A Further Discoverie of the Office of Publick Address for Accomodations, 1648.
Here’s what M-W says in a usage guide:
“Hopefully when used to mean ‘it is hoped’ is a member of a class of adverbs and adverbial phrases known as disjuncts. Disjuncts provide a means for the author or speaker to comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (such as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, and unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The ‘it is hoped’ sense of hopefully is entirely standard.”
So if this use of “hopefully” is so old, why all the fuss? Well, though the usage has been known since the 1600s, it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that it became, first, more common, and later, hugely popular. And since the ’60s or so, a misconceived “rule” against it also became popular.
If you don’t mind our cribbing from our own book, here are a few passages from Origins of the Specious:
“It’s hopeless to resist the evolution of ‘hopefully.’
“Usage experts used to insist, and many traditionalists still do, that there’s only one correct way to use ‘hopefully’—as an adverb meaning ‘in a hopeful manner.’ (‘Did my horse win?’ Nathan asked hopefully.’) It’s a hanging offense, the sticklers say, to use it to mean ‘it is hoped’ or ‘let us hope.’ (‘Hopefully he won,’ Nathan said.) The word ‘hopefully,’ the argument goes, should modify a verb, not a whole sentence.
“Oh yeah? Writers have been using adverbs to modify entire sentences for hundreds of years. In fact, the first complete English translation of the Bible, the Wycliffe version of about 1382, uses ‘plainly’ (it was spelled ‘pleynly’ then) as a sentence adverb. Here’s the passage in modern English: ‘Plainly this is my infirmity, and I shall bear it.’
“Many other adverbs have been used in the same way by respected writers. Jane Austen in Mansfield Park (1814): ‘Luckily the strength of the piece did not depend upon him.’ Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution (1837): ‘Happily human brains have such a talent of taking up simply what they can carry, and ignoring all the rest.’ Charles Darwin in an 1847 letter: ‘Oddly, I was never at all staggered by this theory until now, having read Mr. Milne’s argument against it.’ Virginia Woolf in a 1939 diary entry: ‘Mercifully we have 50 miles of felt between ourselves and the den.’
“Words like ‘plainly,’ ‘luckily,’ ‘happily,’ ‘oddly,’ ‘curiously,’ ‘surely,’ ‘strictly,’ ‘seriously,’ ‘certainly,’ and more have been used as sentence adverbs for centuries without upsetting anybody. Yet, remarkably, people seem to have drawn the line at ‘hopefully.’ ”
We conclude that “ ‘hopefully’ has long since earned its right to be a sentence adverb. It’s so widely accepted because no other word does the job quite as well.”
[Note: This post was updated on May 23, 2026.]
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She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. If you miss a program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Q: “Panini” and “biscotti” are plurals in Italian, but I often hear them as singulars in English. When words like these are relatively recent additions to English, what are the proper singulars and plurals?
A: As of this writing, “biscotto” and “panino” are the singular forms; “biscotti” and “panini” are the plurals.
So say both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).
But stay tuned. We wouldn’t be surprised if “biscotto” and “panino” went the way of “graffito.”
Why? Because more and more people are treating the plural forms as singular and using them with singular verbs.
When Pat is in New York for her monthly WNYC broadcasts, she regularly has lunch at an Italian kiosk in Grand Central Station. The lunch counter serves both panini and biscotti. But customers generally ask for “a panini” or “a biscotti.”
When a foreign word sneaks into English, it becomes an English word and acquires a life of its own. The word may keep some or all of its foreign flavor, at least for a while, but it may not.
Many foreign words adopted into English have lost the plural inflections they had in their parent languages.
Spaghetti, for instance, is a plural in Italian, but we don’t say, “These spaghetti are delicious.” Similarly, Italian plurals like zucchini and fettuccine are treated as singulars in English.
The word “graffiti,” too, comes from an Italian plural but it’s more commonly used as a singular in English. More people say “graffiti is” than “graffiti are.” We had a blog entry about graffiti a couple of years ago.
Furthermore, once new words are adopted they generally form their plurals in the usual English way.
For example, when you and a friend both want a cappuccino, you don’t tell the barista at Starbucks that you want “two cappuccini.” You ask for “two cappuccinos.”
That’s why we hear people speak of “biscottis” and “paninis”—hence re-pluralizing those originally plural words.
You ask about “proper” usage. The process of Anglicization doesn’t happen overnight, if it happens at all.
As we often say, English is a work in progress, and common usage is what influences lexicographers to update their dictionary entries generation after generation.
So until things sort themselves out, you can’t do better than to consult the most recent dictionaries. And, as we say, stay tuned.
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Q: I got Origins of the Specious for Christmas from my older daughter, and I am enjoying it. I dog-eared page 35 so I wouldn’t lose the place where you write “a couple” instead of “a couple of.” This usage is getting more and more common, but I still don’t like it. Dang!
A: You’re right (good eye!)—on page 35, we write, “That’s been the rule for the last couple hundred years….”
We do this again on page 180: “…the word ‘decimate’ executed a couple more turns in the road.”
As we’ve written elsewhere on the blog, the informal use of “couple” before a plural, without the usual “of” afterward, is common in casual writing and in speech.
The deletion is especially common when “couple” is followed by a numerical term, like “hundred,” or a time element, like “weeks.”
In Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths, we aimed for an informal voice, so we feel this usage is justified here.
In fact, “couple,” with its air of inexactitude, is rather informal itself.
We did a search, and we find that except for those two passages, we stick to “couple of” throughout the book.
We write “couple of months (p. 25), “couple of seafaring myths” (p. 68), “couple of years” (pp. 99, 133, 188), “couple of decades” (pp. 150, 176), “couple of misconceptions” (p. 164), and “couple of lifetimes” (p. 193).
And for rhythmic reasons, we also even used “couple of hundred years” in a couple of spots (pp. 53, 165).
Yes, we added “of” here to the numerical phrase (“couple hundred years”) that caught your eye.
By the way, “couple” isn’t followed by “of” in terms of comparison, like “couple more” or “couple fewer.”
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Q: I’ve always wondered why some people say “right-hand turn” or “left-hand turn” instead of the more succinct “left turn” or “right turn.” If they’re going to use a body part, why not “right-foot turn” or “left-nostril turn”?
A: Perhaps people sometimes use “hand” in these directional phrases because they so often use their hands in gesturing to show such directions.
In any case, it seems natural to associate right and left with our right and left hands.
The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for “right-hand” or “right hand”—meaning on or toward the right—dating back to 1576.
John Milton used the adjective in Paradise Lost (1667): “Som times He scours the right hand coast.”
So did William Bartam in his Travels in North and South Carolina (1791): “On the right hand side was the Orangery.”
Similarly, “left-hand” or “left hand” has been used for centuries, meaning on, toward, or placed on the left side, the OED says.
Here’s a quotation from the satirist Samuel Rowlands (1598): “A little from that place Vpon the left-hand side.”
Both “right-hand” and “left-hand” have metaphorical meanings as well, stemming from age-old associations of “right” with correctness and “left” with wrongness.
Since Old English, “right-hand” has meant valuable or superior, as in “he’s my right-hand man,” or “to give the right hand of fellowship.”
This meaning probably came about, the OED says, “on account of the perception that the right hand was the stronger and the more appropriate for most tasks.”
And for centuries, “left-hand” has meant illegitimate (as in “a child on the left-hand side”), ill-omened, inferior, or sinister.
In fact, the Latin word sinister means left or left-hand, while the Latin dextra, which gave us “dexterous,” means the right hand.
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Q: Why does cooking something “from scratch” mean making it from the most basic ingredients?
A: To bake a cake “from scratch,” as you say, means to make it without using a prepared mixture of ingredients.
You’re probably puzzled by the usage because it originated not in cooking, but in the sporting world. Here’s the story.
The noun “scratch” has had several different meanings in sports terminology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The oldest, dating back to the 18th century, was “a line or mark drawn as an indication of a boundary or starting-point.”
In boxing, for example, “scratch” was “the line drawn across the ring, to which boxers are brought for an encounter.”
That’s where we get phrases like “to come up to (the) scratch,” and “to toe the scratch.” A fighter who “comes up to scratch” is ready and able to box.
But another meaning of “scratch,” the OED says, is “the starting-point in a handicap of a competitor who receives no odds,” a usage first recorded in 1867.
And, of course, the word is often used in the phrase you ask about, “from scratch,” which the OED says means “from a position of no advantage, knowledge, influence, etc., from nothing.”
Here’s the OED’s first citation for the phrase, from Bicycle Journal in 1876: “Mr. Tom Sabin, of the Coventry Bicycle Club, has won, during last week, three races from scratch.”
And here’s a figurative usage, from The Economist in 1936: “Nazi Germany, starting her rapid re-armament ‘from scratch’ in 1933, was fortunate enough to have a surplus capacity in all sections of her heavy industries.”
We didn’t see any citations in the OED for the phrase used in the culinary sense.
The earliest one we could find in the New York Times archive was from a Dec. 10, 1946, article about preparing economical meals.
In discussing processed foods, the author notes that in the city “the old-fashioned style of cooking—from scratch, as it were, without frozen or canned products—is on the wane.”
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Q: I’m sick of hearing the verb “curate” used loosely, as in “I’m going to curate my next garage sale … closet cleanout … laundry sorting.” AAUGH! (Forgive me, Charlie Brown.) Please do what you can to set these “curators” straight.
A: Let’s start with the noun “curate,” a word that entered English in the mid-14th century with the meaning of a clergyman.
Later, in the 16th century, the term came to mean an assistant to a parish priest in the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
The noun “curate” comes from the medieval Latin word curatus, an adjective meaning “of, belonging to, or having a cure or charge,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
(Here “cure,” from the Latin cura, or care, means “the spiritual charge or oversight of parishioners or lay people,” the OED says.)
Shortly after “curate” entered English, so did another noun, “curator.” This word came from the Latin curator or curatorem (meaning overseer, guardian, or agent).
When “curator” first appeared in English, in 1362, it meant a curate. But by the early 1400s it was used in a more secular way, to mean a legal guardian.
In the 17th century, it acquired a few more meanings: a manager or steward, an officer of a university, or a person in charge of a museum, art gallery, library, or the like.
This last meaning gave rise to the verb “curate,” which the OED describes as a back-formation of “curator.”
We’ve written before about back-formations, which are new words formed by dropping prefixes or suffixes from older ones.
Other examples of back-formations include “diagnose” (from “diagnosis”), “escalate” (from “escalator”), “enthuse” (from “enthusiasm”), and “surreal” (from “surrealism” and “surrealist”).
But back to the verb “curate,” which is defined in the OED this way: “to act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.); to look after and preserve.”
The OED’s first printed citation is from the 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed.), but no doubt earlier examples will come to light.
We say this because the gerund “curating” was known much earlier. Here’s a quotation by the naturalist W. E. Hoyle that appeared in 1906 in The Museums Journal:
“I think it will be generally admitted that the business (or may I say ‘profession’) of museum ‘curating’ is one which demands … a special technical training.”
“Curating” is defined in the OED as “the supervision of a museum, gallery, or the like by a curator; the work of storing and preserving exhibits.”
Lately, however, the verb “curate” has been bandied about pretty freely (not to mention pretentiously), and has come loose from its museum moorings.
As Alex Williams wrote in the New York Times in an Oct. 4, 2009, article, stores now “curate” their merchandise, nightclubs “curate” an evening’s entertainment, and websites “curate” their content.
“Curate,” Williams wrote, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.”
Back in more “print-centric” days, the reporter added, “the term of art was ‘edit’—as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully.”
How long will this new use of “curate” last? We suspect it will go away once it’s no longer on the cutting edge.
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Q: “John sat, clipping coupons, at his kitchen table. He did this one or two times in a typical month, and it was the central event in his financial life.” What is John’s financial condition? Is he rich or poor or somewhere in between?
A: You’re right. Without any context that would explain it, this passage is ambiguous.
Is John clipping coupons from the newspaper (“50% off when you buy two!”) because he’s pinching his pennies? Or is he clipping coupons from his bonds because he’s loaded?
The word “coupon” has an interesting history. It ultimately comes from the Latin colaphus (a blow with the fist).
The Latin word is also the source of the French coup (a blow) and our English word “coup,” which originally meant a blow but now means a successful move or a brilliant stroke.
“Coupon” was originally colpon or copon in Old French, where it meant a cutting or a piece cut off, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In the 14th century, that Old French word entered English as “culpon,” a now obsolete word that meant a slice or strip.
The original, meanwhile, evolved into the modern French coupon, which was then reintroduced into English in the 19th century with its new meaning. (By then, the old “culpon” had been forgotten.)
When it first appeared in English in 1822, the OED says, “coupon” meant, in part, “one of a set of certificates attached to a bond running for a term of years, to be detached and presented as successive payments of interest become due to the holder; a separable dividend-warrant.”
In 1864, the travel entrepreneur Thomas Cook introduced a new meaning: prepaid tickets, issued by excursion agencies, that a tourist could use for travel and hotel expenses.
In 1906 a less prosperous meaning emerged, and a “coupon” could also mean the thing you clip from an ad to get a freebie or discount. Unfortunately, that’s the “coupon” we’re most familiar with!
As for the pronunciation of “coupon,” don’t jump to conclusions. According to standard dictionaries, it can be properly pronounced as either KOO-pon or KYOO-pon.
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